Global Research

Not recommended as a safe place in which to bring up a family or for long-term retirement.  However, short-term gains still possible on the Tel Aviv bourse (TASE) provided profits repatriated, and in US$:  

‘Between 1948 and 1997, 20,093 Israeli soldiers were killed in combat, 75,000 Israelis were wounded, and nearly 100,000 Israelis were considered disabled army veterans. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Anti-Defamation League, a total of 1,194 Israelis and foreigners were killed and 7,000 wounded between September 2000 and August 2010 by Palestinian terror attacks (most of them during 2000–2005 Second Intifada); while more than 3,000 Israelis have been killed and 25,000 have been wounded as a result of Palestinian violence and hostile enemy action (without including wars) since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 until today. Palestinians killed 1,074 Israelis and wounded 7,520 between 2000 and 2005’

Between 2000 and 2006, Israelis killed by suicide bombings were 540

CONCLUSION:  Britain, France, Europe and the United States are all far safer places to live than in Israel. The prospects now for any peaceful settlement in former Palestine with the emergence of an extremist right-wing, Netanyahu government intent on extending illegal settlements and alienating both its neighbours and the international community, yet further – is nil.

Not recommended as a safe place in which to bring up a family or for long-term investment or retirement.  However, short-term gains are still possible on the Tel Aviv bourse (TASE) provided you repatriate your profits smartly, and in US dollars.  But beware of possible changes in bi-lateral trading conditions and a restricted access to the European single market.

EUnewsdesk   12 May 2015

For the complete article published by the London Review of Books Click here

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

Greece has been invited by Russia to become the sixth member of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). The $100 billion NDB is expected to compete with Western dominance and become one of the key lending institutions.

The invitation was made by Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak on Monday during a phone conversation with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, according to a statement on Greece’s Syriza party website. Tsipras thanked Storchak, who’s currently a representative of the BRICS Bank for the invitation, and said Greece was interested in the offer.

“The Prime Minister thanked Storchak and said he was pleasantly surprised by the invitation for Greece to be the sixth member of the BRICS Development Bank. Tsipras said Greece is interested in the offer, and promised to thoroughly examine it. He will have a chance to discuss the invitation with the other BRICS leaders during the 2015 International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg,” the statement said.

During the 6th BRICS summit in Fortaleza in June 2014 the members agreed to forge ahead with the $100 billion NDB, as well as a reserve currency pool worth over another $100 billion. In March this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified the NDB.

The new bank is expected to challenge the two major Western-led institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It will finance infrastructure projects in the BRICS countries and across other developing countries and is expected to start functioning by the end of 2015, with the headquarters in Shanghai.

Strengthening ties

Russia and Greece have been strengthening economic cooperation, as both countries have their own issues. While Russia is stuck in a so-called ‘sanctions war’ with the EU and the US, Greece is struggling to repay its multibillion euro debt to the troika of international lenders – the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission.

Greece is trying to find a compromise with its international creditors to have a further €7.2 billion bailout unlocked. So far Athens has been settling its IMF repayments on time. The country started repaying €750 million in debt interest Monday, but Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis warned Greece’s finances are “a terribly urgent issue,” and the country could default by next month if no proper measures are taken.

Greece’s government has agreed a number of strategic deals with Russia during Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ visit to Moscow in April, including participation in the Turkish Stream project that’ll deliver Russian gas to Europe via Greece.

It was rumored Russia was ready to help the Athens, but President Putin said Greece hasn’t formally asked Moscow for help. Instead of direct financial assistance Russia could help out by buying Greek state assets in privatization sales, or in other investment projects, the President said in April.

The top thing that I look for in polling-results this early in a Presidential race, is the ratio of “Favorable” or “Positive,” to “Unfavorable” or “Negative” ratings, regarding each candidate. These ratings tap into the public’s sentiments concerning each individual candidate, instead of into mere name-recognition; and they’re also not comparing the candidates with each other, which most voters at so early a stage in the Presidential contest can’t yet do in any reliable way. When respondents are being permitted to indicate not just their pro-or-con direction but also the strength of their feelings regarding the given candidates, then the most meaningful ratio is produced.

One such poll was just issued: On May 11th, the GWU “GWBattleground” poll was published, and it offered its 1,000 respondents both the favorable-unfavorable, and also the degree-or-intensity, parameters; and, so, it can provide an unusually reliable indication, at such an early date, concerning whom the serious contenders will likely turn out to be when this contest matures.

Here, then, are the results, in this poll, for each of the following candidates:

Clinton: Strong Favorable = 27%, Strong Unfavorable = 39%

Biden: 14%, 32%

O’Malley: 1%, 6%

Warren: 14%, 13%

Bush: 8%, 30%

Cruz: 8%, 25%

Walker: 11%, 15%

Rubio: 11%, 19%

Paul: 10%, 18%

Huckabee: 12%, 20%

Fiorina: 3%, 10%

This sampling was done in the days right after Sanders had entered the Presidential contest on the Democratic side and before it was known that Warren wouldn’t be running; and, apparently, the organizers of this poll didn’t yet have enough time to scratch Warren and replace her with Sanders on their list to be sampled. Sanders will be the progressive candidate to run against Clinton; Warren won’t.

On the Republican side, Carson — who is running to become the first Black to receive the Republican Presidential nomination, like Herman Cain was in 2012, and who, also similarly to Cain, has never held any elective federal office — was also not listed on this questionnaire. Perhaps the presumption there was that Carson is merely another Cain.

Now, let’s examine more closely these findings:

The only candidate who had a positive ratio, a ratio of more than 1 instead of less than 1 — that is, had more “Strong Favorable” than “Strong Unfavorable” ratings — was Warren, who was also the only progressive on the list; and yet even her  ratio was only just barely positive, 14%/13% or 1.08. The second-scoring candidate was Walker, whose 11%/15% ratio is .73. The only Democrats on this list other than Warren were Clinton, whose 27%/39% ratio is .69; and Biden, whose 14%/32% ratio is .44; and O’Malley, whose 1%/6% ratio is .17.

Why, then, did Warren outperform all others in this poll? It can’t be on account of whom the competition is, because these ratios aren’t actually about the competition for any given candidate; they’re only about the respondents’ positive versus negative feelings toward each one of the individual candidates.

So: here are the key data that might explain Warren’s topping this poll:

On 28 December 2011, Pew’s people-press.org headlined “A Political Rhetoric Test,” which repeated a 2010 Pew survey and found the same thing as their earlier one had found — that the most-popular ideological category in the United States is “Progressive.” The positive/negative rating on that 2011 poll was 67%/22%, or 3.05.

Next was “Conservative,” at 62%/30%, or 2,07.

Next was “Liberal,” at 50%/39%, or 1.28.

Next was “Libertarian, at 38%/37%, or 1.03.

They also sampled “Socialism,” which turned out to be the least-popular of the tested “Political Terms,” at 31%/60%, or .52. (Perhaps lots of respondents thought it meant “communism,” a hold-over from the cold war.)

They also sampled “Capitalism,” to compare it against “Socialism,” and they found it to score at 50%/40%, or 1.25, much more popular than “Socialism,” but not nearly as popular as “Conservative” at 2.07, and vastly less popular than “Progressive” was, at 3.05.

Whereas Bernie Sanders, who entered the Presidential race on April 30th, wasn’t listed, he is one of the three progressives in the U.S. Senate, along with Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown. The expectation has long been that one of those three would probably enter the contest to provide an alternative to the conservative and mainstream Democrats, Hillary Clinton and the other or others; and Sanders has turned out to be that progressive. Does this mean he would have scored positively, as Warren did, if his name were polled? Not necessarily, and here is why:

Sanders has, throughout his career, self-identified both as “progressive” and as “socialist,” which means as both the most-favored and the most-disfavored of all the ideological categories tested. He has always made clear that he favors “democratic socialism, such as in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark,” and not “dictatorial socialism, or communism, such as in the Soviet Union or Cuba,” but, during the next year, as he is contesting in Democratic primaries, will Democrats see him as representing the type of government that northern Europe has; or, instead, the type of government that the Soviet Union had?

If they see him as being the former, then he’ll probably win the Democratic nomination; if the latter, then one of the regular Democrats will. His entire voting-record in the Senate, and in the House before that, has, in fact, been “socialist” in the sense of progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, and of Social Democrats in the European tradition, which is dominant in northern Europe. But Sanders has chosen to identify himself as a “socialist,” not only as a “progressive”; and each voter will need to determine for him or her self what that means, regarding him. Sanders has laid that term, “socialism,” before the public, whether he should or not, and now he’ll have to deal with that — a matter of educating the public about basic ideology, if he can do that.

None of what has been said here encompasses possible outright blunders that any one of the candidates might make, or has made, such as when Jeb Bush on Fox News this week on Monday May 11th, was asked whether, if he were President, knowing everything that is known today, would he have invaded Iraq as his brother did in 2003, and he said yes. So, already, Bush — who had scored only 8%/30%, or .27, even before that disqualifying remark — is virtually dead in the water.

Clinton won’t make that blunder, because, whereas the pressure on Republican candidates is for them to endorse George W. Bush, the pressure on Democratic ones is for them not to, but instead to endorse Barack Obama, who always opposed that invasion. But she voted for the invasion of Iraq while she was in the Senate, and Sanders voted against it then when he was in the House. Those votes could determine who wins the Democratic nomination, and even the Presidency. (Of course, if Clinton becomes the candidate, then she won’t be using that argument against the Republican, because she won’t want to remind voters that she had voted with virtually all Republicans on that. Sanders won’t have that weakness if he gets to the general election; he’ll instead be able to rip the Republican nominee to shreds on the matter of the Iraq-invasion.)

As the Wall Street Journal put it, on 15 October 2014, reporting what is still the most recent poll on the subject, “Americans in record numbers say the Iraq war was not worth it. A full two-thirds (66%) of those surveyed said that conflict wasn’t worth fighting. Even Republicans who say they are voting for a more robust response to the Middle East militants say the war wasn’t worth it, 49% to 41% who say it was worth it.” So: Jeb Bush simply stuck his foot down the throats of even Republicans there; and, among the general electorate (which is what he’d need to convince if Jeb were to win the Republican nomination), that ratio is actually 26% saying “Worth it,” and 66% saying “Not worth it.”

That’s not really “two-thirds” like the WSJ said; it’s instead 66%/92%, or 72%, of those who had an opinion on the matter. Only 28% of those who have an opinion are with Jeb on it. So, if Republicans were so stupid as to give Bush their nomination, they’d probably be thereby handing the White House to whomever the Democrats would nominate, even if it were to turn out to be someone who had voted for that war, like Hillary Clinton, because no Democrat is under any pressure to support today that invasion in 2003. Whereas Jeb says that the invasion was the right thing to have done, no Democrat, in retrospect, is saying any such thing. However, Hillary, unlike Bernie, won’t be in the position of being able to raise the issue in attacking the Republican nominee.

This is another reason why Sanders would probably be able to crush any Republican except perhaps Rand Paul, if he were to win the Democratic primaries.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of  Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

Over the strenuous objections of Canada’s Conservative government, an Alberta court allowed Omar Khadr—the victim of 13 years of illegal detention, torture and abuse at the hands of US and Canadian authorities—to be released on bail last Thursday.

A Canadian citizen by birth, the now 28-year-old Khadr was imprisoned for a decade at the US’ Guantanamo Bay concentration camp with the support of Canada’s government under the Chretien-Martin Liberals and their Conservative successors.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has vilified Khadr for years as a “convicted terrorist,” giving its imprimatur to his fraudulent 2010 conviction by a drumhead US Military Commission of having killed a US soldier when he was 15 years old during a firefight in Afghanistan.

The Conservatives have gone to extraordinary lengths to prolong Khadr’s ordeal since the Obama administration returned him to Canada in 2012, fighting tooth and nail to ensure he remains behind bars and under the most difficult prison conditions. This continued last week with the government shamelessly lying in an attempt to get an emergency stay of his release on bail. Government lawyers claimed Khadr’s release on bail would cause “irrevocable harm” to Canada’s relations with the United States—no matter that US officials said that they had no objection to his release!

After Khadr’s release into the custody of his lawyer Thursday afternoon—on stringent bail conditions that include wearing an ankle bracelet and being subject to a strict curfew—Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney insisted, against all evidence, that Khadr “has not changed” his “ideology,” a reference to the radical Islamist views of his late father, a senior Al Qaeda operative.

Speaking at a press conference Friday, Prime Minister Harper once again denounced Khadr and declared the government’s support for the pseudo-legal process to which he was subjected and under which he could potentially have been sentenced to death. “Mr. Khadr, as we all know,” declared Harper, “pled guilty to very grave crimes, including murder.”

Khadr had sought bail while awaiting the outcome of the Harper government’s vindictive Supreme Court appeal of a lower court ruling that he should be considered a “young offender.” Khadr is also appealing his US conviction of “war crimes.”

In a series of court filings in the various litigations, Khadr’s lawyers have argued that their client has been an exemplary prisoner and that even a Corrections Canada report has conceded he represents no danger to the public. They further argue that he was wrongly incarcerated due to a “confession” extracted under torture; that under international law he should have been deemed a child solider and therefore exempt from any war crime charges; and that even if this precept of international law is disregarded he should be considered a “youth offender” and any incarceration in Canada should be subject to the limits on the detention of juveniles stipulated in the country’s criminal code.

So egregious has been the treatment of Khadr by US and Canadian authorities, and so patently vindictive the Harper government’s hounding of him, that large sections of the Canadian establishment have come to see his continued incarceration as an embarrassment that brings the judicial system into disrepute. Even stalwart media defenders of the Harper government like the Globe and Mail and the neo-conservative National Post have editorialized in recent months for an end to Khadr’s imprisonment.

The Obama administration has also been eager to distance itself from the case. It believes it is more important to defend the NSA’s global spying operations and the “right” of the US President to order the summary execution via drone strikes of “terrorists,” including US citizens, than to uphold Khadr’s continued incarceration.

Khadr was grievously wounded by US forces in the 2003 Afghanistan firefight. Captured by US forces, he was incarcerated first at the notorious Bagram base concentration camp and then at Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the complicity of Canadian Liberal and Conservative governments, he was for years the last remaining citizen of a Western country detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Statements from Khadr and other eyewitnesses about his torture while in US custody shed further light, if any more is needed, on the barbaric, criminal methods American authorities have employed in their “war on terror.” Suffering from severe concussion, with shrapnel wounds to his face and eyes and three bullet holes in his back, the youth was placed under a regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques” within 12 hours of his release from hospital into Bagram.

The boy was hooded and hung for long periods by his wrists in a cage (“Palestinian hanging” according to the Israeli Defense Forces slang used by his interrogators), beaten, waterboarded, threatened with rape and subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold. He was short-shackled into extremely painful “stress” positions for up to 10 hours. Many nights he lay in terror listening to the persistent screaming from other detainees enduring their own interrogations. Later, in Guantanamo, much of this treatment continued.

In a further violation of international law, the US dragged him before a drumhead military commission, in which elementary judicial principles were set aside. With the military threatening him with life imprisonment, Khadr entered into a plea bargain. After his repatriation to a Canadian prison, Khadr recanted any admission of guilt.

The “legality” of his trial makes a mockery of democratic principles. The 2009 Military Commissions Act passed by Congress and applied in Khadr’s own case baldly states, “A detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.”

After objections and foot-dragging by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Khadr was returned to Canada at Washington’s insistence in 2012. On his arrival, the government vilified him as a “hardened terrorist” and had him incarcerated as an adult in an Alberta federal prison.

In 2010 Canada’s highest court found that Khadr’s constitutional rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were violated during the course of his imprisonment and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay. In a decision that underlines Canada’s complicity in the brutal program of torture administered by the CIA and US military, the Supreme Court ruled that agents of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Department of Foreign Affairs had violated Khadr’s basic rights by interrogating him while he was indefinitely detained, had no access to legal counsel, and had been subjected to weeks of sleep deprivation in order to “soften him up.”

Despite ruling that Khadr’s democratic rights had been violated, the Supreme Court allowed the Canadian government to continue its backing of his illegal detention at Guantanamo Bay and his prosecution by the US military commissions, saying that it did not want to interfere with the government’s prerogative to conduct foreign policy.

Dennis Edney, Khadr’s lawyer, told reporters after last week’s successful bail hearing,

“We left a child, a Canadian child, to suffer torture. We participated in this torture. My view is very clear: Mr. Harper is a bigot. Mr. Harper doesn’t like Muslims….He wants to show he is tough on crime and who does he pick on? A 15-year-old boy who was picked up and put in the hell-hole of Guantanamo.”

But it is not only Harper and his Conservatives who are responsible. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Supreme Court of Canada and the entire political establishment, including the corporate media, share culpability. It was under Liberal rule that CSIS and Foreign Affairs officials aided and abetted Khadr’s torture. As for the New Democratic Party, it kept mum on Khadr’s plight until prodded by a public outcry in recent years as the details of his mistreatment became widely known.

While the Conservatives are largely alone in arguing for Khadr’s continued persecution, the establishment is united in seeking to present his case as unique and in seeking to avoid calling anyone to account for his ordeal. The reality is the Canadian state’s complicity in his illegal detention and torture has established chilling legal precedents that threaten the basic rights of all Canadians. Moreover, this has been part and parcel of a vast expansion of the coercive powers of the state in the name of the “war on terror.” In a context of massive social inequality, a resurgence of imperialism and an ever-wider assault on public services and workers’ rights, the ruling class is breaking with bourgeois legality and increasingly turning toward authoritarian methods of rule. The imminent passing of the anti-democratic Bill C-51, which gives the national security apparatus carte blanche to violate fundamental democratic rights, is only the latest manifestation of this.

Pelican affected by Deepwater Horizon spill. Photo: Louisiana GOHSEP. Used under Creative Commons license.

British Petroleum (BP) has been sued by some 25,000 Mexican fishing businesses over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The company says it has paid $1.8 billion in compensation to U.S. businesses but has yet to offer money to those affected south of the border.

Deepwater Horizon was a floating rig built by Hyundai Heavy Industries of South Korea and leased by Transocean of Louisiana to BP to explore for oil 4,000 feet below the surface in the Macondo Prospect some 41 miles off the coast. On April 20, 2010, methane gas from the well forced its way to the surface and caused the well to blow out. The resulting fire killed eleven workers and burned for three months before it was capped, but not before an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil were spilled.

“To say that damages only occurred in the United States is a lie and shows a lack of respect for Mexico,” Horacio Polanco, the lawyer for the plaintiffs in three Mexican coastal states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Quintana Roo, told El Pais newspaper. “There are at least 30 types of migratory species that we share with the United States, and the damage has been enormous.”

Polanco’s lawsuit was filed just days before U.S. courts threw out a lawsuit against BP filed by Mexican state governments, stating that the individual states did not have standing in court.

“The Mexican constitution vests ownership of ‘lands and waters within the boundaries of national land territory’ in the ‘nation,'” wrote Chief Judge Carl Stewart of the U.S. Court of Appeals in a judgment handed down May 1. “The state constitutions … bespeak a role for the states in managing some of the country’s property. But they do not provide the Mexican states with the crucial proprietary interest.”

The courts will now have to decide if individual Mexican businesses can sue BP. And the courts are also expected to hear a lawsuit filed in April 2013 by the Mexican federal government for compensation from BP.

To date, BP has set aside $43 billion to cover costs related to the spill – which include direct clean up costs, compensation to private businesses and fines to government authorities.

Earlier this year Judge Carl Barbier ruled that the company should also pay the U.S. government a fine of $13.7 billion for violations of the U.S. Clean Water Act. 

Previously, the company had agreed to pay out $7.8 billion to compensate most private sector claimants in the U.S. under a settlement agreement signed in March 2012. That figure has risen steadily and the company says it now expects to pay out as much as $9.7 billion.

In addition, if Polanco wins, he says that his Mexican clients should be paid as much as $50,000 each or another $1.25 billion. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. business owners are complaining that they have yet to be paid over three years after they settled with BP. Brent Coon, a Texas lawyer whose firm represents 10,000 spill clients, told the Nation magazine that he expects that some 75 percent of small-business owners—“the Gulf Coast blue-collar, hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck guys”—may never be paid.

BP is hardly short of money to make payments to either the U.S. or Mexican fishing businesses. The company reported $12.1 billion in profits in 2014 and $13.4 billion in 2013. BP ownedapproximately $315 billion in assets around the world in 2014, up from $236 billion in 2009, the year before the spill, according to estimates provided in court.

Separately, in January 2013 Transocean agreed to pay out $1.4 billion to settle all U.S. government claims against it. And last September, Halliburton, which was also a defendant in the lawsuits, settled all claims with the U.S. government for a payment of $1.1 billion.

Senator Richard (Dick) Shelby

Senator Richard Shelby, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, is set to release details of his proposed financial reform legislation today which Wall Street hopes will have so much smoke and mirrors to appease the liberal and conservative factions on the Committee that no one will notice that it’s another big sellout to Wall Street.

The bill will hold out the promise of reforming the Federal Reserve while failing to do anything material to reform it. It will promise to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens on community banks so that they can survive and compete while leaving intact the very financial structure that is killing off community banks faster than you can say Dodd-Frank.

The biggest joke in the proposed legislation is that the Fed will somehow be tamed by allowing the President of the United States to nominate, with Senate confirmation, the President of the New York Fed – the organization that is effectively running the Fed from New York by following the marching orders of the mega Wall Street banks. President Obama’s nominations, with Senate confirmation, have not exactly been a boon to the American people when it comes to other overseers of Wall Street like the Treasury Secretary, the SEC Chair, or the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve – all of whom had egregious Wall Street conflicts but were installed anyway.

According to leaks, Shelby’s bill will propose a dramatic increase in the amount of consolidated assets required to designate a bank a “systemically important financial institution” or SIFI. According to rumors, that amount may go from the current $50 billion to potentially $500 billion. While that would relieve some banks of burdensome regulatory filings, it won’t materially change the competitive landscape. Here’s why.

As of June 30 of last year, Bank of America had 5,096 branches spread across the country holding $1.172 trillion in deposits. JPMorgan Chase had 5,682 branches holding $1.079 trillion in deposits. Wells Fargo had 6,314 branches with $1.073 trillion in deposits. With that quantity of branches dwarfing all other banks, backed by multi-million dollar ad campaigns, these mega banks are effectively giant money vacuums, sucking up deposits and making it almost impossible for community banks to compete.

That concentrated money and power then corrupts the financing of campaigns to place more Wall Street cronies in Congress to prevent any meaningful financial reform.

Because these same mega banks are also making wild gambles in exotic derivatives for the house (no, the Volcker Rule has not been implemented, six years after the crash) it means the insured-deposits of the middle class have become wagers against the interests of the same middle class. The London Whale is a case study in this form of hubris.

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Il 70° anniversario della vittoria sul nazismo, il 9 maggio a Mosca, è stato boicottato su pressione di Washington da tutti i governanti della Ue, salvo il presidente greco, e messo in ombra dai media occidentali, in un grottesco tentativo di cancellare la Storia. Non privo di risultati: in Germania, Francia e Gran Bretagna risulta che l’87% dei giovani ignora il ruolo dell’Urss nella liberazione dell’Europa dal nazismo. Ruolo che fu determinante per la vittoria della coalizione antinazista. Attaccata l’Urss il 22 giugno 1941 con 5,5 milioni di soldati, 3500 carrarmati e 5000 aerei, la Germania nazista concentrò in territorio sovietico 201 divisioni, cioè il 75% di tutte le sue truppe, cui si aggiungevano 37 divisioni dei satelliti (tra cui l’Italia). L’Urss chiese ripetutamente agli alleati di aprire un secondo fronte in Europa, ma Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna lo ritardarono, mirando a scaricare la potenza nazista sull’Urss per indebolirla e avere così una posizione dominante al termine della guerra. Il secondo fronte fu aperto con lo sbarco anglo-statunitense in Normandia nel giugno 1944, quando ormai l’Armata Rossa e i partigiani sovietici avevano sconfitto le truppe tedesche assestando il colpo decisivo alla Germania nazista. Il prezzo pagato dall’Unione Sovietica fu altissimo: circa 27 milioni di morti, per oltre la metà civili, corrispondenti al 15% della popolazione (in rapporto allo 0,3% degli Usa in tutta la Seconda guerra mondiale); circa 5 milioni di deportati in Germania; oltre 1700 città e grossi abitati, 70mila piccoli villaggi, 30mila fabbriche distrutte. Questa pagina fondamentale della storia europea e mondiale si tenta oggi di cancellare, mistificando anche gli eventi successivi. La guerra fredda, che divise di nuovo l’Europa subito dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale, non fu provocata da un atteggiamento aggressivo dell’Urss, ma dal piano di Washington di imporre il dominio statunitense su un’Europa in gran parte distrutta. Anche qui parlano i fatti storici. Appena un mese dopo il bombardamento nucleare di Hiroshima e Nagasaki, nel settembre 1945, al Pentagono già calcolavano che occorrevano oltre 200 bombe nucleari per attaccare l’Urss. Nel 1946, quando il discorso di Churchill sulla «cortina di ferro» apriva ufficialmente la guerra fredda, gli Usa avevano 11 bombe nucleari, che nel 1949 salivano a 235, mentre l’Urss ancora non ne possedeva. Ma in quell’anno l’Urss effettuò la prima esplosione sperimentale, cominciando a costruire il proprio arsenale nucleare. In quello stesso anno venne fondata a Washington la Nato, in funzione antisovietica, sei anni prima del Patto di Varsavia costituito nel 1955. Terminata la guerra fredda, in seguito al dissolvimento nel 1991 del Patto di Varsavia e della stessa Unione Sovietica, su spinta di Washington la Nato si è estesa fin dentro il territorio dell’ex Urss. E quando la Russia, ripresasi dalla crisi, ha riacquistato un ruolo internazionale stringendo crescenti rapporti economici con la Ue, il putsch in Ucraina, sotto regia Usa/Nato,  ha riportato l’Europa a un clima da guerra fredda. Boicottando sulla scia degli Usa il 70° anniversario della vittoria sul nazismo, l’Europa occidentale (quella dei governi) cancella la storia della sua stessa Resistenza, che tradisce sostenendo i nazisti andati al governo a Kiev. Sottovaluta la capacità della Russia di reagire, quando viene messa alle corde. Si illude di poter continuare a dettare legge, quando la presenza a Mosca dei massimi rappresentanti dei Brics, a partire dalla Cina, e di tanti altri paesi conferma che il dominio imperiale dell’Occidente è sulla via del tramonto.

Manlio Dinucci 

 

 

Claiming otherwise is one of his many Big Lies. On May 1, 2011, he willfully deceived the US public saying:

“The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda.”

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.”

In last Sunday’s London Review of Books, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shredded Obama’s Big Lie like others before him.

Obama’s official narrative “might have been written by (Alice in Wonderland author) Lewis Carroll,” he said. It was a total fabrication. More on his account below.

Volumes of evidence separate fact from fiction. On July 11, 2002, TheNew York Times said “Osama bin Laden is dead. (He) died in December and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan.”

“Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, echoed the information…(T)he truth is that Osama bin Laden is dead.”

The BBC, Fox News and other media sources reported the same information. David Ray Griffin‘s seminal book on the topic titled “Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?” did it best.

He presented “objective evidence and testimonies.” The former includes the following:

Through December 13, 2001, the CIA monitored messages between bin Laden and his associates. Suddenly they stopped.

On December 26, 2001, a leading Pakistani newspaper reported bin Laden’s death. It cited a prominent Taliban official attending his funeral – witnessing his dead body before it was laid to rest.

His was very ill with kidney disease and other ailments. In July 2001, he was treated at the American Hospital in Dubai.

On September 10, 2001 (one day before 9/11), CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported his admittance to a Rawalpindi, Pakistan hospital.

He had nothing to do with 9/11. An earlier article discussed the Mother of All Big Lies.

In January 2001, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said bin Laden appeared “in the last stages of kidney failure” (according to Griffin) – based on video evidence he saw in late November or early December 2001.

In July 2002, CNN reported the capture of bin Laden’s bodyguards months earlier in February. “Sources believe that if the bodyguards were captured away from bin Laden, it is likely the most-wanted man in the world is dead,” it said.

Washington offered a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture or killing. No one came forward to claim it. More on this below.

Testimonial evidence Griffin cited included influential “people in a position to know” saying bin Laden died in December 2001 including:

• Pakistan President Musharraf;

• FBI counterterrorism head Dale Watson;

• Oliver North saying, “I’m certain that Osama is dead…and so are all the other guys I stay in touch with;”

• Afghanistan President Karzai;

• Israeli intelligence saying supposed bin Laden messages were fake; and

• Pakistan’s ISI “confirm(ing) the death of…Osama bin Laden (and) attribut(ing) the reasons behind Washington’s hiding (the truth) to the desire of (America’s hawks) to use the issue of al Qaeda and international terrorism to invade Iraq.”

In October 2008, former CIA case officer Robert Baer told National Public Radio when asked: “Of course he’s dead.”

In March 2009, former Foreign Service officer Angelo Codevilla published an American Spectator article titled “Osama bin Elvis, saying:

“Seven years after (his) last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence of Elvis’s presence among us than for his.”

Griffin explained today’s advanced technology can create fake messages and videos able to fool most people.

Pre-May 2011 claims about “bin Laden’s continued existence (weren’t) backed up by evidence,” Griffin explained.

Perpetuating the myth about bin Laden remaining alive until May 2011 remains one of the Big Lies of our time.

It bears repeating. Clear evidence proves he died of natural causes in December 2001. Keeping alive a dead man was done to pursue America’s phony “war on terror.”

So-called “Enemy Number One” was used to stoke fear as pretext for post-9/11 imperial wars on one country after another to this day.

Griffin hoped his book would help shorten America’s wars. They rage endlessly. Don’t expect Hersh’s article to change things.

He said bin Laden’s reported killing was “the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election.”

The official White House account of bin Laden’s death was totally “false,” said Hersh. His version of events differs markedly from Griffin’s explained above.

Most important is both explanations and others expose the official Big Lie – hype used as justification for America’s war on terror, naked aggression against one country after another by any standard.

Hersh said the May 2011 bin Laden operation began in August 2010 after a former senior Pakistani (ISI) intelligence official offered information on his location in return for the $25 million reward Washington promised leading to his death or capture.

Claiming he was in Abbottabad under ISI house arrest doesn’t comport with convincing evidence of his December 2001 death.

Saying Obama wanted Osama dead belies his earlier demise. The staged bin Laden killing was hokum – especially with no visuals, corpse, independent proof and shifting official accounts.

Major events are always strategically timed for political reasons. In this case, to boost Obama’s sagging image. It got an immediate bump following the staged event.

It diverted attention from neoliberal harshness, force-fed austerity and protracted homeland Main Street Depression conditions.

They’re evident today in unprecedented levels of borderline/actual/or deep poverty, unemployment or underemployment, homelessness, hunger and overall deprivation in the world’s richest country.

It continued post-9/11 fear-mongering to further Washington’s imperial agenda – featuring one direct or proxy war of aggression after another against nations threatening no others.

So-called DNA evidence claimed to prove bin Laden’s death 12 hours after the staged Abbottabad incident was fake.

Experts explain DNA identification takes days to complete – impossible in hours, especially in a location with no professional lab or skilled personnel to conduct it.

Convincing evidence revealed about the alleged May 2011 bin Laden killing proves the official White House account was fabricated – one of many of Obama’s Big Lies.

A Final Comment

On August 6, 2011, 30 US special forces (including 20 Navy Seals) involved in the Abbottabad incident died in a reported helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

Draw your own conclusions. Dead men tell no tales.

The famous physicist Albert Einstein was fond of Gedankenexperimenten – thought experiments – which tested his understanding of physics problems and stimulated solutions to them. For example, when he was a teenager, Einstein asked himself, ‘What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light?’ Pursuing this question, he eventually came up with the Special Theory of Relativity and the most famous equation in science, E=mc².

Imagine, then, this thought experiment. Consider how a general election might turn out if the media spectrum ran the whole gamut from the right – the BBC, Guardian and Independent, for example – to the hard right (the Mail, Sun, Express and so on). Some readers might object that the BBC, Guardian and the Independent are not right-wing at all, but centre or even left-liberal. But, as we have shown in numerous books and media alerts, these media organisations are embedded in powerful networks of big business, finance and establishment elites. Naturally, these are the one per cent – or even narrower – interests that corporate media largely serve and support. Such media do not even deserve to be called ‘centre’, if the term is to retain any meaning.

In this case, of course, a thought experiment is not required because reality carried out the experiment for us, with the results being all too obvious last Friday. The Tories were returned to Westminster with a 12-seat majority. Notably, they only had 37% support from a turnout of 66%. That means only 24% of the eligible electorate actually voted for a Tory government. Such is the undemocratic nature of the electoral system in the UK. The establishment wins every time.

As Neil Clark observes in an article for RT, there is a long history of British press scaremongering to prevent any threat to corporate and financial interests come election time. As usual, the Murdoch press led the way, with the Sun warning on April 30:

‘A week today, Britain could be plunged into the abyss. A fragile left-wing Labour minority, led by Ed Miliband and his union paymasters and supported by the wreckers of the Scottish National Party, could take power… You can stop this. But only by voting Tory.’

The ludicrous warning about ‘left-wing’ Labour – a pro-business, pro-austerity party that has cut its roots from working people – was repeated across much of the press. Even the ostensible ‘liberal’ Independent, owned by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, came out in support of the Tories.

After weeks of debate about the likelihood of a hung Parliament and permutations of possible coalitions, opinion pollsters and professional pundits expressed surprise at the relatively comfortable Tory win. But for investigative reporter Nafeez Ahmed, the outcome was predictable. In a piece titled ‘How Big Money and Big Brother won the British Elections’, published the day after the election, Ahmed noted:

‘The ultimate determinant of which party won the elections was the money behind their political campaigns.’

The Tory party was the biggest recipient of donations, ‘the bulk of which came from financiers associated with banks, the hedge fund industry, and big business.’

In summary:

‘the most important precondition for victory in Britain’s broken democracy is the party’s subservience to corporate power.’

The BBC’s ‘Love Letter’ To David Cameron

BBC News marked the Tories’ return to power with what read like a hymn of praise to David Cameron on its website. The Tory leader had ‘proved the doubters in his own party and beyond wrong by winning a majority of his own at the 2015 general election.’ The puff piece claimed that Cameron’s ‘presentational skills were never in doubt’ and pointed to ‘his easy charm and ability to appear “prime ministerial” at news conferences and summits’. A photo caption told readers that:

‘David Cameron took the traditional route to the top via Eton and Oxford.’

This was Tory PR dressed up as BBC journalism. The sycophancy was so laughable and transparent that it was rightly described on Twitter as:

‘A beautiful example of Toady Tory journalism’

Another Twitter user noted:

‘Anyone who thinks #BBC left-wing, read their love letter to David #Cameronhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32592449 … Dire excuse for journalism.’

Presumably there was no room in this ‘love letter’ to remind readers of Cameron’s inglorious role in Nato’s bombing of Libya in 2011.The illegal Western ‘intervention’ for regime change was built, as ever, on a campaign of disinformation and propaganda. Today, the suffering of Libya is immeasurable; not least as seen in the desperate plight of those fleeing across the Mediterranean and, all too often, drowning in the attempt. This is a damning indictiment of Western policy. If there truly was a left media in this country, Cameron’s record on Libya alone would have been scrutinised by journalists, his decisions challenged, and the consequences of those disastrous decisions for the suffering Libyans laid bare. Instead, in its shameful silence, the corporate media have effectively exonerated Cameron for his crimes.

Elsewhere on the BBC, there was extensive coverage of the 70th anniversary of VE Day, with militarism and imperialism not far below the surface. Along with the election coverage, it was all symptomatic of the sickness of a society under relentless establishment propaganda bombardment.

Meanwhile, the Guardian’s own love affair with that old war criminal Tony Blair shows no signs of abating. Blair’s piece of vacuous post-election ‘comment’ was heavily billed at the top of the Guardian website. He had the nerve to declare that ‘Labour must be the party of ambition as well as compassion’. Compassion, of course, was in short supply during Blair’s extended stay in power.

Apparently, Blair’s hands have not been dipped in sufficient blood to prevent him being regarded as a credible commentator by Britain’s flagship newspaper of liberal journalism. Should we describe this as surreal – or worse? This surely desecrates the memory of those who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere because of the many shameful decisions taken by Blair and the governments he led. But when we live under occupation by a troll army of corporate news media, war-criminal politicians are never beyond the pale; as long as they are our war-criminal politicians.

