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The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act. The US Government even surmised in court that such an Espionage Act prosecution of the New York Times may have been successful.

It is hard for me to convey to a British audience what an assault this represents by the Trump administration on Americans’ self-image of their own political culture. The First Amendment is celebrated across the political divide and the New York Times judgement is viewed as a pillar of freedom. So much so that Hollywood’s main superstars are still making blockbusters about it, in which the heroes are the journalists rather than the actual whistleblower, Dan Ellsberg (whom I am proud to know).

The US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the USA are not in court to hear it and do not report it, because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored. Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?

Err, yes.

The prosecution’s line represented a radical departure from their earlier approach which was to claim that Julian Assange is not a journalist and to try and distinguish between his behaviour and that of newspapers. In the first three days of evidence, legal experts had stated that this gloss on the prosecution did not stand up to investigation of the actual charges in the indictment. Experts in journalism also testified that Assange’s relationship with Manning was not materially different from cultivation and encouragement by other journalists of official sources to leak.

By general consent, those first evidence days had gone badly for the prosecution. There was then a timeout for (ahem) suspected Covid among the prosecution team. The approach has now changed and on Tuesday a radically more aggressive approach was adopted by the prosecution asserting the right to prosecute all journalists and all media who publish classified information under the Espionage Act (1917).

The purpose of the earlier approach was plainly to reduce media support for Assange by differentiating him from other journalists. It had become obvious such an approach ran a real risk of failure, if it could be proved that Assange is a journalist, which line was going well for the defence. So now we have “any journalist can be prosecuted for publishing classified information” as the US government line. I strongly suspect that they have decided they do not have to mitigate against media reaction, as the media is paying no attention to this hearing anyway.

I shall now continue my exposition of the questioning of Eric Lewis. I shall not set out as much of this in full detail as dialogue as I did yesterday, but will do so at key points in the summary.

James Lewis QC Returning to the European Court of Human Rights judgement in the case of Babar Ahmad, you state that their finding that solitary confinement is permissible did not take into account more recent studies such as the 2020 Danish study by Wildeman and Andersen. Do you say this study would have reversed the ECHR decision?
Eric Lewis That is impossible to say. I hope that if the ECHR had before it the large body of evidence on solitary confinement available today, the judgement may have been different.
James Lewis QC What are the five limitations to their study which Wildemann and Andersen mention?
Eric Lewis I don’t have it in front of me.
James Lewis QC Why did you not mention the five limitations in your report? They state that their methodology is strictly observational and cannot be used to prove cause and effect.
[The report in effect shows a much higher suicide rate post-incarceration among those who had been subjected to solitary confinement, from a very large sample of ex-prisoners.]
Eric Lewis I could have written hundreds of pages on recent social sciences developments on solitary confinement. This is just one such report.
James Lewis QC You were just fishing about for something, omitting details which counter your opinion.
Eric Lewis There is a huge amount of data, including from the US Bureau of Prisons. You just picked out one caveat of one report.
James Lewis QC Please keep your answers concise. The situation has changed due to the Cunningham Mitigation. Do you know what that is?
Eric Lewis Yes
James Lewis QC Why did you not mention it in your report?
Eric Lewis Because it is not relevant. A number of recommendations were set out, which have not been implemented in practice.
James Lewis QC Gordon Kromberg has produced the Cunningham Mitigation for us. In November 2016, in settlement of an 8th Amendment claim, it was admitted that conditions for mental health treatment in the Florence Colorado ADX are unsatisfactory and a large number of measures were agreed. Do you agree with Mr Kromberg that the Cunningham Mitigation has improved matters.?
Eric Lewis In some ways it has improved matters, in other ways things have gotten worse.

James Lewis QC then proceeded to state in response to Eric Lewis’s written statement on Covid, that Gordon Kromberg affirmed that as of 2 September there was no Covid in the Alexandra Detention Centre where Assange would be kept pre-trial. Eric Lewis countered that levels of Covid in federal prisons in the USA are 18%.

James Lewis QC You stated in the press that the maximum sentence is 340 years when now you state it is only 175 years. You miscalculated didn’t you? You took 20 years per count as the base when it should be 10.
Eric Lewis It was a mistake in an interview.
James Lewis QC You don’t really believe in 175 years maximum sentence, do you? It’s just a soundbite.
Eric Lewis started to answer and James Lewis QC cut him off. Edward Fitzgerald rose and objected that the witness must be allowed to answer. Baraitser agreed.
Eric Lewis The US government has called this one of the biggest cases in history. Espionage convictions frequently attract long sentences. Pompeo has categorised Wikileaks as a hostile intelligence agency. The government asked for 60 years for Chelsea Manning. I considered the charges in relation to the official sentencing guidelines.
James Lewis QC. Gordon Kromberg has testified that only a tiny fraction of all federal defendants attract the maximum sentence. The sentencing guidelines stipulate no unwarranted disparity with similar convictions. Jeffrey Sterling was a CIA agent convicted of selling secrets on Iran to Russia. He had faced a possible maximum sentence of 130 years, but had received only 42 months.
Eric Lewis The prosecution asked for a much longer sentence. In fact that was a very unique case not comparable…
James Lewis QC Why did you not give a realistic estimate and not a soundbite?

[In fact James Lewis’ categorisation of the Jeffrey Sterling case is entirely tendentious and it is hardly a sensible comparator. Sterling was a rare black CIA officer, involved in a long and bitter dispute with his employer over racial discrimination, convicted on purely circumstantial evidence of giving information to an American journalist about a completed CIA operation to leak false Iranian plans to Russia. Sterling was not accused of leaking to Russia. The entire case was very dubious.]

Eric Lewis I followed sentencing guidelines. I gave what I calculated as the statutory maximum, 175 years, and an estimate from my experience of the very lightest sentence he could expect, 20 years. Sterling got well below the guidelines and the judge explained why.

James Lewis QC now ran through a couple more cases, and stated that the longest sentence ever given for unlawful disclosure to the media was 63 months – presumably not counting Chelsea Manning. Eric Lewis replied that the specific charges laid in the Assange indictment relate to disclosure to a foreign power, not to the media, and of information helpful to the enemy. Sentences for the counts Assange was charged on were much higher.

James Lewis QC stated that sentencing was by an independent federal judge who had life tenure, to free them from political influence. There was brief to and fro about the circumstances in which a federal judge might be impeached. The judge assigned the Assange case was Claude Hilton, who had been on the bench since 1985. James Lewis QC challenged Eric Lewis as to whether he thought Claude Hilton was fair, and Eric Lewis replied that Hilton had a reputation as a heavy sentencer.

James Lewis QC then asked Eric Lewis whether he accepted that the US Department of Justice had sentencing principles in place which specifically guarded against unnecessarily long prison sentences. Eric Lewis replied that the USA had the highest percentage of its population in jail of any country in the world.

Counsel for the US Government James Lewis QC then stated he would turn to the First Amendment issue.

James Lewis QC You suggest that the First Amendment precludes this prosecution.
Eric Lewis Yes, There has never been a prosecution of a publisher under the Espionage Act for publication of classified information.
James Lewis QC Are you familiar with the Rosen Case of 2006. This was precisely the same charge as Assange now faces, 793 (g) of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to transmit classified information to those not entitled to receive it. Have you read the case?
Eric Lewis Not in a long while, because ultimately it was not proceeded with.

[James Lewis read through lengthy extracts of the Rosen judgement, which I do not have in front of me and was unable to get down verbatim. What follows is therefore gist not transcript].

James Lewis QC In the Rosen case, it is made plain that the receiver, not just the discloser, is liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act. The judge noted that although the Espionage Act of 1917 had been criticised for vagueness, Congress had never felt the need to clarify it. It also noted that much of the alleged vagueness had been resolved in various judicial interpretations. It noted the fourth circuit had rejected a first amendment defence in the case of Morison.
Eric Lewis Morison is different. He was a leaker not a publisher.
James Lewis QC The Rosen judgement also goes on to state that vagueness does not come into play where there is clear evidence of intent.
Eric Lewis When you consider the 100 year old Espionage Act and that there has never been a prosecution of a publisher, then intent…
James Lewis QC [interrupting] I want to move on from intent to the First Amendment. There are supreme court judgements that make it clear that at times the government’s interest in national security must override the First Amendment.
Eric Lewis In times of imminent danger and relating to immediate and direct damage to the interests of the United States. It is a very high bar.
James Lewis QC The Rosen judgement also notes that the New York Times Pentagon Papers case was about injunction not prosecution. “The right to free speech is not absolute”.
Eric Lewis Of course. The arguments are well rehearsed. Movement of troop ships in time of war, for example; cases of grave and immediate danger. In the Pentagon Papers Ellsberg was, like Assange, accused of putting named US agents at risk. The bar for overriding the First Amendment is set very high.
James Lewis QC [Reading out from a judgement which I think is still the Rosen judgement but it was referred to only by bundle page.] He also notes that serial, continuing disclosure of secrets which harm the national interest cannot be justified. It therefore follows that journalists can be prosecuted. Is that what he says, Mr Lewis?
Eric Lewis Yes, but he is wrong.
James Lewis QC Do you accept that the Pentagon Papers judgement is the most relevant one?
Eric Lewis Yes, but there are others.
James Lewis QC A close reading of the Pentagon Papers judgement shows that the New York Times might have been successfully prosecuted. Three of the Supreme Court judges specifically stated that an Espionage Act prosecution could be pursued for publication.
Eric Lewis They recognised the possibility of a prosecution. They did not say that it would succeed.
James Lewis QC So your analysis that there cannot be a prosecution of a publisher on First Amendment grounds is incorrect.

Eric Lewis gave a lengthy answer to this, but the sound on the videolink had been deteriorating and had in the public gallery become just a series of electronic sounds. The lawyers carried on, so perhaps they could hear, but I know Julian could not because I saw him trying to communicate this to his lawyers through the bulletproof glass screen in front of him. He had difficulty in doing this as he was behind them, and they had their backs to him and eyes fixed on the video screen.

James Lewis QC I challenge you to name one single judgement that states a publisher may never be prosecuted for disclosing classified information?

Eric Lewis gave another long answer that appear to reel off a long list of cases and explain their significance, but again I could hear only a few disjointed words. The sound eventually improved a bit.

Eric Lewis There has been an unbroken line of the practice of non-prosecution of publishers for publishing national defence information. Every single day there are defence, foreign affairs and national security leaks to the press. The press are never prosecuted for publishing them.
James Lewis QC The United States Supreme Court has never held that a journalist cannot be prosecuted for publishing national defence information.
Eric Lewis The Supreme Court has never been faced with that exact question. Because a case has never been brought. But there are closely related cases which indicate the answer.
James Lewis QC Do you accept that a government insider who leaks classified information may be prosecuted?
Eric Lewis Yes.
James Lewis QC Do you accept that a journalist may not aid such a person to break the law?
Eric Lewis No. It is normal journalistic practice to cultivate an official source and encourage them to leak. Seymour Hersh would have to be prosecuted under such an idea.
James Lewis QC Do you accept that a journalist may not have unauthorised access to the White House?
Eric Lewis Yes.

James Lewis then started to quote a judgement on White House access, then appeared to drop it. He then said he was turning to the question of whether this was a political extradition.

James Lewis QC Do you have any qualifications in social science?
Eric Lewis I have a degree in Public International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of International Relations.
James Lewis QC Have you published any peer reviewed publications?
Eric Lewis No.
James Lewis QC You opined in another extradition case, that of Dempsey, that it was based upon political opinion. The High Court of England described your evidence as “pure conjecture”.
Eric Lewis Yes, that was their view. Dempsey was en route to Syria and approached at an airport by FBI agents. He explained to them that he was going to Syria to work with an anti-Assad group. Nothing was done. But by 2016 policy towards Assad had changed and Dempsey was charged. My evidence was about a change of policy, not political opinions.
James Lewis QC Turning to the expert evidence of Prof Feldstein last week, do you agree with his statement that while the Obama administration did not take the decision to prosecute, he did not take the decision not to prosecute. Do you agree?
Eric Lewis No. I believe that is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Justice Department works.
James Lewis QC Do you have first-hand knowledge or sources for your opinion?
Eric Lewis No.
James Lewis QC So your information is only from newspapers.
Eric Lewis And TV interviews and statements.
James Lewis QC Statements like those from Matthew Miller who had left the Justice Department two years before he spoke to the Washington Post?
Eric Lewis Yes, but he remained close to Attorney General Eric Holder.
James Lewis QC Do you agree with Gordon Kromberg that prosecuting decisions are taken in line with federal guidelines that preclude political prosecution?
Eric Lewis No. Not under William Barr. The system is now top down political prosecution.
James Lewis QC So you claim the guidelines are not followed?
Eric Lewis I do. So do the 2,600 former federal prosecutors who called for Barr’s resignation and the 1,000 former prosecutors who protested the Roger Stone commutation. Or Judge Gleeson in his reports on political prosecution decisions.
James Lewis QC Do you accuse Gordon Kromberg of bad faith?
Eric Lewis I don’t know him. But I do know there is disclosure of heavy political pressure in this case.

There followed some discussion on Trump’s changing relationship with Wikileaks over the years, and also of the Classified Information Protection Act and whether it hampers the defence in disclosure and in taking instruction from the accused. This was to be discussed in greater detail with the next witness.

Edward Fitzgerald then led the witness in re-examination. He asked Eric Lewis to mention the television interviews he had referred to in noting the political change from Obama to Trump. Eric Lewis cited Sarah Sanders saying “we did something” and contrasting this with Obama’s inaction, and Eric Holder stating that they had decided not to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act as he was not acting for a foreign power.

Edward Fitzgerald then asked about the pressure put on prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia to bring the present prosecution. Eric Lewis referred to the article by Adam Goldman in the New York Times to this effect. Ten days after this article the Justice Department stated it was a priority to prosecute Assange.

Lewis explained that William Barr had made explicit that prosecution was subject to political direction. He subscribed to the Unitary Executive Theory and held that all prosecution decisions were by or on behalf of the President. Barr had set this out in a memo that stated directly that prosecutors were “merely the hand” of the Presidency. This was not theory. This was how the Justice Department was now run. Many federal prosecutors had resigned. Many had refused to touch the Assange prosecution. “Mr Kromberg, as is his right, did not.”

Edward Fitzgerald then noted that James Lewis had queried Eric Lewis’s qualifications to comment on prison conditions. Yet for the prosecution, US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg had submitted voluminous comments on prison conditions. Did Mr Kromberg have academic qualifications in penology as required by James Lewis? Eric Lewis replied that he believed not, and certainly he had no doubt he himself had greatly more practical experience of prison conditions than Mr Kromberg. Mr Kromberg’s exposition of official policy was doubtless correct, but it bore no relation to the actual conditions in jails.

On solitary confinement, Edward Fitzgerald outlined the UN’s Mandela rules, under which 22 hours or more in a cell a day and no significant human contact constitute solitary confinement. Lewis replied that the SAM regime would definitely breach the Mandela rules.

The next witness was Mr Thomas Durkin. He is an attorney practising for 47 years, licensed to appear in the Supreme Court. From 1973–8 he was a US Assistant Attorney and since then has been in private practice. He teaches law at Loyola and has received a lifetime achievement award from the Illinois Association of Criminal Lawyers. He also appeared by videolink.

Edward Fitzgerald asked Mr Durkin about the special problems of cases working with classified materials. Durkin said that the biggest problem is that you cannot discuss classified disclosure material with your client. You can only look at the material on a special computer in a secure location – a SCIF – and have to prepare your material there. Mr Assange will not know what his lawyers have learned, and nor will they be able to ask him what the material relates to or signifies. This is an incredibly difficult hardship in taking instructions and preparing a defence.

Edward Fitzgerald asked Mr Durkin if there is a real chance that Julian Assange will receive an effective rest-of-life jail sentence. Durkin replied that this was a very likely possibility. Looking through the counts and the enhancements that might apply, he would rate the offences at 38, 40 or 43 points on the sentencing scale. That would put the range at 235 months to life, and there were multiple counts that could be sentenced consecutively. Durkin said that based on his extensive experience of national security trials, he would expect a sentence of 30 to 40 years. The government position was that Assange was more to blame than Manning. They had asked for 60 years for Chelsea Manning.

Edward Fitzgerald then asked about the effect of the plea bargaining system. Thomas Durkin replied that an early guilty plea reduced the sentencing score by three points. That could make several years difference in sentence. But much more important was the freedom of the prosecution to reduce the counts charged in exchange for a guilty plea. That could make a massive difference – potentially from 100 years plus to ten years, for example. The system greatly reduced freedom of choice and was a massive disincentive to stand trial. People just could not take the risk. A large majority of Durkin’s clients now took a plea deal.

Mr Durkin agreed with a suggestion from Edward Fitzgerald that a condition of a plea deal for Julian Assange was likely to be that he gave up the names of Wikileaks’ sources.

Edward Fitzgerald asked Mr Durkin whether there had been a political decision by the Trump administration to prosecute Assange. Durkin said there were no new criminal justice considerations that had caused the change in approach. This was most likely a political decision.

Edward Fitzgerald asked Durkin about Gordon Kromberg’s assertion that a Grand Jury was a powerful bulwark against a political prosecution. Durkin replied this was simply untrue. A grand jury virtually never refused to authorise a prosecution. In the whole of the USA, there was generally about one refusal every four or five years.

James Lewis then started cross-examination. He asked if Durkin was saying that Assange would not receive a fair trial in the US, or just that it was difficult? Durkin replied that Julian Assange would not get a fair trial in the USA.

Lewis suggested that the requirement to see classified material in a SCIF was merely an inconvenience. Durkin said it was much more than that. You could not discuss material with your client, which materially limited your understanding of it. James Lewis countered that US Assistant Attorney Kromberg’s affidavit stated that Assange would be able to see some classified material himself. A classified facility would be available for him to meet his attorneys. Durkin said he did not accept this description. He had never seen anything like this happen.

Lewis then said Durkin’s statement was that there will be an unprecedented volume of classified material disclosed in this prosecution. But he could not know that. He had no idea what would be disclosed or what the defence would be, if any. Durkin replied that much could be understood from the extensive indictment and from what happened in the Chelsea Manning case. Lewis repeated Durkin did not know what would happen. Assange might plead guilty.

Lewis suggested the plea bargain system was in essence the same in England, where defendants could get one third off sentence for a guilty plea. Durkin said plea bargaining in the US went far beyond that. The government could put a big offer on the table in terms of reductions of charges and counts.

Lewis then went to the question of a change of policy between the Obama and Trump administrations. He established that Durkin relied on media reports for his view on this. Durkin pointed out that the Washington Post report of 25 November 2013 that the Obama administration would not prosecute, had quoted multiple former and then current Justice Department employees and crucially no denial or counter briefing had ever been forthcoming. It had never been contradicted.

That was the end of Tuesday’s hearing. In conclusion I need to correct something I published yesterday, that there were only three journalists in the video gallery to cover the trial. James Doleman led me to another hidden nest of them and there are about ten in total. The main titles are inexcusably unrepresented, but press agencies are, even if their feed is being little used.

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Featured image is from Wired

A 42 square mile block of ice has just hived off from the Arctic’s largest ice shelf, in northeast Greenland, alarming climate scientists. That is the size of Santa Barbara, California. It is ginormous.

