Global Research

Sniper Attacks As False Flag Terror

Random shootings are a type of false flag terror …

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, speaking Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an ultra-right political conference held in suburban Washington DC, compared the working class and student protesters who thronged the streets of Madison in 2011 to ISIS terrorists. “If I could take on 100,000 protestors, I could do the same across the world,” he said, boasting that his defeat of the unions in Wisconsin qualified him to wage war in the Middle East.

Following his remarks, Walker was criticized by at least one other potential candidate, former Texas governor Rick Perry, who said on MSNBC, “You are talking about, in the case of ISIS, people who are beheading individuals and committing heinous crimes, who are the face of evil. To try to make the relationship between them and the unions is inappropriate.”

In a brief interchange with reporters, Walker backtracked, saying, “There’s no comparison between the two, let me be perfectly clear. I’m just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling a difficult situation was the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with.”

He continued, attacking the media questioners, saying, “You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit. That’s the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.” Walker’s campaign later issued a statement declaring, “He was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS.”

No one at CPAC was fooled by the subsequent disclaimers. On the contrary, Walker’s remarks, including his comparison of protesters to ISIS, were greeted with noisy cheering, and his speech was the most well-attended of the day’s events. Walker is a top-tier candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, leading in party polls in Iowa, the first state primary contest, and well financed by billionaire supporters like the Koch brothers.

The clear favorite among the half dozen potential presidential candidates who addressed CPAC, Walker repeatedly cited his success in pushing through a battery of anti-worker laws in Wisconsin as his political calling card.

When a heckler shouted something about his attacks on workers, Walker received a standing ovation from the crowd as he claimed to represent “the hard-working taxpayers of this country.” He provoked another ovation by announcing he would sign a right-to-work law next week, making Wisconsin the 25th state to outlaw the union shop.

Walker’s “gaffe,” if it was one, was the blurting out of a usually unspoken truth: in the eyes of the American ruling elite, the working class at home is an enemy just as dangerous—and in reality, far more dangerous—than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

The Wisconsin governor is not the first prominent figure in the US ruling elite to make such a comparison. Only a month ago, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton—appointed by liberal Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio—announced plans for a Special Response Unit of 350 highly trained paramilitary police.

This new unit was “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” Bratton said, equating peaceful marches against the official whitewash of police murders in New York City to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine that killed 10 people and the massacre of nearly 200 people in Mumbai. (See: New police unit in New York: The ruling elite prepares for class struggle).

Like Walker, Bratton sought to defuse outrage, saying he had misspoken and that there would be two separate elite police units, one to kill terrorists, the other to beat and arrest demonstrators.

In making an amalgam of peaceful protest and terrorism, to justify murderous mass repression, American politicians are following in the footsteps of military juntas and right-wing dictators around the world.

Only two days before Walker’s speech, the Egyptian military dictator, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi issued a decree that broadens the official definition of terrorism to include any group that uses “any means” to disturb public order, endanger state interests, or “disrupt the constitution or law, or harm national unity.”

Japan Times, Feb 25, 2015 (emphasis added): Radioactive isotopes [have] been draining into the Pacific… from the roof of the No. 2 reactor building, which is highly contaminated…. Meanwhile on Sunday, Tepco reported water contaminated with high levels of radiation was flowing into the ocean at the plant’s port.

Kyodo News, Feb 25, 2015: Highly toxic water leaks into ocean from Fukushima plant —Highly radioactive rainwater [is] accumulating on the rooftop of the No. 2 reactor building… In a separate incident… highly contaminated water leaked into the nearby bay through a different gutter… The cause and the amount of water leakage remain unknown.

Reuters, Feb 25, 2015: [TEPCO believes] a pool of highly contaminated water on the roof [is coming from] gravel and blocks laid on the roof of the building… it plans to remove them by the end of March.

Fairewinds Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen on WDEV, Feb 24, 2015 (at 30:15 in): “The pressures got so high in the containment, it blew the top off the containment.”

IANS, Feb 25, 2015: [Tepco] announced having detected deposits of highly radioactive water on the roof of the plant’s reactor number 2. The liquid contained 29,400 becquerel per litre of radioactive caesium and 52,000 of strontium and other beta-ray emitting substances… [Tepco] decided against making the findings public until now as it did not have results of the analysis on the accumulated liquid’s radioactivity levels.

Newsweek, Feb 25, 2015: The fallout from the Fukushima disaster is far from over… Local commercial fishermen are reportedly outraged… “I don’t understand why [Tepco] kept silent… Fishery operators are absolutely shocked,” [said] Masakazu Yabuki, chief of the Iwaki fisheries cooperative… [The] plant has been plagued by a staggering number of accidents.

Xinhua, Feb 25, 2015: TEPCO blasted for concealing latest radioactive leak for nearly a year — [Fishermen blamed TEPCO] for knowingly allowing radioactive substances… to flow freely into the sea since April last year… this year [Prime Minister] Abe’s government announced that TEPCO would be the Main Sponsor for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics… local, national andinternational fury once again rises at [TEPCO]… [It’s] the latest indication that the crisisat the plant is far from under control… Japan’s top government spokesperson reiterated the government’s long-standing mantra… “The situation is completely under control… Any negative impact of radioactive water on the environment is completely blocked.”

NHK, Feb. 24, 2015: [TEPCO] did not take any measures to prevent radioactive water…flowing into the Pacific… TEPCO was aware… April last year [yet] has not installed floodgates [and] does not plan to install any devices in the channel.

NHK, Feb. 25, 2015: [R]adioactive substances spilled into the Pacific beyond the plant’s port… TEPCO knew last April [and] did nothing to prevent contaminated water fromleaking directly out to sea, nor did it make the finding public.

NHK, Feb. 25, 2015: Fishermen accuse TEPCO of betrayal… A TEPCO official… apologized.

Watch NHK’s broadcast here | Full Gundersen interview here

Human Rights Watch has been part of a sectarian, anti-Syrian propaganda campaign. It is hyping the “barrel bombs”, allegedly used by the Syrian government, as inhumane weapons. I have yet to see Human Rights Watch equally damning the indiscriminate use against civilians of improvised rockets by the Jihadist “moderate rebels.”

Yesterday Human Rights Watch send out this tweet:

bigger

According to HRW the picture of the destroyed town is somehow related to Syrian “barrel bombs.” That is not the case.

The picture was published in the New York Times on February 13, 2015.¸

Caption states: “The predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani is devastated after months under siege by Islamist forces and airstrikes by a United States-led coalition” | Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images (Click to enlarge)

The New York Times caption says:

The predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani is devastated after months under siege by Islamist forces and airstrikes by a United States-led coalition

The picture’s credentials are “Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images.”

Massive U.S. bomb attacks obviously destroyed the city of Kobane. The U.S. no longer uses improvised “barrel bombs” dropped from planes and helicopters. It did use “barrel bombs” extensively in Vietnam.

Syrian “barrel bombs” did not destroy the city of Kobane. It was destroyed by regular U.S. air force bombs. Damage by “barrel bombs” could hardly be worse. Indeed “barrel bombs” thrown out of hovering helicopters are likely much better targeted and more precise than unguided bombs dropped from fast moving jets.

The Human Rights Watch tweet includes another deception. It links to a February 24 piece by the New York Times as if that piece would somehow confirm HRW`s claim. But that New York Times piece is not a neutral report. The piece, headlined “Syria Dropped ‘Barrel Bombs’ Despite Ban, Report Says”, is solely about a HRW report about “barrel bombs” in Syria. The HRW tweet is in effect linking to its own claims disguised as a link to a reputable source.

It is interesting, and noncredible, that Human Rights Watch feels the need to use a picture of “good” U.S. created destruction to demonstrate destruction created by the “bad” Syrian army in its fight against U.S. supported Jihadis. The picture is obviously not the only thing HRW gets wrong.

Update:

This is not the first time HRW is using pictures of the “wrong” side. In October 2014 it used a picture of a woman crying over Ukrainian federalist, who were burned to death by Nazi-hordes in Odessa. to call for a “stand against Putin’s repressive policies”.

 Chicago, IL — Four more victims of incarceration at Chicago’s Guantanamo Bay style secret detention/torture center, known as Homan Square, have come out and spoken to The Guardian about their experience being essentially treated like cattle. They are four black males, Brock Terry, Kory Wright, Deandre Hutcherson and David Smith.

Three of them were held in 2006, and one in 2011.

They were kicked in the genitals while helpless and bound, put in ‘kennels for humans’, and they heard the bloodcurdling screams of other helpless victims while they thought they would never see the light of day again.

One man named Brock Terry was caught with five pounds of cannabis, and ended up being shackled to the “little circular thing behind the bench”, arms spread open, being fed only twice in 3 days. The Chicago police are known for turning up the temperature in the facility to extremely high temperatures, and then depriving victims of water while they are tied up, arms extended.

“I sat in that place for three days, man – with no talking, no calls to nobody,” Terry said. “They call police stations, I’m not there, I’m not there.”

“I was kept there. I didn’t speak to a lawyer or anything,” he continued. “I didn’t interact with nobody for three days. And then when I do see the light of day, I go straight to another police station, go straight there to county and be processed.”

He also said he didn’t see any other victims there, but he heard cries from people being seemingly tortured, and they screamed “no, no, no” and “stop”.

Another black man named Deandre Hutcherson was shackled in the same vulnerable position, and he said he was punched in the face, and stomped in the genitals “like he [the cop] was putting a cigarette out”

“They got kennels – like, for people,” Terry also told the Guardian. “I didn’t really want to believe that, but it is the truth.”

“I never saw anyone, but I know something else is going on. You don’t want to be in that kind of situation, so you gotta be quiet about it, so you don’t go down that route.” Terry continued.

More details will be released as the situation unfolds.

There is a movement to #Shut Down Homan Square tomorrow, and a Twitter storm today.

Please share this with beyond as many people as possible. This is a step too far, and we simply can’t stand for it.

In a last minute strategic move by counsel, Dr. Wouter Basson’s sentencing by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has again been delayed.

Basson, who was found guilty by the HPCSA in 2013 of acting unprofessionally as the director of the apartheid government’s biological and chemical warfare unit, Project Coast, may have had one of the longest running trials in history. The initial complaints against him were filed with the medical board in 2000, only to be delayed until the conclusion of his criminal trial in Pretoria High Court.

As director of Project Coast in the eighties and early nineties, Basson allegedly provided assassination chemicals to members of the South African Defence Force, and, according to testimony heard in the criminal case, was involved in 229 murders. In addition, he was charged with embezzlement, drug trafficking and possession of illegal drugs. When he was arrested in 1997, he had more than 1000 Ecstasy tablets in his possession.

The judge in the criminal matter, Willie Hartzenberg, acquitted Basson of all charges against him in 2002. There were over 150 witnesses who testified against Dr. Basson. Basson was the sole witness in his defense.

Basson was known to be working on developing a blacks-only bioweapon, work which may have come to fruition. Much of his activities with Project Coast remain secret and undisclosed. He had also developed high ranking contacts with British and American intelligence and their governments’ biological and chemical weapons programs.

Basson is currently a successful cardiologist in Capetown.

In 2007, the HPCSA began its inquiry into Basson’s activities under the apartheid regime.

In 2013, the HPCSA determined that he had acted unethically as a medical doctor in the following charges:

1. Dr Basson coordinated the production of large quantities of illegal psychoactive substances;
2. Dr Basson was involved in equipping mortars with teargas for use against Angolan government soldiers;
3. Dr Basson provided SADF operatives with disorienting substances to facilitate illegal kidnapping;
4. Dr Basson made available cyanide capsules to SADF soldiers so that they could decide to commit suicide to avoid revealing information under torture.

His sentencing has been repeatedly delayed since that time, as his legal counsel, Jaap Cilliers, has failed to come to court for Basson’s sentencing on multiple occasions, necessitating continuances.

In January, Cilliers filed an emergency petition with the court in Pretoria, stating that two of the HPCSA professional conduct committee members were biased against Basson, due to their membership in organizations which had signed a petition asking for Basson to be stripped of his medical license. This petition was signed by a number of South African medical professionals and groups, including the South African Medical Association and the Rural Doctors Association of South Africa.

In his answering petition, HPCSA committee chairperson Jannie Hugo admitted his membership in the two organizations and wrote:

I did not participate in the process of the compilation of the petitions. I also did not sign any of them….the reason thereof is simple-I could not allow myself to be influenced by and participate in the process relevant to the issues to be determined in the proceedings, which were occurring outside the hearing.

In addition, Cilliers has alleged that committee member Professor Roland Edgar Mhlanga was also a member of the SAMA and thus should also be recused.

Mhlanga stated in his affidavit that he was not a member of either organization and that he did not sign any petitions.

Judge Bert Bam of the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria has ruled that Basson may apply for the two committee members’ recusal.

Bam wrote, “Not only will an order in this regard materially affect the proceedings, but it will surely have a devastating effect on the officer in question.”

The HPCSA will convene again on the Basson matter on March 12. If the past is any indicator, Basson will continue to evade sentencing. According to some “Basson watchers,” should the matter end up in Pretoria court rather than in the administrative proceedings launched by the HPCSA, the doctor may prevail. Many of the sitting judges are hold-overs from the apartheid era legal system and appear to be amenable to Basson’s issues.

Janet C. Phelan, investigative journalist and human rights defender that has traveled pretty extensively over the Asian region, an author of a tell-all book EXILE, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

British colonial soldiers committed genocide in the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. They then looted some 4,000 pieces of art which have never been returned. A Nigerian film recreates the invasion, exposing the bestial brutality of Empire.

On Saturday 7 February, a packed British Film Institute (BFI) audience attended African Odyssey’s hosting of ‘Grand Theft Africa: History of the Benin Bronzes.’ It opened with a one-hour presentation by historian and Pan-Africanist Dr Ama Biney on the historic and continuing ‘scramble for Africa.’ The focus of her presentation and theme for the film that followed was the 1897 invasion of Benin, which contributed to the greater African holocaust enshrined in our experience of enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism. The brutal desecration of Benin lives and culture through the theft of over 4,000 of its artefacts by Western Europeans seems to be a known but yet untold story. It led to the demise of the Great Benin Kingdom, marking a most significant period in the continuing scramble for African resources. During the invasion the Oba (King) was deposed and deported to Calabar on 13 September 1897 where he died 16 years later. The Nollywood director, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen’s film captures the horrific invasion in which Benin’s well organised governmental system, cultural and spiritual traditions, kept in place for thousands of years, were callously disrespected by the British invaders. The event at the BFI was well timed to correspond with the anniversary on 10 February of the invasion. What follows is a reflection of the event as I attempt to capture the impression it left on me.

The past is present

One of the lasting messages of Dr Biney’s presentation was that the ‘past is not dead – that it lives on in the present.’ This is how she perceives the impact of history. The infamous ‘Scramble for Africa’ in which 14 European powers voraciously supped around the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference table is a haunting and living legacy impeding the struggle for sovereignty and self-determination for many African states. Yet their lack of self-determination is linked to the unnaturalness of their construction, as these states represent the demographically modified appendages of the European imperialist project. Since the Conference preceded the invasion of Benin by over a decade it might appear accidental – or fortuitous. Likewise since the conference was held 130 years ago the social, economic and political instabilities associated with these states might suggest some natural inability to self-govern. Clearly this would be an ill-conceived perspective ignoring the deliberate and lasting impact of the Scramble.

This historical appendage made it possible for the Malian president to request help from France, its former colonial ruler, to intervene in the political crisis a couple years ago. Such interventions, whether sanctioned by African leaders or not, do not necessarily improve the conditions of the people they are supposedly called to assist; nor do they help to advance the sovereignty of African states. Historically, the image of ‘anarchy’ and destabilisation through the creation of proxy wars has been used by Western governments to justify interference in the affairs of other sovereign states. Similarly, parallels can be made of the moral arguments about fighting Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria and the 1897 invasion by the UK government. Some chaos or anarchy has to be created/detected for which the burden to solve becomes that of the all-saving Europeans. Their military power would give them unfair advantage and means to occupy. The ‘humanitarian’ guise of rescuing 300 school girls provided a perfect opportunity for the US-European military expansion to West Africa. Excessive foreign troops stretched across large areas of Africa means a military occupation that has little to do with ‘saving girls.’ The question is whether Western intervention is necessary or is this interference part of their imperialist strategy? In other words: Are matters made worse or better by their intervention?

In her talk, Dr Biney reminded us which European countries were among those 14 powers at the conference: France, Britain, Germany and Portugal. The map she used to more visibly imprint the dissection of the continent showed the dominance of the French and British. She allowed a resonant beat to sink into our hearts the poignant fact that around this inglorious table no African leader was present. Therefore it remains to be said that Africans should be left to resolve their own internal affairs. Their self-determination will always be blighted by the interventionist strategies of Western governments whose interests lie in the control of our resources.

Circumstances of the invasion

What was striking from Dr Biney’s account was that prior to the 1897 invasion, between 1850-1880 there was a small European presence in Africa. They had coastal outposts from which they were exercising legitimate trade, particularly in palm oil and groundnuts. This trade had replaced the Trans-Atlantic Trade in human beings as slaves. The wanderlust of explorers, the crusading of missionaries and the avaricious traders combined to reshape the course of Africa’s history. The European countries involved in the trade sought to advance and protect their own interests, establishing military outposts that would later double as holding forts for enslaved Africans literally bound for the Atlantic. These outposts (forts) remain, as I observed during a trip to Cape Coast and Elmina Castles in Ghana. But those erected on the other side of the Atlantic also remain in the Caribbean islands. During a visit to some of these at the end of 2013 there was a sense that Africans (in the diaspora) had little claim to the land/islands but were forced to import everything and instead focus their economic interest on tourism – another way of saying exploration. At every corner of these islands there are churches – since the missionary project was supported by the respective European states.

Whilst they protected their claim along the coast, the real loot and ventures lay in the interior, which for many were yet unexplored. The increasing competition to discover and exploit Africa’s wealth naturally led explorers deeper into the interior. The Berlin Act, furthermore made it necessary for each European power to ‘inform each other of its claim’ to a portion of territory and establish the claim legitimately by ‘occupation.’ As we see today the interventionist strategy has its base in history whereby European governments used the internal disputes of African micro-states to push moral arguments about why they needed to be governed by external intermediaries. Some of the moral arguments were founded on the alleged principle of civilising Africans from their fetishisms and traditional practices, including human sacrifice. As Dr Biney noted, Europeans exaggerated these customs and practices in order to serve their own interests. Although the Europeans claimed to be concerned about internal slave trade and general conflicts in Africa, with the exception of the Yorubas no mention was made of internal slavery in the Berlin Act. Dr Biney argued that contrary to the supposed anarchy in Africa, most of West Africa was peaceful with well-organised states and strong rulers.

A sinister agreement

By the time of the invasion, Benin was expanding, having subsumed smaller states into its Kingdom through military force. The Edo region, in which the City of Benin was situated, was discovered by British explorers venturing deeper into the hinterland. The impressive cultural artefacts, along with the discovery of vast amounts of rubber leant fervour to the mission to totally colonise the region.

Oba Ovonramwen, who had inherited a kingdom at war not only with other states but with its own internal struggles, had to establish firm leadership but was loved and respected by his people. The British knew this. In 1891 the British Vice Consul H.L. Gallwey took a spurious treaty to Oba Ovonramwen. He didn’t sign the treaty but instead authorised one of his chiefs, who clearly couldn’t read English, to do so. According to Dr Biney the terms afforded protection for the Oba by Queen Victoria in return for loyalty to Britain; he could not entertain any other foreign power. There also had to be free trade with Britain and the kingdom had to receive missionaries. When the Oba flouted these terms a new treaty was devised aimed at forcing the Oba to submit to the British Empire.

Genocide: calling it by its name

Following his own orders, and perhaps owing to some despotic trait and loyalty to the British Crown, the Acting Vice Consul James Phillips ignored warnings not to enter Benin, when at this time a sacred ceremony was in swing. But he persisted to enter the City. This was regarded by the Benin chiefs as a challenge to the sovereignty of the kingdom for which they retaliated by killing Phillips and six other British men. This presented Britain with the opportunity of war against the kingdom and 1,500 soldiers primarily made up of Africans from other colonised territories were dispatched to avenge the killing of the seven Britons; two of them had escaped. The defeat of Benin, as Dr Biney explained, was due to the ‘superior technology’ of British weaponry. The Africans were admirable adversaries but their machetes, bows and arrows couldn’t compare. Though available on the continent, there was limited access to machine guns which would have aided their combat. Even if they could obtain the machine guns, there weren’t enough soldiers trained to use them. The outcome of this unfair advantage was genocide in which thousands Africans lost their lives. Shamefully this wholesale sacking of the Benin Empire also culminated in the grand theft of cultural artefacts bestowing the history and heritage of the Benin people.

‘The totality of the plan’

Another striking observation in Dr Biney’s presentation was the citation by fellow historian, Toyin Falola, who attributed the defeat of Nigeria (Benin) to the series of ‘so-called little wars’ waged by Britain as a decided method that ‘boosted the idea of imperialism.’ In other words, these little wars were by design part of a bigger plan for total domination. Former African leaders, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea Republic, posited pan-African unity, calling for a level of consciousness that would recognise the ‘totality of the European plan’ – a systematic, well-practiced strategy of divide and rule. Colonialism was replaced by neo-colonialism after extending pretentious arms of independence.

When Ghana gained its independence in 1957 as the first country in sub-saharan Africa to do so, Nkrumah made it clear that unless all African territories were liberated, none were. The vision of total liberation of its people and of all the macro and micro African states would be the appropriate response to this ‘totality of the plan’ by Britain, US and other Western European nations still intervening in African affairs.

Invasion 1897, the film

It fulfilled a lifetime ambition of the Nollywood director Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen to produce a film about the invasion of Benin but also to screen it in the City of London. His diminutive figure was overshadowed by lofty aspirations and confidence as he beamed from the BFI podium. That the film, a Nollywood production, was even being screened at the BFI was another achievement he credited. In September last year filmmaker Nadia Denton curated a weekend centred on the rise of Nollywood. This was held in conjunction with the launch of her book, ‘The Nigerian Filmmaker’s Guide to Success: Beyond Nollywood’. This film builds on the commitment by the African Odyssey’s programme of ‘inspirational films by and about the people of Africa.’

The film opened with harrowing scenes of violence, with heads cleanly swiped by machetes and lobbed across my unsuspecting imagination early on. We were forewarned about the violence but I wasn’t prepared for the immediacy of it. These scenes of violence were interspersed in the film, building particularly during the invasion itself where graphic depictions of cannon explosions, bodies burning, machine gun killings, machete executions that exposed the impact of the devastation to African lives. Though the ‘white men’, as they were called in the film, lost their lives, this was disproportionate because Africans were fighting both for and against the British.

Dubious cast

Apart from the recognisable Rudolph Walker and Charles (Chucky) Venn (both from Eastenders) most of the cast were unknown to UK audiences or were acting for the first time. This might explain the awkward staccato diction of some of the actors, especially those playing English soldiers who hardly seemed committed to the process. I wondered if this was to do with cultural allegiance – the difficulty or pressure to show one’s culture in its true (in this case negative) light. For me the most remarkable acting was by Mike Omoregbe who played Oba Ovonramwen. He was committed to portraying the strength, complexity and anxieties of the Benin leader. He brought to life the image of this proud, powerful warrior king that Dr Biney barely had time to show us during her talk. He was convincing in embodying the spirituality and beliefs in ancestral traditions that underscored the King’s life and that of his people. Surprisingly, we were later told it was Omoregbe’s first acting role and that he was a priest whose faith wouldn’t approve of the traditional spiritual practices the film promoted so well. This shows the open-mindedness of Omoregbe and further reveals the daringness of Imasuen who cast him.

The role of the British museum

After the brutal opening scene, the film moved into present day to encapsulate the umbilical link with the past. A Nigerian descendant attempts to retrieve one of the Benin Bronzes from the British Museum. During the court hearing he refuses to plead guilty of theft, because he claims that he was restoring the items, stolen by the British, on behalf of his family. It wasn’t intended to be but this was somewhat comical. Yet, I imagine many Africans who visit the British Museum feel the same compulsion. I do. To mark the centenary of the invasion in 2014, the film was screened at the museum, amidst some security anxieties about protests and demonstrations. This is another of Imasuen’s accomplishments and speaks of the unabashedness of the British authorities about their grand theft of African resources. Perhaps they consider this screening some kind of concession. I see it the way Dr Biney regards the presentness of the past which will continue to speak until justice is done. Indeed, the penultimate scene in the film in which Oba Ovonramwen is captured was ominous. Throughout the film his speeches were deliberately elevated by the use of proverbs and allegories in contrast to the bland exchanges between the British soldiers. In his last speech he expressed prophetic sentiments of exacting justice.

The African perspective 

From the BFI podium and to welcome audience response Imasuen said he wanted to make a film that was unapologetically from the African perspective. He achieved this by privileging the views and motivations of the Africans, showing particularly that they were concerned with preserving their cultural heritage and protecting their sovereignty. The invaders on the other hand were ignorant, blood thirsty and greedy; ready to wage an unjust war to strengthen their own empire thousands of miles away. The visualisation of African courage during the invasion reinforced Dr Biney’s account about their bravery during combat; that they were not passive bystanders but ready warriors to defend their kingdom. Although many of the soldiers in the British army were Africans, I think the film was making a point in depicting this. The stark blue uniforms worn by the soldiers vividly conveyed a problem. As long as Africans see themselves as separate and divided, each state can be manipulated by the colonisers to commit soldiers to fight against the other. I’m trying to imagine a day I’d see a film whereby European soldiers (white) are en mass fighting on the side of Africans against another European aggressor. Africans need to be committed to identifying a unity of interest. When it comes to advancing their interests European leaders, as the film depicts, are two-faced and two-tongued. They conspire together, though they don’t always agree, to protective their collective and nationalistic aims. Somehow they’ve convinced African leaders they need to act differently.

Though he said the film was unapologetically from the African perspective there was a massive oversight by the director. In the last scene, in which the African descendent achieves victory in court for his alleged attempted larceny of the Benin Bronzes he is embraced by his European partner fully clad (in the court) in the cultural orange beading, including a crown, found in Nigeria. They hugged, once, twice and then they kissed long. I was disappointed by this seemingly out of place addition – gutted that after all the pronouncements against the ‘white men’ and the blatant caricaturing of Queen Victoria that Imasuen felt he needed to close the film with this lasting image. Throughout the film and in keeping with social history of the day there was lack of agency in the depiction of the African women. However, I wonder at the insensitivity to African women by reinforcing a tired stereotype of a successful African man (symbolised by the raised hand of victory, mirroring Nelson and Winnie after the former’s release from prison) and his European (white) woman. Imasuen tried to pass it off as a ‘cultural marriage’ claiming that he didn’t want to be seen to be preaching hate. But for me this scene was a wasted effort, no love angle of this kind was necessary. It seemed as though it was about compromise and a lack of total conviction.

The same could be said of the decision not to use a Nigerian language and maintain the subtitles (which were in English despite all the actors speaking in English). His rationale for this was about trying to ‘reach’ a wider audience. One wonders how far that reach needed to be given the 170 million population of Nigeria. The ‘reach’ ought to be seen as coming from those who are interested in evolving cultural representations, not our complicit perpetuation of cultural imperialism through the predominance of the English language. Still respect is due to him for producing a film that tells this true story intrinsically from the worldview of Africans.

The artefacts and the grand theft 

We saw clipped scenes of not only British but other European soldiers grabbing the loot from the decimated City of Benin. As well as Britain Dr Biney mentioned Sweden, Holland, Germany and the US as being beneficiaries of this looting. Imasuen related a story about seeing one of the Benin pieces on sale in the US for $54,000 and tried to compute how this sum would transform the lives of contemporary Edo artisans. With regard to the artistic feel of the film, there was a moderate attempt at this. There were some shots of the landscape; the red earth beautifully contrasting the tropically green trees gave a sense of the place. This was complimented by simple yet striking cultural costumes like the white puffy bottom half robes of the chiefs, the elaborate warrior vestments, including the visible crafting of their machetes and the impressive garments worn by the Oba. The achievement of this is commendable especially because the project was self-funded.

Imasuen commented during the Q&A that the craft and skill of creating those stolen artefacts has not been lost. There were shots of the bronze smelting, as homage to the skill and craft involved in producing the looted Benin bronzes.

Reparations

In her final remarks Dr Biney emphasised a call for reparations and restitution to account for the devastating loss of African life and the grand theft of thousands of Benin artefacts residing in the European museums and private collections Chicago. Despite attempts by the Edo people to secure the return of these treasures there has been no recognition of their claim. Imasuen recounted that during the build up to screening the film at the British Museum items were returned to the Benin Royal family by a descendant of one of the British men who looted the wares during the invasion. The emphasis on reparations highlighted the necessary and humane response in the 21st century to ameliorating the devastation of African cultural heritage under colonialism. This is part of a wider movement for reparations with which Dr Biney recommended young people to become involved.

Conclusion

The past does not only intrude but makes certain demands on the present. As I contemplate the stern face of Oba Ovonramwen, the confidence in his stature, I perceive an irrepressible spirit that will not rest until justice in some form is achieved for his people. In this way he can be said to embody the ancestral spirit of millions of Africans who perished during the holocaust or maafa (genocide). The combination of historical documentation from Dr Biney’s presentation and the artistic and cultural representation by Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen’s film provided excellent insight about the circumstances of the invasion. This was followed by lively debate during the Q&A which included on the panel along with Dr Biney and Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, Nadia Denton, Mike Omoregbe (the Oba) and BFI’s David Somerset, Chairing.

I agreed with two memorable remarks. One stressed that the director didn’t have to pander to any suggestion he might be preaching hate in his film; that after all Africans were treated inhumanely in our brutal encounters with Europeans and we had nothing to apologise to them for; that in fact we’re still awaiting apology from them. The second asked that Imasuen took more care in the way he spoke about the value of African art. There was some miscommunication that suggested he would rather have compensation for the total value accumulated over one hundred years of theft, rather than having the artefacts themselves returned. The point was that we must appreciate both the artefact and their monetary worth, because if we didn’t and any slackness in our expressions about this would potentially send the wrong message and further hamper the campaign for reparations. I commend the effort of the African Odyssey team who brought the event to us in collaboration with Tony Warner of Black History Walks. Sponsors of the film, including Sapetra and Greenwich TV, and promoters j2 knosults were represented and to them too I express gratitude. Overall it was good to be there, the pre-screening presentation was great and despite some of its contradictions the film, as Nadia Denton summed up contributed to a necessary debate about the importance of history to the question of sovereignty and self-determination.

Click on the link to the official website for Invasion 1897.

Dr Michelle Yaa Asantewa formerly taught English Literature, Editing and Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University and currently facilitates writing workshops as an Independent Scholar. Her first novel Elijah and poetry collection The Awakening and Other Poems were self-published and are the launch publications for Way Wive Wordz Publishing. A Pan-Africanist and writer activist her blog waywivewordzspiritualcreative fuses social, spiritual and cultural experiences with artistic expression.

The US Commerce Department said Friday that Gross Domestic Product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew by only 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, down from an earlier estimate of 2.6 percent and a sharp fall from earlier quarters.

This followed the announcement by the Labor Department on Thursday that consumer prices fell by 0.7 percent, the largest fall since December 2008. Over the past 12 months, prices have fallen by 0.1 percent, the first annual deflation figure posted since October 2009.

These figures belie official claims that the US is an economically healthy counterbalance to the overall slump and deflation that now encompasses most of the world. In fact, US economic growth, hampered by an enormous impoverishment of the working class in the years following the financial crisis, remains far below previous historical averages.

On Tuesday, Standard and Poor’s said that its Case-Shiller Index showed that home prices grew by 4.6 percent over the past year, the slowest housing price increase since 2011. “The housing recovery is faltering,” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones, told the Los Angeles Times. “Before the recession, anytime housing starts were at their current level… the economy was in a recession.”

Meanwhile the number of people in the US newly filing for jobless benefits jumped by 31,000 to 313,000 last week, in the largest increase since December 2013, reflecting a series of mass layoffs and business closures announced this month.

On February 4, office supply retailer Staples announced plans to buy its rival Office Depot, which would result in the closure of up to a thousand stores and tens of thousands of layoffs. The next day, electronics retailer RadioShack filed for bankruptcy, saying it plans to close up to 3,500 stores.

Mass layoffs have also been announced at online marketplace eBay, credit card company American Express, the oilfield services companies Schlumberger and Baker Hughes, as well as the retailers J.C. Penney and Macy’s.

These disastrous economic developments come even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time record of 18,140 on Wednesday, though it retreated slightly later in the week. Worldwide, the FTSE All-World Index is near its highest level in history.

The rise in global stock indices reflects the satisfaction of global financial markets with the pledge by the Syriza-led Greek government to impose austerity measures dictated by the EU, as well as indications by Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen in congressional testimony this week that the US central bank is likely to delay raising the federal funds rate in response to recent negative economic figures.

The US federal funds rate has been at essentially zero since the beginning of 2009. Together with the central bank’s multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” program, this has helped to inflate a massive stock market bubble that has seen the NASDAQ triple in value since 2009.

This enormous growth in asset values has taken place despite the relatively depressed state of the US economy, which grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in 2014. During the entire economic “recovery” since 2010, the US economy has grown at an average rate of 2.2 percent. By comparison, the US economy grew at an average rate of 3.2 percent in the 1990s and 4.2 percent in the 1950s.

The ongoing stock market bubble has led to a vast enrichment of the financial elite: the number of billionaires in the US has nearly doubled since 2009. The financial oligarchy, however, has not used its ever-growing wealth for productive investment, as shown by the decline in business spending in the fourth quarter of last year. Instead, it has either hoarded it or used it to buy real estate, art and luxury goods.

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that global sales of “ultra-premium” vehicles, costing $100,000 or more, surged by 154 percent, compared with a 36 percent increase in global vehicle sales overall. The report noted, “Rolls-Royce registrations have risen almost five-fold. Almost 10,000 new Bentleys cruised onto the streets last year, a 122 percent increase over 2009, while Lamborghini rode a 50 percent increase to pass the 2,000 vehicle mark.”

Meanwhile, the number of people in poverty in the US remains at record levels. In January, the Southern Education Foundation reported that, for the first time in at least half a century, low-income children make up the majority of students enrolled in American public schools.

To the extent that jobs are being created in the US, they are largely part-time, contingent and low-wage, replacing higher-wage jobs eliminated during the 2008 crash. A report published last year by the National Employment Law Project found that while American companies have added 1.85 million low-wage jobs since 2009, they have eliminated 1.83 million medium-wage and high-wage jobs.

Earlier this month, Jim Clifton, head of the Gallup polling agency, denounced claims that the US unemployment rate has returned to “normal” levels. “There’s no other way to say this,” he wrote. “The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

“Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the US is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older.”

Clifton added, “I hear all the time that ‘unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.’ When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth—the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real—then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t ‘feeling’ something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives.”

On Thursday, the Washington Post revealed the identity of “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operative featured in grisly videos depicting the beheading of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning.

The Post named the ISIS member as Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old who was born in Kuwait and raised in London. He is described in a CNN report as “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

The media reporting on this identification has been dominated by discussions of the psychology of terrorism and the role of Islamist ideology, along with speculation as to why someone from such a background would choose to engage in such barbaric acts.

All of these banalities are part of a campaign of deliberate obfuscation. Purposefully left in the shadows is the central revelation to accompany the identification of “Jihad John”—the fact that he was well known to British intelligence, which undoubtedly identified him as soon as his image and voice were first broadcast in ISIS videos.

Not only did Britain’s security service MI5 carefully track his movements, it carried out an active campaign to recruit him as an informant and covert agent. As the British daily Guardian put it Thursday, MI5 has “serious questions” to answer about its relations with Emwazi.

Chief among these questions is whether the intelligence agency was successful in its recruitment efforts. In other words, did Emwazi go to Syria with MI5’s foreknowledge and blessings?

If there is doubt as to whether Emwazi was recruited, it is clear that other ISIS jihadists have been. The BBC reported that British intelligence has refused to name Emwazi for “operational reasons.” It adds: “The practice by intelligence agencies of approaching jihadist sympathisers to work for them is likely to continue. It’s believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State ‘capital’ of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice.”

At its heart, the case of “Jihadi John” is of significance because of what it says about the real relationship between Western imperialism and ISIS. In the final analysis, ISIS is a product of the interventions by Washington and its allies in the region.

Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.

It is not only a matter of these movements emerging out of the mayhem, death and destruction unleashed by the US military and CIA in these countries at the cost of well over a million lives and wholesale social devastation.

Like Al Qaeda before it, ISIS is a creation of US and Western imperialism, unleashed upon the peoples of the region in pursuit of definite strategic aims. In Libya, Islamists now affiliated with ISIS provided the principal ground forces for the US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, ISIS, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist militias have played a similar role in a war for regime-change that has been backed by Washington and its allies.

By all accounts, so-called “foreign fighters” comprise the largest component of the “rebels” who have sought to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past three-and-a-half years. Estimates have put their number at over 20,000, with recruits drawn from throughout Europe, North America, Central Asia and elsewhere.

While the media presents the flow of these fighters into Syria as something of a mystery, the question of how they have gotten there can be easily answered. The CIA, MI5 and other Western intelligence agencies have not merely turned a blind eye to Islamists traveling from their respective countries to the Syrian battlefield, it has offered them active encouragement. Turkey, a key US ally, has facilitated the flow of these elements across its border into Syria.

It should be recalled that Western governments and media painted forces like ISIS in Syria as democratic “revolutionaries” waging a progressive struggle against a tyrant. The war, which was stoked through orchestrated provocations, was cited as a justification for “humanitarian” intervention.

Arms and funding poured in to back the largely Islamist “rebels,” even as Washington and its allies steadily escalated the threat of direct intervention. The Obama administration went to the brink of launching a savage bombardment of Syria in September 2013, only to beat a tactical retreat in the face of unexpected opposition.

The Islamist forces on the ground in Syria felt themselves the victims of a double-cross. Much like the CIA’s Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs a half-century earlier, their promised US air support did not come and they lashed out in retribution. Ultimately, this took the form not only of the serial beheadings of Western hostages, but also the debacle inflicted upon the US-trained security forces in Iraq.

Washington has hypocritically seized upon the beheadings in an attempt to whip up support for its new intervention in the Middle East. But when similar atrocities were carried out by ISIS and its cohorts against Syrian Alawites, Christians and captured conscripts, the Obama administration looked the other way.

In the wake of the revelations about “Jihadi John,” Britain’s Tory Prime Minister David Cameron issued a ringing defense of the country’s security services, describing its members as “incredibly impressive, hard-working, dedicated, courageous.” He declared his sympathy for their “having to make incredibly difficult judgments.” He insisted that “the most important thing is to get behind them.”

If Britain were a functioning democracy, the revelations about the role of MI5 and its relations with Mohammed Emwazi and ISIS generally would be the subject of a parliamentary inquiry that could spell the fall of the government.

However, in London, as in Washington, the government has been largely taken over by the military and intelligence apparatus, whose crimes are systematically covered up with the aid of a complicit corporate-controlled media.

For workers in Britain, the US and internationally, these revelations only underscore the necessity to build up a genuine antiwar movement based on a socialist and internationalist program and in intransigent opposition to all attempts to exploit the crimes of ISIS—the Frankenstein’s monster created by imperialism—to justify the escalation of war abroad and repression at home.

On Monday February 16, North Korea’s Ambassador to the UN, Jang Il Hun, held a press conference with several journalists who cover the UN. It was a holiday in NY and the UN headquarters buildings were closed for the American President’s Day.The press conference was held at the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Mission to the United Nations in New York. At the press conference the Ambassador explained that not only was February 16 a holiday in the US in honor of American presidents but it was also the date that his country celebrates the birthday of their great leader Kim Jung Il.

The Ambassador said that the press conference had been called to make public the positions of the DPRK on the so called “Conference on North Korean Human Rights: the Road Ahead”, to be held the next day in Washington by the governments of the US and South Korea. He explained that this conference was part of the US government’s hostile policy toward the DPRK, a political policy that the US had pursued for almost 70 years since the division of Korea. The US, he pointed out, was responsible for the division of Korea.

The Washington conference was intended to mark the first year anniversary of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s COI Report, a report Ambassador Jang said was fabricated, based on false testimony of witnesses, many of whom remained anonymous.

Ambassador Jang said that the DPRK had complained about the conference to the US government and asked that the US cancel it. This request had been made through the contact in the US State Department, which is the channel for communication between the DPRK and the US. The US and DPRK do not have formal diplomatic relations. In the event that the US refused to cancel the conference, Ambassador Jang explained that DPRK asked to ”take part in the conference as the party concerned.”

The response from the US government, reported Ambassador Jang, was that the conference was being held by private organizations and as it was not a government event, the US government could not cancel it. Nor was it possible for the US government to invite the DPRK to attend. Ambassador Jang reminded journalists that the US government had held a conference during the Opening of the UN General Assembly which took place this past September. When the DPRK requested to attend, the US government refused the request. (1) Hence to claim that the US government was not responsible for denying the DPRK the right to attend a conference about DPRK Human Rights that the US government held was clearly a false claim.

The Washington conference was held on February 17 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). An article in the Korea Times newspaper on February 10 had reported that “South Korea and the United States” would “host a conference on Feb. 17 in commemoration of the first anniversary of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report on North Korea’s state-perpetrated human rights violations.”