Another feature of life under this corporate media occupation is that those at the top of the political system are interchangeable. It hardly matters that Ed Miliband resigned in the wake of Labour’s pitiful showing in the election. Likewise, with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Other figureheads will be appointed who uphold corporate-friendly, establishment-bolstering policies, with the requisite smattering of largely empty rhetoric about ‘tackling inequality’ and ‘protecting public services’.

The Independent even had the gall to assert in an editorial that:

‘Their two successors would do well to start thinking about a truly progressive coalition of their two parties.’

The reader is supposed to swallow the myth that, in a political system hammered into shape by corporate interests, ‘mainstream’ parties could possibly deliver anything ‘truly progressive’. But this low standard of journalism, indeed media deception, is par for the course. Likewise, a newly elected government – even, as in this case, the return to power of the same dominant party – is presented by the corporate media as having a fresh chance to prove itself. Every time this happens we are supposed to forget the state’s relentless promotion of the destructive aims of big business, while the majority of the public are squeezed and the poor, weak and vulnerable trampled upon.

One recent Guardian editorial took seriously the prospect that an unalloyed Tory government will live up to ‘Mr Cameron’s professed wish to unify rather than divide.’ How much more evidence does the Guardian need that Tory talk of ‘unity’ – ‘We’re all in this together’ – is a cruel sham? Unforgivably, even now the paper fails to point to the chasm between Tory propaganda and reality. Instead, the Guardian editors are giving the Tories yet another chance to demonstrate their bona fides by setting three ‘tests’ for them – on Europe, the future of the UK, and the challenge ‘to do far more to bring the country back together economically.’ As John McEnroe might have said, ‘You cannot be serious.’

Nowhere does the Guardian mention the Climate Armageddon towards which we are headed, and which puts these three ‘tests’ in the shade. So much for the Guardian’s much-vaunted commitment to put climate ‘front and centre’ of the paper.

As for Labour’s capitulation to corporate power, the Guardian has nothing to say and can do little better than come up with such anodyne remarks as:

‘Labour must again learn to tell stories, in a voice – and perhaps an accent – that speaks to the individual ear, and the country as a whole.’

It gets even worse, with inane comments that presumably came across as profound at editorial meetings:

‘In part, this is about ditching jargon, resolving the uneasy inheritance of the New Labour years and finding a new facility to deploy moral arguments instead of the dismal lexicon of technocracy.’

Labour and ‘moral arguments’? The mind boggles at the lack of insight that sees those words committed to posterity after all that Labour has done; not least the immoral arguments and deceits that launched the illegal invasion of Iraq. Attempting to brush the ‘supreme international crime’ under the carpet with the weasel words ‘the uneasy inheritance of the New Labour years’ is appalling. One wonders whether any senior Guardian staff have sufficient self-awareness, and the remnant shreds of dignity, to be squirming uneasily after the paper’s earlier declared support for Ed Miliband.

The embarrassment about Miliband was felt elsewhere too. Russell Brand promptly broadcast what sounded like a climbdown on his Trews YouTube channel, saying that he had ‘got caught up in some mad The Thick Of It’ moment. He as much as admitted that he had been swayed too easily by those around him:

‘People were telling me, journalists, people who know loads about politics….’

Given that Brand’s eve-of-election argument to support Labour echoed that of Guardian columnist Owen Jones, it’s not hard to guess who he was referring to here. Perhaps Brand might consider a no-holds-barred approach in future, and bravely expose the role of BBC News and the Guardian in preventing the revolution he, and many others, would like to see.

‘The Faulty Logic Of The Lesser-Evil Argument’

In Scotland, voters were able to vote for a major party that had explicitly rejected the ‘austerity’ mantra relayed endlessly by the unholy Tory-Lib Dem-Labour triumvirate. 56 out of the 59 Westminster constituencies north of the border voted for MPs from the Scottish National Party. Labour, who traditionally enjoyed strong support in the ‘heartland’ of Scotland, were almost entirely wiped out there, with just one Labour MP elected (one Lib Dem and one Tory made up the remaining Scottish seats).

As blogger John Hilley wrote:

‘Despairing people in England and Wales can take comfort from the tsunami of resistance that’s been unleashed in Scotland. Bereft of meaningful choices, the crushing of Labour may be hard to take, but the Miliband lifeboat was really just another pirate neoliberal ship, corporate owned and dutifully captained. Take heart from its sinking, and remember all those “radical” apologists who tried to sell it as a seaworthy vessel for meaningful change.’

Hilley added:

‘We also need a new assault on every part of the establishment-serving media, from the simpering Guardian to the gutter Sun.’

This election has made that clearer than ever before. Western politicians are fond of extolling Western ‘democracy’ and decrying electoral ‘charades’ in other nations, especially those lined up for possible future ‘intervention’. But there can be no truly ‘free’ elections in the West while corporate media shape and control what passes for news and debate, effectively limiting the choice of policies and politicians available to the public.

Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist who is now independent, nailed the meaning of the general election outcome. First, he demolished the ‘lesser evil’ argument that is trotted out each time an election approaches:

‘The faulty logic of the lesser-evil argument is apparent the moment we consider the Blair case. If there is no political cost for committing the ultimate war crime, because the other guys are worse, what real leverage can the electorate ever have on the political system? The “left” vote will always gravitate to the slightly less nasty party of capital. No change is really possible. In fact, over time the political centre of gravity is likely to shift – as has in fact happened – ever more to the right, as the corporations accrete ever greater power.’

The reality is that any party hoping to claim power has first to ‘seduce’ the corporations which, of course, includes the major news media. As Cook observed:

‘Without most of the media on your side, no party stands a chance of winning because the media subtly controls the narrative of the election: what count as “the issues”, how the leaders and their platforms are presented, what and who is considered credible.’

Genuine change, made ever more necessary by the urgent threat of climate instability, requires no less than a revolution. This can never come from constantly recycling the ‘lesser evil’ argument. Central to this revolution is disentangling ourselves from the skewed, elite-serving perspective of the corporate media. Cook expressed it well:

‘We cannot imagine a different world, a different economic system, a different media landscape, because our intellectual horizons have been so totally restricted by the media conglomerates that control our newspapers, our TV and radio stations, the films we watch, the video games we play, the music we listen to. We are so imaginatively confined we cannot even see the narrow walls within which our minds are allowed to wander.’

This is why Media Lens believes that it is crucial to challenge the corporate media, to boost the public’s understanding of the reality of corporate news, and to promote independent journalism which is genuinely in the public interest.

DC & DE

I recently snapped a photo from an advertising circular that was delivered to my home, proudly promoting Monsanto’s ‘probably carcinogenic’ Roundup, on sale no less, at a local hardware store. While US garden and DIY stores are still selling cancer-causing poison in a jug, a German retail giant will no longer carry glyphosate-containing products as of September 30, 2015

More than 350 ‘toom Baumarkt DIY’ stores belonging to the REWE Group are removing any product that contains this endocrine disrupting chemical concoction, and as of today, no such products can be re-ordered from their stores.

The company told the world about this new policy just recently in a press release (in German).

However, by the end of 2013, toom Baumarkt had begun to remove this product and approximately 60 percent of glyphosate-containing products were removed from their shelves.

Instead, Toom Baumarkt offers its customers alternative, environmentally acceptable products. As the EU determines whether or not to ban glyphosate, the store will likely see sales soar, as people around the world are becoming educated about just how problematic glyphosate can be to humans, animals and the ecosystem.

 

In a statement, Dominique Rotondi, General Purchasing Manager for toom Baumarkt said:

“As a responsible company, it is important to regularly review our entire range and seek to protect the environment and nature with alternative and more sustainable options. Toom Baumarkt is constantly and consistently developing a more sustainable portfolio of products.”

Customers of toom Baumarkt DIY stores are given much more sustainable alternatives to fighting garden pests, fungus and other plant diseases, and can even speak with staff members about specific alternative plant products which are not based in harmful biotech chemical science. Further information about alternative plant protection can be found here.

Although an EU ban would send a huge message to Monsanto, the makers of Roundup, we need not wait for our governments to make these decisions. Retailers will feel the burn when there are no longer customers buying their toxic products.

Let’s hope, just as the demand for organic food increases, the boycott of these toxic chemicals is amplified also. You can help by passing along the positive actions of companies like toom Baumarkt DIY.

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Rafael Rivera – who served in the U.S. Army for seven years – writes:

The police in Ferguson have better armor and weaponry than my men and I did in the middle of a war. And Ferguson isn’t alone — police departments across the US are armed for war.

The Hill notes:

[Senator] McCaskill pointed out that in some places local police departments are more heavily armed than the National Guard.

Business Insider points out:

Someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment[ed] that “We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone”

Constitutional and civil rights lawyer John Whitehead notes that homeland security officers within the U.S. have three times as much ammunition as front-line soldiers in Afghanistan (and possess a type of ammunition that is banned in war zones).

Huffington Post reports:

Many combat veterans have since pointed out that the SWAT officers are more heavily armed and outfitted than they themselves were while patrolling the streets of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Indeed, many veterans have noted that American police are more heavily armed than they were when serving on the front lines:

The gentleman on the left has more personal body armor and weaponry than I did while invading Iraq. pic.twitter.com/5u6TxyIbkk

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) August 14, 2014

 

@joanmccarter My troops were never as well equipped, nor as poorly trained or disciplined as they are. This is something else. @dailykos — soonergrunt (@soonergrunt) August 14, 2014

 

@inteldump @CaptainAwwsum @AthertonKD those mraps are a hell of alot more advanced then we had in 06-07 OR 09-10 — Charles Bragg (@CharlieB4Real) August 14, 2014

 

I don’t know how it was in IRQ and AFG, but in Bosnia we had less firepower while on patrol than the cops in #Ferguson

— Dan Bramos (@CaptainAwwsum) August 14, 2014

 

4 years in the Army, including 2 spent staring down N. Korea and I never had as much sweet gear as the cops in Ferguson, Mo. pop. 21,000

— Journanalyst™ (@_Journanalyst) August 14, 2014

 

I would like to point out that these cops have better gear than many American soldiers 15 miles from North Korea. https://t.co/fG6i5DUiWi

— Nate Bethea (@inthesedeserts) August 13, 2014

We’ve decided, as a society, that local police forces need greater armor capabilities than an invasion force in 2003.

— Alex Horton (@AlexHortonTX) August 14, 2014

Indeed, the extreme militarization of American police is as anti-American as it gets.

The Israeli authorities have issued a new raft of demolition orders to Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem.

On Sunday, an Israeli court approved the demolition of eight Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Semiramis. The court said the owners must destroy the homes themselves and pay fines of 49,000 shekels ($12,667) by 1 August, Ma’an News Agency reports.

The demolition orders in Semiramis were delivered just days after Israel announced that it will build 900 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish-only colony in East Jerusalem, according to the anti-settlement group Peace Now.

In March, ahead of elections for Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to expand settlements in the occupied city.

“We will continue to build in Jerusalem, we will add thousands of housing units, and in the face of all the [international] pressure, we will persist and continue to develop our eternal capital,” Netanyahu said.

Rima Awwad, a member of the Jerusalemites Campaign, a group that campaigns for Palestinian rights in the city, said Netanyahu “campaigned on a platform of de-Palestinianization of the occupied city and he is now following through on his promise.”

Validating racist laws

Awwad told The Electronic Intifada that Netanyahu’s plan for Jerusalem is to “drive out its Palestinian population.”

A complex web of discriminatory laws regulates every aspect of Palestinian life in the city, she added.

This week’s announcement to expand settlements comes less than a month after Israel’s high court gave the green light to government authorities to apply the Absentee Property Law in Jerusalem.

The law, previously used to confiscate Palestinian property in present-day Israel, enables Israel to confiscate East Jerusalem property belonging to Palestinians living elsewhere in the occupied West Bank.

“The court’s decision has validated one of Israel’s most racist and arbitrary laws, enacted in 1950 primarily to confiscate Palestinian refugee property after their displacement from their homes,” Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, a Haifa-based legal rights group for Palestinians in Israel, said in a recent press release.

“There is no other place in the world, not in democratic systems nor in dictatorial regimes, where such a law applies,” Jabareen remarked, adding that the law pays “no regard to [Palestinians’] protections under international law.”

Collective punishment

Last month, the Ramallah-based Palestinian rights group al-Haq decried Israel’s policy of collective punishment against Palestinians in Jerusalem.

On 13 and 14 April, Israeli occupation forces used concrete blocks to seal off the entrances of Hizma, a Jerusalem-area village, and left an explanatory sign for residents.

“To the residents of the area: a few of you are responsible for disrupting public order by their acts of riots, and because of them this barrier was set up,” the sign read.

On the first night, Israeli soldiers set up a checkpoint at the entrances and informed Palestinian motorists that vehicles were forbidden from entering or exiting Hizma.

On 24 April, Israeli soldiers shot dead 17-year-old Ali Muhammad Abu Ghannam in al-Tur, a Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem cut off from the city by Israel’s wall in the West Bank.

The Israeli army subsequently closed off the entrance to al-Zaim, a Palestinian part of Jerusalem cut off from the rest of the city by Israel’s wall in the West Bank.

“This closure negatively affected 6,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites in al-Zaim,” al-Haq reports. “Those going into the town from Jerusalem had to take a longer route, turning a five-minute drive into one taking approximately half an hour.”

“Farih Yousef Abu Lihya, 41, owns two hardware stores and a restaurant in al-Zaim. Since the imposed closure, his income has decreased by 80 per cent,” al-Haq’s statement reports.

Incitement

These recent measures come at a time when anti-Palestinian incitement is at fever pitch.

On 19 April, right-wing Israeli youth marched through Jerusalem’s Old City signing “death to Arabs” and other racist chants, as reported by The Electronic Intifada.

The estimated 1,500 participants were escorted by Israeli police and soldiers, according to Kifaya, a racism-monitoring website.

On Monday, Israel’s high court issued a ruling permitting Israelis to march through Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter on Jerusalem Day a holiday celebrating Israel’s military occupation of the city in 1967.

The court rejected a petition filed by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations asking that it prevent marchers from passing through the Old City.

The march will be held on 17 May.

“In recent years, the parade has been characterized by numerous acts of racism and violence against Arabs, as well as damage to property at the hands of marchers,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reports.

During last year’s Jerusalem Day march a mob of Israelis were caught on tape attacking Palestinians.

In the aftermath of the eruption of anger in Baltimore, Maryland over the police killing of Freddie Gray, the media and political establishment are seeking to conceal the real social and political issues at stake.

The killing of 25-year Gray last month—only one of the latest in a wave of police murders around the country—triggered clashes with police, demonstrations that spread to other cities and a police-military occupation of the city that was only lifted last week. While Gray’s murder was the catalyst, the scope and magnitude of the social discontent was fueled by the destitute conditions confronting working-class youth in the city’s poorest, largely minority, neighborhoods.

Much of the political elite that runs Baltimore is African American, including the current mayor, police chief and the majority of the city council. Although this fact has seriously undermined the arguments of the proponents of identify politics, it has not stopped them from insisting once again that the essential division in American society is race, not class.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a lead editorial, “How Racism Doomed Baltimore.” The newspaper, which sets the tone for what is described as “liberal public opinion” in America, declared that conditions in the city could only be understood within the context of the city’s legacy of racism and segregation.

“Americans might think of Maryland as a Northern state, but it was distinctly Southern in its attitudes toward race,” the Times editorialists write before giving a potted history of the state, from efforts to disenfranchise black voters in 1905 to more contemporary examples of racial segregation in public housing.

The desperate condition of young low-income men, the newspaper says, cannot be understood outside of the context of the

“century-long assault that Baltimore’s blacks have endured at the hands of local, state and federal policy makers, all of whom worked to quarantine black residents in ghettos, making it difficult even for people of means to move into integrated areas that offered better jobs, schools and lives for their children.”

The

“tensions associated with segregation and concentrated poverty place many cities at risk of unrest. But the acute nature of segregation in Baltimore—and the tools that were developed to enforce it over such a long period of time—have left an indelible mark and given that city a singular place in the country’s racial history.”

That Baltimore, like many cities in the north and the south, had a history of racial segregation is of course true. However, if a reader of this column were not familiar with the politics of Baltimore, they might be excused for believing the city is run by the Ku Klux Klan and that its police force is made up of Night Riders covered in white sheets.

The Times does not mention either that the political establishment in the city is predominantly African American, or that half of the Baltimore Police Department is black. Indeed, three of the six cops indicted for Gray’s killing, including the driver of the police van charged with murder, are African American.

The relentless police violence in Baltimore stems not from racism but from class oppression, which the black politicians defend no less than their white counterparts. Unable to contain her hatred and fear of the city’s youth after sporadic rioting erupted the day of Gray’s funeral, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake declared, “Too many people have spent generations building up the city for it to be destroyed by thugs who are trying to tear down what so many fought for. They are tearing down businesses, destroying property.”

Rawlings-Blake speaks for a whole layer of wealthy African Americans who have a stake in defending their property and wealth and overseeing a system that produces ever-greater poverty for black and white workers alike. This corrupt social layer includes countless academics, politicians, preachers, millionaire “civil rights” leaders and black entrepreneurs who have benefited from government funding for minority-owned businesses and African-American university programs.

Alongside the Times are various pseudo-left organizations that have long promoted identity politics in order to subordinate the interests of workers and youth to the Democratic Party. They represent the strivings of a segment of the upper middle class that uses the politics of race, gender and sexual identity as part of efforts to gain more of a share of the wealth exploited from the working class.

With angry youth in the streets of Baltimore denouncing the mayor and other black officials, the International Socialist Organization (ISO)—which hailed Obama’s 2008 as a “transformative event in US politics, as an African American takes the highest office in a country built on slavery”—has suddenly discovered a “black elite” whose interests are at odds with the majority of minority workers and youth.

The problem, however, is that these “black elected officials” defend the “racist system!”

The ISO’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor—an assistant professor in Princeton’s African American studies department—tells us, “Black elected officials have largely governed in the same way as their white counterparts, reflecting all of the racism, corruption and policies favoring the wealthy seen throughout mainstream politics.” This “powerful Black political class,” she continues, “helps to deflect a serious interrogation of structural inequality and institutional racism.”

In other words, the problem is, according to Taylor, that the black politicians are simply not aggressive enough in their promotion of identity politics. Never does she suggest that there is a fundamental unity of interests between black and white workers.

The New York Times, the ISO—which is essentially an auxiliary agent of the Democratic Party—and the political establishment as a whole are determined to prevent any real examination of the social and economic structure of America because they all defend the capitalist system, which is the source of poverty and police brutality.

It has been 50 years since Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, one of the first of a wave of urban uprisings across the United States in the 1960s. The call made in the 1968 Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders for massive government spending to stop the country’s drift towards racial and economic polarization was never realized. Instead President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs gave way to massive outlays for the Vietnam War, with politicians declaring that it was impossible to provide “guns and butter.”

The five decades that have elapsed have seen the deindustrialization of major manufacturing centers like Baltimore, combined with an unrelenting destruction of social programs. At the same time, sections of the African American upper middle class have been elevated into positions of privilege and power.

By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich, including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.

Since taking office Obama has only escalated these reactionary policies. Today the American ruling class will not even provide “guns and water,” as tens of thousands of low-income residents in Baltimore and Detroit are seeing their water service shut off for unpaid bills. The only “urban policy” Obama and the ruling class have is to try to contain the explosive social tensions with police military repression.

Whatever role racism might play in any particular act of police violence, the events in Baltimore expose the fact that it is in fact class that is the determining factor. With nothing to offer masses of people, the political and media representatives of the ruling class, along with the upper middle class boosters, are determined to block the development of a politically conscious and united movement of black, white and immigrant workers and youth against the profit system.

Image: White House photo-op of Situation Room during operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden

Nearly four years since the US Special Forces raid that resulted in the murder of Osama bin Laden, an extraordinary political exposure by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published Sunday in the London Review of Books has torn the mask off the official narrative by the US government.

The wealth of details laid out in Hersh’s article calls attention to the reality that nothing that any government official says on the record can be taken as the truth, and that the mainstream media operates as an echo chamber for official lies. Hersh asserts that the accounts given by President Barack Obama and members of his administration “might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” author of Alice in Wonderland.

Among the claims exposed as fabrications are that the CIA torture program contributed to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout; that the raid was carried out without the knowledge of the Pakistani government; that the Special Operations team intended to take bin Laden alive, and only killed him after he resisted; and that bin Laden was given an Islamic burial at sea from the carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Hersh writes that the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden was initiated in August 2010 after a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to give the CIA bin Laden’s location in return for the $25 million bounty the US government had placed on the Al Qaeda leader’s head in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In its broadcast Monday night, NBC News said that it had independently confirmed that Pakistani intelligence sources had given bin Laden’s location to the CIA in 2010—perhaps the most important claim made in Hersh’s report, and a devastating refutation of the official Obama administration cover story.

The Al Qaeda leader’s location was not discovered via the CIA’s torture program, as depicted in the propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty. This claim and the film were used to bolster public support for the CIA’s illegal operations and further reinforce the Obama administration’s concocted narrative about the killings.

The walk-in told the CIA that bin Laden had lived with several of his wives and children undetected in the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2006 when his location was betrayed by local tribesman bribed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Bin Laden was then transferred to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was held as a prisoner of the ISI. The residence was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy and a 15-minute helicopter ride from Tarbela Ghazi, an ISI covert operations base.

Bin Laden’s location in a headquarters town of the Pakistani military, crawling with security agents, has always been the weakest link in the official US narrative of the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader. Hersh’s account provides a far more convincing explanation of why bin Laden was in Abbottabad—he was being held under house arrest by the Pakistani authorities while they discussed his fate with their American paymasters.

According to the retired US official interviewed by Hersh, Saudi Arabia was financing bin Laden’s upkeep in Abbottabad and worried that if the American government discovered that he was being held by the ISI they would force him to give up the details of the Saudi monarchy’s support for Al Qaeda. The Pakistanis in turn worried that the Saudis might provide the US with information on his location, sparking a conflict with the US. These relationships demonstrate the fraud of the “war on terror,” since bin Laden was being housed and financed by two of the leading US allies in the alleged struggle against Al Qaeda.

In fact, Saudi Arabia has longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, and members of the Saudi monarchy—likely with the knowledge of sections of the US state—financed and supported the hijackers who participated in the September 11 attacks.

Hersh’s source makes absolutely clear that it was the intention of the Obama administration from the outset to kill bin Laden, and that this was enthusiastically supported by all concerned, the Pakistanis and the Saudis, for the time-honored reason that “dead men tell no tales.” The raid against bin Laden’s compound, blessed by the ISI, was nothing less than a hit ordered by Obama, the executioner-in-chief. The informant had told the CIA that bin Laden was in poor health and would not put up any resistance.

The retired official stated that the operation against bin Laden “was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.” A former Seal commander told Hersh, “We were not going to keep bin Laden alive—to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, ‘Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.’”

The Obama administration has maintained since the assassination that killing bin Laden was seen only as a last resort, and that the primary mission was to capture him alive.

According to Hersh, the US commandos moved into the compound unopposed. There was no firefight as claimed by US officials. Using explosives to blow open steel security doors, the Special Forces operatives methodically made their way to the third-floor rooms where bin Laden was living. The Al Qaeda leader retreated to his bedroom where two of the Navy Seals opened fire with their automatic rifles, cutting his body to pieces. The commandos did not shoot in self-defense, the gravely ill bin Laden never reached for an AK-47, and he never tried to use one of his wives as a human shield.

Hersh writes that “a carefully constructed cover story would be issued” following the killing of bin Laden, in part to avoid revealing the role of the Pakistani state in providing the US with information about his location. A week after the killing, “Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border…. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests….”

The White House decided to announce bin Laden’s assassination on the night that it happened, however, in part due to the fact that a US helicopter had crashed in bin Laden’s compound, making the operation impossible to hide. The announcement—which Hersh describes as a “series of self-serving and inaccurate statements”—also provided the White House with an opportunity to rally support for the expansion of militarism abroad and the assault on democratic rights within the US.

The claim that bin Laden’s body was subsequently given a proper Islamic burial at sea from the USS Carl Vinson is also exposed as a lie. Instead, what remained of bin Laden’s bullet-riddled body, including his head, which is described as having “only a few bullet holes in it,” was unceremoniously tossed into a body bag. On the commandos’ helicopter trip back to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, pieces of the body were dropped over the Hindu Kush mountains.

Hersh has come under immediate attack from the mainstream media for his reliance on anonymous sources. Such criticism means little coming from a media that relies consistently on anonymous government and intelligence sources to push the official line in the “war on terror” and in support of US provocations from Ukraine to the South China Sea. In the eyes of the government stenographers in the corporate-controlled media, Hersh’s main sin is that he uses anonymous sources to challenge the official narrative rather than regurgitate it.

Based on the historical record, Hersh is a far more reliable witness than the innumerable millionaire anchor-persons and pundits who serve as apologists for American imperialism. He was the first journalist to expose the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In 2013-2014, he published two devastating exposures of the US claims that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, demonstrating that it was far more likely that the US-backed “rebels” were responsible.

It is far from certain that Hersh has provided the final accounting of the events that led to bin Laden’s death. While it relies chiefly on the account of a single anonymous retired senior intelligence official corroborated by other unnamed intelligence officials in the US and Pakistan, his narrative is a far more robust and believable story than the account spun by the propaganda of the Obama administration and the corporate media.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 2015 (emphasis added): Beach mystery: Another dead whale washes up in Pacifica — For the second time in three weeks, a dead whale has washed up on [the same beach]… “Something’s going on with nature,” said Ralph Clement… “This is kind of eerie. What are the odds of two whales in the same place? It has to mean something.”… “This is just not supposed to happen,” [Courtney] Patterson said. “It’s very unnerving. Is this caused by a lack of food?”… Jane Nahass said she has been walking on Pacifica beaches for 26 years and never saw two dead whales so close together. “Something’s going on,” she said.

NBC Bay Area, May 5, 2015: The 32-ft humpback is only a 5 minute walk from the decomposing sperm whale… Witness: “This is totally something new, something strange.” The Marine Mammal Center calls the beached whales a coincidence [and that it’s] an expected spot for marine life to wash up… But for a small crowd on the beach, the whale was anything but expected. Witness: “I’ve never seen this before in my whole life.”

KTVU, May 5, 2015: Anchor: Yet another dead whale was discovered today [at] almost the exact same spot where another huge whale washed ashore… Reporter: In 3 weeks, 5 dead whales have now beached along the Northern California coast.

KRON, May 6, 2015: Scientists conducted a necropsy on the 42-foot adult female humpback… if the whale had been struck by a ship, the scientists would have expected to see more broken ribs, so the exact cause of death remains unknown…

NBC Bay Area, May 5, 2015: John Valentini, 74 [said] “I have no idea what’s going on.” Sue Pemberton with the California Academy of Sciences [said] she doesn’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the ocean, or that there is an epidemic of dead whales… Scientists still don’t know what killed the adult sperm whale [from April]… the Marine Mammal Center… has responded to 21 humpback whales and 17 sperm whales that washed up… in its 40-year history.

Press Democrat: Apr 20, 2015: A rare stranding of a 26-foot-long killer whale… the third cetacean to become stranded along the Northern California coast in less than a week… a common dolphin [was] found dying early last week… [It’s] just the sixth time in 40 years that the center has responded to a call about a stranded orca, [a Marine Mammal Center official] said.

San Jose Mercury News, Apr 22, 2015: Stranded killer whale mystifies scientists

CBS Bay Area, May 5, 2015: Fifth Dead Whale In 3 Weeks Washes Ashore NorCal Beach… two whale strandings occurred on the same beach… a killer whale also beached [in a] rare occurrence… April 24, two gray whale carcasses washed up on a Santa Cruz County beach.

KCRA, Mar 6, 2015: Massive Humpback whale washes ashore in Santa Cruz County

Dolf DeJong, vice president at Vancouver Aquarium, May 4, 2015: Grey Whale Washes Up On[Vancouver Island]… a dead marine mammal on shore is not a frequent occurrence… This was the first dead whale I had ever seen [and it] died far too early… we do not know the cause…

Xinhua, May 8, 2015: Workers bury a gray whale at the seashore [10 miles from San Diego]

Watch News Reports: NBC Bay Area | KTVU

3) Separation from adults: International law provides that every child deprived of his or her liberty shall be separated from adults, with the exception of unusual cases in which it is not in the child’s best interest to maintain such separation. (ICCPR 10, 2, CRC art. 37(c))

Khadr has been detained with the general detainee population at Guantanamo since he was 16. In 2003, the US government took steps to segregate other child detainees (three children estimated to be between the ages of 13 and 15) from the adult population in a separate facility, but refused to take such action in the case of Khadr, despite his status as a minor.

4) Contact with family: Detained children have the right to maintain contact with their family through correspondence and visits. (CRC art. 37(c)).

In five years of detention, Khadr has been allowed to speak to his family by telephone only once. His family has never been allowed to visit him.

5) Education, recreation: Children deprived of their liberty have the right to special care and assistance, including the right to education and recreation.(Beijing Rules 13.5, UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles 12, 18(b)(c), 38, 47.)

Although US authorities provided other children held at Guantanamo with access to specialized tutors, a designated social worker, and recreational opportunities, these options were not made available to Khadr.

6) Specialized juvenile justice systems and rehabilitation: Child offenders should have access to specialized juvenile justice systems, with specially-trained judges, prosecutors and attorneys. A cornerstone of international juvenile justice standards is also a focus on rehabilitation and social reintegration. (ICCPR 14 (4), CRC art.40(1), Beijing Rules 2.3.)

Khadr has never had the opportunity to request that his case be transferred to a specialized juvenile justice system or the consideration of a non-judicial disposition. He has not been afforded access to specially-trained judges or prosecutors with expertise in juvenile justice standards or the particular needs and rights of alleged juvenile offenders. No consideration has been given to his rehabilitation or eventual reintegration into society.

No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has prosecuted a former child soldier for violating the laws of war.

There is an overriding presumption in international law that any exception be expressly authorized. The Special Court for Sierra Leone (“SCSL”) is one such exceptional case and its jurisdiction was limited to promoting the child’s “rehabilitation, reintegration into and assumption of a constructive role in society.” Even with these qualifications, the SCSL has made it its policy not to prosecute any former child soldiers.

In 2000, the United States signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict and ratified it in December 2002. Article 6(3) of the Optional Protocol obliged States Parties to take all feasible measures to ensure that persons within their jurisdiction recruited or used in hostilities contrary to the present protocol are demobilized or otherwise released from service. States Parties shall, when necessary, accord to such persons all appropriate assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration.

The rehabilitation of former child soldiers generally entails reunification with the child’s family, counseling, educational and vocational training, and other necessary assistance to aid their reintegration into society. The “Paris Principles,” international guidelines regarding children associated with armed forces or groups state that “at all stages,” the objective of programming for children who have been involved with armed forces should be to enable children “to play an active role as a civilian member of society, integrated into the community and, where possible, reconciled with her/his family.”

If Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. Democratic Presidential nomination, then how strong a candidate will she be against a Republican nominee who, as a representative of the conservative party, is proudly and openly supporting conservative positions?

Taegan Goddard of The Week headlines on May 11th, “Is Hillary Clinton Flip-Flopping or Just Evolving?” and he notes several issues on which she has rhetorically veered to the left recently. He further notes that one of the things that probably shaved a crucial few percentage-points off the losers in previous Presidential general-election contests and caused them to lose, such as John Kerry and Mitt Romney, was the given candidate’s primary-campaign rhetorical flip-flops that had been made during the Party’s primaries in order to be able to wrap up that candidate’s Party-base so as to win its Presidential nomination and so be able to become a participant in the general-election contest.

In other words, the record is clear: such flip-flops reduce the ardor of the given Party’s voters to come to the polls and vote on Election Day. The opposite Party’s nominee, who hasn’t flip-flopped quite so blatantly, wins the general election because that Party’s base then comes to the polls in droves on Election Day in order to ensconce into the White House someone whom they passionately want to be there, someone whom they strongly believe represents their values. Thus, George W. Bush and Barack Obama became Presidents, while Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, and Mitt Romney didn’t.

Whereas today, some Republicans might not consider George W. Bush to have been a really conservative President, they strongly did believe him to be a really conservative Presidential nominee, both in 2000 and in 2004. And whereas today, some Democrats might not consider Barack Obama to be a really progressive President, they strongly did believe him to be trying and doing his best to be so against the ferociously conservative Republican congressional opposition, both in 2008 and in 2012.

So: in order for Hillary Clinton to be credible in the general election against whomever the Republicans end up nominating, she will need to out-compete that nominee on consistency, and not only on ideology. Polls show that the two Parties are overall fairly-equally close to the viewpoints of the American electorate on ideology; but, in the final election, what makes the decisive difference is usually instead the passion-factor: the devotedness of the given nominee’s followers, and this means mainly the Party (but also independents who respect the given person’s consistency or “honesty”). Flip-floppers don’t get it, and they never can, especially when things become closer and closer to Election Day and the voters become more concerned about the issues than they were at the contest’s start (i.e., before the debates and the advertisements).

The stakes at the end of a Presidential contest are more stark than they ever were before. The key factor then becomes trust: if you don’t trust your Party’s nominee, you’re a lot less likely to go to the polls to vote for him or her. That’s a major reason why the U.S. has one of the lowest of all nations’ voter-participation rates.

If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, then how will she be able to attack the Republican nominee for being a tool of Wall Street — which she will have to do (and do convincingly) in order to beat the Republican?

Here’s her record, and here are its results:

How many Democrats will be too disheartened even to show up and vote? And how many of them will even be wondering whether perhaps some of the “private” emails that Ms. Clinton had wiped off her computer’s (even off of her server’s) hard drive, might have been emails with some of the Wall Street bigs (and their law and accounting firms) who were on that list of her top campaign contributors? Even the legality of her having destroyed those emails is far from clear. So: how will she be able to motivate her Party-base, when that final moment arrives?

If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, then trust will be the killer campaign-issue, even if it’s not an issue that’s being discussed in the campaign. The closer and closer to Election Day, the bigger and bigger that issue will be. We’re as far from it now as we can be, but, with Hillary Clinton, it’s already rising, and no one has any suggestion of a way in which it will likely recede. And this is only the start.

Regardless of whom Democratic voters select to become the Democratic nominee, and regardless of whom Republican voters select to become the Republican nominee, it would not be going out on a limb to predict, right now, that the Democratic nominee will be campaigning in the general election for the issues on which polls show that the public agrees mainly with the Democratic positions, and that the Republican nominee will be campaigning in the general election for the issues on which polls show that the public agrees mainly with the Republican positions. The silent but decisive killer-issue will be trust.

In primary elections, it’s smart for voters to be concerned about ideology. But, if they really want to be voting for the next President of the United States, then the smartest voters in the primary elections will be even more concerned about trustworthiness. When the final election comes, that tends to be the determining issue — more than ideology, more than “experience,” more than anything else.

“And right now and I’m ready to support my words, and i take full responsibility for my words they (government) have recreated (the great purges of) 1937, perhaps even the worst version of it.”  -Anatoly Sharij (from this interview)

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A chill has settled over journalists living and working in Ukraine.

As reported by Amnesty International, a number of journalists in the country have been facing harrassment from authorities. Prominent blogger Ruslan Kotsaba for example, was arrested on February 7 in a town 130 km southeast of Lviv. He was charged with “high treason” on March 31, and sentenced with up to 15 years in prison. His crime? Posting a video describing the conflict in the south and east of the country as “the Donbas fratricidal civil war” and expressing opposition to the military conscription of Ukrainians to take part in the offensive.

On April 7, the Security Bureau of Ukraine detained two bloggers with the independent political site “Voice of Odessa.” One of the women had her personal computer, telephone and personal belongings seized during the raid. On that same day, the SBU put out the following statement:

“The security service of Ukraine … has discontinued operation of a number of Internet sites that were used to perpetrate information campaigns of aggression on the part of the Russian Federation aimed at violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order and territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine.” [1]

 As of this writing, the whereabouts of these two bloggers remain unknown.

 And there are the suspicious deaths.

In March, the 45 year old journalist Oles Buzyna, who was thought to have “pro-Russian” views, had stepped down from his position as editor-in-chief with the Segodnya (“Today”) newspaper. In a blog entry, he explained that his decision was motivated by what he called “censorship” imposed from on high. According to the blog post, the editorial position of the paper had been reset so that the new Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was effectively immune from criticism.

One month after leaving his position with the paper and posting that blog entry, Buzyna was gunned down by masked assailants in the courtyard of his building.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we examine the threats facing working journalists in today’s Ukraine with the assistance of a provocative and popular blogger named Anatoly Sharij.