Danish scientists are speaking ominously of “glacier disintegration.”

The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reports,

“Annual end-of-melt-season area changes for the Arctic’s largest ice shelf in Northeast Greenland are measured from optical satellite imagery, and it shows that the area losses for the past two years (year 2018/2019 and year 2019/2020) both exceeded 50 km2. In total an area nearly twice that of Manhattan Island, New York. In the survey period since 1999, the ice shelf has lost 160 km2.”

In the old days before human beings started burning so much coal, gasoline and natural gas, there were seasonal changes to the ice shelf. It would melt a bit in the summer but then grow back in the winter. Now it is just melting.

The Associated Press reports that last year, in 2019 alone, Greenland lost an unprecedented amount of ice, enough to cover all of California in over 4 feet of water. The average woman in the US is 5’5″ and the average man 5’10” so that would be up to their chests. The whole state.

The survey gives a graph where you can see how out of line 2020 has been with the average temperatures of the previous decade:

Average temperatures in Greenland have heated up by 5.4 degrees F. since 1980.

Speaking of the disintegration of glaciers, it is happening in Antarctica, too. There are two gargantuan glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, that are already responsible for 5% of sea level rise. They anchor the West Antarctic Ice Shelf. If they become unmoored, and the parts of the ice shelf that are not already in the water plop into the ocean, it would raise sea level by an average of 10 feet over time.

That would pretty much do in Miami and New Orleans, but also parts of lower Manhattan. It would be a catastrophe.

So the bad news? They are becoming unmoored.

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A combination of factors—all related to the climate crisis—is believed to be behind one of the largest mass bird die-off events in recent memory in the Southwest, according to biologists.

Scientists say thousands of dead migratory birds have been found across states including New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado in recent weeks as the American West faces wildfires that have burned through millions of acres in matter of days.

Dr. Martha Desmond, a biology professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU), told The Guardian that the die-off, which was first detected in late August, is a “national tragedy.”

“I collected over a dozen in just a two-mile stretch in front of my house,” Desmond told the newspaper. “To see this and to be picking up these carcasses and realizing how widespread this is, is personally devastating.”

Allison Salas, a graduate student at NMSU, reported on Twitter that the university is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to understand the causes of the die-off, which ornithologists have linked to smoke from the wildfires as well as a drought in the Southwest.

USFWS and NM Game & Fish have been alerted. We at NMSU are working closely with them and other local wildlife biologist to understand the cause of this mass mortality. (2/9) pic.twitter.com/eg26PfejCQ

— Allison Salas (@salasphorus) September 13, 2020

The birds seem to be in relatively good condition, except that they are extremely emaciated. They have no fat reserves and barely any muscle mass. Almost as if they have been flying until they just couldn’t fly anymore. (5/9) pic.twitter.com/tTPlDxwraf

— Allison Salas (@salasphorus) September 13, 2020

We have very little data, but suspect that the west coast fires, in combination with the local cold front we experienced last week, has altered the migration patterns of many migrants. On top of that, there is little food and water available here in the Chihuahuan Desert. (7/9) pic.twitter.com/YB2Ct0ucxx

— Allison Salas (@salasphorus) September 13, 2020

“The fact that we’re finding hundreds of these birds dying, just kind of falling out of the sky is extremely alarming,” Salas told The Guardian. “The volume of carcasses that we have found has literally given me chills.”

Researchers say the birds are mainly migratory birds—such as warblers, swallows, and flycatchers—which travel to Central and South America from Canada and Alaska each year as the weather grows colder. Resident bird species don’t appear to be affected.

Based on the large volumes of dead birds found throughout the region since August 20, when the first group was found at White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, ornithologists believe thousands of birds could already be dead. Desmond told the Las Cruces Sun News that “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of migratory birds” could be lost in the die-off.

When migrating from Canada, bird species must stop every few days to gather food, drink water, and rest. With wildfires overwhelming the West Coast, scientists say birds may have been pushed into desert areas in New Mexico—which has been suffering from a drought—where food and water sources are scarce.

Changes in the birds’ northern habitat, caused by the heating of the planet, may also have pushed the species to begin their migration earlier than usual this year, before building up fat reserves which would have helped sustain them on the journey.

“We’re kind of coming at them from all sides,” Salas told The Guardian. “If we don’t do anything to protect their habitat we’re going to lose large numbers of the populations of several species.”

Desmond told WBUR that upon arriving in the drought-stricken Southwest, “a lot of birds up north were probably caught off guard.”

Since August 20, two doctoral candidates at the University of New Mexico discovered 305 dead birds in the northern part of the state and linked the deaths to starvation. Trish Cutler, a wildlife biologist at White Sands Missile Range, told KOB, a local TV station in Albuquerque, that “a couple of hundred” dead birds were found at the weapons testing site last week, compared with the fewer than half a dozen carcasses that are found there on a weekly basis.

Dr. Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told the New York Times that extremely poor air quality in the West, caused by the wildfires, is likely a contributing factor to the die-off as well.

“It’s different this year than other years,” Farnsworth told the Times. “We’ve had plenty of hot summers but very few that have had these huge-scale fires combined with heat combined with drought.”

Environmental justice advocates on social media decried the “ecological disaster” detected in the Southwest.

Reported a few times last evening on the Southwest bird die-off. This is an ecological disaster on a massive scale. As a birder, I am horrified. https://t.co/b0awViDmB8

— Watchdog Progressive (@Watchdogsniffer) September 16, 2020

The signs are everywhere – mother nature is done with us and who can blame her – https://t.co/h6op8QNagk

— Erin Brockovich (@ErinBrockovich) September 15, 2020

“The signs are everywhere,” tweeted consumer advocate Erin Brockovich. “Mother Nature is done with us, and who can blame her?”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: One of the hundreds of dead birds reported throughout New Mexico over the past two weeks. (Photo: Allison Salas/New Mexico State University)

Roger came by the house yesterday evening. In his early 20s Roger is from Gaza. He’s full of energy and ideas and has been like this since he arrived in Samos over a year ago. His days are full of activity mainly with the children in the camp. There he and his friends have what might be called a mass following of young children! They play, sing, draw, party and talk together. In these ways the children learnt about the importance of washing hands and other steps they could take to keep Covid out of their lives. And in all these activities it is the sounds of joy and laughter which dominate.

Roger is Palestinian, and as with most Palestinians humour is a major feature of their survival under (Israeli) occupation. It is no accident that Liverpool, the poorest city in England is also famous for its humour. As with the refugees on Samos humour has long been one of the ways in which the poorest of that city have countered their marginalisation and neglect and asserted their enduring humanity. Humour is a way underdogs have always used to fight back. I would hazard a guess that we could make a very long list of similar places. Authority in whatever form is not good at humour. It cannot control the jokes we make or manage the humour we see in the world around us. It gives us power. Maybe this was what Emma Goldman was getting at when she “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”

In Gaza as in Liverpool and certainly on Samos island humour is in an endless battle with sadness. It is an ongoing daily reality that ebbs and flows. Roger and his friends in the camp know this and see their mission as creating happiness to keep sadness at bay. The struggle between tears and laughter is a central feature of daily refugee life on Samos as it is for many communities denied and deprived of the material and psychological essentials necessary for living.

As Roger told us the rewards of being engaged in the camp can be awesome. He was very excited by the range of talents and interests he keeps discovering – athletes, artists, tattooists, tailors and dressmakers, builders, house painters, teachers, nurses, cooks of all kinds, gardeners, farmers, actors, singers, musicians, dancers and more. So many talents, he said, but never used, mobilised or even recognised by the authorities. So no support. This is where Roger and his friends seek to focus their energies looking to nourish and encourage talent which can then be shared and enjoyed by others.

But that has always been the case on Samos. Without exception, the best aspects of refugee life on Samos have been created by the refugees themselves. The Open Doors shop is probably now the outstanding example. That is not to ignore the contributions of some of the NGOs here or the flow of largely young north European volunteers who still come Samos with their big hearts. But always they are a mixed blessing. We are not alone in wondering why they come here when all of them are from countries which have significant issues with poverty and suffering. “Why don’t they dig where they stand” is a common question. “Why do they take jobs which we can do? Why do they assume that a young white European can work with vulnerable and traumatised children with no preparation or support?” There is a terrible lack of appreciation of the talents and skills of the refugees here, who are too often simply dismissed and ignored as worthless and useless. The only exceptions being those they need to act as translators.

This is the back cloth against which refugees in the camp acquired sewing machines to make decent masks. Now on Samos it is mainly the refugees who are masked up, not the locals. (How things have changed since the only masks seen here before, and long before Covid, were worn by the police and border guards as they dealt with new arrivals!)

The upside of this neglect is that the people in the camp whilst lacking so many necessary resources for daily life are left to their own devices. Yella the creative west African artist is left alone to run his art classes in a small square in the centre of Vathi; the same is true for the young Saudi doctor who manages with friends the clinic they have created in the jungle and so it goes from communal kitchens to football competitions. But it could be so much more with a different mind set. So much of what is needed by the refugees – food, safe living places, work that sustains, – are also needed by many of the locals. More so now in the midst of the Covid pandemic that has virtually wiped out tourism on the island this year. Many here do not know how they will survive the winter months now that they have no income from their summer tourist jobs.

Because so many refugees are now confined on Samos for months even years and are also concentrated in Vathi we have seen a slow but deepening of contacts between locals and refugees. There are growing numbers on both sides of this divided population who are recognising that they have much in common and need to work together. The creation of Just Action which provides food aid to both locals and refugees is probably the clearest example of this shifting dynamic. Roger and his friends, as well as those working in Open Doors and Just Action are amongst those who are now talking and thinking about how they can join together and help create new bonds of solidarity between the refugees and the locals. Albeit for differing reasons in part, both groups know that they have been abandoned; they get nothing but the barest minimum from the state and they expect nothing. Growing numbers are beginning to realise that together they can do better.

We wait to see what follows if the Athens government actually does achieve its objective of moving all the refugees to the new closed camp on a remote hill top 12 km from Vathi by the end of this year. There are still many local people in Vathy who would like to see the refugees moved out of their city. Years of hostility to the refugees, driven by the Orthodox Church and successive governments with the connivance of much of the mainstream media have left a deep scar which drives this hope that the refugees will be removed from their midst. As I am writing these words, it has been announced that 2 African refugees in the camp have been tested positive for Covid. There are no more details as yet. If true this is a devastating development in that the only 2 cases of the virus so far on Samos were amongst local people who had been visiting in Athens. As everyone knows the camp is a ticking bomb when it comes to health. And the inevitable tighter lock down of the camp which will now be implemented will have dire consequences for the refugees. And, not the least it will give added impetus to the demands to get the refugees out of town.

But what many who are leading this demand, such as the mayor of Vathi seem to ignore is the changing and changed character of the city. Not all the refugees live in the camp. Over recent years there are many hundreds of families and groups renting homes and some neighbourhoods in Vathi are dominated by ‘refugee’ households. I use ‘ ‘ because there are a growing number of those gaining asylum in Greece who are deciding that Samos island is preferable to Athens or Thessaloniki as a place to live and be safe (especially with respect to the children). In other words they are no longer refugees in the formal sense. They will not go to the new camp. They will remain in Vathi and try to make their lives there, at least for some years.

And as is often the case with migrations into new places, we can see an energy and determination to make a life which is in contrast to the islanders who seem more locked into an ‘endure’ mode. (And the newcomers are invariably much younger than the locals). A clear example of this has been in the creation of a new coffee bar in Vathi this summer by a group of young men from Gaza who have their asylum.

The complete renovation of the shop revealed the range of talents amongst the refugees. Brilliant plastering and decoration, wonderful lighting and all done by themselves. It faces many challenges but it is thriving. Samos town is changing and as more people who came as refugees stay here this will continue.

(Just an aside increasing numbers of the island’s new residents are confronting the police who daily harass the refugees back into the camp as evening falls. The police don’t discriminate so end up bullying those who have both papers and homes in the town and are under no lock down provisions. Those with children are furious that their children are frightened by shouting police demanding that they leave the beach and get to the camp. The police are now facing a completely new experience on Samos of having to apologise to those they have previously abused with impunity.)

So in the darkness here we do see some light and we do hear laughter. But the dark cloud of Covid is ever present revealing more starkly the as yet unexploded health bomb that is the camp in Vathi. Many on Samos have been shaken by the recent fire in Moria. As the MSF director there observed the bomb of Moria. has exploded. These are tense times on Samos and not helped by the latest hard lock down following the Covid cases recently identified in the camp. There are more than a few refugees who do not believe that Covid has come into the camp especially as there have been hardly any new arrivals for over 6 months now. They believe that it is a lie to justify locking them in the camp. Refugees don’t trust the authorities.

As I was writing last night, I had a call not only about the Covid cases in the camp but about a wild fire raging on the hills of Vathi right above the camp. Thankfully strong winds were blowing the fire away from the camp. It is outrageous that neither Moria nor Samos camps have any firefighting capacity or protection. Fire has always been the outstanding threat for years in these camps.

Soon summer will be ending and the rains will come. As every winter the authorities will wring their hands as the bad weather batters at the shelters and tents. Survival will rest as always in the hands of the refugees. And the utterly intolerable situation of thousands of human beings imprisoned on the frontier islands of Greece will continue.

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The Western media is touting the results of a so-called “Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” conducted through the United Nations. 

AFP in an article titled, “Venezuela president behind crimes against humanity: UN probe,” would claim:

In their first report, a team of investigators tasked with probing a slew of alleged violations in Venezuela said they had found evidence that state actors, including President Nicolas Maduro, were behind serious international crimes.

It is only until the ninth paragraph that AFP finally admits (emphasis added):

The three-person team was unable to visit Venezuela, but based their findings on 274 remote interviews with victims, witnesses, former state officials and others, and analysis of confidential documents, including legal case files. 

Other articles announcing the “investigation” including CNN’s “Venezuela’s government accused of committing crimes against humanity in UN report,” make no mention at all of the fact investigators never set foot in Venezuela before drawing their conclusions.

Zero Credibility 

It would be unimaginable for police to never bother visiting a crime scene before carrying out and concluding an investigation based on ” remote interviews” with people who claimed to be witnesses. Likewise, it is unimaginable that any legitimate investigation into Venezuela’s internal political affairs can be conducted by “investigators” who never bothered to even visit the country.

And of course, the UN investigation is not legitimate. Interviews and accusations are where investigations begin, not where they end. The collection of actual evidence is required to substantiate such claims – a collection of evidence the politically-motivated interests behind this latest investigation and its public promotion have no interest in carrying out.

UN “Investigation” Enables, Not Exposes Abuse  

As to why there are efforts to accuse Venezuela of “crimes against humanity” without carrying out a real investigation stem from ongoing efforts by Washington and its European allies to overthrow the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and install their handpicked proxy Juan Guaido.

In addition to this blatant example of political interference in Venezuela’s internal political affairs – announcing an opposition figure “president” of a country outside of said nation’s own political processes –  the US has spent millions of dollars annually funding opposition groups in an attempt to undermine Venezuela’s political independence.

The US National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) admits to interfering in Venezuela’s internal political affairs.

Besides former President Obama’s supposed “goodwill,” Joe Biden has nothing to show for his performance as former vice president, except for frequent gaffes and fake dentures. He is the weakest Democratic presidential candidate in decades and doesn’t stand a chance against incumbent Trump.

Although the unequivocal support of the mainstream media and the American national security establishment might still tip the balance in his favor in the November presidential elections. This is the reason why he had to choose articulate and persuasive Kamala Harris as a running mate on the insistence of the Democratic Party whips despite personal reservations.

Pontificating on the British electorate’s sovereign decision to quit the European Union yesterday, the unequivocal proponent of Washington-led neocolonial world order masqueraded as purported “globalization” warned the Conservative-led Boris Johnson government of the United Kingdom in a characteristically blunt and haughty manner that there would be no trade deal between the US and the UK unless the latter respects the Northern Irish peace deal, which was never in danger to begin with.

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Biden said in a tweet. “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

It’s pertinent to mention that the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its corollary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.

Historically, the NATO military alliance at least ostensibly was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the former Soviet clients, the Central and Eastern European states, to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international isolated.

It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of workers from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe. 

Regarding the global footprint of American forces, according to a January 2017 infographic [2] by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were deployed across the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.

In July, the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon’s European Deterrence Initiative, though the main factor that prompted Trump to pull out American forces from Germany was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refusal to attend G-7 summit in person due to coronavirus outbreak. The summit was scheduled to be held at Camp David on June 10 but was cancelled. About half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and Poland, and the rest returned to the US.

In Europe, 47,000 American troops were stationed in Germany since the end of the Second World War and before the withdrawal of 12,000 US forces in July, 15,000 American troops were deployed in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.

Not surprisingly, the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, were as freaked out over the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and threatened to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the precedent of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 28,500 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and send a signal to the leaders of the former Soviet Union, which had not developed its nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East.

Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

There is an essential stipulation in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the impoverished developing economies of Eastern Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the prosperous developed countries would permit free movement of labor.

What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of people only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they serve the interests of their largest donors by shares, the developed economies.

Regardless, while joining the EU, Britain compromised on the rights of its working class in order to protect the interests of its bankers and industrialists, because free trade with the rest of the EU countries spurred British exports.

The British working classes overwhelmingly voted in the favor of Brexit because after Britain’s entry into the EU and when the agreements on abolishing internal border checks between the EU member states became effective, the cheaper labor force from the Eastern and Central Europe flooded the markets of Western Europe.

Consequently, the wages of native British workers diminished and finding employment also became difficult, because immigrant workers were willing to do the same job for lesser pays, hence raising the level of unemployment among the British workers and consequent discontentment with the EU.

The subsequent lifting of restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the European Union in January 2014 further exacerbated the predicament of the British workforce. Thus, the majority of the British electorate voted in a June 2016 referendum to opt out of the EU.

The biggest incentive for the British working classes to vote for Brexit was that the East European workers would have to leave Britain after its exit from the EU, and the jobs would once again become available with better wages to the native British workforce.

The prosperous developed economies of the Western Europe would never have acceded to the condition of free movement of labor that undermines their economic interests, but Washington vociferously persuaded the reluctant countries of the Western Europe to yield to the condition against their national interests in order to wean away the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe from the Russian influence.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policies as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

It would be pertinent to mention that though the Conservative-led government was in favor of Brexit, the neoliberal British deep state and the European political establishments led by France and Germany were fiercely opposed to Britain’s exit from the EU.

Since the referendum, the British deep state and the European political establishments created numerous hurdles in the way of Brexit. The First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon demanded more autonomy and control over Scotland’s vast oil and gas reserves and threatened that Scotland could secede from the United Kingdom over Brexit.

Had it not been for charismatic Boris Johnson, winning an overwhelming mandate from the British public in the December elections, Brexit would never have materialized under bumbling Theresa May.

In 2018, 25 out of 27 EU member states signed an enhanced security cooperation agreement known as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), whose aim is to structurally integrate the armed forces of the EU members. Britain, along with Denmark and Malta, was left out, apparently to punish the British electorate for opting out of the European Union.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Biden warns UK on Brexit: No trade deal unless you respect Northern Irish peace deal:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu/biden-warns-uk-on-brexit-no-trade-deal-unless-you-respect-northern-irish-peace-deal-idUSKBN2680R7

[2] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/16/world/trump-military-role-treaties-allies-nato-asia-persian-gulf.html

[T]he great majority of people will not die from this [virus] and I’ll just repeat something I said right at the beginning because I think it’s worth reinforcing:

Most people, a significant proportion of people, will not get this virus at all, at any point of the epidemic which is going to go on for a long period of time.