The article explained that Seoul’s Yonsei Center for Human Liberty along with three other think tanks and human rights institutions in the U.S. would organize the conference. (2) Given that a number of speakers at the conference were current or previous government officials, and the role that several of the speakers played in promoting a hostile policy toward the DPRK on behalf of the US, South Korean or other similar government entities, US government claims that the meeting was not sponsored by government entities could only raise serious questions about the accuracy of such a claim. Clearly the conference was supported by the US government, and speakers with a record of hostility toward the DPRK and tacit or vocal support for regime change were, it appeared, those who were included in the program.

The agenda of the program was devoid of speakers with diverse views on what would be an appropriate course of action toward building friendly relations between the US and the DPRK. While it was noted that the DPRK had sought to negotiate over the human rights issue before the UN General Assembly resolution on the issue had been passed in December, one could only wonder how negotiation had been rejected, yet the parties involved in the conference claimed they sought to improve the human rights situation in the DPRK.

Notable was the fact that by rejecting any US government policy of negotiation with the DPRK, speakers at the conference appeared to be intent on seeking not improvement of human rights in the DPRK but regime change. Discussing how to use UN channels and processes to bring about this end, however is contrary to the obligations of the charter of the UN. Thus language used in several of the talks at conference substituted the threat of referral of officials of the DPRK to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the weapon in place of overt discussion of regime change.

On December 22, the Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights, Ivan Simonovic had held a stakeout for journalists after he had presented a report to the UN Security Council about alleged human rights abuses by the DPRK. At the stakeout a journalist asked if Mr. Simonovic had confidence in the evidence against the DPRK. His response was that this was an area where he had “mixed feelings.” That the COI report was not “what can be used in a court of law.”(3)

One focus of those pursuing a hostile policy against the DPRK is the creation of an office sponsored by the UN in Seoul, South Korea to gather so called evidence against the DPRK.

The claims against the DPRK, many of which are based on so called anonymous witnesses, have raised serious questions about reliability. One of the most publicized stories by a defector who has been public in his accusations against the DPRK, has been acknowledged by the defector to be a false story.

In January, Shin Dong-hyuk acknowledged that he had falsified a number of claims that he had made about his experiences in the DPRK. These claims about the DPRK were the subject of a book by Blaine Harden which has been widely promoted and translated into a number of different languages. Harden acknowledges the central role that Shin played in promoting human rights complaints about the DPRK. Harden writes(4):

“Shin had become the single most famous witness to North Korea’s cruelty to its own people. He posed for photographs with the American secretary of state, received numerous human rights awards, and traveled the world to appear on television news programs like 60 Minutes. His story helped launch an unprecedented United Nations inquiry that accused North Korea’s leaders of crimes against humanity.”

After Shin Dong-hyuk acknowledged that he gave false testimony, the DPRK sent a letter to the UN Secretary General and the Security Council to draw their attention to this development.

The letter from the DPRK referring to this acknowledgement by Sin Tong Hyok (aka Shin Dong-hyuk), explained(5):

“(I)t cannot be overlooked that John Kerry, US Secretary of State and other American politicians, not content with resorting to their desperate anti-DPRK policy, have misled the world public sentiment and cheated the international community with scandalous misinformation by bringing Sin Tong Hyok to make a false testimony in the anti-DPRK ‘human rights campaign’ although they were well aware of his true nature.”

“This reminds the international community of the fact that Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State made a lengthy lie on the ‘possession of weapons of mass destruction’ by the Saddam Hussein regime at the Security Council meeting on 5 February 2003 in order to make an excuse and condition for invasion of Iraq.”

“Since the report of the COI was proved to be a fraudulent document fabricated by false testimonies of liars like Sin Tong Hyok, it is needless to say, all the ‘resolutions’ on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea forcibly adopted by the General Assembly on the basis of such false documents are invalid.”

“I strongly request that the United Nations should take an impartial and fair stand, being well aware that the anti-DPRK ‘human rights campaigns’ pursued by the United States and others are utterly irrelevant to the protection of genuine human rights, rather dangerous moves to tarnish the image of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and find a pretext to invade it.”

In contrast to the kind of hostile North Korean program held on February 17 in Washington, is a program held by the Asia Society in New York in July of 2013, titled “Avoiding Apocalypse: Searching for Peace with North Korea.” The speakers at this program discussed the importance of building a dialogue between the US government and the North Korean government. (6) In the program, former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson and Ambassador Donald Gregg, former US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea raised the question: “How does the US government improve the relationship between itself and North Korea?”

They pointed out the problem created by the hostile relationship fostered by US policy and called for creative thinking to change the situation. “Whether that be the appointment of a special envoy, or something else to be done by the UN, or something by the media, some kind of thinking has to evolve,” Governor Richardson explained. The Washington conference that the DPRK has critiqued is but a continuation of the kinds of actions that have stymied the development of a friendly relationship that will foster peace. The need to foster friendly relationships between states, however, is mandated by the UN Charter and is the obligation of the member nations of the UN.

Notes

1)Ronda Hauben, “Information Warfare at the United Nations, Humanitarian Concerns or Geopolitical Power Play?”

http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2014/12/31/information-warfare-at-the-un/

“On Sept 23, 2014 the US Secretary of State John Kerry held a meeting near UN headquarters in NYC helping to set in motion UN actions to condemn the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly referred to as North Korea, for alleged human rights violations.

The subject of the meeting was allegedly a UN Human Rights Commission of Inquiry (COI) Report claiming human rights abuses in North Korea. The North Korean Foreign Minister who was attending the opening session of the 2014-5 General Assembly and his delegation were not allowed into this US sponsored meeting about North Korea.”

2) Yi Whan-woo, N. Korean human rights conference due in US, Korea Times, February 10, 2015

http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2015/02/113_173399.html

3) Ivan Šimonović on the situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – Security Council Media Stakeout (22 December 2014)

http://m.webtv.un.org/watch/ivan-Šimonović-on-the-situation-of-human-rights–the-democratic-peoples-republic-of-korea-security-council-media-stakeout-22-december2014/3957338562001

Following is a transcript of the question asked by journalist at the stakeout about Mr Šimonović’s confidence that the conclusions and findings of the COI Report are sufficiently corroborated by other evidence and Mr Šimonović’s response.

Q: “Are you satisfied that the conclusions and findings in the Commission of Inquiry are sufficiently corroborated not only by the statements of the defectors but by other evidence of documentary and visual nature from satellites?”

“And do you agree mostly from your visits to other countries and examining the records of human rights records with the conclusions of the commission that the abuses in North Korea are unparalleled.”

Mr Šimonović’s response: “Well, here I would like to share with you my mixed feelings. I do think that it is really good to have solid evidence of crimes against humanity being perpetuated. On the other hand we have to be fully aware that this threshold used for (the) Commission of Inquiry is not the threshold for evidence that can be submitted in the court of law.

There is plenty to do in further collection of documents and in further collection of other forms of evidence. We think its highly important to have those other things collected to ensure that there is accountability when there will be an opportunity to implement it in real life.”

4) Blaine Harden, http://www.blaineharden.com/

5) JA Song Nam, Ambassador, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Press Release, 21 January 2015, Letter Sent to UN Secretary General and UN Security Council.

6) Ronda Hauben, Out of the Box Diplomacy to Build a Dialogue with North Korea, July 15, 2013.

http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2013/07/15/out-of-the-box-diplomacy-to-build-a-dialogue-with-north-korea/

See also http://asiasociety.org/video/policy/searching-peace-north-korea-complete

The propaganda from the Obama Administration is that the decline in the labor force participation rate from a high of about 67 % to a low of about 63 % is due to baby boomers retiring in mass. The Federal Reserve is continuing this lie. On more than one occasion during Yellen’s bi-yearly Q&A with congress, she was asked about the decline in the labor force participation rate to which she replied that the decline was mainly due to demographic factors. Although this answer is vague, it is clear enough that it is similar to if not the same as the answer supplied by the White House.    

How the Fed can continue this lie even though its own data refutes it is beyond comprehension. That none of the senators and congressman confronted the lie shows their culpability or their ignorance and is compatible with both. The reason we are being deceived is that the actual data and the explanation of the decline it most strongly supports are inconsistent with the fairy tale of economic recovery.

The Fed divides the labor force into four general groups: 16-19 year olds, 20-24 year olds, 25-54 year olds, and 55 and over. How is the decline in the participation rate divided between these groups? Participation amongst 16-19 year olds has declined about 10 % over the last eight years. Participation amongst 20-24 year olds has declined about 5 % over the last eight years. The participation amongst 25-54 year olds has declined about 2.5 % in the last eight years. Contrary to these groups, the participation of people 55 and over has actually increased by about 1.5 %.

(Source: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/categories/32443)

Thus, we can see that the Fed’s own data refutes its chairman’s explanation of the decline. These data do not support a theory that the decline is due to an aging population. If it were not for those 55 and over, the decline would, in reality, be worse than it is, not better, because participation of every other general group is in decline. One might think that most of the decline is due to people who are uneducated. It is important to keep in mind that, although the decline is greater in the 16-19 and 20-24 groups than in the 25-54 group, these groups are small in comparison and so have less of an impact on the total participation rate. Moreover, in addition to the general groups mentioned, the Fed keeps data on more specific groups. If we look at the Fed’s data for those 25 and over who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the decline in eight years is even worse that that of the 25-54 group at about 4 %.

(Source: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU01327662)

So, what explanation of the decline do the data most strongly support? The answer is that the data most strongly supports the view that the decline is due to serious employment problems in the United States and policies that hurt savers. Low interest rates force those 55 and over to go back to work. As high-skill jobs require training and investment by employers, companies will not employ grandpas, whom they think will soon retire, in high-skill jobs, and so they are forced to work the low-skill jobs of 16-24 year olds. 25-54 year olds compete for more high-skill jobs than exist. Most of the jobs that have been created since the great recession are low-skill service jobs

(Source: http://www.nelp.org/page/content/lowwagerecovery2014).

Some in this 25-54 group, being unwilling to work a low-skill job as a bartender, drop out of the labor force (we see this in the bachelor degree or higher, 25 and over data), but many, like the grandpas, are forced to take low-skill jobs. This forces 16-24 year olds to compete with those with more education and experience for low-skill jobs. Unable to compete, they drop out of the labor force.

It is absolutely stunning that the above explanation of the decline in the labor force participation rate, which is strongly supported by the data, goes unmentioned by those in power. Many congressman and senators may just be too ignorant to realize that Yellen’s explanation is inconsistent with the Fed’s data. The chairman of the Fed, though, is not plausibly ignorant of the Fed’s own data. Yellen lies.

Pendaran Roberts recently received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Nottingham in the UK. He has numerous academic publications on the philosophy of color and perception. To take a look at his academic work check out http://philpapers.org/profile/755

The Western media’s latest tall tale is that Russia is supposedly tricking its greenest conscripts into ‘invading Ukraine’ under the auspices that they’re being sent to Rostov instead, and threatening them with detention in a military prison if they refuse. They got the idea right – young recruits being forced into a war they don’t want to fight – but they mixed up the actors and the battlefield; it’s actually Ukraine that’s forcing its young men to fight in Donbass, not Russia forcing its own to fight in Ukraine. One doesn’t have to take the author’s words for it, though, since the Western media has surprisingly published several accounts that corroborate this truth, and they’re definitely worth looking into.

The Dangerous Inexperience Of Youth

Ukraine’s recruits are dramatically unprepared for war, and actually pose a greater threat to themselves than any ‘pro-Russian separatist’ does. Take a look at what the UK’s The Sunday Times published over the weekend:

“An elite soldier who resigned from the British MobArmy to train Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists has revealed the true extent of disarray in Kiev’s military.

He said the string of bloody defeats for Ukraine, including last week’s fall of Debaltseve, was due largely to a failure of command and a lack of skills and discipline.

The 40-year-old, a naturalised Briton of Ukrainian descent, who served in Afghanistan and the Middle East, said Ukraine’s forces, made up largely of volunteers and conscripts, suffer great casualties because of frequent incidents of friendly fire and the mishandling of weapons.

“Six out of 10 casualties among the Ukrainian volunteers occur because of blue-on-blue shooting [the army term for friendly fire] and the inability to handle weapons,” said the man, who would give only his nom-de-guerre Saffron.”

It’s not adults that volunteer for armed service who accidentally shoot themselves or their friends with firearms; it’s immature and inexperienced young men who are forced into battle that make such ‘mistakes’. For all that is known, it may even be that some of the recruits were purposely inflicting non-fatal injuries on themselves or their friends in order to be dismissed from the front lines and hopefully escape the meat grinder that Poroshenko had forced them into.

Like Sheep To The Slaughter

Kiev’s forces weren’t just defeated by the Eastern Ukrainian militias, they were totally slaughtered, but Poroshenko continues to publicly play dumb about what really happened in Debaltsevo. His troops, on the other hand, aren’t holding their tongue, and they’re enraged at what they view as the President’s personal betrayal of their interests. From the UK Independent:

““We conveyed him our thanks,” “Sanya”, a private from the brigade, told The Independent. “We thanked him for his siege denials, we thanked him for equipping us so well, we thanked him for the ceasefire, and we thanked him for sending us out like meat to a grinder.”

Soldiers seemed especially vexed at official military statements that only 13 soldiers had been killed and 157 wounded during the retreat. The number of dead was “clearly in the hundreds,” they said.”

“Sanya’s” account of mass casualties is also supported by Yury Tandit, the chairman of Ukraine’s “Prisoner Exchange Assist Center”, which operates under the supervision of the Security Service of Ukraine. He said that there are 1,500 Kievan forces missing in action, and realistically speaking, it’s not likely that they’ve been sitting in a tavern eating salo this whole time. It’s more probable that many of them were killed, and that only a scant number of those listed are still alive (let alone uninjured).

All of the abovementioned details confirm what many in the non-Western world were already aware of, and it’s that Kiev’s forces were totally crushed during the recent fighting in Donbass. One can’t help but think that these hundreds of young men would have been of better service to their country by helping to rebuild its economy, instead of being forced to destroy Donbass and lose their lives in the process.

Run While You Still Can

It’s not just non-Western outsiders that realize the futility of Kiev’s War on Donbass, but also thousands of Ukrainian young men themselves who are cognizant of the imminent catastrophe awaiting them when they’re called up for the draft. As Dmitry Babich quite accurately comments, “Russia invented the most humane method of warfare: inviting the enemy’s male population of the draft age to “wait out” mobilization on the territory of the “hated aggressor.” This witty observation was made in reference to Putin’s suggestion that the law be changed in order to accommodate the thousands of young Ukrainians who fled to Russia to avoid the draft. That being said, Foreign Policy magazine reports that thousands of others are simply vanishing off the grid in order to dodge their ‘duty’, be it by going to the West or hiding out undercover in a nearby province.

Ukrainian youth is trying to avoid mobilisation by any possible means.

And it’s not just those who are ‘unpatriotic’ that are fleeing the country, but also some of the original participants in EuroMaidan, as documented by Vice magazine. In their piece on the topic, they recount how many of the young pro-Western liberals most fervently in support of regime change last year have now become totally disillusioned with the current reality in the country and are leaving for good to Western Europe. The publication quotes a graduate researcher writing a dissertation on the Maidan youth, who notes that:

“The Maidan allowed a lot of people to see an idealistic version of change, but they also saw what implementation of that change would actually mean. They understood that implementation was going to prevent actual radical change, because it’s too hard to implement things that would actually make things different in Ukraine.”

In light of what appears to be an increasingly collective understanding of Ukraine’s failure as a state, thousands of young recruits and ‘intellectuals’ alike are expected to continue fleeing their former country, which they no longer recognize ever since the pro-Western coup seized power over a year ago. They’re running while they still can, since they know fully well that if the government catches them before they escape the draft, they’ll either be imprisoned or sent to a front-line meat grinder, neither of which looks attractive to a young man with future plans.

Concluding Thoughts

The sad reality of the Ukrainian Civil War is how inaccurately the Western mainstream media reports on the situation. On the one hand, much of what they say is actually true, except they substitute “Ukraine” for “Russia” and pass off every tragedy as Moscow’s fault. This is the way it’s been since they first started covering the carnage in Eastern Ukraine, and it’s had the effect of warping their audience’s perception of what truly is transpiring there. It’s not Moscow that’s destroying Donbass, it’s Kiev, just like it isn’t Russia that’s forcing its young men to fight and die in that war, but Ukraine. If there’s one primary lesson that readers can thus learn from observing Western reporting on Ukraine’s Civil War, it’s that everything bad that Russia is accused of doing is actually what Ukraine has done, and that by simply reversing the two names, they’ll see that the truth behind the Donbass tragedy was right in front of them the entire time.

Andrew Korybko is the political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.

U.S. President Barack Obama has stated many times his case against Russia — the reason for the economic sanctions. In his National Security Strategy 2015, he uses the term “aggression” 18 times, and 17 of them are referring specifically to only one country as “aggressive”: Russia. However, not once does he say there what the “aggression” consisted of: what its target was, or what it itself was. He’s vague there on everything except his own target: Russia.

For those things (what Russia’s “aggression” consists of), Obama’s only statement that has been even as lengthy as moderately brief — since he has never presented it at any more length — was his interview with Fareed Zacaria of CNN on 1 February 2015, which happened to be a statement given only three days short of the first anniversary of his agent’s, Victoria Nuland’s, having selected, on 4 February 2014, whom the next leader of Ukraine would be, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (she called him “Yats”) after the democratically elected and sitting Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, would become overthrown, which happened 18 days later, on 22 February 2014. (It was nothing like Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution”. This wasn’t democratic; it was a coup.)

Obama said there, in this CNN interview, that the reason for the sanctions against Russia was that,

“since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine — not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protests in the Maidan and Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine — since that time, this improvisation that he’s been doing has getting — has gotten him deeper and deeper into a situation that is a violation of international law, that violates the integrity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, has isolated Russia diplomatically, has made Europe wary of doing business with Russia, has allowed the imposition of sanctions that are crippling Russia’s economy at a time when their oil revenues are dropping. There’s no formula in which this ends up being good for Russia. The annexation of Crimea is a cost, not a benefit, to Russia. The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over.”

That’s all; he didn’t mention the subsequent shooting-down of the Malaysian airliner over the conflict-zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014, which was the incident that he used, after the first set of sanctions, in order to get the European Union to increase the sanctions against Russia (and that incident will be discussed at the end of this article because he simply didn’t mention it in this, his lengthiest statement on the cause of the sanctions). His entire reason there — and no reason at all was given in his National Security Strategy 2015 for calling Russia “aggressive” — was “the annexation of Crimea.”

What, then, are the facts on that matter, of Crimea?

First, we must make note of the fact that this annexation occurred on 16 March 2014, when Crimeans went to the polls and voted in a referendum on whether to remain ruled by the Ukrainian national Government in Kiev, as they had been ruled only since 1954, or instead by the Russian national Government in Moscow, as they had been ruled from 1783 to 1954; and we must also keep in mind that this referendum had occurred as a direct result of Obama’s coup against the man, Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Crimeans had voted at around 75% throughout Crimea. In the United States, that type of election, one in which the leading candidate had received 75% of the vote, would be called a “landslide.”

How would Americans feel if they had voted 75% for a President in 2010, for a six-year term, only to find him overthrown in an extremely violent coup four years later by a foreign power that they despised and feared as an aggressor, as Crimeans overwhelmingly, and by far more than 75%, felt about the United States? Specifically, if you’ll look there (at that link) at those polls by Gallup (and you can get to each one of them there by just two clicks, so it’s quick), what you’ll find is that even before Obama’s February 2014 coup which overthrew the Ukrainian President whom nearly 80% of Crimeans had voted for, the Crimean people overwhelmingly wanted to secede from Ukraine — and, especially now they did, right after the President for whom they had overwhelmingly voted, Viktor Yanukovych, had been overthrown in this extremely bloody coup. Furthermore, in April 2014, Gallup again polled Crimea, and they found that 71.3% of Crimeans viewed as “Mostly positive” the role of Russia there, and 4.0% viewed it as “Mostly negative”; by contrast, only 2.8% of Crimeans viewed the role of the United States there as “Mostly positive,” and a whopping 76.2% viewed it as “Mostly negative.” During the intervening year (i.e., both before and after Obama’s coup and the resulting secession-referendum), Crimeans’ favorability toward America had plunged down to 2.8%, from its year-earlier 6%. Clearly, what Obama had done in Ukraine (his violent coup in Kiev) had antagonized the Crimeans. And, as if that weren’t enough, the 2014 poll provided yet more evidence: “The 500 people that were sampled in Crimea were asked [and this is crucial] ‘Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status [whether to rejoin Russia] reflect the views of most people here.’ 82.8% said ‘Agree.’ 6.7% said ‘Disagree.’”

But there turned out to be even more evidence that the referendum-results in Crimea had been accurate: Even after just one click (not even two) from there, you’ll see the following information, also with a link to its source:

Because both of those two Gallup polls had been paid-for by the U.S. Government, Canada’s Government wanted its own read on the Crimean situation; and, so, they hired a different polling organization to do their own poll. However, the Canadian Government got no better news than the U.S. Government had gotten: 82% of Crimeans “Fully endorse” Crimea’s having become part of Russia; 11% “Mostly endorse” it; 2% “Mostly disapprove”; 3% “Don’t know”; and only 2% “Fully disapprove.” Or, to put it simply: 93% approve; 3% don’t know, and 4% disapprove. The results of the referendum had been 96% to rejoin Russia. 4% voted against. That’s like the 4% who disapproved of the return to Russia, in the Canadian-sponsored poll.

In a situation like that, what can one say of President Obama’s statement against Russia: “The days in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over.”

Which country had engaged in conquest here? Did Russia conquer Crimea, as Obama constantly alleges? Or did the United States conquer Ukraine? Is Putin the aggressor? Or is Obama?

Obama knows the answer to that question. He isn’t an ignorant man. He had hired Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to head the State Department, and they had hired Dick Cheney’s chief foreign-policy advisor Victoria Nuland to run the operation to take over Ukraine. (And they kicked off the coup a day earlier than the Maidan demonstrations even started, but the operation had been long plannedregardless.) Obama knew that both Clinton and Kerry had voted for the invasion of Iraq and that both have also been lifelong supporters of the CIA’s Gladio operation that hired Hitler’s and Mussolini’s intelligence operatives in order exploit not only anti-communist sentiment but anti-Russian sentiment in Eastern Europe (and here’s the much lengthier BBC documentary on that), so as for the U.S. to take control of Eastern European countries and strip Russia of its western allies and take Russia over, as well, for an unchallenged American Empire, which Obama constantly refers to as “the one indispensable nation,” meaning that all other nations are “dispensable.”

Obama has a consistent record as being supportive of the Gladio operation, and of the CIA’s other specifically anti-Russian operations, though his statement to Fareed Zakaria on CNN pretended that Obama had been friendly toward Russia when Dmitry Medvedev was Russia’s President, throughout Obama’s first term. (He can pretend that, because it helps deceive people to think that Putin must be overthrown, that Putin is ‘the problem.’)

All during Obama’s first term, he was continuing the preparations at the CIA, State Department, etc., to conquer Russia by surrounding it with recently recruited hostile NATO member states, thus far:

Croatia and Albania in 2009 under Obama;

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004 under Bush;

Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 under Clinton — that’s a total of 12 formerly Russia-friendly nations which have switched to become members of the anti-Russia military club: NATO.

Obama is having trouble bringing Ukraine into that club, because Putin has set a red line at Ukraine, both because of its size and because of its having, ever since 1783, Russia’s key naval base, in Crimea. President Obama knew that he would be crossing this red line by seizing Ukraine as he did in February 2014, but he did it anyway; and Putin responded by using Russia’s existing military in Crimea to protect Crimeans so that they could have a peaceful and honest referendum, which Putin knew, just as well as Obama did, would overwhelmingly favor rejoining Russia.

Yet now, Obama has the nerve to say that it’s Putin instead of Obama who has been the aggressor here and who should be subject to “regime change.” (Of course, if Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush becomes the U.S. President, then there will be continuity of the existing U.S. imperial regime, which actually started in earnest in 1980, long before Putin came to power.)

Regarding the shoot-down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner (the pretext for Obama’s getting the EU to support increased anti-Russian sanctions): the U.S.-Ukrainian account of the downing is that pro-Russian rebels shot it down by mistake, with a missile. For this, Obama blamed Russia, and his agents who run European governments and the EU went along with that and hiked their economic sanctions against Russia; but, nobody in power believed it, because the postulated scenario is absurd to anyone who knows anything. However, even if that scenario had been true, yet still, Obama definitely caused the Malaysian airliner to be downed.

Furthermore, the reason why the official ‘investigation’ into the downing is not being made public is that Obama’s own Ukrainian Government was given veto-power over everything that will be in it, and they won’t allow the additional evidence, above and beyond the already dispositive evidence that has been revealed but not publicized, to be included in it; so, the report is not issued. The Ukrainian Government weren’t able to prevent the decisive proof that their own Air Force plane had intentionally shot it down from leaking out; but the Western press have cooperated with Obama to suppress that information. More information keeps leaking out supporting that earlier proof; but, actually, additional proof isn’t even needed. Publication of the existing damning evidence is. However, no one will be able to suppress the ‘findings’ by the official ‘investigation.’ So: it doesn’t yet exist, and maybe it never will.

 In other words: President Obama planned and executed an operation to take over Ukraine for the United States; and for then using that country as a springboard to ‘justify’ sanctions against Russia, including sanctions that have been added, on the basis of Obama’s operation shooting down the Malaysian airliner in order to be able to stir up yet more hatred against Russia. And here is how the ‘news’ media in the West have reported on all that.

If it seems like George Orwell’s 1984, that’s because it is.

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.

The title of Horace Campbell’s book on NATO’s 2011 Libyan intervention, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, is an allusion to a Guardian article by Seumas Milne entitled, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure.” Echoing Milne’s use of “catastrophic” is apt. Claudia Gazzini of the liberal NGO International Crisis Group points out that, if the casualty figures provided by Libya’s National Transitional Council are accurate, “the death toll subsequent to the seven-month NATO intervention was at least ten times greater than the tally of those killed in the first few weeks of the conflict” before NATO intervened. As Campbell shows, while NATO claimed to be protecting human rights, it bombed Libyan civilians and enabled the Libyan opposition to persecute black African migrant workers and ethnically cleanse the black Libyan town of Tawergha. Less than four years after NATO attacked Libya, Bernadino Leon, the United Nation’s special envoy to Libya, saysthe country is “close to the point of no return.”

Perhaps as many as two million Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia, though the exact figure is in dispute. In November, militants claiming affiliation with ISIS secured control of the Libyan city of Derna, where they have carried out public executions and assassinated activists.

Nicholas Pelham reports that almost all of the exiles who returned to Libya after the overthrow of the government have left; that more would have left had European consulates remained open; that warlords have taken power in several parts of the country; that “a once relatively homogenous society has splintered into multiple bickering armed groups”; that separatism has gained traction in Cyrenaica, which has just a third of Libya’s population but two thirds of its oil fields, most of its aquifers, and the country’s gold mines; that cafes and power stations have been burned; that embassies and assorted other targets have been car-bombed; and that airports have been attacked. Tripoli’s population, Pelham writes, is “distraught,” and Libyans “feel even more isolated than when the UN imposed sanctions on [Muammar] Gaddafi.”

Nation Divided by Civil War

At the time of writing, negotiations are underway to end an ongoing civil war. There are two rival seats of government, each with its own institutions. One is the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), which was set up when the capital was seized by Libya Dawn after it did badly in parliamentary elections.

Libya Dawn is an umbrella organization made up of assorted Islamist groups, including the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which is backed by U.S. ally Qatar, as well as various militia from Berber towns. Many of Libya Dawn’s leaders are former fighters from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that, before trying to kill Gaddafi in the 1990s, fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden. That group was backed by another U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia.

The other seat of government is the Tobruk-based House of Representatives. They have allied themselves with what remains of the Libyan state’s armed forces and with troops loyal to former army commander Khalifa Haftar. The latter helped Gaddafi overthrow the previous regime in 1969 but fled Libya upon falling out with the colonel after Haftar led a failed war with Chad.

Haftar, who is believed to have been a CIA asset, returned to Libya during the war against Gaddafi. Haftar’s forces are backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have bombed parts of Libya. Haftar has shelled apartment blocks, Pelham reports, and bombed Tripoli’s airports as passengers were about to board planes.

According to Libya Body Count, nearly 3,000 Libyans have died violent deaths since the beginning of January 2014. As Pelham writes, the “scale of the terror and destruction” carried out by both Libya Dawn and Haftar’s forces “far surpasses that of Gaddafi’s last years. One wonders how many of the Westerners who cheered on the war against him recognize this.”

That Egypt and Qatar – both staunch U.S. allies – are on opposing sides of the conflict suggests that the United States is effectively backing both sides of the Libyan civil war.

Campbell’s book is a helpful guide to how Libya got to this point. At the outset he explains that, before the tumult in Libya began, “he had taken the position that though Gaddafi should be opposed, it was equally necessary to oppose the NATO intervention.” While Campbell worried about how Gaddafi would respond to protesters, he regarded the social forces in Libya as politically underdeveloped and knew that the British and French “were up to mischief” once French President Nicolas Sarkozy began to champion the Libyan opposition, given that Sarkozy was “no friend of progressive African movements.”

Campbell’s view of the Libyan crisis is consonant with the one put forth in an open letter signed by two hundred African intellectuals, a document to which Campbell repeatedly returns. It expressed “our desire, not to take sides, but to protect the sovereignty of Libya and the right of the Libyan people to choose their own destiny.” Toward the end, the letter stated:

“Those who have brought a deadly rain of bombs on Libya today should not delude themselves to believe that the apparent silence of the millions of Africans [sic] means that Africa approved of the campaign of death, destruction and domination which that rain represents. … The answer we must provide practically, and as Africans, is – when, and in what ways, will we act resolutely and meaningfully to defend the right of the Africans of Libya to decide their future, and therefore the right and duty of all Africans to determine their destiny!”

As Campbell’s book makes clear, he and the signatories of that letter were justified in their suspicion that imperialist states and their allies were motivated to intervene in Libya by concerns other than the welfare of Libyans. In that sense, Campbell’s book is an ideal companion piece to Maximilian Forte’s important Slouching Toward Sirte. While Forte’s book is notable for its meticulous detailing of how events played out in the Libyan affair, Campbell situates these in the larger context of the international capitalist dynamics driving them. While it is not perfect, anyone with an interest in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya should read Campbell’s book. At times it meanders, and several claims that should be supported by citations are not. What he offers, however, is both an illuminating account of how Libya was torn asunder and an extremely useful contribution to efforts to understand precisely how militarized imperialist capitalism operates.

Campbell’s central premise is that NATO, and its allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, took advantage of and exacerbated the crisis that emerged in Libya following the protests that began in February 2011. The ruling classes in NATO states exploited the Libyan protests to assert Western military and economic control in Africa and to curtail efforts to create African unity and autonomy from the West. Wikileaks cables show Gaddafi’s government was seen as a barrier to these aims, and NATO’s Libyan expedition was also propelled by frustration in the elite sectors of Western states over their inability to control Libyan assets in the financial sector.

Ulterior Motives

One of Campbell’s most important insights is that the decision of Western powers and their allies to seek regime change in Libya has to be understood in the context of the 2008 financial meltdown. Whereas in the crisis of the 1930s colonial powers forced Africans to increase agricultural production so they could continue extracting the same value from the continent that they had before the Depression, Campbell suggests that in response to the 2008 crisis imperial powers had to find new ways of prying wealth from African states because they are now formally independent. Taking advantage of the turmoil in Libya in early 2011 was one way to do that, particularly because European powers did not have as much access as they would have liked to resource-rich Africa, and the NATO states were alarmed by China’s increasing role on the continent. Even during the Gaddafi government’s détente with the West, the Libyan state remained an obstacle to Western imperialist endeavors such as the building of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) military bases.

These tensions came to a head in early 2011, when, Campbell contends, elites in the U.S. wanted to “preempt other revolutionary uprisings of the type and scale that removed the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt,” a goal that he says was “outlined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., at a major seminar on the implications of the uprising in Egypt.”

Moreover, Campbell writes that shortly after Tripoli fell, and the Libyan government was all but defeated, the Italian energy giant ENI was in the city to discuss resumption of Libyan gas exports. He characterizes Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Tripoli a few days later as an instance of “fierce competition between French and other Western forces for control over the future of Libyan oil” and quotes the Guardian‘s description of the trip as “first and foremost, the Dave and Sarko spoils of war tour.”

In addition to oil, Campbell suggests that the coalition that overthrew Gaddafi is also likely interested in the enormous water wealth of Libya’s Nubian Sandstone Aquifer and the 4,000-kilometer Great Manmade River Project, as well as in exploiting the physical and mental labour of the Libyan people. This is the framework in which one should consider the British defense secretary’s remark near the end of the NATO intervention that business people should “pack their bags” for Libya and the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli’s claim that Libya had a “need” for American companies on a “big scale.”

Goldman Sachs in Tripoli

Campbell describes how the financialization of the energy sector deepened alliances between banks and oil companies, particularly after the banks lost billions in the subprime mortgage crisis and placed greater emphasis on energy trading.

During Gaddafi’s rapprochement with the west, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and neoliberal “reformers” in Gaddafi’s government entered the financial sector by establishing the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a holding company responsible for managing the Libyan government’s investments in the oil and gas industry in the international finance market. The LIA paid Goldman Sachs $1.3-billion for options on currencies and stocks. However, the credit crisis caused the value of Libya’s investments in Goldman to drop 98 per cent. Those losses created tension between Goldman and the Libyan leadership – Libya ultimately rejected Goldman’s efforts to get them to further invest in the company, and the parties did not agree on a deal to compensate Libya for the lost money. Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, Campbell reports, there has been very little discussion of how Libya might recoup these losses.

A closely related issue was Libya’s bumpy relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an organization established in 1981 by the pro-U.S. governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to, in Campbell’s words, “recycle the resources of Arabia for the Western financial system.” At the time of NATO’s intervention, Campbell claims, Wall Street speculators allied with the GCC in a struggle with the Libyan leadership for control of the Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation, a major player in regional offshore, investment banking, and project finance services. The reason for the dispute was that the Libyans, Campbell says, wanted “to move the Arab Banking Group out of its servile position to Western banking interests,” a shift opposed by the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and other shareholders.

When NATO wanted the appearance of broad Arab support for the no-fly zone over Libya, an endorsement came from the Arab League in a vote that was held when only eleven of the twenty-two member states were present. Six of the nine who voted in favor were members of the GCC.

Moreover, the LIA, like many Western firms, invested billions in energy money in the “dark markets” of the UAE. Campbell suggests throughout the book that the neoliberals in Gaddafi’s government who were aligned with Western intellectuals of a similar persuasion ultimately helped bring about the government’s demise.

Despite opposition from their nationalist counterparts, the neoliberals entangled the country’s assets with Western companies, who were then able to restrict the Libyan state’s financial options at a crucial moment. After the beginning of the February 2011 uprisings, “when the Libyans started to move to divest their funds from their overexposure to British and U.S. financial institutions, Libya’s assets were frozen. This was prior to the ruse of protecting Libyans.”

Because of the opaque nature of international markets, one can hardly demand of Campbell unambiguous proof of causation between the banks and energy firms’ relations with the Libyan government and NATO’s decision to overthrow Gaddafi. For the same reason, details about the activities of – and relationships between – these actors are necessarily scarce.

Still, Campbell manages to paint a picture of the Libyan state’s often-tumultuous relationship with the financial sector that dominates NATO states. Consequently, his theory that the Gaddafi government’s relationship with other players in the financial sector was a driving force behind the NATO intervention will seem perfectly plausible to readers familiar with the leading role that Wall Street has played throughout the history of American imperialism. In contrast, readers who embrace the “bumbling empire” theory of U.S. foreign policy in North Africa will be less willing to accept that the U.S. government knows what it’s doing.

Internationalism, Not Intervention

As Campbell writes, chronicling the cataclysmic results of recent imperialist ventures in the Middle East and Africa is not about “gloating but part of an effort to strengthen the resolve of the peace and justice movement to challenge militarism and exploitation.”

One aspect of this worthy goal must be opposing those ostensible leftists who call for Western-led military interventions in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Ukraine. Western military interventions like the one in Libya are expressions of capitalist hegemony and only wind up strengthening that hegemony.

If leftists want to build alternatives to global capitalism, we must recognize that claims to internationalism are worse than meaningless when they enable imperialist bloodbaths. •

Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. This article first published by Jacobin magazine.

When money and power are involved, those standing to gain the most will say and do anything to push their agenda forward. Five centuries ago, saying and doing anything involved exploiting people’s superstitions and their faith in religion. Today, saying and doing anything means also exploiting science.

Science, engineering, and design are amongst our most practical and effective tools to make real and meaningful change. But because they are so powerful and appealing, the potential for their abuse in the wrong hands is immense. Compounding this is the naivety of those who are fascinated by science’s promise but blind to its potential abuse.

It wasn’t long ago when big-tobacco had armies of “scientists” citing the latest “studies” confirming the health benefits and safety of smoking. Of course these were paid liars, not scientists, even if many of them had PhDs. And it was lies they were telling, even if mixed with shades of science. Today, special interests have refined this practice of filtering lies and exploitation through the lens of science regarding everything from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the false debate on climate change, to the questionable interests behind global vaccination programs.

The latest example of this comes via National Geographic which recently published an article titled, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?,” which claims:

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Indeed, just as religions claimed a monopoly on morality and spirituality, National Geographic condemns those “empowered by their own sources of information” and “their own interpretations of research,” maintaining that the only truth to be found is amongst the “consensus of experts.”

The Consensus of “Experts” 

The article goes on to claim:

The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

National Geographic never explains why “organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry” are conspiring to lie, but the notion that “scientists” would conspire to lie is “laughable.” After all, scientists work under various organizations funded by special interests as well, including immense corporate-financier interests – many of which overlap with big-oil, ironically. If the billions to be made by big-oil is motivation enough to lie and say the Earth isn’t getting warmer, aren’t the billions to be made in a “carbon credit” pyramid scheme also motivation enough to lie that it is?

The “science” of smoking. Images collected by the New York Times for their article, “When Doctors, and Even Santa, Endorsed Tobacco” depict “scientific studies” assuring consumers of the safety, even benefits of smoking cigarettes commonsense told everyone else were literally killing people. Those today who think they are ahead of everyone else by parroting “scientific studies” regarding big-ag’s GMOs, big-pharma’s vaccines, and big-oil and bankers’ climate change racket are ahead of nothing. They are being duped by an old trick practiced shamelessly for at least 100 years.

A truly scientific examination of the facts would reveal that the climate always changes – that humans are most likely impacting the climate since virtually everything else does – but that also both big-oil and big-business possess enough money to buyout both sides of the climate change debate, and profit from it without actually truly understanding the climate or what humanity can do to adjust to it no matter what it does or why.

The article then states:

…evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Evolution does happen. Biology is incomprehensible without it. The climate does change. The science of vaccines is sound. The problem that most people have with each of these topics is not honestly addressed by National Geographic. The article puts up strawmen arguments to make anyone questioning the established narrative appear exceptionally irrational, even dangerous.

Few if anyone seriously questions the theory of evolution. The moon landings are also mentioned in the article, but also are included for the sole purpose of making people questioning the matters of GMO, climate change, and vaccines seem more unreasonable and fanatical.

Besides appealing to mainstream “experts,” the article doesn’t actually address the arguments for or against each of the three latter topics. The article is essentially a long winded hit piece on people questioning the establishment and what it claims science is telling us about each of these three points of contention. It is essentially a warning against “heresy.”

The few hints included in the article however, reflecting the talking points of big-government, big-business, and big-academia, are easily dismantled with the skeptics’ arguments conveniently excluded from the article.

GMO and Natural Selection 

National Geographic claims:

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.

It is true. Traditional breeding has altered the genetic constitution of plants and animals we consume daily. So drastically have we altered many of the grains we consume over the centuries, many people cannot even consume them because of gluten intolerance.

Nature too alters genes through mutations and natural selection. These genetic changes can lead some species to success, and in other cases, these genetic changes can lead an entire species toward extinction. In some drastic examples, these genetic changes can lead entire ecosystems into extinction – the greatest example being the Great Oxygenation Event (one of several mass extinction events in Earth’s natural history) in which cyanobacterial filled the Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen, killing off most of the planet’s anaerobic inhabitants.

If nature can lead itself off such catastrophic cliffs with natural genetic mutations, and traditional breeding has altered our food to the point it is not edible to some, what might humans altering DNA inside organisms lead to?

Biotechnology cannot be uninvented. While it shouldn’t be feared, it should be respected. It should be understood by the greatest number of people across the widest possible social strata. The democratization of this technology means the unlocking of its potential for the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of people, controlled by the very people who will directly benefit from it.

Until then, skepticism regarding products peddled by immense corporate monopolies jealously hording this technology caught time and time again infiltrating government regulatory bodies and running stables of “scientists” and “researchers” churning out “peer reviewed studies” sponsored by the very producers of the subject at hand is not “irrational” nor constitutes a distaste for science, but rather is simple, cautious commonsense.