Anatoly Sharij had been forced to flee the country in 2012 after facing trumped up charges. He had been granted refugee status in EU. While not exactly a “pro-Russian” journalist he has been very effective using videos to highlight the deceptions and lies appearing in the Ukrainian news media. As a result he has been receiving death threats. His website is sharij.net. 

The transcript for this interview, conducted with the assistance of Winnipeg-based Konstantin Goulich, appears below.

The interview is followed by an excerpt of a speech given at last March’s US-Russia forum in Washington by American journalist Robert Parry. As a reporter in the 1980s he helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal for the Associated Press. He now works with the independent news site Consortium News. In this talk, Parry comments on the unprecedented ‘groupthink’ that seems to pervade the US media when it comes to the Ukraine conflict.

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Interview with Anatoly Sharij

Anatoly Sharij is a prominent video-blogger, journalist and media expert from Ukraine presently exiled in EU. Anatoly is a prominent critic of the current state of journalism in Ukraine. He made a name for himself by exposing fakes and propaganda in Ukrainian and Russian media. Anatoly is extremely critical of the atmosphere of terror and intimidation the current Ukrainian government had created in Ukraine, both for the journalist community and for the population, with the recent string of murders and arrests. His work had caused some very public spats with government officials, and pro-regime media personalities.

Global Research: Hello, Anatoly Sharij. Welcome to the broadcast. I would like to ask you some questions. First of all, if you could explain. You are a journalist, and you’ve worked out of Ukraine. Could you tell us the circumstances by which you ended up leaving Ukraine?

Anatoly Sharij: Good afternoon Michael. Indeed I used to be a journalist in Ukraine. In 2011 I`ve had began to have problems with ministry of Internal Affairs. Why? For what reason? For the reason that I and my colleagues from Ukrainian TV channel 1+1 who are unfortunately no longer employed by it we were closing drug selling points, establishments legally selling synthetic drugs, after using which young people were jumping out of buildings. And we were closing the illegal casinos.

The problem was that just like those drug selling points were working under the protection of Department of Combating Illicit Drug Trafficking so were the casinos working under the protection of the structures within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. At first I was warned through then adviser of the Minister of Internal Affairs, he had warned me to hold my horses (to slow down ) a bit. Yet we had continued (our work), that’s when the problems had begun. At first there was a provocation at one of the fast food restaurants. A person who was later determined to be off staff employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had attacked my wife. I was forced to shoot him (with a trauma pistol – a self defence weapon).

Immediately after that (incident) I had called the police. Yet, I did not stop and had continued my work closing down the drug selling points and illegal casinos. After that my car was shot up. The car was shot at, and a half a year later I was accused of shooting at my own car. I was under two court indictments.

There was zero evidence (presented), but you don’t need evidence in Ukrainian courts. The judge had refused all attempts at mediation. That’s when, before my final hearing I had (escaped the country) to the West. Using some other person’s documents I crossed the border and ended up in European Union where I asked for refugee status. I had provided all the documents concerning my criminal cases, documents from all of my court hearings. And in 2012 I was granted a full refugee status.

GR: So Anatoly, you’re now based in Lithuania, and my understanding is that there have been efforts and pressure on the Lithuanian government to have you extradited back to Ukraine. Is that correct?

 AS: No, that’s not the case. In 2013 I was arrested in Netherland by Interpol under request of Ukrainian authorities , then ruled by (former president) Yanukovich. Yet (authorities in) Netherlands after hearing the evidence against me, while I was under arrest, had determined them to have been falsified. In essence that was a second country in EU that had determined that case against me had been fabricated.

Nevertheless, in 2015 a series of articles against me was published, for which no one had asked for my comment. This was happening in Lithuania. The series of articles had appeared that had stated that I was a Putin’s propagandist, that I was pro-Russian. Which was completely false, and no one had bothered to ask me for a comment. Furthermore, I had contacted those Lithuanian journalists, who I refuse to call journalists they are pseudo-journalists. I’ve contacted them and had offered to provide my comments, but all of them had refused.

Shortly after, there was an unofficial request from Ukraine at the level of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, after which a statement from Lithuanian Deputy Interior Minister had appeared in the media ,where he had said that my (refugee) status will be reviewed (reconsidered), not because I had lied when I was applying for (refugee) status. No! It was because (according to him) the democracy had been established in Ukraine, and I was under no threat. Even though I’m still wanted under two criminal cases, and I receive direct physical threats on a regular basis from representatives of the Ukrainian government.

The last such threat came from the Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs. In other words they are either trying to accuse me of terrorism or supporting terrorism, or funding terrorism.

GR: You say that what you’re being told is that Ukraine is a peaceful country, but we’re hearing about incarceration of journalists and even the killing of journalists. For example Ruslan Kotsaba was arrested February 7^th and charged on March 31^st with high treason. He was sentenced for up to 15 years. And his crime as I understand it was posting a video describing the conflict as Donbass fratricidal civil war and expressing opposition to a military conscription of Ukrainians. Then of course, there was a recent killing outside his home of 45 year old journalist Oleg Buzina. I’m wondering first of all if you see your case consistent with what is happening journalist to journalist across the board. And I’m also wondering when did you (first?) see that apparent suppression of free speech. Where did it have its origin?

AS: I will voice my own opinion. I remember how I’ve learned of Oleg Buzina’s murder. I was driving in my car. When I learned of his murder, it was such a shock for me that I’ve stopped my car on the side of the road, because I consider… I mean I had considered him to be my friend. I know that he had never crossed the line, what I mean is that he had always played by the rules.

The problem with what is happening right now. The problem of what is happening right now is that the state had stopped to play by the rules. A person should not be incarcerated under false allegations. If you don’t like what the person is saying, but he is not calling for division of the country, not calling for anything illegal. And Buzina never called for something like that.

I had never in my life said that I consider Ukraine not to be unitary (united). For example I consider Crimea to be part of Ukraine. This is my personal opinion, yet I receive without exaggeration up to a hundred threats a day. A hundred threats a day in social media. Threats of murder, threats of quartering, threats that they will find me abroad. The problem is that the West unfortunately had stopped noticing what happens in Ukraine.

I can understand that the West was demonstrating its friendship, provided friendly support, but no one should be covering up for the criminals. It’s unacceptable to turn a blind eye to the crimes. It’s unacceptable to not notice violations of human rights. When the Adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs had started uttering threats at me, I had contacted Amnesty International, Human Right Watch and I had not received a reply from either organisation. Amnesty International had contacted me, they had promised me to call back, but they never did. I can see what is happening. Everyone is turning a blind eye.

When illegal procedure of removing my refugee status was started in Lithuania, which is unacceptable, it’s illegal to do so. When Deputy Interior Minister had made his statements to the press, which he had no legal right to do, since the refugee status of a person in a confidential information, he had violated the law, it’s a criminal offence. No one had noticed. And nobody is paying attention right now either. Oles Buzina got murdered, and I’ve read in western press that he was a pro-Russian journalist. As soon as they put a label on a person, it becomes OK to kill him. That is the main problem.

The west must open it’s eyes, to what is happening in Ukraine. Because what is happening is unacceptable, people are being jailed for 15 years for having an opinion. That is not normal.

GR: Anatoly, just a couple of notes on what you just mentioned. Maybe you can explain when did this intimidation, harassment, killing of journalists start. Did it start with you, does it go back to February of 2014, with removal of Yanukovich, but I also wanted to get a little bit more. Because I did see a report from BBC about journalist Oleg Buzina, and they did mention that there was a number of these suspicious killings. There was a report, I can’t remember which agency it was at the moment, which had talked that Buzina had been killed one month after stepping down from his newspaper, because he had refused the media censorship that he said was being imposed on his newspaper from on high. So it seems like this is an individual who had refused to be, and this is just an interpretation, kind of a propaganda organ for the state and one month later he ends up dead. I don’t know if you see that as a coincidence or if there is a direct connection with his stepping down, or his outspokenness, or idea that he is just independent minded person. Is this just an attempt, may be a very brutal fascistic attempt, to shut down free speech?

AS: I will answer the first part of your question first. Under the Yanukovich regime if you were a political journalist you were protected, absolutely protected. What I mean by that is that the pressure ( by the government) was applied only to the people ( journalists) who were going after specific personas (official). I was practising social journalism, and I was going after Ministry of Internal Affairs, I was going after specific generals. I was publishing fact based videos. I was publishing videos of soliciting murder that were recorded using hidden cameras. Those were very specific things (reports).

“The west must open it’s eyes, to what is happening in Ukraine. Because what is happening is unacceptable, people are being jailed for 15 years for having an opinion. That is not normal.”

Yet, I can’t remember people being thrown in jail on completely made up charges. Back then they could have passed it as a criminal case. For example if you did something (they didn’t like), then they might find you to be in possession of some drugs, something along those lines.

Right now I can see that people, without any after thought are saying that they will throw me into jail, because of things I say. And what do I talk about?What do I do? I expose fakes produced by Ukrainian media. I’m currently ranked first among Russian speaking video bloggers. I’ve managed to attain such popularity in a matter of a year. This is what gets them (Ukrainian Media?) embarrassed. They had made several attempts to get my Youtube channel closed. It was completely shut down three times, and I had to get it restored through my lawyers in the United States.

Then they started to threaten me with reprisals. As it was the case with threats I had received from members of Ukrainian parliament Bereza and Philatov, those are not the least important people in Ukrainian parliament. They, on their Facebook pages, in front of hundred of thousands of people had threatened me with murder. That is why the situation had deteriorated. I’m certain that what had happened was an evolution of pressure aimed at the journalists.

As for Oles Buzina. Indeed he was a chief editor of “Segodnya”( Today) newspaper. He had tried in that news paper under his editorial control to publish objective materials. In other words, today the objective journalism in Ukraine is almost completely banned. You must either stick to the party line.

Similar to what used to happen in USSR, there was an official line of Communist Party of the Soviet Union, if you were to step away from that line you might start to have problems, or your entire publication may start to have problems. For this reason the owner had attempted to frame his work, and Oles had left the newspaper. He was murdered soon after. And if you were to read the comments of the officials of the Ukrainian government in social media, you will see that they were saying that: “things are as they should be.”

Furthermore, the car used by the killers still had the licence plate attached, but they (Ukrainian authorities) have yet to find the killers. Why? Because, they do not want to find those killers. They use it as an example for everyone else of what would happen if someone were to cross that proverbial party line.

And right now and I’m ready to support my words, and I take full responsibility for my words they (government) have recreated 1937, (the time of great purges) perhaps even the worst version of it.

Intermission

GR:Have you noticed those changes since the beginning of February 2014 when the new government came to power?

AS: These changes had started to occur during the Maidan revolution. During the revolution there were constant baseless insinuations, accusations, constant fakes, constant propaganda. And then when new government came into power the pressure (on the journalists) had steadily started to increase.

GR: Anatoly I’m curious to know about other players in this whole conflict. I mean there are state forces that are in league with the current government, but we have a lot of other figures influencing things. You’ve got organized crime, you’ve got the oligarchs, you’ve got the Western connections within Ukraine. You’ve got the Russians, probably having their own connections within Ukraine. I wondering who all is benefiting from this suppression of press and freedom of speech, of harassment and intimidation of journalists like yourself. Is it just state authorities or are their other figures that can be benefiting from and influencing the situation?

AS: In my opinion, and I’m certain of it, the people most interested are the central Ukrainian authorities (government). As you probably know, the power is only strong as long as everyone keeps their silence. And at the moment it’s beneficial to keep quiet. Even if you’re aware of some crime committed by, let’s say, those (territorial or national guard ) battalions in Donbass region, you’re much better off keeping it to yourself. Because, if you were to go public, not only would you get noticed by Ukrainian security services. Alternatively representatives of those battalions may show up and in worst case murder you.

Similar to what had happened few days ago when law enforcement officers were gunned down in the centre of Kiev. Three police officers were gunned down. And that is considering that I had published three reports in regards to those people who then went on to murder the officers. So while I was not keeping quiet, the others were.

What’s worse they were turning them into heroes! As it turns out it’s more beneficial to keep your silence even if it may lead to murder or may have some other colossal consequences. I’m sure that it benefits the Ukrainian authorities. However, I do not differentiate between Ukrainian government and oligarchs that are presently in power. The idea behind the revolution was to wrestle control of the state away from oligarchs. Yet instead we saw governor, well now ex-governor Kolomojski, owner of channel 1+1, in control of several of the regions, by the way the complaints launched by that tv station against my Youtube channel had caused it to be destroyed twice.

And of course all of the outlets, for journalist community are owned by the oligarchs. All of the TV channels are owned by the oligarchs. The Fifth Channel is owned by Poroshenko, STB belongs to Pinchuk. As it turns out all oligarchs own the TV channels. The only place lay person can find some truth is in the internet. Yet if he finds Sharij on the internet, that means that Sharij has to be silenced as well. That is my impression.

GR: Anatoly, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about those journalists who are putting forward the information and commentaries that are supportive of the current governing authorities. Could you talk about individuals like Elena Vasileva, and the extent to which what they are being putting forward is being embraced not just by people within Ukraine, but by wider international press. How influential have these figures been?

AS: I’ll start from the end. The degree of the influence Vasilieva has become obvious to me when the information she had provided was used in UN Security Council. That is when I realised how serious things are. I’ve been fighting with that individual and with fakes that she was disseminating for half a year! I was exposing her fakes. I was showing that those were lies. She was burying football teams. She was saying complete gibberish. She was quoting UN figures that are nowhere to be found in UN reports. Yet, Ukrainian media were constantly rebroadcasting her fakery.!

So if there was a person to appear who would be saying complete nonsense, which can be easily fact-checked, as long as that nonsense is following in line with official position of the state, that nonsense would be broadcast by mainstream media. There were people like her before and after. Some people appear all the time that say things that I refute on my channel. However, Ukrainian channels do not want to publish corrections.

What’s worse, I can see that the situation is deteriorating. For example, Facebook status updates of some anonymous people began to appear on the front pages. The value of the information had vanished, it had disappeared. What we now see in front of us are no longer mass media nor journalists, but propagandists who re-broadcast any nonsense as long as it’s beneficial for the government. There is no more journalism in Ukraine.

GR: Anatoly, you say that journalism is dead, but what about other prominent bloggers or some of these collectives such as anti-maidan.com? Do you see those entities to be more reliable or beginning to approach actual journalism? Are these resources that people can rely on?

AS: They are a threat, but I don’t see them as an alternative. Unfortunately I do not see bloggers from anti-maidan as an alternative to journalism Because we can see propaganda on one side, and on the other side we see the other propaganda. There are just as many fakes on the other side too, but if from one side we see supposedly pro-Ukrainian propaganda, which in reality is not pro-Ukrainian but pro-State propaganda, then from the other side we see very clear pro-Russian propaganda.

“What we now see in front of us are no longer mass media nor journalists, but propagandists who re-broadcast any nonsense as long as it’s beneficial for the government. There is no more journalism in Ukraine.”

I’m not a friend of propagandists. Yes, the anti-maidan community has respect for me for certain principles I have. Even though, and let me repeat myself, to me Ukraine is unitary and Crimea belongs to Ukraine. I cannot use their information as reliable as, let me repeat myself, it’s also propaganda.

GR: Anatoly what are your thoughts then about western journalists going in there? I mean Graham Phillips or George Eliason. People from the west going into Ukraine. Do you feel anymore respectful of those sorts of individuals. For that matter, are there any prominent journalists from outside going in Russian or Western that you feel are somewhat reliable in terms of what they put forward?

AS: About Graham, you see I respect Graham and when he was detained at the airport I was first to say that he was in trouble, it’s unfortunate that he had been detained. Thank god it didn’t happen right now, because I think that today they would not let him out alive.

Yet when a person starts to openly express his own opinion in his reports, and his own definitions of this or that power, whether or not I have favourable opinion of that power, I consider them to no longer be a pure journalist. For me there is pure journalism and non-pure journalism. That’s why I do not even call myself a journalist at the moment, because I often express my personal opinions on my blog.

Graham deserves respect along with his European colleagues, even if they have pro-Russian position. He deserves respect because he is often present at the scene, and he gives information directly from the scene. If you were to remove his personal opinions he provides exceptionally valuable information.

Similarly, there are Russian journalists who work there, who undoubtedly… their information undoubtedly when it ends up with their news channels, is transformed and is broadcast without doubt as propaganda, either in light or extreme form. However , the importance of that information to me is that it comes directly from the scene of the event. These people provide exclusive video footage, and Ukrainian TV channels steal that footage and present it as their own. And the reason for that is the absence of Ukrainian journalists in Donbass region on the separatist controlled territory.

GR: Anatoly I wanted to also ask about Western reporting on this. As I understand you have been approached by western journalists and they don’t seem to be broadcasting what you saying, at least that’s what I understand. What is at the heart of western journalists not being able to reliably relay that kind of information, because they don’t seem to be under the gun the same way journalists within Ukraine are. They don’t seem to be subjected to the same kind of death threats that you’ve been talking about directed against yourself. What is the motivation for those journalists to may be sit on those stories that should be reported?

AS: My attitude towards Western journalists that work in Donbass region is without doubt of complete respect, if they convey their information not through the prism of propaganda, but if they provide pure information. As for the Western mass media as a whole, first of all, I tend to separate mass media into ones from Old Europe, the US and Canada are a separate category, and ones from New Europe. For example, I had personal encounter with journalism from Baltic states. As far as I’m concerned, there is no journalism in Baltic States either. As they do not follow any journalistic standards, and often re-broadcast Ukrainian fakes. Western journalism has its own peculiarities.

For example, we hear a statement by President Poroshenko where he declares that a Russian armoured column was destroyed. Almost immediately, all Western radio stations, all Western TV channels carry this message. However, two days later when I publicly ask them the question where, at what coordinates was that column destroyed – I would send my own journalists that work for me to that spot – no one can give me an answer. Because, that column had never existed in first place! But Western journalist can’t imagine that a Head of State would openly lie on the air. Perhaps that is the problem.

I was asked to give an interview from Netherlands and I gave a very long interview, furthermore I personally had it translated and sent it to them for their convenience. The interview was about BUK (missile system suspected of shooting down MH17) and my impression of what had happened there. I’ve provided my vision of the events. The interview was never published, after that the journalist had stopped communicating with me. What I suspect is that there is some politics involved and the information that should not be discussed never makes it on the air.

Of course, there are no such threats (to Western journalists as opposed to Ukrainian ones). I had frequent discussions with (Western) journalists. It’s a completely different level of professionalism. If they are taking an interview with you, they will turn you inside out while they sit and simply nod their head. Yet, at the same time those are people who work for publications and those publications have owners, and the owners possibly have certain political motivations or interests in specific types of information never making it into print. That is the only way I see it.

GR: Anatoly do you see the situation in the next several months either for the worst or for the better?

AS: Undoubtedly, the situation will only deteriorate.

I can see this as a reverse evolution. I’m observing this pattern ever since the beginning of the Maidan Revolution. I can see how afraid my colleagues are. Many of them had contacted me, journalists that still work for TV channels. And they keep on telling me that they can’t release truthful information even if they want too.

We can take Channel 112 for example. As soon as they’ve attempted to publish information just a little bit outside of the bounds of official line, they’ve immediately received a warning. If they get another warning, the State regulator will immediately have their licence pulled. “INTER” TV channel, used to be different as well. They are under pressure too.

Newspaper “Vesti” had their offices burned and no one was found responsible! As for the newspapers that they distribute, some people in ski masks show up and steal those. It happens all the time! That’s why I do not see the situation improving. I’m certain the situation will continue to deteriorate as long as West is turning the blind eye.

West should not be blind to what is happening! These are not some form of childish horse play. Those are murders we dealing with now! People are really being thrown into jail. Ruslan Kotsaba is sitting in jail and for what? For nothing but his position, he had never called for anything illegal, he had simply voiced his position, and now he is being accused of high treason! This is a complete legal nihilism (disregard for law). Yet the only force that can exert some influence over Ukraine is the Western society, and no one else. No one else can influence the situation. That’s why I’m waiting for the West to take a notice of what is going on!

 Intermission

GR: Anatoly I also wanted to ask, you had mentioned earlier the pattern of intimidation and deaths that it recalls the 1937 period. I’m wondering if there is anything else that you are witnessing in this society today that recalls the events of 1937.

AS: No doubt. The situation is that even people that have an opposite position are afraid to speak out. Because of their own fear they attempt to hide in the crowd. When everyone in the crowd starts shouting “Glory to the nation!” or “Death to the enemies!” then you start to shout same thing as well, not because you agree, but because you’re afraid.

We have seen this in 1937. We remember what had happened in Nazi Germany, millions of people were persuading themselves, pushing their own fear into subconsciousness, that they like (approve) what was happening around them. They were sincerely happy with the executions, or that tens, or hundreds or thousands of dissidents were thrown into jail, like we see right now in Ukraine. They believed… they’ve projected an impression that they believed that someone was guilty of committing acts of terrorism.

Today in Ukraine as many as 20 to 30 terrorists are detained every day! I do not believe that those terrorist acts are real. I do not believe that accused were attempting to blow up a bridge or assault the members of the government, or make an attempt on the life of the president Poroshenko. All of the above are carbon copy of 1937.

“When everyone in the crowd starts shouting “Glory to the nation!” or “Death to the enemies!” then you start to shout same thing as well, not because you agree, but because you’re afraid.”

Plus, today in Ukraine it became very popular to be an anonymous informant. People write anonymous accusations, people are asked to write anonymous accusations. People accuse their neighbours. In Mariupol after it was occupied by Azov battalion, the security service had quite a harvest because neighbours were writing about their neighbours. If someone didn’t like someone they would just make an accusation that so and so had cooperated with separatist or shared separtatist ideas, obviously such practices are outside of law. Yet in Ukraine today it’s considered to be very honourable to be an anonymous accuser. To inform, that’s another clear analogy I see with 1937.

GR: Anatoly is there anything else that you’d like to add that our listeners really need to know about, that will help them understand the situation with journalism and suppression of freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Ukraine that we haven’t mentioned yet that you would like to share?

AS: I think I had said everything. As for the situation with human rights, well I can be an example. I have to change addresses every other day. I can’t use phones. I have to use special programs that change IP address to access the internet, and for what? I have never done anything illegal! If I did, believe me, Interpol would have been already looking for me, and I would have been extradited long time ago!

People are wanted for speaking the truth. People have to hide and be afraid for their life. Not because they suffer from paranoia, but because they see how their friends get murdered on the streets of so called European state. That’s why I believe that other examples are redundant. I can see on my own example how far freedom of speech had advanced in Ukraine.

GR: Anatoly one last question for you if you don’t mind. There was a website “Peacekeaper” I believe it was called, and it was endorsed by Gerashenko. And it was posting information about people who got murdered. And it was somehow used as a crowd sourcing tool, could you talk a little more about that?

AS: Website “Mirotvorec” (Peacekeeper) was set up a few months ago with the active participation of Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs Gerashenko and with active participation, as far as I understand, of Ukrainian security services because all of their branches have their home pages hosted there as advertisements.

The personal information had started to appear on it soon after including phone numbers, home addresses, including names of children of people who someone thought were terrorists. They were accused of being terrorists. In fact, I had been contacted by people who had their information posted on the website and it turned out to be either people who practise sport shooting, who live in Russia and had never left Russian territory.

One person had contacted me from Siberia who had never left his village. He was also listed on the website as Russian terrorist. Then they’ve started to post information of people who’s opinions they didn’t like. Oles Buzina had his information listed there. They had listed his home address, which I believe had really helped his killers, and he was murdered the very next day. The former Member of Parliament from Regions Party had his information posted there and he was also murdered the next day.

After Buzina was murdered, my information was posted as well, but they didn’t know my address so they’ve listed me as homeless. So I’ve decided to strike back! I’ve decided to pay them with the same coin, so I’ve published in my video blog personal information of the creator of the website.

The very next day the pressure on me had increased. I was accused of financing terrorism, but I’ve continued to fight against that website. I’ve contacted human rights organizations. I’ve received no reply. However, I suppose someone in the West had noticed it, because Ukrainian Ombudsman had reacted and she released a statement saying that this is illegal and people behind the website should bear the responsibility. No one can be called a criminal without court’s decision. The principle of the presumption of innocence can not be suspended in one single country.

So the website has serious problems right now and those government officials involved are trying to distance themselves away from it. Yet some time ago it was actively promoted by main Ukrainian mass medias.

GR: Anatoly, there was information about this girl posted there. Can you tell us more about that?

AS: Yes, yes, I had noticed that girl too. They published her information, She was twelve years old and they called her an enabler and supporter of terrorists, and published her home address. The girl is twelve years old. I found her and I contacted her. The girl turned out to be a very sick girl, a physically sick child. So, they have started publishing the personal information of sick children.

GR: Thank you very much, I’m done now. “Spasibo!” Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us, and thank you for your patience through this entire process and we’re looking forward to getting this interview broadcast tomorrow, and it will be posted to our website shortly after that. So, thank you very much.

AS: Thank you very much! It would be a pleasure for me to give you any kind of commentaries you would like. And I hope that the West will finally start paying attention. Thank you very much.

End of interview.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:16)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

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Note:

1)http://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-disappears-opponents-of-the-kiev-regime-abductions-of-independent-journalists/5441924

Deutsche Bank headquarters. Photo: gravitat-OFF. Used under Creative Commons license

Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay out a record $2.5 billion fine to settle U.K. and U.S. government investigations into allegations of fixing global interest rates, just months after six other banks paid out $4.3 billion on similar charges. Activists say that the banks should have faced criminal charges.

“The question remains: does the punishment fit the crime?” writes Angela McClellan of Transparency International. “We think not: why allow a company to settle when they fail to cooperate with the investigation? Also, given the gravity of the situation a big fine won’t do, criminal charges should be considered as well.”

The banks have been accused of manipulating the global system of interest rates for $360 trillion in financial contracts, notably the London Inter Bank Offer Rate (LIBOR). LIBOR is set by the British Bankers Association which publishes an average of rates reported to them verbally by participating bankers. Such rates exist for as many as 150 different kinds of loans – mostly for overnight transfers between banks although they ultimately also affect the price of consumer loans like mortgages, car loans and credit card loans.

Since LIBOR rates are set based on private conversations held between a small group of individuals that are not subject to verification, the banks have allegedly been fixing the rates illegally for over 30 years to increase profits, according to whistleblowers.

Government investigators have published transcripts of instant messages between traders to prove that they were knowingly rigging the interest rates.

For example, on August 20, 2007, Mark Wong of Deutsche Bank was quoted saying: “It’s just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money or lose if opposite. It’s a cartel now in London.”

Two days later, Jezri Mohideen, head of yen products for Royal Bank of Scotland in Singapore, asking other traders to help him rig LIBOR rates.

Mohideen: “What’s the call on the Libor?”
Trader 2: “Where would you like it, Libor that is?”
Trader 3: “Mixed feelings, but mostly I’d like it all lower so the world starts to make a little sense.”
Trader 4: “The whole HF [hedge fund] world will be kissing you instead of calling me if Libor move lower.”
Trader 2: “OK, I will move the curve down 1 basis point, maybe more if I can.”

Under the terms of the new settlement, Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay the regulators substantial fines to drop the investigation. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was paid $800 million, the U.S. Department of Justice received $775 million in criminal fines, the New York state’s Department of Financial Services got $600 million in regulatory fines and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was paid $344 million in regulatory fines.

Last November, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS also agreed to pay multiple regulators in return for dropping the investigations. Citibank and JP Morgan each paid out a total of $1 billion – $350 million to the CFTC and $310 million each to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. UBS, a Swiss bank, paid the FCA $371 million and a Swiss Franc 134 million ($138 million) fine to Finma, Switzerland’s financial regulator.

Regulators say that the public interest has been served because the banks have admitted that their staff were engaged in fraud.

“We must remember that markets do not just manipulate themselves: It takes deliberate wrongdoing by individuals,” Benjamin Lawsky, the superintendent of financial services for New York state said in a press release. “Deutsche Bank employees engaged in a widespread effort to manipulate benchmark interest rates for financial gain.”

“One division at Deutsche Bank had a culture of generating profits without proper regard to the integrity of the market,” Georgina Philippou, acting director of enforcement at the FCA said in a press statement. “This wasn’t limited to a few individuals but, on certain desks, it appeared deeply ingrained.”

Observers say that knowledge of the practice was likely to have extended beyond just one division. “It seems hard to imagine a situation today where such wide scale misconduct could be carried out without the executive management knowing or at least turning a blind eye,” Tony Brown, managing director of Bivonas Law, told the Financial Times.

Indeed the FCA noted that Deutsche Bank falsely claimed to have created controls over LIBOR traders, accidentally destroyed evidence; and took two years to provide other information requested by investigators.

Given these circumstances, McClellan says that the fines amount to no more than a slap on the wrist for the senior executives.

“Although the amount of the fine seems exorbitantly high, the deterrent effect of fines is questionable in this case too. The expected impact on Deutsche Bank’s earnings will be small,” she wrote. “The most effective deterrent for unethical behaviour are sanctions on individuals. There is still a possibility that criminal charges will be pursued. If these are senior enough people and the criminal investigation proceeds, this would send a strong signal to the banking community that bad behaviour results in personal punishment.”

Others agreed. “If senior executives like board members were not directly involved but responsible, they should go to jail,” David Pereiz, partner with the New York law firm Reisman, Peirez, Reisman and Capobianco, told the Wall Street Journal. Otherwise the misconduct is “never going to stop.”

The interest rate scandal is only one of several scandals surrounding the big global banks. Fifteen major banks are currently being for investigated for rigging the $5.3 trillion global foreign exchange market. The final tally of fines in the foreign exchange scandal has been projected to be as high as $41 billion.

Not surprisingly, the banks being investigated are the very same as those implicated in the interest rate scandal. Indeed just four major banks together control over half the foreign-exchange market, according to Euromoney, an industry publication. Barclays of the UK has 10.2 percent of the market, Citigroup in the U.S. has 14.9 percent, Deutsche Bank from Germany has a 15.2 percent share while UBS of Switzerland has 10.1 percent.

Genetically engineered crops, or GMOs, have led to an explosion in growers’ use of herbicides, with the result that children at hundreds of elementary schools across the country go to class close by fields that are regularly doused with escalating amounts of toxic weed killers.

GMO corn and soybeans have been genetically engineered to withstand being blasted with glyphosate – an herbicide that the World Health Organization recently classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The proximity of many schools to fields blanketed in the chemical puts kids at risk of exposure.

But it gets worse.

Over reliance on glyphosate has spawned the emergence of “superweeds” that resist the herbicide, so now producers of GMO crops are turning to even more harmful chemicals. First up is 2,4-D, a World War II-era defoliant that has been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease and reproductive problems. Young children are especially vulnerable to it.

A new EWG interactive map shows the amounts of glyphosate sprayed in each U.S. county and tallies the 3,247 elementary schools that are located within 1,000 feet of a corn or soybean field and the 487 schools that are within 200 feet. Click on any county on the map to see how much GMO corn and soy acreage has increased there as well as the number of nearby elementary schools.

The 15 states outlined on the map across the center of the country are the ones where the Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of Dow AgroSciences’ Enlist Duo – a combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D – on GMO corn and soybeans engineered to tolerate both weed killers.

The chart shows the 10 states with the most elementary schools within 1,000 feet of a corn or soybean field. These states account for 53 percent of the total acreage planted with genetically engineered GMO corn and soy. EPA has approved the use of Enlist Duo in seven of them.

The inescapable connection between GMO crops and increased use of toxic herbicides is one reason why many people want to know whether the products they buy contain GMOs. Polls show that more than 90 percent of consumers favor labeling GMOs, but without a mandatory labeling law, they have no way to know for sure.

Methodology:

EWG approximated school locations using the ESRI (www.esri.com) landmark shape file for schools, derived from the U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System – Schools layer. These are considered the best available data for school locations. The data were filtered to the best of EWG’s knowledge to include only locations whose attributed name reflects an operating elementary school, but they may inadvertently include some free-standing school administrative offices or buildings that formerly housed schools but are now in other use.

Zones within 200 feet and 1,000 feet of each school were delineated using the school’s point location in the ESRI data, not the physical footprint of the school grounds. As a result, EWG’s analysis may over- or under-estimate the exact distance of school grounds to the boundaries of nearby corn or soybean fields. School locations were evaluated for proximity to the boundaries of corn and soybean fields as delineated in the USDA 2013 cropland data layer (30-meter resolution).

EWG acknowledges that spatial analyses of this kind may include some level of error (such as incorrect or outdated school or crop field locations or boundaries) even with standard, best available data sources. EWG welcomes information to revise and correct any locational errors in the underlying data.

Data on estimated glyphosate use was drawn from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Estimated Annual Agricultural Pesticide Use for Counties of the Conterminous United States (2008-2012 & 1992-2009). According to the USGS, “Pesticide use estimates from this study are suitable for making national, regional, and watershed assessments of annual pesticide use, however the reliability of estimates generally decreases with scale.”

Data on the acreage of genetically modified corn and soybeans were assembled by extrapolating from county-planted acreage using state percentages of biotech varieties by crop, as reported by the USDA. For corn, state level “herbicide resistant” + “stacked gene” varieties were used to extrapolate county-level planted acreage. If a state was not specifically listed in the USDA NASS Acreage Report, the category “Other” was used in the extrapolation. For soybeans, the state-level “all biotech varieties” was used to extrapolate planted acres at the county level. If a state was not specifically listed in the USDA NASS Acreage Report, the category “Other” was used in the county extrapolation.

Introductory note by Anatoly Karlin

This article originally appeared at The Unz Review 

President Xi Jinping (pictured left, meeting the Patriarch Kirill) penned an op-ed in a Russian newspaper on May 6th in which, in stark contrast to the typical Western bile and hostility, he acknowledges the role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazism and warns off against attempts to revise that outcome, be it on paper or in real life.

I am translating it in full for two reasons.

First, it constitutes a first-hand glance at official relations between China and Russia, which – much to the consternation of neocons, Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Western imperialists – are instead of fighting each other for make benefit of the US are instead building strong relations and continuing to ink dozens of deals whose total value now probably stands at close to a trillion dollars.

Second, to explicitly give the lie to Western propaganda that Russia is somehow “isolated” by the fact that none of Washington’s European stooges turned up at the Victory Day parade in Moscow this May 9th. Who cares? Not many Russians, at any rate. China, India, and dozens of other countries did turn up. That’s the world’s second superpower and the representatives of half of humanity. As for Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and Dave – quite frankly, the air is cleaner for their absence.

*Soundtrack – Russians and Chinese are Brothers Forever*

To Remember History, To Open the Future

by Xi Jinping

On May 9th, Victory Day in the world war against fascism, at the invitation of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, I will visit Russia and take part in the celebrations in Moscow devoted to the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This sacred day I will celebrate together with the Russian people and the entire world.

Everyone remembers that the aggressive wars begun by the fascists and militarists inflicted unprecedented damage and suffering on the peoples of China, Russia, and the countries of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. The relentless struggle between justice and evil, light and darkness, freedom and slavery, was joined by the peoples of China, Russia, and more than 50 other countries, as well as by all the other peace-loving peoples of the world, who stood up as one and formed a broad international anti-fascist and anti-militarist front. All these nations fought in bloody battles against the enemy, and in so doing defeated the most evil and brutal aggressors, bringing peace to the world.

I remember, in March 2013, when I first visited Russia on a state visit, I laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin walls. There was a depiction of a soldier’s helmet and a red banner on the tomb, and there burned an eternal fire, symbolizing the unbroken life and unwavering fearlessness of our fallen heroes. “Your name is unknown, your deeds are immortal.” They will never be forgotten by the Russian people, the Chinese people, or anyone else.

China was the main theater of military operations in Asia during the Second World War. The Chinese people stood up before anyone else in the struggle against the Japanese militarists, waged the longest war, fought in the hardest conditions, and, like Russia, suffered the most enormous losses. The Chinese army and people fought stoically and persistently, locking down and destroying numerous contingents of the Japanese aggressors. At the cost of a huge national sacrifice – the lives of more than 35 million people – a great victory was finally won and an enormous contribution was made to victory in the world struggle against fascism. The exploits of the Chinese people in the war against the militarists, just like the exploits of the Russian people, will be immortalized forever in history and will never die.