Of those who do, some of them will get the virus without even knowing it, they will have the virus with no symptoms at all, asymptomatic carriage, and we know that happens. – Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, 11 May, 2020

But this is not what the British public have had been told (as well as a host of other countries who have been railroaded into joining the Great Scampede). The government and the mainstream media have presented the Virus to us as something akin to the Bubonic Plague, and of course the public have responded by behaving as though it is the Bubonic Plague. This is why the government changed the name of the virus from SARS-COV-2 (its correct designation) to COVID-19 in order to sever the connection to the Influenza virus, its literal ancestor. The state (and of course, big Pharma) had to present this virus to us as ‘novel’ and infinitely more dangerous than the Flu, which it’s not, it has about the same death rate as seasonal Flu, although it is especially dangerous to a vulnerable minority, average age 85 with multiple health issues, who should be protected and by-and-large, aren’t, itself a entirely preventable crime of vast proportions. (Each year, about 1 Billion people come down with the Flu globally and up to a 1 million die from it but still less than those who die from another highly infectious disease, Tuberculosis which in 2017 killed nearly 1.5 million).

Source: https://twitter.com/JohnDStats

But why has the world been shut down? Why destroy most of the world’s economies in order to quell (conquer, defeat?) a virus which is not dangerous to the great majority of us, perhaps 95% or more? Has some kind of mass psychosis taken hold of the political classes of the major (read imperialist) economies of the world who kicked this off? You really have to ask, ‘what’s in it for the ruling class’ that would lead them to deliberately inflict such mayhem on hundreds of millions of people and appear to destroy the economies of the leading capitalist states? What is it that the rest of us are not seeing or being prevented from seeing?

…The financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. – ‘Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?’ By Prof. Anthony Hall

Whatever it is, it’s being presented to us as the ‘New Normal’, without however, telling us what this ‘New Normal’ actually consists of. But let me hazard a guess that whatever the ‘New Normal’ is it wont be nice for a great percentage of the world’s population. Already, it’s estimated that at least 1 billion people are in great danger of dying from starvation and disease caused directly by the lockdown, notthe Virus.

Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the Oligarchy was there—a fact established in blood, a stupendous and awful reality. Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows, was any permanence attributed to the Iron Heel. Its overthrow was a matter of a few short years, was the judgment of the revolutionists. – The Iron Heel, Jack London, 1910.

It would appear that the major capitalist classes of the world have waged total war on the planet’s people without firing a shot and at the same time set up the infrastructure needed to enslave us, and all in order to preserve the rule of a bankrupt Capitalism. The ‘New Normal’ really is Jack London’s The Iron Heel made real.The Virus is all about saving capitalism from itself.

How ironic then, that the catalyst for this global coup d’etat was China and one has to ask the question, why China? Could it be that China is a major obstacle to the establishment of the ‘New Normal’ and if so, it gives us an insight into what this ‘New Normal’ is really all about.

What the Government Knew (And Planned for)

These are just some of the UK government’s documents prepared for the ‘New Normal’. Most deal with the ‘security’ aspects of an alleged pandemic rather than the health issues, except of course when it comes to considering vaccines. So aside from the clampdown on our civil liberties in the name of fighting the Virus, the goverment failed to deliver on every other key, issue!

• UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011
• Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014
• Cabinet Office National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies
• NICE guidelines
• Exercise Cygnus
• ‘Mindspace’ – Influencing behaviour through public policy‘
• Imperial College Modelling March 2020

So What Is the ‘New Normal’?

“Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.” – Sky News, August 13, 2020

Undoubtedly, capitalism is in crisis, perhaps its final crisis, though what might follow may be even worse, at least judging by how the state has responded to ‘rule breakers’. But what does shutting down the global economy achieve (aside from much pain and death for the vast majority) and what is the objective once you dismiss the idea of ‘defeating’ the virus as the rationale behind it? After all, it’s already clear that the global shutdown is causing many more deaths than the Virus has, or will ever do.

But Why?

Some talk of a global conspiracy, the imposition of a world government (engineered by the billionaire foundations, et al.) and no doubt somewhere, there’s talk of the Illuminati being involved. But undoubtedly, there is a conspiracy and at the very highest levels of the ruling political classes. Others have compared the Virus to 9/11 and look what that did to us! Is it really our health and well-being that occupies the minds of the elite any more than the War on Terror was about protecting us from terrorists.

Jump to 2020. Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19 lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up everywhere at the same time. They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red orange yellow blue green. As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001. In Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it’s color chart ends in blue, not green, with Phase 4 blue termed “the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” Interesting wording. A resumption that takes us back to the future. – ‘From Terrorists to Viruses: Dystopian Progress‘ by Ed Curtin, 7 September 2020

It’s clear now, that the only way to sell the ‘New Normal’ (or the ‘Great Reset’), was to create an abject fear of our existing life. Thus social distancing, the compulsive hand-washing, masks and of course the Lockdown, all serve, not as health aids but to destroy the old order. It’s now reached the point where rather than ‘seeking our permission’ via the government’s ‘nudge unit’, force is now needed. To that end a new kind of ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) has been created:

To help enforce the new measures, [Boris] Johnson…announced that he would be recruiting thousands of new ‘COVID Marshalls‘. The first group of England’s newly deputised Marshalls could be seen on Monday enforcing meticulous social distancing orders, one-way system on pavements, and telling people to wear masks in shops and at takeaways venues. They will also be handing out masks and hand sanitizer in order to “keep everyone safe.” – ‘UK ‘Coronaphobia’ is Pushing the Country Towards a Stasi-like State’, 21st Century Wire, 15 September 2020

The objective being the undermining of the existing social and economic relations but critically, without replacing capitalism with something better. In other words, these new and enforced conditions of existence have nothing to do with health or with the virus and its spread but everything to do with Capitalism attempting to reinvent itself. The Virus is simply a convenient and very useful excuse, assuming you can convince the world of its danger to life, which explains the censorship and suppression of any views that challenge this fictional narrative, called COVID-19 or, as BBC News, the Guardian, the Australian government and a host of others now call, that “deadly virus”.

That the rest of the world went along with it, is simply testament to the power of the Imperialist states to cajole and threaten any country that resists. Sweden for example, was made to look like some kind of mass murderer of its population, simply because it refused to implement a Total Lockdown.

So What Do the ‘Masters of the Universe’ Have Planned for Us?

Well, they know where they want to go, the question is, can they get there?

The Great Reset is immensely ambitious, spanning over 50 fields of knowledge and practice. It interconnects everything from economy recovery recommendations to “sustainable business models”, from restoration of the environment to the redesign of social contracts.

The beating heart of this matrix is  – what else – the Strategic Intelligence Platform, encompassing, literally, everything: “sustainable development”, “global governance”, capital markets, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, gender parity, LGBTI, systemic racism, international trade and investment, the – wobbly – future of the travel and tourism industries, food, air pollution, digital identity, blockchain, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI).

In the end, only an all-in-one Plan A applies for making these systems interact seamlessly: the Great Reset – shorthand for a New World Order that has always been glowingly evoked, but never implemented. There is no Plan B. – ‘From 9/11 to the Great Reset. From Al Qaeda to Covid The Virus…’ By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

As I’ve stated before, there will be a massive shakeup of corporations; bankruptcies, mergers, new governments and new social orders and of course the further destruction and reformation of working and middle class life. Critically, and of great importance to the imperialist states, will be ‘The Great Reset’s’ devastating impact on the Global South, the consequences of which we are already witnessing. The Great Reset implements the objectives of the Club of Rome (COR) initiated in 1965, that saw one, if not its major objective, a vast reduction in the populations of the Global South, a process that has reached its apotheosis in the Global Lockdown.

“We believe in fact that the need will quickly become evident for social innovation to match technical change, for radical reform of the institutions and political processes at all levels, including the highest, that of world polity. And since intellectual enlightenment is without effect if it is not also political, The Club of Rome also will encourage the creation of a world forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation.” – The Limits of Growth.

This was from the COR’s first publication in 1972. It sold 12 million copies. Many of COR’S executive members were drawn from NATO, that should give you a good idea where COR stands in the scheme of things.

It’s been calculated that the capitalist economies in the so-called developed world, can survive with perhaps 20% of the working population, the managerial class, kept in work to maintain the capitalist order for its masters. As for the rest? Well it will be a vastly enlarged ‘precariat’, thus the ‘experiments’ with so-called universal basic income (rather than letting great chunks of the formerly employed starve to death, keep them alive on a subsistence ‘wage’).

And What of Our Putative Left?

What I do find really depressing (though not at all surprising), is the degree to which the left and organised labour have been sucked into this nightmare but then again, they’ve been bitten by the fear bug as well. Organised labour of course, has a vested interest in maintaining the existing order, most of its members work directly or indirectly (via privatisation) for the corporate, capitalist state, hence their (assumed) interests coincide. The term ‘labour aristocracy’ has never rung so true.

The left, such as it is, has bought the ‘Great Reset’, hook, line and sinker. All rational thinking appears to have fled, as the Great Scampede wreaks its havoc.

The omens are not good. Without a coherent and organised opposition to this insanity, it looks like what we should really should call the The Iron Heel will succeed in reshaping the world according to its own desires while the rest of us look on, powerless to stop it and simultaneously grappling with the ravages of climate change.

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William Bowles is an outstanding author and geopolitical analyst, He is frequent contributor to Global Research

On March 10th of this year, there were 290 daily new U.S. cases of Covid-19 (coronavirus-19).

On March 13th, U.S. President Donald Trump declared a pandemic national emergency, because the number of daily new cases was now suddenly doubling within only three days. However, no lockdown was imposed. The policy-response was instead left to each individual. This is in accord with America’s libertarian ideology. Trump even announced that “he was allowing his health secretary to bypass certain regulations to provide more flexibility to doctors and hospitals responding to the outbreak” — outright reducing, instead of increasing, federal regulations, this being his way to address the matter. That’s the libertarian response.

Covid-19 (coronavirus-19) cases started soaring in the U.S., from 600 daily new cases on March 13th, to 25,665 on March 31st. Americans were scared to death, and facemask-usage soared, and independent small businesses started laying people off en-masse. (Restaurants, hair salons, travel agencies, inns, dental offices, etc., were hard-hit.)

Immediately, the alarming rise in new cases halted on April 4th (at 34,480), and the daily new cases remained approximately flat, but slightly downward, from March 31 to June 9th (when it reached bottom at 19,166), but then soared yet again, to 78,615, on July 24th.

But, then, it again declined, so that, on September 8th, it was at only 28,561. This was already returning to around what the new-cases rate had been back on March 31st. So: despite peaking again on July 24th, the rate of daily new cases was little changed between March 31st and September 8th. And, all during that 5-month period, people were coming back to work.

The key immediate and direct economic variable affected by Covid-19 is the unemployment rate. Here, that economic effect is clearly shown:

U.S. unemployment: March 4.4%, April 14.7%, May 13.3%, June 11.1%, July 10.2%, August 8.4%

Though the daily-new-cases rate went down after March 31st and after July 24th, the unemployment rate progressed far more gradually downward after March 31st: the small businesses that had been panicked by the explosion of new cases during March were now gradually re-opening — but they remained very nervous; and, so, unemployment still was almost twice what it had been during March.

Here, that experience will be compared with two Scandinavian countries, starting with Denmark, which declared a pandemic national emergency on March 13th, just when Trump also did. “Starting on 13 March 2020, all people working in non-essential functions in the public sector were ordered to stay home for two weeks.” The daily new cases fell from the high of 252 on March 11th, down to the low of 28 on March 15th, but then soared to 390 on April 7th, and gradually declined to 16 (only 16 new cases) on July 9th. Then it peaked back up again, at 373, on August 10th, plunged down to 57 on August 26th, and then soared yet again back up to 243 on September 8th. The new-cases rates were thus irregular, but generally flat. By contrast against the experience in U.S., Denmark’s unemployment-rate remained remarkably stable, throughout this entire period:

Denmark: March 4.1, April 5.4, May 5.6, June 5.5, July 5.2

Sweden’s Government pursued a far more laissez-faire policy-response (“The government has tried to focus efforts on encouraging the right behaviour and creating social norms rather than mandatory restrictions.”), and had vastly worse Covid-19 infection-rates than did the far more socialistic Denmark, and also vastly worse death-rates, both producing results in Sweden more like that of the U.S. policy-response than like that of the Danish policy-response, but far less bad than occurred on the unemployment-rate; and, thus, Sweden showed unemployment-increases which were fairly minor, more like those shown in Denmark:

Sweden: March 7.1, April 8.2, May 9.0, June 9.8, July 8.9

That was nothing like the extreme gyration in:

U.S.: March 4.4%, April 14.7%, May 13.3%, June 11.1%, July 10.2%, August 8.4%

Why was this?

Even though Sweden’s policy-effectiveness was more like America’s than like Denmark’s at keeping down the percentages of the population who became infected, and who died from Covid-19 (i.e., it was not effective), Sweden’s policy-effectiveness at keeping down the percentage of the population who became unemployed was more like Denmark’s (i.e., it was effective, at that). Unlike America, which has less of a social safety-net than any other industrialized nation does, Sweden had, until recently, one of the most extensive ones, and hasn’t yet reduced it down to American levels (which are exceptionally libertarian).

Therefore, whereas Swedes know that the Government will be there for them if they become infected, Americans don’t; and, so, Americans know that, for them, it will instead be “sink or swim.” Make do, or drop dead if you can’t — that is the American way. This is why Swedish unemployment wasn’t much affected by Covid-19. When a Swede experienced what might be symptoms, that person would want to stay home and wouldn’t be so desperate as to continue working even if doing that might infect others. Thus, whereas Sweden’s unemployment-rate rose 27% from March to May, America’s rose 202% during that same period. Americans were desperate for income, because so many of them were poor, and so many of them had either bad health insurance or none at all. (All other industrialized countries have universal health insurance: 100% of the population insured. Only in America is healthcare a privilege that’s available only to people who have the ability to pay for it, instead of a right that is provided to everyone.)

On September 9th, Joe Neel headlined at NPR, “NPR Poll: Financial Pain From Coronavirus Pandemic ‘Much, Much Worse’ Than Expected”, and he reported comprehensively not only from a new NPR poll, but from a new Harvard study, all of which are consistent with what I have predicted (first, here, and then here, and, finally, here), and which seems to me to come down to the following ultimate outcomes, toward which the U.S. is now heading (so, I close my fourth article on this topic, with these likelihoods):

America’s lack of the  democratic socialism (social safety-net) that’s present in countries such as Denmark (and residual vestiges of which haven’t yet been dismantled in Sweden and some other countries) will have caused, in the United States, massive laying-off of the workers in small businesses, as a result of which, overwhelmingly more families will be destroyed that are at the bottom of the economic order, largely Black and/or Hispanic families, than that are White and not in poverty. Also as a consequence, overwhelmingly in the United States, poor people will be suffering far more of the infections, and of the deaths, and of the laying-off, and of the soon-to-be-soaring personal bankruptcies and homelessness; and, soon thereafter, soaring small-business bankruptcies, and ultimately then big-business bankruptcies, and then likely megabank direct federal bailouts such as in 2009, which will be followed, in the final phase, by a hyperinflation that might be comparable to what had occurred in Weimar Germany. The ceaselessly increasing suffering at the bottom will ultimately generate a collapse at the top. Presumably, therefore, today’s seemingly coronavirus-immune U.S. stock markets, such as the S&P 500, are now basically just mega-investors who are selling to small investors, so as to become enabled, after what will be the biggest economic crash in history, to buy “at pennies on the dollar,” the best of what’s left, so as to then go forward into the next stage of the capitalist economic cycle, as owning an even higher percentage of the nation’s wealth than now is the case. Of course, if that does happen, then America will be even more of a dictatorship than it now is. Post-crash 2021 America will be more like Hitler’s Germany, than like FDR’s America was.

The Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is just as corrupt, and just as racist, as is the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. And just as neoconservative (but targeting Russia, instead of China). Therefore, the upcoming November 3rd elections in the U.S. are almost irrelevant, since both of the candidates are about equally disgusting. America’s problems are deeper than just the two stooges that America’s aristocracy hires to front for it at the ballot-boxes.

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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.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

Covid-19 is “much less severe” than the average annual flu and current “draconian” restrictions are no longer justified, according to a senior Health Service Executive doctor.

People at low risk from the virus should be exposed to it so they can develop herd immunity and reduce the risk to vulnerable groups, according to Dr Martin Feeley, clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group.

“That is what is happening and yet the policy seems to be to prevent it,” he says. “This should have been allowed to happen during the summer months before the annual flu season, to reduce the workload on the health service during winter months.”

Any assessment of Ireland’s strategy to combat the virus should take into account the cost to people’s quality of life, according to the former vascular surgeon, who points out that “you can’t postpone youth”.

“The financial cost can be seen in any walk or drive through cities, towns and villages. Mortgage repayments and other financial setbacks are virtually all suffered by the young worker or business person and not by the over-65, who are guaranteed their pension, as indeed are the salaries of the individuals who decide to inflict these draconian measures,” the 70 year old told The Irish Times.

Dr Feeley is critical of the media and public “obsession” with daily case numbers, when so few people are being admitted to hospital or intensive care units. “The number of deaths among recent cases is less than one in a thousand. This data reflects a disease much less severe than the average annual flu.

‘Borders on hysteria’

“The media reaction to these cases, ie, with the gravity appropriate to reporting deaths from a major catastrophe, borders on hysteria. Opening a newscast with the number of people testing positive for a condition less dangerous than the flu, which many don’t even know they have, is scaremongering.”

Read complete article on the Irish Times

Our thanks to The Irish Times fro bringing this article to our attention.

….

Most people are already immune to the virus, due to cross-immunity from prior coronaviruses, while the wearing of masks is an ineffective “politically driven endeavour”, they say.

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Featured image: Dr Martin Feeley says any assessment of Ireland’s strategy should take into account the cost to people’s quality of life. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Globally, we are seeing a massive campaign of disinformation on the main stream media that sets aside all the principles of a democratic state governed by the rule of law.

While a great number of colleagues doctors present with different views, unprecedented censorship prevents them from making the news.

Information from different thinking experts and professionals can currently be found almost exclusively through targeted searches on the internet or alternative news sources, but not in the mainstream media.

The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, doctors have come together and drafted an open letter addressed to colleagues and the government pleading for proportional measures. This letter aims to stimulate an open and frank debate on how to tackle the Covid-19 outbreak and was signed by more than 800 doctors. The petition has been stopped by now.

And an open, sharp-worded letter, written by doctors and mental health care providers, that has already been signed by more than 2500 healthcare professionals.

United States

In the US, a group of doctors in the field, who see patients on a daily basis, united in “America’s Frontline Doctors” and gave a press conference which has now been watched millions of times. A must see. See this and this.

Spain

A public press conference of “Doctors for Truth” in Madrid, attended by some 400 doctors and scientists under the slogan “A world dictatorship with a sanitary excuse”. See this.