The Problem isn’t Vaccines, its the Criminals and Killers Peddling Them 

Commonsense also tells us that rolling up our sleeve and allowing ourselves to be injected by a substance produced by literal criminals is a demonstration of unhinged, absolute insanity.

Indeed, the manufacturers of vaccines are criminals, literally. One example is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), an immense pharmaceutical giant based in the UK. It has been caught on at least 3 separate continents engaged in a multi-billion dollar bribery racket. In China when the police began investigating the systemic corruption driving GSK’s sales in Asia, GSK attempted to bribe the police as well.

The Financial Times would report in an article titled, “Police accuse GlaxoSmithKline China head of ‘ordering’ bribes,” that:

According to the official, the company’s China subsidiary set up several internal units with code names like “operation Great Wall” and “operation soaring dragon” specifically to bribe doctors and government officials.

He also said that in 2012, as the company came under scrutiny from the authorities, Mr Reilly and two Chinese subordinates established a “crisis management team” to bribe law enforcement officers from China’s industrial and commercial administration. The goal was to convince them to stop an investigation into the company’s illegal activity, the official said.

The pharmaceutical giant has been caught in Europe, the Middle East, and the US in similar bribery rackets of equal immensity.

GSK also manufactures vaccines for diseases including hepatitis, rotavirus and HPV infections, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, bacterial meningitis, and influenza. The question of whether or not properly manufactured vaccines can guard against the above mentioned diseases isn’t the question, the question is why would anyone trust their health and life to a corporation engaged in global-spanning criminality?

But GSK’s bribery scandals and the fact that virtually all other mega-pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in similar practices isn’t the worst of it.

During the height of South Africa’s apartheid system, government scientists were working on vaccines that would devastate the nation’s black communities. The Economist would report in an article titled, “Dr Death and Prime Evil,” that (emphasis added):

In contrast to the conviction of Mr de Kock stands the bizarre case of Wouter Basson (pictured), a medical doctor who ran the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme. Nicknamed “Dr Death” by newspapers, he was granted immunity for many crimes because they allegedly took place outside South Africa. As Dr Death he allegedly provided cyanide capsules to soldiers, and tried to develop bacteria that would selectively kill black people, as well as vaccines to make black women infertile.

The United Nations would elaborate on this biological weapons program in their report titled, “Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme,” which stated (emphasis added):

One example of this interaction involved anti-fertility work. According to documents from RRL [Roodeplaat Research Laboratories], the facility had a number of registered projects aimed at developing an anti-fertility vaccine. This was a personal project of the first managing director of RRL, Dr Daniel Goosen. Goosen, who had done research into embryo transplants, told the TRC that he and Basson had discussed the possibility of developing an anti-fertility vaccine which could be selectively administered—without the knowledge of the recipient. The intention, he said, was to administer it to black South African women without their knowledge.

Dr. Basson helped develop vaccines aimed at destroying South Africa’s black communities. They were to be given to victims without their knowledge.

One wonders what sort of lies the South African media would have invented, when black women began to realize the vaccines were in fact a weapon aimed at them and their communities and began warning others not to take them. Would terms like “anti-vaxxers” have been invented, and parades of “scientists” rolled out to assure South Africans that vaccines were perfectly safe and those refusing to take them were dangerously ignorant? Would South Africa’s version of National Geographic have claimed such people were simply being irrational in the face of the unquestionable reasoning of science?

Why is National Geographic now calling people “irrational” for being suspicious of vaccines when they are created by criminal corporations and when there are recent examples of governments using vaccines as weapons against their own people?

It might also trouble readers to know that South Africa’s repressive, racist, genocidal regime at the time received significant support from the United States and many European nations. This included both political support and significant military aid.

Considering all of this, it would seem rather unreasonable to trust “the experts.”

As with GMOs, studies underwriting the safety and necessity of these vaccines are also subject to immense lobbying efforts and outright corruption and criminality. Efforts to vaccinate the entire population of the planet (7 billion and counting) with a growing number of vaccines, including boosters for those who have already received them, is worth billions upon billions. Trusting “scientists” without considering the possibility this immense fortune might skew their objectivity is folly. It is just as dangerous to be ignorant of the human condition and its corruptibility as it is to be ignorant of scientific facts regarding diseases and the benefits of vaccines.

What is the truth behind the science of vaccines? They work. They may or may not be necessary in nations whose populations have access to proper nutrition along with modern sanitation and hygiene practices. If vaccines are to be distributed, they should be manufactured and administered by interests outside of government and corporate entities, both of whom have proven beyond doubt they cannot be trusted with such a responsibility.

Climate Change Will Happen, With or Without Us 

Everything from the sun, to geological processes, to constantly evolving ecosystems have an impact on the climate. There is no “normal” climate we must attempt to maintain. Millions of years before human civilization, CO2 levels and temperatures were many times higher than what they are now. During the Cretaceous period there were no ice caps and the continent of Antarctica was covered with lush temperate forests inhabited by dinosaurs.

The future after anthropogenic climate change causes sea levels to rise? No, this is the Earth tens of millions of years ago when CO2 levels were 15 times higher than they are today and Antarctica was covered in temperate forests filled with dinosaurs. Climate change is going to happen with or without humanity, and instead of working on policy, we should be working on technology that will help us minimize our impact on the Earth (and our own health) and ‘weather’ the weather, no matter what it does or why.

Humanity itself has seen wild fluctuations in the climate, enduring an ice age and an exceptionally warm period during Medieval times.

The fact that the climate of the planet naturally changes, however, does not absolve humans from minimizing their impact on the planet. Beyond ending the reckless genetic contamination of the planet’s genetic heritage through the use of GMOs, the petrochemical industry and the heavily centralized consumerist paradigm that currently exists must also be dismantled, decentralized, and converted to more sustainable and healthier alternatives, not only for the planet, but for society and human beings individually.

Deutsche Bank’s “CO2 Clock” meant to leverage people’s fear of anthropogenic climate change directly into billions via a “carbon credit” pyramid scheme. While big-oil makes billions off of petrochemicals destroying the environment and then denying their role in doing so, their literal bankrollers are making billions exploiting public outrage over their practices. Meanwhile, the climate may or may not be changing, with or without humans driving it, and no one is genuinely examining it because they are all entangled in this immense racket.

That should be a conclusion both sides of the current climate change debate could agree on – one doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand the impact on human health car exhaust has on the human body or the immense waste involved in manufacturing plastic trinkets in China, putting them on a ship to steam across oceans to be put onto trucks to be put into a Walmart and sit under lights burning 24 hours a day to be bought by a consumer who drove to the store and now must drive back home.

But dismantling immense oil and retail monopolies and replacing them with self-sufficient, high-tech local communities seems to be furthest from the minds of those championing urgent activism in response to climate change. Instead, they propose even more power be put into the hands of governments, banks, and corporations to create “policy.” The “policy” to no one’s surprise, leaves more power centralized in the hands of the very special interests that are truly and quantifiably destroying the environment.

Why aren’t people seeking technological rather than political solutions to address climate change? What if we mitigate humanity’s impact on the climate, and it still changes, just as it has for hundreds of millions of years before humans walked the Earth? Will “carbon credits” feed us if the world becomes incredibly cold, destroying global agriculture? Will it hold back flood waters if oceans rise despite our greatest efforts? Some how, “science” has convinced people to worry immensely about a problem but do nothing at all practical about it.

What is it about rational “science” that has people acting so irrationally?

Science as the New Religion 

Hiding behind science is nothing new. Darwinists hid behind it to prop up their racism, which in fact inspired the Nazis to hide behind it to scientifically prove they were the “master race.” The Nazis, in fact, loved science, and used it with horrible precision. As mentioned before, big-tobacco used “science” to prove their products were perfectly “safe.” What precisely has convinced people today that such charades are not still playing out, more refined now than ever?

As National Geographic stated, people love their tribes. Those who have circled their wagons around “science” as their chosen dogma, are no different than the religious they believe themselves to be superior to. They have not truly and objectively looked into any of the issues they blindly support – and as National Geographic did, simply claim “it’s science!” or that “experts said!”

The arguments made for GMO, vaccines, and climate change are made by the same circle of special interests and propagated by their immense media monopolies. Little they say can be independently verified by the army of sycophants that eagerly repeat their claims. Citing a “peer reviewed study” is different than reproducing an experiment’s results oneself.

Also troubling is that following the money to see just how valid or compromised such studies might be seems not to even factor into this tribe’s calculus. Their belief that scientists are infallible and incorruptible is as naive as those who believe their respective priest classes are likewise somehow above all others morally, spiritually, and intellectually.

National Geographic’s article will undoubtedly help reinforce this new, backwards religion of “science,” while leaving real science battered, abused, and a stolen shield carried by liars as they carry out misdeeds against others. And while this new religion will swear their “science” is the only answer – all others might hear is yet another and particularly shrill voice amongst many others drowning out the voice of real reason.

“Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. According to legend, Iran’s President has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, “Israel must be wiped off the map”. Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made, …” (Arash Norouzi, Wiped off  The Map: The Rumor of the Century   January 2007)

“The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect “regime change”. The cloaks of “human rights” and of “democracy” were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts. (Professor Eric Waddell,  The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945- ), Global Research, February 2007

“This is a [Pentagon] memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” (General Wesley Clark, Democracy Now, March 2, 2007)

*         *        *

Washington is in the “business of destroying” a very long list of countries.

Who is “Wiping Countries off the Map”? Iran or the United States?

During a period which is euphemistically called the “post-war era” –extending from 1945 to the present–, the US has directly or indirectly attacked more than 40 countries.

While the tenets of US foreign policy are predicated on the “spread of democracy”, US interventionism –through military means and covert operations– has resulted in the outright destabilization and partition of sovereign nations.

Destroying countries is part of a US Imperial project, a process of global domination.  Moreover, according to official sources, the US has a total of 737 military bases in foreign countries. (2005 data)

The Notion of “Failed States”

The Washington based National Intelligence Council (NIC) in its Global Trends report  (December 2012)  “predicts” that 15 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East will become “failed states” by 2030, due to their “potential for conflict and environmental ills”.

The list of countries in the 2012 NIC report includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, DR Congo, Malawi, Haiti, Yemen. (see p  39)

In its previous 2005 report, published at the outset of Bush’s second term, the National Intelligence Council had predicted that Pakistan would become a “failed’ state” by 2015 “as it will be affected by civil war, complete Talibanisation and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”.

Pakistan was compared to Yugoslavia which was carved up into seven proxy states after a decade of US-NATO sponsored “civil wars”.

The NIC forecast for Pakistan was a “Yugoslav-like fate” in a “country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005).

While the failed states are said to “serve as safehavens for political and religious extremists” (p. 143), the report does not acknowledge the fact that the US and its allies have, since the 1970s, provided covert support to religious extremist organizations as a means to destabilize sovereign secular nation states. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan were secular states in the 1970s.

A Yugoslav or Somalia-style “failed state status” is not the result of internal social divisions, it is a strategic objective implemented through covert operations and military action.

The Washington based Fund for Peace, whose mandate is to promote “sustainable security through research”, publishes (annually) a “Failed States Index” based on a risk assessment (see map below).  Thirty three countries (included in the Alert and Warm categories) are identified as “failed states”.

According to the Fund for Peace, the “failed states” are also “targets for Al Qaeda linked terrorists”

“The annual ranking of nations by the Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy for failing/fragile-state trouble-signs comes as international alarm grows about al-Qaeda-linked extremists setting up a state-based sanctuary in northern Mali for jihadi expansion.”

Needless to say, the history of Al Qaeda as a US intelligence asset, its role in creating factional divisions and  instability in the Middle East, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are not mentioned.  The activities of the jihadist Al Qaeda units in most of these countries are part of a diabolical covert intelligence agenda.

“Weaker” and “Failed States”: A Threat to America

In a twist logic, “weaker failed states”, according to the US Congress, are said to constitute a threat to the security of the US. The latter includes “several threats emanating from states that are variously described as weak, fragile, vulnerable, failing, precarious, failed, in crisis, or collapsed“.

As the Cold War concluded in the early 1990s, analysts became aware of an emerging international security environment, in which weak and failing states became vehicles for transnational organized crime, nuclear proliferation pathways, and hot spots for civil conflict and humanitarian emergencies. The potential U.S. national security threats weak and failing states pose became further apparent with Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attack on the United States, which Osama bin Laden masterminded from the safe haven that Afghanistan provided. The events of 9/11 prompted President George W. Bush to claim in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy that “weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states.” (Weak and Failing States: Evolving Security, Threats and U.S. Policy, CRS Report for the US Congress, Washington, 2008)

What is not mentioned in this Congressional CRS report is that the “hot spots of organized crime and civilian conflict” are the result of US covert intelligence operations.

Amply documented, the Afghan drug economy which generates over 90 percent of the World’s supply of heroin is tied into a multibillion dollar money laundering operation involving major financial institutions.  The drug trade out of Afghanistan  is protected by the CIA and US-NATO occupation forces.

Syria: Categorized as a “Failed State”

The atrocities committed against the Syrian population by the US-NATO sponsored Free Syrian Army (FSA) create  conditions which favor sectarian warfare.

Sectarian extremism favors the breakup of Syria as a Nation State as well as the demise of the central government in Damascus.

Washington’s foreign policy objective is to transform Syria into what the National Intelligence Council (NIC) calls a “failed state”.

Regime change implies maintaining a central government. As the Syrian crisis unfolds, the endgame is no longer “regime change” but the partition and destruction of Syria as a Nation State.

The US-NATO-Israel strategy is to divide the country up into three weak states. Recent media reports intimate that if  Bashar Al Assad “refuses to step down”, “the alternative is a failed state like Somalia.”

One possible ”break-up scenario” reported by the Israeli press would be the formation of separate and  “independent” Sunni, Alawite-Shiite, Kurdish and Druze states.

According to Major-General Yair Golan of Israel’s IDF “Syria is in civil war, which will lead to a failed state, and terrorism will blossom in it.”  The Israel Defence Forces are currently analyzing “how Syria would break up”, according to Major General Golan (Reuters, May31, 2012)

In November,  United Nations peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi intimated that Syria could become “A New Somalia” ,… “warning of a scenario in which warlords and militia fill a void left by a collapsed state.” (Reuters, November 22, 2012)

 “What I am afraid of is worse … the collapse of the state and that Syria turns into a new Somalia.”

“I believe that if this issue is not dealt with correctly, the danger is ‘Somalisation’ and not partition: the collapse of the state and the emergence of warlords, militias and fighting groups.” (Ibid)

What the UN envoy failed to mention is that the breakup of Somalia, was deliberate. It was part of a covert US military and intelligence agenda,  which is now being applied to several targeted countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which are categorized as “failed states”.

The central question is: who is failing the failed states? Who is “Taking them Out”?

The planned break-up of Syria as a sovereign state is part of an  integrated regional military and intelligence agenda which includes Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan. According to the “predictions” of the National Intelligence Council, the breakup of Pakistan is slated to occur in the course of the next three years.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.

“While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

Nuclear war has become a multibillion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”.

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled.

Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.”

(Michel Chossudovsky, Towards a World War III Scenario, Global Research, Montreal,  2012)

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Reviews

Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet earth. This book is required reading for everyone in the peace movement around the world.”
-Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois College of Law

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute  

A new study proves just how invasive Monsanto’s best selling chemicals are, revealing how herbicide toxins are appearing in 75% of rain and air samples.

Take a deep breath. Thanks to the massive use of herbicides across the planet, you likely just inhaled a dose of Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, Round Up – at least according to the latest US Geological Survey published in the journal Enviromental Toxicology and Chemistry.

The chemical ingredient used in Round Up, known as glyphosate, as well as other ‘inert’ toxic chemicals, were found in over 75% of the air and rain samples tested from Mississippi in 2007 – a large river that cuts through the middle of the US, and is the basin in which hundreds of farms’ runoff drains.

An evaluation of numerous pesticides currently used were measured through water and air samples collected from 1995 to 2007 during growing season along the Mississippi Delta agricultural region. If 75% of samples containing Round Up isn’t shocking enough, there’s more:

• Round Up chemicals were prevalent, but so were 37 other toxic compounds – all present in both rain and air samples.

• Glyphosate was found in 86% of air samples, and 77% of rain samples.

• Seven compounds in 1995 and five in 2007 were detected in more than 50% of both air and rain samples. Atrazine, metolachlor, and propanil were detected in more than 50% of the air and rain samples in both years.

Read: 3 Studies Proving Toxic Glyphosate in Urine, Blood, Breast Milk

The report states that 2 million kilograms of glyphosate were applied statewide in 2007, or 55% of the total herbicide flux for that year (~129 μg/m2), leading them to state the high prevalence of glyphosate in air and water “was not surprising.”

What is surprising is that these results are not becoming widely distributed until 2015.

This estimate, if correct, reveals that there has been an ~ 18 fold increase in glyphosate concentrations in air and water samples in only 12 years (1995-2007), and likely more since the samples were taken.

This means that our bodies have been under fire with biotech toxins, not just in the food we eat, but in the air we breathe, and the water we drink, for more than a decade.

The longer the period of exposure we are subjected to, you can bet the more diseases will crop up.

These toxins have cumulative and synergistic effects with other toxicants with incalculably complex results that produce far more harm together than glyphosate alone (i.e. synergistic toxicity).

If you want to breathe a sigh of relief, you’ll have to fight biotech. It isn’t just the food they are poisoning.

Follow us: @naturalsociety on Twitter | NaturalSociety on Facebook

The recent hysteria propagated by the dinosaur media regarding the latest measles outbreak is beyond illogical and simply based on a patchwork of lies and misinformation. News of the recent “Disneyland measles outbreak” has brought forth a sudden myriad of self-proclaimed “experts” on measles and vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella).

Aside from expressing a know-it-all attitude, vaccine proponents have viciously attacked and threatened anyone in favor of, or even on the fence about, not vaccinating. One of the most classic (and also completely unreasonable) threats insist that parents who choose not to vaccinate should be arrested and charged with child abuse, a concept that infringes not only on natural health freedom but freedoms rooted in the framework of a true democracy.

All of this anger, hate and debate over a disease that hasn’t taken a life in the U.S. since the early 2000s? Anyone with remotely any intelligence can sense that this issue goes much deeper than what’s being reported on TV.

As with any emotionally charged issue, the measles debate has quickly turned political, being used as a tool to influence voters, as well as eliminate more freedoms through forced vaccinations.

For such a heated debate, little true information is being provided. For one, those only following mainstream media may not realize that people who have been vaccinated for measles may be more dangerous than those who haven’t.

As Natural News‘ Jonathan Benson recently reported, numerous published studies show that people who have received the MMR vaccine shed the diseases for weeks, or in some cases even months. This means that the vaccinated could potentially be infecting others, as the virus is very contagious, making vaccinated individuals very dangerous, especially around those with compromised immune systems.

Benson’s report continues to note that nearly two decades ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention realized this phenomenon when they tested urine samples collected from newly vaccinated 15-month-old children as well as young adults and found that nearly all of them had detectable levels of the measles virus inside their bodies.

If I had to bet, I doubt emerging self-proclaimed “experts” on the MMR vaccine and measles aren’t privy to this information, making their accusations even more unfounded.

MMR vaccine contains human DNA from fetal cells linked to autism?

Another important tidbit of information that’s being completely ignored on a national level is the possible link between the MMR vaccine’s ingredients and autism. A study released in 2011 called “Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review,” considers a host of peer-reviewed, published theories that suggest a possible connection between vaccines and autism.

The study’s lead researcher, Helen Ratajczak, a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm wrote:

“Documented causes of autism include genetic mutations and/or deletions, viral infections, and encephalitis following vaccination. Therefore, autism is the result of genetic defects and/or inflammation of the brain.”

Human tissue used in 23 vaccines

One of Ratajczak’s biggest concerns is the human DNA used in vaccines, including cells from the fetal lung tissue of aborted babies. Around the time vaccine makers removed thimerosal (mercury) from most childhood vaccines (except for the flu shot), they began making vaccines using human tissue to grow viruses, including measles and chicken pox.

Ratajczak observed a correlation between the introduction of human DNA to the MMR vaccine and autism, suggesting a possible link. She also notes an additional spike in autism in 1995 after vaccine makers began growing the chicken pox vaccine in human fetal tissue.

In regard to why human DNA could possibly cause brain damage, Ratajczak said that the DNA in vaccines is taken up by human cells and recombined into their genome. She further stated:

“That DNA is incorporated into the host DNA. Now it’s changed, altered self and body kills it. Where is this most expressed? The neurons of the brain. Now you have body killing the brain cells and it’s an ongoing inflammation. It doesn’t stop, it continues through the life of that individual.”

Sources:

http://healthimpactnews.com

http://www.thenewamerican.com

http://www.cbsnews.com

http://www.historyofvaccines.org

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.rescuepost.com

How Many Constitutional Freedoms Have We Lost?

This post explains the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution – and provides a scorecard on the extent of the loss of each right. (This is an updated version of an essay we wrote in February. Unfortunately, a lot of information has come out since then.)

First Amendment

The 1st Amendment protects speech, religion, assembly and the press:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Supreme Court has also interpreted the First Amendment as protecting freedom of association.

However, the government is arresting those speaking out … and violently crushing peaceful assemblies which attempt to petition the government for redress.

A federal judge found that the law allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.

There are also enacted laws allowing the secret service to arrest anyone protesting near the president or other designated folks (that might explain incidents like this).

Mass spying by the NSA violates our freedom of association.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist for exercising our First Amendment rights certainly violates the First Amendment. The government is using laws to crush dissent, and it’s gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny.  (And the U.S. is doing the same things that tyrannical governments have done for 5,000 years to crush dissent.)

For example, the following actions may get an American citizen living on U.S. soil labeled as a “suspected terrorist” today:

• Taking any steps to protect your privacy (and see this)

• Being a hippy

• Complaining about the taste of your tap water

• Being young (if you live near a battle zone, you are fair game; and see this)

• Acting like a kid

• Using social media

• Reporting or doing journalism (and here and here)

• Having “strange odors” or “bright colored stains on clothes” (what if you eat mustard or ketchup?)

• Speaking out against government policies

• Protesting anything (such as participating in the “Occupy” or “Tea Party” movements).  For example, Department of Defense training manuals classify all protest as “low-level terrorism”. And see this, this, this and this

• Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this)

• Criticizing the government’s targeting of innocent civilians with drones (although killing innocent civilians with drones is one of the main things which increases terrorism. And see this)

• Asking questions about pollution (even at a public Congressional hearing?)

• Paying cash at an Internet cafe

• Asking questions about Wall Street shenanigans

• Holding gold

• Creating alternative currencies

• Stocking up on more than 7 days of food (even though all Mormons are taught to stockpile food, and most Hawaiians store up on extra food)

• Having bumper stickers saying things like “Know Your Rights Or Lose Them”

• Investigating factory farming

• Infringing a copyright

• Taking pictures or videos

• Talking to police officers

• Wearing a hoodie

• Driving a van

• Writing on a piece of paper

• (Not having a Facebook account may soon be added)

And holding the following beliefs may also be considered grounds for suspected terrorism:

• Being frustrated with “mainstream ideologies”

• Being a libertarian

• Liking the Founding Fathers

• Being a Christian

• Being anti-tax, anti-regulation or for the gold standard

• Being “reverent of individual liberty”

• Being “anti-nuclear”

• “Believe in conspiracy theories”

• “A belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack”

• “Impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”

• “Insert religion into the political sphere”

• “Those who seek to politicize religion”

• “Supported political movements for autonomy”

• Being “anti-abortion”

• Being “anti-Catholic”

• Being “anti-global”

• “Suspicious of centralized federal authority”

• “Fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”

• “A belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in … survivalism”

• Opposing genetically engineered food

• Opposing surveillance

And see this. (Of course, Muslims are more or less subject to a separate system of justice in America.)

And 1st Amendment rights are especially chilled when power has become so concentrated that the same agency which spies on all Americans also decides who should be assassinated.

Second Amendment

The 2nd Amendment states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Gun control and gun rights advocates obviously have very different views about whether guns are a force for violence or for good.

But even a top liberal Constitutional law expert reluctantly admits that the right to own a gun is as important a Constitutional right as freedom of speech or religion:

Like many academics, I was happy to blissfully ignore the Second Amendment. It did not fit neatly into my socially liberal agenda.

***

It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

***

More important, the mere reference to a purpose of the Second Amendment does not alter the fact that an individual right is created. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is stated in the same way as the right to free speech or free press. The statement of a purpose was intended to reaffirm the power of the states and the people against the central government. At the time, many feared the federal government and its national army. Gun ownership was viewed as a deterrent against abuse by the government, which would be less likely to mess with a well-armed populace.

Considering the Framers and their own traditions of hunting and self-defense, it is clear that they would have viewed such ownership as an individual right — consistent with the plain meaning of the amendment.

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that … here’s the really hard part … the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

The gun control debate – including which weapons and magazines are banned – is still in flux …

Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com.

Third Amendment

The 3rd Amendment prohibits the government forcing people to house soldiers:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

A recent lawsuit by a Nevada family – covered by (Mother Jones, Fox News and Courthouse News – alleges violation of the Third Amendment.

Moreover, the military is arguably quartering “digital” troops within our homes.

Fourth Amendment

The 4th Amendment prevents unlawful search and seizure:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But the government is spying on everything we do … without any real benefit or justification.

Indeed, experts say that the type of spying being carried out by the NSA and other agencies is exactly the kind of thing which King George imposed on the American colonists … which led to the Revolutionary War.

And many Constitutional experts – such as Jonathan Turley – think that the police went too far in Boston with lockdowns and involuntary door-to-door searches.

Fifth Amendment

The 5th Amendment addresses due process of law, eminent domain, double jeopardy and grand jury:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But the American government has shredded the 5th Amendment by subjecting us to indefinite detention and taking away our due process rights.

The government claims the right to assassinate or indefinitely detain any American citizen on U.S. citizen without any due process. And see this.

For example, American citizens are being detained in Guantanamo-like conditions in Chicago … including:

• Brutality

• Being held in secret

• Not even telling a suspect’s lawyer whether his client is being held?

And see this, this and this.

As such, the government is certainly depriving people of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

There are additional corruptions of 5th Amendment rights – such as property being taken for private purposes. And the right to remain silent is gone.

The percentage of prosecutions in which a defendant is denied a grand jury is difficult to gauge, as there is so much secrecy surrounding many terrorism trials.

Image by William Banzai

Sixth Amendment

The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to hear the criminal charges levied against us and to be able to confront the witnesses who have testified against us, as well as speedy criminal trials, and a public defender for those who cannot hire an attorney:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Subjecting people to indefinite detention or assassination obviously violates the 6th Amendment right to a jury trial. In both cases, the defendants is “disposed of” without ever receiving a trial … and often without ever hearing the charges against them.

More and more commonly, the government prosecutes cases based upon “secret evidence” that they don’t show to the defendant … or sometimes even the judge hearing the case.

The government uses “secret evidence” to spy on Americans, prosecute leaking or terrorism charges (even against U.S. soldiers) and even assassinate people. And see this and this.

Secret witnesses are being used in some cases. And sometimes lawyers are not even allowed to read their own briefs.

Indeed, even the laws themselves are now starting to be kept secret. And it’s about to get a lot worse.

Moreover, government is “laundering” information gained through mass surveillance through other agencies, with an agreement that the agencies will “recreate” the evidence in a “parallel construction” … so they don’t have to admit that the evidence came from unconstitutional spying.   A former top NSA official says that this is the opposite of following the Fourth Amendment, but is a “totalitarian process” which shows that we’re in a “police state”.

And there are two systems of justice in America … one for the big banks and other fatcats, and one for everyone else. The government made it official policy not to prosecute fraud, even though fraud is the main business model adopted by Wall Street. Indeed, the biggest financial crime in world history, the largest insider trading scandal of all time, illegal raiding of customer accounts and blatant financing of drug cartels and terrorists have all been committed recently without any real criminal prosecution or jail time.

On the other hand, government prosecutors are using the legal system to crush dissent and to silence whistleblowers.

And some of the nation’s most powerful judges have lost their independence … and are in bed with the powers-that-be.

Seventh Amendment

The 7th Amendment guarantees trial by jury in federal court for civil cases:

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

But there are two systems of justice in America … one for the big banks and other fatcats, and one for everyone else.  So good luck going after the powers-that-be.

And the World Justice Project – a bipartisan, independent group with honorary chairs including numerous current and former Supreme Court Justices – released a report saying that Americans have less access to justice than most wealthy countries …  and many developing nations.  The report finds that Americans have less access to justice than Botswanans,  and that only the wealthy have the resources to protect rights using the court system:

For example, Germans sue equally whether they are rich or poor  … but in America, only the wealthy have the resources to protect rights using the court system:

And the austerity caused by the highest levels of inequality in world history – which are in turn is caused by socialist actions by our government, which have destroyed the Founding Fathers’ vision of prosperity – is causing severe budget cuts to the courts, resulting in the wheels of justice slowing down considerably.

Finally, federal judges have recently decided that they can pre-judge cases before the plaintiff even has the chance to conduct discovery … and throw cases out if they don’t like plaintiff’s case.

Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com

 

Eighth Amendment

The 8th Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Indefinite detention and assassination are obviously cruel and unusual punishment.

The widespread system of torture carried out in the last 10 years – with the help of other countries – violates the 8th Amendment. Many want to bring it back … or at least justify its past use.

While Justice Scalia disingenuously argues that torture does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment because it is meant to produce information – not punish – he’s wrong. It’s not only cruel and unusual … it is technically a form of terrorism.

And government whistleblowers are being cruelly and unusually punished with unduly harsh sentences meant to intimidate anyone else from speaking out.

Ninth Amendment

The 9th Amendment provides that people have other rights, even if they aren’t specifically listed in the Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

We can debate what our inherent rights as human beings are. I believe they include the right to a level playing field, and access to non-toxic food and water. You may disagree.

But everyone agrees that the government should not actively encourage fraud and manipulation. However, the government – through its malignant, symbiotic relation with big corporations – is interfering with our aspirations for economic freedom, safe food and water (instead of arsenic-laden, genetically engineered junk), freedom from undue health hazards such as irradiation due to government support of archaic nuclear power designs, and a level playing field (as opposed to our crony capitalist system in which the little guy has no shot due to redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super-elite, and government support of white collar criminals).

By working hand-in-glove with giant corporations to defraud us into paying for a lower quality of life, the government is trampling our basic rights as human beings.

Tenth Amendment

The 10th Amendment provides that powers not specifically given to the Federal government are reserved to the states or individual:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Two of the central principles of America’s Founding Fathers are:

(1) The government is created and empowered with the consent of the people

and

(2) Separation of powers

Today, most Americans believe that the government is threatening – rather than protecting – freedom. We’ve become more afraid of our government than of terrorists, and believe that the government is no longer acting with the “consent of the governed“.

And the federal government is trampling the separation of powers by stepping on the toes of the states and the people. For example, former head S&L prosecutor Bill Black – now a professor of law and economics – notes:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the resident examiners and regional staff of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency [both] competed to weaken federal regulation and aggressively used the preemption doctrine to try to prevent state investigations of and actions against fraudulent mortgage lenders.

Indeed, the federal government is doing everything it can to stick its nose into every aspect of our lives … and act like Big Brother.

Conclusion: While a few of the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights still exist, the vast majority are under heavy assault.

Other Constitutional Provisions … and The Declaration of Independence

In addition to the trampling of the Bill of Rights, the government has also trashed the separation of powers enshrined in the main body of the Constitution.

The government is also engaging in activities which the Founding Fathers fought against, such as taxation without representation (here and here), cronyism, deference to central banks, etc.

As the preamble to the Declaration of Independence shows, the American government is still carrying out many of the acts the Founding Fathers found most offensive:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. [Background here and here]

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. [Background here, here, here, here and here]

***

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: [Background]

***

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences [Background]

***

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. [Background]

***

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. [Background here, here and here]

“Submarines are the spaceships of the ocean.”[1] Idiosyncratic as ever, the remark from Australia’s independent Senator John Madigan on the ABC program Q & A, who had seemingly come down from a distant historical shelf, says the needed thing when it comes to submarine fleets.  Submarines are akin to extra-terrestrial vessels, moving through space.  They are also the obsessive hallmarks of military establishments keen for a fictional presence in the deep ocean. To hell with the logistics – every state shall have its childish complexes.

Certainly, in the context of such countries as Australia, the presumption is that maritime powers need to have some submerged, naval deterrent.  Britain continues to intrigue with its nostalgically pining idea of a nuclear-sea deterrent, with Trident becoming the unimpeachable weapon of politics, ever costly, ever draining.  Abandon Trident, it seems, and you commit a form of treason, or at the very least, political suicide.

When Philip Hammond replaced Liam Fox as secretary of state for defence in October 2011, commentators were aflutter that the successor “may be less committed to renewal of the country’s nuclear deterrent than his predecessor” (Jane’s Defence Weekly, Oct 19, 2011).  There was little to fear, with Hammond doing the customary reassuring rounds, and claiming that threats posed by Iran and North Korea somehow necessitated Britain’s continued need for Trident.  The UK Ministry of Defence and partners have now gone for over two years in their efforts in delivering a new generation of ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) class submarines, though the first is only scheduled to appear in costly majesty in 2028.

Like all deterrents, there are usually emotional yard sticks rather than genuine statements, and almost always irrelevant.  But the submarine entices and excites, a weapon that gives the scantiest of illusions about security.  “And when we talk about the subs,” exclaimed Madigan, “it absolutely bloody well astounds me that the rest of the world, our major competitors like Japan and Germany, these countries have been building submarines for over a hundred years.”

And not just those powers.  The fantasy of security at sea, bought with expansive submarine fleets, risks creating another distracting, and ultimately dooming arms race.  New Delhi, to give one notable example, is pushing for nuclear-armed submarines, with the INS Arihant scheduled to come into service this year.  China is already bristling in that department, with US Vice Admiral Joseph Mulloy suggesting that it has outpaced the US in terms of raw numbers.[2]

The Australian Defence Force Chief Mark Binskin is certainly unconvinced about any need for such a new fleet, which will cost in the order of $20 to $30 billion, though he does concede to its emotive potential.  “I don’t believe you have to build [submarines] to be able to sustain in the country.”  The Abbott government has been squirming over the process of how, exactly, the submarines will be built, be it offshore or actually in Australia itself.  No formal tender process has been suggested – instead, a “competitive evaluation process” is on the cards, which is bound to involve neither competition or evaluation.

In the spirit of jingoism, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has made it clear that an openly competitive process might lead to the sneaky Russians getting a bite of the submarine market. “An open tender is there for anyone and the last thing we would want to see is a Russian company, for argument’s sake, bidding to produce an Australian submarine” (AAP, Feb 11). Fears, perhaps, that it just might work.

The government has, in turn, attacked their opposite numbers for wanting submarines from Russia or, in a rather stretched manner, Korea.  “What the leader of the Opposition wants, he wants anyone to be able to compete to provide Australia’s next generation submarines.  He might want the Russians to compete.  The Putin class subs.” As for North Korea, an open tender might well give Australia “Kim Jong-il submarines.”

Across the political aisle, opposition leader Bill Shorten has been happily dumping on the Japanese, whom he cannot stand coming into contention as a possible builder of Australian submarines.  “In the Second World War, 366 merchant ships were sunk off Australia and the government in the 1930s said ‘we don’t need Australian ships, we’ll privatise them.”  This, argues Abbott, demonstrates a form of “antediluvian xenophobia”.

Both sides of politics, in other words, have their foreign monsters, engineers and designers who just won’t, for some far-fetched historical reason, be considered.  Not only is the construction issue a vapidly patriotic one; it is steeped with competitive idiocy.

All in all, the question to be asked is how a fleet of 12 costly, overbearingly unproductive submarines could make a difference in the Asia-Pacific, other than wounding the budget.  Maritime power is, as defined by the British Ministry of Defence, “The ability to project power at sea and from the sea to influence the behaviour of people or the course of events.”[3]  The British rationale for exercising maritime power is bound up in its past as a naval power, wedded, as well, to the idea that “prosperity, stability and security depend upon the vital access provided by the sea and the maintenance of an international system and free trade.”  That too, has its inventory of illusions.

The Australian variant of this vision, however, is hard to fathom.  It intends introducing the equivalent of air rifles before howitzers.  For the US cheerleaders such as Greg Sheridan of The Australian (Feb 21), the presence of a new submarine fleet is necessary to “balance” the arms race in the region.  How that balance is measured is impossible to say, though certainty is never far from those who have invested in deterrence the properties of clarity and reality.  Perhaps they are spaceships of the ocean after all.

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

Notes:

[1] http://junkee.com/submarines-are-the-spaceships-of-the-ocean-and-other-things-we-learned-from-last-nights-qanda/50246
[2] http://rt.com/news/235651-china-us-submarine-fleet/
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/33699/20110816JDP0_10_BMD.pdf

• 

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  25 Facts About the Pharmaceutical Industry, Vaccines and “Anti-Vaxers”

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The heavy snowfalls during the months of December 2013 and January 2014 were caused by the excessive snow and ice deposits formed in the Arctic region during August 2013.

Last year, fifty states in the U.S. experienced heavy snowfalls during the months of December 2013 and January 2014. Based on the information released on the internet, I found out that the snowfall was the aftermath of the unusual formation of extensive ice deposits in the Arctic region. However, it is explained on the basis of the “Global Warming” conception.

We are told that the ice deposits on the surface of the sea in the North Polar Region melted and the resultant sea water on the surface evaporated with the heat and rose up. This affected the polar vortex, which usually circles the middle and upper troposphere and extends into stratosphere. This further altered the path of the polar vortex, which widely spread over the entire North American continent causing heavy snowfall. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2757831/Is-global-warming-causing-COLDER-winters-Melting-ice-destabilising-polar-vortex-study-claims.html

But the British Meteorological Department has found out from the records of 30,000 stations which recorded weather that during the past seventeen years, i.e. from 1997 to 2014, the world’s temperature had not risen at all. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2436710/Met-office-proof-global-warming-pause-climate-summit-confirms-global-temperature-stopped-rising.html

Hence the explanation given for the widespread snowfall in America last year, during the months of December 2013 and January 2014 on the basis of the “Global Warming” conception is totally wrong.

In the year 2007, BBC released a news item stating that a study conducted by Prof. Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski and researchers of NASA has predicted that particularly in the month of September 2013, the North Polar Region might be ice-free. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

But contrary to the predictions of those “Global Warming” scientists, the Arctic Region was not only not sea ice-free, but that ice had unusually formed in an area of around 5,33,000 square miles amounting to 29 percent of additional ice formation in the Arctic Region, and this was captured in the satellite images of NASA.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/And-global-COOLING-Return-Arctic-ice-cap-grows-29-year.htm

It proves that the unusual excessive formation of ice in the Arctic Region is the sole reason for the heavy snowfall in America.

There is also a possibility that this incident would recur if excessive ice is again formed in the Arctic Region. So, America, Canada and European nations may be alerted on these grounds.

The Obama Justice Department announced Tuesday that it will not press federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman for the February 2012 slaying of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin.

Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement declaring that “a comprehensive investigation found that the high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution cannot be met under the circumstances here.”

Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, criticized the decision in comments to reporters following the announcement, which came on the eve of the third anniversary of the killing of the 17-year old in the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community in Sanford, Florida.

“[Zimmerman] took a life, carelessly and recklessly, and he shouldn’t deserve to have his entire life walking around on the street free. I just believe that he should be held accountable for what he’s done,” Fulton said.

Pointing to the recent exoneration of police officers who killed unarmed youth and workers in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, Fulton said, “We have grand juries and special grand juries; they’re making a decision to not even arrest a person.”

Zimmerman, a self-appointed vigilante with aspirations to join the police or the military, stalked Martin as he returned from purchasing snacks at a nearby convenience store before shooting the youth less than 100 yards from the home where Martin’s father was staying.

“This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something… these assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman can be heard to say on a recording of a phone call to police taken just prior to the killing.

Police arrived on the scene just minutes after the call ended, where they found Martin lying unresponsive on the ground near Zimmerman, who was still holding the weapon used to kill the youth.

Police and local prosecutors initially refused to arrest or charge Zimmerman. After widespread protests, Zimmerman was eventually charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder.

Among the issues raised in the case was Florida’s reactionary “stand your ground” law, one of a raft of measures across the US aimed at promoting law-and-order vigilantism. The law was initially cited by prosecutors in justifying their decision not to bring charges against Zimmerman, and was later referred to by the judge in his trial.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Zimmerman was acquitted of both charges after a month-long trial. Prosecutors conducted the trial in an ineffectual manner, with police officers called by the prosecution barely concealing their sympathy for the killer.

Race was likely a factor in the killing of Martin. However, in an effort to obscure the social and class dynamics underlying the events in Ferguson, the Democratic Party and Obama administration have worked aggressively to frame the incident entirely in racial terms.

The federal civil rights investigation terminated this week was announced as part of these political maneuvers by the White House, which aimed to dissipate popular anger and channel the protest movement behind the Democratic Party.

This political operation was aided by the professional practitioners of identity politics, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, along with the various “left” groups that orbit around the Democratic Party. Obama’s race was cited as part of efforts to present the federal government as an instrument for achieving justice in the Zimmerman case.

While the decision not to charge Zimmerman for violating Martin’s civil rights does not come as a surprise, it is clearly a calculated political move on the part of the Obama administration. The announcement means an end to any possibility of holding Zimmerman criminally accountable, thus encouraging the type of vigilantism that led to Martin’s death.