The Chinese and Russian peoples supported each other, helped each other, they were comrades in arms in the war against fascism and militarism, and built a friendship with each other forged with blood and life. In the most difficult times of the Great Patriotic War, many of the best sons and daughters of the Chinese people decisively joined in the battle against German fascism. Mao Anying – the eldest son of Chairman Mao Zedong – fought on many battles as a political officer of a tank company of the 1st Belorussian Front, up to the storming of Berlin. The Chinese fighter pilot Tang Duo, as deputy commander of a fighter company of the Soviet Army, distinguished himself in air battles against the fascist forces. Children of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and descendants of the fallen heroes of the Chinese Revolution, when studying at the Ivanovo international boarding school, despite that they were still only children, nonetheless went off to dig trenches, prepared Molotov cocktails, prepared food and clothes for the fighters, chopped trees, dug out potatoes, and looked after the wounded in hospitals. Apart from that, many of them regularly donated blood – 430 millilitres once per month for the soldiers at the front. The Chinese female journalist Hu Jibang, small and weak, underwent the entire war from the first day to the last, through bullets and fire, writing about the resilience and courage of the Soviet people, the barbarous cruelty of the fascist hordes, and the joy of the Russian soldiers and people in their times of triumph. It emboldened the armies and peoples of both countries, raising their will to fight to the end, to the final victory. Alongside the above heroes there are many other representatives of the Chinese people who contributed to the Great Patriotic War while remaining unknown soldiers.

The Russian people gave the Chinese people valuable political and moral support in their war against Japanese invaders. This included large convoys of arms and war material. More than 2,000 Soviet fighter pilots joined the Chinese air force and helped in the air battles over China. More than 200 of them died in battles over Chinese soil. In the closing phase of the war, Red Army soldiers of the Soviet Union were sent to north-east China. Together with the Chinese army and people they fought against the Japanese militarists, which helped China tremendously in achieving final victory. The Chinese people will always remember the Russians, both soldiers and civilians, who gave their lives for the independence and liberation of the Chinese nation.

The famous Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky said, that, having forgotten history, our soul can get lost in the darkness. To forget history is to commit treason. The Chinese and Russian peoples stand ready, together with all peace-loving countries and peoples, and with the automost determination and decisiveness, to oppose any actions or attempts to deny, distort, and rewrite the history of the Second World War.

This year, China and Russia will hold a series of events to mark the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Second World War. There will also be many other events conducted by the UN and other international and regional organizations. The purpose of these events and celebrations is to demonstrate our determination to defend the results of the Second World War, to protect international equality and justice, and to remind out contemporaries that it is necessary to preserve and guard the peace that was won for humanity at too high a price.

The hard lessons of the Second World War tell people, that humanity’s coexistence is not subject to the laws of the jungle; that world politics is diametrically contradictory to belligerent and hegemonic power politics; and that the path of human development is not founded on the principle of “winner takes all” or in games with zero-sum outcomes. Peace – yes, war – no, cooperation – yes, confrontation – no, mutual gains are honored, while zero-sum results – are not: This is what constitutes the unchanging core and essence of peace, progress, and the development of human society.

Today, mankind has unprecedentedly good opportunities for the realization of our goal – peace, development, and the formation of a system of international relations that is ever more strongly based on the spirit of cooperation and mutual benefits. “Unity – is strength, while self-isolation – is weakness.” Cooperation and the win-win principle should be adopted as the basic orientation of all countries in international affairs. We have to unite our own interests with the common interests of all countries, find and expand on the common points of interests of different parties, develop and establish a new conception of multilateral win-win, to always be ready to extend a helping hand to each other at difficult times, to partake together of rights, interests, and responsibilities, and to collectively collaborate to solve growing global problems such as climate change, energy security, cybersecurity, national disasters, and so on. In short, we are in it together on our planet Earth – the homeland of all humanity.

The Chinese people and the Russian people – they are both great peoples. In the years of grief and misery, our indestructible camaraderie was cemented in place with blood. Today the peoples of China and Russian will hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder defend peace, promote development, and make their contributions to lasting world peace and human progress.

Copyright  RG.ru (Russian) and the Unz Review 2015

The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs offshoring, and financial deregulation. In these events we find the basis of our foreign policy problems and our economic problems.

The United States has always had a good opinion of itself, but with the Soviet collapse self-satisfaction reached new heights. We became the exceptional people, the indispensable people, the country chosen by history to exercise hegemony over the world. This neoconservative doctrine releases the US government from constraints of international law and allows Washington to use coercion against sovereign states in order to remake the world in its own image.

To protect Washington’s unique Uni-power status that resulted from the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 penned what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. This doctrine is the basis for Washington’s foreign policy. The doctrine states:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

In March of this year the Council on Foreign Relations extended this doctrine to China.

Washington is now committed to blocking the rise of two large nuclear-armed countries. This commitment is the reason for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda. China is now confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington’s control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests.

9/11 served to launch the neoconservatives’ war for hegemony in the Middle East. 9/11 also served to launch the domestic police state. While civil liberties have shriveled at home, the US has been at war for almost the entirety of the 21st century, wars that have cost us, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, at least $6 trillion dollars. These wars have gone very badly. They have destabilized governments in an important energy producing area. And the wars have vastly multiplied the “terrorists,” the quelling of which was the official reason for the wars.

Just as the Soviet collapse unleashed US hegemony, it gave rise to jobs offshoring. The Soviet collapse convinced China and India to open their massive underutilized labor markets to US capital. US corporations, with any reluctant ones pushed by large retailers and Wall Street’s threat of financing takeovers, moved manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs, such as software engineering, abroad.

This decimated the American middle class and removed ladders of upward mobility. US GDP and tax base moved with the jobs to China and India. US real median family incomes ceased to grow and declined. Without income growth to drive the economy, Alan Greenspan resorted to an expansion of consumer debt, which has run its course. Currently there is nothing to drive the economy.

When the goods and services produced by offshored jobs are brought to the US to be sold, they enter as imports, thus worsening the trade balance. Foreigners use their trade surpluses to acquire US bonds, equities, companies, and real estate. Consequently, interests, dividends, capital gains, and rents are redirected from Americans to foreigners. This worsens the current account deficit.

In order to protect the dollar’s exchange value in the face of large current account deficits and money creation in support of the balance sheets of “banks too big to fail,” Washington has the Japanese and European central banks printing money hand over fist. The printing of yen and euros offsets the printing of dollars and thus protects the dollar’s exchange value.

The Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking had been somewhat eroded prior to the total repeal during the second term of the Clinton regime. This repeal, together with the failure to regulate over the counter derivatives, the removal of position limits on speculators, and the enormous financial concentration that resulted from the dead letter status of anti-trust laws, produced not free market utopia but a serious and ongoing financial crisis. The liquidity issued in behalf of this crisis has resulted in stock and bond market bubbles.

Implications, consequences, solutions:

When Russia blocked the Obama regime’s planned invasion of Syria and intended bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that while they had been preoccupied with their wars in the Middle East and Africa for a decade, Putin had restored the Russian economy and military.

The first objective of the Wolfowitz doctrine–to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival–had been breached. Here was Russia telling the US “No.” The British Parliament joined in by vetoing UK participation in a US invasion of Syria. The Uni-Power status was shaken.

This redirected the attention of the neoconservatives from the Middle East to Russia. Over the previous decade Washington had invested $5 billion in financing up-and-coming politicians in Ukraine and non-governmental organizations that could be sent into the streets in protests.

When the president of Ukraine did a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed association of Ukraine with the EU, he saw that it didn’t pay and rejected it. At that point Washington called the NGOs into the streets. The neo-nazis added the violence and the government unprepared for violence collapsed.

Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt chose the new Ukrainian government and established a vassal regime in Ukraine.

Washington hoped to use the coup to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Russia’s only warm water port. However, Crimea, for centuries a part of Russia, elected to return to Russia. Washington was frustrated, but recovered from disappointment and described Crimean self-determination as Russian invasion and annexation. Washington used this propaganda to break up Europe’s economic and political relationships with Russia by pressuring Europe into sanctions against Russia.

The sanctions have had adverse impacts on Europe. Additionally, Europeans are concerned with Washington’s growing belligerence. Europe has nothing to gain from conflict with Russia and fears being pushed into war. There are indications that some European governments are considering a foreign policy independent of Washington’s.

The virulent anti-Russian propaganda and demonization of Putin has destroyed Russian confidence in the West. With the NATO commander Breedlove demanding more money, more troops, more bases on Russia’s borders, the situation is dangerous. In a direct military challenge to Moscow, Washington is seeking to incorporate both Ukraine and Georgia, two former Russian provinces, into NATO.

On the economic scene the dollar as reserve currency is a problem for the entire world. Sanctions and other forms of American financial imperialism are causing countries, including very large ones, to leave the dollar payments system. As foreign trade is increasingly conducted without recourse to the US dollar, the demand for dollars drops, but the supply has been greatly expanded as a result of Quantitative Easing. Because of offshored production and US dependence on imports, a drop in the dollar’s exchange value would result in domestic inflation, further lowering US living standards and threatening the rigged, stock, bond, and precious metal markets.

The real reason for Quantitative Easing is to support the banks’ balance sheets. However, the official reason is to stimulate the economy and sustain economic recovery. The only sign of recovery is real GDP which shows up as positive only because the deflator is understated.

The evidence is clear that there has been no economic recovery. With the first quarter GDP negative and the second quarter likely to be negative as well, the second-leg of the long downturn could begin this summer.

Moreover, the current high unemployment (23 percent) is different from previous unemployment. In the postwar 20th century, the Federal Reserve dealt with inflation by cooling down the economy. Sales would decline, inventories would build up, and layoffs would occur. As unemployment rose, the Fed would reverse course and workers would be called back to their jobs. Today the jobs are no longer there. They have been moved offshore. The factories are gone. There are no jobs to which to call workers back.

To restore the economy requires that offshoring be reversed and the jobs brought back to the US. This could be done by changing the way corporations are taxed. The tax rate on corporate profit could be determined by the geographic location at which corporations add value to the products that they market in the US. If the goods and services are produced offshore, the tax rate would be high. If the goods and services are produced domestically, the tax rate could be low. The tax rates could be set to offset the lower costs of producing abroad.

Considering the lobbying power of transnational corporations and Wall Street, this is an unlikely reform. My conclusion is that the US economy will continue its decline.

On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America’s self-image as the “exceptional, indispensable” country with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war. Neither Russia nor China will accept the vassalage status accepted by the UK, Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The Wolfowitz Doctrine makes it clear that the price of world peace is the world’s acceptance of Washington’s hegemony.

Therefore, unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our likely future.

Washington’s aggression and blatant propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic alliance. Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebration of the defeat of Hitler is a historical turning point. Western governments boycotted the celebration, and the Chinese were there in their place. For the first time Chinese soldiers marched in the parade with Russian soldiers, and the president of China sat next to the president of Russia.

The Saker’s report on the Moscow celebration is interesting.  Especially note the chart of World War II casualties. Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia that defeated Hitler. In the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out of the story the Red Army’s destruction of the Wehrmacht. In line with the rewritten history, Obama’s remarks on the 70th anniversary of Germany’s surrender mentioned only US forces. In contrast Putin expressed gratitude to “the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory.” thesaker.is

For many years now the President of Russia has made the point publicly that the West does not listen to Russia. Washington and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan do not hear when Russia says “don’t push us this hard, we are not your enemy. We want to be your partners.”

As the years have passed without Washington hearing, Russia and China have finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war. Had there been any intelligent, qualified people in the National Security Council, the State Department, or the Pentagon, Washington would have been warned away from the neocon policy of sowing distrust. But with only neocon hubris present in the government, Washington made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity.

Shortly before a huge migrant boat disaster early this month, The Sun, a daily paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, published a column by British TV star and rightwing provocateur Katie Hopkins calling migrants “cockroaches” and “a plague of feral humans.” 

Not long after it went to press, as many as 850 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean when their wooden fishing boat capsized about sixty miles off the coast of Italy. Days earlier, 400 refugees had drowned. The death toll this year has already reached1,780, a more than 50-fold increase from the same time last year. The death toll is projected to rise further during the warmer seasons.

Given the timing, Hopkins’ genocidal language generated a great deal of attention and outrage, including a denunciation from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, who likened her vitriol to Nazi propaganda against Jews in the lead up to the Holocaust.

Largely unnoticed amid the uproar was the fact that Hopkins’ proposed solution — to “bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats” — is precisely what Europe’s supposedly “enlightened” liberals have chosen to do.

In response to the crisis, European Union leaders have agreed to launch military operations against smugglers in Libya using Apache helicopter gunships, to send nearly all migrants who survive the journey back to where they fled and to destroy the boats before they set sail to Europe.

The EU also plans to outsource its border patrol operations to security forces in Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Mali and Niger to prevent refugees from reaching the Mediterranean coast, further restricting their freedom of movement and ability to escape persecution and possibly deporting them back to their places of origin, which include Syria, South Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip.

Death as deterrence 

As Europe scrambles to respond to worldwide outrage spurred by this latest migrant boat catastrophe, it has placed the blame squarely on the smugglers.

There is no doubt that the human traffickers have engaged in murderous exploitation of refugees. In September, smugglers deliberately sank a boat, killing some 500 people, almost all of whom were Palestinians from Gaza. However, shifting all the blame onto smugglers deflects from Europe’s own culpability.

Smugglers are merely a symptom of Europe’s deadly border policies.

Over the last decade, the EU has deliberately sealed its land borders, effectively pushing refugees to use deadly sea routes.

The border between Spain and Morocco, one of just two land borders connecting Europe to Africa, is sealed by fence that is seven yards high and reinforced with barbed wire. Though the fence hasn’t stopped people from trying to climb over it, the barbed wire tearing through their flesh in the process, those who manage to scale the fence alive are swiftly deported.

Bulgaria, which two decades ago celebrated the dismantling of a wall that caged people in, is building a wall at its border with Turkey to keep mostly Syrian refugees out. Bulgaria became a preferred route after the construction of a fence at the Turkey-Greece border for the same reason.

With land borders cut off, refugees, no less desperate for security, are predictably risking dangerous sea voyages on rickety vessels to reach safety.

(US Border Patrol employs a similar policy of “deterrence” at the US-Mexico border, where the wall funnels migrants into the most dangerous desert terrain, where many die of thirst on the perilous trek from Mexico to the US.)

Let them drown?

After nearly 400 African refugees died in the Mediterranean trying to reach the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in 2013, Italy launched Mare Nostrum, a navy search and rescue operation that saved 150,000 lives until it was scrapped in October 2014.

The EU replaced Mare Nostrum with Operation Triton, which is overseen by Frontex, the European border management agency. Though the EU agreed to triple the budget of Triton in response to the latest mass drowning, the extra funding is unlikely to stem the deaths. Triton’s mandate is surveillance and border protection, not search and rescue, and it only patrols up to thirty miles off the Italian coast. Even the head of Frontex stated that the agency’s priority is not to rescue migrants.

The British government explicitly refused to take part in any search and rescue operations, arguing, against all available evidence, that saving people encourages migrants to make the dangerous sea voyage. Britain’s Home Office minister, James Brokenshire, insisted that halting rescue operations “at the earliest possible opportunity” would deter potential migrants from setting out on their voyages. (According to Frontex, the number of migrants increased 160 percent three months after Triton replaced Mare Nostrum.)

There are more refugees today fleeing war and persecution than at any time since the Second World War, according to the UN. The refugee crisis is largely isolated to the Global South due in no small part to the lasting impacts of colonialism and ongoing imperialism pursued by countries in the Global North.

Meanwhile, the EU will only offer resettlement to 5,000 people who qualify for asylum, meaning the vast majority who survive the Mediterranean “will be sent back as irregular migrants under a new rapid-return program co-ordinated by the EU’s border agency, Frontex,” according to The Guardian.

Such policies are reminiscent of the treatment of another group of persecuted refugees in the not-so-distant past.

In the lead up to the Nazi Holocaust, Western nations not only placed quotas on Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, but in some cases boats full of Jewish refugees were turned away. Such was the fate of the SS St. Louis, the infamous cruise liner carrying 900 German Jews who were denied entry in 1939 by Cuba, the United States and Canada, forcing them to sail back to Europe. More than 250 of those on board died at the hands of the Nazis.

Today, Western leaders atone for their nations’ complicity in the Holocaust with cheap pronouncements of “never again,” declarations of unconditional support for Israel and a commitment to fight anti-Semitism and discrimination, all the while denying asylum to today’s persecuted refugees.

Cheap talk 

During his 26 April visit to Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil, French President François Hollande warned, “The worst can still happen. Anti-Semitism and racism are still here.”

“We must not forget anything,” he said.

Just two days earlier, Hollande announced that he would be seeking a UN resolution to grant the EU authorization to destroy migrant boats before they set sail for Europe.

The fact that most of today’s refugees are Muslim provides an ideological imperative for blocking their entry into an increasingly Islamophobic Europe, with politicians stoking fears of Islamic terrorism and anti-Semitism to rationalize border cruelty.

Indeed, Raymond Shamash, a member of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), explained to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he is running for office to protect Jews from Muslim immigrants.

“Most of the people coming over from Libya and Sudan and Somalia and Afghanistan do share one characteristic — that they are Muslims. I feel a demographic shift will make the position of the Jewish community untenable,” said Shamash.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage recently issued a similarly panicked warning, arguing that relaxing EU asylum policies would result in “a million Islamic extremists coming to our countries and posing a direct threat to our civilization.”

Likewise, Kent Ekerot, a member of the Swedish Democrats (SD), insists that anti-Semitism in Sweden is entirely “imported” due to “unrestricted immigration” of Arabs and Muslims, which he and his party fervently oppose.

Rooted in fascism and the country’s neo-Nazi movement, SD captured 13 percent of the vote in the last general election, making it the third most popular political party in Sweden.

Israel’s existence as an exclusionary settler state is deceptively justified on similar grounds — as a necessary response to the world’s indifference to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Meanwhile, Israel refuses to grant asylum to non-Jewish African refugees fleeing genocide in places like Eritrea and Sudan, preferring instead to round them up into detention and deport them.

Openly referred to as “infiltrators” by Israeli government officials, Africans seeking asylum have — like Palestinians — been labeled a threat because they are not Jewish. Earlier this month it was discovered that three Eritreans who Israel deported were among those beheaded in Libya by Islamic State  (also known as ISIS) for not being Muslim.

Israelis on social media rejoiced at the news, with some heaping praise on the killers. “It’s a shame [Islamic State] doesn’t catch them before they reach Israel,” commented one Israeli. “Now we understand how to deal with the problem, bring here ISIS and they will take of the Eritreans and Palestinians,” remarked another.

This is the hatred European leaders are endorsing when they exploit the Holocaust to justify Israeli apartheid. But European support for Israeli discrimination is more than just empty penance for the past. After all, Fortress Europe benefits from Israel’s cruel policies of occupation and exclusion.

Israeli technology created to make the control and removal of Palestinians more efficient may be procured by the EU to militarize the borders of Fortress Europe, as The Electronic Intifada’s David Cronin has reported.

As the Mediterranean Sea becomes a graveyard for refugees, it’s more apparent than ever that Europe has learned all the wrong lessons from one of the darkest chapters in its history.

LE XXIÈME SIÈCLE. LE SIÈCLE DE L’EAU.

L’un des enjeux majeurs entourant le devenir de l’humanité est la disponibilité d’une eau de qualité qui est devenue plus précieuse encore que le pétrole. C’est l’or bleu. C’est le fondement de la vie et c’est le vecteur par excellence des sédiments utiles au renouvellement des sols à l’intérieur des bassins de drainage. « L’eau est un solvant unique qui transporte les éléments nutritifs essentiels à la vie » (Sauver la Planète, p. 152). C’est aussi, dans les zones humides un filtre efficace. Un peu partout dans le monde, l’eau se raréfie en raison des changements climatiques qui engendrent des périodes de sécheresse prolongées comme on peut l’observer cette année en Californie, puis par suite de la surutilisation de l’eau dans les zones semi-arides irriguées, de la surexploitation des nappes aquifères et de la gouvernance déficiente du patrimoine hydrique dans les zones d’abondance.

« Aujourd’hui encore, les contentieux à propos de l’eau sont nombreux à travers le monde, notamment au Nord et au Sud de l’Afrique, au Proche-Orient, en Amérique centrale, au Canada et dans l’Ouest des États-Unis. Au Proche-Orient, par exemple, une dizaine de foyers de tensions existent. Ainsi l’Égypte, entièrement tributaire du Nil pour ses ressources en eau, doit néanmoins partager celles-ci avec dix autres États…Quant à l’Irak et la Syrie, ils sont tous deux à la merci de la Turquie, où les deux fleuves qui les alimentent, le Tigre et l’Euphrate, prennent leur source. L’eau de l’Euphrate a d’ailleurs souvent servi d’arme brandie par la Turquie contre ses deux voisins : grâce aux nombreux barrages qu’elle a érigés sur le cours supérieur du fleuve et qui lui permettent d’en réguler à sa guise le débit en aval, la Turquie possède là, en effet, un puissant moyen de pression ».

Nous aborderons cette problématique dans un deuxième article consacré à l’analyse des conflits actuels.

« Avec l’essor démographique et l’accroissement des besoins, ces tensions pourraient se multiplier à l’avenir. C’est ce que prédisent certains experts pour le XXIe siècle. D’autres en revanche pensent que la gestion commune de l’eau peut être un facteur de pacification. Ils mettent en avant des exemples étonnants de coopération : le plus fameux est celui de l’Inde et du Pakistan qui, au plus fort de la guerre qui les opposait dans les années 1960, n’ont jamais interrompu le financement des travaux d’aménagement qu’ils menaient en commun sur le fleuve Indus » (cnrs.fr).

Un très grand nombre d’études, d’analyses et de bilans ont été proposés à ce sujet au cours des dernières années. Mentionnons, notamment, celles du PNUE,  le bilan dressé par Olivier Petitjean  (mars 2009), l’ouvrage de Frédéric Lasserre et de Luc Descroix intitulé : Eaux et territoires. Tensions, coopérations et géopolitique de l’eau (2011) et une analyse de Martine Valo, journaliste de Planète, exposant une vue d’ensemble de la problématique : La crise de l’eau illustrée en 5 graphiques (mars 2015).

Nous présentons, dans cet essai, les enjeux entourant le processus de raréfaction de l’eau. Quelle est l’ampleur des risques liés à la diminution de l’eau dans les zones déjà fragilisées par la baisse des nappes phréatiques? Est-ce que la demande accrue de l’eau dans les mégalopoles cause ou causera des conflits majeurs? Quelle serait l’approche à privilégier dans la gestion du patrimoine hydrique mondial?

Nous exposons, dans une première partie, les enjeux globaux entourant la raréfaction de l’eau à l’échelle mondiale. Nous définissons le bassin versant,  le cadre d’intervention à adopter dans la gestion du patrimoine hydrique et les modes d’établissement d’aires protégées avec sauvegarde du couvert végétal dans les bassins de réception des affluents des grands fleuves et sur les versants montagneux et la stratégie mondiale pour un partage harmonieux de l’eau dans les différentes régions du monde. Nous concluons en reprenant le Manifeste mondial de l’eau qui a été lancé au début du siècle.

Nous examinerons, dans un autre article, la problématique de l’approvisionnement de l’eau dans trois régions dans lesquelles les États s’affrontent ou bien cherchent à coopérer dans le partage de l’eau disponible, soit Israël, la Jordanie et la Palestine dans le bassin du Jourdain, l’Inde et le Pakistan dans le bassin de l’Indus et l’Égypte et les dix autres États qui se partagent les eaux du Nil.

I. Les zones arides (figure 1)

Les terres arides occupent 41% de la surface de la terre. Elles sont peuplées par plus de deux milliards d’êtres humains dont 90% habitent un pays en développement. Entre 10 et 20% des terres arides sont dégradées. Elles correspondent à 43% des terres cultivées de la planète (suds-en-ligne.ird.fr): « Elles sont en proie au processus de désertification dans lequel les sols deviennent de moins en moins fertiles (comme nous avons été à même de l’observer dans le Sahel). Ce phénomène global résulte des activités humaines et des variations climatiques…La désertification menace les zones arides du monde entier et a lieu à un rythme beaucoup plus soutenu que par le passé. Ce processus est renforcé par l’augmentation de la population qui a pour effet d’accroître la pression sur le territoire, à travers la mise en culture ou en pâturage de zones autrefois préservées » (seos-project.eu). La raréfaction de l’eau est accentuée également par les prélèvements faits pour approvisionner les mégalopoles comme c’est le cas à Los Angeles et dans la capitale du Mexique, problématiques que nous avons eu la possibilité d’étudier sur place.

Figure 1. Carte mondiale des zones arides

Source : https://suds-en-ligne.ird.fr/desertif/carte.html

La disponibilité de l’eau dans les zones semi-arides devient de plus en plus problématique. Dans plusieurs régions du monde marquées par un tel régime climatique l’eau n’est tout simplement pas au rendez-vous. Ces régions sont principalement le Sahel, les contours du désert australien, les zones influencées par les courants froids telles que la côte occidentale de l’Amérique du Sud et celle de l’Afrique, les hauts plateaux intérieurs eurasiens, les zones sous le régime climatique méditerranéen et les grandes prairies intérieures de l’Amérique du Nord et de l’Amérique du Sud. Plusieurs de ces zones sont attenantes aux grands déserts (figure 1). Ces zones, dans bien des cas, surexploitées, voient leurs nappes phréatiques s’abaisser rendant le couvert végétal très vulnérable aux incendies lors des périodes de sécheresses prolongées, une situation qui se présente fréquemment dans les régions marquées par le climat méditerranéen et, notamment, en Australie et en Californie. Le régime des précipitations, fort variable et même imprévisible, peut même forcer les habitants de ces régions à pratiquer la transhumance afin de pouvoir assurer leur subsistance.

Il y a six types de déserts qui sont au cœur des zones semi-arides et qui s’agrandissent à leur détriment. Les déserts de la zone intertropicale créés par la circulation atmosphérique globale caractérisés par de faibles précipitations, une forte évaporation et une forte insolation. Ce sont les déserts d’Australie, du Sahara et ceux de l’Afrique du Sud. Les déserts continentaux situés sur les hauts plateaux à l’intérieur des terres caractérisés par une très forte amplitude thermique (étés très chauds, hivers très froids) tels que ceux de Gobi et de Taklimakan (Asie de l’Est). Les déserts centraux en Australie, le Great Basin en Amérique du Nord, le désert de Monte en Amérique du Sud. Les déserts côtiers  situés sur les côtes le long de zones de remontées d’eaux profondes caractérisés par de faibles précipitations, une hyperaridité et des brumes de soirée tels que celui de l’Atacama au Chili, le désert de Namibie, le désert de Baja California au Mexique et le désert de la côte atlantique marocaine. Les déserts d’abri de la zone tempérée (‘rain shadow deserts’) comme c’est le cas de la Vallée de la Mort  aux USA abritée par la Sierra Nevada et caractérisée par de faibles précipitations, une forte évaporation et une forte insolation en y ajoutant, ici, les Cascades (figure 2), l’Himalaya et les Andes. Les déserts polaires (l’Arctique et l’Antarctique) reçoivent peu de précipitations, à cause de la présence de cellules anticycloniques (seos-project.eu). Nous avons été à même de faire des observations sur le terrain dans le désert de Mojave en Californie (figure 3), dans le désert de Djibouti et dans les déserts de Chihuahua, de Sonora et de la Baja California au Mexique (figure 4).

Figure 2. La Vallée de la mort, Californie, USA

Source : http://www.roadtrippin.fr/californie/death-valley/death-valley.php

Figure 3. La dune de Kelso dans le désert Mojave, Californie, USA

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelso_Dunes

Figure 4. Le champ de boulders (roche granitique) de Cataviña , Baja California Sur, Mexique

 

Source : allposters.com

Figure 5. Madagascar. Zone semi-aride consacrée à l’élevage

Source : http://blog.agrophil.org/#post51

Figure 6. Parc national Tarangire, Tanzanie

Source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tarangire-Natpark800600.jpg

Figure 7. Populations affectées par la désertification (en millions de personnes)

Source : https://suds-en-ligne.ird.fr/desertif/carte.html

Utilisation sans cesse croissante de l’eau. Pollution consistante et mortalité infantile élevée

Les rapports sur l’état du patrimoine hydrique mondial exposent les grands enjeux entourant la raréfaction de l’eau douce due à la surexploitation, à la pollution ou au gaspillage de la ressource. Ici, nous retenons les données de la stratégie pour l’Avenir de la Vie (1991) et les constats dressés en 2007 et 2012 avec GEO 4 et GEO 5.

 1991.

Selon la stratégie pour l’Avenir de la Vie lancée en 1991, « le problème de l’eau est quasi planétaire et c’est l’homme qui en est la cause. Le monde prélève actuellement 35 fois plus d’eau qu’il y a trois cents ans et les prévisions indiquent que, d’ici l’an 2000, le volume prélevé aura encore augmenté de 30 à 35%. Notre utilisation de l’eau ne peut continuer à ce rythme si la population mondiale atteint 10 milliards d’habitants d’ici 2050. Aujourd’hui, de nombreux pays souffrent de graves pénuries d’eau. La concurrence entre les utilisateurs ne cesse d’augmenter et les institutions sont impuissantes à l’arbitrer. Les détournements et retenues d’eau ont des répercussions de plus en plus graves sur les écosystèmes (PNUE, WWF et UICN, 1991, p. 152).

2007. GEO 4.

Selon le PNUE, la dégradation de la qualité de l’eau due activités humaines continue de nuire à la santé humaine et aux écosystèmes. Trois millions de personnes meurent chaque année de maladies  causées par une eau polluée dans les pays en développement, la majorité étant des enfants de moins de cinq ans. Les polluants les plus préoccupants sont les pathogènes microbiens et les charges excessives d’éléments nutritifs. L’eau contaminée par des microbes reste la principale cause des maladies et des décès à l’échelle mondiale. Beaucoup de nutriments conduisent à l’eutrophication des eaux en aval des cours d’eau et des zones côtières avec la perte d’usages bénéfiques pour les humains. La pollution diffuse provenant des surfaces terrestres, notamment l’agriculture et le ruissellement urbain, requiert une action urgente par les gouvernements et le secteur agricole. La pollution par les pesticides et les substances perturbant le système endocrinien de même que les sédiments en suspension sont également difficiles à contrôler. Il existe des preuves que le système intégré de gestion des ressources hydriques (IWRM) à l’échelle du bassin versant a contribué à améliorer le traitement des effluents et la restauration des zones humides, le tout accompagné par l’éducation et la sensibilisation du public et été une réponse efficace à tous ces problèmes (PNUE, GEO 4, p. 116-117).

 2012.  GEO 5.

« L’augmentation de l’utilisation efficace des eaux dans tous les secteurs est essentielle en vue d’assurer des ressources durables en eau pour tous les usages. La demande en eau de l’homme, avec seulement des améliorations limitées en efficacité, se multiplient et sont déjà insoutenables dans de nombreuses régions. Néanmoins, le potentiel existe pour des gains d’efficacité: efficacité de l’irrigation, par exemple, pourrait être augmentée d’environ un tiers simplement en mettant en œuvre la technologie existante. Au niveau local, les stratégies de demande et d’approvisionnement intégrées sont essentielles. Au niveau des bassins versants, des systèmes de répartition de l’eau plus efficaces et équitables sont nécessaires. Le commerce de l’eau pourrait virtuellement atténuer la demande en eau dans certains endroits ».

…« Il est difficile d’évaluer les progrès réalisés pour répondre aux exigences environnementales de l’eau. De meilleures stratégies et des outils sont nécessaires pour l’efficacité, la répartition équitable de l’eau entre les différents utilisateurs… La mise en œuvre intégrale des engagements internationaux et l’application des accords juridiquement contraignants…faciliteront  l’utilisation durable de la ressource par l’homme et les écosystèmes. Réduire à la fois la pollution ponctuelle et non ponctuelle est impératif afin d’améliorer la santé de l’écosystème et de fournir de l’eau potable pour les humains. Des réalisations importantes dans la réduction de certains polluants ont eu lieu depuis 1992, bien que de nombreux plans d’eau soient encore affectés, et de nombreux nouveaux contaminants ont des effets mal compris. Le traitement des eaux usées municipales et industrielles est réalisable avec la technologie existante, mais nécessite une meilleure surveillance réglementaire, des investissements dans les infrastructures et dans la formation, en particulier dans les pays en développement. La gestion intégrée des éléments terrestres et hydriques et la participation des intervenants sont nécessaires pour réduire les pollutions de l’eau douce et les systèmes marins. L’amélioration de l’approvisionnement en eau et de l’assainissement est probablement le moyen le plus simple du rapport coût-efficacité de la réduction des décès liés à l’eau et aux maladies à l’échelle mondiale. Bien que l’objectif du Millénaire pour le développement (OMD) sur l’approvisionnement en eau ait été atteint en 2010, plus de 600 millions de personnes n’ont toujours pas accès à l’eau potable en 2015. La cible des OMD concernant l’assainissement est peu susceptible d’être atteint, avec 2,5 milliards de personnes actuellement sans des installations sanitaires améliorées; les populations rurales pauvres sont les plus touchées. Augmenter l’approvisionnement en eau et l’assainissement permettrait de réduire la charge mondiale de morbidité liée à l’eau d’environ 10 pour cent. L’augmentation des investissements dans les infrastructures, le renforcement des capacités et la réglementation sont nécessaires et la participation des femmes est essentielle pour la gestion de l’eau et la prévention des maladies d’origine hydrique. Des considérations sur le climat dans tous les secteurs liés à l’eau est essentiel pour faire face aux événements extrêmes et à l’augmentation de la variabilité climatique. Les inondations et les sécheresses causent encore des pertes en milliards de dollars à chaque année » (unep.org).

Selon OXFAM, aujourd’hui, près de 783 millions de personnes n’ont pas accès à l’eau potable, tandis que 2,3 milliards ne disposent pas d’installations sanitaires de base. Chaque année, les maladies liées à l’eau causent le décès de 2,2 millions de personnes, pour la plupart des enfants de moins de 5 ans (oxfam.qc.ca).

II. Le partage de l’eau

Un stress hydrique qui touche une large partie du globe (figure 8)

« Le stress hydrique – autrement dit, une ressource insuffisante pour répondre aux différentes activités humaines et aux besoins de l’environnement – commence lorsque la disponibilité en eau est inférieure à 1 700 mètres cubes par an et par personne. Quasiment les trois quarts des habitants des pays arabes vivent en dessous du seuil de pénurie établi, lui, à 1 000 m3 par an, et près de la moitié se trouvent dans une situation extrême avec moins de 500 m3, en Égypte et en Libye notamment » (lemonde.fr).

« Les pays en voie de développement ne sont pas les seuls touchés. « Comment l’Ouest américain, certaines provinces de Chine, le Mexique ou encore le Sud méditerranéen vont-ils faire dans trente ans s’interroge Richard Connor, expert pour l’ONU, qui participe pour la quatrième fois au rapport annuel sur l’eau. Le stress hydrique peut avoir des conséquences incalculables. Par exemple, en 2010, les sécheresses et les feux de forêt dans les steppes de Russie ont fait chuter les exportations de blé. Résultat : le prix du pain a doublé, ce qui a débouché sur le printemps arabe »  (lemonde.fr).

Figure 8. Les régions à risque

Source: eco-fr.e-monsite.com

La carte des régions à risques pour l’horizon 2020 (figure 8) illustre les diverses problématiques qui vont se poser. Les régions avec pénuries structurelles correspondent à la péninsule arabique, une bande longeant la mer Méditerranée allant de l’Égypte au Maghreb, au nord-est de l’Afrique du Sud, à toute la partie du Sud-Est australien, à la Chine du Nord, à la Mongolie, au Sud-Ouest des États-Unis et à une grande partie du territoire mexicain et, en particulier, dans les plateaux intérieurs. Les régions à pénuries conjoncturelles comptent une bonne proportion du territoire de l’Afrique du Sud, Madagascar, le nord de l’Inde, l’Iran, le Pakistan, le Proche-Orient et une portion des plateaux intérieurs asiatiques. Les aires dont la situation est considérée critique en raison du manque d’investissements correspondent à l’Afrique subsaharienne entre le Sahel et  l’Afrique du Sud.

Plus de neuf villes dépendent de transferts d’eau à longue distance, soit Los Angeles, México, D.F, Johannesburg, Casablanca, Tripoli, Barcelone, Tel-Aviv, Téhéran et Pékin.

Les villes dont 20% de la population n’a pas accès à l’eau à domicile sont Calcutta, Djakarta, Rangoun, Karachi, Khartoum, Lagos, Abidjan, Addis-Abeba, Bombay, Chennai, Manille, Kinshasa, Luanda, Nairobi, Ho-Chi-Minh-Ville et Dacca, des villes dont les infrastructures ne peuvent donc répondre à tous les besoins d’approvisionnement et d’assainissement des eaux.