Germany
An international group of doctors has launched an extra-parliamentary enquiry into the “exaggerated and oppressive corona measures”, with a view to questioning politicians and scientists around the world. See this.

International

The initiative by Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, and Robert F. Kennedy, lawyer, among others, addresses the many inconsistencies surrounding corona policy and is addressed to the presidents of the WHO, the European Commission and the European Parliament. See this.

Belgium

A Belgian initiative, which has already been signed by more than 900 doctors and health professionals (3 september 2020). See this.

An open letter on the initiative of a group of doctors from the Cliniques Universitaires St-Luc, UCLouvain, which can be signed by anyone. See this.

Sign the open letter here.

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Sky News host Alan Jones says he has warned time and time again the political leaders who are the architects of this coronavirus response will not be able to escape the criticism that is now finding its way into the public place.

It comes as an economist in the Victorian Department of Finance and Treasury, Sanjeev Sabhlok, on Wednesday penned an article in the Australian Financial Review announcing his resignation from his position.

Mr Sabhlok wrote he resigned “so that I would be able to speak out against the state’s management of the COVID-19 infection”.

“I made a number of criticisms of the state government on social media. The head of human relations at Treasury asked me to remove them.

“I resigned on the same day, the only honourable course for a free citizen of Australia,” Mr Sabhlok wrote.

Mr Sabhlok continued to note a number of his other criticisms over the response to the virus.

“One question remains, how many others have been silenced across all arms of government, including in Canberra,” Mr Jones said.

Mr Jones also reiterated his call for a national advertising campaign to “tell the public the truth about the fact this virus is not a pandemic”.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the Youtube video above

The appointment of Mauricio Claver Carone (an American citizen) as president of the Inter-American Development Bank is generating many controversies across Latin America. For the first time in its more than 60 years of existence, the IDB will be chaired by an American citizen. This fact causes great discontent particularly in Latin countries, which are the most fragile economies of the continent.

Mauricio Claver Carone is Trump’s senior advisor for Latin America. More than that, Carone is the real mind behind US’ aggressive foreign policy on the American continent in the last years. A lawyer and specialist in Latin America, Carone has been Trump’s major strategist in drafting coercive policies against Cuba and Venezuela. Indeed, what scares the Latin countries is not only the fact that an American citizen was chosen to lead the Bank, but the fact that Carone was the choice.

It should be clarified that this designation was not an ideological confrontation in a democratic institution. The IDB cannot even be considered a democratic institution, since the vote depends on the bank’s economic power, now mostly in the hands of the United States. Washington has 30% of all voting power in the bank’s decisions. Interestingly, in second place is precisely Brazil (with 11%), a country that is currently governed by a political wing absolutely aligned with the US foreign policy. Therefore, the “election” of the bank’s president can be considered a purely figurative act to serve American interests.

Four countries were united in their resistance to the appointment of Carone. The governments of Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico have officially supported the postponement of the elections but have not achieved their objective. Despite resistance, Mauricio Carone was designated president of the IDB during an electronic meeting of the Bank’s Board of Governors and will take the office on October 1, 2020, for a period of five years, and will be responsible for the operations of the IDB Group.

The IDB has significantly increased its financial presence over the years in Latin America and the Caribbean, but it is also important to note that the IDB’s loan policies have always obeyed Washington, acting in accordance with the American political projects. In this way, the IDB will continue to act as an arm of the American diplomacy and will serve US interests instead of financing regional development projects, as it should do, according to its original objectives. In this way, loan policies will be implemented in accordance with political and ideological views, economic projects and diplomatic ties with governments aligned with Washington.

Currently, the IDB’s financial products include loans, grants, guarantees and investments. The IDB’s main asset is undoubtedly its loan portfolio. The American government is perfectly aware of the moment that the world is going through – when multilateral credit institutions will play an especially important role in times of illiquidity. In this sense, Carone’s presidency comes at a particularly strategic moment.

However, the case must be analyzed considering a recent initiative by the American government to increase its economic presence in Latin America. It is called “Growth in the Americas Initiative” and is a major American project to expand its economic control over Latin America and the Caribbean, obtaining a reformation of the Latin American states’ financial and political dependence on Washington. In an official statement, the American government defines the Initiative as follows: “The U.S. government will officially launch the expanded Growth in the Americas (América Crece) initiative on December 17 in Washington, D.C.  Growth in the Americas is a whole-of-government initiative that will foster private sector infrastructure investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Expanded bilateral cooperation between the United States and countries in the region will help reduce excessive regulatory, legal, procurement, and market barriers to investment.  Growth in the Americas will facilitate job creation and accelerate economic growth in the Americas by promoting the private sector as the primary engine of growth to develop critical infrastructure of all types – energy, airports, ports, roads, telecom, and digital networks, among others.” In fact, by gaining control over the IDB, the United States achieved a major step in the Initiative’s triumph, even before its official launch.

In a global scenario of economic crisis and instability due to the coronavirus pandemic and with the intensification of the trade war between the US and China, the American strategy seems to be focused on a progressive confirmation of its regional power. No longer able to guarantee full control over the global financial market, Washington now concentrates on the American continent and on obtaining a political and economic reformation of the region, making Latin States increasingly financially dependent and politically aligned with the interests of the White House. Considering Carone’s election and this global context, we can foresee a period of great difficulties for Latin States.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The founding of the Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples on September 6, 2020 marks a new political milestone. In the most difficult of circumstances, having to cope with not only the U.S. and Canadian sanctions but the pandemic as well, the Bolivarian Revolution has made this effort for the benefit of all who believe in its liberatory ideals across the planet. The goal of the Institute is to coordinate global solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution and the Venezuelan people, and the solidarity of the South American nation toward struggles for social and economic justice of peoples throughout the world. It will also develop research, training, and promote critical discussion.

The Institute also answers to the current and urgent crisis facing the planet. The first paragraph of the statement by the by the Simón Bolívar Institute reads:

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the capitalist model of society based on individualistic values, with the sole goal of accumulating wealth, is not capable of defending humanity, guaranteeing fundamental rights, or safeguarding life on the planet. In light of this failure, the model uses violence to maintain its hegemony, appropriates for itself the people’s natural resources, attacking the working class, and those who seek to build an alternative model.”

Viewers virtually attending the ceremony in Caracas from all over the world were shown that another world is possible, with more than 100 special guests, among whom were social leaders, former presidents, and activists, from numerous countries, including the prestigious musican Roger Waters.

One of the first to speak was Fernando González Llort, president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship of the Peoples (ICAP). The Cuban people have been victims over the last few years of an intensification of the criminal U.S. embargo. Yet, González Llort’s focus was on international solidarity among the peoples and not the U.S. two-party system as a source of salvation.

Other participants included Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, both of whom would have an ax to grind as a result of the recent coup in Bolivia and judicial corruption in Ecuador. Both former presidents are being affected by politically motivated court decisions to prevent them from competing in elections. There were many others as well, including Colombian activist Laura Capote, representing Marcha Patriótica, whose fellow social leaders are being murdered in increasing numbers. In fact, in one of the first public statements of the Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples, the organization expressed its condemnation of 10 recent murders in Colombia perpetrated by police officers. The Institute also denounced the assassinations of more than 600 social and indigenous leaders over the last 2 years and of the killing of two hundred demobilized former guerrilla fighters that were protected by the Peace Accord of 2016.

Former Bolivian President Evo Morales also participated

A Refreshing Talk

As the proceedings progressed and while I was reflecting on the content, so appropriately flourishing outside the box of the stifling mainstream U.S.-political paradigm, one of several representatives from the U.S. spoke, the academic Adrienne Pine. She stressed the importance of keeping the focus on the need to develop the revolutionary movement against the poisonous ideological notion of reforming a decaying system. I immediately commented on Twitter about her great and refreshing words: “the problem of fascism is not to vote for one or another party, but the solution is revolution.”

The hosts spoke in much the same way, leaving no wiggle-room for pinning any hopes of transformation, of humanization, on the US duopoly that has applied harsh and illegal sanctions that mainly harm the Venezuelan people.

We also had the honor to be connected virtually with President Maduro whose message was directed to us, representatives of the peoples of the world, when he said:

“I request the full support of the solidarity movements in disseminating the truth about Venezuela and with the truth, winning peace, sovereignty, independence and respect for our people.”

Minister of People’s Power for Foreign Affairs, Jorge Arreaza, stressed this initiative was created to coordinate solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, but also solidarity from Venezuela and the Americas with all the revolutions and just causes of the world. In a recent op-ed published by COHA, he laid to rest any illusions about November 2020 when it was clear that the Democrats were attacking Trump from the right:

“Trump would do better if he followed his initial instinct of talking to President Maduro. A respectful dialogue with Venezuela is what is really in the interest of the U.S.”

During his inaugural speech, Minister Arreaza also said that

“This Institute belongs to you, it belongs to the peoples of the world and we want you to take advantage of it, to use it as your own (…) From Venezuela we stand in solidarity with all those struggles, with Julian Assange and his prison more than unjust, with the Palestinian people, Saharahui, with all those who are oppressed, subjected to unjust wars, and to imperialism ”.

Many of us from the capitalist West, like those in the South, feel at home in Venezuela. Solidarity is not a one-way street. Solidarity is rather adhered to as mutual support for the same cause of opposing capitalism, its offshoot racism, the unipolar hegemony of imperialism and its genocidal wars. We all stand on an equal footing for the same cause of a multipolar world, sovereignty of the peoples, peace, and a new social-economic system.

Carlos Ron, president of the new institute, and Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Arreaza.

As Carlos Ron told us at the launching ceremony:

“My friends, be aware that you have a people who knows about your struggles, who recognizes them and shares them.”

In fact, we in Canada, like our sisters and brothers in the U.S., experienced the profound sincerity of Carlos Ron’s remarks.  We shared two events in 2020 alone. Firstly, we savored the defeat of the Trudeau government’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council (and I am convinced that one of the reasons for this victory over Trudeau’s submission was the Canadian government’s Venezuela policy). Secondly, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, with the collaboration of many others,held a virtual Zoom conference with Jorge Arreaza organized from Canada, which was viewed by many thousands. Arreaza delivered a diplomatic and yet scathing political critique of Trudeau’s interference in Venezuela via his leadership of the Lima Group.

The launching of the Simón Bolívar Institute coincided with the anniversary of Bolívar’s Letter from Jamaica of September 6, 1885, whereby he reaffirmed and deepened the outlook and goals of the independence movement from Spain. Taking one sample paragraph from this historic letter, we can fully appreciate the perennial relevance of Bolívar’s legacy, by just replacing Spain with the U.S.

“At present the contrary attitude persists: we are threatened with the fear of death, dishonor, and every harm; there is nothing we have not suffered at the hands of that unnatural stepmother-Spain. The veil has been torn asunder. We have already seen the light, and it is not our desire to be thrust back into darkness. The chains have been broken; we have been freed, and now our enemies seek to enslave us anew. For this reason [South] America fights desperately, and seldom has desperation failed to achieve victory.”

The Institute  is wielding Bolivar’s sword to immediately carve out a space for itself in cyber communications. Its Twitter account jumped from zero to over 3,400  followers by September 15 with many daily updates still being posted in the aftermath of the Institute’s founding. Likewise, its two new YouTube channels (English with over 300 subscribers and Spanish with over 800) are constantly developing, as are its Telegram and Instagram accounts and web site. The launching ceremony can be seen here in Spanish, and here in English.

People from all over the world participated in the launching of the new institute.

Tribute to lawyer and activist, Kevin Zeese

The event was dedicated to the memory and legacy of Kevin Zeese, known internationally as part of the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective in Washington DC. He passed away suddenly on the early morning of September 6, the day the Caracas-based event took place. At only 64 years of age, his death came as a shock to us all. Carlos Ron, vice-minister for North America of Venezuelan Foreign Affairs and the newly-appointed president of the Simón Bolívar Institute, immediately turned our sorrow into a collective joy. He dedicated the launching of the Institute to Kevin. It was not a matter of a formal dedication. On the contrary, both the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza and Carlos Ron wove a memorial and fitting tribute to Kevin into the very fabric of the Institute’s founding.

I never met Kevin. I closely followed his heroic defence of Venezuelan sovereignty right in the belly of the imperial beast. However, although I would have flown to Washington to offer my support and write articles, I have been barred from entering the U.S. since March 2019. At that time, a year and a half ago, I was on my way to Washington DC with a message of support from the Canadian movements for that historic demonstration in the U.S. capital in support of Venezuela.

I therefore dedicate this article to Kevin Zeese, his partner Margaret Flowers, his family and comrades.

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This article was originally published on the Council for Hemispheric Affairs.

Arnold August is a Montreal-based author, journalist, speaker and Fellow at the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. He has written 3 books on Cuba, Latin America and the US. His articles appear in English, Spanish and French in North America, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Current focus: geopolitics of the relations between U.S., Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and the role of Canada.

Credit of all photos: Foreign Relations Ministry of Venezuela

A recent moratorium issued by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has provided a window of relief to millions facing evictions due to payment arrears on their rents and mortgages.

Perhaps as an election ploy by the current administration, the question of public health is paramount when a country is experiencing the largest outbreak of an infectious disease in more than a century.

This measure comes amid one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression during 1929-1941.

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of millions have been thrown out of work in the United States. The administration of President Donald J. Trump is overseeing the most deadly spread of the pandemic internationally.

Trump continues to blame the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the failures of his oval office to take preventative and adequate mitigation efforts aimed at halting the spread of the disease. Since February, nearly 200,000 people have died due to COVID-19 while more than 6 million were infected with the highly contagious illness.

Housing activists across the U.S. are grappling with the significance of the CDC moratorium and what actions are needed to protect working and impoverished people from being thrown out of their homes irrespective of government policy. Many are concerned about what will happen after the moratorium expires and whether it will be extended by whichever candidate wins the November presidential election.

As part of the process of movement building and political coordination, a public meeting known as “Liberation Mondays” was held in the city of Detroit on September 14 which was hosted by the General Baker Institute (GBI). Additional sponsors of the gathering were the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, Detroit Will Breathe (DWB), the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) in Detroit, the Black-Brown Alliance of DSA, among others.

Several of the leading organizations concerned and working on the housing crisis in Detroit were present. This event represented a perspective on housing that is in line with the current national and international struggles against police violence and institutional racism. DWB, which has led demonstrations in Detroit and the suburbs against police misconduct for over three months, were a key component in the meeting.

Those speaking from the panel assembled were Agnes Hitchcock of the Call Em out Coalition, a grouping which has existed for more than a decade geared towards holding public officials accountable to the people of Detroit. Also Monica Lewis-Patrick represented We the People of Detroit, an organization committed to ensuring clean running water for all residents of the city and Tristan Taylor, an organizer for DWB. The forum was chaired by the Black-Brown Alliance of DSA and Kenya Fentress of Black Lives Matter across 8 Mile.

The Detroit Eviction Defense (DED) coalition had two representatives who spoke to the escalating housing crisis in the city. Jim Dwight said during his comments that the majority of people coming to DED for assistance were African American women. Detroit is an overwhelming African American populated municipality which has undergone decades of underdeveloped and systematic oppression. Detroit was subjected to the illegal imposition of emergency management and bankruptcy from 2013-2014. Since then the corporate-oriented Mayor Mike Duggan has incessantly sought to transfer public resources to private capitalist interests that are dominating the economy of Detroit including  Dan Gilbert, the Illitch family and the leading financial institutions, such as Chase Bank.

As a direct result of the pandemic, the “development” model of business office space availability, entertainment, sports, high-rent apartments, expensive condominiums and tourism has been in severe decline. The much championed casino hotels have reopened recently with monumental reductions in allowed capacity.

Photo is from the author

During the summer, the City administration placed through a 5-4 vote by the equally corporate compliant City Council, a bond initiative ostensibly designed for “blight removal” on the November ballot. A previous version went down in flames due to mass mobilizations by community activists in November. Already, the City of Detroit owes homeowners at least $600 million in overpayments of property taxes in a municipality which is still ranked as the poorest major urban area in the U.S.  After 2014, hundreds of millions of dollars were redirected from the Federal Hardest Hit Funds to demolition projects which created even more blight compounded by the subsequent environmental degradation left by the unscrupulous outside contractors.

During the GBI public meeting on September 14, a representative of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition said that we must move towards demanding rent relief, forgiveness and direct subsidies for housing. Moratorium NOW! Coalition was founded during the height of the economic crisis, popularly known as the “Great Recession” in 2008. Since then the organization has fought for a halt to all foreclosures and evictions along with militantly opposing the contrived emergency management and bankruptcy of 2013-2014. In recent years, Moratorium NOW! Coalition has sought a bailout for homeowners facing property tax foreclosure through the Government of Wayne County. Thousands have lost their homes as well due to over-assessed property taxes which are illegal even according to the laws of the State of Michigan.

Will the CDC Moratorium Resolve the Current Crisis?

Khalifa from DED spoke at the September 14 Detroit meeting on a document she drafted which explains the CDC moratorium. People are being evicted despite the declaration of this policy shift by the CDC which is ostensibly supported by the White House.

A recent report published on the situation in Texas in the city of Houston, where the pandemic has taken a devastating toll, it says that:

“Houston Public Media sent a reporter to four different courthouses last week to observe about 100 eviction cases and found that only one renter was able to use the CDC order to block eviction. So in 99% of those cases the order was having no effect at all. Legal aid attorneys in Houston also say it’s still too often business as usual at eviction hearings. The judges aren’t asking landlords if tenants sent them CDC declarations. Many tenants don’t show up. And among those that do, most don’t appear to even know about their rights under the CDC order. The judges don’t ask them about that. And in the vast majority of cases, the landlord is given the right to evict them. That’s despite the CDC order, in the middle of a pandemic.” (See this)

If this is the situation in Texas which is an epicenter for the pandemic, it appears as if the same process is taking place in other regions of the U.S. Many judges are aligned with the landlords who often are wealthy corporations whose only interests are to maximize their profits from renters. The banks have proven time again that they have no consistent program to help homeowners remain in their houses. Many of the financial institutions culpable in the 2008 crisis violated their own rules as well as federal laws in order to repossess the homes of working families throughout the country. This same process holds true for property tax foreclosures which have been a major problem in the city of Detroit.

Reflecting the national dilemma facing the working class and the nationally oppressed, the New York Times published an article on September 16 noting:

“The order, a moratorium imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is meant to avoid mass evictions and contain the spread of the coronavirus. All a qualifying tenant must do is sign a declaration printed from the C.D.C. website and hand it over to his or her landlord. But it’s not as simple as it sounds: Landlords are still taking tenants to court, and what happens next varies around the country.” (See this)

Housing is a Human Right: The Need for Another Social System

When the question of the need for fundamental social change in the U.S. was raised at the September 14 Liberation Monday public meeting all of those present agreed. Housing should be a guaranteed benefit for everyone living in modern day society.

Under capitalism in the U.S., housing is not a fundamental right for the workers and oppressed. Millions today are imperiled by the specter of homelessness. Water resources are denied to thousands in Detroit and millions across the U.S. Detroit has been a target for the termination of water services, and surprisingly enough, there are many municipalities which exceed the motor city as it relates the rates of shutoffs.