The announcement also comes in the wake of media reports that the administration will not bring civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. An official announcement on that investigation is expected soon.

Joe Della Vedova, por­ta­voce dell’ufficio del Pen­ta­gono respon­sa­bile del pro­gramma F-35, ha comu­ni­cato che «l’Italia rimane impe­gnata nel pro­gramma e ad acqui­stare, in tale qua­dro, 90 cac­cia F-35». Solo dopo che la sua dichia­ra­zione è stata ripor­tata dall’agenzia Reu­ters, la mini­stra della Difesa Roberta Pinotti ha con­fer­mato, con un mes­sag­gio su Twit­ter, che «il numero di 90 è stato sta­bi­lito dal pre­ce­dente Governo. Il pro­gramma pro­se­gue secondo l’illustrazione data al Parlamento».

Dimen­tica di dire, però, che il governo Renzi si era impe­gnato cin­que mesi fa, in base a una mozione Pd, a «rie­sa­mi­nare l’intero pro­gramma F-35 per chia­rirne cri­ti­cità e costi con l’obiettivo finale di dimez­zare il bud­get» da 13 a 6,5 miliardi di euro, cifra con cui — si stima — si potrebbe acqui­stare, oltre ai 6 già com­prati, al mas­simo una ven­tina di F-35.

Da qui la noti­zia, allora dif­fusa dai media, del «dimez­za­mento» degli F-35. Smen­tita ora dall’annuncio che l’Italia man­tiene l’impegno ad acqui­starne 90, fatto che non ci sor­prende dato che sul mani­fe­sto abbiamo sem­pre soste­nuto che il governo Renzi non aveva alcuna inten­zione di ridurre tale numero. L’Italia si impe­gna ad acqui­stare 90 cac­cia F-35 della sta­tu­ni­tense Loc­kheed Mar­tin — 60 a decollo e atter­rag­gio con­ven­zio­nale e 30 a decollo corto e atter­rag­gio ver­ti­cale — senza cono­scerne il prezzo. Una recente stima del Pen­ta­gono quan­ti­fica in 98 milioni di dol­lari il costo uni­ta­rio della prima ver­sione e in 104 milioni quello della seconda versione.

Spe­ci­fica però che il costo è rela­tivo all’aereo «motore non incluso» (come sen­tirsi dire da un con­ces­sio­na­rio che nel prezzo dell’auto non è com­preso il motore). Una stima di mas­sima si può rica­vare dal bilan­cio del Pen­ta­gono, che pre­vede per l’anno fiscale 2015 uno stan­zia­mento di 4,6 miliardi di dol­lari per l’acquisto di 26 F-35, ossia 177 milioni di dol­lari — equi­va­lenti a circa 140 milioni di euro — per ogni caccia.

La Loc­kheed assi­cura che, gra­zie all’economia di scala, il costo uni­ta­rio dimi­nuirà. Tace però sul fatto che, come avviene per ogni sistema d’arma, l’F-35 subirà con­ti­nui ammo­der­na­menti che faranno lie­vi­tare la spesa. Alla quale si aggiun­ge­ranno gli enormi costi ope­ra­tivi per il man­te­ni­mento e l’armamento di una flotta di F-35. Sem­pre con denaro pub­blico, sot­tratto alle spese sociali

L’impianto Faco di Cameri, scelto dal Pen­ta­gono quale «polo di manu­ten­zione dei veli­voli F-35 schie­rati in Europa, sia di quelli acqui­stati dai paesi euro­pei sia di quelli Usa ope­ranti in Europa», già costato all’Italia un miliardo di euro, dà lavoro a meno di mille addetti che, secondo Fin­mec­ca­nica, potreb­bero arri­vare solo a 2500 a pieno regime.

E, nell’annunciare la scelta di Cameri, il gene­rale Usa Chri­sto­pher Bog­dan ha chia­rito, in pre­vi­sione di ulte­riori spese per lo svi­luppo dello sta­bi­li­mento, che «i paesi part­ner del pro­gramma F-35 si fanno carico degli inve­sti­menti per tali impianti».

I por­ta­voce sta­tu­ni­tensi, inter­vi­stati dalla Reu­ters a Roma e a Washing­ton, si com­pli­men­tano col governo Renzi per­ché, «nono­stante le pres­sioni poli­ti­che», è riu­scito a man­te­nere l’impegno ad acqui­stare 90 cac­cia­bom­bar­dieri F-35, il «numero giu­sto» per assi­cu­rare la par­te­ci­pa­zione indu­striale ita­liana al pro­gramma e, allo stesso tempo, «la difesa del paese».

Riten­gono di grande impor­tanza che «l’Italia rim­piazzi la sua obso­leta forza di cac­cia­bom­bar­dieri» (defi­ni­zione in cui col­lo­cano non solo i Tor­nado ma anche i più recenti Euro­fighter Typhoon), «nel momento di cre­scenti ten­sioni inter­na­zio­nali per i mem­bri della Nato, con ribelli pro-russi che com­bat­tono il governo ucraino e, subito al di là del Medi­ter­ra­neo, con mili­tanti dello Stato isla­mico che stanno avanzando».

Con­fer­mano così che l’F-35 è par­ti­co­lar­mente impor­tante per subor­di­nare ancor più l’Italia ai piani di guerra del Pentagono.

In April 2004, the world was shocked and horrified by the release of photographs of sadistic torture carried out by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees at the prison, most of them locked up for opposing the US military occupation, were beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and killed.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site explained that the crimes revealed in the photos and the psychology underlying them could be understood only in relation to the brutality of social relations in the United States, together with the dirty colonial aims of the war itself.

The WSWS further warned that

“such a military, accompanied by a growing army of professional ‘civilian’ mercenaries, represents a danger not only to oppressed peoples in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, but to the democratic rights of the population in the US.”

A decade later, this assessment has been fully borne out. On Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper revealed the existence of what it describes as a “black site” on the West Side of Chicago, where police detain, beat and torture prisoners, while keeping their whereabouts secret from their families and attorneys.

The newspaper writes:

“The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.”

Among those detained at the facility was Brian Jacob Church, one of the “NATO 3” who were entrapped by Chicago police in 2012 in connection with protests against the US-led military alliance, which was meeting in Chicago.

Church was taken to the secret facility and handcuffed to a bench for 17 hours. Along with two other protestors, he was set up by police on terrorism charges and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

Vic Suter, another participant in the protests, said that she was taken to the facility and interrogated while shackled to a bench for eighteen hours before she was allowed to see a lawyer.

The Guardian writes that detainees taken to the facility report having been beaten and otherwise tortured by police. In 2013, one detainee was found unconscious in an interview room at the facility. He later died.

On Thursday, the Intercept corroborated the Guardian’s account, interviewing another torture victim at the facility who was handcuffed across a bench and hit in the face and groin until he agreed to provide false testimony to police.

The revelations follow the report last week by the Guardian that Richard Zuley, one of the lead torturers at the Guantanamo detention center, used similar techniques to secure false confessions from murder suspects when he was a detective with the Chicago Police Department.

Chicago has a long history of police violence. It is also the political home of Barack Obama and has been run since 2011 by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff.

The Obama administration, far from repudiating the horrific and criminal actions of its predecessor, has deployed the apparatus of police violence ever more directly against the American people. A series of events has marked the increasingly open application within the borders of the United States of the murderous methods of the “war on terror” tested out and perfected in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.

· In September 2010, the Obama administration ordered raids on the homes of leaders of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Minneapolis and Chicago on charges of “providing material support to terrorism.”

· In May 2012, Chicago police arrested the “NATO 3,” charging them with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

· In March 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the president had the right to kill American citizens without a trial or any legal due process, including within the borders of the United States.

· Just one month later, in April 2013, the city of Boston was placed under de facto martial law following the Boston Marathon bombings, with residents told to “shelter in place” while armored vehicles and helicopters patrolled the streets and police carried out warrantless house-to-house searches.

· In June 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” The ACLU reported that the Defense Department had transferred $4.3 billion in military hardware, including armored vehicles, helicopters, and belt-fed machine guns, to local police departments.

· In August 2014, the authorities responded to protests against the police murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown with a military/police crackdown. Hundreds of peaceful protesters were arrested, shot with rubber bullets or exposed to tear gas, and over a dozen members of the press were detained.

The Obama administration is presently seeking a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, nominally to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but with no geographical boundaries defined. On Wednesday, three Brooklyn residents were arrested in connection with this new war on ISIS, clearly raising the potential for this second “war on terror” to become an occasion for police-military operations within the US “homeland.”

These developments express the growing convergence of militarism abroad with the attack on democratic rights within the US. What ties these two processes together are the class interests of the financial aristocracy and the criminal methods it employs in the defense of its wealth and power.

In pursuit of these aims, the ruling class seeks to mobilize the most backward and reactionary sections of the population, including sadistic prison guards and fascist-minded police detectives. But the ultimate responsibility for these crimes rests with forces at the highest levels of the state.

It is worth recalling that late last year the Senate released a report implicating the Bush administration in a brutal torture regime carried out at Guantanamo and CIA “black site” torture centers throughout the world. Far from anyone being held accountable for these crimes, those who ordered and carried them out have defended their actions, while the Obama administration has sought to block any prosecution of those responsible.

The actions of the ruling class express the character of American capitalism, which is based on parasitism, fraud, criminality and an economic order in deep decline. The American ruling class has no response to the crisis of its system and the inevitable growth of social opposition other than violence and repression.

Non è vero che la guerra del 2011 abbia digre­gato lo Stato libico. Il per­ché ce lo ha spie­gato il pre­si­dente eme­rito della Repub­blica, Gior­gio Napo­li­tano, inter­ve­nendo al Senato: «Ritengo che, nel senso moderno dell’espressione, uno Stato non sia mai esi­stito in Libia».

Pochi mesi fa, aveva defi­nito la Libia «Stato fal­lito» (cate­go­ria creata dal «Fondo per la pace» Usa). Ora però ci ha ripen­sato: «Che si possa par­lare oggi di Stato fal­lito suscita in me per­ples­sità: non era uno Stato l’esercizio del potere auto­cra­tico e per­so­nale del pre­si­dente Ghed­dafi sulla base di un sistema di equi­li­bri con la mol­ti­tu­dine delle tribù». Sulla sponda sud del Medi­ter­ra­neo non c’era dun­que uno Stato, la Repub­blica araba di Libia, nata nel 1969 dopo oltre 30 anni di domi­nio colo­niale ita­liano e quasi 20 di una monar­chia suc­cube di Gran Bre­ta­gna e Stati uniti. Uno Stato che, abo­lita la monar­chia, aveva chiuso nel 1970 le basi mili­tari sta­tu­ni­tensi e bri­tan­ni­che, e nazio­na­liz­zato le pro­prietà della Bri­tish Petro­leum. Uno Stato che – docu­men­tava la Banca mon­diale nel 2010 – man­te­neva «alti livelli di cre­scita eco­no­mica», assi­cu­rando (nono­stante le dispa­rità) il più alto tenore di vita in Africa e dando lavoro a circa due milioni di immi­grati afri­cani; che regi­strava «alti indi­ca­tori di svi­luppo umano» tra cui l’accesso uni­ver­sale all’istruzione pri­ma­ria e secon­da­ria e, per il 46%, a quella di livello uni­ver­si­ta­rio. Uno Stato che aveva reso pos­si­bile con i suoi inve­sti­menti la nascita di orga­ni­smi che avreb­bero potuto rea­liz­zare l’autonomia finan­zia­ria dell’Africa: la Banca afri­cana di inve­sti­mento (in Libia), la Banca cen­trale afri­cana (in Nige­ria), il Fondo mone­ta­rio afri­cano (in Camerun).

Riscri­vendo la sto­ria, tutto que­sto viene can­cel­lato e la Libia del 1969–2011 viene rap­pre­sen­tata come un non-Stato, una «mul­ti­tu­dine di tribù» (defi­ni­zione di stampo colo­niale) tenute insieme dal potere di Ghed­dafi. Potere che indub­bia­mente esi­steva, frutto delle fasi sto­ri­che attra­ver­sate dalla Libia, ma che si era allen­tato e decen­trato aprendo la pro­spet­tiva di una ulte­riore evo­lu­zione della società libica.

La Libia, dopo che gli Stati uniti e l’Unione euro­pea ave­vano revo­cato l’embargo nel 2004, si era rica­vata uno spa­zio a livello inter­na­zio­nale. Nell’aprile 2009, a Washing­ton, la segre­ta­ria di stato Hil­lary Clin­ton strin­geva calo­ro­sa­mente la mano a uno dei figli di Ghed­dafi, dichia­rando di voler «appro­fon­dire e allar­gare la nostra coo­pe­ra­zione». Nem­meno due anni dopo, la stessa Clin­ton lan­ciava la cam­pa­gna inter­na­zio­nale con­tro Ghed­dafi, pre­pa­rando la guerra.

Ora però, nel qua­dro della com­pe­ti­zione per le pros­sime pre­si­den­ziali, gli sche­le­tri escono dall’armadio: docu­men­tate prove (pub­bli­cate dal «Washing­ton Times» e all’esame della com­mis­sione con­gres­suale di inchie­sta sull’uccisione dell’ambasciatore Usa a Ben­gasi nel 2012) dimo­strano che è stata la Clin­ton a spin­gere l’amministrazione Obama alla guerra con­tro la Libia «con falsi pre­te­sti e igno­rando i con­si­gli dei coman­danti mili­tari». Men­tre la Clin­ton accu­sava Ghed­dafi di geno­ci­dio, l’intelligence Usa rife­riva attra­verso i suoi rap­porti interni che «Ghed­dafi aveva dato ordine di non attac­care i civili ma di con­cen­trarsi sui ribelli armati».

Viene alla luce anche un docu­men­tato rap­porto, inviato nel 2011 dalle auto­rità libi­che a mem­bri del Con­gresso Usa, sulle for­ni­ture di armi ai jiha­di­sti libici da parte del Qatar con il «per­messo della Nato». In quel momento il pre­si­dente Napo­li­tano dichia­rava che, «non potendo restare indif­fe­renti alla san­gui­na­ria rea­zione di Ghed­dafi», l’Italia ade­riva al «piano di inter­venti della coa­li­zione sotto guida Nato».

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu’s speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It’s too close to Netanyahu’s election. (That doesn’t persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then “politics” wouldn’t be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don’t want the U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech is hardly the same as backing coups in Ukraine and Venezuela or giving Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons every year.)

The Speaker didn’t ask the President. (This is likely the big reason that Democrats are promising to skip the speech. I’m actually amazed more of them haven’t made that promise. Netanyahu seemed to me to miss the extent to which the United States has become a term-limited monarchy. Congress typically wants to pass the buck on wars to the President. The President typically controls one of the two parties quite tightly. But do I actually care that Congress didn’t consult the President? Hell no! Imagine if, during the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, Congress had offered a joint-session microphone to El Baradei or Sarkozy or Putin or, indeed, Hussein to denounce all the bogus claims about WMDs in Iraq? Would you have been outraged by the impoliteness toward President Bush or delighted that a million people might not get killed for no damn reason?)

These kinds of reasons do have a practical weakness: they lead to calls for postponing the speech, rather than canceling it. Some other reasons have more serious flaws.

The speech damages bipartisan U.S. support for Israel. (Really? A slim minority of the President’s party skips the speech for a laundry list of lame excuses and suddenly the United States is going to stop providing all the free weapons and vetoing every attempt at legal accountability for the crimes of the Israeli government? And that would be a bad thing if it actually happened?)

The speech hurts the critical effort of negotiations to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (This is the worst of the bad reasons. It pushes the false idea that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it. It plays right into Netanyahu’s fantasies of poor helpless nuclear Israel the victim of Iranian aggression. In reality, Iran has not attacked another nation in modern history. If only Israel or the United States could say as much!)

As I said, I’m glad anyone’s skipping the speech for any reason. But I find it deeply disturbing that an enormously important and deeply moral reason to skip the speech is obvious and known to every member of Congress, and while most are acting against it, those acting in accordance with it refuse to articulate it. The reason is this: Netanyahu is coming to spread war propaganda. He told Congress lies about Iraq in 2002 and pushed for a U.S. war. He has been lying, according to leaks this week of his own spies’ information and according to the understanding of the U.S. “intelligence” services, about Iran. It is illegal to spread war propaganda under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a party. Congress is struggling to keep up with the wars President Obama is continuing, launching, and risking. Here’s one war Obama seems not to want, and Congress is bringing in a foreign leader with a record of war lies to give them their marching orders. Meanwhile, an agency of that same foreign government, AIPAC, is holding its big lobby meeting in Washington.

Now, it is true that nuclear energy facilities create dangerous targets. Those drones flying around French nuclear plants scare the hell out of me. And it is true that nuclear energy places its possessor a short step away from nuclear weaponry. Which is why the U.S. should stop spreading nuclear energy to countries that have no need of it, and why the U.S. should never have given nuclear bomb plans to Iran or sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to prison for allegedly revealing that act. But you can’t accomplish good by using horrific mass murder to avoid horrific mass murder — and that’s what Israeli-U.S. aggression toward Iran means. Stirring up a new cold war with Russia in Syria and Ukraine is dangerous enough without throwing Iran into the mix. But even a war that confined itself to Iran would be horrifying.

Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, “I’m skipping the speech because I’m opposed to killing Iranians.” I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I’ll believe it when I hear it said.

ÖBB train in Vienna. Photo: ÖBB/Bönsch.

Do & Co. AG, an Austrian catering company, has been accused of paying its Hungarian staff one third of what it pays Austrian citizens for the same jobs. The employees work on trains operated by the Austrian state railway company making trips between countries in central Europe.

The catering staff are employed by two different subsidiaries of Do & Co., which is headquartered in Vienna. Both are named Henry am Zug (HAZ), but one is based in Austria and and the other is based in Hungary. The parent company generatedrevenues of €636 million ($720 million) last year from its operations which include running bars, restaurants and hotels in multiple countries, as well as providing catering services for airlines, trains and international sporting events.

In April 2012 Do & Co. was awarded a catering contract for Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) to supply drinks and food on about 160 long distance trains in central Europe. The company employs about 600 staff of whom 100 are employed by HAZ in Hungary. The Hungarian staff receive a monthly salary of €500 ($570) after tax while Austrian staff receive between €1200 and €1500 a month ($1368 to $1710).

“Eighty percent of the time we work outside Hungary for a 100 percent Hungarian salary,” Kati Fossi, a HAZ Hungary employee and works council representative, told Profil, an Austrian weekly magazine. (Many European companies have works councils who negotiate working conditions with the management. They often exist in parallel with unions but do not replace them.)

“Hungarian workers have been tricked out of their money for years,” Gerhard Tauchner, a union activist with Vida, the Austrian transport and service union, told Profil.

Do & Co. claims that Hungarian employees only work on trains that depart or end in Budapest. But an investigative report published last month by Netzwerk Soziale Verantwortung (NeSoVe), an Austrian activist coalition on corporate justice, alleged that workers employed by the Hungarian subsidiary were found working on a train that was travelling from Zurich in Switzerland to Vienna.

Allegations of malpractice on ÖBB trains have been made in the past. Union activists have also accused E-Express, the previous catering contractor, of underpaying Hungarian workers and forcing them to work 30 hours a shift.

In 2011, former E-Express employees told der Kurier newspaper that their employer hadengaged in tax fraud; used malfunctioning refrigeration units and water tanks; and forced employees to serve expired food to customers.

When the train catering contract was put out to bid in 2012, Do & Co. beat E-Express by submitting a lower bid. E-Express then sold their catering subsidiary – which was called Foom – to Do & Co. Foom was renamed Henry am Zug but it continued to employ most of the same staff.

But by late 2012, Henry am Zug employees began to complain to the media about working conditions. The employees said that they were forced to work up to 10 hours without a break and were not provided with recreation rooms. Der Standard reported that workers were told that the company would fire them if they did not make enough sales, a complaint that the company denied.

“I don’t need this discussion,” Attila Dogudan, the CEO of Do & Co., told der Standard in January 2013. “We do not want to save money by using cheap labor from Hungary.” Instead of paying Hungarian workers more money, he announced, he would replace them with Austrian employees.

When Fossi relayed employees’ complaints to the HAZ management, she was laid off for a month in April 2013, despite the fact that one of her tasks was to act as a liaison between management and staff. “They made me understand that I should keep quiet”, Fassi told Profil.

Last year, the Austrian Trade Union Federation came to the support of the train workers and set up a complaints hotline for them to report problems. “The wage fraud has to stop,” Helmut Gruber of Vida told Format magazine.

The laws governing European workers who are employed in other countries can be complicated. In 1996, a European Union directive stipulated that labor contracts for workers posted abroad should be governed by the laws of the country where they were physically employed, including wage rates, shift lengths and occupational safety.

In 2008, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) clarified that host countries had the right to demand that foreign companies pay the local legal minimum wage, but could not require them to pay any more since such a requirement would cause those “undertakings to lose the competitive advantage which they enjoy by reason of their lower wage costs.”

That debate continues to this day. Last week, the ECJ allowed a Finish union to intervene on behalf of Polish workers in Finland to demand that their Polish employer pays them the minimum hourly Finnish wage and enjoy equal rights as local workers, after the Polish employer refused to recognize the union’s right to organize the foreign workers.

Part of the problem in Austria, however, is that there is no legal minimum wage. Instead 98 percent of jobs are subject to collective bargaining agreements. In recent press statements, Dogudan has claimed that the rules make little sense for workers who work in multiple countries, since “pilots that cross multiple countries would need to be subject to multiple collective bargaining agreements.”

But Dr. Josef Unterweger, an Austrian labor lawyer, told NeSoVe that pilots do “have contracts with airlines… Based on this comparison Mr Dogudan must be supportive of the idea that the servers on the train – just like the ticket inspectors and the railroad engineers – should have a contract with the railway company and be paid by it.”

by Jeremy Gillula and Mitch Stoltz  

Today the FCC voted three to two to reclassify broadband Internet access as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, and forbear from the parts of the Act that aren’t necessary for net neutrality rules. This reclassification gives the FCC the authority to enact (and enforce) narrow, clear rules which will help keep the Internet the open platform it is today.

Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a non-elected federal government agency, voted three-to-two to reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act. This means that – without the vote of Congress, the peoples’ branch of government – a federal agency now claims the power to regulate the Internet. I am surprised that even among civil liberties groups, some claim the federal government increasing regulation of the Internet somehow increases our freedom and liberty.

The truth is very different. The adoption of these FCC rules on the Internet represents the largest regulatory power grab in recent history. The FCC’s newly adopted rule takes the most dynamic means of communication and imposes the regulatory structure designed for public utilities. Federal regulation could also open the door to de facto censorship of ideas perceived as threatening to the political class – ideas like the troops should be brought home, the PATRIOT Act should be repealed, military spending and corporate welfare should be cut, and the Federal Reserve should be audited and ended.

The one bright spot in this otherwise disastrous move is that federal regulations making it more difficult to use the Internet will cause more Americans to join our movement for liberty, peace, and prosperity. The federal government should keep its hands off of the Internet!

The Obama Administration has done a good thing in granting whistleblower status to a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist who says he intentionally omitted information in a study years ago that indicated a race-based link between childhood diseases, including autism, and vaccines.

The scientist, Dr. William S. Thompson, still works for the CDC, and now he’s collaborating closely with a congressman’s office to provide details about his actions to Capitol Hill, The Daily Caller reports.

In August of last year, Thompson put out a statement revealing his omission:

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.

His full statement is here.

News of Thompson’s whistleblower status comes amid recent controversy regarding vaccines and potential 2016 presidential candidates who have made statements, amid a new measles outbreak, that parents ought to have some control over whether or not to vaccinate their children.

Potential GOP contenders Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have made pro-parental rights statements; former First Lady and potential Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has called vaccine science “settled.”

But, as The DC reported further:

Thompson said that he and other CDC scientists intentionally fudged the results, manipulating the pool of children they analyzed and limiting the proper number of African-American children from participating. The authors limited black children from showing up in the results by excluding babies without a state of Georgia birth certificate.

That, they concede, skewed the data.

“It was a mutual decision among the five co-authors,” Dr. Brian Hooker told The Daily Caller

Hooker, an associate professor at Simpson University in California, discovered the deception during conversations he held and secretly recorded last year. He began talking with Thompson in 2013 and wound up getting it all on audio recording before distributing the information to vaccine skeptics online.

“I live close to the Oregon border. I taped the conversations in a hotel room,” Hooker said. “I didn’t want people to run out and delay vaccination because of this, because it was only one piece of data. But it was the one piece of data that CDC chose to cover up.”

“I did record phone conversations without his prior knowledge. That’s not something I took lightly, and I went to the state of Oregon to do it,” Hooker, the father of an autistic child, told The DC. “I live fairly close to the Oregon border, so for most of the conversation I was taping him in a hotel. The stuff that was being revealed was really radioactive. I consulted with two different attorneys and decided to go ahead and record these phone calls.”

At Thompson’s direction, Hooker revised the original data.

“When I ran the effect for males only for African-Americans the likelihood was 3.36. Stronger effect in African-American males and it looked like the effect was exclusively in African-American males, not females,” he said.

Following the skewing of data, Thompson sent a letter to then-CDC Director Dr. Julie Geberding in 2004 to discuss “problematic results” in relation to the MMR vaccine and autism. His letter highlights the paranoia within the CDC at the time.

“We’ve not yet met to discuss these matters…. I will be presenting the summary of our results from the Metropolitan Atlanta Autism Case-Control Study and I will have to present several problematic results relating to statistical associations between the receipt of MMR vaccine and autism,” Thompson wrote.

Geberding is presently the executive vice president of vaccine-maker Merck, after serving a couple of years as president of the company’s vaccine division.

The full Daily Caller report begins here.

The mainstream media is, of course, working to suppress this, as The Daily Sheeple documents here.

Sources:

http://dailycaller.com

http://www.thedailysheeple.com

http://www.morganverkamp.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

Vaccine Fanaticism

Medical Fascism

Medical Kidnapping

Poland’s largest farmer uprising ever has occurred as convoys of tractors took to the roads recently in protest of GMO infiltration and land grabs by biotech and Big Ag corporations.

More than 150 farmers blocked roadways and held numerous demonstrations in order to bring attention to the important issue of food sovereignty in Poland. Their focus is a ban on GMOs and a restoration of small farmer’s rights after decades of oppressive health and safety regulations which take rights away from small farms and give them to mono-cropping, poisoning Big Ag mega-companies.

The farmers have been stalwart – refusing to call off their demonstrations until their demands are met. Rallies and demonstrations have littered the country – in over 50 locations. Hundreds are picketing government offices in addition to the road blockades.

In the largest organized farmer’s protest the country has likely ever seen, the farmers are demanding that legislators protect the small farmer from exploitation by monopolizing companies and refuse the sell off of their country’s land to these behemoths. As the farmers point out, once the land is sold, the Big Ag model can’t be stopped, and the land is forever lost.

Read: Record GMO Farmers Switching to NON-GMO Crops in 2015

Until government officials agree to talk with the farming unions, they have vowed to keep up their efforts. Edward Kosmal, chairman of the farmers protest committee for West-Pomeranian Region said:

“We are ready for dialogue. We look forward to meeting with you, Prime Minister, and beginning a comprehensive government commitment to solving the problems of Polish agriculture. If you do not enter into a dialogue with the Union, we will be forced to step up our protests.”

• Regulation of land grabs by primarily Western companies (translation – biotech and Big Ag) to prevent small farmers from losing their livelihoods.

• The legalization of direct sale of produce and other foods from farms to the people. This cuts out the middle man and allows the higher quality produce of many farms to reach its customers directly. Poland currently has some of the most extreme policies of all of Europe in this regard, making it nearly impossible for small farmers to compete with big food companies who are notorious for selling us fake and highly processed foods.

• Change inheritance laws so that families can rightly leave land under lease to their heirs.

• BAN THE CULTIVATION OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS!

One farmer stated:

“We demand the introduction of legislation that will protect Polish land from exploitation by foreign capital! Agricultural land cannot be sold to commercial companies. It’s part of Polish territory. Once sold it will be lost.

An Intense Escalation of Events

The farmer’s protests represent a dramatic increase in activist fervor that has been boiling to the surface for over a year, with marked unrest in the northern provinces.

These provinces are especially upset about not being able to sell their (mostly) organic produce, though uncertified. It is usually of higher quality than the food grown on modern industrial farms. Poland is one of the last places in Europe where ‘peasant’ farmers still use traditional agricultural methods, without the use of chemicals and very low mechanization, so the soil is healthier, and so are the plants grown there. The large majority of small farms are no larger than 5 hectares.

Industrial-bent foreign corporations are keen to expand their operations in Poland, and many small farmers see the increasingly ridiculous regulations as an attempt to force families off their land.

Furthermore, one of Poland’s biggest industrial producers, in the form of Smithfield (the world’s biggest pig producer which bought Poland’s Animex SA in 1999) is influencing the largely right-wing government. They own a string of 16 hog farms where conditions have been called“horrendous,” so you know they are not interested in protecting small farmer’sland rights or producing high-quality, no-GMO, organic food.

The triad of government and corporate interests in Poland along with EU pressure is causing the protests to reach a more fevered pitch.

“These protests are touching the raw nerve of what’s wrong with the inhuman, neo-liberal and profit obsessed practices of today. Practices which ignore the real needs of farmers and consumers alike.”

Read: Brazil’s Farmers Rise up in Protest Against Big Ag’s Policies

Polish farmers are joined with millions of others who have been protesting against Monsanto, Cargill, and other biotech and Big Ag interests who have little concern for the quality of our food supply. Over 50 countries have marched against Monsanto, so the thousands marching in Poland are not alone. Almost all states in the US have marched against Monsanto and Big Ag, and Vermont recently staged a protest at the US Canadian border which involved more than 79 Vermont towns.

“We are here at the border to demonstrate the global solidarity of farmers in the face of corporate globalization. The corporate takeover of agriculture has impoverished farmers, starved communities, and force-fed us hazardous genetically engineered crops, only to line the pockets of a handful of multinational corporations like Monsanto at the expense of farmers who are struggling for land and livelihood around the world!”

You can read more about land grabs by multinationals at Pesticide Action Network, as well other sites. The actions of these companies keeps the world hungry and sick, not well fed. As the Global Policy Forum explains, unfair distribution of land, and unfair access to ownership explain much of the poverty and hunger in the world – NOT – as biotech would have us believe, the inability to grow enough food. Its all about distribution.

It is the one- percent-ers, owning most of the multinational companies, not rural farmers who commandeer the land. Even when small farmers do own land, they still suffer from inequality due to government regulations that favor these enormous companies.

“The struggle for land reform, which would shift the balance of power in favor of marginalized landless farmers, has been going on for many decades. However the food and financial crises contribute to worsening the trend towards land concentration, in which governments, agro-industrial corporations and private investors buy up fertile land in poor countries, [largely to spread GMOs] depriving small farmers of their ability to grow their own food.”

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National identities tend to be the strained contrivances of ministries of culture and propagandists. Their committee work formation, through eager pen, official pronouncement and neat selection of what are termed historical facts, reflects the odd flavour.  A good deal of gibberish and mendacity is required, a stretch of the historical record.  Any inconvenient facts or data will require either dismissal or inventive incorporation.

A series of these actions is evident on arriving at the city of Skopje, capital of the Republic of Macedonia.  Even the country’s name has been the source of dispute, with Greece desperate to halt any chance of territorial claims to its northern territories with the cumbersome appellation Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.  Most countries have, however, been won over by Skopje’s inventive case, or at the very least unconvinced by Greece’s cri de coeur.

Hopping off at the central bus station that has the characteristic Balkan grime and soot, pungent with suffocating fumes, there is one theme that stands out: the somewhat crazed and dedicated efforts to link Macedonian identity – that of the post-Yugoslavian state – with the toil, conquest and influence of the Argead dynasty.  “Alexander the Great,” asserted the republic’s former foreign minister, Antonio Milososki, “had no passport or birth certificate.”

Officials in Athens engage in regular tirades against the Macedonian effort to appropriate Alexander III (‘the Great’), his father, Philip II of Macedon, and an entire dynasty, as heroic manifestations of the credo of a state.  They should know – the Greek obsession with Hellenic revivalism has form, typified by fits of urban destruction in the nineteenth century when ancient Greece became the motif par excellence.  Unfortunately for them, there are rivals.  Everyone wishes for that chance to bite the rich pie of Alexander’s legacy. The cost, however, has come to over 200 million euros, and set to balloon.

Even cultural kitsch, when mixed with political seriousness, can produce its small cultural bombs. Strikingly, one of these incendiary devices, at least in the symbolic sense, is Alexander the Great’s statue, rising at 22 metres in the central square. It is an alarming grotesque of sorts, with Becaphalus heaving like a genetically modified beast with enormous hind muscles, a hormone monstrosity saddled by an equally monstrous master.

This is Skopje’s vulgar rebuke to Athens, “our way of saying [up yours] to them,” in the words of Milososki in October 2010.  Dispute our claims to be a Republic of Macedonia, but not our statues of appropriation.  Or the airport, or roads, which bear the family names of antiquity.

The archaeological museum, one in a series of modern wonderland structures situated on the Vardar river front, houses what is meant to be a temple of culture.  It is only something you might look forward to if you wished for a meal heavy in the propaganda of the great Macedonian peoples.  The visitor may wonder whether this languishing white elephant houses but a few artefacts, with a “made in China” label carefully concealed.  Such feelings are admittedly harsh, and ignore local resourcefulness, mixed in with a good deal of guile.

The guide who greets you on this occasion hopes to banish such snobbish contempt.  This is the committee of culture representative in full swing.  He is an astonishingly enthusiastic man, engaged with his audience, and determined to seek what he calls “parallels” with other nations.  (If you say that you are from Denmark, incidentally, you will be told that your ancestors subjugated the ancient capital of Macedonia – at some point.)  The tour is extensive, fastidious, and even exhausting.

Dozens of tribal names and peoples are tossed into the mix, ranging from the Neolithic period characterised by the worship of vast, large-hipped sculptures of fertility to the Pannonian princesses and high priestesses who communicated their fortunes to rival kings and chieftains via an opium induced state.  There are burial reconstructions.  There are hoards of coins.

While there is no reason to be surprised that solid, durable Ottoman currency, the historically enchanting currency of Alexander’s empire or that of Rome, the haunting money of the Serbian rulers of the 14th century, or the subsequent influence of the grosso coins of Venetian treasure, could be found in this land, the sceptic has to ask a vital question: How has one of Europe’s poorest states assembled such a collection?  Moreover, it is one typified by neatly assigned spots and displays in the manner of an eccentric numismatist.  The lot of such countries is rich in terms unrestored ruins from Greco-Roman times, but the treasuries tend to be poor.

An answer is that the government of Macedonia has been busy in recent years, getting the bricks and mortar ready and attempting to transform the capital.  This is yet another historical re-enactment, a theme that is suggested on the famous stone bridge – the Kameni most – that was given its current form by the Ottoman conqueror, Sultan Mehmed II, between 1451 and 1469. Those with Serbian sympathies prefer the designation of the Dušan bridge, after the Serbian ruler Stephen Uroš IV Dušan.

The city had to undergo another dramatic transformation with the sundering earthquake of 1963, one that levelled the city with uncompromising fury.  Hotel Macedonia ceased to exist, as did all its residents bar one enterprising individual who got into the fridge as all was caving in around. Another got buried in his bathtub when taking a bath, though his only question on being recovered was who had won the battle.  A curious bit of city trivia is that one building which survived the appalling assaults of the earthquake seemed to be dedicated to Mother Teresa.

What the earthquake did not do, bad taste has in the form of the project “Skopje 2014”.  Pompous buildings disgrace the new bridges crossing the river Vardar – they seem like vain efforts to create a Las Vegas front of cultural entertainment, ostensibly to add a spring into the city’s aesthetic.

In that sense, these efforts at cultural mimicry have succeeded – one cannot help but be grimly entertained by the sculptured figures on the new bridges, meant to represent every notable that has had some connexion, however tenuous, to Macedonian lands.

There are forgotten rulers who look bemused on the Bridge of Civilisations, and there are the more recent composers, singers, and writers who tend to be world famous in Macedonia, on the Art Bridge.  When one is encountering the figures of antiquity, the jaw is bound to fall.  The connection between the eccentric entity that is Macedonia and Philip II of Macedon is as firm as that between the Skopje citizen and Erich von Däniken’s all-inventive ancient aliens.

The bridge figures themselves, all acting as crowding irritations, have no simulated inner life, resembling the poorest copies of the worst workshop.  The Greek tradition that this Skopje exercise would supposedly channel the sensuous life through marble, giving it breath.  Instead, it looks like the low grade social realists from the long vanquished regime of Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu have been rehired – or at the very least their children.  One would get as much historical thrill from the gyrations of Disney characters.

Some of the locals have been testy about the cost of the project; others prefer to take issue with the history.  But it is not the Disneyland variant of Alexander the Great that is troubling. Rather, it is the Serbian presence, personified by a sculpture of King Dušan. In December 2013, an unruly attempt was made by Albanians to topple the figure.  The Albanian NGO, Wake Up, argued that, “Erecting a monument to a Serbian occupier speaks of an identity crisis, or of the Serbophilia of those who put it there” (Balkan Insight, Dec 9, 2013). The paradox of Balkan richness is that certain identities assert purity in the face of a hybrid existence.

The identity crisis certainly persists in other architectural forms, though this speaks more about the attractions of entertainment and cash than any vestigial cultural message.  The constructions of bulbous stationary ship restaurants on the Vardar grant this some swelling emphasis.  We are bearing witness to a confused casino, where the cards of culture are being distributed by suspect croupiers.

The one area where the must of history lingers with any sense of plausibility is that of Bit Pazar, the old Turkish quarter.  The narrow streets typical of the Turkish design have survived. There is the formidable stone fort of Kale, a brooding overseer of a city teeming with chaotic themes.

The Ottoman buildings seem overgrown yet charming – they bulge and wish to move onto the streets, outgrowing their joints, exceeding their limbs.  There are jewellers.  There is the presence of an astonishing degree of bling – garish dresses with glitz and eye-watering designs.  There are sellers of the famous miniature shoes hung like peppers.  There are well patterned coffee grinders to be bought. There is the holler of Turkish music and Albanian markets.

No figure represents Skopje’s classic of re-creation and dissimulation than Mother Teresa herself, whose legend of moral invention stalks the city. Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, as she was born, was scented by keen hagiographers, notably a seduced Malcolm Muggeridge in his Something Beautiful for God (1970), and placed on the fast tract to sainthood with the beatification points accumulated as a masterful broker in the world of charity and religious pandering.  Her presence is ubiquitous in the city.  Her banal pleas feature on buildings.  She is found on fridge magnets.

While the late Christopher Hitchens did regard the antics of the departed Mother Teresa as those of a manipulative troll of souls and decaying bodies, best described in The Missionary Position, the ultimate excuse of channelling bad consciousness to heal poverty and sickness, Teresa herself showed, more than any other moronic self-help book, the power of re-invention.  Just as St. Francis of Assisi, to embrace the poor, embraced the leper (in her words in a 1981 interview, “The encounter with the leper made St. Francis.”), the poor of Calcutta made Mother Teresa.  She even regarded the cruelly impoverished much as the statues of Skopje 2014 might be seen as – astounding aesthetic efforts.  “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s passion.”  Truth be told, this is grotesquery at work.

In 2013, three Canadian academics, Serge Larivée, Carole Sénéchal and Geneviève Chénard, examined Mother Teresa’s record, and found that the barbs fired by Hitch and other critics should be taken seriously.  The blessed figure had proven as cagey, and as enigmatic, as any Skopje government official – only rough estimates are available regarding the costs of Skopje 2014.  Mother Teresa, to such ends, showed a “suspicious management of funds that she received” (Studies in Religion, Jan 15, 2013).  “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Teresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?” posed Larivée on the University of Montreal website (Mar 1, 2013).

Her religious views, and attitudes about caring for the poor, were also deemed dogmatic.  The respected British medical journal, The Lancet, ran a piece in September 1994 by R. Fox arguing that Mother Teresa’s Order had poorly trained staff and did not provide adequate medical assessments.  Such was the lot of a hospice.  As for an even harsher Hitchens, the hospice had facilities that were “rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind any modern conception of what medical science is supposed to do” (Free Inquiry, Sep 30, 1996).

Seductive deceptions have the longest legs, and will go far in the forums they will rest in.  Mother Teresa was, in that sense, the most modern of salespersons, stroking egos and breaking others.  Her spirit animates the costly revitalisation project of Skopje 2014.  In the words of another ego keen on marketing moral matters, Bob Geldof, “The way she spoke to journalists showed her to be as deft a manipulator as any high-powered American public relations expert.”  Little surprising, then, that she had the ear of every world leader, and conscious stricken philanthropist, there was.  If that is the ultimate recipe of success, than the defiantly resilient Skopje citizen knows where to aim.
 
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

This week I was invited to address an important conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.  Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.  All of Russia is distressed that Washington alone has destroyed the trust between the two major nuclear powers that had been created during the Reagan-Gorbachev era, trust that had removed the threat of nuclear armageddon. Russians at every level are astonished at the virulent propaganda and lies constantly issuing from Washington and the Western media. Washington’s gratuitous demonization of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has rallied the Russian people behind him.  Putin has the highest approval rating ever achieved by any leader in my lifetime.  

Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the trust achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility of nuclear war from the grave in which Reagan and Gorbachev buried it.  Again, as during the Cold War the specter of nuclear armageddon stalks the earth.

Why did Washington revive the threat of world annihilation?  Why is this threat to all of humanity supported by the majority of the US Congress, by the entirety of the presstitute media, and by academics and think-tank inhabitants in the US, such as Motyl and Weiss, about whom I wrote recently? 

It was my task to answer this question for the conference.  You can read my February 25 and February 26 addresses below.  But first you should understand what nuclear war means.  You can gain that understanding here:  

http://thebulletin.org/what-would-happen-if-800-kiloton-nuclear-warhead-detonated-above-midtown-manhattan8023 

The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative Ideology of American Hegemony,

Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Hosted by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Moscow, February 25, 2015,  Hon. Paul Craig Roberts

Colleagues,

What I propose to you is that the current difficulties in the international order are unrelated to Yalta and its consequences, but have their origin in the rise of the neoconservative ideology in the post-Soviet era and its influence on Washington’s foreign policy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only constraint on Washington’s power to act unilaterally abroad.  At that time China’s rise was estimated to require a half century.

Suddenly the United States found itself to be the Uni-power, the “world’s only superpower.”  Neoconservatives proclaimed “the end of history.”

By the “end of history” neoconservatives mean that the competition between socio-economic-political systems is at an end.  History has chosen “American Democratic-Capitalism.” It is Washington’s responsibility to exercise the hegemony over the world given to Washington by History and to bring the world in line with History’s choice of American democratic-capitalism.

In other words, Marx has been proven wrong.  The future does not belong to the proletariat but to Washington.

The neoconservative ideology raises the United States to the unique status of being “the exceptional country,” and the American people acquire exalted status as “the indispensable people.”

If a country is “the exceptional country,” it means that all other countries are unexceptional.  If a people are “indispensable,” it means other peoples are dispensable. We have seen this attitude at work in Washington’s 14 years of wars of aggression in the Middle East. These wars have left countries destroyed and millions of people dead, maimed, and displaced. Yet Washington continues to speak of its commitment to protect smaller countries from the aggression of larger countries.  The explanation for this hypocrisy is that Washington does not regard Washington’s aggression as aggression, but as History’s purpose.

We have also seen this attitude at work in Washington’s disdain for Russia’s national interests and in Washington’s propagandistic response to Russian diplomacy.

The neoconservative ideology requires that Washington maintain its Uni-power status, because this status is necessary for Washington’s hegemony and History’s purpose.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world supremacy is most clearly and concisely stated by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative who has held many high positions: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Director of Policy Planning US Department of State, Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to Indonesia, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank.

In 1992 Paul Wolfowitz stated the neoconservative doctrine of American world supremacy:

“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.”

For clarification, a “hostile power” is a country with an independent policy (Russia, China, Iran, and formerly Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad).

This bold statement struck the traditional American foreign policy establishment as a declaration of American Imperialism.  The document was rewritten in order to soften and disguise the blatant assertion of supremacy without changing the intent.  These documents are available online, and you can examine them at your convenience.

Softening the language allowed the neoconservatives to rise to foreign policy dominance. The neoconservatives are responsible for the Clinton regime’s attacks on Yugoslavia and Serbia. Neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz, are responsible for the George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives are responsible for the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi in Libya, the assault on Syria, the propaganda against Iran, the drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen, the color revolutions in former Soviet Republics, the attempted “Green Revolution” in Iran, the coup in Ukraine, and the demonization of Vladimir Putin.

A number of thoughtful Americans suspect that the neoconservatives are responsible for 9/11, as that event gave the neoconservatives the “New Pearl Harbor” that their position papers said was necessary in order to launch their wars for hegemony in the Middle East.  9/11 led directly and instantly to the invasion of Afghanistan, where Washington has been fighting since 2001. Neoconservatives controlled all the important government positions necessary for a “false flag” attack.

Neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is married to another neoconservative, Robert Kagan, implemented and oversaw Washington’s coup in Ukraine and chose the new government.

The neoconservatives are highly organized and networked, well-financed, supported by the print and TV media, and backed by the US military/security complex and the Israel Lobby.  There is no countervailing power to their influence on US foreign power.

The neoconservative doctrine goes beyond the Brzezinski doctrine, which dissented from Detente and provocatively supported dissidents inside the Soviet empire. Despite its provocative character, the Brzezinski doctrine remained a doctrine of Great Power politics and containment. It is not a doctrine of US world hegemony.

While the neoconservatives were preoccupied for a decade with their wars in the Middle East, creating a US Africa Command, organizing color revolutions, exiting disarmament treaties, surrounding Russia with military bases, and “pivoting to Asia” to surround China with new air and naval bases, Vladimir Putin led Russia back to economic and military competence and successfully asserted an independent Russian foreign policy.

When Russian diplomacy blocked Washington’s planned invasion of Syria and Washington’s planned bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that they had failed the “first objective” of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and had allowed “the re-emergence of a new rival . . . on the territory of the former Soviet Union” with the power to block unilateral action by Washington.

The attack on Russia began. Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine and cultivating Ukrainian politicians.  The NGOs were called into the streets. The extreme nationalists or nazi elements were used to introduce violence, and the elected democratic government was overthrown. The intercepted conversation between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev, in which the two Washington operatives choose the members of the new Ukrainian government, is well known.

If the information that has recently come to me from Armenia and Kyrgyzstan is correct, Washington has financed NGOs and is cultivating politicians in Armenia and the former Soviet Central Asian Republics.  If the information is correct, Russia can expect more “color revolutions” or coups in other former territories of the Soviet Union.  Perhaps China faces a similar threat in Uyghurstan.

The conflict in Ukraine is often called a “civil war.”  This is incorrect.  A civil war is when two sides fight for the control of the government.  The break-away republics in eastern and southern Ukraine are fighting a war of secession.

Washington would have been happy to use its coup in Ukraine to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base as this would have been a strategic military achievement.  However, Washington is pleased that the “Ukraine crisis” that Washington orchestrated has resulted in the demonization of Vladimir Putin, thus permitting economic sanctions that have disrupted Russia’s economic and political relations with Europe. The sanctions have kept Europe in Washington’s orbit.

Washington has no interest in resolving the Ukrainian situation.  The situation can be resolved diplomatically only if Europe can achieve sufficient sovereignty over its foreign policy to act in Europe’s interest instead of Washington’s interest.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world hegemony is a threat to the sovereignty of every country.  The doctrine requires subservience to Washington’s leadership and to Washington’s purposes.  Independent governments are targeted for destabilization. The Obama regime overthrew the reformist government in Honduras and currently is at work destabilizing Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and most likely also Armenia and the former Central Asian Soviet Republics.

Yalta and its consequences have to do with Great Power rivalries.  But in the neoconservative doctrine, there is only one Great Power–the Uni-power.  There are no others, and no others are to be permitted.

Therefore, unless a moderate foreign policy arises in Washington and displaces the neoconservatives, the future is one of conflict.

It would be a strategic error to dismiss the neoconservative ideology as unrealistic. The doctrine is unrealistic, but it is also the guiding force of US foreign policy and is capable of producing a world war.

In their conflict with Washington’s hegemony, Russia and China are disadvantaged. The success of American propaganda during the Cold War, the large differences between living standards in the US and those in communist lands, overt communist political oppression, at times brutal, and the Soviet collapse created in the minds of many people nonexistent virtues for the United States. As English is the world language and the Western media is cooperative, Washington is able to control explanations regardless of the facts. The ability of Washington to be the aggressor and to blame the victim encourages Washington’s march to more aggression.

This concludes my remarks.  Tomorrow I will address whether there are domestic political restraints or economic restraints on the neoconservative ideology.

Paul Craig Roberts, Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Moscow, February 26, 2015

Colleagues,

At the plenary session yesterday I addressed the threat that the neoconservative ideology poses to international relations.  In this closing session I address whether there are any internal restraints on this policy from the US population and whether there are economic restraints.

Just as 9/11 served to launch Washington’s wars for hegemony in the Middle East, 9/11 served to create the American police state.  The  Constitution and the civil liberties it protects quickly fell to the accumulation of power in the executive branch that a state of war permitted.

New laws, some clearly pre-prepared such as the PATRIOT Act, executive orders, presidential directives, and Department of Justice memos created an executive authority unaccountable to the US Constitution and to domestic and international law.

Suddenly Americans could be detained indefinitely without cause presented to a court. Habeas corpus, a constitutional protection which prohibits any such detention, has been set aside.

Suddenly people could be tortured into confessions in violation of the right against self-incrimination and in violation of domestic and international laws against torture.

Suddenly Americans and Washington’s closest allies could be spied on indiscriminately without the need of warrants demonstrating cause.

The Obama regime added to the Bush regime’s transgressions the assertion of the right of the executive branch to assassinate US citizens without due process of law.

The police state was organized under a massive new Department of Homeland Security.  Almost immediately whistleblower protections, freedom of the press and speech, and protest rights were attacked and reduced.

It was not long before the director of Homeland Security declared that the department’s focus has shifted from Muslim terrorists to “domestic extremists,” an undefined category. Anyone can be swept into this category.  Homes of war protesters were raided and grand juries were convened to investigate the protesters. Americans of Arab descent who donated to charities–even charities on the State Department’s approved list–that aided Palestinian children were arrested and sentenced to prison for “providing material support to terrorism.”

All of this and more, including police brutality, has had a chilling effect on protests against the wars and the loss of civil liberty.   The rising protests from the American population and from soldiers themselves that eventually forced Washington to end the Vietnam War have been prevented in the 21st century by the erosion of rights, intimidation, loss of mobility (no-fly list), job dismissal, and other heavy-handed actions inconsistent with a government accountable to law and the people.

In an important sense, the US has emerged from the “war on terror” as an executive branch dictatorship unconstrained by the media and barely, if at all, constrained by Congress and the federal courts. The lawlessness of the executive branch has spread into governments of Washington’s vassal states and into the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, all of which violate their charters and operate outside their legal powers.

Jobs offshoring destroyed the American industrial and manufacturing unions. Their demise and the current attack on the public employee unions has left the Democratic Party financially dependent on the same organized private interest groups as the Republicans.  Both parties now report to the same interest groups.    Wall Street, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (oil, mining, timber) control the government regardless of the party in power. These powerful interests all have a stake in American hegemony.

The message is that the constellation of forces preclude internal political change.

Hegemony’s Archilles heel is the US economy. The fairy tale of American economic recovery supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar’s value up, the stock market up, and interest rates down.  However, there is no economic information that supports this fairy tale.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s. There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years. The labor force is shrinking. The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio. The 5.7 percent reported unemployment rate is achieved by not counting discouraged workers as part of the work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find a job and has given up looking.)

A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term (less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported, stands at 11.2 percent.  The US government stopped including long-term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994.  If the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate in the US stands at 23.2 percent.

The offshoring of American manufacturing and professional service jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology has decimated the middle class. The middle class has not found jobs with incomes comparable to those moved abroad. The labor cost savings from offshoring the jobs to Asia has boosted corporate profits, the performance bonuses of executives and capital gains of shareholders. Thus all income and wealth gains are concentrated in a few hands at the top of the income distribution.  The number of billionaires grows as destitution reaches from the lower economic class into the middle class.  American university graduates unable to find jobs return to their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes and work as waitresses and bartenders in part-time jobs that will not support an independent existence.

With a large percentage of the young economically unable to form households, residential construction, home furnishings, and home appliances suffer economic weakness.  Cars can still be sold only because the purchaser can obtain 100 percent financing in a six-year loan.  The lenders sell the loans, which are securitized and sold to gullible investors, just as were the mortgage-backed financial instruments that precipitated the 2007 US financial crash.

None of the problems that created the 2008 recession, and that were created by the 2008 recession, have been addressed.  Instead, policymakers have used an expansion of debt and money to paper over the problems. Money and debt have grown much more than US GDP, which raises questions about the value of the US dollar and the credit worthiness of the US government.  On July 8, 2014, my colleagues and I pointed out that when correctly measured, US national debt stands at 185 percent of GDP.  http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/

This raises the question: Why was the credit rating of Russia, a country with an extremely low ratio of debt to GDP, downgraded and not that of the US?  The answer is that the downgrading of Russian credit worthiness was a political act directed against Russia in behalf of US hegemony.

How long can fairy tales and political acts keep the US house of cards standing?  A rigged stock market.  A rigged interest rate. A rigged dollar exchange value, a rigged and suppressed gold price.  The current Western financial system rests on world support for the US dollar and on nothing more.

The problem with neoliberal economics, which pervades all countries, even Russia and China, is that neoliberal economics is a tool of American economic imperialism, as is Globalism.  As long as countries targeted by Washington for destabilization support and cling to the American doctrines that enable the destabilization, the targets are defenseless.

If Russia, China, and the BRICS Bank were willing to finance Greece, Italy, and Spain, perhaps those countries could be separated from the EU and NATO.  The unraveling of Washington’s empire would begin.

The strategic equation in the Middle East is about to see major changes. It strongly appears that the Iranian-led Resistance Bloc or Axis of Resistance — comprised of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and a cross-section of Palestinian and Iraqi groups — is about to become more powerful than ever before.

After a cooling of ties, a new understanding is being hammered out between Hamas and Tehran. Meanwhile Yemen is under the control of the Houthis and both the US and the House of Saud have essentially lost the four to five years they had invested after the eruption of the Arab Spring of regime management in Sana. Not only is the Resistance Bloc emerging more powerful, but Iran is becoming indispensable to the regional security architecture of everything east of Egypt in the Mashreq. The security and defensive forces in Syria and Iraq have become integrated with Tehran’s security architecture. Hezbollah has emerged stronger than ever too with a genuine regional reach and presence that extends from Lebanon and Syria in the Levant to the territory of Iraq where it is fighting the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Israel is beginning to feel the pressure and has begun to show some signs of panic. When talking about Iranian influence in the Middle East, Israeli politicians and media reports claim that a third Arab capital—Sana—is now under Tehran’s control. Moreover, Tel Aviv has begun to rattle the cage as nuclear negotiations—and the undisclosed talks about non-nuclear issues— between the US and Iranian governments have been underway.

The House of Saud is anxious too. For these reasons the relationship between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Israel are closer and more strategic than ever. Both the Israelis and House of Saud have also started a propaganda campaign using the unconcealed presence of Iranian military personnel in Syria to try to scare the Arab public by ridiculously claim that the Iranians have been using the Syrian conflict to gain influence inside Syria. This rhetoric is fear mongering that ignores that fact that Tehran was already the strategic ally of Damascus before the Syrian crisis and that an Iranian presence existed in Syria long before 2011. What is true, however, is that ties have deepened between Tehran and Damascus.

Iran and the Israeli-Occupied West Bank

In preparation for his March 3, 2015 speech to a joint session of the US Congress, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone on overdrive stating that the Iranians have been opening new fronts against Israel. Netanyahu claims that Israel faces a threat from Tehran on six different fronts. These fronts are (1) Lebanon, (2) Syria, (3) the Gaza Strip, (4) Egypt’s volatile Sinai Peninsula, (5) Israel’s interests and missions abroad, and (6) the Iranian nuclear energy program.

Netanyahu’s talking points are simple: Iran is entrenching itself on Israel’s borders with a mission to destroy Israel. This is what he wants to tell the US Congress in what is appearing to become the partisan affair of a Likudnik-Republican political alliance that should also be read as an indicator of a major divide in elite opinions in the US.

Perhaps recognizing the extent of his bravado or being warned about the exaggeration of his claims, Netanyahu’s talking points mellowed down a bit. Instead of continuing his rhetoric about the six fronts against Israel, he began to concentrate on the older Israeli talking point about a «third front» being opened by Iran and Hezbollah in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

As an omission of Tel Aviv’s occupation of Syrian territory, the Golan Heights have historically been called the Syrian Heights in Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has largely ignored reality. He discredited himself on numerous occasions, ranging from his presentation to the UN General Assembly in 2012, which was reticulated internationally as farce and sophistry, to his imaginative assessment of the 2015 report on the Iranian nuclear energy program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Not only has Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly presented a delusional and fanciful assessment of the IAEA’s report on the Iranian nuclear energy program, he has largely ignored Iranian statements about the only new front that the Iranians have acknowledged that they actually want to create against the Israelis.

The new front that the Iranians want to create against Israel is no secret whatsoever. Iranian security and military officials have been very public about their willingness to arm those Palestinians that want to resist the Israeli occupation of their homeland in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The arming of the Palestinians in the West Bank has been stopped, because the West Bank is run from Ramallah by the collaborationist Palestinian regime of the corrupt Mahmoud Abbas — better known as the Palestinian Authority — which embezzles and squanders the international aid and taxes of the Palestinian people. The shameless Hashemite dictatorship in Jordan — which the governments and major human rights organizations in the US and European Union have done their best to sanitize as some type of liberal democracy in the eyes of public opinion — and its absolute monarch King Abdullah II have also assisted Israel and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in pacifying the Palestinians in the West Bank as their homeland is illegally colonized.

Hitherto, Iranian military and security officials have been saying for more than half a year that they are more than willing to arm and help those Palestinians in the West Bank who want to end the Israeli occupation. These Iranian calls and offers to arm the Palestinians in the West Bank against Israel, however, were renewed after Tel Aviv killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Brigadier-General Mohammed-Ali Allahdadi on January 18, 2015.

The Israeli False Narrative about the Attack in Quneitra

Allahdadi was killed near the Quneitra Crossing in the northeastern part of the Golan Heights that is under Syrian control and not occupied by Israel. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard flag officer died when the Israelis targeted two vehicles with six Hezbollah fighters — including Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of assassinated Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah — and himself. The vehicles had been doing a reconnaissance and inspection tour of the area to help the Syrian government fight the insurgents that Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the US have been backing since 2011.

Initially, the Israeli government and military said nothing, thinking that Hezbollah and Iran would be too humiliated by the Israeli offensive inside Syria against them to publicize what happened. On the contrary, Tehran and Hezbollah announced it immediately. Hezbollah even proudly declared that the mixture of Lebanese and Iranian blood that was shed in protection of Syria symbolized a common cause and destiny between Lebanon, Iran, and Syria in a historic battle.

The Israelis then tried to spread disinformation. One unnamed senior Israeli security source told Reuters that «Israeli forces believed they were attacking only low-ranking guerrillas.» It has been commonly acknowledged that the decision to bomb the reconnaissance vehicles was made at the highest level in Israel.

After the strike on Allahdadi’s convoy, the Israelis began to talk about how Tehran and Hezbollah are preparing to open up a new front in the Golan Heights against Israel. Hezbollah has pointed out that these Israeli claims are intended to obfuscate Israel’s cooperation with Jabhat Al-Nusra in the Golan Heights and the rest of Syria. Hezbollah has categorically said that the reconnaissance convoy that Israel attacked was not present to prepare for a war against Israel. According to Hezbollah and Tehran, instead the Israelis were protecting Al-Nusra, which has built a strong presence in the area with Israel’s help.

Regardless of the validity of these claims, these Israeli talking points about a front in the Golan Heights or Syria have been repeatedly used to justify Israeli military offensives in the Syrian crisis as an air force for the insurgents trying to topple the Syrian government. Not only have there been protests inside Israel by the Druze community against Israel’s support to Jabhat Al-Nusra, but the UN Security Council had been told in 2014 by a UN peacekeeping contingent from Ireland, India, and Fiji that Israel has been collaborating with the insurgents.

The insurgents themselves are publicly calling for Israel to continue its military support. The Jerusalem Post reported on February 12, 2015 that the Syrian insurgency, «whose forces are fighting against a new offensive in the South [of Syria] by the axis of the Syrian Army, Hezbollah, and Iran, is calling on Israel to attack their positions.» The Jerusalem Post says that an Israeli «in frequent contact with the Syrian opposition» asserted that the Syrian insurgents were warning Israel that if it did not attack the Syrian military and stop it from regaining control of southern Syria that the Axis of Resistance will retake the border.

Hezbollah’s Response from the Sheeba Farms

The Israelis were sent a startling warning from Hezbollah in retaliation to the Israeli attack on Jihad Mughniyeh’s convoy. Tel Aviv seemed to be in shock when Hezbollah reacted without hesitation on January 28, 2015. The US Department of State’s spin-doctor spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki would react by contradictorily saying that the US urged «all parties to refrain from any action that could escalate the situation» and that Israel had a right to launch an attack into Lebanon.

The US media would dishonestly also try to conceal some important facts. The first fact that the US media tried to conceal was about the location of the Hezbollah attack on the Israeli military, the Sheeba Farms. The Sheeba Farms is Lebanese territory occupied by Israel, but the US media used misleading wording and made misleading statements to make it sound like the Sheeba Farms was Syrian territory as a means of trying to make it look like Hezbollah had launched an attack outside of Lebanese territory on Israel. The second fact that the US media tried to obfuscate was the fact that a Spaniard soldier serving as a United Nations peacekeeper in the village of Ghajar was killed by the Israelis when they responded to the Hezbollah attack. Press reports would say that a Spaniard peacekeeper died as a result of the attack, but would try to conceal the fact that the Israeli military had killed him.

The Washington Post would report, in what was clearly a calculated information leak, on January 30, 2015 that Jihad Mughniyeh’s father, Imad Mughniyah, was killed by the US and Israel together in a joint CIA and Mossad operation. An anonymous former intelligence official told Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima that the US had made the car bomb that killed Imad Mughniyah in Damascus. Perhaps the leak was a tactic to mitigate the response against Israel or perhaps it was deemed the right time to reveal that the US had been involved in Imad Mughniyah’s murder in 2008. Regardless, it showcased the connections of the Washington Post to US intelligence and, more importantly, made an open and negative omission that the US has been carrying out car bombings (like the one that killed Rafik Al-Hariri).

A New Chapter for Hezbollah and Israel

Hezbollah responded during the zenith of Israeli’s military alertness. The crisis in Syria has changed the nature of the struggle between Hezbollah and its Israeli enemy. Hezbollah now has a regional presence that extends from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq. Its confidence level has gone up and it has become battle-hardened and gained more experience. This is why Hezbollah did not hesitate to respond immediately as a demonstration that the Lebanese organization could at will chose the location, timing, and target of its battle with Israel. This is why Hezbollah targeted two Israeli military vehicles at almost the exact same time of the day that the Israelis had launched their attack on Jihad Mughniyeh’s convoy.

Furthermore, Hezbollah differentiated between an Israeli assassination of one of its members and an Israeli military attack before 2015. That has changed according to Hezbollah’s leadership. Secretary-General Nasrallah has announced that the Lebanese organization will treat assassinations and military attacks as one and the same and that Hezbollah will respond to Israeli aggression in a way that it determines fitting in its time and place of choosing.

The Israelis were taken by surprise by the Hezbollah counter-offensive. Firstly, the Israelis wrongly thought that the Syrians and Iranians would not want Hezbollah to respond, because they were afraid Israel would use the opportunity to attack Syria and change the internal balance of power. Hezbollah made it clear that it would react to any attack and that neither Iranian nor Syrian interests would trump that.

Secondly, a new weapon was used against Israel. Due to this new missile technology it has been pointed out — even gloated with pride and triumph — in Lebanon that Tel Aviv could not immediately respond in the field against the Hezbollah fighters that launched the attack, because the Israelis could not detect the missiles even though the Israeli military was on standby and alert after Israel had launched an offensive attack against Hezbollah inside Syrian territory. Tel Aviv has also been given a demonstration that Hezbollah’s intelligence has become more effective in monitoring the Israeli military.

If none of these points were clear to the Israelis, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made them clear in a public address about the Hezbollah counter-offensive were he stated that the Israeli’s killed the Hezbollah members in the middle of the day (11:30 a.m.) and that in return Hezbollah killed their soldiers in the middle of the day (11:25 a.m.). In return for the two vehicles that Israel destroyed with its missiles, Hezbollah destroyed two of Israel’s military vehicles with its missiles. Nasrallah would point out that there was one main difference between Hezbollah and the Israeli military and that is that the Israelis did not dare to claim responsibility for their attacks whereas Hezbollah has always claimed responsibility for its actions.

The ball was been put back in Israel’s court by Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah through their counter-offensive, so to speak. Meanwhile the strategic equation and balance in the Middle East is changing to the benefit of Hezbollah and its allies in the Resistance Bloc. This is important subtext. These factors should not be forgotten when analyzing Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Capitol Hill and anything he says about Iran opening a «third front» on March 3, 2015.

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on February 25, 2015.

The anti austerity and anti water privatisation movements in the Republic of Ireland gathered momentum towards the end of 2014, culminating in large scale protests in the capital and many towns and cities around the country. The state owned television and radio broadcaster continuously downplayed the strength of the protests, and provided a negative portrayal of protesters on daily and evening news (see here). Persistently focusing on incidental negative elements of this grass roots social movement. The Tanaiste, Ms. Joan Burton (Irish Deputy Prime Minister and member of the Irish Labour Party) met face to face with a minor demonstration at Jobstown, Dublin on November 15^th 2014. Ms. Burton was initially struck with a water balloon as she entered the reception at An Cosan (Higher Education Centre. (see here.) Afterwards, she became delayed in a parked car for more than 2 hours while attempting to leave the engagement, due mainly to a peaceful sit-in on the public road. She eventually left the scene after Gardai (police) reinforcements arrived.

The Aftermath

 The Irish state responded to these events, three months later, beginning on Feb 9^th 2015. Mr. Paul Murphy (Anti Austerity Alliance and elected representative to Dail Eireann) and councillors Mr. Kieran Mahon and Mr. Mick Murphy (both Anti Austerity Alliance) were the first three among twenty peaceful protesters arrested during a week long Garda action. Mr. Paul Murphy was brought to Terenure Garda station for the alleged ‘false imprisonment’ of Ms. Joan Burton in her car during the Jobstown demonstration (see here.) Although he and the others engaged with the Police at some level, following legal advice he refused to answer questions about the Jobstown demonstration (see here.) None of the twenty arrested were formally charged. These very public arrests occur two weeks before planned protests at the Annual Labour Party Conference in Killarney on February 28^th 2015. In light of the events at Jobstown, this post examines the right to social protest and state obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Civil Society and Democracy

The collective longing of a society, vocally expressed and manifested through association and peaceful assembly, is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy (see UN High Commission report here.) Indeed, it forms part of the necessary ambit for progress and individual fulfilment, acting as a counterweight to both an authoritarian government and the tyrannical market. Voluntary organisations forged in the community, and created to defend or advance the causes they believe in, are imperative to the realisation of the ‘good society’ (see here.) This requires protection against arbitrary interference by the State.

Social Protest and the ECHR

The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights has strongly favoured the right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly on the ‘public highway’ against restrictions to the right by state authorities’ (see Rassemblement Jurassien v Switz here.) Thus, the unnecessary dispersal of demonstrations, the banning of marches, and according to Keir Starmer QC, the ‘instigation of criminal proceedings’ specifically against individuals in the aftermath of an assembly – all fall under the rubric of articles 10, and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European Court recognises that the ‘threat of arrest has a chilling effect’ on the exercise of freedom of expression (see Steel and Others v UK , para 99.) Significantly, the Court has categorically stated that punitive measures, regardless of how minimal, even those categorised as implying ‘mainly moral force’ are interferences with Convention rights. In the case of Ezelin v France, a lawyer took part in a demonstration and was reprimanded by the French Bar Council, for not answering police questions, and for not disassociating from an element of the protest which abused the police and wrote graffiti on public buildings. The penalty was minor but had ‘moral force.’ The Court held that this sanction was not necessary in a democratic society, and contravened article 11 (see para 53.) If these actions are taken in the aftermath of an assembly, such actions are considered as ‘equal an interference as the physical removal of the applicants at the time’ (see Keir Starmer, p 630.) Thus, the actions of state authorities ‘must not discourage individuals, for fear of disciplinary sanctions, from making clear their beliefs.’ (see Ezelin v France, para 52.)

Spontaneous Demonstrations

Of course, a demonstration may ‘annoy’ or ‘give offence to persons opposed’ to that which is expressed during an assembly, (see Plattform Artze fur das leben v Austria, note 23), and minor disturbances are to be expected in public gatherings. In the case of Bukta v Hungary a minor detonation, during a spontaneous demonstration outside a venue where the Prime Minister was in attendance, did not convince the Court that there was a danger to public order, sufficient to warrant dispersal of the assembly. The court stressed that ‘public authorities must show a certain degree of tolerance at public gatherings’ (see para 31.) With regards to the dispersal of an assembly by state authorities, including spontaneous demonstrations without a license – if a license is required by national law – the Court will support peaceful demonstration (see G V FRG.) This means that peaceful intent by the organisers is sufficient. If an element of disorder materialises during an otherwise peaceful protest, as quiet often it does, the Court will balance the danger to public order, against the right to freedom of assembly. In doing so, the Court will assess not just the facts of the case at national level but the entire political backdrop in the state at that time. The UN Special Rapporteur, on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, pointed out that States ‘should recognise the positive role of peaceful protests as a means of strengthening human rights and democracy’ (see UN High Commissioner Report.)

Blockades and Occupation

In Steel and others v UK the Court stipulated that expression may take the form of ‘physically impeding the activities’ of which the protesters disapprove. This constituted expressions of opinion within the meaning of article 10. It appears a certain amount of impediment will be protected, however if those protesting create a danger of serious physical injury to themselves and others, arrest most likely will be deemed a proportionate restriction of the right. The peaceful occupation of a building, even if clearly against domestic law, may also be regarded as peaceful assembly in certain cases (see Cisse v France.) In this case the church did not make a complaint to the authorities about their occupiers.

In the case of G v FRG, the Commission held that the conviction of a protester engaged in a spontaneous peaceful sit in, blocking the entrance to an American Barracks in Germany, was a violation of his right to peaceful assembly. His conviction ‘needed to be justified as a restriction prescribed by law, and necessary in a democratic society for one of the purposes set out in Article 11 para. 2 of the Convention.’   At the 14 year long Corrib Gas Dispute in County Mayo, Ireland, numerous incidents of police brutality have been documented (see here.) Strategies in Rossport circa 2011, appear to include the continuous arrest of protesters outside Shell gates, then later released without charge. Thus the protesters were denied their right to freedom of assembly on the public highway or their right to a public hearing. Interestingly, it is reported in the Guardian Newspaper that Shell provided consignments of alcohol worth €35,000 to the Belmullet Garda station at Christmas 2007 (see here.) The actions of the police in Rossport often appear to be in direct conflict with the State’s positive obligation to enable lawful demonstrations to proceed peacefully.

Restrictions on the Right to Freedom of Assembly.

Restrictions and penalties must be prescribed by law, have a legitimate aim and be necessary in a democratic society. The term necessary implies the existence of a ‘pressing social need’ (see Barthold v Germany, para 55.) The term ‘pressing social need’ must include the ‘clear and present danger test’ in light of the particular circumstances of the case (see Arrowsmith v UK, para 95.) The contracting states have a margin of appreciation in assessing whether such a need exists but this goes hand in hand with European Supervision (see Lingens v Austria, para 39.) Restricting rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly because of legislation ‘which has just been contravened – does not constitute a legitimate aim within the meaning of article 11(2)’ (see Cisse v France, para 50)

Is breaking the law justified in certain circumstances?

 The general aim of social protest and civil disobedience is to express ones political and social thoughts and opinions and effect positive change in our society. These rights, quiet simply must be protected by the state. There are occasions when breaking the law may be the only method available to the protester to adequately express his or her conscience. This issue arose in the Australian case of New South Wales District Court, Regina v Kirkwood et al 15^th May 2002 (unpub), (cited here.) In this case, 46 Greenpeace activists had deliberately broken the law, by invading a nuclear power plant, with the intention of highlighting the inadequate security at the plant. It was accepted by the presiding judge, that the objectives and motives of the protesters could not be achieved by demonstrating at the front gate. Their actions were necessary to demonstrate in graphic terms the woeful security at the plant, despite committing the crime of trespass. Thus, in the arena of civil disobedience, the end may in certain circumstances, legally justify the means.

When polio (poliomyelitis) became an epidemic in the U.S. and other parts of the world many people were understandably concerned. Diseases are absolutely frightening. During the 1950’s, polio made the public fearful. In April of 1952, Dr. Salk announced at the University of Michigan that he had developed a vaccine against the polio virus. That same day, the U.S. government approved a license for the immediate distribution of the polio vaccine. By 1954 the U.S. government allowed national testing for the newly developed vaccine which Dr. Salk himself developed by growing a live polio virus in kidney tissues in Asian Rhesus monkeys. He used formaldehyde to kill the virus. Dr. Salk injected the vaccine into humans with a small amount of the actual virus into the body so it’s natural defenses can build immunity or a defense mechanism against the virus. The first experimentations on humans resulted in 60%-70% who did not develop the virus although 200 people were reported to have caught the disease, 11 of them died as a result. The cause was a faulty batch, but regardless of the outcome, vaccine tests continued unabated. One year after the result, four million vaccinations were given in the U.S. By April 12th, 1955, the Salk vaccine was licensed for distribution after the results were officially published.

The release of the polio vaccine prompted criticism. In December 1960, a health news magazine called the ‘Herald of Health’ published a crucial report titled ‘The Great Salk Vaccine Fiasco: Misuse of statistics, blackout of vaccine cases, cited by eminent Chicago doctor’ By Ernest B. Zeisler, M.D. (which can be found at www.vaclib.org) who disagreed with Dr. Salk’s claims that the vaccine was safe or even useful against polio.  Dr. Zeisler wrote a personal note to the publisher of the magazine M. S. Arnoni and told him that “No newspaper, periodical or medical journal will touch this. Many authorities in this field agree with me, and some have written me to say so and to congratulate me for what they call my ‘courage.’But no medical man will agree with me publicly”.  

Dr. Zeisler wrote:

On April 12, 1955, results of a 1954 field test were published and the Salk vaccine became a licensed product. Prof. Paul Meier of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University revealed that “the vaccines used in the field trial, which were produced by two of the manufacturers, had been extensively tested in three laboratories and had been found negative for live virus. Many of the lots of vaccine released after the field trial had been produced by other manufacturers and had been tested only by the producer. Therefore, the safety of these lots could not properly be judged from the results of the field trial. All manufacturers had rejected some lots because live virus had been found in them, and therefore Salk’s theory that safety was guaranteed by the method of preparation obviously did not apply

Dr. Zeisler’s report was well documented with evidence regarding the safety of the polio vaccines. He quoted Professor Meier’s statement which was published in 1957 report by Science Magazine. What was disturbing about the vaccine trials that it lacked proper controls and a little less than half was even considered “bias in favor of the vaccinated” which violated the basic principles of scientific research.  Dr. Zeisler quoted K.A. Brownlee from the University of Chicago in the Journal of the American Statistical Association which was published in 1955 described what the field trials actually proved:

The field trial itself had violated the cardinal principles of scientific procedure. As said by Brownlee in the Journal of the American Statistical Association:

“. . . 59 per cent of the trial was worthless because of the lack of adequate controls. The remaining 41 per cent may be all right but contains internal evidence of bias in favor of the vaccinated. .. The reviewer . . . would point out that gamma globulin was triumphantly proclaimed effective by the National Foundation after a similar trial . . .”

Dr. Zeisler said that the U.S. Public Health service continued to promote “gamma globulin” or a human blood plasma made from donated human blood that contained antibodies to fight diseases as a way to combat polio.  He wrote “It may be of interest to note that in May of 1954, several months after it had been shown to be valueless in preventing poliomyelitis, the U.S. Public Health Service continued to recommend and distribute gamma globulin “for use against poliomyelitis.” Zeisler criticized the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for not publishing Brownlee’s criticism.   However, the official report of the field trials which proved inaccurate was used by the ‘National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’ several months later in an effort to promote the polio vaccine to the public in 1955.  So how safe was the polio vaccine according to Dr. Salk?  He was interviewed by LIFE magazine in an article titled ‘Tracking the Killer’ and was asked if his “monkey vaccine was safe” and he answer was “There is no question of ‘how safe is it?’ It is safe, and it can’t be safer than safe’.” The deception committed by the medical establishment and the U.S. government was undeniable as Dr. Zeisler wrote that “the public was deceived into permitting mass vaccination of children with a vaccine which should have been known to be unsafe and which was not known to be of any value in preventing poliomyelitis.” With this proven fact, he added “that certain lots of vaccine had produced a number of cases of poliomyelitis, and within another four weeks all the vaccine was withdrawn from use.”

Was the Salk vaccine safe and highly effective? Two Conflicting Reports

The U.S. Public Health Service issued two conflicting reports.  In the first report it stated “that a single inoculation of the Salk vaccine used in 1955 was sufficient to give from 50 to 80 per cent protection against paralytic poliomyelitis” Dr. Zeisler also noted that the second report “two days later it issued another report stressing the safety of the current Salk vaccine.” JAMA released a statement by Dr. Herbert Ratner, an Associate Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University in Chicago and also a Health Commissioner of Oak Park, Ill which did not agree with the results from the U.S. Public Health Service claimed Dr. Zeisler. Dr. Ratner’s statement said:

The widespread national publicity that followed these reports naturally led the public and the medical profession at large to believe we now had a safe and highly effective vaccine. “However, what was not made sufficiently clear in the reports and press stories that covered the country was that the first report, stressing excellent effectiveness, referred to an earlier model of a Salk vaccine and Hurt the second report, stressing current safety referred to a later model, . . . the Salk vaccine, for which great effectiveness is claimed on the basis of one inoculation, is a product that is no longer on the market nor in the hands of physicians . . . The Salk vaccine, then, which we were encouraged to believe is both highly effective and safe on the basis of recent reports, turns out to be, when highly effective, a vaccine that is no longer on the market and, when safe, a vaccine that has yet to make its appearance and clinically prove its effectiveness . . . during the summer the promoters of the vaccine continued to urge mass inoculations in spite of recognized ignorance on their part

There was an Increase of polio cases in Chicago as of June of 1956. Dr. Herman Bundesen and Dr. John B. Hall (who did not believe the Salk vaccine was the cause) responded to the new findings which Dr. Zeisler noted from a Chicago Daily News report in June 1956:

Dr. Herman Bundesen, President of the Chicago Board of Health, was quoted as saying: “It’s too early to speculate on the efficacy of the vaccine.” This moment of candor was not to recur from then until now. On the same day, Dr. John B. Hall, director of the Cook County Board of Health, said, concerning six cases of polio in children who had received, the Salk vaccine. he did not think the vaccine caused the polio attacks in those who got the disease after inoculation”

During the month of July 1956, Zeisler wrote a letter to Dr. Hart E. Van Viper, A medical Director of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis asking why did he tell both doctors to “take leadership” in their community claiming that the vaccine was 75% effective and therefore it is deemed safe.  What if a real estate agent was trying to sell you a house that had a 75% chance of collapsing, but told you the house was safe regardless of the fact, would you still buy it?  Dr. Van Riper’s response contradicted what he said prior to Dr. Zeisler’s letter:

On July 3, 1956 the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis sent a letter to all physicians over the signature of Hart E.Van Riper, its Medical Director, urging them to “give reassurance that the present Salk vaccine is safe and effective to patients, parents and others in your community who still needlessly doubt it … the vaccine is at least 75% effective in preventing paralytic poliomyelitis. . . . Won’t you take leadership in your community and among your patients to see that they get this safe, highly effective vaccine now?”

On July 9, I wrote to Dr. Van Riper, quoting Drs. Bundesen and Hall, and asking: “Why, if the vaccine has been proved to be 75% effective is it still too early even to speculate about its effectiveness? And why, if it has been proved safe is it possible for the head of a health department merely to think that it did not cause infection?”

In his reply, dated July 12, Dr. Van Riper said as to Dr. Bundesen’s remark that “it’s too early to speculate about the effectiveness of the vaccine”: “I can only assume that Doctor Bundesen intended to imply that we could expect an even greater degree of effectiveness in the prevention of paralytic poliomyelitis in 1956 as compared with 1955, . . .”

It seemed that Dr. Van Riper “was assuming” that Dr. Bundesen was betting that the vaccines were expected to be more effective than the previous year.  What was questionable to Dr. Bundesen’s implications was that he started to consider that the Salk vaccine was actually spreading the disease wrote Dr. Zeisler:

That this is not at all what Dr. Bundesen intended to imply is shown by the fact that only two days after expressing his doubt, he called a conference of health authorities to decide whether or not vaccination with the Salk vaccine should not be entirely discontinued in view of the accelerated rise of new cases of paralytic polio in Chicago. Dr. Bundesen obviously was considering the possibility that the Salk vaccine would help spread the disease.

On July 27, there were already 203 reported cases of paralytic polio in Chicago. But Dr. Bundesen said: “. . . there were no paralytic cases among children who had received all three shots.” On the same day I wrote Dr. Van Riper the following: “If no child in the area had received three injections, then the fact that none of those with paralytic polio had received three doses is irrelevant and inevitable. In the daily figures which have been given there is always the statement as to how many of those who have come down with paralytic polio had been vaccinated, but never any figure as to how many children in the area had been vaccinated compared to the total number in the area. . . . People are being urged to have their children vaccinated at once, and physicians are urged to further this, with the implication that such procedure will be effective in stemming the tide of the present epidemic. . . . Yet, inasmuch as the third dose is to be given seven months after the first, only the first two could have’ any possible effect this year.”