Selon le PNUE, « un tiers de la population mondiale vit dans des pays qui souffrent d’un stress hydrique modéré ou fort c’est-à-dire où la consommation d’eau dépasse de 10% les ressources renouvelables d’eau douce. Quelques 80 pays, comptant 40% de la population mondiale, souffraient au milieu des années 90 de diverses pénuries d’eau et on estime que dans moins de 25 ans deux tiers de la population vivront dans un pays connaissant un stress hydrique » (GEO 3, 2002, p. 150).

Selon un rapport de l’ONU rendu public récemment, « si rien ne change, la planète devrait faire face à un déficit global en eau de 40% d’ici 2030. La gestion de l’eau est inadaptée. L’irrigation intensive, le rejet incontrôlé de pesticides et de produits chimiques et l’absence de traitement des eaux usées sont notamment montrés du doigt. Des régions de Chine, d’Inde et des États-Unis, ainsi que le Moyen-Orient, puisent dans des réserves souterraines de manière non durable ». Le rapport rappelle que « malgré des progrès considérables ces dernières années, 748 millions de personnes sont toujours privées d’accès à une eau protégée d’une éventuelle contamination » (C. Serrat, 2015, p. A3).

La mauvaise répartition de l’eau dans le Monde, source de conflits ou de coopération ?

Selon le CNRS, « avec 40000 km3 d’eau douce qui circule chaque année sur les terres émergées, on est en droit de penser que la ressource est suffisante . . . mais elle est très mal répartie car neuf pays se partagent 60% des réserves mondiales (USA, Canada, Russie, Chine, Inde, Brésil, Colombie, Pérou et Indonésie), mais l’Asie qui concentre 60% de la population mondiale, ne dispose que de 30% de la ressource disponible, et de même une moyenne par pays et par habitant qui varie de 1 à 20 000 entre les Émirats du Golfe persique et l’Islande ! Le réchauffement climatique et la raréfaction des pluies, la surexploitation agricole et les pollutions, mais aussi la surproduction poussant à la surconsommation, combinés avec la croissance exponentielle de 7 milliards d’êtres humains aujourd’hui, 8,5 milliards en 2030 et de 9 à 10 milliards en 2050, font que la quantité d’eau disponible par habitant ne cesse de diminuer » (cnrs.fr).

Or, comme le montre cette carte, une bonne moitié des pays dans le Monde, dépendent à plus de 30% d’une ressource en eau extérieure à leur territoire, qui est donc une source de conflit possible avec des pays voisins. L’eau est une ressource qui se fait rare. De nombreux experts prévoient des conflits pour le partage de cette ressource de plus en plus convoitée car il existe 263 bassins fluviaux partagés entre 145 pays. Car notamment lorsqu’un cours d’eau traverse une frontière, l’eau devient alors un véritable instrument de pouvoir aux mains du pays situé en amont. Qu’il soit puissant ou non, celui-ci a toujours théoriquement l’avantage, puisqu’il a la maîtrise du débit de l’eau (cnrs.fr).

Selon Olivier Petitjean, « la géographie de l’eau, c’est-à-dire les divisions entre bassins versants et la distribution de la ressource au niveau mondial, ne recoupe quasiment jamais les frontières administratives. Il suffit de superposer la carte politique du monde et celle des bassins versants pour révéler la réalité et l’ampleur de l’interdépendance entre régions et pays en ce qui concerne les ressources en eau. Les chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes. On compte aujourd’hui 263 bassins versants transfrontaliers (50 de plus qu’il y a trente ans, en raison notamment de la dislocation du bloc soviétique). 19 pays se partagent le bassin du Danube, 11 ceux du Nil et du Niger, 9 celui de l’Amazone. 145 pays ont au moins une partie de leur territoire située dans un bassin transfrontalier. 30 sont entièrement situés à l’intérieur de tels bassins. 39 pays, représentant une population de 800 millions de personnes, dépendent pour moitié ou plus de ressources en eau qui trouvent leur origine à l’extérieur de leurs frontières. Des pays tels que l’Égypte, l’Irak, la Syrie, le Turkménistan ou l’Ouzbékistan, qui disposent tous de systèmes d’irrigation étendus sur lesquels repose une bonne part de leur fortune économique, dépendent quasi entièrement de l’eau de fleuves prenant leur source dans les pays voisins » (partagedeseaux.info).

En se référant aux données historiques le même auteur présente un bilan plutôt optimiste: « Les données historiques semblent d’ailleurs confirmer que l’interdépendance débouche le plus souvent sur la coopération entre pays plutôt que sur des conflits, infirmant ainsi les prévisions alarmistes. On cite souvent le conflit entre Lagsah et Umma, deux cités-États mésopotamiennes, vers l’an –2500, comme le seul cas répertorié de guerre engagée exclusivement sur la question de l’eau. Des historiens ont compté pas moins de 3 600 traités internationaux relatifs à l’eau entre 805 et 1984. Des chercheurs de l’Université d’État de l’Oregon ont étudié les données sur les 50 dernières années et ont conclu que sur 1 831 événements et initiatives internationaux relatifs à l’eau, plus des deux tiers étaient de nature coopérative et que l’immense majorité des cas de conflits en sont restés au stade de l’affrontement verbal. Dans 37 cas seulement (principalement au Proche-Orient), les pays concernés ont engagé une forme quelconque d’action militaire (tirs, destruction d’infrastructures, etc.) »  (partagedeseaux.info).

« Ces mêmes chercheurs précisent que les conflits (verbaux ou armés) portaient principalement sur des problèmes de quantité d’eau partagée entre les pays (61 % des cas), sur des infrastructures (26 %), et seulement marginalement sur des questions de qualité de l’eau (4 %). Plusieurs cas récents donnent toutefois à penser que les conflits transfrontaliers liés à la pollution de l’eau pourraient prendre davantage d’importance dans l’avenir… Une cause récurrente de conflits est une action engagée unilatéralement par un pays d’amont (construction d’un barrage, détournement de l’eau) qui a des effets négatifs potentiels sur les pays d’aval »  (partagedeseaux.info).

L’eau utilisée comme enjeu durant les conflits armés

Au XXème siècle, plusieurs actes de guerre ont éclaté en rapport avec l’approvisionnement en eau douce. Selon Oxfam Québec, « pendant la guerre du Vietnam (années 1960), de nombreuses digues ont été détruites ou endommagées par les bombardements continus. Selon les autorités du Vietnam Nord, entre 2 et 3 millions de personnes seraient mortes noyées ou de faim à la suite de ces attaques. En Irak, près de 1,5 million de sacs d’eau ont été distribués l’an dernier aux personnes déplacées ainsi qu’aux hôpitaux. Aujourd’hui, l’ONU recense près de 300 points chauds où l’eau pourrait devenir source de tensions. En Cisjordanie, les colons israéliens consomment en moyenne 620 mètres cubes d’eau par personne par an, comparativement à moins de 100 mètres cubes pour les Palestiniens (oxfam.qc.ca).

III. L’établissement d’aires protégées en tant que sauvegarde du couvert végétal dans les bassins de réception des affluents des grands fleuves et sur les versants montagneux

La mise en valeur des ressources naturelles est facilitée quand le cadre d’intervention correspond au bassin hydrographique. Il s’agit là de l’unité naturelle par excellence pour un mode d’aménagement du territoire tenant compte des conditions de renouvellement des ressources. Ce cadre permet de bien saisir les différentes composantes du milieu physique, les modalités du relief, les zones sécuritaires, les zones à risques, le bilan hydrique régional, la nature et la densité du couvert végétal ainsi que les patterns de l’utilisation du sol. Un bel exemple de l’application de ces principes s’est développé au Costa Rica. Celui-ci assure la sauvegarde des forêts des versants volcaniques de la Sierra centrale avec la création de parcs nationaux comme c’est le cas des volcans Arenal, Tenorio et Miravalles (areasyparques.com). Ces aires deviennent des zones de rétention d’eau précieuses pour l’approvisionnement des régions situées dans les plaines environnantes comme c’est le cas observé dans la province du Guanacaste. D’ailleurs, c’est le seul pays au monde dont les limites administratives correspondent à des aires de conservation dont les principes de création sont inspirés par les concepts à la base de l’établissement des Réserves de la Biosphère du Programme MAB de l’Unesco. Dans ces espaces on retrouve « des aires centrales, ayant comme fonction la protection de la nature et devant être protégées par la législation nationale (classées aires protégées); des zones tampon qui entourent ou jouxtent les aires centrales qui sont des zones de développement durable où les activités de production doivent rester compatibles avec les principes écologiques, dont l’éducation environnementale, la récréation et la recherche scientifique; des zones de transition (également dites “de coopération”), se prêtent aux diverses activités » (wikipedia.org) (figure 9).

Figure 9. Costa Rica. Aires de conservation

Source : http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr/1997/mapaac.html

Selon la stratégie pour l’Avenir de la Vie «les politiques adoptées pour chaque bassin versant devraient être fondées sur une évaluation de la capacité de charge, revêtir une dimension plurisectorielle et prendre en compte les neuf principes suivants :

–         L’utilisation des eaux de surface, souterraines et côtières à l’intérieur de chaque bassin devrait être planifiés sur la base d’évaluations de la quantité et de la qualité de l’eau;

–        La consommation domestique, industrielle et agricole, ainsi que les volumes requis pour la conservation des zones humides, ne devraient pas excéder les limites d’un approvisionnement durable prenant en compte tous les besoins de l’écosystème;

–        Des normes de quantité et de qualité devraient être fixées pour les différentes utilisations de l’eau, y compris le maintien des structures et fonctions de l’écosystème;

–        Le volume des eaux d’irrigation devrait être limité au minimum requis pour lessiver le sel;

–        La gestion de la qualité et du niveau des nappes d’eau souterraines devrait viser à minimiser les impacts écologiques comme la salinisation, la subsidence des sols, la libération de nutriments préjudiciables et la réduction du débit des cours d’eau;

–        Afin de préserver le niveau de la nappe phréatique, il convient de calculer le taux potentiel de pompage d’après le taux de recharge naturel;

–        Les risques sanitaires devraient être pris en compte dans le calcul des volumes d’eau requis et dans l’élaboration des plans d’irrigation;

–        Les pratiques dommageables pour la qualité de l’eau, comme les travaux d’assèchement, les remblayages en déchets solides, et l’utilisation d’engrais, de pesticides et autres substances potentiellement polluantes, devraient être contrôlées de près afin que l’eau polluée n’affecte pas la qualité des eaux souterraines et que le ruissellement de surface ne dégrade pas la qualité des eaux fluviales;

–        On devrait promouvoir des technologies propres et appliquer à la lutte contre la pollution le Principe de Prévention, visant à empêcher les rejets de substances toxiques ou synthétiques dont les effets à long terme ne sont pas connus » (UICN, PNUE et WWF, p. 157-158). 

IV.  L’UICN et la stratégie mondiale pour un partage harmonieux de l’eau dans les différentes régions du monde. Une vision pour le 21^ème siècle – Lancement en 2000

Détérioration des écosystèmes et des ressources en eau

« L’eau qui a été dans le passé une source de vie hautement respectée, n’est, de nos jours, qu’un simple produit. On prend souvent sa valeur à la légère et on en fait couramment un usage abusif. De par le monde, l’utilisation de l’eau par les humains a déjà provoqué l’assèchement et la pollution de cours d’eau, de lacs et de nappes souterraines. L’eau potable est de plus en plus rare. D’ici l’an 2025, on prévoit que les prélèvements d’eau augmenteront de 50 pour cent dans les pays en développement, et de 18 pour cent dans les pays développés, ce qui aura des incidences redoutables sur les écosystèmes. Au cours du siècle dernier, plus de la moitié des zones humides du monde ont été détruites. Des espèces actuellement menacées dans le monde, dont le nombre dépasse 3 500, 25 pour cent sont des poissons et des amphibiens. Si les êtres humains continuent de prélever l’eau à ce rythme, la détérioration ou la destruction complète des écosystèmes terrestres, dulcicoles et côtiers qui sont indispensables à la vie sera inévitable ». (portals.iucn.org)

« Les causes de cette situation sont multiples et, il serait injuste de blâmer un seul groupe d’utilisateurs. Nous sommes tous responsables de l’état des ressources. La croissance des populations et de la consommation, le développement de l’infrastructure, les changements de vocation des terres et l’utilisation indue des sols, la surexploitation des espèces et des écosystèmes, ainsi que la pollution de l’eau, du sol et de l’air par des substances chimiques et des agents biologiques, tous mettent en péril les fonctions des écosystèmes producteurs de nos ressources en eau douce. Nous semblons incapables de mettre au point des plans d’action sociaux et politiques cohérents pour remédier à ces prélèvements et à cette détérioration sans borne. Le déclin des ressources et l’accès nettement inéquitable à celles qui restent font naître partout dans notre société des conflits qui, à certains endroits, laissent présager l’explosion d’actes de violence ». (portals.iucn.org).

Un tel avenir est inacceptable. Toutefois, des expériences un peu partout dans le monde démontrent qu’il existe des solutions de rechange. À l’aide de pratique écologiquement durables et des mesures de conservation qui existent, il est possible de réaliser la vision dont traite ce document.

Nous devons choisir, et c’est maintenant qu’il faut le faire (portals.iucn.org). 

Conclusion

Selon GEO-4, « en tant que principal moyen d’intégration sur la surface terrestre, l’eau possède un fort potentiel pour réduire la pauvreté, accroître la sécurité alimentaire, améliorer la santé humaine, contribuer à des sources d’énergie durables et fortifier  l’intégrité des écosystèmes et leur durabilité. Les biens et services liés à l’eau représentent des opportunités significatives pour la société et les gouvernements en vue d’atteindre ensemble les objectifs du développement durable et ce tel qu’on l’a reconnu dans la Déclaration du Millénaire et lors du Sommet mondial sur le développement durable, le tout dans le contexte de la réalisation des OMD » (GEO-4, 2007, p. 149).

 Jules Dufour

Centre de recherche sur la Mondialisation

Nous présentons ici le texte du Manifeste de l’eau pour un nouveau contrat mondial de Ricardo Petrella. Celui-ci expose, les grands enjeux géopolitiques, économiques et sociaux du partage et de la gestion de l’eau à l’échelle mondiale.

Le droit de tous à la vie

Nous venons d’Afrique, d’Amérique Latine, d’Amérique du Nord, d’Asie, d’Europe. Nous nous sommes rassemblés à trois reprises en 1998 sans autre légitimité et représentativité que celle d’être des citoyens concernés par le fait qu’1 milliard et 400 millions de personnes sur 5,8 milliards d’habitants de la planète n’ont pas accès à l’eau potable, source primordiale de vie. Ce fait est inacceptable. Or, le risque est grand qu’en 2020, lorsque la population mondiale atteindra environ les 8 milliards d’êtres humains, les personnes n’ayant pas accès à l’eau potable s’élèvent à plus de 3 milliards. Cela est inadmissible. On peut, on doit empêcher que l’inadmissible devienne acceptable. Comment ?

Nous pensons qu’il sera possible de le faire en appliquant les principes et les règles ci-dessous.

L’eau “source de vie” appartient aux habitants de la Terre en commun.

En tant que “source de vie” fondamentale et non-substituable de l’éco-système Terre, l’eau est un bien vital qui appartient aux habitants de la Terre, en commun. Aucun d’entre eux, individuellement ou en groupe, ne devrait avoir le droit d’en faire son appropriation privée. L’eau est un bien patrimonial commun de l’humanité. La santé individuelle et collective en dépend. L’agriculture, l’industrie, la vie domestique y sont liées. Il n’y a pas d’accès à la production de la richesse sans accès à l’eau. L’eau, on le sait et tout le monde le dit, n’est pas une ressource comme les autres ; elle n’est pas une marchandise échangeable, monnayable. Son caractère irremplaçable fait que toute communauté humaine -et chacun de ses membres- a le droit d’avoir accès à l’eau, en particulier à l’eau potable, en quantité et qualité nécessaires et indispensables à la vie et à l’activité économique.

Principes

Le droit à l’eau est un droit inaliénable individuel et collectif

 L’eau appartient davantage à l’économie des biens communs et du partage de la richesse qu’à l’économie de l’accumulation privée et individuelle et de la prédation de la richesse d’autrui. Alors que le partage de l’eau a été souvent dans le passé source majeure d’inégalités sociales, nos civilisations d’aujourd’hui reconnaissent que l’accès à l’eau est un droit fondamental, inaliénable, individuel et collectif. Le droit à l’eau fait partie de l’éthique de base d’une “bonne” société humaine et d’une “bonne” économie. Il appartient à la société dans son ensemble et aux différents niveaux d’organisation sociétale, selon le double principe de co-responsabilité et de subsidiarité, de garantir le droit d’accès pour tous et pour toute communauté humaine sans discrimination aucune de race, de sexe, de religion, de revenu, de classe sociale.

Principes

L’eau doit contribuer à la solidarité de vie entre communautés, pays, sociétés, sexes et générations

Ce n’est pas parce que les ressources en eau douce sont inégalement distribuées sur Terre, ou parce que le revenu est aussi très inégalement réparti entre les êtres humains et les pays de la planète, qu’il doit y avoir également inégalité d’accès à l’eau entre personnes et communautés humaines. De même, l’inégalité dans la distribution de la ressource et des revenus ne signifie pas que les peuples riches en eau et les personnes riches en revenu puissent en faire l’usage qu’ils veulent, voire la vendre (ou l’acheter) “à l’étranger” pour en tirer le maximum de profit (ou de jouissance). Il est temps que l’eau cesse d’être, dans de nombreuses régions du monde, source de grandes inégalités entre les hommes et les femmes, ces dernières supportant tout le fardeau des activités domestiques liées à l’eau. Il y a encore aujourd’hui, à l’aube du troisième millénaire, trop de guerres entre États voisins à cause de l’eau, car les États concernés, qui se trouvent en meilleure position géo-économique, utilisent l’eau comme un instrument au service de leurs intérêts stratégiques de puissance “hégémonique” locale. Il est possible de soustraire l’eau aux logiques de l’Etat-puissance pour la rendre res publica sous la tutelle de l’État-citoyen.

Principes

L’eau est une affaire de citoyenneté et de démocratie

Créer les conditions nécessaires et indispensables pour que l’accès à l’eau soit effectif et optimal, c’est l’affaire de tout le monde. C’est une affaire aussi entre générations. Il appartient en effet, aux générations actuelles d’utiliser, valoriser, protéger, conserver les ressources en eau de manière à ce que les générations futures puissent jouir de la même liberté d’action et capacité de choix que nous souhaitons pour nous actuellement. Le citoyen doit être au centre des décisions. La gestion intégrée durable et solidaire de l’eau est du domaine de la démocratie participative, représentative et directe. Elle dépasse les compétences et les savoir-faire des techniciens, des ingénieurs, des banquiers. L’usager (consommateur solvable et non-solvable) a un rôle important à jouer par ses choix judicieux et ses pratiques guidées par les principes d’une économie et d’une société durables.

Principes

Toute politique de l’eau implique un haut degré de démocratie au niveau local, national, continental, mondial

 Par définition, l’eau appelle une gestion décentralisée et transparente. Les dispositifs de la démocratie représentative doivent être renforcés. Un champ considérable est ouvert aux dispositifs de la démocratie participative au niveau des villages, des villes, des bassins aquifères, des régions. Des cadres réglementaires clairs au niveau international et mondial doivent faire émerger et rendre visible la politique durable et solidaire de l’eau au niveau de la communauté mondiale. Les instances parlementaires sont appelées à jouer un rôle fondamental dans la construction d’un droit mondial de l’eau au cours des vingt prochaines années. Nous pensons aussi qu’il est urgent et indispensable de (re)valoriser les pratiques locales et traditionnelles. Un patrimoine considérable de savoirs et de compétences et de pratiques communautaires solidaires, d’une très grande efficacité, a été dilapidé. Il risque d’être détruit encore davantage dans les années à venir.

Principes

L’accès à l’eau passe nécessairement par le partenariat. Il est temps de dépasser les logiques des “seigneurs de la guerre” et des conflits économiques pour l’hégémonie et la conquête des marchés

La citoyenneté et la démocratie se fondent sur la coopération et le respect mutuel. Elles vivent par et dans le partenariat. “Partenaires pour l’eau” est le principe inspirateur de tous les dispositifs (tels que “les contrats de rivière”) qui ont permis ces derniers temps de surmonter efficacement les conflits qui dans certaines régions du monde ont traditionnellement envenimé les relations entre communautés riveraines ou partageant le même bassin hydrographique. Nous soutenons, bien entendu, un partenariat local/national/mondial, public/privé réel, fondé sur le respect des diversités, où les multiples logiques et cultures en présence peuvent équitablement contribuer à la gestion intégrée, solidaire et durable de l’eau, dans l’intérêt général. Un partenariat qui ne serait que formel, soumis, en réalité, aux logiques et aux intérêts des acteurs privés en compétition acharnée entre eux pour la conquête du marché -ce qui serait inéluctablement le cas si l’eau devait être reconnue comme étant surtout un bien économique et un bien marchand- ne pourrait que nuire à l’objectif de l’accès à l’eau pour tous et de la gestion intégrée, durable et solidaire des ressources en eau.

Principes

Nous pensons que la prise en charge financière de l’eau doit être à la fois collective et individuelle selon les principes de responsabilité et d’utilité

Assurer l’accès de base à l’eau pour la satisfaction des besoins vitaux élémentaires et fondamentaux de toute personne et de toute communauté humaine est une obligation pour la société dans son ensemble. C’est la société qui doit assumer collectivement la couverture de l’ensemble des coûts relatifs à la collecte, production, stockage, distribution, utilisation, conservation et recyclage de l’eau en vue de fournir et garantir l’accès à l’eau dans la quantité et en qualité considérées comme étant le minimal vital et nécessaire indispensable. L’ensemble de ces coûts (y compris les externalités négatives qui ne sont pas prises en compte par les prix du marché) sont des coûts sociaux collectifs au niveau des communautés humaines de base. Ceci devient encore plus vrai et significatif à l’échelle d’un pays, d’un continent et de la société mondiale. Leur financement doit être assuré par voie de répartition collective. Les mécanismes de tarification individuelle, selon des prix progressifs, doivent intervenir à partir d’un usage de l’eau dépassant le minimum vital nécessaire et indispensable. Au-delà du minimum vital, la progressivité des prix est fonction de la quantité utilisée. En outre, tout abus et excès dans l’usage doivent être considérés illégaux.

Pour que ces principes et ces règles deviennent des réalités vivantes au cours des 20-25 prochaines années, lorsque deux milliards d’êtres humains viendront s’ajouter à la population actuelle, nous proposons que les mesures suivantes soient prises et mises en oeuvre, sorte de “Contrat Mondial de l’Eau”, selon deux axes majeurs. •la constitution d’un “réseau de parlements pour l’eau”

•la promotion de campagnes d’information, de sensibilisation et de mobilisation autour de “L’eau pour tous”.

Nous proposons d’outiller l’initiative du Contrat Mondial de l’Eau d’un instrument de collecte et d’analyse de données (quantitatives et qualitatives) les plus rigoureuses possibles, grâce à la mise en place progressive d’un Observatoire Mondial des Droits de l’Eau.

Constitution d’un Réseau de Parlements pour l’Eau

C’est aux Parlements, organes principaux de la représentation politique dans les sociétés “occidentalisées”, ou aux institutions comparables dans d’autres contextes civilisationnels, que revient la responsabilité de modifier les législations existantes en application aux principes et aux règles ci-dessus explicités. Définir un corpus juridique nouveau en matière d’eau, non seulement au plan local et national mais également au plan international et mondial (un “droit mondial de l’eau”) constitue une tâche primordiale face au vide juridique existant dans ce domaine à l’échelle mondiale. La priorité est à donner à un “Traité Mondial de l’Eau” fondé sur le principe de l’eau en tant que bien vital patrimonial commun de l’humanité. Ce “traité”, par exemple, exclurait l’eau de toute convention internationale commerciale (dans le cadre de l’OMC), comme c’est déjà le cas pour le domaine culturel.

Propositions

Promotion de campagnes d’information, de sensibilisation et de mobilisation concernant:

•1 le développement (ou modernisation) des systèmes de distribution et d’assainissement des eaux pour les 600 villes des pays d’Afrique, d’Asie, d’Amérique Latine et d’Europe orientale et Russie qui auront plus d’un million d’habitants en 2020 et dont le système d’eau est déjà aujourd’hui inadéquat, obsolète, voire inexistant.

•2 la lutte contre les nouvelles sources de pollution des eaux dans les villes des pays d’Amérique du Nord, d’Europe Occidentale et du Japon dont le contamination du sol et des nappes phréatiques de surface et en profondeur est de plus en plus inquiétante, grave et, dans certains cas, irréversible. Il s’agit, concrètement, à partir de programmes locaux au niveau urbain de réaliser l’objectif de la création de “3 milliards de robinets d’eau”. Les mouvements associatifs, les ONG, les syndicats, les scientifiques ont à cet égard un rôle essentiel et déterminant à jouer.

A cette fin, la priorité est à donner à : •La réforme profonde des systèmes actuels d’irrigation liés au mode de production agricole (et agro-alimentaire) industriel, intensif. Les solutions existent, entre autres l’irrigation “goutte à goutte”.

L’agriculture actuelle “moderne” est la principale consommation des ressources en eau douce de la planète (70% des prélèvements totaux mondiaux, dont la très grande partie est liée à l’irrigation). Or, 40% de l’eau d’irrigation se perd chemin faisant. En outre, ses excès sont à l’origine de graves atteintes et menaces à l’environnement par la salinisation des sols et l’hydromorphisme (engorgement)

•Un moratoire de 10 à 15 ans en ce qui concerne la construction de nouveaux grands barrages dont l’on connaît désormais les inconvénients considérables à court et à long terme pour l’environnement, les populations, la gestion intégrée et durable de l’eau.

Mise en place d’un Observatoire Mondial des Droits de l’Eau

Le but de l’observatoire sera de collecter, produire, distribuer, disséminer les informations les plus rigoureuses et fiables possibles en matière d’accès à l’eau du point de vue des droits individuels et collectifs, de la production d’eau, son utilisation, sa conservation/protection, sa gestion durable et démocratique. L’Observatoire devrait devenir l’un des dispositifs d’information et de communication de référence mondiale notamment pour la valorisation des pratiques effectives de partenariat réel et de gestion solidaire.

Éditions Labor, Bruxelles, 1998, 160 pages

Personnalités ayant participé à la rédaction de l’ouvrage :

Mario Soares, ancien Président de la République du Portugal

Mario Albornoz, Professeur à l’Université de Quilmès, Argentine

Raoul Alfonsin, ancien Président de la République d’Argentine

Driss Ben Sari, Professeur à l’Université de Rabat, Maroc

Rafael Blasco Castany, Presidencia de la Generalitat Valenciana

Rinaldo Bontempi, Membre du Parlement européen, Italie

Larbi Bouguerra, Professeur, Groupe de Lausanne, Tunisie

David Brubaker, Global Resource Action for the Environment, USA

Joao Caraça, Directeur à la Fondation Gulbenkian, Portugal

Susan George, Directeur adjoint du Transnational Institute, France/USA

Antonio Gonçalves Henriques, Vice-Président de l’Istituto do Aguà, Portugal

S.A.R. le Prince Laurent, Président de l’Institut Royal pour la Gestion Durable des Ressources Naturelles, Belgique

Candido Mendes, Sénateur, Président de l’Université Candido Mendes, Brésil

Hasna Moudud, Présidente, National Association for Resources Improvement, Bangladesh

Sunita Narain, Directrice adjointe du Center for Science and Environment, Inde

José Antonio Pinto Monteiro, Ministre de l’Environnement, Cap-Vert

Pierre-Frédéric Ténière-Buchot, Mission Eau, Programme des Nations-Unies pour l’Environnement (PNUE), France

Abou Thiam, Professeur à l’Université de Dakar, Sénégal

Lars Ulmgrend, Secrétaire Général du Stockholm Institute, Suède

Anders Wijkman, Directeur au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Suède

Riccardo Petrella, Secrétaire du Comité, Président du Groupe de Lisbonne, Italie

(http://www.waternunc.com/fr/manifeste_eau.htm).

Deuxième partie :

Un bilan hydrique mondial. Le partage de l’eau dans les bassins versants du Jourdain, du Nil et de l’Indus

 

Jules Dufour, Ph.D., C.Q., géographe.  Professeur émérite. Membre de la Commission mondiale des Aires protégées de  l’Union Internationale de la nature (UICN), Gland, Suisse

Membre, COFEX-Nord. Projet d’aménagement hydroélectrique de Grande Baleine, Nunavik (1992-1994). Expert, Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE). Projet d’aménagement hydroélectrique de la rivière Sainte-Marguerite, SM-3 (1993)

Commissaire, Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE). Projet de la dérivation des eaux de la rivière Manouane (2001)

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PROGRAMME DES NATIONS POUR L’ENVIRONNEMENT (PNUE). 2012.  Global Environment Outlook-5. Environment for the future we want.  Printed and bound in Malta by Progress Press Ltd, Malta. PROGRESS PRESS LTD. 551 pages. En ligne : En ligne : http://www.unep.org/french/geo/geo5.asp

PROGRAMME DES NATIONS UNIES POUR L’ENVIRONNEMENT (PNUE). 2012. GEO-5. L’avenir de l’environnement mondial. Résumé à l’intention des décideurs. 20 pages. En ligne : http://www.unep.org/geo/pdfs/GEO5_SPM_French.pdf

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By Colin Taylor

In this clip from the Kelly File, Jeb Bush declares that he still would have invaded Iraq based on the “faulty intelligence” that was available at the time, and that he would still have done it knowing what we know now. It’s a shocking admission that seriously puts his foreign policy credibility into question.

Neither Kelly’s questions nor Bush’s response actually make any sense, unless we are working under the assumption that it would have been Jeb instead of George as President, with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and the neo-con elite that engineered the false case against Iraq, the false allegations of WMDs, and the nonexistent link between Saddam and al-Qaeda that suckered America into believing that the war in Iraq was necessary for national security.

Jeb had this to say about the catastrophic invasion:

 “In retrospect, the intelligence everybody saw — that the world saw, not just the United States — was faulty. And, in retrospect, once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first.”

Quite an understatement from Jeb, as the invasion was so poorly planned there was no response in place to fill the vacuum of power after Saddam fell, allowing the country’s long-simmering sectarian tensions to explode into a whirlwind of violence that Iraq is still grappling with to this day.

It’s astonishing to see Jeb Bush declare that he would have done the same thing. Far from distancing himself from his brother’s disastrous presidency, he is embracing his brother’s legacy, an unwise move that will come back to haunt him in future.

Watch it here:

Copyright Colin Taylor, Occupy Democrats 2015

This will be something for the books of violent dispute. A series of gun battles over the weekend lasting over 16 hours have left eight police officers and fourteen gunmen dead in the town of Kumanovo in Macedonia. The slain police were members of the anti-terrorist Tigers unit.  The Macedonian police authorities have since released a video of the captured gunmen, with a few sporting UCK insignia.[1]

Where, then, with the various punters in this latest lethal spat? Officially, the European Union is urging calm between participants. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary-General, has also expressed “great concern” while urging all sides to “exercise restraint and avoid any further escalation, in the interest of the country and the whole region.”

But only a few members of the EU refuse to acknowledge the legal status of a state that was given birth in similar circumstances, one waged with a narrative of bullets and ethnic politics. Neighbouring, Albanian-majority Kosovo, long deemed part of Serbia, provides the toxic model of rebellion in the broader context of Balkans politics.  The recognition of Kosovo, broadly speaking, is Europe’s green light for secession.

For that reason, various organisations and states are keeping watch on the latest affair: will the argument by the Albanian separatists for a province along Kosovo lines be cleaved off the Macedonian state?  In 2001, sparks flew between the security forces and Albanian insurgents, ending with the hastily cobbled Ohrid peace accord. “This Framework,” it reads, “will promote the peaceful and harmonious development of civil society while respecting the ethnic identity and interest of all Macedonian citizens.”[2]

The air has been heavy with prospects of such a confrontation.  On April 21, a police outpost in the village of Goschince, part of the predominantly Albanian municipality of Lipkovo 25 kilometres northeast of Skopje, was attacked by a group of 40 armed gunmen wearing the uniforms of the National Liberation Army (NLA).  Hostages were taken, and threats issued.

According to the spokesman describing the attacks, “The leader of the group, speaking in Albanian… told the captured police officers the following: ‘We are from the NLA and tell everyone that nobody can save you, neither [Prime Minister] Nikola Gruevski, nor [head of the junior Albanian DUI party] Ali Ahmeti. We want our own state.”[3]

The town of Kumanovo itself demonstrates that dreary repetitiveness of factions seeking advantage and reward, flavoured by a hint of conspiracy and not so grand design.  There are the separatists themselves, operating in various guises. There are the corrupt government officials who align themselves with status quo corruption while extolling the virtues of stability. Then there are the indigent civilians who simply wish to continue living in an ethnically mixed city, desperate as it might be.  As a resident told the Balkan Insight, “We all know each other, we would have seen if there were any terrorists.  Everything seemed normal until yesterday.”

The formidable Albanian presence in Macedonia has led to its fair share of scuffles and grief.  But the very basis of the framework agreement in 2001 was based on two neat, if unfortunate delusions: the existence of a nourished, extant civil society, and the “harmonious” existence of the ethnic setting. Neither has come to pass, one feeding the other noxious, undermining gruel.  In such a vacuum, nature has done its best to fill it with considerable nastiness.

Such acts of instability also take place in a country run by a government well versed in wire-tapping and profligate misrule.  They, it can be said, provide the pretext and the incitement for those who prefer action to empty salutations to constitutional rule.  The accord itself notes how, “A modern democratic state in its natural course of development and maturation must continually ensure that its Constitution fully meets the needs of all of its citizens and comports with the highest international standards, which themselves continue to evolve.”  There are even suggestions filling the rumour mill that the attacks over the weekend were staged as efforts on the part of the government to retain power.  Crisis breeds reactive crisis.

Since 2006, Prime Minister Gruevski has been in charge, leading the VMRO-DPMNE party in a series of coalition governments.  Drunk on megalomania and revisionism, Gruevski has drained the public purse for enormous cultural projects, notably around the city of Skopje, emphasising the poorly made point that Macedonia gave birth to western civilisation.  This form of “antiquisation” insinuates Disneyland practices into ritualised worship.  Heads have invariably swollen in the process.

Since February, opposition leader Zoran Zaev has been busy releasing recordings he claims were provided by the intelligence services concerned about the tilt towards authoritarianism. “After nine years of leading the country, they need to control everything.”  Thousands have purportedly figured in the targets, including ambassadors, journalists and members of the opposition.  In a twist of some perversion, it has been claimed that Gruevski has himself been a victim of such wiretapping, made more fascinating by the fact that the spy chief is his cousin. Such a climate a healthy civil society do not make.

This did not seem to concern Gruevski, who jumped on the opportunity to remind Macedonians about the role played by the police, who had, he hyperbolically suggested “prevented the murders of 8,000 people.”  Internationalising the conflict, he suggested that the attacks were part of a broader trend, facilitated by “participants in several countries, some in the Middle East, which points out to their big experience in guerrilla fighting.”  Gruevksi is, however, closer in pointing the finger to a Kosovo connection with the 40-strong group.

As with so much in the affairs of the Balkans, there are suggestions of other hands, powers lurking to alter the balance and move the pieces.  “There is foreign intelligence in this scheme,” argues Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki.  “There is no proof of who the foreign power is – but the people in the [wiretapping] affair have admitted that a foreign power is involved.”[4]

All, it seems, is woe and shambles.  The separatist fires will be well sustained with such figures as Gruevski in power.  In turn, the incumbent government draws salvaging political profit, even as the state withers before the strain of spending and poverty.  With such rulers in charge, insurrection receives its justifying inspiration.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

US policy think-tank Brookings Institution confirms that contrary to propaganda, US-Saudi “moderates” and Turkey-Qatar “Islamists” have been coordinating all along. 

The war in Syria continues to drag on, with a recent and renewed vigor demonstrated behind an opposition long portrayed as fractured and reflecting a myriad of competing foreign interests. Chief among these competing interests, the public has been told, were the US and Saudis on one side, backing so-called “moderate rebels,” and Turkey and Qatar on the other openly backing Al Qaeda and its various franchises including the Islamic State (ISIS).

However, for those following the conflict closely, it was clear from the beginning and by the West’s own admissions that success hinged on covertly providing arms, cash, equipment, and both political and military support to Al Qaeda and other sectarian extremists, not opposed by Saudi Arabia, but rather by using Saudi Arabia as the primary medium through which Western material support could be laundered.