These issues require the transformation of the capitalist order into socialism. Under socialism all people are entitled to housing, water, utilities, education and environmental quality.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

Julian Assange si trova rinchiuso in un carcere di massima sicurezza in Gran Bretagna dove attende di essere giudicato. Nel caso dovesse essere estradato negli Stati Uniti rischierebbe fino a 175 anni di carcere. In questo focus speciale di #Byoblu24 vi mostriamo in esclusiva l’intervista che la giornalista Berenice Galli di Comitato No Guerra No Nato ha fatto al padre dell’attivista, John Shipton il quale definisce il processo a carico del figlio come “Una farsa in cui ad Assange è impedito difendersi in maniera regolare ed appropriata”.

Non solo, una questione sulla quale riflettere è quella relativa alla Giudice che deciderà la sua estradizione o meno negli USA, ha spiegato su Byoblu24 il giornalista Manlio Dinucci. “La Arbuthnot è la consorte di Lord James Arbuthnot, già ministro degli appalti della difesa britannica e membro del think tank transatlantico legato al governo americano, Henry Jackson Society. La HJS ha accusato l’attivista di seminare dubbi sulla posizione morale dei governi democratici occidentali, con l’appoggio di regimi autocratici” – e prosegue Dinucci – “La vicenda di Assange dovrebbe interessare tutti perché la sua libertà è la libertà di tutti noi e dell’informazione”.

Are children and youth affected by COVID-19?

Wearing masks is mandatory for all, especially at school for children and adolescents from the age of 11 [1]. Mandatory social distance. Continuous hand washing with hydroalcoholic gels.

Young people must remain masked and keep their distance from their peers, not to mention the permanent fear spearheaded by all these extreme measures.

Several competent people, scientists, doctors, say that the COVID-19 pandemic is over [2], that we now have a high number of positive PCR tests because they are too sensitive [3-4], but that COVID disease is disappearing, as evidenced by the decrease in deaths and the disappearance of seriously ill or even hospitalized patients, especially because of mutations in the virus, which has become less virulent [5-6].

In the world :

(© Daily new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people, Our World in data, Europe, Sept 13, 2020)

Being myself a hospital doctor in intensive care in Belgium, I can attest to the near disappearance of the COVID-19 disease.

Moreover, as pediatric professors Christèle Gras-Le Guen, vice-president of the French Society of Pediatrics, and Régis Hankard, coordinator of the Pedstart pediatric clinical research network, testify in this article [7], COVID-19 is not a disease that concerns children.

They are adamant: “Covid-19 is definitely not a pediatric disease.”

“The idea that emerges from these observations is that children must not be subjected to drastic measures, painful to live with, that could disrupt their daily lives, when this microbe really is of little concern to them.” [7]

Wearing a mask for 8 hours in a row, seeing their teacher masked, being cut off from their facial expressions, their smile, being unable to hear their explanations correctly, being frustrated in their sociability could correspond to these draconian measures, painful to live with, which could upset their daily life, when this microbe barely concerns them?

It is important to understand from several studies in different countries that children and adolescents are virtually unaffected by COVID-19 and that their role in the transmission of the virus in the population is minimal [8-9-10-11].

In this study from the Netherlands :

“The new coronavirus is mainly spread among adults, and from adults in the family to children” [12].

Not the other way around.

“Very few cases of transmission (of COVID-19) have been observed in schools. ” [13]

This is confirmed here: CHILDREN DO NOT TRANSMIT COVID19:

400 articles all confirm, without exception, that Covid 19 is rare and almost always benign in children, that children under 19 are not contaminated by schoolmates but by parents at home, that they do not contaminate adults, and that the confinement of children is responsible for frequent behavioural and social psychological disorders in addition to a clear negative impact on their schooling.

As Dr. Antonio Lazzarino (University College London UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care) says in response to an article in the British Medical Journal [14] (BMJ) :

“Before introducing clinical and public health measures, all potential side effects of these measures should be identified and described, and only then should it be decided whether they are more beneficial than harmful. “[15]

Wearing a face mask can give a false sense of security [16].

This view is shared by the Public Health Agency in Denmark [17].

Wearing a mask leads to problems of hygiene that far outweigh the benefits of this measure:

To guarantee the effectiveness of a mask, people must not touch the mask, must change the single-use mask frequently or wash it regularly and properly, place it on the face in a tight way, otherwise the risk of contamination may increase sharply. [18]

In 2015, a study [19] looked at the frequency with which we touch our face (very often unconsciously). The subject studied was the transmission of respiratory infections and staphylococcus aureus (bacteria much larger than a virus).

(© Face touching : A frequent habit that has implications for hand hygiene )

On average, we touch our mouth 4x per hour and our nose 3x per hour. This is increased with the continuous wearing of a mask due to the irritation and itching caused.

Can you imagine, with children?

This is even more of a problem since it has been shown that the SARS-CoV-2 virus tends to accumulate on the outer surface of the mask [20]. So the virus will get on the hands and  contamination will flare up.

Let us continue in this demonstration that the problems related to the mandatory and continuous wearing of the mask by everyone, especially by children and adolescents, is more problematic than beneficial.

Talking with a mask can lead to talking much louder, thus projecting droplets further away through our masks, or bringing two people closer together, forgetting the required distance of two meters.

Wearing a mask directs a good part of the exhaled air towards the eyes, which, in addition to generating an uncomfortable sensation, can lead to touching our eyes even more, 3x per hour in normal times, much more with a mask (source of viral and bacterial contamination via the conjunctiva).

If your hands are contaminated, then you will be contaminated through this gesture, which is facilitated by wearing a mask, and you will contaminate everything you touch.

The physical and physiological problems caused by the mandatory and continuous wearing of a mask.

Many doctors report an increase in infectious skin problems (impetigo, staphylococcal infections) and eye problems (conjunctivitis) in children and adults, which are far from being harmless.

Doctors are also observing an increase in respiratory problems such as asthmatiform bronchitis.

All this is related to the continuous wearing of the mask.

No matter what some people say, a face mask that is worn mostly continuously makes breathing difficult.

For people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), people who already have difficulty breathing at rest, masks quickly become unbearable because they increase their feeling of suffocation [21].

In addition, a fraction of the exhaled CO2 is re-inhaled with each respiratory cycle. This negligible effect in a healthy person can cause problems in more fragile people.

COPD is characterized by a certain degree of hypercapnia (elevation of partial blood pressure in CO2 or capnia).

These two phenomena, a feeling of suffocation and increased capnia, can lead to an increase in breathing frequency and an amplification of breathing movements, thus increasing the amount of air inhaled and exhaled with each breath. This can, paradoxically, increase the risk of spread of SARS-CoV-2 if one of these infected or carrier persons breathes harder because of the mask, which is precisely what we want to avoid. Most importantly, the mask, in these infected COPD patients, may worsen their clinical condition, as their increased inhalation efforts may introduce more viral material into their lungs [15].

There were 251 million COPD patients worldwide in 2016 [22].

Furthermore, despite media intoxication claiming the contrary, yes, the continuous wearing of a mask, even more so if worn correctly (tightly), for hours on end, can lead to a decrease in the partial pressure of the blood in oxygen or PaO2.

A study published in 2012 evaluated the effect of prolonged surgical mask wear on the health of 53 Turkish surgeons [23].

These were previously healthy individuals.

They observed an increase in heart rate and a decrease in pulsed oxygen saturation (SpO2 reflecting arterial saturation) as soon as after the first hour of wearing the mask, compared to values taken without the mask. A small variation in oxygen saturation (SpO2-SaO2) may reflect a large variation in blood oxygen partial pressure (PaO2).

(© The pulse oximeter )

This curve is the hemoglobin dissociation curve. The partial pressure of oxygen in the arterial blood (PaO2) determines the saturation (SpO2). A decrease in SpO2 of 10 (100 to 90%) corresponds to a decrease in PaO2 of 40 (100 to 60 mm Hg).

The researchers conclude that their results show the potential clinical impact of prolonged mask wear on respiration.

The decrease in SpO2 was most pronounced with surgeons over 35 years of age.

Masks create a humid climate because the exhaled air is heated and humidified and this moisture (water vapor) is captured and concentrated by the mask in front of the nose and mouth. This humid environment is favorable to SARS-CoV-2 which remains active and this will increase the viral load near the nose and mouth.

The body’s first defense against an aggression, particularly viral or bacterial, is innate immunity. This plays a crucial role and is sufficient, for most healthy people, to overcome an infection, without recourse to the antibodies of specific late immunity. The effectiveness of innate immunity is inversely proportional to viral load [24]. The higher the viral load, the more likely it is that innate immunity will be overwhelmed.

Do you see how the continuous wearing of masks by everyone can worsen contamination rather than reduce it?

The following are the most serious.

The psychological and mental problems caused by the mandatory and continuous wearing of a mask.

The psychological impact!

There is a lack of official recognition in the media or in government reports of all the deleterious effects of the continuous wearing of masks, as if the most important thing is to do everything possible to get people to allow themselves to be masked, regardless of the consequences.

This particularly concerns children and adolescents whose brains, especially emotional and relational brains, are in full development!

Children depend largely on facial expressions to understand and apprehend their environment [25].

Hiding the lower half of the face diminishes the ability to communicate, interpret and imitate the expressions of those we come into contact with. Positive emotions become less recognizable and negative emotions are amplified.

Emotional mimicry, contagion and emotionality in general are reduced as well as teacher-student bonding, group cohesion and learning – of which emotions are a major driver.

The benefits and risks associated with the continued wearing of masks at school should be seriously studied, considered and made clear and obvious to all teachers, parents and students [26].

From a medical and human perspective, it is serious that our rulers do not report these complications and do not take them into account before dictating their measures to the population.

Alternatives exist to the continuous wearing of masks.

Viral particles present in the air are sensitive to ambient temperature and humidity and are inactivated by the sun’s UV rays [27].

They will be diluted more quickly outside.

Running courses outdoors or in indoor courtyards is one solution to consider.

This is confirmed in the excellent review on masks, Mask Facts [28], published on the website of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Just by opening a door, a window, the droplets of virus aerosols can be cut in half in 30 seconds [29]!

This is further affirmed by 241 scientists [30] who emphasize the need for proper air ventilation in workplaces, buildings, schools, hospitals and nursing homes.

(© It is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of COVID-19, page 9 of PDF)

Open the class and study windows!

The short, medium and long term negative impact of the antisocial measures of our governments.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, child psychiatrists, general practitioners know the negative effects of the antisocial measures taken by our governments on the development and mental health of children and adolescents.

Several articles, studies and research attest to this.

In this article published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent health [31], the authors emphasize the dramatic impact of social isolation measures on children and adolescents.

They rightly point out that social interactions are part of basic human needs [32], such as eating and sleeping.

Indeed, feeling insufficiently connected to others is associated with profound and long-lasting negative consequences on physical and mental health, and can even lead to more mortality [33].

The negative effects of antisocial measures may profoundly affect adolescents (age 10-24 years) [34].

Adolescents are at a crucial stage of their lives, with the type of social environment having an enormous impact on many vital functions such as proper brain development, healthy self-construction, and good mental health [31].

Even temporary antisocial measures can have a profound and prolonged negative impact on their development.

And a Belgian virologist like Erika Vlieghe would like to keep our children and adolescents in masks throughout the school year?

Dr. Brett Enneking, a child psychologist at Riley Children’s Health in the United States, emphasizes that the lower part of the face plays an important role in children’s language, understanding of emotions and communication in the broadest sense [35].

Sleep disturbances, worsening of separation-related disorders, nightmares and developmental abnormalities are among the short- and medium-term consequences of this social isolation. Some of these complications are already appearing, as witnessed by psychologists and physicians.

Other more serious repercussions are to be feared, such as depression, suicide, social and academic dropouts, as shown by the numerous researches on the negative consequences of social isolation on the good development of the human being.

It is not a question of being anti-masked for the pleasure of opposing authority without any valid reason, or just to avoid some itching or irritation.

This article has documented all the serious deleterious effects that the continuous wearing of a mask and the antisocial measures imposed by our governments can have on physical and mental health, especially of children and adolescents.

Those in charge and the virologists who advise governments where treasures is only okaynever mention the many harmful effects of their measures.

They do not give the population complete and honest information.

In summary,

As eminent pediatricians and research in several countries say, children and adolescents are virtually unaffected by COVID-19. They are almost unaffected themselves and participate in the transmission of the virus only to a negligible extent.

The mask can lead to more infections by several mechanisms:

1. By increasing the tendency to touch one’s face, mouth, nose, eyes.
2. By increasing the concentration of viruses on the outer layer of the mask.
3. By giving a false sense of security.
4. By generating factors that will neutralize the protective effect of the mask, such as speaking louder or getting within 2 meters to understand each other.
5. By surpassing the innate immune defense capabilities due to a higher viral load concentrated by the mask in front of the respiratory tract.

The consequences of imposed antisocial measures, including mandatory and continuous wearing of the mask or excessive distancing, are harmful and serious.

They are long-lasting and significant.

They are physical: impetigo, conjunctivitis, asthmatiform bronchitis, breathing difficulties, headaches (migraines).

They are physiological: hypercapnia, hypoxemia, increased heart rate.

They are mental, perhaps the most serious, especially in childhood and adolescence, and involve disturbances in sleep, emotional communication and maturation, learning, brain development, and can go as far as depression and excess mortality.

In the school setting, however, there are workable alternatives such as ventilating enclosed spaces and holding classes or studies in open spaces, such as courtyards or outdoor spaces.

Finally, and perhaps what makes the continuation of the government’s antisocial measures incomprehensible and serious is the well-documented notion that the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be disappearing within 5 months of the epidemic peak, as shown by clinical data (decrease in hospitalizations, deaths and serious cases in all European countries) and biological data (mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to less virulent forms).

In view of these facts, persisting in this antisocial path is, as this article from FranceSoir [36] emphasizes, maltreatment, particularly for our children and adolescents.

We physicians put one principle above all others, above the precautionary principle.

It is the principle of above all, do no harm (primum non nocere).

Today, by letting our governments apply their antisocial measures, are we not doing more harm than good?

This is what 70 Belgian doctors think when they ask for the abolition of masks in schools [37].

37] This is what 70% of those surveyed in a Belgian newspaper think, saying that students should be able to remove their masks once they sit in class.

38] Let’s hope that this is only the beginning.

Dr Pascal Sacré

Featured Photo: pixabay.com

Notes (Sources) :

[1] “Le port du masque à l’école? Peut-être durant toute l’année scolaire” , estime la virologue belge Erika Vlieghe.  

[2] Lettre ouverte des médecins et des professionnels de la santé à toutes les autorités belges comme aux médias belges. Au 10/09/20 : signée par 238 médecins belges, 804 professionnels belges de la santé, 4327 citoyens

Doctors are demonstrating massively and demanding the immediate cessation of all coronavirian measures: All over the world, we are witnessing a massive disinformation campaign in the mainstream media, which sets aside all the principles of a democratic constitutional state. While many medical colleagues present different medical views, they are hardly heard due to unprecedented censorship. Information from experts and professionals who present a different view of things is currently almost exclusively accessible through targeted searches on the Internet or in alternative information sources, not in the mainstream media.

The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, doctors united and wrote a letter of protest to their colleagues and the government, questioning the proportionality of the measures. The letter, signed by more than 800 doctors, aims to provoke an open and sincere debate on how to deal with the covid-19 epidemic. The petition has now been stopped.
https://opendebat.info/

A protest letter from doctors and professionals in the mental health field, which has already received more than 2500 signatures.
https://brandbriefggz.nl/

United States
In the United States a group of doctors who work in the field and see patients every day, came together in the organization America’s FrontLine Doctors and gave a press conference that has already been watched several million times. A must-see.
https://americasfrontlinedoctorsummit.com/
https://www.xandernieuws.net/algemeen/groep-artsen-vs-komt-in-verzet-facebook-bant-hun-17-miljoen-keer-bekeken-video/

Spain
A public press conference entitled “A world dictatorship with a sanitary excuse” was given by Doctors for truth in Madrid, in front of about 400 doctors and scientists.
https://niburu.co/gezondheid/15385-artsen-komen-massaal-met-coronawaarheid-naar-buiten

Germany
An international group of doctors has initiated extra-parliamentary research following the “exaggerated and oppressive” corona measures in order to question politicians and scientists worldwide.
https://acu2020.org/ 

International
This initiative by Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, and Robert F. Kennedy, lawyer, among others, addresses the many inconsistencies in corona policy and is addressed to the presidents of the WHO, the European Commission and the European Parliament.
https://www.internationalfreechoice.com/

Belgium
A Belgian initiative, signed by more than 1000 doctors and health professionals. (September 3, 2020)
http://omgekeerdelockdown.simplesite.com/?fbclid=IwAR2bJAAShAlIidjnRQPyVSoZbk1Uj-FTHAthL77hKX_Oo8aMLN3V6DdwAac

An open letter launched by a group of doctors from Cliniques Universitaires St-Luc, UCL-Louvain and which can be signed by everyone.
https://belgiumbeyondcovid.be/

[3] Pr. Toussaint : « Les tests se retournent contre nous à l’heure actuelle ! »

[4] Coronavirus – Les tests PCR inadaptés contre l’épidémie? « Jusqu’à 90% de personnes testées ne seraient pas contagieuses »

[5] Évolution du SARS-CoV-2 : mise à jour septembre 2020, Hélène Banoun

[6]https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FD_Raoult_SARS-CoV 2_EID_Sep2020_vL2.pdf , Dramatic increase in the SARS-CoV-2 mutation rate and low mortality rate during the second epidemic in summer in Marseille, IHU

[7] La Covid-19 n’est pas une maladie qui concerne les enfants,  September 6, 2020, pediatric professors Christèle Gras-Le Guen, vice-president of the French Society of Pediatrics, and Régis Hankard, coordinator of the pediatric clinical research network Pedstart, are adamant: “Covid-19 is definitely not a pediatric disease“.

[8] Cluster of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the French Alps, February 2020

[9] No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020 separator commenting unavailable

[10] Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Australian educational settings

[11] SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission in educational settings

[12] Research on the role of children in the spread of the virus aux Pays-Bas

[13] Coronavirus: what researchers know about the risk of reopening schools

[14] Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis, BMJ, 9 Avril 2020

[15] Covid-19: important potential side effects of wearing face masks that we should bear in mind, Response to Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis, BMJ, 20 April 2020 Antonio I Lazzarino, Medical Doctor and Epidemiologist Steptoe A, Hamer M, Michie S University College London UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care

[16] Conseils sur le port du masque dans les espaces collectifs, lors des soins à domicile et dans les établissements de santé dans le cadre de la flambée due au nouveau coronavirus (‎‎2019-nCoV)‎ ‎

[17] Danemark : ce pays qui ne croit pas aux masques,  May 7, 2020 on the website Le Point.fr. The Danish government advises against wearing them and epidemiologists are so unconvinced of their usefulness that they have launched a study on the subject.