This letter elicited only double-talk from Dr. Van Riper in a letter dated August 9. Dr. Bundesen continued to issue reassuring statements. On August 9 he stated he was “concerned with the drop off in the number of persons returning for their second shots of vaccine . . . The situation may become critical unless parents bring their children in for their second and third shots when they are due, and for the first inoculation if they have not already had it.”

“Of the city’s 371 paralytic cases— the form against which the vaccine is effective—not a single case has been reported for any person who had the recommended three inoculations. There have been 54 among those getting only one and 13 among those with two”

He also explained how the numbers did not add up according to the Chicago-Sun Times report:

The obvious explanation for this division of the incidence of paralytic polio was, of course, that there were more persons who had one injection than two, and perhaps none who had all three. This was never suggested by the health authorities or by the medical societies or journals. Even Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told the university’s medical alumni: “Of all the 113 polio cases in Michigan diagnosed as paralytic, not one case has been reported among those children who had previously received three shots of vaccine.”

On September 29, the U.S. Public Health Service said “three Salk shots have proved 100 per cent effective against polio so far this year.”

Still no indication that anyone had received all three injections! On September 30, I again wrote to Dr. Van Riper: “I have inquired from one of the foremost authorities in Chicago as to how many children in the Chicago epidemic area this summer had previously received -three injections. He said no one knew the answer, but that the number was certainly very small. I then asked him whether to his knowledge any of them had received all three injections, and he replied he did not know. I would greatly appreciate your reply to this question. . .” On October 26, after inconsequential interim correspondence, he finally answered: “I am sorry that to date there has not been sufficient time elapsed since the Chicago epidemic to enable anyone to give a definite answer to the question you have raised. I do know that a study is being made and feel sure this will be made public when it is completed.” But no time was needed after the epidemic to determine how many persons had had all three injections before the epidemic began. In any case, here was a clear admission that no one knew so the repeated assurances of the 100 per cent effectiveness of three doses of the Salk vaccine in preventing paralytic polio in this epidemic, admit of no possible explanation other than either deliberate falsehood with intent to deceive or unconscionable stupidity.

By late November the public had seemingly become so apathetic about Salk vaccination that the pharmaceutical houses and the health authorities enlisted the aid of President Eisenhower, and on November 27 induced him to express alarm that there were 17,000,000 doses of Salk vaccine unused on the shelf and that they could “prevent paralysis or even death.” The Sun-Times quoted Dr. Bundesen as saying: “If everyone 45 or under gets the complete series, there will not be a single case of paralytic polio in Chicago in 1957″(14) thereby asserting that the vaccine in three doses was 100 per cent effective. ” On January 3, 1957, U.S. Public Health Service reported that paralytic polio in the United States had dropped from 10,641 cases in 1955 to 6,708 cases in 1956. This was a decrease of 37 per cent.  The New York Times said “Health officials said the use of the Salk vaccine had undoubtedly reduced the disease but there was no way of knowing to what extent”

The propaganda methods used by the pharmaceutical corporations and the health authorities was to sell the notion that the vaccines were safe and effective despite the fact it was the opposite. Dr. Zeisler mentions a report about a meeting that took place in the New York Academy of Science with records of those who received all three doses of the Salk vaccine actually developed polio.  There were at least 150 cases including several deaths due to polio:

Health authorities said they had no explanation for this decrease. Later the same month it was reported at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences that there were records of more than 150 cases of paralytic polio, including several deaths, among persons who had received all three injections of Salk vaccine. Without ever referring to this, newspapers, medical journals and medical societies continued to plug for the vaccine

As Dr. Zeisler summarized in his closing argument proving that his research on the success of the polio vaccine was in fact questionable:

The considerable increase in paralytic poliomyelitis in the United States during the past two years, despite the progressive decrease in the number of the most susceptible persons (those under 40) who have not yet been triply-vaccinated, does not prove that the vaccine is valueless. But the evidence, biased as it is in favor of the vaccine, suggests that it may be of little or no value. Even more, it suggests the distinct possibility that the vaccine may actually be at least partly responsible for the increase by producing carriers who spread the disease

Before Dr. Jonas Salk’s new found invention of the polio vaccine was announced to the public, it was discovered that Salk performed illegal experimentations on mental patients according to www.naturalnews.com  report on the new discovery by Mike Adams titled ‘Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of polio vaccine, exposed as criminal-minded scientist who conducted illicit medical experiments on mental patients’ describing Dr. Salk as a “criminal-minded scientist” who used mental patients to conduct his medical experiments:

Dr. Jonas Salk, one of the “gods” in the cult of pharmacology — a man who is credited with inventing the polio vaccine — has now been exposed as a medical criminal who conducted illegal medical experiments on mental patients. This fact has come to light courtesy of the Associated Press, believe it or not, which has been investigating the history of medical experiments as part of a press effort leading up to scheduled bioethics meetings in Washington.

According to the Associated Press, Dr. Jonas Salk co-authored a clinical trial that “injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later.” The victims of this medical experiment were described as “senile and debilitated,” meaning that obtaining their rational consent to participate in such experiments would have been impossible. And that means Dr. Jonas Salk — one of the most highly-worshipped figures throughout modern medicine — was conducting this trial in violation of medical ethics and in violation of the law

And on that topic, the true history of the criminal medical experiments that have been done in order to boost the profits of Big Pharma will absolutely shock you. As the AP reports:

“The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.”

This is the result of Big Pharma leaning on state authorities, of course. Where profits are to be made, human rights have never gotten in the way. In fact, as the historical record clearly shows, the U.S. government has repeatedly conspired with the drug industry to use innocent human beings as unwitting guinea pigs in dangerous, deadly medical experiments

However, by 1959, at least 90 countries received Dr. Salk’s polio vaccinations for their own citizens.  That same year an interesting turn of events took place; Dr. Bernice Eddy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made an accidental discovery. While she was examining the kidney cells of Rhesus monkeys, she noticed how the cells were systematically dying off. Why was this significant? It was where the polio vaccine originated from. Dr. Eddy’s discovery was quickly dismissed; of course today it would be considered a “conspiracy theory.” Dr. Maurice Hilleman and Dr. Ben Sweet of Merck & Co also managed to isolate the SV40 virus also known as “Simian Virus 40” in the polio vaccinations. In a November 3rd, 2003 issue of the Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology, a report in by Michael E. Horwin explains how the “Simian Virus 40” was found to cause cancer in laboratory animals confirming Dr. Eddy’s findings:

Dr. Eddy discovered that the cells would die without any apparent cause. She then took suspensions of the cellular material from these kidney cell cultures and injected them into hamsters. Cancers grew in the hamsters. Shortly thereafter, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. discovered what would later be determined to be the same virus identified by Eddy. This virus was named Simian Virus 40 or SV40 because it was the 40th simian virus found in monkey kidney cells

After Dr. Eddy’s discovery was made public, several prominent researchers and scientists including Dr. Salk defended the polio vaccine with little evidence to claim that it actually cured Polio.  Dr. Zeisler was not the only medical professional to doubt the effectiveness of the Polio vaccine; Dr. Suzanne Humphries M.D. also stated in the past that a cover-up took place to hide the fact from the public that the polio vaccine was actually spreading polio.  Dr. Humphries explains how a deadly live polio virus strain infected the Salk vaccines which led to an epidemic of a polio-type disease such as “aseptic meningitis” or “Acute Flaccid Paralysis” (AFP). Dr. Humphries wrote ‘Smoke, Mirrors, and the ‘Disappearance’ Of Polio’ in 2012 and said the following:

Unbeknownst to most doctors, the polio-vaccine history involves a massive public health service makeover during an era when a live, deadly strain of poliovirus infected the Salk polio vaccines, and paralyzed hundreds of children and their contacts. These were the vaccines that were supposedly responsible for the decline in polio from 1955 to 1961! But there is a more sinister reason for the “decline” in polio during those years; in 1955, a very creative re-definition of poliovirus infections was invented, to “cover” the fact that many cases of “polio” paralysis had no poliovirus in their systems at all. While this protected the reputation of the Salk vaccine, it muddied the waters of history in a big way

Another interesting fact that Dr. Humphries points out was a Statement made by Clinton R. Miller regarding ‘Intensive Immunization Programs’ on May 1962 before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in the House of Representatives.  Mr. Miller told the committee the following:

The tendency of a mass vaccination program is to herd people. People are not cattle or sheep. They should not be herded. A mass vaccination program carries a built-in temptation to oversimplify the problem; to exaggerate the benefits; to minimize or completely ignore the hazards; to discourage or silence scholarly, thoughtful and cautious opposition; to create an urgency where none exists; to whip up an enthusiasm among citizens that can carry with it the seeds of impatience, if not intolerance; to extend the concept of the police power of the state in quarantine far beyond its proper limitation; to assume simplicity when there is actually great complexity; to continue to support a vaccine long after it has been discredited;… to ridicule honest and informed consent

Adolf Hitler was once quoted as saying if you “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” More than 98 million people were given the polio vaccine through a well-crafted propaganda campaign committed by medical professionals aligned with Merck & Co. and others in the medical establishment and of course, the U.S. government. In today’s market, the Flu vaccine (High Dose) for people over 65 years old costs $54.99 per dose and the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine costs on average $99.99 according to a Walgreen’s price list. Now imagine the total U.S. population as of 2015 stands at over 300 million. If you do the math, pharmaceutical corporations will reap billions of dollars in profits. The mainstream media (MSM) continues to push all types of prescription drugs and various types of vaccines to the public even during commercials. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that advertises prescription drugs and vaccines to the public. Legal drugs is a lucrative business, you can even say dangerous especially when big pharmaceutical corporations, the media and elected officials in Washington collaborate on foreign and domestic policies regarding health as a national security issue.

However, the good news is the growing numbers of people worldwide who do not trust many big pharmaceutical corporations or the U.S. government when it is involved in vaccination campaigns, most notably the recent case of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who might face a possible lawsuit by the Indian government. An investigation is still taking place.  According to a 2012 article published by www.mercola.com titled ‘Confirmed: India’s Polio Eradication Campaign in 2011 Caused 47,500 Cases of Vaccine-Induced Polio Paralysis’ by Dr. Mercola himself  wrote about that the increase of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) was due to the oral polio vaccine (OPV).   NPAFP was now ”12 times higher” with 47,500 cases as the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics reported:

A paper published earlier this year in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics should have made headlines around the globe, as it estimated there were 47,500 cases of a polio-like condition linked to children in India receiving repeated doses of oral polio vaccine in 2011 alone. The incidence of non-polio Accute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) in India is now 12 times higher than expected and coincides with huge increases in OPV doses being given to children in the quest to “eradicate” wild type polio infection and paralysis.

Researchers reported:

“…while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere [First, do no harm] was violated”

I agree with Dr. Mercola’s assessment on the growing distrust of vaccinations on a world wide scale when he said:

What you’re NOT learning from the mainstream media, however, is that there’s a growing public movement fighting the profound misinformation about these OPV campaigns being conducted repeatedly among children in India and other nations. One recent published paper has suggested that increased administration of OPV doses among children in India is associated with increases in Accute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP), which is as crippling and deadly as wild type polio paralysis

Dr. Jonas Salk became a legend in the field of medicine in the U.S. and the world. There is the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, San Diego, California, you have Salk scholarships awarded to students every year, the City College of New York (CCNY) and Salk’s “alma Mater” celebrates his accomplishments. In 2014, CCNY stated that it will “honor polio vaccine pioneer’s 100th birthday with symposium on disease he helped defeat.” They even established the Polio Hall of Fame, Yet the failures of the polio vaccines are ignored by the MSM, the U.S. government and the medical establishment. In this case, propaganda for the polio vaccine has won the battle for “Big Pharma” profits, but the war for our health will be won in the end by the people who do not trust any sort of corporate sponsored drugs or vaccines even when old and new diseases occur.  There are better ways to fight diseases, perhaps with a focus on ’Prevention’ rather than to depend on drugs that are produced for the sole purpose of profits.

“…when you select heroes about which black children ought to be taught, let them be black heroes who have died fighting for the benefit of black people.  We never were taught about Christophe or Dessalines.  It was the slave revolt in Haiti when slaves, black slaves, had the soldiers of Napoleon tied down and forced him to sell one half of the American continent to the Americans. They don’t teach us that.  This is the kind of history we want to learn.” – Malcolm X[1]

February 21, 2015 marked the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X who is is firmly located within the ranks of the foremost luminaries of Pan-Afrikanism.[2] As such, he was very much concerned with the fate of Afrikans across the globe. The broadness of Malcolm’s humanity and sympathy informed his internationalism, which included all oppressed peoples, especially the racialized ones who have experienced the lashes of global white supremacy.[3]

This year, 2015, also marks the commencement of the 100^th anniversary of the United States’ invasion and occupation of Haiti, the 11th anniversary of the Western-backed coup against the democratically-elected government Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the current MINUSTAH occupation, and the 5^th anniversary of the devastating 2010 earthquake. The outlook of this ardent Pan-Afrikanist and internationalist, Malcolm X, ought to have relevance to the organized solidarity that anti-imperialists and Pan-Afrikanists should be demonstrating toward the labouring classes in Haiti.

One of the most important anti-imperialist struggles in the Americas today is the occupation of Haiti by western imperialism by way of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).[4] As long as this military occupation is in effect, the individuals and organizations who claim to be champions of the self-determination and independence of oppressed people should be organizing to end it. The people of Haiti are actively resisting the neocolonial regime and the occupation force that have been imposed on them. The people are making Are we, internationalists, playing our part as comrades-in-arms with “the wretched of the earth” in Haiti?

Haiti’s legacy of materially contributing to the independence struggles in South America and Central America, and accelerating the end to slavery in the Americas ought to inspire a higher level of commitment for its popular struggle on the ground. The Haitian Revolution clearly demonstrated the creative genius, boldness, resilience and self-reliance of a dispossessed people when they are motivated by a compelling idea or vision. Hence, the labouring classes in Haiti are heirs to a revolutionary tradition that affirms the capacity of the socially damned to assert themselves on the stage of history as dramatic actors.

It was not an accident that Malcolm made connection to the Haitian Revolution in his effort to achieve human rights for Afrikan Americans. He expressed admiration for its example of militancy and courage in checkmating white supremacy, enslavement and colonialism, “[Frederick] Douglass was great. I would rather have been taught about Toussaint L’Ouverture. We need to be taught about who fought, who bled for freedom and made others bleed.”[5] Malcolm told his followers that history was a very instructive and wise teacher and worthy of emulation. He encouraged them to “examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problem similar to yours.”[6] The enslaved Afrikans in Haiti used revolutionary violence to assert that the slogan “equality, liberty and fraternity[solidarity]” was applicable to their struggle for emancipation.

One of the most admirable and central elements of Malcolm’s contribution to the Afrikan Revolutionary Tradition was his internationalist and Pan-Afrikanist thoughts and politics. Temkin states that there are much to learn from engaging the internationalist thoughts of Malcolm in areas such as “human rights, the politics of citizenship, the impact of decolonization, anti-imperialism, the global and black left, and the tension between geopolitics and individual or collective political action.”[7] This Afrikan revolutionary was preoccupied with strategically internationalizing the national struggle of Afrikans inside the United States.

He saw the significance of connecting the global struggles for emancipation of the peoples of Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Afrika. This ideological orientation is evidenced in this declaration:

1964 will see the Negro revolt evolve and merge into the worldwide black revolution that has been taking place on this earth since 1945. The so-called revolt will become a real black revolution. Now the black revolution has been taking place in Africa and Asia and Latin America; when I say black, I mean non-white – black, brown, red or yellow.[8]

The common experience of colonialism and white supremacy created the basis for unity of purpose in the eyes of Malcolm. This political sensibility informed his framing of the resistance of the racialized world to European colonialism and the thrust toward independence. It is important to note that this United States-based internationalist held the national resistance struggle of Afrikan Americans as an integral part of the “worldwide black revolution.”

This fight for liberation from white supremacy and imperialism made solidarity and mutual aid among the racialized world majority an objective and existential necessity, from the vantage point of Malcolm’s internationalist outlook. It is for the preceding reason that Malcolm lavished unbridled, albeit unnuanced, praise on the 1955 Bandung Conference that pulled together independent Afrikan and Asian states to further economic cooperation and provide collective resistance to the colonialism and hegemony of the white imperial or major powers.[9]

The work that took place at the Bandung Conference led to the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement of states that stood outside of the West and the former Soviet Union and its state socialist Eastern European allies. Bandung’s unity was seen by Malcolm as a “model for the same procedure you and I [Afrikans in America] can use to get our problem solved.”[10]

Malcolm’s extensive visits to Afrika and Western Asia (Middle East)[11] broadened his internationalist perspective and framing of issues such as black nationalism,[12] the emancipation of women,[13] capitalism as a predator,[14] imperialism as a global system of exploitation,[15] cooperation with whites,[16] and the role of one’s religious beliefs in the secular struggle for emancipation.[17] Malcolm’s political development led him to see the “worldwide revolution” in revolt against an “international western power structure” or a “giant international combine” (imperialism) that ruled the peoples and exploited the resources of the global South.[18] From the time of Malcolm’s Message to the Grassroots in late 1963 to his “worldwide revolution” speech on February 15, 1965, one can see a drastic shift from the overly racializing of the struggle against imperialism to the integration of an economic analysis into his understanding of global white supremacy and western imperialism.

Malcolm’s understanding of class and race oppression and a developing gender analysis informed his framing of Afrikan American oppression within a radical internationalist framework. This internationalizing of the struggle made him a dangerous figure in the eyes of the United States[19] and to the “international western power structure’ as evidenced by the French state denying him entry onto its national territory.[20] The preceding state of affairs which indicate the willingness of the forces of oppression to collaborate or act as one across borders in order to maintain their systems of domination. As such, it is a moral and political obligation, on the part of the oppressed, to strategize and cooperate transnationally, otherwise a revolution in one country would be quite vulnerable.

What lessons or insights should we draw from Malcolm’s international solidarity and global justice orientation on the question of MINUSTAH’s occupation of Haiti and the popular struggle against neoliberal capitalism and the occupier?

A central component of Malcolm’s attempt at internationalizing the struggle of Afrikans in the United States was to seek intervention before international bodies such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Organization of American States.[21] He was especially fixated on the UN as the forum in which the classification of the racist oppression of Afrikan Americans as a struggle for human right as opposed to one for civil rights, would have placed it “completely out of the jurisdiction of the United States government.[22]

The OAU, a body of strongmen, neocolonial agents and kleptocrats, was seen by Malcolm as a body that would demonstrate solidarity with the human rights struggle of Afrikan Americans. However, when this continental group had the opportunity to openly and vigorously challenge the trampling of the human rights of Afrikan Americans, the OAU took the path of least resistance by passing a “moderate resolution against ‘‘racial oppression.’’”[23]

Malcolm overestimated inexplicably gave too much credit to the usefulness of the two-thirds votes of the “continent of Africa, coupled with the Asian and Arab bloc” in the General Assembly.[24] The Security Council is the seat of power and action at the UN and each of the five permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States) wields a veto over its decisions. For example, the UN’s Security Council intervention in the Congo in July 1960 was a classic case of the UN being used by western powers to retain this country within its sphere of influence^[25] and checkmate the feared influence of the former Soviet Union and its military support to the Patrice Lumumba-led government.[26]

Given the current occupation of Haiti by the UN on behalf of western states such as Canada, France and the United States, it is clear that this international institution and its Security Council are not allies in the struggle for human rights in the global South. The UN’s General Assembly may serve, at best, as the conscience of the world and a place for moral victory for causes related to the oppressed. We could look at the case of the United States economic embargo against Cuba or the Palestinians’ quest for self-determination enjoys solid support in the General Assembly, but have foundered on the shore of inaction at the Security Council.

The UN tends to intervene in a country when it is in the interests of western states to do so. Its military presence in Haiti provides legitimacy to western powers’ and the local ruling elite’s attempt to weaken the development or strengthening of a people’s movement that might undermine capitalism and the geo-strategic interests of imperialism.

Malcolm’s appeal to states or international bodies and the questionable efficacy of such an approach ought to lead us in the direction of movements from below as the principal way to challenge imperialism in Haiti, and everywhere.  The operators of the state are fearful of the autonomous organizing of the people. As such, they will seek to undermine the existence of independent, oppositional organizations and movements. The state might do so through co-opting the leaders with material incentives or use the security services to repress both leaders and members by way of the security services.

It was the mobilization of the masses or the fear of them being mobilized that pushed colonial powers such as France and Britain in Afrika[27] and the Caribbean to embark on the path of formal independence. Malcolm claimed that the pre-independence nationalism and consciousness of the people in Afrika had been “fanned from a spark into a roaring flame” and made things too hot for colonialism.[28]

Malcolm’s faith in the “grass roots out there in the streets” acting independently of the politically compromised leadership and driving fear in the power structure[29] is a more fruitful direction in which to oppose the occupation in Haiti. In fact, this is the very approach that the popular movement in Haiti has been using to challenge the western-backed president Michel Martelly and MINUSTAH’s occupation.[30] In 1986, a mobilized Haitian populace brought an end to the Duvalier regime and paved the way for the emergence of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the organizational expression of their self-determination in the form of Fanmi Lavalas.

In spite of state violence being directed at the masses in the streets, they continue to demand a future that centres their economic, social and political interests. Malcolm’s evolving international solidarity politics calls for active involvement with the masses in revolt. He would have encouraged people outside of Haiti to stand with the people of Haiti, given his admiration of the Haitian Revolution. He told a group at a public lecture in France that an effective way to help Afrikan Americans would be to intervene when the police “grab and arrest us, let them know, well, that they shouldn’t have done it.”[31] While Malcolm did not specify the range of actions that should be taken by these would-be internationalists, we have at our disposal a number of initiatives that can be taken to express our solidarity with the people in Haiti.[32]

After all, the struggle in Haiti is a part of the worldwide “black revolution” and the fight against the “international western power structure.” All freedom loving peoples across the globe, and especially those living in the Americas have an anti-imperialist obligation to support the people of Haiti as they resist the oppressive forces that are aligned against them.[33]

A number of Latin American states have contributed military and police personnel to MINUSTAH’s occupation of Haiti. Many organizations in that region have started to organize to force an end to the occupation of Haiti. Internationalists in North America, Europe, Afrika and Asia need to systematically mobilize, educate and organize the people to drive out the occupation and allow the people of Haiti to determine their own path to development. The victory of Haiti in ending slavery and asserting its political independence lit the flame of freedom across the Americas.

Haiti could once again become the trailblazer of emancipation and revolutionary fortitude. Internationalists who are in agreement with Malcolm X’s internationalism and global justice commitments ought to actively support the fight for self-determination, independence and development of the labouring classes in Haiti. It is not enough to issue meaningless praises for Malcolm’s internationalism or be infatuated with the Haitian Revolution. We need to demonstrate our international solidarity with Haiti by working in organizations in our respective countries to support and complement the work being carried out by Haitians to secure their liberation.

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an educator and organizer. He is an organizer with the Campaign to End the Occupation in Haiti and the Toronto Haiti Action Committee.

The victory of the Cuban revolution over the forces of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista meant that January 1, 1959 marked the first time in 467 years that Cubans were not subjected to serfdom and exploitation by a foreign power. Spain was the first country to exercise dominion over Cuba beginning in 1510, up until the Spanish-American War of 1898. During this period, Spain engaged in the exploitation of Cuban natural resources and subjected the native population to forced labour. The Spaniards essentially distributed the “land and indigenous labourers” amongst themselves1. Both African slaves, which were originally introduced to the island by the Spanish, and the native population were forced to endure “harsh working conditions suffered under colonists”2.

The Spanish-American War, which culminated with the expulsion of Spain in 1898, did not bring emancipation to the Cubans that had been fighting for their independence. Instead, this victory only substituted one oppressor for another, as the U.S. transformed Cuba into a neo-colony. From that point forward, the U.S exercised imperial power over the island, exploiting its resources, and dictating Cuba’s domestic and foreign policies. During this time, the Cuban economy was highly dependent on the U.S., as “74% of Cuba’s exports were destined for the US, while 73% of its imports came from the US…the all-important Cuban US sugar export market and price were controlled in Washington” (Ritter, 2010, p. 3). In fact, “[b]y the 1950s, the U.S. controlled 80 percent of Cuban utilities, 90 percent of Cuban mines, close to 100 percent of the country’s oil refineries, 90 percent of its cattle ranches, and 40 percent of the sugar industry”3. Havana also became a popular tourist destination where foreigners, particularly Americans, could indulge in gambling and prostitution.

The Revolution enabled Cuba to become independent of U.S. imperial power.  One of the first acts of the new government was to nationalize foreign enterprises and utilities in addition to instituting a series of land and agrarian reforms. Washington retaliated by imposing a comprehensive commercial, economic and financial embargo in 1962, which blocked virtually all trade between the two countries and banned U.S. citizens from travelling to Cuba.  The U.S. administration regarded the trade embargo as the best mechanism to achieve its objectives, which were aptly summarized by Lester D. Mallory, former deputy assistant Secretary of State, on April 6, 1960:

“The majority of the Cuban people support Castro. There is no effective political opposition… The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection and hardship… every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… a line of action which… makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”4

On December 17, 2014, nearly 55 years after the U.S. imposed its commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, President Barack Obama surprised the world by announcing his intention to enter into negotiations aimed at re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. It is widely believed that this step, which will include re-opening the U.S. embassy in Havana, will pave the way for an end to the embargo and eliminate certain travel restrictions on Americans looking to visit the island. In fact, some progress has already been made with regards to travel restrictions, as Americans are now able to use their debit and credit cards on visits to Cuba. Additionally, as of December 2014, Washington allows Americans to visit Cuba for the following 12 reasons5:

“family visits; official business of the U.S. government, foreign governments, and certain intergovernmental organizations; journalistic activity; professional research and professional meetings; educational activities; religious activities; public performances, clinics, workshops, athletic and other competitions, and exhibitions; support for the Cuban people; humanitarian projects; activities of private foundations or research or educational institutes; exportation, importation, or transmission of information or information materials; and certain authorized export transactions.”6

On February 19th, approximately two months after Obama’s announcement, Cuban vice president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, met with nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives in Havana.  Subsequently, a second meeting will be held in Washington on February 27th. This upcoming meeting holds considerable interest for citizens of Cuba, as many of them expect this meeting to be followed by an announcement of plans to lift the embargo7, partially or completely, on the part of the Washington administration. In reality, however, it is unlikely that the embargo will be lifted unless the Cuban government agrees to meet certain preconditions mandated by Washington. For example, “lawyers are scrambling to determine whether normalized relations with Cuba will create an opportunity to get compensation for lost properties [5,9138 US companies’ expropriation by the Cuban government after 1959 revolution] now estimated to be worth nearly $7 billion9”. Further complicating matters is the fact that that lifting the embargo would require an act of congress; however, if Congress were to vote against eliminating the embargo, President Obama still retains the option of using his “executive power will” to bypass them and force the issue10.

It is well-known that the U.S. embargo has had tremendous consequences on the development of the Cuban economy. According to Havana, the direct economic damages to Cuba attributable to the embargo would exceed $1.1 trillion11 since 1962, “taking into account the depreciation of dollar against gold”12, with specific damages including the loss of earnings, monetary and financial restrictions, and social damages with regards to health, education, culture, the availability of food, etc. Additionally, “the embargo penalizes the activities of the bank and finance, insurance, petrol, chemical products, construction, infrastructures and transports, shipyard, agriculture and fishing, electronics and computing.”13

Despite its longevity and severity, the embargo was not particularly effective in achieving its objectives, as summarized by Lester D. Mallory. Cuban Socialism still managed to be lauded for a number of notable achievements, including attaining full employment, providing universal health care services and universal access to free education, and achieving higher life expectancy, lower child mortality, lower child malnutrition, and lower poverty rates compared to any other Latin American country (Navarro, 2014, Vandepitte, 2011). In fact, a 2014 study published by the World Bank confirmed that Cuba’s education system is comparable to those of Canada, Finland, and Singapore14. In the past, the World Bank also recognized that Cuba’s international “success in the fields of education and health, with social services that exceeds those of most developing countries and, in certain sectors, are comparable to those of the developed nations”15. Furthermore, based on estimates from the United Nations Development Program, Cuba is ranked third in Latin America in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI)16. More precisely, according to the United Nations Human Development Report 2014, “Cuba’s HDI value for 2013 is 0.815— which is in the very high human development category—positioning the country at 44 out of 187 countries and territories17”.

In addition to its success in areas of human development, Cuba has also been active in providing practical foreign aid in the form of sending highly-trained specialists, such as teachers, doctors, and engineers, to developing countries where they are needed. Since 1959, Cuba has been sending doctors to countries in Latin American and Africa that are unable to meet the health care needs of their citizens on their own; this is a practice for which the island is particularly well-regarded. Currently, “around 50,000 Cuban health professionals work in 66 countries worldwide18”. Recent examples of such assistance include sending Cuban doctors to West African countries during the recent Ebola outbreak and to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 where they were largely credited with ending a cholera outbreak19.  Additionally, Cuba also helps combat doctor shortages by providing free medical school to students from various developing countries. Havana’s Latin American Medical School20 is “the largest medical school in the world”21; since 2005, this institution has produced approximately 23,000 doctors and another 10,000 graduates are expected in the near future22.

Despite Cuba’s many social achievements, the United States has made many attempts to undermine the island’s revolution since the very beginning through propaganda, sabotage, and terrorism, including the planning and support of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Fidel Castro was depicted as a military dictator who oppressed the individual freedoms of Cuba’s citizens. In addition to anti-Cuban propaganda, the U.S. government also engaged in direct sabotage aimed at weakening the socialist government, including “chemical and biological warfare against Cuba”, hundreds of attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the imposition of many economic and political sanctions that eliminated access to credit and loans from international banks and prevented free trade from flourishing (Blum, p.186-193).

Barack Obama’s efforts to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba have, in some circles, been interpreted as an admission that Washington’s repeated attempts to destroy the island’s socialist government over the last five decades have failed. However, the possibility exists that this move could be part of a larger strategy aimed at undermining Cuban socialism and dominating the island. History has shown that Washington is not averse to intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries in order to further its own interests; this includes a long list of instances where the U.S. facilitated the overthrow of governments that did not fully commit to their dictates, including Guatemala (1953-1954, 1960), Indonesia (1957-1958, 1965, 1975), the  Dominican Republic (1960-1966), Chile (1964-1973), Cambodia (1955-1973), Laos (1957-1973), the Congo (1960-1964), Greece (1964-1974), Bolivia (1964-1975), Zaire (1975-1978), Iraq (1990-1991), and Afghanistan (1979-1992).

These and many other examples of successive American governments intervening in the internal affairs of other countries in order to destabilize governments that they viewed as even moderately socialist (incorrectly on some occasions) allows for some suspicion about the sincerity of the stated U.S. intentions for its re-engaging with Cuba.

For example, after its official re-opening, the U.S. Embassy in Havana could serve as a location for the planning and staging of strategies designed to facilitate the reversal of Cuban social, political and economic policies. Furthermore, there is also speculation that the motivation for re-establishing relations with Cuba could be to counter recent developments in the political and economic organization of Latin American and Caribbean nations, which have facilitated greater roles for China and Russia in the region.

Over the course of the last decade, Latin American and Caribbean nations have come together to create a number of economic and social organizations including: the Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas (ALBA) in 2004; the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008; and, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in December 2011. ALBA, which was originally created by Venezuela and Cuba and currently counts 11 nations among its members, aims to establish a common regional currency (the Sucre) that could eventually replace the U.S. dollar in international trade transactions. UNASUR, which was created primarily through the efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with support from Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, currently boasts 12 member countries. In addition to establishing a common currency, this organization also aspires for a common passport and parliament for its members, modelled on the European Union. Finally, CELAC includes 33 Latin American and Caribbean nations representing over 600 million people; it seeks deeper integration and greater cooperation among its member countries.

In 2010, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales described CELAC as follows:

“A union of Latin American countries is the weapon against imperialism. It is necessary to create a regional body that excludes the United States and Canada. …Where there are U.S. military bases that do not respect democracy, where there is a political empire with his blackmailers, with its constraints, there is no development for that country, and especially there is no social peace and, therefore, it is the best time for prime ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean to gestate this great new organization without the United States to free our peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean.”23

Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez added the following at the 23rd Rio Group summit:

“Now here, in Mexico, a document, a commitment, the creation of a body of Latin America and the Caribbean, without the USA, without Canada (…) Now we can say from Latin America, from Mexico (…) we have revived the dream and project of Bolívar.”24

The U.S. regards the creation of such organizations that strengthen links between Latin American and Caribbean nations as strategic threats.  CELAC, for example, essentially serves the same function as the Organization for American States (OAS) but excludes the U.S. and Canada from participating. Furthermore, CELAC members will be receiving US$ 250 billion in investments over the next decade from China. The U.S. will likely not look favourably upon the prospect of losing access to the natural resources and enormous consumer market in this region to a key economic rival like China.

In addition to China, Russia is also gaining prominence as a significant economic player in the region. In July 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an agreement with Cuban officials granting Rosneft, an oil company that is majority owned by the Russian government, the rights to explore and extract hydrocarbon reserves located off of the island. During his meetings with Raul Castro and former leader Fidel Castro, which produced this agreement, Putin also “wrote off 90 percent of the more than $30 billion in Soviet-era debt Cuba owed Russia25”. Perhaps Obama should consider following the Russian President’s lead and offer his Cuban counterparts a gesture of goodwill by forgiving the potential compensation that could be sought by U.S. companies for property lost on account of the revolution.

The increasing prevalence of China and Russia in Latin America and the Caribbean represents a real danger to Washington’s future diplomatic, political and economic power and influence on a global scale.  The strategic importance of these regions to the United States is clearly reflected in the Monroe Doctrine, which was established by the administration of President James Monroe in 1823 and stated “that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention26”. Based on the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially regards Latin America as the U.S.’s “backyard”, such Russian and Chinese advances in these regions could also be interpreted as acts of aggression, even though the nature of their involvement is quite different in comparison to the colonial ambitions of countries like Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century.

As long as Cuba exercises caution, does not lose sight of its own interests, and retains a certain degree of control when entering into negotiations with Washington, whether it be on February 27th or during any subsequent meetings, then it is entirely possible for the island to re-establish economic, financial and diplomatic ties with the United States without completely dismantling socialism and the benefits associated with it. Re-establishing diplomatic relations with Washington does not necessitate a clash with the aspirations of the revolution, because socialism does not require a closed commercial state, nor does it reject reforms aimed at revitalizing or strengthening the existing system.

Undertaking efforts to revitalize the Cuban economy is not a new phenomenon.  In fact, Cuba has been trying to rejuvenate its socialist system since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet Union provided Cuba with a great deal of support since the triumph of the revolution and was credited with playing a crucial role in its survival. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant Cuba lost its most important trading partner, which accounted for approximately 80% of the island’s exports and imports at that time; Cuba also had to do without the generous subsidies it received from the socialist block. Consequently, the U.S. also took this opportunity to introduce new measures to further strengthen the blockade, namely the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act in 1996. As a result, Cubans experienced significant hardships and a pronounced decrease in their living standards in what became known as the “Special Period” during 1990 – 1995. During this time, the Cuban economy essentially collapsed and its inhabitants experienced severe shortages in basic supplies, including food and medicine, resulting in malnutrition and associated health problems. In response, new measures were taken to restructure the Cuban economy, especially in the area of tourism. Many of the hotels and resort chains that are joint ventures with Spanish and Canadian companies are outcomes of the reforms that were implemented in response to the “Special Period”.

Re-establishing diplomatic relations with Washington and the movement towards free market policies will not diminish Cuba’s standing as a symbol of the global anti-imperialist movement. In reality, programs aimed at gradually liberalizing prices, privatization, abolishing the ration system, and eliminating the dual currency have been underway for about a decade. That means the model that was conceived in the early years of Cuban revolution has been evolving in order to meet the changing needs and desires of the Cuban people, which have also been evolving with developments in the international political, economic and social arenas. In other words, policies designed to revitalize the socialist system by reducing reliance on social engineering were being put in place since 1991. History has shown that granting too much power to a central planning authority, in terms of organizing the social, political and economic activities of a state, has the potential to engender a situation where constant interference on the part of the government becomes inevitable. In fact, it could be argued that social engineering and the American embargo were the two main enemies of the Cuban revolution. A more open economy can provide buyers, sellers, and producers in the marketplace with greater freedom with which to co-ordinate their activities voluntarily and achieve common goals and ends for society without the need for constant interference on the part of state authorities. The current progress made in terms of re-establishing a normalized relationship with Washington might witness further progress in Cuban’s socialist system. Hopefully, this can be achieved through a cautious and sensible approach that will ensure Cubans never return to the serfdom that preceded the 1959 revolution.

Notes:

^1.  https://archive.org/stream/KacikeJournal/yaremko_djvu.txt

2. https://archive.org/stream/KacikeJournal/yaremko_djvu.txt

3. https://revcom.us/a/056/cubahist-en.html

4. http://rt.com/op-edge/us-cuba-economic-benefits-089/

5. http://rt.com/op-edge/us-cuba-economic-benefits-089/

6. http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/pages/jl9740.aspx

7. October 2014, despite the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution calling for the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba to be lifted for the 23^rd consecutive year^, Washington once again elected to maintain its embargo.

8. These companies include “ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, Freeport-McMoRan, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter and Gamble, Goodyear, Firestone, General Motors, Owens-Illinois, Avon Products, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and many others” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-economic-sanctions-against-cuba-the-failure-of-a-cruel-and-irrational-policy/7024).

9. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/world/cuba-seizures-now-present-opportunities.html?_r=0

10. http://www.globalresearch.ca/repealing-the-us-embargo-on-cuba-the-legislative-process-in-the-us-congress/5424312

^11. http://rt.com/business/186528-cuba-embargo-economic-demage/

12. http://rt.com/business/186528-cuba-embargo-economic-demage/

13. http://www.cetim.ch/oldsite/2003/03js04w4.htm

14. http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/LAC/Great_Teachers-How_to_Raise_Student_Learning-Barbara-Bruns-Advance%20Edition.pdf

15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salim-lamrani/world-bank-cuba-has-the-b_b_5925864.html

16. “The HDI is a summary measure for assessing long-term progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living… a long and healthy life is measured by life expectancy. Access to knowledge is measured by: i) mean years of education among the adult population, which is the average number of years of education received in a life-time by people aged 25 years and older; and ii) expected years of schooling for children of school-entry age, which is the total number of years of schooling a child of school-entry age can expect to receive if prevailing patterns of age-specific enrolment rates stay the same throughout the child’s life. Standard of living is measured by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita expressed in constant 2011 international dollars converted using purchasing power parity (PPP) rates” http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/CUB.pdf)

17. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/CUB.pdf

^18. http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=1782243562&Country=Cuba&topic=Politics&subtopic=Forecast&subsubtopic=Political+stability&u=1&pid=532225237&oid=532225237&uid=1

19. http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/sgsm15619.doc.htms

20. “The University of Toronto has 850 medical students and Harvard University has 735. ELAM has twelve times more students than those two schools combined: 19,550.” (http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2012/06/02/cubatrained_doctors_making_difference_around_the_world.html)

21. https://www.ted.com/talks/gail_reed_where_to_train_the_world_s_doctors_cuba/transcript?language=en

22. https://www.ted.com/talks/gail_reed_where_to_train_the_world_s_doctors_cuba/transcript?language=en

23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Latin_American_and_Caribbean_States#cite_note-telesurtv.net-10

24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Latin_American_and_Caribbean_States#cite_note-15

^25. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/11/cuba-russia-putin.htmls

26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

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1. America’s Climate Complacency

A Washington Post story, reporting the results of a Pew Research poll in 2013, headlined its story, “Americans Are Less Worried about Climate Change than Almost Anyone Else.” In 2014, a poll of 20 wealthy countries found that America leads the world in climate denialism, with 52 percent of the U.S. population stating that climate change is a natural phenomenon (rather than being the result of burning fossil fuels) and denying that the world is headed for environmental disaster unless it quickly changes its habits.³

Why is the United States first in climate complacency? According to leading climate scientist James Hansen, there is in this country “a huge gap between the public’s understanding of the situation and the scientific understanding.”⁴ But why does this gap exist in America?

Physicist Joe Romm, who started the website Climate Progress, has written that, although “our scientific understanding of business-as-usual projections for global warming has changed dramatically,” the U.S. public largely “remain in the dark about just how dire the situation is. Why? Because the U.S. media is largely ignoring the story,” which Romm called “the story of the century, if not the millennium.”⁵

Romm is far from the only person to give this assessment. Eric Pooley, one of America’s leading journalists, offered a parable:

“Suppose our leading scientists discovered that a meteor, hurtling toward the earth, was set to strike later this century; the governments of the world had less than ten years to divert or destroy it. How would news organizations cover this story? Even in an era of financial distress, they would throw teams of reporters at it and give them the resources needed to follow it in extraordinary depth and detail. After all, the race to stop the meteor would be the story of the century.”