And this fact is now confirmed in a recent article published on the Brookings Institution’s website titled, “Why Assad is losing.”

It states unequivocally that (emphasis added):

The involvement of FSA groups, in fact, reveals how the factions’ backers have changed their tune regarding coordination with Islamists. Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria’s south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called “vetted groups,” but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.

Overall, Brookings is pleased to report that with the infiltration and overrunning of much of Idlib in northern Syria, it appears their long-stated goal of creating a seat of power for their proxies within Syria’s borders and perhaps even extending NATO aircover over it, may finally be at hand. Brookings still attempts to perpetuate an adversarial narrative between the West and Al Qaeda, despite admitting that it was only with Western backing that recent offensives spearheaded by Al Qaeda itself were successful.

In reality, as far back as 2007, it was the admitted policy of the then Bush-led White House to begin arming and funding sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda, through the use of intermediaries including Saudi Arabia. Veteran journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh in his report “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?“would lay bare this conspiracy which has since then unfolded verbatim as described in 2007.

The above mentioned Brookings article also alludes to a grander geopolitical landscape taking shape beyond the Syrian conflict. It states in regards to the US now openly backing what is for all intents and purposes an Al Qaeda-led offensive that:

The most likely explanation for such a move is pressure from the newly emboldened regional alliance comprising Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The United States also is looking for ways to prove its continued alignment with its traditional Sunni Gulf allies, amid the broader context of its rapprochement with Iran.

The continuation, even expansion of the US-backed conflict in Syria is the most telling evidence of all regarding the disingenuous nature of America’s rapprochement with Iran. The entire goal of destabilizing and potentially overthrowing the government in Syria is to weaken Iran ahead of a similar campaign of encirclement, destabilization, and destruction within Iran itself.

The fact that events in Syria are being accelerated, with Brookings itself admitting that “international and ideological differences,” have been “pushed to the side,” illustrates a palpable desperation among the West to finish the conflict in Syria in hopes of moving forward toward Iran before regional dynamics and Iran’s own defensive posture renders moot the West’s entire regional agenda, jeopardizing its long-standing hegemony across North Africa and the Middle East.

Similarly rushed operations appear to be underway in Yemen. With Western-backed conflicts embroiling virtually every nation surrounding Iran, the idea that the US seeks anything but Iran’s eventual destruction, let alone “rapprochement” must surely have no one fooled in Tehran.

While Brookings enthusiastically reports on the continued destruction in Syria it itself played a part in engineering and promoting, it still admits that overthrowing Syria’s legitimate government is not inevitable. While it attempts to portray Syria’s allies as withdrawing support for Damascus, the reality is that if and when Syria falls, Syria’s allies are indisputably next in line.

Iran will face an entire nation handed over to Al Qaeda and other heavily armed and well-backed sectarian extremists dreaming of a cataclysmic confrontation with Tehran, fueled by a global network of US-Saudi backed madrases turning out legions of ideologically poisoned zealots. And beyond Iran, Russia faces the prospect of its Caucasus region being turned into a corridor of terror aimed straight at the heart of Russia itself.

The conflict in Syria is but a single battle among a much larger war — a global war constituting what is basically a third World War, fought not upon vast but clearly defined fronts, but rather through the use of fourth generation warfare, proxies, mercenaries, economics, and information. For those that fail to see how Syria is linked to the survival of many nations beyond its borders and the very concept of a multi-polar world built upon the concept of national sovereignty, they invite not just Damascus’ defeat, but that of the world as we know it.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The Houthi rebels and allied armed forces in Yemen announced Sunday they were prepared to back a proposed cease-fire to begin Tuesday evening, even as jet fighters from the US-backed coalition headed by Saudi Arabia continued to carry out air strikes in the brutal military campaign that began on March 26.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened to push back the Houthi rebels after they seized control over most of country’s western provinces and major urban centers, with the support of Yemeni armed forces loyal to former long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saudi Arabia’s stated aim is to reinstate President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was forced to flee the country for Riyadh at the end of March in the face of the Houthi-led assault.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir and US Secretary of State John Kerry announced the proposal for a ceasefire to allow for the distribution of food and medical supplies at a joint news conference in Riyadh last Thursday. “No bombing, no shooting, no movement or repositioning of troops to achieve military advantage,” by the Houthis and their allied forces was a precondition for the proposed pause in air strikes to come into effect, Kerry stated.

Announcing its support for the proposed cease-fire over the weekend, the Houthi leadership council declared that it would “deal positively with any efforts, calls or serious and positive measures that would help lift the suffering and allow aid, supplies and ships to move safely to Yemen.”

Saleh struck a more militant tone Sunday after his compound in the capital of Sanaa was struck by coalition air-strikes for the second consecutive day, killing three people. He declared his open support for the Houthis and encouraged them to keep fighting, stating that the rebels “should continue carrying your arms, ready to sacrifice your lives in defense against these belligerent attacks.”

The former president also taunted the Saudi-led coalition, which has threatened a possible ground invasion since the outset of the air assault in March. “If you are brave enough, come and face us on the battlefield, come and we will be at your reception,” he said. “Shelling by rockets and jet fighters cannot enable you to achieve any of your goals.”

It remains uncertain whether the ceasefire will actually come into effect, as the Saudis have previously promised to halt their air assault only to continue it. The Saudis declared an official end to the bombing campaign and a transition to a political resolution of the conflict on April 21, only to resume and intensify their assault the next day. Coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri warned that any violation of the cease-fire by the Houthis would result in a resumption of air strikes.

Sharaf Luqman, a spokesman for the section of the Yemeni army backing the Houthis, told reporters that they would interpret any attack by members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a breach of the proposed cease-fire. “The army will retort strictly with any breach by Al-Qaeda elements and those who support or finance them,” he said.

The US-backed campaign, now well into its second month, has taken a devastating toll on the population of a country that ranks among the most impoverished in the Arab world. According to UN estimates, more than 1,400 people have been killed and 6,000 injured since the Saudi air strikes began in late March At least half of those killed and wounded have been civilians, including women and children. The UN also estimates that more than 300,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.

Approximately 80 percent of the country’s population, or 20 million people, are going hungry as a result of the assault. The Saudi-led campaign has effectively destroyed Yemen’s major airports and a naval blockade has severely limited the shipment of food and medical supplies to the country.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, Johannes Van Der Klaauw, expressed concern in a statement released Saturday over the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the effect of the indiscriminate nature of the coalition’s bombing on the civilian population, particularly in the northern Houthi stronghold of Saada, which borders on Saudi Arabia.

“The targeting of an entire governorate will put countless civilians at risk,” Van Der Klaauw warned. “The indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, with or without prior warning, is in contravention of international humanitarian law,” he said, emphasizing the criminal nature of the US-backed military operations.

Friday night into Saturday, the Saudi-led coalition launched approximately 140 air strikes against targets throughout Saada. Saudi Arabia initiated the massive bombing campaign after the Houthis reportedly launched mortars and rockets against the Saudi border town of Najran.

Leaflets were dropped by the coalition a few hours in advance of the onslaught, notifying residents that the entire province, which encompasses more than 4,000 square miles and has a population of more than 830,000, has been designated as an enemy military zone. While thousands of families have scrambled to evacuate the province to avoid the onslaught, thousands of civilians still remain in what amounts to a massive free fire zone.

Saudi Arabia has admitted that it has been deliberately bombing schools and hospitals, with the claim that these facilities are being used by the Houthis and the forces allied to them to store weapons and launch attacks.

Llano Ortiz, medical coordinator in Yemen for Doctors Without Borders, denounced the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and the designation of Saada as a military zone. “The bombing of civilian targets, with or without warning, is a serious violation of international humanitarian law,” Ortiz said. “It is even more serious to target a whole province.”

Human Rights Watch has also documented the illegal use of cluster bombs by the coalition forces in Saada. The bombs, which drop small bomblets that deploy shrapnel across a wide area, were banned in 2008 by more than 100 countries that signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The United States and Saudi Arabia are among the countries that did not sign on to the agreement.

The European Union is preparing to bomb targets in Libya to stop migrants from attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in small boats. EU foreign policy coordinator Federica Mogherini is to brief the United Nations Security Council Monday on plans for a “Chapter VII” resolution that would give a UN green light for the use of force.

The plan is the outcome of several weeks of high-level consultations among the 28 EU members, including a foreign ministers’ meeting, held in response to a series of incidents of mass drowning of refugees. The worst such tragedy took place April 19, when some 900 drowned when their small boat capsized after colliding with a freighter.

The wreck of that boat, only 25 meters long, was found last Thursday by the Italian Navy at a depth of 375 meters, 190 kilometers northeast of the Libyan coast. Many bodies were seen in or near the wreckage, according to Giovanni Salvi, prosecutor in the Sicilian town of Catania, who is interviewing the relative handful of survivors.

The “bomb the boats” plan is driven, however, not by the number of deaths by drowning, but by the even larger number of refugees who have successfully reached the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, or have been picked up by merchant ships or the Italian coast guard and navy.

In the most recent tragedy, 40 migrants drowned May 3 when their rubber boat deflated and sank before an oncoming merchant ship could reach them. But another 160 were rescued from the sea. Over that weekend, a total of 4,800 refugees were rescued or reached Lampedusa, while another 2,000 were detained by the Libyan coast guard before their boats left the shore.

EU military intervention would be aimed at stopping the vast majority of refugees now seeking transport across the Mediterranean from even setting foot on board a ship. As for preventing deaths by drowning, it would merely assure that future atrocities would take place along the Libyan shoreline or in the country’s coastal waters, rather than further out in the Mediterranean. “Precision” bombing would not be restricted to empty boats, but would strike Libyan fishermen or even boats fully loaded with refugees.

Italy is to have command of the operation, while at least 10 EU countries would contribute military assets, including Britain, France and Spain. NATO would be kept informed of the military actions but would not initially be directly involved.

EU ships would enter Libyan territorial waters, along with aircraft and helicopter gunships, to identify ships and help “neutralize” them, i.e., blow them to bits. These would reportedly include HMS Bulwark, a helicopter carrier that is the flagship of the British Royal Navy, now deployed at Malta.

In the event that any of the myriad warring factions in Libya fires on EU vessels or aircraft—the country has two governments and multiple militias, many heavily armed by the CIA, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar or other countries—NATO forces, including those of the United States, could then become involved.

This would be carried out under Article Five of the NATO Charter, the same provision invoked by President Obama during his visit to the Baltic States last year, mandating action by the entire alliance when any individual member or its armed forces come under attack.

Libyan ambassador to the UN Ibrahim Dabbashi told the Associated Press that the EU had not consulted his government, which has been driven from the capital Tripoli and reconvened in the eastern city of Tobruk. Neither the parliament in Tobruk nor its Islamist-dominated rival in Tripoli has agreed to the entry of EU forces into Libyan airspace, coastal waters or territory.

It is not clear whether the UN Security Council will endorse an EU military mission in Libya without some Libyan entity giving its approval. Russia and China, which have veto power, have publicly suggested that they regret their actions of March 2011, when they did not block a Security Council resolution that became the basis of the US-NATO bombing campaign against Libya.

On May 7, Lithuanian Ambassador Raimonda Murmokaite, the current Security Council president, said the Tobruk-based government would back the EU operation, and even request it, but Dabbashi poured cold water over that suggestion. “They never asked anything of us. Why should we send them this letter?” he asked, adding, “We will not accept any boots on the ground.”

The Libyan ambassador suggested that instead of EU military forces, the Security Council should lift its embargo on weapons shipments to Libya and let the Tobruk government build up sufficient military forces to retake Tripoli and the western half of Libya, where most of the refugee boats to Europe originate.

The Tobruk government has named General Khalifa Haftar as commander of the Libyan Army. A former Libyan chief of staff who broke with Gaddafi in the 1980s, Haftar spent a quarter-century on the CIA payroll, living near Langley, Virginia, before returning to Libya during the US-NATO bombing campaign.

EU officials have presented the plan to bomb small fishing boats as an effort to attack so-called people smugglers rather than the migrants themselves. The resolution drafted by Great Britain speaks of the “use of all means to destroy the business model of the traffickers.”

But the real attitude of the EU leaders towards the refugees is demonstrated by the conflicts that have broken out over what to do with the relative handful of refugees who have succeeded in reaching European soil—a few hundred thousand people on a continent of 740 million.

All 28 EU members support the military intervention. However, there are sharp disputes over rules being drafted by the European Commission to set quotas for each of the countries to share refugees who survive the perilous sea voyage. Germany is the main force behind the quotas, which have been rejected by Britain and many east European countries, where right-wing parties are whipping up anti-immigrant racism.

Germany and Sweden have taken nearly half of all the current wave of refugees, and want to offload many of them onto the other EU member states.

According to the preliminary report by French authorities, Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz is said to have ‘rehearsed’ a controlled descent on the flight prior to the French Alps crash several times while alone in the cockpit.

While this new detail might be alarming to some – to those familiar with airliner protocol, any major alteration to the altitude settings would be noticed by the flight crew...

‘Valley of Debris ‘ – The remains of Germanwings flight 9525 Airbus A320. (Photo link nydailynews.com)

On Wednesday May 6th, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis (BEA), a civilian agency of the French government released a preliminary report appearing to show that Germanwings co-pilot Lubitz ‘repeatedly’ changed the plane’s altitude dial during its outbound flight to Barcelona, Spain, from Düsseldorf, Germany, this past March 24th.

While the Germanwings Captain, Patrick Sondheimer was out of the cockpit, Lubitz allegedly set the aircraft descent settings five times in a four-and-a-half minute period. On April 3rd, French investigators stated that flight 9525’s black box data revealed that ‘autopilot’ settings had been adjusted to speed up its descent.

This begs the question: If flight 9525 was sped up upon its initial descent – why wouldn’t the flight crew notice deviations allegedly made during the outbound Barcelona descent rehearsal?

Here’s a compelling interview conducted by German journalist, Ralph T. Niemeyer with flight veteran Field McConnell discussing the many anomalies associated with flight 9525’s catastrophic end…

In the video interview above, McConnell outlines how Andreas Lubitz would most likely not have the ability to control flight 9525’s high-speed descent based on his limited flying time (630 hours)as it would have required a much more proficient pilot.

Over the past week, 21WIRE reached out to pilot McConnell to discuss the awareness of the flight crew regarding the abrupt altitude changes allegedly made by Lubitz on the outbound flight from outbound flight to Barcelona from Düsseldorf. Here’s what he had to say:

“The captain and crew would have noticed (altitude changes) and said something and he (Lubitz) then would have been removed from flight status for deviating from an assigned altitude.”

In a recent Germanwings report from CNN, Flightradar24 seems to be playing an important role in the establishment of the ‘official’ French Alps crash narrative:

“Transponder data shows that the autopilot was reprogrammed during the flight by someone inside the cockpit to change the plane’s altitude from 38,000 feet to 100 feet, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks aviation data.”

If you remember last July, here 21WIRE, in a lengthy investigation about the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17, we clearly demonstrated how both FlightRadar and FlightAware changed previous flight path data on their websites between July 24-25th. The data originally published on their website, was altered in favor of a series of new ‘old’ flight paths directed over the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Given CNN’s loathsome reporting about the MH370 disaster and Flightradar24’s data alterations in the aftermath of MH17’s downing in addition to other false reports by other media outlets – how is the public to believe these latest claims about allegedly deliberate altitude changes on the Germanwings flight?

‘Speaking Out’ – Gerard Arnoux, an 18-year Air France captain and spokesperson aviation safety. (Photo link pbs.twimg.com)

Along with 21WIRE, many have questioned the validity of this seemingly biased investigation…

On March 29th, the alternative media site Sign of the Times, discussed the commentary of longtime Air France captain Gerard Arnoux regarding the Germanwings disaster. Here’s the following portion from Sott.net, with Arnoux questioning the official narrative:

“One of the major pieces of data used to justify the “suicide pilot” story comes from the alleged CVR recording where, we are told, Lubitz’s ‘breath’ can be heard. This claim has been directly contested by Gerard Arnoux, an 18-year Air France captain and spokesperson for the national monitoring committee on aviation safety, who appeared on ‘Le Grande Journal’ two days after the crash. Arnoux stated that there were three errors in the official story:

1) It is not possible to hear a pilot’s breath on the CVR. Arnoux states that the cockpit of 1st generation A320s are very noisy, so much so that, in flight, pilots had to use headsets to speak to each other. The idea that the CVR could pick up Lubitz’s breath with so much ambient noise is not possible, according to Arnoux. 

2) The official story claims that investigators heard the ‘beep’ of the knob that Lubitz used to start the plane on its descent. Arnoux states categorically that this knob makes no sound. 

3) Arnoux also wonders why no mention was made by investigators of hearing the loud strident beeping made by the cockpit door console when the emergency access code is entered to open the cockpit door. Arnoux recognizes that the emergency unlock code could have been overridden by someone in the cockpit manually holding the lock button down, but this would not have prevented the beeping once the code was entered outside. This would have been the clearest confirmation that one of the pilots had been locked out. Yet no mention was made of it. Instead, we are asked to accept the word of those privy to the CVR that someone was “banging on the door” and shouting “open the damn door.” And with all that ambient noise in the cockpit too. They must have very good hearing.” 

Questions about the Germanwings disaster continue to persist, just as there are many questions and anomalies surrounding both MH370 and MH17 – many of those questions continue to point back to the Boeing Honeywell ‘Uninterruptible’ Autopilot System a rarely discussed breakthrough in avionics.

You have to wonder if the families of those lost will receive any credible answers from investigators in this highly suspect Germanwings case…

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard (Pluto Press, 256pp)

On 11 January 2013, around 250 activists erected tents on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, on which the Israeli government intended to build a 4,000-house settlement. The activists declared: “We hereby establish the village of Bab Al Shams to proclaim our faith in direct action and popular resistance.”

It was noted at the time that their tactics deliberately mimicked those of Israeli settlers. The act of naming the village after a work of fiction by Elias Khoury also had its echo in Israeli history.

Israel boasts “the only city in the world named after a novel,” Sharon Rotbard claims in White City, Black City. The novel in question is Theodor Hertzl’s Altneuland, known in English as “Old New Land” and in Hebrew as “Tel Aviv.”

Rotbard’s book opens (and closes) with a description of how in July 2003 UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee recommended inscribing the “White City” of Tel Aviv in its list of world heritage sites, in recognition of around a thousand “modernist” buildings it contains that are loosely inspired by the Bauhaus style. Rotbard, an Israeli architect who “decided some twenty years ago” to settle in the “Black City” of Jaffa, is skeptical about the Bauhaus influence on Tel Aviv’s architecture.

“Encyclopedia of ruins”

At its heart, the book focuses on how Jaffa was all but absorbed into Tel Aviv and thus “ceased to exist as an urban and cultural entity” after 5,000 years. This focus on a city that isn’t there, which Rotbard describes as “an encyclopedia of ruins,” makes this a peculiar book to categorize.

It is not exactly a study of history or architecture. In fact, it can be quite frustrating as either, sometimes eliding past and present in the course of its argument. But it is compelling as a ghost story, in which the perpetual fictions created about Tel Aviv cannot obscure its past.

The text’s haunted quality is reinforced by the many images it offers of landscapes that have disappeared: maps, aerial photographs, postcards and a playing card. Other pictures sketch out imaginary futures. They include an image of a 1984 project of skyscrapers which never materialized in Manshieh, a suburb on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

In a section titled “Urbicide,” Rotbard documents in chilling detail how in 1948 the city itself became a weapon. Amichai “Gidi” Faglin, a commander of the Etzel — more commonly known as the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group — led his fighters in what became known as a “mouse hole” technique. This involved placing his forces on either side of Palestinians in order to trap them.

Rotbard associates Faglin’s techniques with the later tactics of the Israeli military, as described by Brigadier-General Aviv Kovachi: “We no longer wish to conform to the alleys, the streets or the city … That is the reason we chose the method of passing through walls, like a worm chewing and ending up in a different place every time.”

Deliberate subversion

Rotbard describes these strategies as “forced geography” — a deliberate subversion of the city as it was planned.

In 1948 the effects were devastating. Thousands drowned as they fled and were forced into the water.

Rotbard writes: “Of all the numerous, unwarranted times the phrase ‘push them into the sea’ has been flippantly bandied around in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this may well be the only instance when the expression has literally taken form.”

Some of the ghosts in this account may never tell their stories, as Rotbard notes: “To this day it is unclear what happened to most of Jaffa’s residents.”

Rotbard explains how in the decades since 1948, Tel Aviv has continued to push anything unwanted into the shadow city at its side:

Everything unwanted in the White City is relegated to the Black City: … garbage dumps, sewage pipes, high voltage transformers, towing lots and overcrowded central bus stations; noise and air pollution factories and small industries; illegal establishments like brothels, casinos and sex shops; unwelcoming and intimidating public institutions such as the police headquarters, jails, pathological institutes and methadone clinics; and finally, a complete ragtag of municipal outcasts and social pariahs — new immigrants, foreign workers, drug addicts and the homeless … Paradoxically, this has actually ensured that the Black City is the most colorful, heterogeneous and cosmopolitan city space in the whole of Israel.

White City, Black City is at its strongest with such concrete details. It is less persuasive as it moves away from them, positing that the history of Tel Aviv might be understood as a parable of modernity.

White City, Black City was first published in Hebrew in 2005 and this edition ends with a downbeat note to the non-Hebrew reader. Rotbard records that Tel Aviv has “accumulated a large number of trophies and titles in addition to its UNESCO diploma” over the past decade, while the violence committed against its neighbors has only intensified.

Rotbard adds relatively little that is new to our understanding of the history of the erasure of Palestine post-1948. But he makes a powerful case that the language of planning and architecture are essential to that narrative: “construction and destruction are the primary expressions of the division of power in Israel.”

Rotbard writes with a compelling mixture of clarity and rage. Yet this book shows that it is not enough just to “tell the story” differently. Certainly the fate of the tent city of Bab Al Shams — whose residents were evicted after just a few days — indicates how hard it can be, in the face of brutal violence, to imagine a different future.

Tom Sperlinger is the author of Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation, which will be published by Zero Books in June.

More than half a million people living in communities along the banks of the Lúrio River in northern Mozambique will be severely affected if the country’s Council of Ministers approves the Lúrio River Valley Development Project (DVRL) in the controversial Nacala Corridor.

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Of these 500,000 people, more than 100,000 in the provinces of Niassa, Nampula and Cabo Delgado will lose their homes and land. At issue is a project that was secretly presented to a small group in a hotel in Maputo in January 2014, at a meeting of representatives of government, international development agencies and the private sector, specifically domestic and foreign companies.

The project falls within a framework of rapid transformation and conversion of the Nacala Corridor, at the epicentre of a struggle for control of land and water by large international corporations, including international cooperation agencies, in the service of their countries of origin. The Mozambican government is increasingly intensifying its efforts to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and establish so-called public-private partnerships as part of its strategy to promote large-scale agriculture in an area already affected by ProSavana, the controversial tripartite programme. ADECRU (Academic Action for the Development of Rural Communities) and GRAIN have found out, through reliable sources whose identities are omitted here for security reasons, that the Lúrio River Valley Development Project was submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (MASA) and is now before the Council of Ministers for approval, as required by law for investments of this magnitude. The project has a budget of 4.2 billion U.S. Dollars for agricultural development and the construction of hydro-electric infrastructure on the Lúrio River.

The project will occupy an area of more than 240 thousand hectares to produce agricultural commodities for export, such as cotton, corn, sugar and ethanol, as well as livestock farming. It also provides for the construction of two dams on the Lúrio River, which will have a generating capacity of 40 MW and 15 MW of electricity respectively, as well as sustain an irrigation system.Article 22 of the Land Act confers the power to grant areas greater than 10,000 hectares on the Council of Ministers, provided that local land use is taken into account. The same law requires the input of the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security for a grant on this scale1. In practice, these powers have been abused, resulting in the approval of projects with severe impacts on the lives of thousands of Mozambicans.

ADECRU and GRAIN have ascertained that the Lúrio River Valley Development Project will be implemented by a company that has already been created, the Companhia do Vale do Rio Lúrio (CVRL) managed by a consortium made up of TurConsult and Agricane. The shareholder structure behind the company remains unknown, shrouded in a high level of secrecy. However, it is known that TurConsult provides services to the hotel and tourism industry and is managed by Rui Monteiro, a very influential figure in that sector. Agricane is a South African company that produces sugarcane and provides consulting services to large-scale farmers in Africa, specifically in the sugar industry. ADECRU requested an interview with TurConsult, but got no response up to the time of the completion of this article.

ADECRU’s Cooperative-Political and Executive Council visited the Lúrio River valley on the 2nd and 3rd of May 2015, holding talks with communities in the districts of Chiuri in Cabo Delgado Province, and Malema and Erati in Nampula Province. They found that the people were unaware of the Lúrio River Valley Development Project. Members and leaders of the communities of Cathai, Munhacuco, Nhequedza, Niveta and Namapa told ADECRU that they had never heard of the project in question.

Based on the principles of citizens’ democratic participation in public life and the duty to openly publish available information of public interest, as guaranteed by Law No. 34/2014, of December 31, better known as the Right to Information Act, ADECRU asked the Council of Ministers for a copy of the project documents for the DVRL and related documentation concerning the Environmental Impact Assessment Study. Up to the time of publication, ADECRU had not received any response.

The image below was taken from the January 2014 presentation of the DVRL and shows the areas that will be affected by the implementation of large-scale agricultural projects for export and animal husbandry.

Preliminary data analysed by ADECRU indicate that more than 500 thousand people will be affected by the project, both downstream and upstream. Of these, more than 100 thousand will be displaced from their land to make way for large-scale agriculture developments on an area of about 240 thousand hectares.

ADECRU and GRAIN hereby publicly denounce and repudiate the Lúrio River Valley Development Project and express their concern and indignation about it. We are firmly against its approval under the terms and assumptions that led to its creation and have allowed it to be gradually put into motion. We therefore demand that Mozambique’s Council of Ministers vote against the project because of the destructive impact that it will have on biodiversity the lives of more than 500 thousand people.

The Lúrio River is the second largest in Mozambique after the Zambezi River. It has a basin estimated at 60,800 km² and an average annual flow of 227 cubic meters per second, covering a distance of about 500 kilometres. The Lúrio River Valley Development Project will be implemented across the districts bordering the Lúrio River including: Lalaua, Malema, Mecuburi, Erati and Ribáuè in Nampula Province; Namuno and Chiuri in Cabo Delgado Province; and Metarica and Nipepe in Niassa Province.

Contacts

Clemente Ntauazi, ADECRU, Maputo (Portuguese)
[email protected]

Devlin Kuyek, GRAIN, Montreal (English)
[email protected]

Notes: 

Approximately $8 billion in debt securities are affecting a popular investor’s service decision about one of biotech’s biggest. Investing credit rating company Moody’s has affirmed that Monsanto’s new rating is being downgraded from ‘neutral’ to ‘negative’ following Syngenta’s announcement that it has refused Monsanto’s unsolicited bid of CHF449 per Syngenta share in a combination of cash and stock.

Monsanto’s offer would have valued another biotech bully at a mere US$20 billion paid in cash. For investors in Monsanto, Moody’s calls their aggressive attempt at takeover a “heightened event risk” due to their more aggressive financial policy.

Indeed – Monsanto’s financial policy seems to match their aggressive actions elsewhere – from bullying federal judges to trying to orchestrate a trade monopoly through the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Moody’s also doesn’t seem to feel confident that Monsanto could come up with the cash even if Syngenta had accepted their deal. John Rogers, Senior Vice President at Moody’s said:

“Monsanto’s bid is indicative of a more aggressive financial policy, especially after it has levered up to undertake a sizable share repurchase program over the past 10 months.”

As per Moody’s ratings rationale, the A3 long-term debt and Prime-2 commercial paper ratings reflect Monsanto’s leadership position in genetically modified (GM) and hybrid seeds, modest leverage (1.6x Net Debt/EBITDA, Retained Cash Flow/Net Debt of 45%), and excellent liquidity.

However, Moody’s doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that consumers and farmers are more increasingly refusing GM products – whether it’s the glyphosate that Monsanto sells via Round Up or the Round Up Ready crops they push on farmers throughout the world.

There have been increasing farmer uprisings against Monsanto, and the demand for organic is booming so much that the US is now importing more organic food than they are growing. This doesn’t bode well for a company that makes its cash by lying, stealing, and poisoning.

Moody’s also bases its assessment on standard adjustments to Monsanto’s financial statements (which currently show debt at $1.8 billion – $1.6 billion in operating leases, and $200 million in pensions for their employees).

Furthermore, Moody’s states “Monsanto’s market position is supported by the largest germplasm library in the industry, technology licensing agreements with its main competitors and clearly defined research pipeline.”

It doesn’t mention that Monsanto’s research pipeline is all paid for and that the company has an entire department dedicated to discounting any scientific research which paints them in an unfavorable light. This is obviously not a sustainable way to do business, since even the World Health Organization has called glyphosate ‘probably carcinogenic’ and organizations everywhere are now demanding a ban on glyphosate.

We can only hope that the Monsanto/Syngenta merger does not happen. It would result in a bloated agricultural chemical giant capable of dominating the seed market at almost three times the rate of its nearest competitor.

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One of the country’s oldest civil rights legal groups has joined the fight against a California bill that would deprive parents in the Golden State the right to decide whether or not they want to expose their children to potentially harmful vaccines.

Mothers who are fighting against SB 277 believe they have an ally in the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) because they and the civil rights legal organization are questioning the constitutionality of the measure.

In recent days, mothers with children in tow ventured to Sacramento, the state capital, to lobby against the measure which would remove all exemptions – religious and philosophical – to opting out of vaccinating children. The measure, if passed, will require all children attending public and private schools to be vaccinated; parents who homeschool their children could still opt out, but many have said homeschooling is not an option because they can’t afford it.

In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, mothers said they would continue coming to Sacramento when the measure comes up before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has been debating it.

The paper said the ACLU would be joining in the effort to oppose the measure under grounds that it may not be constitutional.

ACLU California Center for Advocacy and Policy legislative director, Kevin G. Baker wrote a letter to the bill’s authors, State Sens. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), arguing that the California Constitution appears to provide all children in the state an unconditional right to a public education.

“I was hoping for more of a dialogue”

Baker did not opine one way or the other regarding whether children should be vaccinated or not. Instead, he focused his letter on the contention that the legislation does not provide a sufficient argument for the state having a “compelling interest” in the mandatory vaccination of children.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com

“We’re not solving it with this broad brush approach that keeps kids out of school,” he wrote, according to the Times.

About 2.5 percent of California kindergarteners had persona belief waivers on file with the state at the beginning of the current school year. It was a voluntary decrease from the previous year. According to state records examined by the Times, 0.52 percent of them based in some religious belief while another 1.64 percent are based on “health care practitioner” counseling.

In addition, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there was 90 percent “herd immunity” for measles, a rate that is more than met sufficiently in the 2014-15 California kindergarten class, which has a rate of 92.6 percent.

“I was hoping for more of a dialogue,” Baker said regarding a lack of response from the lawmakers he sent his letter to, according to the Times, “but they think they’ve got the moral high ground here and they intend to just push this through.”

“Your rights are being ripped from you”

British scientist and former physician Andrew Wakefield, whose groundbreaking research linking autism and immunizations helped launch a worldwide anti-vaccination movement, is in California to urge residents to fight back against SB 277.

In an April 25 speech at a local chiropractic college, Wakefield told students they should do all they could to resist the Senate measure.

“Your rights are being ripped from you,” Wakefield said, as quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle. “Parents are no longer going to be in charge of their own children. This is the fight that has to be taken to Sacramento.”

As for Pan, a pediatrician by trade, it is understandable why he is pushing for mandatory vaccinations. As NaturalNews has reported, he has financial connections to Big Pharma vaccine pushers like Merck, the manufacturer of MMR II (measles, mumps and rubella).

Dirty money tends to finance dirty politics. It’s amazingly hypocritical for the party of pro-choice when it comes to abortion transforms into the party of no choice when it comes to harmful vaccines, which represent a form of medical violence against the people.

Sources:

http://www.breitbart.com

http://www.latimes.com

http://www.sfgate.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://truthwiki.org/The_American_Council_on…

http://truthwiki.org/Vaccine_Fanaticism

Reports are now filtering in that preparations for a direct military assault on Syria are being made by Turkey in concert with the Saudis and Qataris. These reports are suggesting that the military offensive will take place within the next few days. Some reports speculate that such action could take place further down the road in late June.

At this moment, Turkish forces are reportedly gathering at the nation’s southern border and Syria’s northern border in a fashion that can signify little except the posturing for military action.

While this article is in no way attempting to make predictions regarding possible military action, to provide dates, or even the hint that these possible attacks will definitively take place, the stage has clearly been set for some time for us to contemplate the possibility of such an attack.

Indeed, in the last few weeks, geopolitical alliances and talks have begun to coalesce so as to indicate that such an attack is not only possible but probable in the near future. After all, the US and NATO have attempted to gin up support for a direct assault on Syria since early on in the crisis when it became apparent that proxy armies of terrorists alone were not going to accomplish regime change.

The plans – at least from Turkey’s side of the fence – appear to be twofold. First, the plan to attack Syria has been part of the NATO agenda from the moment the death squads were routed by Assad’s forces and Turkey has always been a major playing in this regard.

Secondly, Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan’s own governing party has been suffering under a number of scandals, criticisms, and failures over the last several months and, as is the case in every country, a foreign war is more than helpful in diverting the attention of the local population away from domestic concerns. While certainly not the cause, plunging support from the Turkish public is certainly a stick used to prod Erdoğan into further action.

Emboldened by their illegal war in Yemen and their ability to massacre civilians abroad with little condemnation, the Saudis are apparently feeling more capable of acting against Syria directly and especially in concert with the Turks and Qataris. These attacks on Syria would undoubtedly take place – much like the Yemeni strikes – with US backing and support.

The plan was allegedly drawn up in Ankara, Turkey in collusion with the Qataris, who maintain interests in the region due to the Iranian pipeline that was scheduled to move through Syria.

As Ziad Fadel of Syrian Perspective writes,

The plan was to establish a solid foothold in the north of Syria. The Aleppo offensive has ground to a halt with the Syrian Army’s encirclement of the northern capital. Supply lines from Southern Turkey have been cut. Hence, the attack on Idlib which was accomplished using an heretofore unprecedented three-truck suicide barrage and (according to Syrian security sources), a breach in the defenses occasioned by a group of treasonous members of the National Defense Forces (PDC). This was followed by a takeover of most of the town of Jisr Al-Shughoor although no supply lines for government forces have yet been cut.

With Iran’s sanctions set to expire soon after June, 2015, a new and energized Teheran would be the last thing the apes of Ankara and Riyaadh would want. Flush with new wealth, Iran could more easily buttress the economy of Syria as the SAA continues to sweep away the syphilis-carrying rats who keep mouthing that nihilistic and meaningless “Allahu Akbar”.

The attack on Damascus would take place from the Qalamoon, Qunaytra and, possibly, from Der’ah in the south. The idea would be to overwhelm Syrian forces by utilizing Saudi Arabian air power. (Yawn). In the north, the Turks are expected to use their American-manufactured bombers to assist the Alqaeda rodents. Syrian missiles were supposed to be kept at bay by the Patriot Missile System batteries provided by certain NATO countries. The Turks have seriously miscalculated.

Other sources have suggested that a direct military campaign against Syria will begin a bit further off, at the end of June, citing cryptic statements by death squad fighters and supporters that the battle in Syria will be “hot” until June 30.

Turkey – Saudi Arabia – Qatar Agreements

It was reported by the Huffington Post on April 12, 2015 that the Turks and the Saudis are now in “high level talks” regarding an agreement to form a military alliance to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria. The talks are being mitigated by Qatar and have been known for quite some time. In fact, they have been taking place since at least February of this year.

When the meetings were finally made public to Western audiences, Barack Obama chimed in to support the plans by stating that

We both [Obama and the emir of Qatar] are deeply concerned about the situation in Syria. We’ll continue to support the moderate opposition there and continue to believe that it will not be possible to fully stabilize that country until Mr. Assad, who has lost legitimacy in the country, is transitioned out.

How we get there obviously is a source of extraordinary challenge, and we shared ideas in terms of how that can be accomplished.

Sources cited by the Huffington Post suggested that, if the Turkey-Saudi Arabia talks go well, the two countries would move forward with their plans regardless of American support, military or otherwise.

As Grim, Jones, and Schulberg wrote,

The Turks generally support the removal of Assad, but have said that as a non-Arab nation, they are unwilling to take a greater role in Syria without expanded intervention by Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Arab power. Turkey’s leadership has criticized the U.S.-led coalition striking Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria for its refusal to also go after the Syrian regime.