[18] Desai AN, Aronoff DM. Masks and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Published Online First : 17 April 2020. Doi :10.1001/jama.2020.6437

[19] Face touching: A frequent habit that has implications for hand hygiene, Am. J. Infect. Control, 1 Février 2015

[20] Effectiveness of Surgical and Cotton Masks in Blocking SARS–CoV-2 : A Controlled Comparison in 4 Patients, Ann Intern Med, 6 Avril 2020

[21] Kyung SY, Kim Y, Hwang H, et al. Risks of N95 Face Mask Use in Subjects With COPD. Respir Care 2020 ; respcare.06713. Doi :10.4187/respcare.06713

[22] Bronchopneumopathie chronique obstructive (BPCO), WHO (OMS)

[23] Preliminary report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery, A Beder & al, Neurocirugia, 2008, 19, pp 121-126

[24] Chen Y, Zhou Z, Min W. Mitochondria, Oxidative Stress and Innate Immunity. Front Physiol 2018 ;9 :1487. Doi :10.3389/fphys.2018.01487

[25] Mask mandates may affect a child’s emotional, intellectual development, Dr. Mary Gillis, 23 juillet 2020. Young children especially rely on facial expressions to understand situations.

[26] Masked education? The benefits and burdens of wearing face masks in schools during the current Corona pandemic, Trends Neurosci Educ. 2020 Sep; 20, 11 août 2020

[27] Simulated Sunlight Rapidly Inactivates SARS-CoV-2 on Surfaces, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 222, Issue 2, 15 July 2020, Pages 214 222, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaa274. Téléchargeable en PDF

[28] Mask Facts, AAPS, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, 1 Juin 2020.

[29] Small droplet aerosols in poorly ventilated spaces and SARS-CoV-2 transmission, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 1 Juillet 2020

[30] It is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of COVID-19, par Lidia Morawska et Donald K Milton, 2020, Published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

[31] The effects of social deprivation on adolescent development and mental health, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 4, Issue 8, 1 Août 2020.

[32] Baumeister RF Leary MR. The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychol Bull. 1995 ; 117 : 497-529

[33] Hawkley LC, Cacioppo JT. Loneliness matters: a theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Ann Behav Med. 2010; 40: 218-227

[34] Sawyer SM, Azzopardi PS, Wickremarathne D, Patton GC. The age of adolescence. Lancet Child Adolesc Health. 2018; 2: 223-228

[35] Mask mandates may affect a child’s emotional, intellectual development, Dr Mary Gillis, 23 Juillet 2020.

[36] Le port obligatoire du masque pour les enfants, c’est de la maltraitance !, August 21, 2020, by Doctors G Delépine, surgical oncologist and N Delépine, pediatric oncologist.

[37] Septante médecins flamands demandent l’abolition du masque dans les écoles: « Une menace sérieuse pour leur développement »

[38] Les élèves devraient-ils pouvoir enlever leur masque une fois assis en classe ? 69.2% of respondents say YES.

Over 50 years have transpired since the lyrics of this song, Salt of the Earth, resonated then, just as much as now:

.

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth

And when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, they look so strange

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio

And when I look in the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
Or don’t they look so strange

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the two thousand million
Let’s think of the humble of birth 

Mick Jagger, sung by the Rolling Stones

Hundreds of millions of us punch in the hours, day by day, to pay our way in this capitalist circus.

Many wish they could find suitable employment, and others, millions, take one, two and I have heard of even three part time jobs with NO benefits. They, perhaps you too, are what Mick Jagger referred to as the ‘Salt of the earth’.

This writer has worked for perhaps 200 small businesses, mostly in the sales end of them, since college 47 years ago. What have I learned? Well, to a man (sometimes a woman) each owner did what he could to keep as much of the money coming in funneled into his pocket. Since these were all non union jobs, I had no recourse but to just find a new job (with a similar type owner), quit in disgust, or just stay and do what most Amerikan workers do… VENT! When we leave it up to ‘Noblesse Oblige’ that is what we get.

Labor has always been frowned at by the super rich as nothing more than a ‘Necessary Evil’… to them of course. Anytime they could get away with finding and using cheap labor, the did just that. Why do you think so many super rich loved the idea of slavery?

Here is a quote from another great Christian organization, the 1858 Law and Order Party of Kansas (you did not think that Tricky Dick Nixon invented that phase do you?). They had a leader, David Atchison, who actually said the following:

“We believe slavery is a trust and guardianship given us of God for the good of both races. Without sugar, cotton and cheap clothing, can civilization maintain its progress.”

Can you imagine the chutzpah (that is from the anti Christian language, Yiddish) of a fellow human being towards other human beings?

Oh, I forgot, slaves, like the undocumented IE: illegal aliens of our day, are not really looked upon as ‘Human Beings’.

No, as with the Chinese peasants who came here in the 1800s and got jobs, backbreaking jobs, laying out railroad tracks, and dying by the score, these were but one notch above the slave. Do you know where the saying “Ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance” came from? THAT is where it came from!

Trailer of the Salt of the Earth 2014 Documentary on Human Suffering, Slavery and the History of Humanity

Less than 11% of all workers today belong to a union. The highest percentage was at 25% in 1953.

Did they know more at that time than we know now?

So, around 90% of us have no protective umbrella from a union.

Of course government workers, those doing full time, do have many benefits, which have been carefully stripped away over the decades. However, in the private sector labor has Zilch!

Yet, the sun comes up and folks rush off to their jobs, many not knowing what would be in store for them if the boss or the corporation did not need them anymore… at least for that price.

The only true solution, no NOT a revolution, is for ALL workers to belong to what the Industrial Workers of the World AKA Wobblies, called ‘One Big Union’. Imagine the bargaining power that would bring.

The dilemma that the Wobblies faced in the early 20th century was what such ideas could face now: The sellout by those who run the unions nationwide. These leaders marry themselves to one of the two political parties (mostly, but not exclusively, the Demoncrats) and keep their power and prestige while ‘Rome burns’.

Do yourself a favor and read Jagger’s lyrics carefully. And then view to “Salt of the Earth” documentary

Imagine how, in the supposed greatest economy in the world, nothing has really changed… except to add more salt in labor’s wound.

*

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Countercurrents.org, and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Mali’s recent history has been a succession of disputed presidential elections, military coups, insurgencies, civil war and international conflicts. Although there are significant deposits of gold in the country, the country’s strategic location in the centre of the Sahel region of north western Africa and the emergence and rapid growth of ‘jihadist’ armed groups throughout the region following NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 are the main reasons the country has received more international attention than is usual for remote, impoverished African countries.

The military coup staged in Mali last month is the second since 2012, and was prompted by many of the same fundamental factors and causes.

Political situation in Mali

The French began colonizing the area now covered by Mali during the 1880s and 1890s. As the colony of French Soudan, Mali was administered with other French colonial territories as the Federation of French West Africa. In 1956, with the passing of France’s Fundamental Law (Loi Cadre), the Territorial Assembly was granted limited autonomy. After the 1958 French constitutional referendum, the Republique Soudanaise became a member of the French Community and was granted a greater degree of autonomy.

In January 1959, Soudan joined Senegal to form the Mali Federation, which was granted independence within the French Community on 20 June 1960. The federation collapsed on 20 August 1960, when Senegal seceded. On 22 September Soudan proclaimed itself the Republic of Mali and withdrew from the French Community, re-joining it in 1967.

After many years of single-party government, a military coup ousted President Moussa Traoré in 1991 following mass protests and rioting and the constitution was suspended. Amadou Toumani Touré took power as the Chairman for the ‘Transitional Committee for the Salvation of the People’. A draft constitution was approved in a referendum on 12 January 1992 and political parties were allowed to form.

On 8 June 1992, Alpha Oumar Konaré, the candidate of the Alliance pour la Démocratie en Mali (ADEMA, Alliance for Democracy in Mali), was inaugurated as the President of Mali’s Third Republic. President Konaré was again elected president in 1997.

General elections were organized in June and July 2002. President Konare did not seek reelection, and retired General Amadou Toumani Touré, former head of state during Mali’s transition (1991-1992) became the country’s second democratically elected President as an independent candidate in 2002. He was re-elected to a second 5-year term in 2007. LINK

Although in hindsight the twenty-year period ending with the end of Touré’s second term in 2012 was marked by relative stability (at least up until 2011) it was also marked by endemic economic stagnation and corruption, and the grievances of ethnic minorities in the north were not addressed, leading to the widespread rebellion by many Tuareg communities in the far north of the country which was cited by the military as the main reason for them to oust the president, so that they could re-establish security throughout the country and defend its territorial integrity.

Incidentally, some media reports at the time commented that:

A US Africa Command official confirmed on Friday the leader of military coup d’état in Mali has visited the US on several occasions, receiving professional military education.

Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo participated in the America’s International Military Education and Training program, sponsored by the US State Department, Public Affairs representative Patrick Barnes revealed to The Washington Post…

On March 22, just a month before a presidential election in the country, Sanogo and soldiers loyal to him stormed the presidential palace in the capital Bamako and overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure…

The coup claimed three lives, leaving about 40 wounded…

Despite condemning the coup, the US is not planning to reconsider its $140-million aid program to Mali in 2012.

Conversely, on Friday the African Union suspended Mali’s membership of that organization. LINK

In the aftermath of the 2012 military coup Jeremy Keenan commented, as hasty and poorly organized preparations were being made in mid-2013 to hold presidential elections:

“Since February, when France in particular, began pressing for an early presidential election to provide some semblance of a legitimate government, the separatist Kidal region has effectively been ruled, with the backing of the French military, by the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), the predominantly Tuareg group who began the rebellion for an independent Azawad (the Tuareg name for northern Mali) in January 2012.”

Main locations of major ethnic groups in Mali

Most armed conflicts have occurred in the remote and arid north of the country

At the time the French commanders were attempting to prevent massacres of civilians as well as widespread clashes between the two belligerent forces which could have quickly degenerated in all-out and irreversible civil war, something which they ultimately achieved. Gradually the situation was calmed somewhat:

“On June 18, after several weeks of intense negotiations, a peace deal was signed in Ouagadougou between the Malian government and the MNLA and the more recently formed HCUA (Haut Conseil pour l’Unité de l’Azawad). These two groups represented the Tuareg rebels who had begun the rebellion in January 2012. The accord, which called for an immediate ceasefire and for government troops to return to the rebel-held northern town of Kidal, paved the way for the July 28 presidential election.”

However, sporadic violence continued, each side accusing the other of being the instigator, and the subsequent presidential elections did not address the structural causes of the political and economic turmoil ravaging the country.

Moreover, beyond the armed insurgency and calls for succession in the far north, there are also persistent and increasingly deadly disputes between different ethnic groups in central Mali.

Central Mali is populated by, among others, the Fulani, the Dogon, and the Bambara. The Fulani are a primarily Muslim ethnic group of seminomadic herders. Across West and Central Africa, as many as 38 million people belong to this group. The Dogon, a group of as many as 800,000 who practice a polytheistic religion (a small number practice Christianity and Islam), are largely based near the border with Burkina Faso and are mainly farmers. The Bambara, meanwhile, are the largest group in Mali. Most are primarily farmers as well and many practice Islam, although others follow traditional belief and worship ancestors.

Grievances between the three communities are long-standing, often relating to disputes over land and water.

In the past, disagreements were typically resolved quickly. But containing the fighting is getting harder and harder to do. LINK

As the country attempted to organize elections in 2013 Keenan commented that:

Many experts are of the view that the country needs several months of peace, stability and political education before an election can be held. But that political time and space has not been granted. The needs of France, the US, EU, UN and other international agencies for a semblance of a legitimate government able to receive international funds  has taken precedence over the real political needs of the country’s people. The appointment of an elected government is a prerequisite for the release of much needed foreign aid, most of which was suspended following the March 2012 coup.

The tumultuous period was also marked by the beginning of the massive influx of weapons and fighters from the now ‘failed State’ of Libya beginning in 2011 followed by a substantial military intervention by France in 2013 and later the establishment of multinational military forces under the aegis of the United Nations, the regional organization ECOWAS and the more recently formed ‘Sahel-5’ group of neighbouring countries.

Mali’s strategic location has added to its problems

Following large scale protests against endemic insecurity, poverty and corruption in the country, the military staged another coup last month, and the coup’s protagonists succeeded in capturing President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cissé near the capital, Bamako.

Under the banner of the June 5 Movement, a broad coalition of opposition parties, religious leaders, and civil society protested Keita’s 2018 re-election, claiming it was plagued by irregularities, and denounced the government’s effort to pack the Supreme Court with loyalists. The situation further deteriorated when the military killed 11 protesters. LINK

In the aftermath of the latest coup African regional organizations, France, the United Nations, and the United States have called for the restoration of the constitutionally-elected government. But that is unlikely to occur. On August 19 Keita announced that he had resigned in an attempt to prevent further loss. Cissé said that he understood the disappointment and frustration of the protesters who have held massive demonstrations in Mali’s capital.

The situation is reminiscent of the military coup in 2012, which was preceded by an explosive growth in what had been persistent low intensity armed conflict in the country due to an armed insurgency by Tuareg-dominated groups in the remote north of the country and the influx of ‘jihadist’ armed groups, both of which received a large influx of weapons following the overthrow of the Libyan government to the country’s northeast. Neither the countries in the region nor the international military forces sent to the region have managed to stem the large-scale movement of weapons and the growth of insurgent and extremist militant groups throughout the region.

Economy

Another contributing factor is the extremely poor state of Mali’s economy and social conditions more generally. Although total GDP and GDP per capita have increased over the last decade, beyond the generalized figures and apparent slight improvement in the overall economic situation of the country there is a great inequality in the distribution of wealth and income as well as economic and political opportunities. Most of the GDP growth is accounted for by gold production, which provides few jobs and much of the wealth generated has not benefited the people of Mali at all.

The unemployment rate is high and persistent (officially around 10% the real number is significantly higher), and essential services in many areas are rudimentary and inadequate.

Mali’s GDP, 1995-2020

Mali’s GDP per capita, 1995-2020

Mali’s unemployment rate, 1995-2020

SOURCE: tradingeconomics.com

In 2018, Mali exported $2.86 billion worth of goods and imported $3.6 billion worth of goods, resulting in a negative trade balance of $741 million. In 2018, Mali’s exports per capita were $150 and its imports per capita were $189.

Mali’s main exports in 2018 were gold ($2.59B), raw cotton ($93M), unprocessed wood ($37M), mixed mineral or chemical fertilizers ($32.1M), and oily seeds ($22.5M). Mali’s main imports in 2018 were refined petroleum ($549M), light pure woven cotton ($171M), cement ($148M), packaged medicaments ($147M), and broadcasting equipment ($80.7M).

According to one source (OEC), most of Mali’s exports went to United Arab Emirates ($1.33 billion), Switzerland ($1.19 billion), China ($85.2M), Uganda ($55M), and Burkina Faso ($36.6M). However, according to tradingeconomics.com in 2017 most of Mali’s exports were to South Africa (approximately $780 million), followed by Switzerland ($408 million), possibly reflecting disparities in the physical destination of exports and the locations of financial transactions and perhaps customers associated with them. Most imports arrived from Senegal ($699M), Cote d’Ivoire ($528M), France ($371M), China ($345M) and the Netherlands ($153M). SOURCE

It is thought that Mali has considerable natural resources, though most of them have not been exploited, or are subject to illegal and undeclared exploitation, and many prospective areas have not been explored:

The country is endowed with a host of mineral resources which include gold, uranium, diamonds, copper, iron ore, precious stones, zinc, manganese, bauxite, lead, lithium, bitumen schist, marble, gypsum, kaolin, phosphate, lignite, diatomic, and rock salt. LINK

Mali is Africa’s third largest exporter of gold behind Ghana and South Africa. There are three main gold mines located at Sadiola, Morila, and Loula. Sadiola (in the south of the country) and Morila (to the west) produce about 80% of the nation’s gold while the Loula mine (also to the west) opened more recently and is estimated to be capable of producing up to 250,000 ounces of gold per year.

Foreign military forces in Mali

There are some concerns that the presence of foreign troops in Mali may be generating new recruits for the ‘jihadist’ forces and/ or other insurgent or extremist groups even as they attempt to confront and eliminate them. Keenan argues that there could be a rational explanation for this apparent contradiction:

In 2003, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon published a series of maps of Africa which depicted the western Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Southern Algeria, southern Libya, northern Nigeria and Chad) as a “Terrorist Corridor”.

While designed to demonstrate why Washington needed to take its global “war on terror” to North Africa, the maps were also part of the propaganda prepared by the Pentagon to support Rumsfeld’s Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG). This was a covert program to provoke terrorist groups into undertaking violent acts, or to penetrate terrorist groups and local peoples to dupe them into conducting terrorist activities, often in the form of “false-flag” operations, in order to expose them or others to counterattack by US forces.

The most infamous P2OG operation in North Africa involved taking 32 European tourists hostage in the Algerian Sahara in 2003. Allegedly seized by “terrorists”, under the leadership of “Osama bin Laden’s man in the Sahara”, the operation was, in fact, a “false-flag” operation, managed on behalf of the US by Algeria’s Departement du Renseignement et de la Securite (DRS). It’s purpose was to justify the launch of the “Saharan-Sahelian front” in the “war on terror”.

The front was launched in January 2004 through what former president George W Bush called the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI), with 1,000 US forces rolled into action across Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad. Local people called it the “American invasion”. At the time, I warned that it would lead to a regionwide conflagration.

That has now been achieved. One decade later, on 8 May, France’s Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced that France was deploying 3,000 troops, in addition to 1,000 retained in Mali, to fight militant Islamists across the Sahara-Sahel, which he described as “the danger zone, the zone of all types of smuggling”.

“It is absolutely necessary to solve the problems and the dangers of trafficking and terrorism across the region, ” said Drian  “This area is key to the security of African states. But it is also for our own security. […] France is therefore reorganizing its forces to pursue counter-terrorism across several states.”

Equally disconcerting was Le Drian’s statement: “We will stay as long as necessary. There is no fixed date.”

French troops will be based in Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso, with more covert basing facilities available in Mauritania. In addition to its three major military bases at Gao in Mali, Niamey in Niger and N’Djamena in Chad, France is establishing a number of smaller bases, such as at Tessalit in northern Mali, Agades and Diffa in Niger, and Faya and Zouar in Chad.

The main difference between France’s operation and Bush’s PSI, apart from France deploying four times as many troops, is that unlike the PSI, it is not based on fiction. Rumsfeld’s “Terrorist Corridor” has become a self-fulfilled prophecy. LINK

While it is arguable the extent to which the exponential growth and proliferation of extremist groups in the region may be the result of a deliberate plan by powerful groups in Western countries to destabilize, militarize and dominate the region or whether it is purely the result of endogenous factors and a general failure to identify and effectively pre-empt ongoing developments, the military campaign by NATO to overthrow the Libyan government at any cost has undeniably contributed enormously to the region’s difficulties and in particular the severe deterioration in the security situation.

At least four immediate objectives were identified as being behind France’s decision at the time: heavily armed ‘jihadists’ were still operating in northern Mali; Mali serves as a major hub for trans-Saharan trafficking routes of weapons, fighters, drugs and other contraband; there were additional perceived terrorist threats to destabilize Chad; the threat posed by the considerable presence of Boko Haram in neighbouring countries. At the same time, the US maintained a substantial covert military training and assistance program in the region which only became public knowledge when three US commandos from the ‘Green Berets’ were killed in Niger.