In Pooley’s parable, carbon-using humanity is the meteor, which is threatening to destroy civilization. This threat is, Pooley said, the “great story, of our time. But news organizations have not been treating it that way.”⁶

Likewise, Hartmann said: “The mainstream media is failing us when it comes to covering the story of the century.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan said that the climate crisis is “undoubtedly the biggest story of this millennium.”And in her inimitable way, Rebecca Solnit wrote that people a century from now “will think the newspapers should have had a gigantic black box above the fold of the front page every day saying “Here are some stories about other things, BUT CLIMATE IS STILL THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL.”⁷

However, granted that the U.S. media have not done a good job, is it fair to blame them for the fact that America has more climate denialists, and less concern about climate change, than other wealthy countries? After all, fossil-fuel companies, especially ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, have spent tens of millions of dollars to fund dozens of organizations, including the Tea Party, to make climate denialism appear to have arisen spontaneously from concerned citizens.

However, according to journalist Mark Hertsgaard, the responsibility of the fossil-fuel companies does not lessen that of the media. “As a journalist,” he wrote, “it shames me that the [carbon] lobby could never have succeeded without the assistance of the media.”⁸

2. How the Mainstream Media Have Failed

A central reason for the media’s failure involves the journalistic norm of “balanced” reporting. As one discussion put it: “Balance aims for neutrality. It requires that reporters present the views of legitimate spokespersons of the conflicting sides in any significant dispute, and provide both sides with roughly equal attention.”⁹

False Balance

In a study entitled “Balance as Bias,” Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff said:

“[B]alanced reporting can actually be a form of informational bias. Despite the highly regarded IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s] consistent assertions . . . , balanced reporting has allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have their views amplified.”¹⁰

In explaining how balance can be bias, the Boykoffs quoted Gelbspan, who wrote:

“The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness – presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight – is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of views on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.”¹¹

With regard to the idea of giving equal weight to “both sides,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, authors of the great book Merchants of Doubt, said:

“[O]nce a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one ‘side.’ Imagine providing a ‘balance’ to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information. These matters were long ago settled in scientists’ minds. Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth.”¹²

Disputing this issue, Washington Post denialist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”¹³

However, although “science” is never settled, because new facts are continually found, some of which require new theories, this does not mean that there are no settled facts. Although plate tectonics was once fiercely debated, it no longer is. Climate science is still evolving, with many remaining questions (such as “climate sensitivity”). But central issues have been settled, including the fact that increased CO₂ in the atmosphere is raising the planet’s average temperature and that this global warming is causing climate disruption.

Not only is this a consensus today, with over 97 percent of the world’s active climate scientists agreeing, consensus has existed for a long time. As early as 1997, the Washington Post published a story entitled “Consensus Emerges Earth Is Warming – Now What?”¹⁴

Recently, however, the media have largely ignored the distinction between disputed opinion and settled fact. As a result, the media have produced bias. Having studied the stories about global warming in the U.S. “prestige press” (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal) between 1988 and 2002, Boykoff and Boykoff reported that a majority of the stories were “balanced” in this sense:

“[T]hese accounts gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to the view that humans were contributing to global warming, and the other view that exclusively natural fluctuations could explain the earth’s temperature increase.”

For stories to be truly balanced, they should give only as much attention to the views of contrarian scientists as their numbers represent. In 2014, English comedian John Oliver, on his faux TV news show, “Last Week Tonight,” humorously demonstrated what true balance would be. Having described the typical TV debate between a climate scientist and a climate denier, he pointed out that the debate should really be statistically representative of the two positions. So after having two more people join the denier, Oliver brought in 96 more to join the scientist.¹⁵

Gelbspan had suggested something like this many years ago, saying that, if reporters about the climate used the relevant type of balance, a story would primarily discuss the views of mainstream scientists, ”and the skeptics a couple of paragraphs at the end.”¹⁶

In any case, the problem with false balance is that it gives unknowing readers the impression that the scientific community is divided on the issue, and this problem primarily exists in the U.S. media. According to a 2012 report comparing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal with leading newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, and the United Kingdom:

“America is unique when it comes to giving a platform to climate deniers and skeptics. According to a new analysis of data released [in 2011], American newspapers are far more likely to publish uncontested claims from climate deniers, many of whom challenge whether the planet is warming at all.”¹⁷

A particularly egregious example of giving an unworthy scientist a platform, in the name of false balance, appeared in an otherwise excellent Associate Press story about the recent IPCC report, which said that if global warming continues, there will be “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” The AP then quoted denialist John Christy as saying: “Humans are clever. We shall adapt to whatever happens.” But “quoting John Christy on climate change,” said Romm, “is like quoting Dick Cheney on Iraq.”¹⁸

Sometimes, moreover, the press does not even give equal attention to climate science. A 2014 report showed that fringe scientists who rejected the consensus have actually received most of the press coverage, while those who said that “greenhouse gases have caused strong global warming” received only 15% of the coverage.¹⁹

Explicit Denialism

Beyond the implicit denialism involved in false balance, there is also a lot of explicit denialism in American media.

The two media giants who are worst in reporting on the climate are owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation: Fox News and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). In September 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists examined the articles during the previous year in the WSJ’s opinion section dealing with climate science, finding that the “representations of climate science were misleading 81 percent of the time.” But that was pretty good compared with Fox News, whose stories over a six-month period in 2012 “were misleading 93 percent of the time.”²⁰

In 2013, the WSJ published an opinion piece entitled “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” in which the authors said: “[T]he conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity,” ignoring that this is true only in cold countries.²¹

CNBC has not been much better. Examining its stories that dealt with either “global warming” or “climate change” during the first half of 2013, Media Matters found that 51 percent of the stories “cast doubt on whether manmade climate change existed.” The only scientist that CNBC hosted about climate was William Happer, the chairman of the denialist George C. Marshall Institute, who was one of the authors of the aforementioned WSJ opinion piece, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.”²²

Even the Washington Post has given a lot of space to denialists. In 2011, the editor of the Post’s editorial pages wrote, “The GOP’s climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” But then he continued to publish pieces by his resident denialists, Charles Krauthammer and George Will. Krauthammer, whose claim that there is no settled science was cited earlier, has written so much that Joe Romm referred to a 2014 piece by Krauthammer as “his umpteenth falsehood-fest.”²³

Will’s anti-scientific nonsense had gotten so bad in 2009 that other Post reporters contradicted him in a news article. But his perversity continued: In 2014, Will mocked the finding that 97 percent of climate scientists believe that carbon pollution is causing global warming. Asking rhetorically, “who did the poll?” Will suggested that the finding was no more worthy of belief than “100 Authors Against Einstein” produced by a Nazi publishing company. What Will did not tell readers was that what he called a “poll” was actually, as Romm pointed out, “a peer-reviewed analysis of more than 10,000 recent scientific papers on climate science.”²⁴

Fortunately, a reaction against denialism in the media has begun. In general, good newspapers do not publish letters that are based on the denial of basic science, and in 2013 the Los Angeles Times enacted this policy with regard to climate science, with letters editor Paul Thornton explaining:

“I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page. . . . Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

Hartmann responded by saying:

“It’s time for the rest of the media to follow suit. All media outlets, TV, radio, print or otherwise should immediately stop publishing the factual inaccuracies of climate change deniers.”²⁵

Next, Forecast the Facts, hoping to speed up the process, created a petition addressed to five leading newspapers, saying:

“The Los Angeles Times recently announced that they are refusing to publish letters that deny climate change. . . . Sign the petition below to tell the editors of The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal: our country’s most respected newspapers should refuse to print letters that deny basic science.”

In addition, CREDO Mobilize started a petition addressed to all newspapers, “Tell Newspapers: Don’t Publish Climate Change Deniers.”²⁶

In the U.K., the BBC, perhaps responding to John Oliver’s show, announced that its programs will henceforth give denialists only the amount of coverage their prominence merits. But by the beginning of 2015 this policy has not yet been adopted by most of the U.S. media companies.²⁷

Reduction of Coverage

The U.S. mainstream media’s coverage has also failed by giving inadequate coverage, which can be regarded, along with false balance, as implicit climate denial.

Although the U.S. media’s coverage of climate change has never been very high, its coverage went up in 2009, that being the year of the “Climategate” allegations and the climate conference in Copenhagen – which had been widely discussed as the world’s last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. But although there were lots of “climategate” stories, “only a few of the major U.S. news outlets,” reported the Energy Daily, “published accounts of the Copenhagen gathering, which received heavy coverage by news outlets in Europe and Asia.”²⁸

Since 2009, moreover, the coverage has consistently gone down, in spite of the increasingly extreme weather and the ever-fasting melting of glaciers (which is becoming so bad that Glacier National Park will soon need to change its name, and the same will be true of the Peruvian mountain range called Cordillera Blanca, or “White Range”). In spite of all such developments, the number of articles in the U.S. media mentioning global warming declined from 2,286 to 2006 to 1,353 in 2013.²⁹

This type of implicit climate denial can be illustrated by actions of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

NYT Eliminates Climate Desk: The most important of the reductions in coverage was what happened at the New York Times in 2013. At the beginning of that year, the Times eliminated its climate desk, which consisted of seven reporters and two editors. Describing the changes as merely “structural,” the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, declared: “We will continue to cover these areas of national and international life just as aggressively.” But as venerable journalist Dan Froomkin asked, “How is that possible?” And Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ public editor, said that preventing the coverage of the environment from suffering “will be a particular challenge.”³⁰

The warnings by Froomkin and Sullivan were not misplaced. Near the end of 2013, Sullivan reviewed how the Times’ environmental coverage had fared since its “structural changes.” Whereas in 2012, there were 362 print articles that featured climate change prominently between April and September, during those same months in 2013 this number dropped to 247. In addition, the number of front-page stories slipped from nine to three.³¹

When the results for the entire year came in, the number of NYT stories mentioning either “global warming” or “climate change” had plummeted more than 40 percent. According to the University of Colorado, which tracks such changes, this drop was bigger than that of any other newspaper. This was a radical change from 2012, when the Times “had the biggest increase in coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers,” and when Glenn Kramon, assistant managing editor of the Times, had said: “Climate change is one of the few subjects so important that we need to be oblivious to cycles and just cover it as hard as we can all the time.”³²

NYT Eliminates Environmental Blog: Two months after the Times’s elimination of its climate desk, it canceled its Green blog, which had a dozen contributors in addition to its two editors. The Times had created the Green blog in 2008, which was to keep readers up to date on “the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe.” Then in 2010, “taking things up a notch,” the Times introduced a “more ambitious online effort, broadening our lens to include . . . politics and policy, environmental science and consumer choices.” This was timely, the paper’s editors explained, because the Wall Street Journal had shut down its green blog. The NYT’s blog’s editor, Tom Zeller, said: “Better informed citizens are crucial to building a better, greener civilization.”³³

But three years later, the paper’s editors wrote: “The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas.” This surprise announcement led Curtis Brainard, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, to write:

“The Green blog was a crucial platform for stories that didn’t fit into the print edition’s already shrunken news hole. . . , and it was a place where reporters could add . . . information to pieces that did make the paper.”³⁴

The editors who made this decision, continued Brainard,

“should be ashamed of themselves. They’ve made a horrible decision that ensures the deterioration of the Times’s environmental coverage at a time when debates about climate change, energy, natural resources, and sustainability have never been more important to public welfare.”³⁵

Similarly, Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, who according to the Times is “an expert on environmental communications,” said: “The NY Times coverage of the environment has continued its journey from bad to worse. It continues to abrogate its responsibility to inform the public about critical issues.” More sardonically, Slate entitled its response: “The Times Kills Its Environmental Blog to Focus on Horse Racing and Awards Shows.”³⁶

It did not take long for the Times’s reduced coverage to be noticed. In August 2013, for example, the New York Times failed to cover the NOAA’s [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] 258-page State of the Climate report, which is used to set U.S. climate policy. This failure, said Media Matters, “calls into doubt the extent to which the paper can be trusted to maintain strong attention to environmental issues in the face of recent organizational changes.”³⁷

Washington Post Does Likewise: The same weekend, the Washington Post reassigned its top environmental reporter – who was a bright spot on a paper blighted by climate deniers such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer. Making a lipstick-on-a-pig announcement, the editors said:

“We’re very excited to announce the latest evolution of our political team — an online strike force that will help lead our journalism during the day. Juliet Eilperin will return to the world of politics to cover the White House. Juliet has had a terrific run on the environment beat, becoming one of the country’s leading reporters on climate change.”

Joe Romm wrote:

“Yes, no point in keeping one of the country’s leading reporters on climate change on the story of the century. She had a good run, but that climate story is so five minutes ago.”³⁸

Then the following year, the Post dropped first-rate blogger Ezra Klein, who regularly informed readers about science-based coverage of climate change, and replaced him with a website called the “Volokh Conspiracy.” This website was aptly named, pointed out a writer at Grist, because many of its bloggers promoted the idea that global warming is a conspiracy, a hoax. It is alarming, said Romm, that “[new owner] Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post would think such uninformed conspiracy mongering belongs at the Post.”³⁹

Television’s Inadequate Coverage

In addition to reducing its coverage, U.S. television networks commonly give woefully inadequate coverage to important events, sometimes ignoring them completely. Saying that “the TV news is a disgrace,” media critic Todd Gitlin wrote,

“Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires, and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute.”

Moreover, Gitlin said, “The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites. . . , were otherwise occupied.” Media Matters, he reported, gave this summary of the TV coverage of climate change in 2012:

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change. . . . ABC’s This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes. . . . NBC’s Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention. . . . Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC’s This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change. . . . In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”⁴⁰

In June 2013, President Obama gave a major speech, laying out his plan to cut carbon pollution. But except for MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, the Sunday morning news shows, which supposedly deal with the big stories of the week, ignored it. For the most part, those who relied on TV for their news had to rely on Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart.⁴¹

In 2014, the IPCC’s massive fifth assessment report, on which it had been working for several years, was published. MSNBC appropriately devoted almost 20 minutes to it, laying out the risks detailed by the report along with the ineffective attempts to cut carbon. But the coverage by both Fox News and CNN was pathetic.

Fox News did what one would expect: It spent only five minutes on it, most of which was devoted to attacking the idea of climate change, with Bill O’Reilly accusing the climate scientists of wanting to destroy the economy with its “phantom global warming theory.” Although CNN did not attack the IPCC report, it virtually ignored it, devoting only one minute and eight seconds to it. CNN’s Jack Tapper did acknowledge that “all of human civilization could be at risk,” but CNN considered this point deserving of only 48 seconds.⁴²

Ignoring Climate Change while Discussing Extreme Weather

Given the increasingly extreme weather of the past several years, the media were virtually forced to discuss it. But they usually have not felt compelled to connect the extreme weather with climate change, which was true of both newspaper and television coverage. This was even true of 2013, which was “a big year for climate,” especially “the increase in ferocity of our weather.” The extreme weather events of that year included “deadly flooding in Colorado, the string of major wildfires across the American West, and bouts of unseasonable temperatures across the country.” But according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a study of 450 stories in the nightly news showed that “96 percent of extreme weather stories never discussed the human impact on the climate.”⁴³

(This failure cannot be justified by the reluctance of climate scientists to attribute particular weather events to global warming. Climate scientists now agree that, in Kevin Trenberth’s words, “Global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather because the environment in which all storms form has changed from human activities.” Likewise, James Hansen said: “We now know that the chances these extreme weather events would have happened naturally — without climate change — is negligible.”⁴⁴)

Media Matters reported essentially the same thing, referring to the Midwest floods in the spring of 2013. Whereas ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had devoted a total of 74 segments to the flooding, not one mentioned climate change (CBS came the closest, mentioning that heavy downpours have increased). Media Matters found the newspaper stories hardly better. In a total of 35 articles about the floods, only one by USA Today mentioned climate change. Reuters and the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal stories remained silent about it.⁴⁵

Even NPR was guilty of this failure. In 2013, after commenting about an NPR story that mentioned the melting of glaciers without explaining why, Joe Romm said, “apparently we won’t be hearing more about why more glaciers are receding or speeding up — or what it all really means for humanity, like say, that whole sea level rise thing.”⁴⁶

3. The U.S. Media’s Ultimate Crime

In 2014, a host for a CNN show, reflecting on what it would take to change the thinking and actions of average Americans, wrote:

“Here’s what is missing from our national conversation about climate change: an emotional charge that hits you in the gut. . . . We need in-your-face cause and effect. Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America and the media’s all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes. But do reporters covering the who, what, when, where and how, ever talk about the real why? . . . . No. It’s still considered inappropriate to talk about the big elephant in the field, namely what we have long accepted as an act of God is increasingly becoming an act of man.”⁴⁷

As for what a good story would be like, an example was provided by reporter Clayton Sandell of ABC News. In a segment headed “Extreme Weather from Mother Nature,” Sandel said:

“Scientists say human-caused climate change is already helping shift the planet’s natural balance. Creating more heat waves, drought, and intense downpours. A stormy and expensive reality, that’s already on our doorsteps.”⁴⁸

In addition, a writer for the New Yorker has explained how slight changes in typical presentations could help people connect extreme weather with climate change. Whereas exceptionally cold weather generally weakens Americans’ belief in climate change, in the UK it strengthens it. The reason for the difference, concluded researchers at Cardiff University, is that the UK media “had framed the weather within the context of climate change, emphasizing that it was unnatural, rather than simply cold. Perhaps,” said the writer, “if people here were told that it’s not just brutal out there, it’s unnaturally brutal, they, too, might jump to a different conclusion.”⁴⁹

Accordingly, there are simple things the media could do that could help the public understand the reality and seriousness of climate change. But as it is, Gelbspan said, the U.S. press coverage of the crisis is “a betrayal of the public trust.”⁵⁰

The culpability of the American press has also been expressed by journalist Wen Stephenson, who had worked at NPR, PBS, the Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. In an open letter to his former journalism colleagues, Stephenson said:

“[Y]ou are failing. Your so-called ‘objectivity,’ your bloodless impartiality, are nothing but a convenient excuse for what amounts to an inexcusable failure to tell the most urgent truth we’ve ever faced. What’s needed now is crisis-level coverage.”

Spelling out what this would mean, Stephenson continued:

“In a crisis, the criteria for top news is markedly altered, as long as a story sheds light on the crisis topic. In crisis coverage, there’s an assumption that readers want and deserve to know as much as possible. In crisis coverage, you ‘flood the zone.’ The climate crisis is the biggest story of this, or any, generation — so why the hell aren’t you flooding the climate ‘zone,’ putting it on the front pages and leading newscasts with it every day?”⁵¹

Besides being an inexcusable failure and a betrayal of the public trust, the U.S. media’s failure can be considered the ultimate crime.

Writing in the Guardian, Stephan Lewandowsky said: “The media failed to accurately report facts prior to the Iraq War; climate reporting is failing in similar fashion.” Some journalists who had supported the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction felt anguish about having used “’evidence’ now known to be bogus” to support the push for war. “The lethal fallout from misinformation a decade ago,” wrote Lewandowsky, “primarily affected the people of Iraq.” But “the fallout from misinformation about climate change is likely to affect us all.”⁵²

Indeed, some journalists – besides Eric Pooley, who was quoted above – have said that unmitigated climate change threatens the very continuation of civilization.

• In his criticism of the mainstream media’s climate coverage as criminal, Hartmann said: “After all, the future of all life on Earth is at stake.”

• In his critique of U.S. press coverage as a “damning betrayal of public trust,” Gelbspan said climate change “threatens the survival of our civilization.”

• Romm said that “unless we start cutting carbon pollution soon, the impacts threaten to destroy the stable climate that made modern civilization possible.”⁵³

Moreover, it has become a consensus among scientists, along with others who know the scientific facts, that climate change caused by global warming threatens to bring civilization to an end.

• “Global warming,” said Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, “[is] raising concerns about the [ability] of Earth’s environment . . . to maintain viable human civilizations.”

• Lester Brown subtitled a book Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

• National Medal of Science recipient Lonnie Thompson, explaining the new outspokenness of climate scientists, responding to the question of why sober climatologists have begun speaking out publicly about the dangers of global warming, said that “virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

• Former Vice President Al Gore, speaking of the climate crisis, said: “What hangs in the balance is the future of civilization as we know it.”

• In 2011, Lester Brown, Bill McKibben, and a large number of other environmental leaders, wrote a letter to the presidents of the United States and China, saying: “It is time to publicly acknowledge that the continued burning of fossil fuels threatens the survival of civilization.”

• In 2012, twenty previous winners of the Blue Planet Prize said that “society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.”⁵⁴

The destruction of civilization, some writers have pointed out, would amount to suicide:

• New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert famously said: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

• Mohamed Nasheed, while he was the president of Maldives, said that if the nations fail to sign a commitment to bring carbon emissions down, they will in effect have signed a “global suicide pact.”

• Paul and Anne Ehrlich, saying that climate disruption is threatening human civilization with collapse, added: “Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale.’”⁵⁵

However, unlike suicide in the normal sense, the suicide involved in the destruction of civilization would take not simply the politicians, media moguls, owners of fossil-fuel companies, and others who actively caused it, but all the rest of us, too. Accordingly, in light of the stakes, the U.S. media’s coverage of climate change is not simply a crime, but the ultimate crime.

In 2013, Tom Engelhardt, recognizing that genocide is usually considered the ultimate crime, coined the term “terracide” to describe an even more ultimate crime, writing:

“To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide? It would be, because it would be not only the ‘ultimate crime against humanity’ but also ‘against most living things.’”⁵⁶

The fossil-fuel companies are guilty of the ultimate crime, he said, because they are earning their “profits directly off melting the planet, knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat, the very temperature range that for so long made life comfortable for humanity.”⁵⁷

As indicated, Engelhardt directs his indictment at fossil-fuel companies. But as Hartmann and Hertsgaard both pointed out, the fossil-fuel companies could never have been able to continue their polluting ways – long after the scientific community had reached consensus about connection between fossil-fuel emission, global warming, and climate change – without the assistance of the media. And so the U.S. media share the responsibility for terracide.

Noam Chomsky has explicitly connected the U.S. media to the ultimate crime: Besides writing that “we are moving toward what may in fact be the ultimate genocide – the destruction of the environment,” Chomsky said: “The media cooperate by not even reporting the increasingly dire forecasts of international agencies and even the U.S. Department of Energy.”⁵⁸

Conclusion

Accordingly, Hartmann’s charge is correct in spades: Besides being guilty of betraying the public trust, the U.S. mainstream media’s climate coverage is guilty of facilitating the move toward the ultimate crime, terracide.

David Ray Griffin is emeritus professor at Claremont Theology School and Claremont Graduate University. His most recent book is Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO₂ Crisis? (Clarity Press, 2015).

Notes

1. This essay is an adaptation of a chapter entitled “Media Challenge” in Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO₂ Crisis? (Clarity Press, 2015).

2. Thom Hartmann, “The Mainstream Media’s Criminal Climate Coverage,” 26 February 2014.

3. Max Fisher, “Americans Are Less Worried about Climate Change than Almost Anyone Else,” Washington Post, 27 September 2013; referring to “Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research,” Pew Research Center, 2 April 2013; Joanna B. Foster, “Poll: U.S. Leads the World . . . in Climate Denial,” Climate Progress, 22 July 2014.

4. Richard Gray, “Climate Scientists Are Losing the Public Debate on Global Warming,” Telegraph, 8 April 2012.

5. Joe Romm, “Media Largely Ignores Latest Warning from Climate Scientists,” Climate Progress, 19 March 2009; Romm, “A Stunning Year in Climate Science Reveals that Human Civilization Is on the Precipice,” Climate Progress, 15 November 2010.

6. Eric Pooley, “How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? American Press and the Economics of Climate Change,” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, January 2009.

7. Hartmann, “The Mainstream Media’s Criminal Climate Coverage”; Ross Gelbspan, “U.S. Press Coverage of the Climate Crisis: A Damning Betrayal of Public Trust,” The Heat is Online, June 2010; Rebecca Solnit, “Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart: The Climate for 2015,” TomDispatch, 23 December 2014.

8. Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 263.

9. Robert M. Entman, Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Democracy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 30.

10. Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff, “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press,” Global Environmental Change 14 (2004), 125–136.

11. Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription (Perseus Press: Cambridge, 1998), 57-58.

12. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 214.

13. Charles Krauthammer: The Myth of ‘Settled Science,’” Washington Post, 20 February 2014.

14. A 2009 study found that, when asked whether “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures,” 97.5% of climatologists who actively publish research on climate change responded “yes”; Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Earth and Environmental Sciences 90/20 (20 January 2009); Joby Warrick, “Consensus Emerges Earth Is Warming – Now What?” Washington Post, 11 November 1997. Washington Post, 11 November 1997.

15. Boykoff and Boykoff, “Balance as Bias”; Joe Romm, “The 97 Percent: Watch John Oliver’s Hilarious ‘Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate,’” Climate Progress, 12 May 2014.

16. Gelbspan, “U.S. Press Coverage of the Climate Crisis.”

17. Stephen Lacey, “American Newspapers Are Number One in Climate Denial,” Climate Progress, 14 October 2012.

18. Joe Romm, “Climate Scientists Spell Out Stark Danger and Immorality of Inaction in New Leaked Report,” Climate Progress, 27 August 2014; referring to Seth Borenstein, “Draft Of Upcoming IPCC Report Presents Stark View of the Future As Climate Change Rages On,” Associated Press, 26 August 2014.

19. John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli, “New Study Finds Fringe Global Warming Contrarians Get Disproportionate Media Attention,” Guardian, 11 August 2014.

20. “Science Group Calls on News Corp. to Improve Climate Science Content,” Union of Concerned Scientists, 21 September 2012.

21. Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2013.

22. Shauna Theel, “CNBC’s Climate Denial Is Bad for Business,” Media Matters, 18 June 2013.

23. Fred Hiatt, “On Climate Change, the GOP Is in Never-Never Land,” Washington Post, 15 April 2011; Joe Romm, “Shameless Flameout: Washington Post Once Again Publishes George Will’s Anti-Scientific Nonsense,” Climate Progress, 17 January 2013; Romm, “Paging Jeff Bezos: George Will Compares Climate Scientists to Nazis,” Climate Progress, 28 February 2014 

24. Joe Romm, “Washington Post Publishes Two Strong Debunkings of George Will’s Double Dose of Disinformation,” Climate Progress, 21 March 2009; Joe Romm, “Washington Post Reporters Take Unprecedented Step of Contradicting Columnist George Will in a News Article,” Climate Progress, 7 April 2009; Romm, “Paging Jeff Bezos: George Will Compares Climate Scientists to Nazis.”

25. Paul Thornton, “On Letters from Climate-Change Deniers,” Los Angeles Times, 8 October 2013; Thom Hartmann, “The Mainstream Media’s Criminal Climate Coverage,” 26 February 2014.

26. “Tell Newspapers: Don’t Publish Climate Denial,” Forecast the Facts.

27. Emily Atkin, “To Improve Accuracy, BBC Tells Its Reporters to Stop Giving Air Time to Climate Deniers,” Climate Progress, 7 July 2014.

28. Quoted in Joe Romm, Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions (Island Press, 2010), 58.

29. Douglas Fischer, “Climate Coverage Down Again in 2011,” Daily Climate, 17 January 2012; Jack Shafer, “Why We’re So Blasé about Global Warming,” Reuters, 30 August 2014.

30. Margaret Sullivan, “Keeping Environmental Reporting Strong Won’t Be Easy,” New York Times, 11 January 2013.

31. Joanna M. Foster, “Climate Coverage Drops at the New York Times after Paper Closed Its Environmental Desk,” Climate Progress, 25 November 2013.

32. Joe Romm, “Silence of the Lambs: Climate Coverage Drops at Major U.S. Newspapers, Flatlines on TV,” Climate Progress, 14 January 2014; Douglas Fischer, “Climate Coverage, Dominated by Weird Weather, Falls Further in 2012,” Daily Climate, 2 January 2013.

33. Tom Zeller, Jr., “Green: A New Name, a Broader Mission,” New York Times, 21 April 2010.

34. Curtis Brainard, “NYT Cancels Green blog,” Columbia Journalism Review, 1 March 2013.

35. Ibid.

36. Joe Romm, “In Epic Blunder, NY Times and Washington Post All but Abandon Specialized Climate Science Coverage,” Climate Progress, 4 March 2013.

37. Max Greenberg, “Two Big Climate Stories You Didn’t Read About in The New York Times: Times Skips Stories Soon after Closing Environmental Desk and Green Blog,” Media Matters, 7 August 2013.

38. Romm, “In Epic Blunder, NY Times and Washington Post.”

39. Joe Romm, “Washington Post Drops Climate Hawk Ezra Klein, Adds Climate Confusionist Blog Volokh Conspiracy,” Climate Progress, 23 January 2014.

40. Todd Gitlin, “Is the Press Too Big to Fail? 
It’s Dumb Journalism, Stupid,” in “The Tinsel Age of Journalism,” Tomgram, 25 April 2013.

41. Joe Romm and Andrew Breiner, “Sunday News Shows Ignored Obama’s Climate Plan but Late-Night Comics Picked Up the Slack,” Climate Progress, 1 July 2013.

42. Andrew Breiner, “CNN Ignores Major Climate Report, But Fox News Does Something Even Worse,” Climate Progress, 2 April 2014.

43. Emily Atkin, “96 Percent of Network Nightly News’ Coverage of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change,” Climate Progress, 19 December 2013.

44. John M. Broder, “Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause,” New York Times, 15 June 2011; Amanda Holpuch, “NASA’s Scientist’s Study Quantifies Climate Change Link to Extreme Guardian,7 August 2012.

45. Jill Fitzsimmons and Shauna Theel, “Media Ignore Climate Context of Midwest Floods,” Media Matters, 7 May 2013.

46. Joe Romm, “NPR Airs Story on Melting Glaciers without Explaining Why They Are Melting,” Climate Progress, 30 May 2013.

47. Jane Velez-Mitchell, “Let’s Tell the Truth about Extreme Weather,” CNN, 16 May 2014.

48. Clayton Sandell, “Extreme Weather from Mother Nature,” ABC News, 24 June 2013.

49. Maria Konnikova, “Hot Heads in Cold Weather,” New Yorker, 7 February 2014.

50. Gelbspan, “U.S. Press Coverage of the Climate Crisis.”

51. Wen Stephenson, “A Convenient Excuse,” The Phoenix, 5 November 2012.

52. Stephan Lewandowsky, “Media Failure on Iraq War Repeated in Climate Change Coverage,” Guardian, 6 December 2013.

53. Hartmann, “The Mainstream Media’s Criminal Climate Coverage”; Gelbspan, “U.S. Press Coverage of the Climate Crisis”; Joe Romm, “Climate Change 101: An Introduction,” Years of Living Dangerously.

54. Paul J. Crutzen, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36/8 (December, 2007), 614-21; Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, substantially revised edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Lonnie G. Thompson, “Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options,” Behavior Analyst, 33/2 (Fall 2010), 153–70; Al Gore, “Climate of Denial: Can Science and the Truth withstand the Merchants of Poison?” Rolling Stone, June 2011; Lester Brown et al., “Presidents Obama, Hu: Declare Global Climate Emergency, say Green Business Leaders, NGOs,” Sustainable Business, 19 January 2011; The Blue Planet Laureates, “Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act,”February 20, 2012.

55. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2006), 189; Nasheed Fears ‘Suicide Pact’ at Copenhagen,” Agence France-Presse, 9 November 2009; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 9 January 2013.

56. Tom Engelhardt, “The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History,” TomDispatch, 23 May 2013; “Is Climate Change a Crime against Humanity?” TomDispatch, 22 May 2014.

57. Engelhardt, “The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History.”

58. Noam Chomsky and Andre Vitchek, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (Pluto Press, 2013), 2; Noam Chomsky, “Destroying the Commons: 
How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta,” in “Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours,” TomDispatch, 22 July 2012.

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Image: Opposition politician, Antonio Ledezma, was arrested by SEBIN on Thursday afternoon (Telesur).

Caracas, February 19th 2015 (venezuelanalysis.com) Venezuelan opposition Mayor and longtime rightwing politician, Antonio Ledezma, has been arrested by the country’s intelligence services, SEBIN, for his alleged role in plotting to stage a coup against the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro. 

The planned coup was uncovered last week by security forces, just hours before several US backed Air Force officials had planned to partake in a bombing spree of strategic targets in the capital. They had hoped this would lead to the assassination of the country’s president and bring about regime change in the South American country.

“Antonio Ledezma who, today, by order of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was captured and is going to be prosecuted by the Venezuelan justice system, to make him answer to all of the crimes committed against the peace and security of the country and the Constitution… We’ve had enough of conspiracies, we want to work in peace!”

announced Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, amidst a chorus of cheers from onlookers.

Last week, Ledezma, who is current Mayor of the Metropolitan Capital District of Caracas, signed a statement calling for a “National Transition Agreement” alongside opposition politicians, Maria Corina Machado and currently detained leader of the Popular Will party, Leopoldo Lopez.

The document calls on Venezuelans to unite behind a plan to remove elected President Nicolas Maduro and sets out an action programme for the would be provisional government. This includes facilitating the return of “exiled” Venezuelans, prosecuting current members of government and reaching out to international financial lending agencies such as the International Monetary Fund.

Circulated on February 11th, the statement was disclosed just a day before the attempted coup was set to unfold and was reportedly the signal to set the plan in motion.

“It has no base in any juridic text, it is a putschist act of conspiracy that is unfortunately to the liking of thousands of opposition militants who have been indoctrinated to attack democracy,” Constitutional Lawyer, Jesus Silva, told Venezuelanalysis.

Ledezma’s detention comes in the wake of several other arrests, including those of a number of airforce officials implicated in the plan.

According to revelations made by the President of the National Assembly, Diosadado Cabello, on Wednesday night, Ledezma has since been named by one of the arrested officials under questioning.

The confession links Ledezma to a plan to “eliminate” opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez last year in order to create “chaos” and destabilise the government. Fellow opposition politician and National Assembly legislator, Julio Borges, is also implicated in the assassination plan, which forced an intervention by the government in early 2014. At the time, Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, stated that the government had acted to protect her husband’s safety.

Unlike, Ledezma, Borges cannot be prosecuted as National Assembly legislators are protected by political immunity.

The “Blue” Coup 

Although details surrounding Ledezma’s exact role in the recently discovered “Blue” coup plot are still unclear, it appears that the opposition politician is implicated beyond his call for a transitional government.

Following the announcement of the coup plot last Thursday, the Maduro administration suggested that further arrests were to be made once there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the political ringleaders of the plan.

“In these intelligence investigations, we have discovered a codified message, in another language,  by an important leader of a party. On translating it, we found that it gave the details, the elements of the coup. We are about to capture the person who brought the script that they were going to read, the script they were going to read out was already written, and circulated by a person who I will name at the correct moment”

said Maduro, referencing a preplanned statement which was to be read out to the public following the aerial bombardment, announcing a “rebellion” of the armed forces against the government.

Arrest and possible prosecution

Although international press has widely reported that the Mayor was manhandled when SEBIN officers entered his office, a video of the detention has emerged appearing to show a reticent but unharmed Ledezma being escorted from his office by several armed guards. Photos published of glass on the floor in Ledezma’s office by news agency, Ultimas Noticias, appear to show that SEBIN forcibly entered the building.

He has since been transferred to the SEBIN’s head office in Plaza Venezuela, Caracas, where a few hundred of his supporters gathered outside in protest in the early evening. They were joined by former presidential candidate and current Governor of Miranda State, Henrique Capriles Radonski. Streets were clear by around 10pm.

It is expected that the opposition politician will now await a hearing before a judge to decide whether there is sufficient evident to proceed with the case against him.

“Ledezma is Mayor and for that reason he does not bear the Constitutional right to impunity as legislators, governors and the heads of national public powers do. Legally speaking, he should be presented before a judge, along with a public prosecutor and his defence lawyer within the next 48 hours,”

Silva informed us.

It is not the first time that Ledezma has been implicated in a plan to violently overthrow the government. In 2002, he participated in an attempted coup which saw socialist president of the time, Hugo Chavez, ousted for a period of 47 hours. Last year, he was also named several times as a “principal ally” by currently detained terror plotter, Lorent Saleh. Saleh was one of the main underground activists fuelling the armed barricades known as guarimbas which last year claimed the lives of at least 43 Venezuelans. He had planned to go on a killing spree with the help of Colombian paramilitaries but was arrested before the plan could take place.

Political trajectory  

Popularly known as “the vampire”, Ledezma began his political career in 1973 as a member of the “Democratic Action” Party. In 1989, he infamously became Governor of the Federal District of Caracas, when he oversaw one of the most violent periods in the history of the Caracas Metropolitan Police.

The police body, which was since disbanded in 2010 due to its human rights violations, regularly opened fire on unarmed student protests, systematically repressed street vendors, pensioners and the unemployed, as well as regularly disappeared political activists.

During this period he also oversaw the “Caracazo,” when up to 3000 people were killed and disappeared by security forces in the wake of violent protests against a government imposed austerity programme.

This particular period of Ledezma’s career earnt him the reputation of “student killer” amongst working class Venezuelans. He is founder and current leader of the rightwing party known as the “Brave People’s Alliance”.

Image: Cité Soleil, population 400,000, was paralyzed by gang violence on February 23, 2015.

This past week, Haitians in Port-au-Prince were already grieving after at least 18 people died in a Carnaval stampede at around 2 a.m. on Feb. 17.

Daniel “Fantom” Darius, the lead singer Barikad Crew, was standing atop a towering Carnaval float when his head struck a high-voltage wire strung across the street, producing an electrical explosion that panicked the tightly packed crowd below. (Ironically, Darius survived.) Some 76 other people were hospitalized with serious injuries, bringing this year’s toll of Carnaval wounded to 123, even though the final day’s celebration was cancelled and replaced with an official memorial ceremony where the tragedy struck.

Many blame the government of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Evans Paul, already beleaguered by massive demonstrations demanding their resignations, for the accident, citing “criminal negligence.”

Then this past week, violence flared between two armed gangs in the capital’s sprawling shanty town of Cité Soleil, resulting in at least eight dead, according to government officials. Neighborhood residents put the death toll at about 20.

One gang is controlled by a former prisoner, Gabriel Jean-Baptiste, who is said to be close to the Martelly/Paul government, while the other is controlled by former deputy Alméthis Junior.

The gang war brought all activity to a stand-still in Cité Soleil on Mon., Feb. 23. Schools, businesses, and even informal commerce stopped in the slum of 400,000.

Reynald Joli-Fils, the Martelly-appointed mayor of the area, said that the neighborhoods of Bélécourt, Boston, and Brooklyn were particularly paralyzed. Gang wars between rival groups have always existed, he said, usually for control of an area.

But local residents say harder-than-ever economic woes and the unstable political situation have contributed to the upsurge in gang violence. Joli-Fils complained that the Haitian police do not have sufficient resources to overcome the turf wars which have flared since October 2014 and called on the national government to intervene quickly so as to prevent the situation from becoming even worse.

While there is said to be a police shortage to stem violence in Haiti’s slums, there appear to be enough officers to ensure the safety of people close to the President. For example, Martelly’s long-time personal friend Roro Nelson holds no official post in the government but has several police agents providing him security. Other presidential advisors and consultants enjoy the same privilege.

Meanwhile, bandits are wreaking havoc around the capital. Fri., Feb. 13 was a particularly bad day. On Avenue Martin Luther King in Nazon, used by vehicles heading to the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, two gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire on two other young men on a motorcycle who had just withdrawn 7,500 gourdes ($160) from a bank. The shots killed Emmanuel Sanon, who was driving the motorcycle, and the thieves made off with the money.

Meanwhile at around 3 p.m., an armed commando burst into the Office of Insurance, Injuries, Sickness and Maternity (OFATMA), located in Cité Militaire in the capital’s northwest corner. The attack killed two and wounded five others.

One young man, trying to escape over the OFATMA hospital fence, was shot with 15 bullets and died on the spot. The other casualty was a member of the hospital’s security staff. According to an OFATMA official, this crime was the result of clashes among local armed gangs, particularly those in Cite Soleil and Simon-Pelé.

The same day there was another robbery which claimed one life in Tabarre near Carrefour Fleuriot. Many link the rise in crime to the high cost of living, which is a direct consequence of the high price fixed by the government for petroleum products, despite continuing protests. Others ask what invisible hands may be behind the crime wave.

Who supplies the armed gangs with weapons and ammunition? Does the crime provide profits for those in power and the country’s financial oligarchy? What role do bankers play in the many suspicious robberies against exiting bank customers, where criminals often know the exact amount of cash their victims withdrew?

Reflecting the crisis, the United States, Canada, and France have issued travel advisories to their citizens visiting Haiti.”Repeated strikes and demonstrations pose risks of violent incidents and especially roadblocks that impede travel,” the French Embassy wrote. “It is recommended to stay away from crowds.” The French also warned about “armed attacks at the exit of the Port-au-Prince airport,” noting that “attacks can target a particular vehicle leaving the airport on the day of arrival or the next day, having been tracked by gangs.”

In a Feb. 9 statement, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry told its citizens to be particularly wary of the capital’s districts of Martissant, Carrefour, Bel Air and Cité Soleil since “these neighborhoods are dangerous because of rampant crime and the reduced ability of local authorities to maintain order… The police are not able to respond quickly to calls for assistance in these areas. It is strongly advised not to go out after dark.”