Saudi Arabia recently demonstrated its willingness to intervene militarily in the region by leading a coalition of Arab nations in launching airstrikes against the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen. While the U.S. did not participate directly, American officials said the U.S. provided logistical and intelligence support to the mission.

There have been previous indications that Turkey and Saudi Arabia were discussing a cooperative effort in Syria. On March 2, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Salman, met in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where they announced an agreement to jointly boost aid to the Syrian opposition and broaden overall cooperation on defense and security matters.

The latest news of high-level talks, however, is the first indication of direct military participation against Assad by either country.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia have traditionally found themselves at odds, despite both cooperating with their allies in NATO and the US. This tendency to work together closer and openly, however, has surprised many. As Andrew Korybko writes,

This deadly collaboration proves that the two have temporarily put aside their ideological differences and agreed to sort it out in the aftermath of their unified regime change operation. Furthermore, it highlights that Saudi Arabia is front-and-center in destabilizing the Mideast, and that even Riyadh’s rivals have no choice but to eventually end up collaborating with it in order to pursue what they identify as shared military interests.

Grim, Jones, and Schulberg point out that Turkey has recently taken more open steps indicating that it is preparing to deploy ground troops in Syria. They write that,

Weeks after he met with the Saudi king, the Turkish leader signed a defense dealwith Qatar to facilitate intelligence sharing, military cooperation and possible deployment of Turkish and Qatari troops in one another’s countries. This agreement builds upon a joint training deal the two countries signed in 2012, and positions Qatar well to mediate the discussions between Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Osman Taney Koruturk, the main representative of the leading Turkish opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) on Turkey’s foreign affairs committee, is concerned that Turkish ground troops could soon be in Syria. He and other opposition members on the committee expressed this concern during official talks over the deal, and later in a press conference after it was signed by the committee on March 2, according to documents obtained by The WorldPost. The deal was then sent to the Parliament and Erdogan to be signed.

At the very least, there has been a clear intensification of death squad activity in Northern Syria in the areas bordering Turkey. This is obviously because of Turkish assistance, training, arming, and funneling of jihadists into Syria through their borders. It is also because the recent strengthening of the alliance between Turkey and Saudi Arabia has resulted in even further alliances between the two interlopers’ proxy forces who often fought separately from one another due to minor differences in religious ideology (at the bottom levels of their fighting forces).

As Korbyko points out,

The only reason that these differing terrorist groups cooperate and don’t behead another is because their external patrons are now on the same page in pursuing regime change first and settling intra-jihadist scores second. Specifically, it’s being widely reported that Turkish President Erdogan and new Saudi King Salman agreed to a de-facto alliance over Syria when the former visited the new regent last March, meaning that pro-Muslim Brotherhood groups led by Turkey are fighting alongside Wahhabist ones led by the Saudis, or put another way, that mortal Mideast enemies are now wartime comrades.

The plans to invade Syria directly are no doubt known by the Syrian government. After all, it was an issue that was addressed by Permanent Syrian Representative to the UN Bashar al Jaafari, when he stated on May 4, 2015 that “Any serious attempt to occupy Aleppo will be met with ‘open war’ with the party that it would resort to whether Turkey or any other.”

The Iranian Element

One possible motive for the intensification of proxy forces and possible direct military attacks and ground troops is the possibility of the removal of sanctions on Iran placed upon them by the imperialist US and Western countries. While the odds that any attempt at the removal of sanctions on Iran or peace with the Persian country will fail due to the lack of sincerity on the part of the Anglo-Americans, if sanctions are removed, Iran will become an even bigger regional player, particularly in regards to its ally Syria.

As the Huffington Post reported,

“It’s an alliance that’s being forced by the perceived success of the Iranians,” said Firas Abi Ali, a Middle East senior manager at the risk analysis firm IHS, referring to the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the issue of Syria.

Ali added that without international sanctions, Iran would likely be doing even more to help Assad.

“Iran has been engaged in Syria with one hand tied behind its back as a result of the sanctions,” he said. “Without that constraint, the perception among the Sunni states — Turkey and Saudi Arabia — would be that they need to contribute significantly more to match what they fear will be an increased Iranian commitment.”

As mentioned earlier, Ziad Fadel hastened to point out that, with the Iranian sanctions set to expire in June 2015 a “new and energized Teheran” would be the last thing the Turks and Saudis want to see. “Flush with new wealth, Iran could more easily buttress the economy of Syria as the SAA continues to sweep away the syphilis-carrying rats who keep mouthing that nihilistic and meaningless ‘Allahu Akbar,’” he writes.

Make no mistake, however, while the mainstream press attempts to present the actions of Saudi Arabia and Turkey as independent and centered around their own interests, the truth is that the alliances and any military action will be part of the NATO sponsored and directed plan to destroy Syria and, later, Iran. As Korybko writes in his article, “The only other country that could possibly bring together Israel, Egypt, and Turkey in various Mideast hot and cold wars is the US, making it seem as though Saudi Arabia endeavors to be a ‘mini-America’ in the area.”

Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s moves in the Middle East, at least in regards to the larger geopolitical spectrum, are most certainly not independent. In fact, it would be safe to say that both countries along with Qatar have played the role of the US and NATO’s puppets for quite some time.

What War Might Look Like

Much like the ensuing provocations taking place in Ukraine and hence Russia, provocations in the Middle East can have wide-reaching effects. A Saudi-Turk strike against Syria could serve to finally end the resistance put up by Bashar al-Assad and turn the country into another Libya. Or it could backfire and result in the downing of large quantities of invading jets as well as the potential destruction of Turkish infrastructure and the loss of Turkish lives in addition to its Syrian victims.

Such an attack could also draw in regional powers like Iran and Israel or even the ultimate involvement of Russia and the United States.

At this point, one can only speculate when the direct assault on Syria will take place. However, as we move into the weekend and as military posturing from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar continues to become more threatening, it is important to watch the developments closely and to oppose any and all involvement of NATO, the GCC, or the US in Syrian affairs.

For those of us who have tried to warn of and prevent a direct military intervention in Syria, we must now continue to keep the Syrian people in our thoughts and prayers.

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1and volume 2, and The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria. Turbeville has published over 500 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV.  He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com. 

Khadr is a Canadian citizen – one of America’s youngest wrongfully charged war on terror victims at the time of his illegal arrest and detention. 

On July 27, 2002, US forces abducted him in Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan. He was caught in a gun fight, shot twice in the chest and blinded in one eye.

At age 15, he was lawlessly detained, interrogated and brutally tortured at US Bagram and Guantanamo torture gulags.

He was tried before a US military commission the Supreme Court ruled lacks “the power to proceed because (its) structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld June 2006).

Congress circumvented the High Court ruling by passing the Military Commissions Act (October 2006). It grants extraordinary unconstitutional rights.

It violates core international humanitarian laws. Guantanamo and other US torture prison detainees have no rights whatever.

Khadr was charged with being an unlawful enemy combatant (now called an unprivileged enemy belligerent). Either term is a long-defunct WWII designation superseded by the four Geneva Conventions.

Khadr was coerced to admit crimes he never committed. At the time, former Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) President Michael Ratner called his admission:

“…a ‘show plea.’ He pleaded guilty to crimes he was never charged with and crimes about which there was almost no evidence, except a confession made under torture including threats of gang rape.”

“So why did he do it?” He faced life in prison “even without a trial. He was being tried in a military commission, not a real court.”

He had no right of appeal. He was denied judicial fairness. “Under these circumstances his conviction was almost guaranteed.”

“The Obama administration is trying to” do the impossible. It wants to “save face. (Khadr) was the first trial of a child soldier by a Western power since World War II.”

“Charges and trials of juveniles are utterly illegal. Top that off with torture” coerced confessions. Obama operates as ruthlessly as Bush.

Imagine making a young child look like “a really bad guy and guilty.”

“The Khadr case is one of the most disgusting chapters in a post-9/11 detention system that should have long ago been relegated to a trash bin.”

He was charged with “material support for terrorism.” At the time of his arrest, no such crime existed.

CCR said “civilians like Omar Khadr who engage in hostilities (whether in self-defense or otherwise) do not violate the laws of war merely because they lack the combat immunity of a soldier.”

Khadr was Obama’s first military commission trial – a kangaroo court by any standard, deeply flawed with no legitimacy.

Military commissions deny due process and judicial fairness. They’re tribunals established to convict.

Khadr was born in Toronto. He was an innocent boy when abducted. He was living with his family in Afghanistan.

He was wrongfully accused of killing a US soldier. A later leaked Defense Department Criminal Investigation Task Force report revealed his innocence.

The soldier’s death was by friendly fire. Khadr had nothing to do with it.

It didn’t matter. He was horrifically mistreated – 13 years in gulag confinement, often in solitary confinement.

On September 26, 2012, he was repatriated to Canada – placed in maximum security confinement.

Instead of freeing him at the time, the fascist Harper regime continued his brutalizing treatment – complicit with Washington in gross violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and fundamental international law.

Despite all he endured, he somehow retained his dignity and positive outlook. He yearned only for a normal, productive life. In a December 2012 letter to a friend he wrote:

“The light of goodness outshines shadows that might be. There are too many good things in this life (as hard as it might be) to worry or even care about the bad things.”

“Things are what we make out of them. Prison can be a deprivation of freedom, or a time to enlighten ourselves. For me it is the latter.”

On May 7, Canadian Court of Appeal Judge Myra Beilby said “Mr. Khadr, you’re free to go” – despite Ottawa’s emergency request to keep him imprisoned.

In April, a lower Alberta court granted him release on bail while his appeals process continues – under strict conditions.

His lawyer Dennis Edney and wife offered him residence in their home. A required ankle monitor tracks his movements. A 10PM – 7AM curfew was imposed. He has limited Internet access only.

He has restricted communication with his family in Ontario – supervised and only in English.

Ottawa continues contesting his release on bail. He faces more court proceedings in September, as well as a US review of his case.

He’s suing Harper’s government for $50 million – claiming violation of his fundamental rights, including complicity with US torture and denying him rights of a child under international law.

He wants a “fresh start,” he said. “There are too many good things in life that I want to experience.”

He wants to finish his education and work in healthcare. “I have a lot of basic skills I need to learn,” he said.

He’s now aged 28. “This is (his) first time out in society since the age of 15,” Edney explained.

“I’m delighted. It’s taken too many years to get to this point. We were the only Western country that didn’t request one of its detainees come home. We left a Canadian child in Guantanamo Bay to suffer torture.”

For now he’s released on bail. It remains for Canada’s judicial system and America’s to decide if he’ll remain free.

Kathy Kelly is just out of prison, where she’d been sent for nonviolently opposing drone murders.

An appeals court has just overturned convictions for Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, imprisoned for entering and protesting a nuclear weapons site at Oak Ridge, Tenn., three years ago. Resentencing on lesser charges, and quite possibly immediate release, is expected.

Amazingly, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the government failed to prove that the activists intended to “injure the national defense.” (Maybe Venezuela, accused by President Obama of being a threat to the same, should appeal to the Sixth Circuit!)

The U.S. government has just dropped charges against eight members of the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance who nonviolently protested the U.S. military’s environmental destruction with a march from the EPA to the Pentagon this past Earth Day.

“It can only be speculated why the charges were dismissed,” said NCNR. “The eight activists were charged with ‘Failure to Comply With a Lawful Order’ and were scheduled to appear for trial on June 4 at the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA. The group was well prepared to challenge the charge and to speak some truth to power in the courtroom. Perhaps the U.S. attorney recognized that the defendants at the Pentagon were simply exercising their constitutionally-protected right to speak out against our government’s wrong-headed policies. Or possibly he agreed with the defendants’ messages.”

In recent months there have been absurd indictments and sentences. But there have also been surprising acquittals and the dismissal of charges.

Freedom isn’t free, it’s won by continued protests of wars.

Now to free all the other prisoners!

John Kiriakou, just out of prison, writes about his experience here.

A recent peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed what many fracking critics have argued for years: hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas can contaminate groundwater.

The study’s release comes as a major class action lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2009 winds its way to a jury trial later this year. The lawsuit over fracking groundwater contamination pits plaintiffs based in Dimock, PA against Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation.

For the study, researchers examined groundwater contamination incidents at three homes in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin in Bradford County. As The New York Times explained, the water samples showed “traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids.”

It’s not the first time fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination in northeastern Pennsylvania. And that brings us back to Dimock, , located in neighboring Susquehanna County.

As DeSmogBlog revealed in August 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had in its possession an unpublished PowerPoint presentation summarizing an Agency-contracted study that linked fracking to groundwater contamination in Dimock, a study the Agency later abandoned and censored.

That presentation was subsequently leaked and published here for the first time.

Image Credit: DeSmogBlog

In its official July 2012 Dimock desk statement, EPA said “there are not levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the Agency.” As Greenpeace USA researcher Jesse Coleman recently pointed out, EPA has done the bidding of the oil and gas industry on multiple instances during high profile fracking studies.

That PowerPoint presentation and the new Bradford County study could both potentially serve as key pieces of evidence in theU.S. District Court case.

Ely v. Cabot

Initially, the U.S. District Court complaint filed in November 2009 featured many more plaintiffs.

The story of how fracking forever changed Dimock played a prominent role in the documentary films “Gasland” and “Gasland: Part II.” Dimock’s saga also received national and international media coverage by “60 Minutes” and the BBC.

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But years passed by in the case and eventually most of the plaintiffs agreed — some would argue they were forced — to enter into a plea deal with Cabot. But the rest of the plaintiffs have stood their ground, and will soon have their day in court.

Many of the plaintiffs entered into a presidential election-year plea deal with Cabot in August 2012, a month after EPA declared publicly that water is safe to drink in Dimock (while privately telling citizens the opposite). The case caption then changed fromNorma Florentino v. Cabot to Scott Ely v. Cabot.

Photo Credit: Stand With Dimock Families

Ely is a former Cabot employee joined in the case by co-plaintiff Ray Hubert, who lives up the street from Ely on Carter Road.When shown the leaked PowerPoint back in August 2013 by DeSmog, Ely expressed despair over EPA abandoning ship in this high profile study.

“When does anybody just stand by the truth? Why is it that we have a bunch of people in Washington, DC who are trying to manipulate the truth of what’s happening to people in Dimock because of the industry?,” Ely asked rhetorically at the time.

“We thought EPA was going to come in and be our savior. And what’d they do? They said the truth can’t be known: hide it, drop it, forget about it.”

“Stand with Dimock Families”

Advocates for the grassroots group Energy Justice Network have created an IndieGoGo page to raise funds for the legal battle set to go to a jury trial sometime between October and December 2015, depending on the Judge’s final scheduling decision. They have also created a website, StandWithDimock.org.

AUDIO BELOW

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The IndieGoGo page explains that the co-plaintiffs have limited access to clean water due to the impacts of Cabot’s drilling operations.

“[S]ince 2008, the Elys and Huberts have been living without reliable access to water and under rationing conditions.  To survive day to day, these families haul water at their own expense every week for drinking, bathing and other daily basics. They purchase bottled water for drinking and cooking,” the page explains. “The Court has recognized that these plaintiffs have a case against Cabot which they are preparing to present to a jury of their peers.”

To be certain,  this is a case that will be key in determining whether frackers who contaminate drinking water can be held accountable under federal law.

Entergy Corporation’s Indian Point nuclear plant is located 38 miles north of New York City. It was commissioned in 1974. It experienced numerous incidents warranting concern – the latest on May 9.

A transformer exploded. Fire and black smoke were visible. The plant’s Unit 3 was shut down after the incident. Officials claimed no threat to public safety.

Nuclear experts cite Indian Point’s notorious history of unaddressed health hazards, safety violations, numerous accidents and pollution – issues persisting throughout its operating life.

Waste water emitted from its facilities killed millions of Hudson River fish and other aquatic life forms.

High levels of cancer occur in communities close to all nuclear power plants – notably in the case of Indian Point. Documented evidence shows infant mortality rates drop significantly in communities near shuttered nuclear plants.

Indian Point is located on or near three earthquake faults. Officially, the facility is built to withstand a 6.1 magnitude event. Seismologists predict an eventual major earthquake far more powerful than Indian Point can tolerate.

Experts want the facility closed. It’s outlived its useful period of serviceability, they say.

It needs to be shuttered to avoid a potentially catastrophic incident. Millions of New York City and state residents are at risk.

Imagine the possibility of turning the entire area into an uninhabitable dead zone – like around Chernobyl and Fukushima. Investigations conducted by the New York Daily News and others show Indian Point’s fire detection and suppression systems to be woefully inadequate. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called the facility’s failure to comply with federal fire regulations “reckless and unacceptable.”

US nuclear facility operators notoriously ignore vital safety regulations. People living in the vicinity of these plants face potentially major hazards. Information about them is suppressed. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman says “US reactors are riddled at thousands of key junctures with (so-called) ‘fire protection’ materials that burn while leaving a dangerous char that hampers fire fighters.”

“America’s toothless regulators have given reactor owners no reason to shore up their (woefully inadequate) fire protection.”

A 2011 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)/Riverkeeper report (conducted by Synapse Energy Economics) urged closing River Point – replacing it with safe alternative energy options.

The facility isn’t needed to supply New York with energy. A risk analysis assessment “compare(d) the human and financial costs of the Fukushima disaster to the potential risks of a nuclear crisis at Indian Point…”

It showed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) “underestimates the danger posed to Indian Point from seismic activity.”

“An accident at one of (its) reactors on the scale of the recent catastrophe in Japan could send a fallout plume south to the New York City metropolitan area, requiring the sheltering or evacuation of millions of people, and cost ten to 100 times more than Fukushima’s disaster.”

Wind, solar and other renewable energy options would make New York much safer. They could be in use within 10 years or sooner, the report said.

New York has a surplus of electricity generating capacity. It permits plenty of time to phase in safe, reliable options.

Indian Point’s license comes up for renewal this year for an additional 20 years. It’s currently running under a “period of extended operation” while relicensing proceedings continue.

They’re not expected to be completed before at least 2018 or later. Meanwhile, operations aren’t affected.

Hazards remain. Critics want Indian Point decommissioned before a potentially catastrophic one occurs.

Costa Rica condemns Saudi Arabia’s dropping US-made cluster bombs on Yemen, in defiance of international law, including the Convention on Cluster Munitions that specifically outlaws the development, production, distribution, stockpiling, and use of cluster munitions, including the cluster bombs the Saudis have used since March 26 in their uncontested air attack on Yemen with an estimated 215 jet fighters from nine countries. (The Saudis are also bombing people in Syria and Iraq.)

Human Rights Watch presented evidence of the Saudi cluster-bombing campaign in a widely under-reported analysis presented May 3. The New York Times had a story datelined Cairo on page A8 of its May 3 print edition covering the Human Rights Watch report, but the paper has had no follow-up. The online version of the Times story noted, near the end, that both the Saudis and Americans have used cluster bombs in Yemen as long ago as 2009, without provoking significant protest.

Amnesty International issued a report May 8 documenting Saudi bombing of densely-populated areas of Yemen where the Saudis mostly killed civilians. An earlier Amnesty report documented the Saudi killing of hundreds of Yemeni civilians in its US-supported bombing campaign. Also on May 8, the Saudis announced that it would begin a unilateral ceasefire beginning at 11 p.m. on May 12, conveniently timed to precede meetings of President Obama and Arab dictatorship representatives, including the five countries leading the attacks on Yemen, starting May 13.

Cluster munitions are a particularly hideous weapon of war, designed primarily to kill people indiscriminately, both immediately and for years after they have been dispersed. Anti-personnel cluster munitions, whether delivered by air or artillery, burst in mid-air, spreading submunitions or bomblets that can remain lethal for years, as they have, for examples, in Viet-Nam, the Falklands, Chechnya, Croatia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria, and now Yemen.

By condemning Saudi and others’ use of US cluster bombs, Costa Rica is an exception among the “civilized” nations of the world. Costa Rica is one of 116 current signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which entered into force on August 1, 2010. Most countries in Europe and North America have signed the convention, but the United States and Russia have not. Neither have China or Israel. Nor has thecoalition of Arab dictatorships attacking Yemen: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, Sudan, and Morocco. (Among Middle East countries, the only ones that have forsworn cluster bombs are Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.)

Cluster munitions help hold down the cost of global militarism

The United States position, as expressed in 2011 by the Heritage Foundation, is a morally duplicitous defense of American militarism ability to do whatever it considers its imperial necessity:

The Convention on Cluster Munitions is a misbegotten treaty that neither advances the laws of war nor enhances security. It is an unverifiable, unenforceable, all-or-nothing exercise in moral suasion, not a serious diplomatic instrument. It creates perverse incentives for insurgents to use civilian populations as human shields, undermines effective arms control efforts, inhibits nation-states’ ability to defend themselves, and denigrates the sovereignty of the United States and other democratic states.

The U.S. should emphatically reject both the convention and the undemocratic Oslo Process that produced it and should instead continue to negotiate a realistic and enforceable protocol on cluster munitions that balances U.S. military requirements with the humanitarian concerns posed by unexploded ordnance.

This thoughtless think tank expression of the establishmentariat’s view of the need for heavily-muscled US exceptionalism had been expressed considerably more forthrightly in May 2008 by then-Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Stephen Mull:

Cluster munitions are available for use by every combat aircraft in the U.S. inventory, they are integral to every Army or Marine maneuver element and in some cases constitute up to 50 percent of tactical indirect fire support. U.S. forces simply cannot fight by design or by doctrine without holding out at least the possibility of using cluster munitions.

What that really means is that cluster munitions cost a lot less than standard ordnance, so the military can kill lots more people with many fewer airplanes, rockets, and artillery. In one test, the alternative to cluster munitions was found to be nine times as expensive and to take 40 times as long to create equivalent destruction.

Current US policy relies on diversion and moral obtuseness

The US State Department spins the issue along the lines of moral relativism, as well as irrelevance, by bringing in landmines (unexploded cluster bombs become, in effect, landmines) – without mentioning that the US is NOT among the 162 signatories to the landmine treaty of 1997 (along with China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia and 26 others). The publicly stated US policy on “Cluster Munitions” is, in its entirety, morally bankrupt:

The United States shares in the international concern about the humanitarian impact of the indiscriminate use of all munitions, including cluster munitions. That is one of the reasons that it spends more than any other country to eliminate the risk to civilians from landmines and all explosive remnants of war, including unexploded cluster munitions.

Cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility. Their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk. Moreover, cluster munitions can often result in much less collateral damage than unitary weapons, such as a larger bomb or larger artillery shell would cause, if used for the same mission.

The essential perversity of US policy is demonstrated by its banning the export of almost all cluster munitions, but allowing export of the CBU-105 that is used in Yemen on the basis of the humanitarian argument that this state-of-the-art cluster munition has a lower failure rate than earlier designs. The CBU-105 is banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions as posing an unacceptable risk to civilians.

Financing of cluster munitions manufacturing is predominantly American. In 2012, Pax Christi foundthat of 137 cluster-munition financing institutions, 63 were US-based, followed by South Korea with 22 and China with 16. Together these banks and others invested more than $43 billion in cluster bomb makers during 2009-2012. Among the leading US-based investors in cluster bombs are AIG, Wells Fargo Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. Investment in cluster bomb making continues to grow worldwide, according to Pax Christi. Two years ago, companies that make cluster munitions thought they were feeling some heat and thought there was jeopardy to their profits from “a global advocacy campaign that targets manufacturers of military hardware,” according to National Defense, NDIA’s Business and Technology Magazine. In an April 2012 article, the magazine fretted about the possibility of no more war, according to senior fellow Steven Groves at the Heritage Foundation, attacking Code Pink and others, arguing that they:

… don’t like drones because they’re a projection of American power. But if you ban drones, you’d have to also ban cruise missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft…. You start with the most unpopular weapons and you work your way back. You attack the munitions, the depleted uranium, the drones, all the way to tanks and soldiers. Antiwar activists want to ban war by banning all weapons of war.

That threat still hasn’t materialized.

Meanwhile the Saudis lie, bomb, and kill with US blessings

Search for “cluster bombs” on the Saudi Embassy website, then wait quite awhile, and eventually it tells you: “This webpage is not available.” Chances seem good that a Saudi webpage about cluster bombs has never been available. Search for “Yemen” and you get the same result online. On the ground in Yemen you can find Saudi cluster bombs all too easily, but that is reality, and reality for the Saudi dictatorship is a variable that must be carefully and unscrupulously manipulated.

Even though the Saudi site search finds no “Yemen,” the Saudi Embassy Public Affairs page of May 8 featured a Yemen story of May 6, accusing Yemenis of attacking Saudi civilians, under the headline: Four killed, eleven injured in shelling from Yemen

That story, in its entirety, reads: “A spokesman of the civil defense in Najran Province announced today that four people we killed and eleven injured as a result of shelling originating from Yemen. The spokesman said that shells have hit a civilian targets.”

The rest of the sanitized Saudi propaganda version of its illegal, aggressive war on Yemen is covered on another page for “Operation Decisive Storm” that begins with one Orwellian headline on March 25 –Saudi Arabia launches military operations in support of legitimate Yemeni government – and ends with another on May 4 – Saudi Arabia to establish unified coordination relief center for Yemen.

The so-called “relief center” doesn’t appear to be a “center” at all, but refers to promised Saudi efforts to consult with its co-aggressors and with donor nations to coordinate the delivery of international human relief aid already waiting to go to Yemen but delayed by the continuing Saudi bombing campaign. The Saudis already control the unchallenged air war that is devastating a defenseless Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Now, as they make it clear in their May 4 press release, the Saudis are determined to decide which Yemenis get fed and which starve:

Minister [of Foreign Affairs Adel bin Ahmed] Al-Jubeir said that Saudi Arabia is consulting with coalition members and all countries supporting the coalition’s efforts in Yemen in order to determine specific areas in Yemen where humanitarian aid to be delivered. The foreign minister added that all air operations would cease at specific times in these areas to allow the delivery of relief supplies….

Mr. Al-Jubeir warned that Houthi militias and forces loyal to former Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh will try to exploit the ceasefire and prevent the people of Yemen from receiving aid. He reiterated that Saudi Arabia will respond to any violations of this ceasefire by resuming air attacks targeted at Houthi militia groups.

Waging aggressive war with cluster bombs is a war crime within a crime against humanity, not that there is much international outrage at these US-supported atrocities. The Houthis in Yemen are a designated despised minority, like the Jews of Europe or the Armenians of Anatolia, and if the world ever cares, it will be a belated, contrived contrition too late to matter to the dying and dead now.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years of experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

May 9, 2015 is truly a historical day.  For the first time ever, the West has boycotted the Victory Day Parade in Moscow and, also for the first time ever, Chinese forces have marched on the Beautiful Square, (“Red” square is a mistranslation – the “Red Square” ought be called the “Beautiful Square”) with the Russians.  I believe that this is a profoundly symbolic shift and one which makes perfectly good sense.

The past

For one thing, Russia and China suffered more from WWII than any other country.  See for yourself:

Now take a look at the casualties suffered by the “boycotting countries” and everything becomes clear (the only exception to this rule is Poland, which lost a huge proportion of its population).  The fact is, that for all the Hollywood movies produced about WWII, the Anglo countries suffered very little, compared to the huge losses of Russia (25+ million) and China (15+ million).  For details, see here and here.  As for continental Europe, it’s resistance to the Nazis, while very real and heroic, was a feat of the few, not a true national resistance (like in the Soviet Union, Poland or Yugoslavia).  But there is much more to this than just numbers.

The real reason why the US/NATO/EU countries have boycotted the celebrations in Moscow is, of course, not their very modest contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, but their unconditional support for Nazi Ukraine: the “country” which considers Stepan Bandera a national hero, the OUN-UPA death squads as a “heroic liberation movement” and the liberation of the Ukraine as a “Soviet occupation”.  It is also a fact that the Anglos have always shared these feelings and that had developed several plans for total war against the USSR were considered right at the end of the war which  I have already mentioned them in the past:

Plan Totality (1945): earmarked 20 Soviet cities for obliteration in a first strike: Moscow, Gorki, Kuybyshev, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Saratov, Kazan, Leningrad, Baku, Tashkent, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Molotov, Tbilisi, Stalinsk, Grozny, Irkutsk, and Yaroslavl.

Operation Unthinkable (1945) assumed a surprise attack by up to 47 British and American divisions in the area of Dresden, in the middle of Soviet lines. This represented almost half of the roughly 100 divisions (ca. 2.5 million men) available to the British, American and Canadian headquarters at that time. (…) The majority of any offensive operation would have been undertaken by American and British forces, as well as Polish forces and up to 100,000 German Wehrmacht soldiers.

Operation Dropshot (1949): included mission profiles that would have used 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs on 200 targets in 100 cities and towns to wipe out 85% of the Soviet Union’s industrial potential at a single stroke. Between 75 and 100 of the 300 nuclear weapons, were targeted to destroy Soviet combat aircraft on the ground.

Ask yourself a simple question: why were these plans never actually implemented?  The answer is both simple and obvious: because the West feared the Red Army.  And since the West was terrified of the Red Army, what do you think the western guests felt each time they watched the Victory Day parade in Moscow?  Were they thinking about how the Soviet Army defeated the Nazis, or about how the Russian Army kept them in check?  Again, the answer is obvious.

The reality is that while western people very much belong on the Beautiful Square for the Victory Day parade, the western leaders do not: not only did the Anglos carefully nurture and promote Hitler, they always saw him as “their SOB” whom they hoped to unleash against the Soviet Union.  Their plan failed, of course, but that only increased their russophobia (“phobia” in the double sense of “fear” and “hate”).  To see the western leaders “missing” today is, therefore, a very good thing and I personally hope that they never get invited again (I know, they will, but I wish they weren’t).

The present

The Anglo-American Empire and Russia are at war.  Of course, the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides makes this a special kind of war.  It is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% military.  But it is a very real war nonetheless, if only because the outcome of this war will decide the future of the planet.  The Donbass or the Ukraine are, of course, of exactly zero interest to the West.  What is really at stake here is the survival of one of two different models:

–

Anglo-American Unipolar Imperial Model	Russian Multipolar Model
One world Hegemon	Collaborative development
Might makes right (national and international)	Rule of law (national and international)
Single societal model	Each country has its own societal model
Ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”	Respect for international law
Secularism and relativism	Central role for religions and traditions
Military violence as preferred solution	Military violence as option of last resort
Rule of the 1%	Rule of the 99%
Ideological monism	Ideological pluralism
White supremacism	Multi-culturalism

–

Both Russians and Americans are quite aware of what is at stake and neither side can back down.  On one hand, if the US/NATO/EU prevail, they will have succeeded in breaking the Russian “back” and Russia will rapidly be submitted.  Should that happen, all the BRICS countries will soon follow, including China.  On the other hand, if Russia prevails in the Ukraine, then the US grip on the EU will soon be weakened and, possibly, lost altogether and the entire world will see that the Empire is crumbling.  Should that happen, the entire international financial system will escape from the Anglo-American control and liquidate the petrodollar.  The consequences of such a collapse will be felt worldwide.

Xi , Putin and Nazarbaev together on Vday

The presence of Xi Jinpin next to Putin on this historic day, the participation of the Chinese military in the parade and the presence of PLA Navy ships alongside the Russian Black Sea Fleet, is a direct and powerful message to the world: in this titanic struggle, China is fully throwing her weight behind Russia.

[Sidebar: Notice on the photo of Xi and Putin that there is one more absolutely crucial figure sitting next to the war veteran: Nursultan Nazarbaev, the President of Kazakhstan.  The crucial role this man has played to shape today’s world has not been recognized, but with time I am sure it will.  Long before Putin, it was Nazarbaev who did everything in his power to prevent the breakup of the Soviet Union, the creation and strengthening of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union.  I would note that Putin has, on several occasions, expressed his deep admiration for, and gratitude to, Nazarbaev whom he has explicitly described as the “father” of the new Eurasian union.]

This is the “new Russia” – one literally flanked by her two allies, China and Kazakhstan.  It is hard to over-estimate the importance of this event: for the first time in 400 years Russia has finally fully turned her face to her natural ecosphere – the East.

Many languages and culture have an expression which basically says that you recognize your true friends in times of hardship.  I believe that this is true.  This is even truer in international politics.  And if you apply this criterion to the history of Russia, you come to a simple, but inevitable conclusion: the West has never been Russia’s friend (of course, I am talking about the ruling class, not the common people!).  By turning towards Asia, Russia is finally “coming home”.

Chinese units have never marched on the Beautiful Square before, and to see them there today also sends a clear message to the West: we are standing with Russia!

Chinese forces on the Beautiful Square

Chinese Navy in Novorossiik

The future

Today’s Victory Day parade in Moscow marks a turning point in Russian history: now, for the first time ever, there is a consensus in Russia that instead of looking West, Russia must look North (Siberia, the Arctic), East (Asia) and South (Latin America, Africa).  There will be no “big break” with the West, however, as Russia will continue to hope for the decolonization of Europe.  In part, this process has already begun in Greece and Hungary, and it is simmering in Serbia, France, Italy and even Germany. The potential for a European decolonization is definitely there and Russia should not, and will not, give up on Europe.

Another major priority of Russia will be to try to facilitate a rapprochement between the two other BRICS “heavyweights”: China and India.  Tensions between these two giants are an inherent risk for all the BRICS members and cannot be allowed to remain.

Russia will also try to strengthen her informal but still very real alliance with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.  These three are natural allies for Russia and while it is too early to include Iran or Syria in the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where Iran already has an observer status, eventually this should happen.  Iran could also become the first non-ex-Soviet country to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

Still, the single most important development in the future will be the deepening of the symbiotic relationship between China and Russia, the one I call the “China-Russia Strategic Alliance” which Larchmonter445 has so brilliantly analyzed in his “Vineyard of the Saker White Paper: the China-Russia Double Helix“: while remaining externally two separate countries, Russia and China will form a single economic, political and military entity, fully integrated and fully dependent on each other (Xi and Putin have again signed a list of mega-contracts between the two countries).

Unless of course, a full-scale war breaks out between the Empire and Russia.

I personally have no hope for a peaceful solution for the Ukrainian civil war.  There is nothing which could be meaningfully negotiated between Russia and the Nazi regime in Kiev.  Besides, all the indicators and warnings seem to agree on the fact that an Ukronazi attack on Novorussia is all but inevitable.  At that point, there are only two possible outcomes: either the Novorussians are defeated and Russia has to openly intervene, or the Ukronazis are defeated and the Novorussians go on the offensive and liberate most, or even all, of Novorussia and the Donetsk region.  I am cautiously optimistic and my sense is that the Urkonazis will be defeated for a third time.  When that happens, the regime in Kiev will most likely rapidly collapse.

Conclusion

I am under no illusion that the end of World War II brought happiness and freedom to all of mankind, even less so in Eastern Europe.  In reality, it brought an untold number of horrors and suffering to many nations, especially Germany.   I don’t see Victory Day as a celebration of Communism or of the Soviet regime, but as a victory over one of the most abhorrent regimes in history.  It was the victory of all the people who fought against the Nazis and not of one specific political ideology or order.  But, by the same token, I don’t think that it makes sense to deny that Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union played a key role in this victory.  The notion that the Russian people prevailed “in spite of Stalin” really makes no sense as he, and his commanders, played a key role in every single major battle of this war, just as Hitler and his commanders did on the other side.  As I said before, this victory belongs to all those who helped defeating the Nazis and that very much includes Stalin, his commanders and the CPSU.  Hence the Red banners do belong to this parade.

Finally, this day is also a day of celebration for all those who, today, are still resisting the true “heir” of the Nazi regime – the AngloZionist Empire, with its global hegemonic ambitions and never ending colonial wars.  Thus today is a day of celebration for all of us in the Saker community, our brothers (and sisters!) in arms and all our friends and allies in this global resistance to global Empire.

I congratulate you and wish you a joy-filled and peaceful Victory Day!

The Saker

PS: we all probably have our own favorite iconic photo for World War 2.  Mine is this one:

Sergei Makarovich Korolkov minutes before his execution by the Germans

It shows a Russian soldier, Sergei Makarovich Korolkov, who has just been captured by a German unit and is about to be executed.  I love his look of self-confident defiance, which, to me, symbolizes the real “ultimate weapon” of the Russian people: an unbreakable willpower, even in the face of defeat or death.

PPS: check out the excellent article “To be Russian” by Andre Vltchek.