Another detailed study, by Gary Busch, examines the long-term role and objectives of the French military in Africa. Among many other things, the study notes that during the de-colonization process France’s former colonies were obliged to sign a pact with their colonial master:

The Colonial Pact Agreement enshrined a number of special preferences for France in the political, commercial and defence processes in the African countries. On defence, it agreed to two types of continuing contact. The first was the agreement on military co-operation or Technical Military Aid (AMT) agreements. These covered education, training of soldiers and officers of African security forces.

The second type, secret and binding, were defence agreements supervised and implemented by the French Ministry of Defence, which served as a legal basis for French interventions within the African states by French military forces. These agreements allowed France to have pre-deployed troops and police in bases across Africa…

The Colonial Pact was much more than an agreement to station soldiers across Africa. It bound the economies of Africa to the control of France. It made the CFA franc the national currency in both former colonial regions of Africa and created a continuing, and enforceable, dependency on France.

In summary, the colonial pact maintained French control over the economies of the African states…

France not only set limits on the imports of a range of items from outside the franc zone but also set minimum quantities of imports from France. These treaties are still in force and operational. LINK

Beyond the US’ and later Europe’s ‘War on Terror’, in more recent times to the existing geopolitical plots and disputes pummelling the region has been added a new ‘Cold War’, as Western countries and experts express great concern over the increasing presence of Russia and China in many countries in the region.

The main foreign military forces that have been active in Mali since 2013 when they were first sent their in force include the following.

On 11 January 2013, France launched Operation Serval, deploying 1,700 soldiers, warplanes and helicopters to halt the southwards advance of jihadist groups that were taking over northern Mali.

In August 2013, France replaced Serval with Operation Barkhane, a mission that was extended to apply across the Sahel, an area the size of Europe. Barkhane is the largest operation deployed abroad by the French armed forces, with around 4,500 troops as of late 2019.

Ten French soldiers were killed during in Operation Serval and 28 more have been killed during Operation Barkhane.

The European Union Training Mission in Mali (EUTM Mali) was launched in February 2013 and consists of 620 soldiers from 28 European nations, tasked with training Mali’s army. The task force operates at a camp in Koulikoro, 60 kilometres northeast of the Malian capital Bamako.

In May 2018 the European Union extended the mission’s mandate for two years and almost doubled its budget to 59.7 million euros ($65.7 million), while expanding its duties to training for troops in the G5 Sahel force.

The first 6,000 UN peacekeeping troops of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) deployed to Mali in July of 2013. The deployment replaced an African International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA) which had been sent by the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

As of late 2019 MINUSMA had approximately 13,000 Blue Helmets on the ground, one of the largest UN military operations in the world. More than 200 soldiers have died, including more than 100 killed in hostile action.

In November 2015, the G5 Sahel countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Mali and Niger – decided to create a joint military force to fight extremist forces in the region. The targeted groups included Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Boko Haram movement which has its main bases in northeast Nigeria.

However, the G5 Sahel military forces remain extremely limited in their capabilities due to a lack of funding, training and equipment. LINK

It has been reported that Turkey has recently signed a ‘military cooperation agreement’ with Niger, though there are very few details as to the location, size and activities of the anticipated Turkish military contingent beyond the ubiquitous ‘training and assistance’ objectives.

Main extremist and ‘jihadist’ armed groups in the region

The regional security situation has deteriorated to unprecedented levels since the overthrow of the Libyan government. Crux, a Christian news agency, states that as of late 2019:

Islamist militants with links to al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State have continued to extend their reach across the region, even as they lose ground in the Middle East.

According to ECOWAS, a regional body for West Africa, over 2,200 terrorist attacks have taken place across the Sahel in the last four years, resulting in the deaths of 11,500 people. Thousands more have been wounded and millions of others displaced.

The Islamist insurgency is also stoking inter-tribal and ethnic tensions in the region, exacerbating the problem…

In 2012, the militants largely operated in northern Mali, where they joined forces with separatist Tuareg rebels to take over a number of strategic towns, including the legendary city of Timbuktu.

In January 2013, French forces dislodged them, but they later regrouped and spread into Central Mali, Burkina Faso and the Tahoua and Tillaberi regions of southwestern Niger.

And the spread of the insurgency has been aided by geography: The Sahel’s vast desert and porous borders make the flow of arms from Libya relatively easy. In addition, all three of the most affected countries have a weak state sector…

While jihadist groups used to primarily target government officials, soldiers and local leaders who opposed them, they are now attacking ordinary civilians and entire villages.

Churches are also a popular target, with Islamist groups trying to force the Christian population to convert to Islam or flee the region.

Burkina Faso is 60 percent Muslim, with Christians making up about a quarter of the population. Mali is around 90 percent Muslim, with Christians making up about 5 percent of the population. Niger is over 99 percent Muslim, with just 0.3 percent Christian. LINK

A report by Foreign policy describes the impact this has had in central Mali:

Jihadi groups have been able to exploit local concerns. Previously contained to the north by MINUSMA and the G5 Sahel force, jihadi groups have spread into the center of Mali and into Burkina Faso since 2015. Two are of particular concern. The first is the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (known as JNIM), which is affiliated with al Qaeda and claimed responsibility for the March 2018 attack on the French Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and on Burkinabe troops near the village of Toeni in December 2018. The other group is Ansarul Islam, which was formed in 2016 and has received support from both al Qaeda and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.

Although Islamist terrorist groups have not taken control of territory in central Mali, they have been able to set up bases from which they launch raids on nearby villages and towns. They target the Dogon and Bambara, as well as those who are affiliated with—or provide information to—the security forces. JNIM has also conducted attacks it says are in retaliation for the targeting of the Fulani. LINK

According to a report by Human Rights Watch in 2018, the Fulani Islamist leader Hamadou Koufa Diallo is particularly influential in recruiting locals. Fulani groups have accused the Malian military of cooperating with armed groups from other ethnic communities to attack them on numerous occasions. However, the rank and file soldiers are also in an extremely difficult position, as they find themselves amidst warring communities and subject to ambushes by armed extremist groups that often outnumber them and are better equipped.

Some communities have also form their own militia groups for self-defence given the inability of the central government and international forces to protect them, however these armed militia groups have also been accused of attacking other ethnic communities in the region as they become embroiled in the escalating and increasingly violent disputes.

Future developments

The military coup has greatly complicated the fight against extremist and ‘jihadist’ terrorist groups in the region as well as what paltry efforts there were to address the grievances of the Tuareg communitiers and thereby reach peace with their armed insurgent groups. The European and multilateral international military forces in the country, or cooperating with Mali’s armed forces to combat armed extremist groups, are unable to operate effectively in the current situation.

The other G5 Sahel Group members are considering imposing sanctions on Mali and have temporarily closed their borders with Mali in response to the coup. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has also suspended financial flows between its 15 members and Mali. The African Union has also condemned the military coup.

Both the African Union and the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) condemned the coup and suspended Mali’s membership. Seeking to pressure the country’s military leaders to hand over power, ECOWAS set a deadline of September 15 for the junta, which calls itself the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, to appoint a civilian to lead a transitional government. It’s unclear what steps will be taken if the demand is not met. The bloc imposed sanctions on Mali in the wake of the coup, closing borders and banning trade, and called for elections to be held within 12 months.

The leadership void, legitimacy crisis of what there is in terms of leadership, and social and economic turmoil that are simultaneously afflicting the country represent an unprecedented existential threat for the nation as it struggles to contain and eliminate the threat from armed extremist groups and pacify the increasingly agitated and angry ethnic groups in the centre and north of the country.

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Amid growing controversy over a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Israel, newly published results from a survey conducted by EKOS Research Associates show that Canadians do not want Israel to be treated differently than other countries when it comes to consequences for alleged war crimes or human rights violations. The survey found that Canadians support an ICC investigation of any country accused of war crimes, including Israel, and they do not want Canada to overlook Israel’s human rights violations. The survey further found that Canadians do not support recognizing Jerusalem as exclusively Israel’s capital.

The survey was co-sponsored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), and the United Network for Justice and Peace in Palestine-Israel (UNJPPI). All survey results, charts, and the report entitled “No Double Standards: Canadians Expect Greater Impartiality vis-à-vis Israel” can be accessed at www.cjpme.org/survey2020 or www.ijvcanada.org/survey2020 or https://unjppi.org/survey-2020-part-2.html.

The results show that a strong majority of Canadians want the ICC to investigate war crimes wherever they occur, including those committed by Israel. 84% of Canadians would support an investigation of Israeli officials. Further, only one-third of Canadians think that Canada should consider stepping in if it is opposed to an investigation.

“Canadians support an impartial ICC, and they oppose the idea that Canada should interfere in investigations it doesn’t like,” Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. Early this year, Canada surprised many when it attempted to deter a possible ICC investigation into alleged war crimes by Israeli and Palestinian officials. “Evidently, Canadians do not think that Israel, or any other government, should be shielded from accountability over its actions,” said Woodley.

The survey results also show that most Canadians do not want their government to overlook any country’s human rights violations, including Israel’s, no matter the circumstances. For example, 86% of Canadians disagree with the idea that Canada should overlook Israel’s human rights violations just because it is considered to be an ally.

“This demonstrates that Canada’s tendency to apply double standards when it comes to Israel is very unpopular with Canadians,” said IJV’s National Coordinator Corey Balsam. “Although successive governments have tended to mute their criticism of Israel, Canadians believe that Israel’s violations should be treated as seriously as those of any other country.”

The results of the poll also show that four out of five Canadians (82%) want Canada to maintain its current policy on Jerusalem and continue to call for the city to be shared, rather than recognizing Jerusalem as exclusively Israel’s capital. Even among Conservative Party supporters, a slim majority support maintaining Canada’s current policy on Jerusalem (54%). Despite this, newly minted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has pledged to move the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem: a move that would break with longstanding Canadian policy and potentially further ignite tensions in the region.

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“The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria.”

– Anthony Hall, August 23, 2020 [1]

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LISTEN TO THE SHOW

 

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 marked a staggering moment of confusion and chaos for Americans, and much of the world.

Four hijacked airlines, three demolished towers and nearly 3000 people dead in an event that committed the US and the world on course for a War on Terrorism, intended to prevent the event from ever happening again.

Americans were now set for a long term endeavour to snuff out each last one of the ‘fiends.’ As a consequence military men and women were active and between their lives and the hundreds of thousands of others unfortunate enough to reside in the places the White House considered Terror Targets, the numbers of people victimized by the attacks would soon explode.

Now, on the 19th anniversary of 9/11, some people might be doubting whether the narrative still connects with a dreary and desolate planet. Resources have shifted away from countries supporting terrorism to a new cold war with Russia and China. In the last seven years or so, Putin alone was found responsible (or so the story goes) of illegal violence in Ukraine, stirring up trouble in Syria, poisoning an ex-Russian spy and his daughter (they recovered), and now taking on his political rival, opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Heck, he is even responsible for putting Trump in the White House!

With Osama bin Laden now clearly no longer a threat and these new and different menaces forcing their way into the public mindset, does the 9/11 narrative and the call to ‘chase them out of their caves’ still possess the same traction now as it did when the smoke was still settling from the blasts in New York City?

On this week’s Global Research News Hour broadcast, we sit down with three guests who believe that the War On Terrorism still matters, though not in the obvious way we are used to thinking.

My first guest, Anthony Hall, believes that Wall Street and the Federal Reserve definitely used the attacks to launch wealth appropriation and kleptocratic activities serving the elites. He argues this harvest of cash is active today in 2020 with the arrival of the COVID 19 crisis.

Our next guest is Graeme MacQueen. Very active as a 9/11 skeptic, MacQueen builds on other aspects of the 9/11 narrative still active today. He also builds on an article he co-wrote which details that reporters on the day of September 11 discussed the reactions as that of ‘explosions’ and not of fire-induced collapses which is the official story.

Finally, Richard Gage, AIA, appears at the end of the show to detail the latest updates in the field of 9/11 politics, 9/11 legal Challenges and a special evening event starting on September 11.

Prof. Anthony James Hall is Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is Professor emeritus of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta.

Dr. Graeme MacQueen is the former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He was an organizer of the Toronto Hearings on 9/11, is a member of the Consensus 9/11 Panel, and is a former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

Richard Gage AIA is a San Francisco Bay Area architect, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 286)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-2020-covid-global-economic-meltdown-political-trickery-and-the-relevance-of-911/5721860

Virtual School Dangers: The Hazards of “Police State Education” During COVID-19

By John W. Whitehead, September 16, 2020

As a result, over the course of the past 30 years, the need to keep the schools “safe” from drugs and weapons has become a thinly disguised, profit-driven campaign to transform them into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, school resource officers, strip searches, and active shooter drills.

How Xinjiang “Interferes” with the EU-China Deal

By Pepe Escobar, September 16, 2020

What the EU essentially wants is equal treatment for their companies in China, similar to how Chinese companies are treated inside the EU. Diplomats confirmed the key areas are telecoms, the automobile market – which should be totally open – and the end of unfair competition by Chinese steel.

Last week, the head of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, threw an extra spanner in the works, telling Die Zeit that “we categorically condemn every form of oppression, forced labor and threat to human rights”, referring to Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

The End of the Balkans. President Vučić signs the White House Agreement. A Dark Day in the History of Serbia

By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, September 16, 2020

According to what we know so far, Serbia and Kosovo signed an economic cooperation agreement in the Oval Office of the White House in the presence of Trump.Serbia has said it is moving its Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and Kosovo is recognizing Israel and opening an embassy in Jerusalem. The two sides also denounced the actions of the Lebanese Hezbollah and agreed to participate in the international campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. The agreements were reached as part of a US-Israeli initiative to resolve the Kosovo issue, which includes measures against China (5G) and Russia (gas). In Serbia, however, President Vucic is already sharply criticized for the agreement as indirectly acknowledging Kosovo’s secession.

COVID-19: Guidance for School Reopening. Report by The Hospital For Sick Children and Unity Health Toronto

By SickKids, September 16, 2020

This living document is meant to provide information to policy-makers by highlighting paediatric-specific considerations based on our collective experience with children and their families/caregivers. The first version of the document was created by a core group of health- care workers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Unity Health Toronto, including those with expertise in paediatrics, infectious diseases, infection prevention and control, school health, psychiatry and mental health.[1] In this updated version, refinements have been made with contributions and endorsements from other Ontario paediatric hospitals (CHEO, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Kingston Health Sciences Centre, Children’s Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre, McMaster Children’s Hospital and Unity Health Toronto), epidemiologists, public health physicians, and a volunteer advisory group of teachers and parents. It was also reviewed by physicians from adult infectious diseases.

Video: Why Lockdowns Are the Wrong Policy. Sweden’s Covid-19 Strategy

By Prof. Johan Giesecke, Anders Tegnell, and UnHerd, September 16, 2020

Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO, lays out with typically Swedish bluntness why he thinks.

Video: Saudi Air Force Is Leveling Yemeni Capital to Ground in Response to Houthi Strikes on Riyadh

By South Front, September 16, 2020

According to pro-Houthi sources, Saudi warplanes conducted over 60 airstrikes on different targets across the country during the past few days. They insist that the most of the targets that were hit were objects of civilian infrastructure. At the same time, Riyadh claims that it has been precisely bombing Houthi military positions.

New Initiative to Expose Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Crimes to the World

By Paul Antonopoulos, September 16, 2020

Veterans from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) terrorist organization feel confident that because they were once supported and backed by the US and Western Europe in their campaign to violently separate Kosovo from Serbia, they are immune from prosecution and believe that their crimes can remain hidden. However, Milovan Drecun, the president of the Working Group of the Assembly Committee for Kosovo and Metohija, will soon launch a drive aimed at international audiences to highlight the brutal crimes committed by the KLA during the Kosovo War of 1998-1999, and have those responsible prosecuted.

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GLOBSEC is probably one of the most well-known and influential political think-tanks in not only Slovakia, but also Central Europe. It aims to support a pro-Atlantic direction for Slovakia. Despite being founded in only 2005, it organizes annual events that are often attended by up to a thousand people from dozens of different countries. Although it receives millions of euros from the Slovak government, it is also funded by the US, and has hosted prominent liberal and pro-Atlanticist speakers such as former British Prime Minister David Cameron, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, long time US Senator John McCain, and well known former US diplomat and political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski.

It is clear that this institution is trying to influence public opinion in Slovakia. However, its own research shows that its efforts are not as successful as they would hope it to be. A recently published  GLOBSEC report titled “Voices of Central and Eastern Europe: Perceptions of democracy & governance in 10 EU countries,” found that 50% of respondents believe that their values ​​are threatened by the “West,” and 53% found that the US specifically was a threat to their “identity and values.” This is in stark contrast to neighboring Poland where only 12% of respondents thought the US was a threat. In fact, no other country surveyed, such as Bulgaria (43%), Czechia (33%), Hungary (21%) and Lithuania (19%), had a majority that thought the US was a threat to their “identity and values.”

The way Slovak politicians communicate Western values is the main reason for this unprecedented result in Central and Eastern Europe. Slovakia, as a traditionally conservative society, has been inundated with Western liberalism that has resulted in draconian political correctness and identity politics. The idea that these values ​​will be forcibly implemented in Slovak society is receiving major backlash.

Washington’s unilateral policies have had a negative global consequence that has not solved geopolitical problems, but in fact worsened them. Intervention against the former Yugoslavia to support the establishment of a narco-state like Kosovo, is one such example. In fact, Slovakia is only one of five countries in the European Union that has not yet recognized Pristina’s independence from Belgrade. Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria is also negatively perceived in Slovakia.

According to the GLOBSEC report, people who are more prone to what the think-tank describes as conspiracy theories, without mentioning specific examples, and the fact that anti-American sentiment in Slovakia is significantly higher than anti-Russian sentiment, would certainly be very frustrating for the researchers. Despite a strong message from the mainstream media and the organization of extravagant events by GLOBSEC, only 26% of Slovaks perceived Russia as a threat to their country, the think-tank said in its 2019 Trends report. This is because “Slovaks have been known for having stronger anti-US sentiments than their neighbours,” as well as “stronger pro-Russian sentiments based on a historical and cultural context.” Slovakia is also the least Russophobic nation in Central Europe because Russia is perceived as a non-aggressive partner that provides a regular and safe supply of raw materials, like gas and oil.

Although 79% of Slovaks believe that their media is “rather or completely free” of influence, only 46% of Slovaks trusted the “standard” of mainstream media. This shows that Slovaks are aware of the gradual monopoly control of their media. It is also this lack of trust in the media that has made Slovakia an anomaly out of the Central and Eastern European countries surveyed in how they trust the US.

The conclusions of this survey would be extremely frustrating for GLOBSEC. Their long-term and systematic effort in trying to influence Slovak opinion has thus far produced poor results. It is likely that we will see increased funding for the think-tank, which will mean more extravagant events, more talks, and more penetration into the mainstream media by GLOBSEC to force Atlanticism onto Slovaks. Whether this will be successful or not still remains to be seen.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

The Saudi-led coalition has been bombing Yemen with a renewed energy following the recent missile and drone strikes on the Kingdom’s capital by the Ansar Allah movement (also known as the Houthis).

According to pro-Houthi sources, Saudi warplanes conducted over 60 airstrikes on different targets across the country during the past few days. They insist that the most of the targets that were hit were objects of civilian infrastructure. At the same time, Riyadh claims that it has been precisely bombing Houthi military positions.