The Canadian warning continues: “The crime rate is high and the security situation is unpredictable. Be very vigilant, no matter where you are in the country. Crime is present, especially in major centers such as downtown Port-au-Prince, which armed gangs continue to plague. There were reports of murders, kidnappings, robberies, burglaries and carjackings, even in daylight. Never walk alone and do not walk after dark. Many gang leaders and criminals incarcerated in the Croix-des-Bouquets Civil Penitentiary (located east of Port-au-Prince) escaped in 2014 and are still at large. Haiti periodically experiences civil unrest, especially during times of political uncertainty and elections. The dissolution of Parliament in Haiti on Jan. 13, 2015, and the current electoral situation has heightened tensions in the capital and across the country. Demonstrations are underway and could lead to violence. Riots can occur with little or no notice. Exercise great caution, avoid demonstrations, and regularly monitor local media to keep abreast of the situation.”

In short, the lawlessness that President Martelly has encouraged and engaged in at the highest levels of government and through promoting a policy of impunity has percolated down and begun to manifest itself throughout Haitian society. The support of the U.S., French, and Canadian Embassies for Martelly’s regime have made them, at the very least, accessories to the crime wave victimizing, above all, the Haitian working poor.

Kiev’s national security and defense council secretary Andriy Parubiy was feted on visits to Ottawa and Washington.

He came seeking more heavy weapons and funding than already provided. He orchestrated February 2014 Maidan killings.

As security chief, he controlled access to weapons used. He took full advantage. He positioned snipers with automatic weapons in Kiev’s Philharmonic Hall.

They murdered around 100 protesters and police. President Viktor Yanukovych was wrongfully blamed. His ouster followed.

Things were scripted in Washington. The rest, as they say, is history. Plans are to Nazify Ukraine nationwide.

Eliminate Donbass democracy. Use Ukraine as a dagger against Russia’s heartland. Perhaps a prelude to WW III.

Parubiy belongs in prison, not high office. He’s responsible for mass murder and coup following violence he and others staged.

On February 23, Canada’s Globe and Mail covered his Ottawa visit. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper marches in lockstep with imperial US policy.

Parubiy said Canada has an “authoritative voice” on what’s ongoing in Donbass. He asked for help to get Washington to supply more heavy weapons and funding than already.

He wants Canada and other Western countries helping the same way.

So Kiev can prepare for renewed aggression against its anti-fascist Southeastern citizens wanting fundamental democratic freedoms everyone deserves.

So-called “defensive” ones are for offense. Including virtually anything short of nuclear bombs. Maybe they come later.

According to the Globe and Mail, Parubiy met with “Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson and James Bezan, the parliamentary secretary to the defence minister…”

Other scheduled meetings followed with House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer an various MPs.

“Canada has been a kind of a leader in the world vis-a-vis Ukraine,” said Paubiy (in translation).

“Words and actions are the same in Canada, so it’s kind of an example for the rest of the world with their Ukraine policy.”

Parubiy discussed Canadian and US support for the next phase of Kiev’s planned aggression.

He called its dirty war without mercy “a global challenge, a global fight, not just a Russia-Ukraine fight.”

He sounded like a sawdust Caesar saying “we are fighting not only for Ukraine but for Euro-Atlantic and European values.”

Providing more funding and heavy weapons likely assures a deeper hole.

Following discussions, Canada’s Nicholson said Canada supports Minsk. “Any attempt to reduce or take away Ukraine’s sovereignty in that way is completely opposed by Canada,” he added.

He withheld comment on whether Ottawa would supply Kiev with weapons.

On February 25, Parubiy arrived in Washington. America’s global propaganda service Voice of America interviewed him.

Ukraine’s Unian (dis)information agency said he discussed some of the armaments he wants Washington to supply – including anti-tank systems and other heavy weapons.

“The list of required equipment has already been submitted to US President Barack Obama, but it is also planned to present it to other officials who ‘are directly involved in the decision making process,’ ” said Unian.

He’s scheduled to meet with Speaker John Boehner, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, and Pentagon officials.

No comment on whether he and Obama will meet. Maybe quietly with little or nothing said.

Kiev and Washington are partners in high crimes. Renewed aggression on Donbass is planned at Obama’s discretion.

Parubiy is a convenient stooge. He came to get marching orders. They exclude peace, stability and good will.

Rogue states make their own rules. Oppose them and face possible imprisonment or death.

Ukrainian Law Professor Olga Zagulskaya criticized Kiev’s war on Donbass. Persecution followed.

She now suffers from hypertension. Kiev’s “psychological torture had its intended effect,” she said.

She was warned her students prepared to boycott her. They were

“set upon (her) by the ‘intelligentsia’ of Miroslav Popovich, Yuriy Vinnichuk ,and Otar Dovzhenko.”

“At least three SBU men were circling around (her), which means it’s not a purely student event.”

Journalists targeted her. Articles said “Lvov National University professor openly supports terrorists.”

She faced possible criminal charges.To avoid legal proceedings, she resigned three years before retirement.

“At one point (she) felt so dizzy (she) could no longer stand.” She sought medical care. She’s “in treatment, possibly for a long time.”

“All because” she opposes Kiev’s war on Donbass. “(A)s Taras Shevchenko once said,” she explained: ‘I incur punishment, I suffer, but I do not repent!’ ”

Obama’s Ukrainian friends are cutthroat killer Nazi thugs. Zagulskaya is lucky to be alive.

She could have been imprisoned or marked for death. Hooligans running Ukraine operate this way.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Despite the all-encompassing belief in democracy and a free press, Americans have very little democracy left and perhaps the worst media in the world. Even people who make efforts to be informed don’t know what is happening domestically and internationally because of the constant lies and disinformation they are exposed to by the corporate media. They act as spokespersons for the powerful instead of providing analysis and information for readers and viewers. The result is a world turned upside down, with lies being sold as the truth. Libya is just the latest example of press malfeasance.

In 2011 the leaders of NATO appeared to pull off the perfect crime. That year they used the Arab Spring democracy movement as a cover to destroy Libya, kill its president, Muammar Gaddafi, and turn that nation over to jihadists supported by the Persian gulf monarchs.

Regime change was the only issue ever on the agenda. They used the dubious doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, R2P, as a means of getting away with murder. This was no mysterious conspiracy either. The American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said quite publicly that her government wanted Gaddafi dead. “We hope that he can be captured or killed soon,” said the characteristically undiplomatic diplomat. After the deed was done she again spoke openly about killing a head of state. “We came, we saw, he died.”

The American government unleashed a race war in the intervention and, to this day, African migrants and darker skinned Libyans are at risk of assault and death. The town of Tawergha was turned to rubble and inhabitants who survived the assault were forced to flee. America’s first black president was responsible for this terror.

2011 was the year that Barack Obama made his bones and a fiendish re-election campaign commercial by going on a killing spree in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden, Gaddafi and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki were all victims of the U.S. hit squad, in a clear violation of law.

Now Libya is back in the news and this very recent past is never mentioned by corporate media. When ISIS decapitated 21 Egyptian Christians the horror was separated from American involvement in that country. The murder of the American ambassador in 2012 is used by Republicans as a club to beat Obama but none of them question the very premise of American involvement there.

Libya is now a ruin. As Vladimir Putin pointed out, everything America touches will end up the same way. The once prosperous country is now in a tumultuous civil war, with war lords fighting for their own piece of the action and ISIS using the media to spread fear and outrage. None of this would have taken place had NATO left Libya alone.

One wouldn’t know this of course from watching the news or reading the newspaper. The United States role in the destruction of Libya has been shoved down the Orwellian memory hole, never to be seen or discussed again.

Boko Haram’s rampages in Nigeria and jihadists incursions in Mali are all a result of the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Death was unleashed not just in Libya, but throughout the region. The killing of the United States ambassador at Benghazi in 2012 was a harbinger of things to come as the jihadists repeat their standard operating procedure toward their benefactors. Now Libyans and Egyptian migrant workers pay the price for western aggressions.

It is staggering to see the depth of manipulation directed at the people of this country. If the president openly calls for the overthrow of a sovereign state, networks and newspapers go along and regurgitate every word. When the project goes south, no one who bragged about it in 2011 will now admit to their role in the disaster and the press continues to repeat official policy like the good little scribes they have always been.

The ISIS story has been dumbed down to tired analysis about a clash of civilizations and whether or not Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims can be peaceful or warlike but the hand of American involvement and the silence about it is the real story.

Therein lies the perennial problem. This is not the first time in history that an administration directed what the media does and doesn’t report. Journalists know that they have to play ball so to speak. If they want the good gig and access to senior officials they will write only what they are told to write. They won’t stray from the script or tell any inconvenient truths like the United States spending the last nearly forty years supporting jihadists who they later end up fighting.

When the next ISIS video of immolation or beheading is released, the history of American involvement ought to be told too. But no one should hold their breath and think that the press will report on any such thing.

Margaret Kimberley‘s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

In the prescient 1984 tome, author George Orwell wrote about a supposedly “fictitious” future in which the civilized world lived in what can only be called a surveillance society, in which “the government” would be able to keep watch on the citizenry 24-7, and through a variety of technological means.

It turns out that Orwell’s premonitions were a lot more realistic than even he likely imagined.

Today, surveillance cameras are everywhere, at least in the modern world. Police have a range of listening devices and surveillance technology, some of which can see through your walls and into your home. And federal spy agencies like the NSA routinely intercept and track Internet and wireless communications.

Now, it seems, even your household goods can spy on you. As reported by Britain’s Daily Mail, you might want to keep a lid on what you say this evening when you sit down in front of your television.

Samsung has issued a warning to owners of its Internet-connected “smart TV” — anything they say while sitting in the vicinity of the device could be overheard.

As the Mail reported further:

The popular televisions are voice activated, so users can switch channels or ask for suggestions of what to watch simply by giving a verbal command.

However, the technology which allows this to happen has a worrying side effect: it records everything else that goes on near the television.

Privacy? What privacy?

According to a clause in Samsung’s privacy policy, buyers should beware:

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

For instance, that means that the TVs might be able to record a family argument that took place in the living room; executives discussing strategy in corporate boardrooms equipped with such smart TVs are at risk of sharing confidential information.

Privacy advocates are understandably upset and concerned, noting that the technology is ripe for abuse by government agencies and “Big Brother” in general (coincidentally, the name of the authoritarian state in Orwell’s novel).

“This thing is going to be in your house, listening in on you,” Renate Samson, of Big Brother Watch, a campaign group named after this very notion, said, as quoted by the Mail. “Samsung say they are providing you with a service, but really the only service you need from a television is to watch programmes.”

More than half of all smart TVs sold in Britain are made by Samsung, the Mail noted.

The problem is in the technology, which was sold as a convenience. The TVs “listen” for simple commands, such as those to switch channels or turn up the volume. But it can process more complicated commands as well, after recording users’ speech and sending it on to a third-party company called Nuance, which is located in the U.S.

Nuance then sends the voice data to a computer server, which then translates the spoken word into text and spits out a response.

As further reported by the Daily Mail:

To give these complex commands, viewers must press a button on the remote control as they speak, and during that time, anything within ‘earshot’ will be collected.

The data is encrypted, but can be listened to by authorised Nuance staff.

The technology giant remained tight-lipped about whether it then keeps users’ data, only saying that it does not sell information on, and that it operates within privacy laws, which vary by country.

Professor Peter Sommer, a digital forensics expert who has lectured at the London School of Economics, said there was ‘no reason’ Samsung would not be storing up data.

“The fear is they could be building up a pattern of your preferences, or learning your voice,” he told the Mail.

Even when interactivity is turned off, the TV can collect data

Users do have the option of stopping the recording of their conversations by Samsung; they can turn the voice recognition feature off. But even then, the South Korean-based technology giant can still collect some information.

“While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it,” says the company’s privacy statement.

The Samsung smart TVs are not the only video and television technology capable of monitoring your activity. As Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported last year, Amazon Fire TV (and similar services) has the capability to act as a spying device.

Read his full report here.

Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.naturalnews.com

Foi publicada pela Strategic Culture Foundation uma reportagem de Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya sobre o esforço em curso levado a efeito por Washington e pela inteligência argentina para derrubar a presidente reformista da Argentina.

Nenhum governo reformista será tolerado por Washington na América Central e do Sul. Por exemplo: a interferência de Washington em Honduras até conseguir derrubar o governo reformista foi legendária. Um dos primeiros atos de governo de Obama foi a derrubada do presidente de Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. Aliado do presidente reformista da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, Zelaya, como Chávez, foi retratado como sendo um ditador e uma ameaça.

Neste momento, Venezuela, Bolívia, Equador e Argentina estão na lista de governos a serem depostos por Washington.

Por décadas, Washington teve o que eufemisticamente chamava de “relações próximas” com o exército hondurenho. Já na Venezuela, Bolívia e Equador, a aliança se dá com as elites hispânicas, que tradicionalmente prosperam permitindo que os interesses financeiros dos Estados Unidos saqueiem seus países. Na Argentina, Washington aliou-se ao serviço de inteligência argentina, que neste mesmo instante está trabalhando com Washington e os oligarcas daquele país contra a presidente reformista Cristina Kirchner.

Washington luta contra as reformas até esmagá-las no intento de proteger a capacidade de saquear e de seus interesses comerciais. Sobre seu tempo de serviço na América Central o general dos fuzileiros dos Estados Unidos, Smedley Butler, disse:

Servi em todas as patentes, de Segundo Tenente a General. Durante todo este período, gastei a maior parte do meu tempo fazendo as vezes de “Leão de Chácara” para as grandes empresas, para Wall Street e banqueiros. Resumindo, eu não passava de um chantagista do capitalismo.

Com a já longamente documentada história da interferência dos Estados Unidos nos acontecimentos internos de seus vizinhos do Sul, a charada é saber por que esses países facilitam a derrubada de seus governos acolhendo embaixadas dos EUA e permitindo que empresas norte americanas operem em seu território?

Sempre que um processo político coloca no poder, em qualquer destes países, um líder que pensa em colocar o interesse de seu povo em confronto com os interesses dos Estados Unidos, este líder ou é derrubado através de um golpe ou assassinado. Para os Estados Unidos, a América do Sul existe apenas para servir aos seus interesses, e cuidam, a cada instante, para que isso continue exatamente assim. Com a aliança eventualmente desenvolvida pelos EUA com a “elite” e as Forças Armadas de determinado país, as reformas sofrem um processo de sabotagem contínua.

Países que se abrem para a entrada de embaixadas dos Estados Unidos, de seus interesses comerciais e de ONGs fundadas nos Estados Unidos não perdem por esperar: mais cedo ou mais tarde sua independência ou sua soberania será subvertida.

Uma real reforma na América Latina só acontecerá com a expulsão dos agentes do interesse norte americano e com a desapropriação dos oligarcas.

– Paul Craig Roberts

A politização da Investigação sobre a AMIA: Pretexto para “Mudança de Regime” na Argentina?

9/2/2015, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – Strategic Culture Foundation

A história tem um jeito estranho de se repetir. Hoje a Argentina está passando por processo semelhante ao acontecido logo depois da queda de Boris Yeltsin, nos anos que se seguiram a 1999, quando Vladimir Putin assumiu o poder, tomando seu lugar no Kremlin como presidente da Federação Russa. Enquanto tenta se safar do jugo estrangeiro, o governo da Argentina em Buenos Aires tem consolidado seu poder econômico e político.

No entanto, o governo argentino tem sofrido a oposição ao mesmo tempo do velho regime e da oligarquia que colaboram, ambos, com os Estados Unidos. Tais forças fazem oposição cerrada contra os maiores projetos nacionais, como a renacionalização de grandes companhias e o fortalecimento do Poder Executivo. Dessa forma, o confronto entre a Presidente argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, e seus oponentes são similares aos confrontos entre o Presidente russo, Vladimir Putin, com os oligarcas e políticos russos que querem subordinar a Rússia a Wall Street e Washington, assim como à Europa Ocidental, grandes centros financeiros.

Não se perde uma oportunidade de enfraquecer o governo argentino. A Presidente Fernández de Kirchner chegou mesmo a acusar publicamente seus oponentes domésticos e os Estados Unidos e trabalharem em conjunto para a mudança de regime.

Quando o DAESH ou “Estado Islâmico” ameaçou matá-la em 2014, ela aludiu ao fato de que a ameaça veio na realidade dos Estados Unidos, já que Washington é a entidade que procura fazê-la desaparecer, assim como é quem está por trás do Estado Islâmico e suas brigadas terroristas na Síria e no Iraque. [1]

A morte de Alberto Nisman

O último capítulo da luta do governo argentino começou em janeiro de 2015. No mesmo dia em que Israel matou o General da Guarda Revolucionária iraniana, General Mohammed Allahdadi, dentro da Síria, o antigo promotor especial Alberto Nisman foi morto por um tiro disparado no lado de sua cabeça no banheiro de seu apartamento fechado em 18/1/2015. [2]

Nisman tinha investigado o atentado a bomba em 1994 contra um edifício de propriedade da AMIA – Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina por um período de dez anos. Em 2003 fora nomeado para a tarefa pelo Presidente Néstor Kirchner, o marido já falecido da atual presidente.

Alguns dias antes, ele tinha feito acusações contra a presidente da Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner e seu Ministro do Exterior, Hector Timerman, ele mesmo um judeu. Nas palavras do New York Times Nisman havia “lançado graves acusações”, [3] afirmando que:

(…) funcionários iranianos teriam planejado e financiado o ataque; que o Hezbollah, aliado do Irã no Líbano o havia executado; e que a presidente da Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, e seus principais assessores tinham conspirado para encobrir o envolvimento iraniano como parte de um acordo para o fornecimento de petróleo do Irã para a Argentina. [4]

Tendo fugido da Argentina após a morte de Nisman, o jornalista judeu Damian Pachter jogou lenha na fogueira desde Israel tendo mesmo escrito um artigo para o Haaretz que não foi apoiado por ninguém, mas mesmo assim muito citado, no qual busca polemizar com o governo argentino. O artigo de Pachter faz a Argentina parecer um país que vive à sombra do nazismo alemão ou de algum regime fascista. Vejam alguns de seus comentários [5]:

●−Não tenho ideia de quando voltarei para a Argentina. Aliás, nem sei se quero voltar. O que eu sei é que o país no qual nasci não é mais o lugar feliz sobre o qual meus avós costumam contar histórias.

●−A Argentina transformou-se em um lugar escuro dominado por um sistema político corrupto. Ainda não entendi direito tudo o que me aconteceu nas últimas 48 horas. Mas nunca imaginei que meu retorno para Israel aconteceria desta forma.

Antes de seguirmos em frente, deve ser acrescentado que nos dez anos de investigação de Alberto Nisman, ele nunca chegou a acusar o Irã ou o Hezbollah. Acrescente-se que foi revelado que Nisman consultou frequentemente os Estados Unidos sobre o caso AMIA e que foi frontalmente acusado por Ronald Noble, antigo presidente da International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) de ser um mentiroso em relação a muitas das acusações que fez sobre o caso AMIA. [6]

A morte de Alberto Nisman foi noticiada como suicídio. No entanto, o momento em que a morte se deu é muito suspeito. Ele faleceu apenas algumas horas antes de depor no Congresso Argentino. O governo argentino disse que o que aconteceu na realidade foi um homicídio destinado a prejudicar o governo. [7] Essa assertiva se tornou plausível tendo em vista que a morte de Alberto Nisman está sendo usada para fins políticos, como munição para a tentativa de remoção do governo argentino.

A quinta coluna na Argentina

O jornal The Guardian publicou um artigo em 27/1/2015 onde relata que a morte de Alberto Nisman aconteceu

(…) depois de uma luta acirrada entre o governo argentino e uma importante agência de inteligência, o que foi revelado depois da morte suspeita de Nisman, tendo a Presidente acusado espiões desonestos que tentam solapar o seu governo. [8]

A partir da reportagem, alguns pontos importantes podem ser notados, entre os quais os que segue:

●− Funcionários do governo acusaram diretamente alguns espiões que eles dizem que trabalhavam junto com Nisman e ao qual forneciam gravações de escutas.

●− Entre eles estava Antonio Stiuso, o qual até o mês passado era o diretor geral de operações para interceptação dos adversários políticos da presidente. Foi demitido quando a presidente Cristina descobriu que ele estava trabalhando em conluio com Nisman na construção de um caso contra ela. Acredita-se que esteja agora nos Estados Unidos.

●− Em um discurso em cadeia de televisão – que pronunciou a partir de uma cadeira de rodas depois de recente acidente – Fernandez criticou também Diego Lagomarsino, o qual foi acusado na segunda feira de ter fornecido ilegalmente uma arma para Nisman. [9]

O que se conclui de todas as informações acima é que a segurança e a inteligência argentina desenvolvem operações destinadas a derrubar seu próprio governo. Acrescente-se que Antonio Stiuso e Nisman estavam trabalhando secretamente para estabelecer um caso que possibilitasse a remoção de Kirchner do poder.

A quinta coluna está presente na Argentina.

Note-se que muitos dos indivíduos envolvidos neste caso são elementos que restaram do período de ditadura militar na Argentina, a qual colaborava intimamente com os Estados Unidos. Isso pode explicar porque se acredita que Stiuso tenha voado para os Estados Unidos. Além disso, este é o motivo que levou o governo argentino a iniciar uma investigação sobre as atividades de vários agentes da polícia federal que estavam monitorando Nisman e porque decidiu substituir a Secretaria de Inteligência (SI – anteriormente Secretaria de Inteligência do Estado ou SIDE) por uma nova agência federal de inteligência. [10]

Todas essas coisas me levaram a tomar a decisão de remover agentes que atuam desde antes da implantação da democracia, afirmou a própria Kirchner. [11]

Nós precisamos trabalhar em um projeto para a reforma do Sistema de Inteligência da Argentina a fim de clarificar um sistema que hoje não está a serviço dos interesses nacionais, declarou a presidente Kirchner sobre as reformas. [12]

Kirchner revelou ainda que a SI estava trabalhando para minar seu governo e anular um acordo que a Argentina tinha assinado com o Irã. O jornal Buenos Aires Herald escreveu que a Presidente Kirchner asseverou que: “(…) desde o instante em que foi assinado o Memorando de Entendimento com o Irã sobre o episódio do atentado contra a AMIA em 1994, você pode notar que o acordo vem sendo bombardeado a partir da SI (Secretaria de Inteligência). [13]

A Argentina é um front da guerra global de múltiplo espectro e a AMIA não passa de um pretexto.

O caso AMIA foi politizado em dois fronts. Um deles é a luta interna e o outro está no campo das relações internacionais. Um grupo de oligarcas argentinos está usando o caso AMIA para retomar o controle sobre o país, enquanto por outro lado os Estados Unidos estão usando o caso AMIA como mais uma ferramenta adequada, como aconteceu com os fundos abutres, para pressionar a Argentina e interferir em seus assuntos internos.

As opiniões estão se radicalizando dentro da Argentina enquanto os ataques são cada vez mais duros. A morte de Alberto Nisman está sendo usada pelos adversários políticos do governo argentino para demonizá-lo. A oposição está até se referindo a Nisman como um mártir na luta pela democracia e liberdade no país, que supostamente estaria sendo conduzido para um regime cada vez mais autoritário.

O confronto político na Argentina sobre o atentado contra a AMIA reflete uma realidade muito mais grave. O Irã não é o único alvo a ser atingido com a polarização sobre o caso AMIA. Nem se trata de procurar justiça para as vítimas do atentado.

China, Russia, Cuba, Brasil, Venezuela, Equador, Bolívia e uma série de outros países independentes também são alvos do que é, na realidade, uma guerra que se trava entre os EUA e os países soberanos que resistem à influência dos Estados Unidos.

O objetivo final dos Estados Unidos é retomar sua influência perdida na Argentina, redirecionar suas relações comerciais e controlar sua política externa. Isto inclui o fim das medidas lançadas por Buenos Aires no sentido de retomar o controle sobre as Malvinas (Falklands) da Inglaterra. As Malvinas estão situadas em uma região rica em recursos energéticos no Atlântico Sul.

Além da guerra por recursos que incluem as reservas de energia, a guerra de múltiplo espectro lançada pelos Estados Unidos contra seus rivais vai cada vez mais em direção a um assalto à agricultura do qual resultará a desestabilização dos preços dos alimentos e eventualmente a fome. Além de uma ainda não explorada reserva de petróleo e gás natural, a Argentina é uma potência agrícola. Controlar Buenos Aires seria útil para os Estados Unidos.

Notas (em inglês):

[1] Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, «Eagles of Empire and economic terrorism: Are vulture funds instruments of US policy?» RT, October 24, 2014.

[2] Almudena Calatrava, «Supporters doubt Argentine prosecutor killed self», Associated Press, Janaury 20, 2015; Jonathan Watts, «Argentinian government moves to dissolve domestic intelligence agency», Guardian, January 27, 2015.

[3-4] Isabel Kershner, «Journalist Who Reported on Argentine Prosecutor’s Death Flees to Israel», New York Times, January 26, 2015.

[5] Damian Pachter, «Why I fled Argentina after breaking the story of Alberto Nisman’s death», Haaretz, January 25, 2015.

[6] «Ex Interpol head Roland Noble: What prosecutor Nisman says is false», Buenos Aires Herald, January 18, 2015.

[7-10] Jonathan Watts, «Argentinian governments moves…», op. cit.

[11-13] «CFK announces plan to dissolve SI intelligence service», Buenos Aires Herald, Janaury 26, 2015.

Paul Craig Roberts (nascido em 03 de abril de 1939) é um economista norte-americano, colunista do Creators Syndicate. Serviu como secretário-assistente do Tesouro na administração Reagan e foi destacado como um co-fundador da Reaganomics.  Ex-editor e colunista do Wall Street Journal, Business Week e Scripps Howard News Service. Testemunhou perante comissões do Congresso em 30 ocasiões em questões de política econômica. Durante o século XXI, Roberts tem frequentemente publicado em Counterpunch e no Information Clearing House, escrevendo extensamente sobre os efeitos das administrações Bush (e mais tarde Obama) relacionadas com a guerra contra o terror, que ele diz ter destruído a proteção das liberdades civis dos americanos da Constituição dos EUA, tais como habeas corpus e o devido processo legal. Tem tomado posições diferentes de ex-aliados republicanos, opondo-se à guerra contra as drogas e a guerra contra o terror, e criticando as políticas e ações de Israel contra os palestinos. Roberts é graduado do Instituto de Tecnologia da Geórgia e tem Ph.D. da Universidade de Virginia, com pós-graduação na Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley e na Faculdade de Merton, Oxford University.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya é cientista social, escritor premiado, colunista e pesquisador. Suas obras são reconhecidas internacionalmente em uma ampla série de publicações e foram traduzidas para mais de vinte idiomas, incluindo alemão, árabe, italiano, russo, turco, espanhol, português, chinês, coreano, polonês, armênio, persa, holandês e romeno. Seu trabalho em ciências geopolíticas e estudos estratégicos tem sido usado por várias instituições acadêmicas e de defesa de teses em universidades e escolas preparatórias de oficiais militares. É convidado freqüente em redes internacionais de notícias como analista de geopolítica e especialista em Oriente Médio.

Recentemente, em viagem pela América Central, contactou a Frente Sandinista de Libertação Nacional, em sua base em León, na Nicarágua. Como Observador Internacional esteve em El Salvador no primeiro turno das eleições.

That the US is arming and training Syrian rebels has been well-documented forover two years, yet Western media have historically suffered from a strange collective amnesia when reporting this fact. As Ian Sinclair noted last September in the Huffington Post(9/23/14):

In mid-2012, the most influential newspaper in the world reported the US was helping to arm the rebels–a fact confirmed by subsequent stories in the New York Times itself, as well as numerous reports in other mainstream news outlets around the world.

Contrast this publicly available, easily accessed information with these summaries from the mainstream media of the ongoing US role in Syria…:

Image: New York Times map (3/24/13) of arms flowing to Syrian rebels “with help from the CIA.” (graphic: Sergio Pecanha/NYT)

• New York Times (5/4/13): “President [Obama] seems to be moving closer to providing lethal assistance to the Syrian rebels, even though he rejected such a policy just months ago.“• Guardian (5/8/13): “The US, which has outlawed al-Nusra as a terrorist group, has hesitated to arm the FSA [Free Syrian Army].”…

• New York Times (9/9/14): “Mr Obama has resisted military engagement in Syria for more than three years, out of fear early on that arming the rebels who oppose Mr. Assad would fail to alter the balance in the civil war.”

• BBC Today Programme (9/11/14), presenter Mishal Husein to US ambassador: “If you [the US] had helped the moderate Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian Army, three years ago, even two years ago, we might well not be in the position that we are now.President Obama’s reluctance to intervene and to take action on Syria has contributed to what we are seeing now.”

Why are all of these professional journalists — supposedly a profession made up of stroppy, questioning cynics — incapable of stating the most basic of facts about the US role in Syria?

This week, it appears, the media’s collective FSA/CIA amnesia has struck once again, with a series of reports that make no mention of the CIA’s ongoing operation of arming and training Syrian rebels that’s been thoroughly documented for over two years.

These reports were previewed last month with a report on CNN (1/16/15) headlined “Pentagon: US to Begin to Train and Equip Moderate Syria Rebels.” This was just false: The US isn’t “beginning to train and equip moderate rebels.” TheGuardian reported onMarch 8, 2013–almost two years ago:

Western training of Syrian rebels is under way in Jordan in an effort to strengthen secular elements in the opposition as a bulwark against Islamic extremism, and to begin building security forces to maintain order in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall.

Jordanian security sources say the training effort is led by the US, but involves British and French instructors.

The Guardian story cited the Pentagon in acknowledging that “a small group of US special forces and military planners had been to Jordan during the summer to help…train selected rebel fighters.”

Two days later, Reuters (3/10/13) cited a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel (3/10/13), “quoting what it said were participants and organizers,” that “Americans are training Syrian anti-government fighters in Jordan”:

Some 200 men have already received such training over the past three months and there are plans in the future to provide training for a total 1,200 members of the “Free Syrian Army” in two camps in the south and the east of the country.

Nevertheless, there were a raft of stories last week that treated US training of Syrian rebels as a brand-new initiative–as in NBC News‘ “US to Equip Moderate Syrian Rebels: Defense Official” (2/17/15):

Congress approved President Barack Obama’s request to authorize training the rebels in September. The first group of rebels is expected to begin the six to eight weeks of training in Jordan by the “middle of March,” the official said.

“The first group”? They’re rather late for that.

Reuters  had  “US to Train and Equip Moderate Syrian Rebels” (2/17/15) and “US, Turkey to Arm and Train Syrian Rebels” (2/19/15)–the former of which reported that “three US officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the training could begin in mid-March.”

“Could begin”? It’s not “beginning,” it’s being reassigned.

The Associated Press (2/18/15) reported that

the US has been talking about training moderate Syrian rebels for months, but has been moving very slowly to identify groups and screen the fighters in an effort to ensure that enemy insurgents aren’t brought in.

The US hasn’t been “talking about” training “moderate” Syrian rebels for months–it’s been actually training them for years, as the Guardian and Der Spiegel revealed.

Even political puff pieces let this trope go unchallenged, as in Politico‘s “Marco Rubio Sharpens Commander-in-Chief Pitch” (2/20/15), which said Rubio

was right, he said, when he warned the US to immediately arm moderate Syrian rebels two years ago–before the radicals in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant began beheading hostages and declaring a caliphate.

But this is the exact opposite of reality: Rubio was “warning” the US ought to do something he, as a member of Congress, very well knew they’ve already had been doing for some time. And, of course, Politico makes no mention of the CIA’s ongoing operation of arming and training Syrian rebels, allowing this nonsensical talking point to go unchallenged.

Some articles, even while mentioning this fact, seem to contradict their own lead while doing so. The Wall Street Journal (2/17/15), writing about a decision to provide US air support to Syrian rebels, writes that “the plan comes as the US prepares to start training moderate rebels, who are waging a two-front fight against the extremists and the Syrian regime.” But in paragraph 12, the article acknowledges:

The Central Intelligence Agency began a covert program to train and arm moderate Syrian rebels in 2013, providing ammunition, small arms and antitank weapons to small groups of trusted fighters. While that program continues, some officials and administration critics say it has fallen well short of its aims.

So, which is it? Is the US “preparing to start training moderate rebels,” or has the CIA been doing so since 2013? What they mean to say, of course, is that the US isn’t “preparing” to “train and arm moderate rebels” but rather–now that the war effort is popular–transferring the duty over to non-clandestine operations in the Pentagon. This isn’t the announcement of a new policy, but rather a bureaucratic restructuring.

Indeed, even the oft-referenced congressional approval of funds for Syrian rebels in September 2014 (Reuters, “US Congress Approves Arming Syrian Rebels, Funding Government,” 9/19/14) was merely a formal sanctioning of a secret congressional approval that occurred nine months prior (Reuters, “Congress Secretly Approves US Weapons Flow to ‘Moderate’ Syrian Rebels,”1/27/14):

The weapons deliveries have been funded by the US Congress, in votes behind closed doors, through the end of government fiscal year 2014, which ends on September 30, two officials said.

The media’s insistence on framing these policies as if they are revelations of anything new–and the omission of the crucial fact that such training and arming has been going on since at least June 2012–is the awkward by-product of a war that’s being done in secret first, only to be formally sanctioned by our institutions of power after the fact. Just as Obama asked Congress to “authorize” airstrikes that began over six months ago, the media is tasked, once again, with acting as if the US’s training and arming of Syrian “moderate” rebels is something new.

It’s not. It’s a years-old political reality that should be treated as a run-of-the-mill government reshuffling rather than the democratically sanctioned shift in policy it almost certainly isn’t.

Adam Johnson is a freelance journalist; formerly he was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitter at@adamjohnsonnyc. A version of this post appeared on his blog Citations Needed (2/22/15).

El 16 de enero de 2015 entraron en vigor las medidas de flexibilización que anunció Estados Unidos en el marco del proceso de normalización de las relaciones bilaterales iniciado por los Presidentes Barack Obama y Raúl Castro. Aunque no ponen término a las sanciones económicas, constituyen una señal positiva y confirman la voluntad de Washington de acabar con una política anacrónica, cruel e ineficiente. Dicha política constituye efectivamente el principal obstáculo al desarrollo de la isla, afecta a las categorías más vulnerables de la población cubana y suscita la condena unánime de la comunidad internacional.[1]

http://monthlyreview.org/books/pb4710/

Contacto: [email protected] ; [email protected]

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French president François Hollande has said his government will soon announce a raft of tough criminal laws to crack down on anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and Holocaust denial.

He made the announcements in a speech to CRIF, France’s main Jewish communal body and Israel lobby group, on Monday.

Hollande said that the Internet needed to be “regulated” to suppress videos and even search results deemed “anti-Semitic.”

The president said that the appropriate model would be the laws used to prevent the dissemination of child pornography.

But the measures are likely only to make matters worse, among other things by criminalizing criticism of Israel and further conflating Zionism with Judaism.

Discipline and punish

The plans will worry civil libertarians already concerned about the crackdown on free speech since the January attacks by three French gunmen on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

Hollande said that details of the draft law would be announced in coming days by his prime minister Manuel Valls.

Meanwhile, Valls recently indicated his direction of travel by declaring that his goal was to fight “Islamofascism” – a term used by the neoconservative, pro-Israel far right to demonize Muslims.

Hollande promised that the laws would become more punitive, so that “no anti-Semitic word or act goes without a response.”

He promised “faster” and “more effective” punishments for “words or writing that are anti-Semitic, racist or homophobic.”

Only in passing, toward the end of the half-hour speech, did Hollande mention that anti-Muslim hate attacks in France in January alone exceeded the entire number recorded in 2014.

He did not announce any specific measures to combat this alarming phenomenon.

The president observed that “Muslims are the first victims of Islamist or jihadist terrorism, whether in the Middle East or Africa,” and called for more international military intervention in those regions.

Hollande did not consider that it was “Western” interventions in Syria, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere that gave rise to the menace known as Islamic State (for an excellent account of that, see Patrick Cockburn’s new book The Rise of Islamic State).

Conflating anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel

Hollande’s speech also confirms the direction hinted at in earlier statements that France is likely to take more measures to suppress criticism of Israel in the name of combating anti-Semitism.

The president told CRIF that anti-Semitism has ancient roots, but asserted that “a more recent source is hatred of Israel.”

But if this is the case, who decides what is “anti-Semitic”? If all anti-Israel and anti-Zionist statements will be considered anti-Semitic then hundreds if not thousands of publications in tens of languages will have to be banned by France.

Hollande shared some disturbing statistics: in 2014 there were twice as many “anti-Semitic acts” recorded as in 2013 and ten times more than before the year 2000.

Lest I be accused of “justifying” these acts, let me be clear: nothing, including Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, justifies insulting or attacking Jews as Jews.

But can it be a mere coincidence that 2014 was the year of Israel’s latest horrific massacre of Palestinians in Gaza that was fully backed by the United States and most EU members, including France?

Can it also be a coincidence that 2000 was the year the second intifada began and Israel launched a brutal crackdown that has since killed more than eight thousand Palestinians, often with weapons provided by those same states?

What is the relationship between these facts?

While Hollande insists that “hatred” of Israel is a form of, or a “source” of “anti-Semitism,” he does not acknowledge the role of Israel in generating the intense hostility sometimes misdirected against Jews.

The Palestinian national movement has always correctly insisted that its enemies are not “the Jews,” but rather Israel and the Zionist colonial movement.

Yet it is Israel that continues to insist that it acts in the name of all Jews everywhere.

It is Benjamin Netanyahu who apparently considers himself not just prime minister of Israel but the leader of world Jewry.

It is Israel that has taken the symbols of the Jewish religion – including its most recognized one, the Star of David – and affixed it to uniforms and weapons of destruction and death that are used to carry out atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon.

It is Zionists who have taken holy scriptures and claimed that they provide a license for modern day Brooklynites and Parisians to violently steal land from Palestinian villagers.

It is Israel’s government-financed settlers who torch Palestinian mosques and daub their walls with “biblical phrases.”

It is Israel-government-backed religious fanatics who yearn – and plan – to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a “Jewish temple.”

It is Israel that has used the Paris Grand Synagogue as a recruiting base for its armyand it is Israeli army commanders who cite Hebrew scripture to justify laying waste to Gaza.

Violent radical Judaism?

If we can say that the horrific actions of Islamic State are a perversion of the beliefs of the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, can we also not say that Zionism is a perversion of Judaism?

CRIF insists that the Paris attacks be labeled “Islamist.” By the same logic, should we label Israel’s crimes acts of “violent radical Judaism?”

While anti-Zionist Jews, secular and religious, have always insisted that Israel and Zionism do not represent them or their religion or cultures, politicians like Hollande reinforce the false and dangerous association between Jews as Jews on the one hand and Israel’s violent racist colonialism against Palestinians on the other.

Some misguided youths, hearing these messages, may indeed believe Israel’s claim that “the Jews” are the enemies of the Palestinians and direct their anger or hatred towards Jewish targets.

They may hear the Islamophobic diatribes emanating from many right-wing and liberal supporters of Israel and also conclude – falsely – that “the Jews” are the enemies of “the Muslims.”

The message has to be clear always and is worth repeating: words or acts targeting Jews as Jews are never a form of solidarity with Palestinians.

We must be equally clear that opposing and resisting Zionism is not anti-Semitic, but a struggle for liberation for Palestinians and indeed for Israeli Jews.

Repeating history

In his address to CRIF, Hollande spoke about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in the bland terms of the defunct “peace process.”

He reaffirmed France’s commitment to the fantasy of the “two-state solution,” offered to host a “peace conference” in Paris and said that no matter who won Israel’s elections next month, France would work with them “in friendship and trust.”

He offered not one single word of comfort or anger about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza where there has been no reconstruction since Israel’s summer attack devastated much of the besieged and impoverished territory.

Hollande warned that those who do not learn from history are destined to relive it.

Yet there was not one word about accountability or justice for the Israeli war crimes that left more than 2,200 people, including more than 500 children, dead in Gaza.

Why are 1.8 million Palestinians, mostly refugees from present-day Israel, caged in Gaza under such abominable conditions in the first place?

The answer is simple: their mere existence, the fact that they live and breathe as non-Jews, is considered a threat to Israel’s self-declared identity as a “Jewish state.”

Palestinians are in a ghetto because of who they are and France’s president has nothing to say about that.

Moving right

While French leaders are doing their best to pander to the prejudices of their audience, it is doubtful it will be enough.

Richard Prasquier, the former president of CRIF, went on national television to say that Hollande and Valls had not gone far enough.

CRIF’s current president Roger Cukierman provoked anger from French Muslim community leaders by declaring that “all the violent attacks today are committed by young Muslims.”

Cukierman also praised Marine Le Pen, leader of the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and traditionally deeply anti-Semitic National Front, as “irreproachable.”

Alas Hollande’s ardor to combat racism was nowhere in sight when it came to the fanatical anti-Arab racism of Israel’s leading political parties.

CRIF heard no rebuke from the supposedly anti-racist Hollande for Cukierman’s public embrace of Israeli ultra-nationalist politician Naftali Bennett, who boasts about how many Arabs he has killed and claims that Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land are “protecting London, Paris and Madrid.”

Education reform

In his speech, Hollande announced education reforms to reinforce the messages he gave to CRIF. But what France really needs to teach its Jewish and Muslim citizens is that contrary to Israeli claims, Israel does not represent Jews and that Israeli policies and Israeli crimes are not Jewish policies or Jewish crimes.

The irony is that it might prove more difficult to convince French Jews and French Christians of this than it is to convince French Muslims.