Estará o chamado Islamic State in Iraque and Síria, ISIS [Estado Islâmico no Iraque e na Síria]/Islamic State in Iraque and the Levant, ISIL [Estado Islâmico no Iraque e no Levante]/Estado Islâmico (EI)/Al-Dawlah Al-Islamiyah fe Al-Iraque wa Al-Sham(DAISH/DAESH) ativo na Ucrânia pós-Maidan? Não há resposta exata, vale dizer: a resposta é “sim” e “não”.

Mais uma vez, o que é esse ISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH? É um bando não coeso nem homogêneo de várias milícias costuradas juntas, frouxamente, exatamente como a Al-Qaeda que o precedeu. Incluídos nessa rede há grupos do Cáucaso, que lutaram na Síria e no Iraque. Agora estão na Ucrânia, usando essa etapa como trampolim para a Europa.

Os Agentes do Caos e a Guerra pela Eurásia 

Os conflitos na Ucrânia, Síria, Iraque, Líbia e Iêmen são, todos, diferentes frentes numa só guerra multidimensional que os EUA e seus aliados fazem contra toda aquela parte do mundo. Essa guerra multidimensional visa a cercar a Eurásia. China, Irã e Rússia são os principais alvos diretos.

Os EUA também mantêm uma sequência de operações mediante as quais planeja tomar esses países. O Irã é o primeiro, depois a Rússia, com a China como última parte desse conjunto eurasiano compreendido nessa “Tripla Entente Eurasiana”. Não é coincidência que os conflitos na Ucrânia, Síria, Iraque, Líbia e Iêmen aconteçam bem próximos das fronteiras de Irã e Rússia, porque Teerã e Moscou são os alvos de curto prazo de Washington.

Nessa mesma linha da natureza interconectada dos conflitos em Ucrânia, Síria, Iraque, Líbia e Iêmen, há também uma conexão entre as forças violentas, racistas, xenofóbicas e sectárias que foram liberadas como “agentes do caos”. Não é coincidência que a revista Newsweek tenha publicado, dia 10/9/2014, a seguinte manchete: “Voluntários nacionalistas ucranianos cometem crimes de guerra de ‘estilo-ISIS'”. [1]

Saibam disso ou não, essas forças desviantes – sejam as ultranacionalistas milícias do Setor Direita na Ucrânia, ou os degoladores da Frente Al-Nusra e oISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH na Síria e no Iraque, todos servem ao mesmo patrão. Esses agentes do caos estão disparando diferentes ondas de caos para impedir a integração da Eurásia e o crescimento de uma nova ordem mundial livre da ditadura dos EUA.

Esse “caos ‘construtivo'” que está sendo disparado na Eurásia acabará por alcançar também a Índia. Se New Delhi pensa que será deixada em paz, está tolamente errada. Os mesmos agentes do caos lá chegarão, como praga. A índia também está na alça de mira dos EUA, como China, Irã e Rússia.

Estranhas alianças: o ISIL/DAESH e os ultranacionalistas na Ucrânia?

Não deve surpreender ninguém que os diferentes agentes do caos estejam alinhados. Servem ao mesmo patrão e têm os mesmos inimigos, um dos quais é a Federação Russa.

Nesse contexto é que Marcin Mamon escreveu sobre a conexãoISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH na Ucrânia.Em sua reportagem, explica até que alguns dos combatentes vindos do Cáucaso sentem que têm uma dívida com ucranianos da extrema direita como Oleksandr Muzychko. [2]

Mamon é cineasta documentarista polonês, que produziu vários documentários sobre a Chechênia, dentre eles The Smell of Paradise com Mariusz Pilis em 2005, para a BBC. É declaradamente simpático à causa dos chechenos separatistas contra a Rússia no Norte do Cáucaso.

As viagens de Mamon ao Afeganistão e sua interação com os combatentes chechenos resultaram em que o documentarista polonês também teve contatos com o ISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH dentro da Síria e da Turquia. E esses contatos, sem que o documentarista esperasse, acabaram por levá-lo por nova trilha, até a Ucrânia.

“Naquele momento, eu nem sabia com quem me encontraria. Só conhecia aquele Khalid, meu contato na Turquia com o Estado Islâmico [ISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH], que me dissera que seus ‘irmãos’ estavam na Ucrânia e que eu podia confiar neles” – Mamon escreve sobre seu encontro, numa “rua esburacada em Kiev, a leste do Rio Dnieper, numa área conhecida como Margem Esquerda”. [3] Num artigo anterior, Mamon explica que esses ditos “‘irmãos’ eram membros do ISIS e de outras organizações”, que “estão em todos os continentes, e em praticamente todos os países, e agora estão também na Ucrânia”. [4] Explica ainda que “”Khalid, que usa pseudônimo, lidera o braço clandestino do Estado Islâmico em Istanbul. Veio da Síria para ajudar a controlar o fluxo de voluntários que chegavam à Turquia, vindos de todo o mundo, querendo unir-se à jihad global. Naquele momento, ele queria pôr-me em contato com Ruslan, um ‘irmão’ que lutava com os muçulmanos na Ucrânia”. [5]

Ultranacionalistas ucranianos como Muzychko também logo viraram ‘irmãos’ e foram aceitos nessa rede. Mamon explica que os combatentes chechenos aceitaram Muzychko, “apesar de ele jamais se ter convertido ao Islã” e que “Muzychko, com outros voluntários ucranianos, uniu-se aos combatentes chechenos e lutou na primeira guerra chechena contra a Rússia”, na qual “comandaram um grupo de voluntários ucranianos chamado ‘Viking’, que combateu sob o comando do famoso líder militante checheno Shamil Basayev”. [6]

Por que o ISIL prepara batalhões privados na Ucrânia?

O que significa que separatistas chechenos e a rede transnacional dos chamados ‘irmãos’ ligados ao ISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH estejam sendo recrutados ou usados nas fileiras de milícias privadas que estão sendo usadas por oligarcas ucranianos? É pergunta muito importante. E é onde se pode ver claramente como todos esses elementos são agentes do caos.

Marcin Mamon viajou à Ucrânia para encontrar o combatente checheno Isa Munayev. O currículo de Munayev é apresentado como segue: “Mesmo antes de chegar à Ucrânia, Munayev já era bem conhecido. Combateu contra forças russas nas duas guerras chechenas; na segunda, comandou a guerra em Grozny. Depois que a capital chechena foi tomada por forças russas, entre 1999 e 2000, Munayev e seus homens refugiaram-se nas montanhas. Combateram ali até 2005, quando Munayev for gravemente ferido e viajou para a Europa para ser tratado. Munayev viveu na Dinamarca até 2014. Então irrompeu a guerra na Ucrânia, e ele decidiu que era hora de voltar a combater outra vez contra os russos”. [7]

A passagem acima é importante, porque ilustra o modo como EUA e União Europeia (UE) apoiaram militantes em luta contra a Rússia. Nos EUA e na UE, o refúgio que a Dinamarca deu a Isa Munayev nunca foi contestado; mas o apoio que supostamente Moscou estaria dando aos soldados da República Popular de Donetsk e da República Popular de Lugansk é tratado como se fosse crime. Por que as duas medidas? Por que EUA, UE e OTAN apoiam movimentos independentistas e milícias armadas em outras partes do mundo, mas reprovam e proíbem que outros países façam o mesmo?

“Um homem mais velho, numa jaqueta de couro, apresentou-me a Munayev. ‘Nosso bom irmão Khalid recomendou esse homem’, disse ele. (Khalid é hoje um dos líderes mais importantes do Estado Islâmico. Khalid e Munayev conheciam-se dos anos em que lutaram juntos na Chechênia” – explica Marcin Mamon sobre as conexões entre os separatistas chechenos e ISIS/ISIL/EI/DAISH/DAESH. [8]

Munayev viera para a Ucrânia para estabelecer “um dos que se desdobrariam em várias dúzias de batalhões privados que brotaram para lutar ao lado do governo ucraniano, operando separados dos militares”. [9] A milícia de Munayev recebeu o nome de Batalhão Dzhokhar Dudayev, em homenagem ao presidente checheno separatista.

NOTAS

1 Damien Sharkov, “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-Style’ War Crimes”, Newsweek, 10/9/2014.
2 Marcin Mamon, “In Midst of War, Uckraine Becomes Gateway for Jihad”, Intercept, 26/2/2015.
3 Marcin Mamon, “Isa Munayev’s War: The Final Days of a Chechen Commander Fighting in Uckraine”, Intercept, 27/2/2015.
4-6 Marcin Mamon, “In Midst of War”, op. cit.
7-9 Marcin Mamon, “Isa Munayev’s War”, op. cit.

3/5/2015, Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA, Strategic Culture Foundation
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/05/03/isil-in-ukraine-america-agents-chaos-unleashed-eurasia.html

Tradução: Vila Vudu, 4/5/2015.

Captured at 15 in Afghanistan and jailed by the U.S., Canadian Omar Khadr, now 28, has been released on bail after 13 years of detention. Khadr mostly spent those years in Guantanamo Bay, the illegal U.S. detention facilities which, according to Amnesty International, “have become emblematic of the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.S. Government in the name of fighting terrorism. At Guantanamo, the U.S. government sought to hold detainees in a place where neither U.S. nor international law applied.”

While he was detained,  the Canadian mainstream media reporting about Omar Khadr was inaccurate and filled with misinformation. It seems like this tendency is not going to end with Khadr’s release.

Although Canadian (English) mainstream media reports admit Khadr pleaded guilty for war crimes before a “widely discredited military commission”, most failed to recognize the fact that Khadr was a child soldier and was tortured while in detention in Bagram and Guantanamo. Yet, international law is unequivocal: if you are under 18 and used in an armed conflict, you are, by definition, a child soldier.

A lot of reporters and columnists say Khadr was “considered by his supporters to be a child soldier”. This is not, however, a matter of consideration, but a matter of fact: 15, in an armed conflict = child soldier. Why are reporters shying away from this particular fact?

In the following CBC news article, the term “child soldier” is not even mentioned once:

Earlier in the day, the 28-year-old convicted war criminal was granted bail in an Edmonton court while he appeals his convictions in the United States….

He was captured in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He was accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier.

In a plea deal that would include his repatriation to Canada, Khadr pleaded guilty on Oct. 25, 2010, to murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy, and two counts of providing material support for terrorism and spying…

Born in Toronto, Khadr was the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, and the last Western citizen to be held at the detention camp. (Omar Khadr, free on bail, vows to prove he is ‘a good person’, CBC.ca, May 7, 2015)

Khadr was merely “the youngest prisoner” at Gitmo. Not a child soldier. The same goes in this other report from the Toronto Star:

Khadr, now 28, pleaded guilty in October 2010 before a widely discredited military commission to five war crimes — including murder in the death of Speer, a U.S. special forces soldier…

Khadr spent almost 13 years behind bars, four of them as a convicted war criminal.

He was captured, badly wounded, by American forces in Afghanistan in July 2002, when he was 15 years old. At one time, he was the youngest prisoner at the American prison compound in Guantanamo Bay. (Mike Blanchfield, Peter MacKay praises Omar Khadr for renouncing violence, as Stephen Harper stays mum, The Canadian Press, May 8, 2015)

Both reports mention that Khadr was 15 when he was captured, but avoid describing him as child soldier. The Star, however, quotes Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski’s completely illogical comment on the “notion” of child soldiers:

“Words are just words,” said Saskatchewan Conservative Tom Lukiwski. “I reject the notion he was a child soldier. I think it was a very deliberate, premeditated act, and he should pay the price for that.” (Ibid.)

“Words are just words?” Well, not exactly Mr. Lukiwski. Legal standards and legal definitions are not “just words” and “child soldier” is one of these:

The internationally agreed definition for a child associated with an armed force or armed group (child soldier) is any person below 18 years of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities. (Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups, 2007.) (Child Soldiers International, Who Are Child Soldiers?)

Mr Lukiwski’s whole statement is absurd: he rejects the “notion” that Khadr was a child soldier and says that it was “ a very deliberate, premeditated act, and he should pay the price.” First Khadr being a child soldier is a FACT, not a “notion”. Nobody can refute the fact that a 15 year old boy in an armed conflict is a child soldier and being 15 is far from being “a very deliberate, premeditated act”. Of course, Lukiwski was referring to the killing (alleged) of an American solider, being a deliberate act, but that is totally irrelevant to the fact that Khadr was 15 years old and a child soldier. Whether he killed or not, whether it was deliberate or not does not change the fact that Khadr was 15, thus a child soldier.

The International Law is unequivocal and applies to Khadr’s case: the “recruitment or use in hostilities of under-18s by non-state armed groups” is prohibited.

Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict (OPAC): Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 May 2000, entered into force on 12 February 2002. OPAC sets 18 as the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities and for compulsory recruitment by state armed forces. States may accept volunteers from the age of 16 but must deposit a binding declaration at the time of ratification or accession, setting out their minimum voluntary recruitment age and outlining certain safeguards for such recruitment. OPAC also prohibits the recruitment or use in hostilities of under-18s by non-state armed groups. (Child Soldiers International, International Standards)

Surprisingly, the report closest to being accurate was in Canada’s conservative newspaper, The National Post:

Khadr, now 28, pleaded guilty in October 2010 before a widely discredited military commission to five war crimes — including murder in the death of Speer, a U.S. special forces soldier. He was 15 at the time of the incident, when he is said to have thrown a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan that killed Speer, and human rights groups have long considered him a child soldier whose treatment violated international law. (Harper not backing down on Omar Khadr: He ‘pled guilty to very grave crimes, including murder’, The Canadian Press, May 8, 2015)

Yet again, Khadr is only “considered by human rights groups” to have been a child soldier. Why so much disdain for legal standards? Were reporters told not to present Khadr as a child soldier?

Reporting on Khadr has never been fair and accurate. In January the support group Free Omar Khadr Now published a “Call for Fair Reporting on Omar Khadr”. We are reprinting it and again asking for fairness and accuracy. Even if now Omar Khadr is free at last, he still deserves justice:

One of the main goals of the Free Omar Khadr Now-campaign is to hold the media accountable for proper coverage of all aspects of Omar’s case. While there has been significant improvement in the way the mainstream media covers the story, misinformation, inaccuracies and lies continue to be printed!

Below the usual falsehoods that Canadian media imposes on us and our call for factual, fair reporting, voiced by Gail Davidson of Lawyers Rights Watch Canada:

(Call for Fair Reporting on Omar Khadr!, Free Omar Khadr Now, January 24, 2015)

 

There are times when the media run by the global elite lets the truth slip out at little. In March 2015 leading US business magazine Forbes revealed that Crimeans prefer to be part of Russia rather than rejoin Ukraine, as shown by repeated polls some of which were conducted by Western institutions. As expected, Forbes couched the information in a headline suggesting that there must have been some Russian aggression: “One year after Russia Annexed Crimea, locals prefer Moscow to Kiev”. To be fair, the article then opens with the words:

“The U.S and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are”.

But perhaps an alternate headline could read: “One year after a US sponsored coup in Ukraine, things are not going to plan”  Perhaps Putin’s ‘annexation’ of Crimea  helped the local population avoid the fate suffered by their fellow citizens in Donetsk and Lugansk who were repeatedly bombed and shelled following Porosheko’s order to unleash the Anti Terrorist Operation. Crimea remains unscathed.

Following the collapse of the USSR, Russia self esteem declined during the Yeltsin era. But now Russia is starting to again play an ever increasing role on the world stage. Russia’s mere existence poses a threat to US hegemony by way of its reluctant to acquiesce to the whims of the self-anointed world policeman. Also, the vast natural resource reserves that Russia possesses are needed to throw global capitalism a lifeline as it faces terminal decline. Hence, the need to surround Russia with NATO bases and attempt to, by all means possible, overthrow Putin and replace him with another Yeltsin.

One can also understand Russia’s paranoia. Russia was attacked twice by Germany within 27 years, on the latter occasion the invading forces were assisted by Ukrainian Banderists. Consider too the aggression from Japan in WW2 as well the invasion by multiple nations following the 1917 Russian revolution who sought to strangle the revolutionary ideas represented by fledgling socialist state. During the cold war, the US was arguably responsible for the lion’s share of aggression or ‘brinkmanship’. Yet, in the eyes of the West, Russian remains the villain.

In December 1991, the people of Ukraine voted to become independent of the USSR. Polarising inequalities, corruption and a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism (at least in certain parts of the country) followed. The Ukraine of 1991 no longer exists, having been riven apart by civil war, economic collapse and a loss of democracy.

Crimea voted to join Russia after the US orchestrated coup in February 2014. The eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk followed suit but paid a heavy price in blood. Talk of secession has since appeared in the regions of Kharkov and Odessa, despite the presence of the increasingly repressive Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and allied paramilitaries.

Recently Standard and Poors downgraded Ukraine’s credit rating for the fifth time since 2013. An article published on a Ukrainian news website in February was titled: “Some experts say: If you can, you must leave [the country]”.

That article later discusses the effects of the high inflation and currency depreciation, describing how in Western Ukraine pensions and the minimum wage have sunk to the equivalent of $36.5 and $47 a month respectively. The article points out that the World Bank sets the absolute poverty threshold level at less than $1.25 a day. Economist Aleksandr Okhrimenko later states that with an average monthly salary of around $150 (130 Euros), Ukraine’s standard of living ranks below that of Tajikistan, Kyrgystan and well below Bulgaria (the EU’s poorest member). Thus Ukraine’s standard of living is now on a similar level to that of Senegal or Nepal. All the while, the Ukrainian currency, the Hryvnia, continues to decline. If Ukraine’s chances of joining the EU were slim in 2013, they are now vanishingly small. Another article states that the average retirement pension in Ukraine now amounts to 1600 Hryvnya (about 65 Euro) per month.”

After being pushed into civil war by the US and supported, mostly, with words only, the pawns leading the coup in February 2014 can survive only through an IMF lifeline. Additionally, Ukraine reportedly owes the ‘aggressor’ Russia $2.5 billion for gas that it has continued to deliver throughout the course of the ‘invasion’ (but for how much longer).

With the cream of the heavy industries in the Donbass lost through secession or destroyed by its own artillery shells it looks increasingly unlikely that the wheels which came off Western Ukraine’s economy will be reattached in the foreseeable future, let alone set in motion to create sufficient wealth to pay off the IMF debt. The IMF will, for a time, continue demanding massive restructuring such as widespread privatisation and massive increases in utility bills. When the people of Ukraine have nothing else left to give, the IMF will become reluctant to throw good money after bad knowing there will be no return on their investment. Russia too will not continue supplying gas for free. When Western money and Eastern gas cease to flow, which of Kiev’s nationalists and Western lovers will then pick up the tab?

If a prize existed to recognise the gratuitous destruction caused to one’s nation in the shortest space of time, surely Poroshenko, Yatsenkuk, Timochenko and their cliques could be in the running. They have succeeded in creating a record downturn in Ukraine’s fortunes. In just a single year, they have managed to turn a country with a shaky economy struggling to keep out of recession, though nevertheless a functioning one with a bourgeoise democratic system, into a dysfunctional state with a third world economy: an unenviable disaster zone plagued by civil war, fascism, and poverty. Whilst Putin is to blame for all this, or at least that is what we are repeatedly told, those who clamour loudest about patriotism and nationalism in Kiev have done the most damage to their nation.

However, the leaders could not have done it alone. The cosmopolitan urban dwellers and the wealthier and more ambitious sections of Ukrainian society sold their souls to find the pot of gold at the end of the EU rainbow. Now they face tears and disappointment. Those students and petty bourgeoisie of the Euromaidan movement who took to Maidan nezalezhnosti in November 2013, helped sell and dismember their nation through their naivety and greed. Instead of the democracy for which they sold their souls, they have found disappointment and destitution. In seeking economic freedom, they helped awaken the nationalist beast. Their dogmatic perseverance led to hundreds if not thousands of young Ukrainian men killing thousands of their former countrymen and women in the east of the country. Due to the stiff resistance of the self-defence forces in Donetsk and Lugansk, Poroshenko and his allies were increasingly forced to rely on gangs of paramilitary forces that include unashamed neo-nazi elements to implement their own version of the Shock and Awe. The mood of the population can be judged by the lack of willing young men heeding the draft call. Reportedly, the 4th wave of military mobilisation to have occurred in a year was a massive failure as many young men refused to report for military service. Many Ukrainians have fled abroad to avoid fighting for the Kiev cabal, a large number of these escaped to Russia, the aggressor.Indeed this must be the only time in recent history that a large number of military aged males flee to the ‘aggressor’ state for safety from their own government.

Due to the political passivity of the Communist Party of Ukraine and without a solid political party or movement offering a socialist alternative, in February 2014 the Euromaidan liberals were quickly swept aside by armed far right organisations. The working class of Ukraine, the unemployed, the retired, those who fought fascism in the 1940s, have been betrayed.

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SALVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

RIP Ukraine 1991-2014

Dr Tomasz Pierscionek is editor of the London Progressive Journal

On May 7,  John Kerry met with Saudi officials in Riyadh. 

A so-called proposed 5-day humanitarian ceasefire is phony. Terror-bombing continues. US/Saudi enforced blockade prevents enough essentials to life from entering Yemen.

Suggesting a limited pause in fighting is willful deception. Washington wants all-out terror war against 25 million Yemenis.

Is large-scale invasion planned? Yemeni UN envoy Khaled Alyemany representing the illegitimate (US-installed) ousted government has called for intervention by foreign ground forces.

Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin called invading Yemen “reckless – an escalation of the situation.”

“What we need is a speedy resumption of negotiations under the mediation of the United Nations,” he stressed.

On May 7, UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Johannes van der Klaauw called for an immediate halt to fighting, saying:

“Civilians were reportedly targeted while they were trying to flee to safer areas, having been trapped in Aden with limited or no access to water, food and health care for weeks.”

“People in Aden have endured extreme hardship as a result of conflict over the last six weeks and must be able to move to safer areas to seek medical and other assistance.”

“Violence towards civilians and aid workers, and attacks on hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, must stop immediately.”

Yemeni doctors and other medical workers demonstrated in front of Sanaa’s UN office. A doctor attending the rally said:

“We have come here…to call for the UN Secretary-General to put an end to this genocide war against the Yemenis. Many patients die at the hospitals because of” no fuel or medical supplies.

Thousands have died, mostly noncombatant civilians either in harm’s way or deliberately targeted.

Thousands more were injured, many maimed for life. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced.

Riyadh’s military spokesman Brig. General Ahmed al-Assiri responded to Houthi and tribal fighters’ cross-border attacks in retaliation against Saudi terror-bombing, ludicrously saying:

“The Houthi militias have crossed red lines and they will be dealt with differently now. (They’ll) pay a harsh and expensive price.”

“The formula has changed after Saudi towns and civilians” were shelled.

AP said Houthis and allied forces consolidated control over most of Aden while Kerry was in Riyadh. The previous day they “overwhelmed” Tawahi’s downtown district and an area presidential palace.

Reuters reported Riyadh’s vow to hit Houthis hard despite a 5-day ceasefire offer. Asseri declined to say if ground invasion is coming. All options are open, he stressed.

In a letter to UN officials, Houthis called for international action against Saudi-led aggression.

Senior Houthi official Tawfiq al-Himyary denounced Riyadh’s phony ceasefire offer – calling it “cover” for its failures.

“Saudi Arabia feels it is in trouble after more than 40 days of aggression,” Himyary said. “It did not reach its stated goals, but killed and displaced thousands of civilians.”

“Saudi Arabia has no right to attack the Yemenis or even to give them any kind of truce. There is no trust in this regime at all.”

 

Three militiamen have been injured over the past 24 hours in shelling of Donetsk People’s Republic.

Ukrainian military action has violated ceasefire arrangements in the war-torn region some 46 times in 24 hours, spokesman Eduard Basurinclaimed.Shelling has been recorded near the settlements of Gorlovka, Shirokino, Spartak, Zhabichevo, Sakhanka, Lozovoye, Novaya Maryevka, Altnoye, Oktyabr, Donetsk airport and Volvo-Centre district.

–

.

A decision has been made in principle to demilitarize the village of Shirokino and to pull back medium weapons having calibresunder 100 mm has been agreed at the Contract Group level, Russia’s OSCE envoy Andrey Kelin told the media on Thursday.”The fundamental agreement does exist. Now the details are to be looked into,” Kelin said.The military sub-group hopes Kiev’s paramilitary entities of Nazis such as Azov, Donbass battalionswill follow accepted decisions. We aren’t so sure.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian media reported that big bad DPR militia shelled peaceful fortification facilities of Kiev’s army around town Gorlovka with MLRS Grad. Following UNIAN report 2 Porosheko’s super soldiers are dead, 9 are injured. However, honest Ukrainian journalists have forgotten to explain why pro-Kiev military have built fortifications around DPR’s town. The only released proof of MLRS shelling by DPR militia is this photo, therefore the most probable case is that it was Kiev’s attempt to attack in Gorlovka sector of frontline.

Two Chinese missile frigates will enter the Russian Black Sea naval base of Novorossiysk for the first time in history. They will then conduct joint exercises with Russia in the Mediterranean.The Linyi and the Weifang will enter the port on May 8 to take part in Victory Day celebrations, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Each is a 4,000-ton vessel of the relatively new Type 054A, which first entered service in 2007. They are accompanied by a support ship. The ships will then head to the Mediterranean for joint drills Russian-Chinese exercise Sea Cooperation-2015.The exercise will take place from May 11 to May 21.

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Over the course of Greece’s painful and protracted negotiations with European creditors, Athens has sought, at various times when a deal seems to be slipping away, to play the Russian pivot card. What began as a series of diplomatic overtures between the Tsipras government and Moscow quickly turned more serious once rumors began to swirl around Greece’s potential participation in Russia’s Turkish Stream pipeline which, as a reminder, will allow Russia to bypass Bulgaria by piping gas through Turkey, then through Greece, Serbia, and Hungary straight to the Austrian central hub.

In short order, it leaked that Moscow was set to advance Greece $5 billion against the future potential profits from the pipeline, a payment which we characterized as a get-out-of-Troika-jail free card and although conflicting reports emerged thereafter regarding just how soon money would actually be flowing from Moscow to Athens, discussions around the pipeline continued to move forward when Gazprom chief  Alexei Millervisited Greece late last month to discuss “current energy issues of interest.”

That visit proved more than Europe could bear, and so the European Commission promptly filed antitrust charges against the Russian gas giant in an absurdly transparent attempt to punish the Kremlin for interfering in negotiations between the EU and its Aegean debt serf.

Now with negotiations between Athens and creditors still fraught with uncertainty, and with the IMF now reportedly at odds with the rest of the Troika over appropriate bailout terms, another interested party is stepping into the melee because, as NY Times reports, fresh off a humiliating political defeat at the hands of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Washington is in no mood to see the birthplace of Western civilization co-opted by a Russian natural gas firm. Here’s more:

The United States, wading into the international efforts to shape Greece’s economic and geopolitical orientation, is pushing the leftist government in Athens to resist Russia’s energy overtures.

A State Department envoy in Athens urged Greece on Friday to embrace a Western-backed project that would link Europe to natural gas supplies in Azerbaijan, rather than agree to a gas pipeline project pushed by Moscow.

The dueling sales pitches, reminiscent of a Cold War struggle, come as debt-burdened Greece is desperate for new sources of revenue of the sort that a gas pipeline could bring.

In an interview in Athens on Friday, before meeting with Greek officials, the State Department envoy, Amos J. Hochstein, said Greece would increase its appeal to Western investors — and would help reduce the European Union’s dependence on Russian gas supplies — if it declined to play host to a pipeline proposed by the Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom.

That pipeline would carry Russian gas to Europe through Turkey and Greece, bypassing pipelines that run through Ukraine…

The geopolitical tug of war over Europe’s energy supply is growing increasingly intense.

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece about the Gazprom pipeline project on Thursday. And Mr. Tsipras’s office has confirmed his country’s readiness to take part in the construction of a Greek pipeline to transfer Russian natural gas from the Greek-Turkish border to Europe.

The Greek foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, has said that the Greek portion of the Russian-backed project could be worth billions of dollars to his country…

While revenue from a new gas pipeline could be years away, such a project — whether with Russian or Western backing — would have obvious allure for Greece.

The Russian proposal is for a pipeline called Turkish Stream. It is intended to replace an earlier Russian initiative for a pipeline to Europe called South Stream, which Mr. Putin was forced to abandon late last year because of European Union rules that would have made the project unpalatable to Moscow by requiring Gazprom to share the pipeline with other suppliers. The South Stream pipeline, running under the Black Sea, would have brought gas into the European Union through Bulgaria.

Mr. Hochstein, the American official, said on Friday that the pipeline he was promoting — called the Southern Gas Corridor project — was farther along in construction. It would involve multiple companies, including the British energy giant BP, and countries including Georgia and Turkey, and it would bring together a series of pipeline projects stretching from Azerbaijan to Italy, through Greece.

The Southern Gas Corridor is a project aimed at “improving the diversity of the EU’s energy supply” — in other words, it’s an attempt to help break Gazprom’s stranglehold and this is of course why Washington is giving Greece the hard sell.

Essentially, the corridor will allow the EU to tap into Caspian gas via a series of connecting pipelines running from Azerbaijan to Italy.

Here is what the European Council On Foreign Relations has to say about the prospects for working closely with Azerbaijan:

Azerbaijan is the supplier best placed to respond to the EU’s strategy of diversifying gas supply away from Russia. Azerbaijan has long been cooperating with Western energy companies on projects such as the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Guneshli oil project and the Shah Deniz gas condensate project (both led by BP), as well as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) pipelines. Thus, the scope for increasing gas supply from Azerbaijan seems to be simply a matter of the economics of the potential supply projects.

The supply is expected to come from the second phase of the Shah Deniz project, with an estimated cost of over $45 billion, or $380-430/billion cubic metres at the Turkey-Greece border, and from the Umid gas field (SOCAR and Nobel Oil). The two projects could potentially supply up to 18-19 bcm per year of gas by 2020, with at least 6 bcm committed to the Turkish market and 10 bcm to Greece, Albania, and Italy. In 2014, the Shah Deniz consortium finally agreed to commit gas resources to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which will bring Azeri gas to Europe through Turkey; although it has a small transport capacity, this project will certainly contribute to the EU’s diversification efforts.

And here is an amusing graphic which outlines the pros and ‘cons’ of various alternatives to Russian energy:

As the Times suggests, this is further evidence that Washington is becoming increasingly concerned that the world is rapidly shifting away from the US-dominated, unipolar model that has existed, in one form or another, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This consternation is beginning to manifest itself in the revitalization of Cold War politics.

Of course the official line is that the US is simply concerned about Greece’s economic future and thereby feels it necessary to adopt a bit of well-meaning paternalism to assist the country — which clearly cannot make decisions for itself — in determining what is in its own best interests. Indeed, Washington is even brazen enough to assume that no one will see the hilarious irony in this assessment of Russia’s Turkish Stream Pipeline: “It’s not an economic project… it’s only about politics.”

We wonder how long it will be before Washinton “urges” Pakistan to tread carefully when cooperating with China on infrastructure development.

We’ll leave you with Vladimir Putin’s take on the issue:

“Just because Greece is debt-ridden, this does not mean it is bound hand and foot, and has no independent foreign policy.”

*  *  *

Here’s the official statement from the US Embassy in Athens:

Mr. Amos Hochstein, Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, visited Athens May 7-8 for discussions with Minister of State Nikos Pappas, Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikos Kotzias, Minister of Productive Reconstruction, Environment and Energy Panagiotis Lafazanis, and energy company officials.

Special Envoy Hochstein came to Athens to reaffirm Secretary of State Kerry’s and the U.S government’s support for Greek energy diversification, including support for key natural gas infrastructure projects such as the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, Greece-Bulgaria Interconnector (IGB), and expanded use of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

These projects will increase Greek and European Union energy security, reduce Greece’s dependence on a single supplier of gas, increase competition, and reduce prices for consumers.  TAP will result in 1.5 billion euros in foreign investment in Greece, generate 10,000 jobs during construction, and provide many millions of euros in revenue annually over 25 years.

The United States is concerned that Greek consideration of an extension of a “Turkstream” pipeline across Greece will not increase energy diversification, may be of concern to EU competition authorities, and is not a long-term solution to Greece’s energy needs.

Mr. Hochstein discussed with Greek leaders Greece’s great potential to play a leadership role in being part of the solution to Europe’s energy security concerns. (emphasis added)

Dear veterans,

Distinguished guests,

Comrade soldiers and seamen, sergeants and sergeant majors, midshipmen and warrant officers,

Comrade officers, generals and admirals,

I congratulate you all on the 70^th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War!

Today, when we mark this sacred anniversary, we once again appreciate the enormous scale of Victory over Nazism. We are proud that it was our fathers and grandfathers who succeeded in prevailing over, smashing and destroying that dark force.

Hitler’s reckless adventure became a tough lesson for the entire world community. At that time, in the 1930s, the enlightened Europe failed to see the deadly threat in the Nazi ideology.

Today, seventy years later, the history calls again to our wisdom and vigilance. We must not forget that the ideas of racial supremacy and exclusiveness had provoked the bloodiest war ever. The war affected almost 80 percent of the world population. Many European nations were enslaved and occupied.

The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the enemy’s attacks. The elite Nazi forces were brought to bear on it. All their military power was concentrated against it. And all major decisive battles of World War II, in terms of military power and equipment involved, had been waged there.

And it is no surprise that it was the Red Army that, by taking Berlin in a crushing attack, hit the final blow to Hitler’s Germany finishing the war.

Our entire multi-ethnic nation rose to fight for our Motherland’s freedom. Everyone bore the severe burden of the war. Together, our people made an immortal exploit to save the country. They predetermined the outcome of World War II. They liberated European nations from the Nazis.

Veterans of the Great Patriotic War, wherever they live today, should know that here, in Russia, we highly value their fortitude, courage and dedication to frontline brotherhood.

Dear friends,

The Great Victory will always remain a heroic pinnacle in the history of our country. But we also pay tribute to our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition.

We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the Victory. We are thankful to the anti-fascists of various countries who selflessly fought the enemy as guerrillas and members of the underground resistance, including in Germany itself.

We remember the historical meeting on the Elbe, and the trust and unity that became our common legacy and an example of unification of peoples – for the sake of peace and stability.

It is precisely these values that became the foundation of the post-war world order. The United Nations came into existence. And the system of the modern international law has emerged.

These institutions have proved in practice their effectiveness in resolving disputes and conflicts.

However, in the last decades, the basic principles of international cooperation have come to be increasingly ignored. These are the principles that have been hard won by mankind as a result of the ordeal of the war.

We saw attempts to establish a unipolar world. We see the strong-arm block thinking gaining momentum. All that undermines sustainable global development.

The creation of a system of equal security for all states should become our common task. Such system should be an adequate match to modern threats, and it should rest on a regional and global non-block basis. Only then will we be able to ensure peace and tranquillity on the planet.

Dear friends,

We welcome today all our foreign guests while expressing a particular gratitude to the representatives of the countries that fought against Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Besides the Russian servicemen, parade units of ten other states will march through the Red Square as well. These include soldiers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Their forefathers fought shoulder to shoulder both at the front and in the rear.

These also include servicemen from China, which, just like the Soviet Union, lost many millions of people in this war. China was also the main front in the fight against militarism in Asia.

Indian soldiers fought courageously against the Nazis as well.

Serbian troops also offered strong and relentless resistance to the fascists.

Throughout the war our country received strong support from Mongolia.

These parade ranks include grandsons and great-grandsons of the war generation. The Victory Day is our common holiday. The Great Patriotic War was in fact the battle for the future of the entire humanity.

Our fathers and grandfathers lived through unbearable sufferings, hardships and losses. They worked till exhaustion, at the limit of human capacity. They fought even unto death. They proved the example of honour and true patriotism.

We pay tribute to all those who fought to the bitter for every street, every house and every frontier of our Motherland. We bow to those who perished in severe battles near Moscow and Stalingrad, at the Kursk Bulge and on the Dnieper.

We bow to those who died from famine and cold in the unconquered Leningrad, to those who were tortured to death in concentration camps, in captivity and under occupation.

We bow in loving memory of sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, comrades-in-arms, relatives and friends – all those who never came back from war, all those who are no longer with us.

A minute of silence is announced.

Minute of silence.

Dear veterans,

You are the main heroes of the Great Victory Day. Your feat predestined peace and decent life for many generations. It made it possible for them to create and move forward fearlessly.

And today your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren live up to the highest standards that you set. They work for the sake of their country’s present and future. They serve their Fatherland with devotion. They respond to complex challenges of the time with honour. They guarantee the successful development, might and prosperity of our Motherland, our Russia!

Long live the victorious people!

Happy holiday!

Congratulations on the Victory Day!

Hooray!

Ho Chi Minh City.