For example, on September 12, the Saudi-led coalition announced that it had carried out a series of airstrikes on the Military Engineering Complex in the Sa’wan Suburb, east of the Yemen capital of Sanaa. According to pro-Saudi sources, the Yemeni Armed Forces loyal to the Houthi government, which controls Sanaa, were “manufacturing and assembling” ballistic missiles and combat drones. The pro-Houthis al-Masirah TV confirmed that Saudi-led coalition warplanes had targeted the Military Engineering Complex with six airstrikes.

On the next day, the new wave of Saudi airstrikes hit the countryside of Sanaa. They allegedly targeted Four drones at Al Dailami Air Base, a military research facility in the Weapons Maintenance Camp, a number of barracks and military posts in the districts of Bani Harith and Arhab, and a headquarters in the al-Sawad Camp.

On September 14, additionally to the Yemeni capital, the Saudi Air Force also conducted raids against Houthi forces in the province of Marib, where the defense of pro-Saudi groups has been collapsing. Clashes between Saudi-led forces and the Houthis have been ongoing across the districts of al-Jubah and Rahbah. However, the main target of the Houthi advance is still the Maas base. Yemeni sources claim that as soon as the base falls, Houthi units will launch an advance on the provincial capital. The Saudi-led coalition captured it in April of 2015 and since then it has successfully kept it under its own control.

Nonetheless, in late 2019 and early 2020, the course of the conflict with no doubt turned to favor the Houthis and Saudi Arabia found itself in conflict even with the main formal ally in the intervention coalition, the UAE. So, the Houthi government now has a good chance to take back the city and the entire province.

This development will become a panful blow to the Saudi leadership and became yet another piece of smoking gun evidence showcasing the failure of its military campaign in Yemen. In response, the Saudi Air Force will likely continue its intense bombing campaign aiming to level Sanaa and other big cities in the hands of the Houthis. The problem with this approach is that this very campaign forces the Houthis to conduct more intense and regular missile and drone attacks on targets inside Saudi Arabia itself.

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President Trump hosts a signing ceremony today in Washington which joins Bahrain, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Israel in the ‘Abraham Accord’ which establishes full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, and portends the possibility that other Arab states will join the strategic realignment of the Middle East.

The accord comes with a prize: for Trump, it is a boost for his re-election campaign, for UAE it is US-made F-35 fighter jets, Reaper drones, and EA-18G Growler jets, and Bahrain is expecting air defense systems.

The ‘Abraham Accord’ is not a peace agreement, but rather an accord to join Israel, UAE, and Bahrain in the suppression of struggles for freedom in Palestine and Bahrain.  Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, explains the accord provides the military, financial and diplomatic infrastructure to repress popular struggles for democracy and freedom in the Middle East.

The Al-Khalifa monarchy of Bahrain is a Sunni royal family ruling over a population which is mainly Shia, poor, and voiceless. Pro-democracy protests broke out in early 2011 and were met with a brutal crackdown by security forces.

Bahrain’s monarch, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, declared martial law and authorized 1,500 troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enter the country to brutally crush the protesters.  In May 2017, Ebtisam al-Saegh, a Bahraini human rights activist, was interrogated for seven hours by Bahraini authorities where she was beaten and sexually assaulted.

Bahrain is part of the coalition at war with Yemen since 2015, alongside UAE and Saudi Arabia, which has launched at least 20,000 airstrikes and killed 17,500 civilians, in a military campaign that has bombed hospitals, school buses, and left 10 million Yemenis at risk of famine.

Bahrain and the UAE had the opportunity to secure a concession for Palestinians in their accord with Israel: to ease the 13-year blockade of Gaza, which has turned it into an open-air prison.  The two royal dynasties who live lives of opulent luxury seemingly can’t imagine what the Palestinian lifestyle is like.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law, has said, “The Palestinians are stuck in the past.” He is right, as their past deprivations were horrific, and those denials of human rights continue today, connecting their collective past with the present in an unchanging nightmare.  The Persian Gulf monarchies have shaken-off their past: the tents are palaces, and the camels were replaced by Ferraris.  “Free Palestine” is a political ideology best remembered by the parents and grandparents of many of the Arab Gulf communities, as the younger generations have shaken-off the past and are embracing a modern society that resembles “Disneyland”.

Israel and some Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf had been discretely developing ties for years, as they share a common animosity of Iran. This animosity is shared by Trump, who ran on a 2016 campaign promise to break the nuclear deal with Iran, which he did.  Trump tasked Kushner with developing and selling the ‘Deal of the Century’, but it failed to be accepted by Israel and the Palestinians. As the Trump re-election bid draws near, his campaign needed a boost, and the ‘Abraham Accord’ comes at the right time.

The Gulf monarchies see Israel as a trading partner with a high-tech economy, and Israel sees them as a way to end its isolation while being infused with cash investments.

All eyes are on Saudi Arabia, and its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has suggested he is open to recognizing Israel; however, his father King Salman has maintained his position of the Saudi proposed ‘Arab Peace Initiative’ of 2002, which would give full recognition to Israel from the entire Arab world after the Palestinians were granted statehood. The ‘Abraham Accord’ affords Israel normalization with UAE and Bahrain while putting annexation of the illegal settlements of the West Bank on hold.  Saudi Arabia has already taken the first step by allowing Israeli commercial flights to use its airspace.

Kushner recently met the Saudi Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia’s Neom region, which is a massive high tech hub being built by the Kingdom and reportedly the site of the first open business deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

They discussed Palestinian issues and ways to support the US-Saudi partnership. Kushner said last month that normalization with Saudi Arabia was an “inevitability.”

Trump’s first presidential visit was to the Saudi capital, Riyadh and he has boasted about negotiating a multibillion-dollar arms sale to the kingdom while defending the Crown Prince against evidence that he ordered the brutal murder and dismemberment of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

If Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel, it would be an immense prize for Trump, and the signing ceremony would likely call for a Hollywood director’s talent to craft a royal pageant, and possible fly-over with green, white, and blue plumes in the sky.

Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq welcomed Bahrain’s decision to normalize relations with Israel and hopes it will contribute to Israeli-Palestinian peace, he said on Sunday. It is thought that Oman, Sudan, and Morocco will be the next in line to sign the accord.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist.

Featured image is from MD

Swami Agnivesh has left us. And yet he is still with us.

He was undoubtedly one of the most courageous fighters against religious fanaticism and religious bigotry of our time. He spoke out without hesitation against fanatical Hindus who distorted religious teachings to justify exclusive interpretations of the faith. Chauvinistic trends within the community that have been gaining currency in recent years —- trends that demean Hinduism’s inclusivism and universalism — earned Agnivesh’s wrath. He denounced those who resorted to narrow, bigoted interpretations of the religion’s perennial truths as traitors and opportunists.

Even before some of these more recent trends in the community, Agnivesh was already a vocal critic of caste practices and the entire caste system just as he was an uncompromising opponent of Brahminical power and influence. Widow immolation in some rural localities in India and other traditions which degraded women also incensed the reformer.

Conventional Hindu leaders like their counterparts in other religions often allowed attitudes and practices that contradicted the essence of their faith to flourish partly because they did not want to antagonise the powerful within their respective communities or because they too benefitted from the prevalence of such attitudes and practices. One such practice which Agnivesh the activist combated with all his energy for decades was bonded labour. He rightly saw it as a blot upon human dignity.

Even more abhorrent institutions and systems have co-existed with religions for millennia. Slavery and racism would be two such examples. Religion should cease to provide the cloak of legitimacy to such blatant wrongdoings including ‘Casino Capitalism’ in our age, Agnivesh insisted. Only then will faith in the Divine, belief in the Almighty, become a conduit for the expression of justice, compassion, love and other such virtues.

For Agnivesh it was the triumph of these values through human action that was the real purpose of life. Organised religion as it is presently constituted will not allow these values to reign supreme.  This is why he often espoused a deeper, broader spirituality that went beyond religion as it is normally understood.

The advocacy of a deeper spirituality at the level of the real and concrete meant defending the legitimate rights of all human beings. Agnivesh did this on numerous occasions. The rights of minorities such as Muslims and Christians in India were also his concern. It is believed that it is for championing such causes that he was assaulted by a group of hoodlums in July 2018 in the Pakur area of Jharkand state. It is alleged that Agnivesh’s assailants were linked to power and authority. They and their ilk often claim that they are defending their faith.

By standing up against such ugly forces, Agvinesh has set an outstanding example for all of us.  This is why he remains eternally relevant. This is why I had opened this obituary by emphasising that he is still with us.  Indeed, Agnivesh’s words and deeds resonant much more with us today than ever before because bigotry and fanaticism are getting stronger in many parts of the world.  Our resistance — purportedly Agnivesh’s last message as  conveyed to a friend —  should therefore also get more organised and more focussed.

There is no better way of honouring the man than by continuing his struggle which is our struggle — the struggle to nurture a true spirituality expressed through our lives while exposing a false religiosity that conceals stark hypocrisy.

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement of a Just World (JUST), Malaysia.

Veterans from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) terrorist organization feel confident that because they were once supported and backed by the US and Western Europe in their campaign to violently separate Kosovo from Serbia, they are immune from prosecution and believe that their crimes can remain hidden. However, Milovan Drecun, the president of the Working Group of the Assembly Committee for Kosovo and Metohija, will soon launch a drive aimed at international audiences to highlight the brutal crimes committed by the KLA during the Kosovo War of 1998-1999, and have those responsible prosecuted.

Drecun, a Member of the Serbian Parliament since 2012 for the Serbian Progressive Party, has been collecting facts and evidence with the working group to shed light on crimes against not only the Serbian minority in Kosovo, but also against other national communities like the Roma, Gorani (Slavic Muslims in southern Kosovo) and Bosnian Muslims. He also refutes allegations made by the Secretary of the Association of KLA War Veterans, Faton Klinaku, that the facts and evidence collected were from interviews conducted in Serbia under pressure and from threats of death.

“First, the representatives of that association are lying when they talk about the manner of questioning witnesses. Our authorities can mediate in establishing contact with our citizens with whom the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office wants to talk,” said Drecun.

Statements are taken by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, and that is a major inconsistency in the claims made by the KLA veterans association. The Specialized Prosecutor’s Office was formed on the basis of law adopted by the Pristina Parliament. Drecun highlights that his group do not hide that they “have an extremely important database and documents” and “have the names of potential witnesses for crimes committed by the criminal KLA.”

Authorities in Serbia meticulously collected all data on crimes committed during and after the 1998-1999 conflict. The findings were made available to the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office to try and establish the truth about criminal allegations and to punish perpetrators if found guilty.

“However, we now have a completely different situation here, where terrorists from the criminal KLA are trying to hide the truth and compromise the evidence available to Serbia. We have never hidden our cooperation with the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office,” said the Serbian MP.

The Republic of Albania, for example, knows a lot about KLA crimes, not only against Serbs, but also against Albanians. Drecun’s Working Group has made available the data that the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office was interested in, and if there are lawsuits, they will be verified and accepted as evidence in court.

“We will present all the documentation at our disposal, and I will present a lot of things to the entire international public through the Working Group, because we will launch an international campaign to show the extent of the criminal activities of the terrorist KLA,” Drecun announced.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was due to meet Kosovo leader Hashim Thaçi in June for a historic meeting at the White House at the behest of US envoy for Kosovo-Serbia negotiations, Richard Grenell. However, this meeting ended before it could even begin as Thaçi became indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for actions he allegedly undertook during the Kosovo War.

Thaçi in 1993 became a prominent member of the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) and became responsible for the finances and armaments of the terrorist organization. The KLA financed its activities by turning Kosovo into a drug smuggling hub to distribute heroin and cocaine throughout Europe.

A 2008 report by German intelligence service BND accuses Thaçi of having deep involvement in organized crime, saying that “The key players (including Thaçi) are intimately involved in inter-linkages between politics, business, and organised crime structures in Kosovo,” and that Thaçi is leading a “criminal network operating throughout Kosovo.” The charges laid against him by the prosecutor’s office in the Hague include murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture. He has also been accused of organ harvesting and drug trafficking by other reports and institutions.

Thaçi has not been found guilty yet, but it is well established that the KLA engaged in such activities under the watchful eye of NATO who were satisfied to allow such a prevalence of criminality to occur in order to weaken a Serbia, who especially in this period, was extremely pro-Russia. However, by ignoring such illicit activities, Kosovo has become a cemented crime hub of Europe that is now difficult to control as Western Europe continues to be flooded with narcotics and human trafficking.

Although the Working Group has ambitions to broadcast internationally the crimes of the KLA, it is likely that their finding will be ignored by the Western press. This is not only to cover their own embarrassment for supporting a drug trafficking terrorist organization, but also because Yugoslavia has already been dismantled and Kosovo is no longer a top priority for the West, even when considering the recent Belgrade-Pristina economic deal made in the US just days ago.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day, their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way, and out of trouble.

Back then, if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school or suffering through a parent-teacher conference about your shortcomings.

Of course, that was before school shootings became a part of our national lexicon.

As a result, over the course of the past 30 years, the need to keep the schools “safe” from drugs and weapons has become a thinly disguised, profit-driven campaign to transform them into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, school resource officers, strip searches, and active shooter drills.

Suddenly, under school zero tolerance policies, students were being punished with suspension, expulsion, and even arrest for childish behavior and minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight.

Things got even worse once schools started to rely on police (school resource officers) to “deal with minor rule breaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes.”

As a result, students are being subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up,” in addition to being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.

This is what constitutes a police state education these days: lessons in compliance meted out with aggressive, totalitarian tactics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has added yet another troubling layer to the ways in which students (and their families) can run afoul of a police state education now that school (virtual or in-person) is back in session.

Significant numbers of schools within the nation’s 13,000 school districts have opted to hold their classes online, in-person or a hybrid of the two, fearing further outbreaks of the virus. Yet this unprecedented foray into the virtual world carries its own unique risks.

Apart from the technological logistics of ensuring that millions of students across the country have adequate computer and internet access, consider the Fourth Amendment ramifications of having students attend school online via video classes from the privacy of their homes.

Suddenly, you’ve got government officials (in this case, teachers or anyone at the school on the other end of that virtual connection) being allowed carte blanche visual access to the inside of one’s private home without a warrant.

Anything those school officials see—anything they hear—anything they photograph or record—during that virtual visit becomes fair game for scrutiny and investigation not just by school officials but by every interconnected government agency to which that information can be relayed: the police, social services, animal control, the Department of Homeland Security, you name it.

After all, this is the age of overcriminalization, when the federal criminal code is so vast that the average American unknowingly commits about three federal felonies per day, a U.S. Attorney can find a way to charge just about anyone with violating federal law.

It’s a train wreck just waiting to happen.

Image on the right: The toy gun was neon green and black with an orange tip featuring the words on the handle: “Zombie Hunter.” (Photo illustration from Fox News)

In fact, we’re already seeing this play out across the country. For instance, a 12-year-old Colorado boy was suspended for flashing a toy gun across his computer screen during an online art class. Without bothering to notify or consult with the boy’s parents, police carried out a welfare check on Isaiah Elliott, who suffers from ADHD and learning disabilities.

An 11-year-old Maryland boy had police descend on his home in search of weapons after school officials spied a BB gun on the boy’s bedroom wall during a Google Meet class on his laptop. School officials reported the sighting to the school resource officer, who then called the police.

And in New York and Massachusetts, growing numbers of parents are being visited by social services after being reported to the state child neglect and abuse hotline, all because their kids failed to sign in for some of their online classes. Charges of neglect, in some instances, can lead to children being removed from their homes.

You see what this is, don’t you?

This is how a seemingly well-meaning program (virtual classrooms) becomes another means by which the government can intrude into our private lives, further normalizing the idea of constant surveillance and desensitizing us to the dangers of an existence in which we are never safe from the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother.

This is how the police sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for probable cause and a court-issued warrant in order to spy us on in the privacy of our homes: by putting school officials in a position to serve as spies and snitches via online portals and virtual classrooms, and by establishing open virtual doorways into our homes through which the police can enter uninvited and poke around.

Welfare checks. Police searches for weapons. Reports to Social Services.

It’s only a matter of time before the self-righteous Nanny State uses this COVID-19 pandemic as yet another means by which it can dictate every aspect of our lives.

At the moment, it’s America’s young people who are the guinea pigs for the police state’s experiment in virtual authoritarianism. Already, school administrators are wrestling with how to handle student discipline for in-person classes and online learning in the midst of COVID-19.

Mark my words, this will take school zero tolerance policies—and their associated harsh disciplinary penalties—to a whole new level once you have teachers empowered to act as the Thought Police.

As Kalyn Belsha reports for Chalkbeat,

“In Jacksonville, Florida, students who don’t wear a mask repeatedly could be removed from school and made to learn online. In some Texas districts, intentionally coughing on someone can be classified as assault. In Memphis, minor misbehaviors could land students in an online ‘supervised study.’”

Depending on the state and the school district, failing to wear a face mask could constitute a dress code violation. In Utah, not wearing a face mask at school constitutes a criminal misdemeanor. In Texas, it’s considered an assault to intentionally spit, sneeze, or cough on someone else. Anyone removing their mask before spitting or coughing could be given a suspension from school.

Virtual learning presents its own challenges with educators warning dire consequences for students who violate school standards for dress code and work spaces, even while “learning” at home. According to Chalkbeat,

“In Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis, that means no pajamas, hats, or hoods on screen, and students’ shirts must have sleeves. (The district is providing ‘flexibility’ on clothing bottoms and footwear when a student’s full body won’t be seen on video.) Other rules might be even tougher to follow: The district is also requiring students’ work stations to be clear of ‘foreign objects’ and says students shouldn’t eat or drink during virtual classes.”

See how quickly the Nanny State a.k.a. Police State takes over?

All it takes for you to cease being the master of your own home is to have a child engaged in virtual learning. Suddenly, the government gets to have a say in how you order your space and when those in your home can eat and drink and what clothes they wear.

If you think the schools won’t overreact in a virtual forum, you should think again.

These are the same schools that have been plagued by a lack of common sense when it comes to enforcing zero tolerance policies for weapons, violence and drugs.

These are the very same schools that have exposed students to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

Zero tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the use of actual drugs and weapons by students have turned students into suspects to be treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, while criminalizing childish behavior.

For instance, 9-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension after school officials discovered that one of his LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun. David Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his school’s zero tolerance policies after he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and tiny plastic Army figures in honor of American troops. School officials declared the hat out of bounds because the toy soldiers were carrying miniature guns.

A high school sophomore was suspended for violating the school’s no-cell-phone policy after he took a call from his father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army who was serving in Iraq at the time. In Houston, an 8th grader was suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in memory of her grandmother (the school has a zero tolerance policy against the rosary, which the school insists can be interpreted as a sign of gang involvement).

Even imaginary weapons (hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in detention. Equally outrageous was the case in New Jersey where several kindergartners were suspended from school for three days for playing a make-believe game of “cops and robbers” during recess and using their fingers as guns.

With the distinctions between student offenses erased, and all offenses expellable, we now find ourselves in the midst of what Time magazine described as a “national crackdown on Alka-Seltzer.” Students have actually been suspended from school for possession of the fizzy tablets in violation of zero tolerance drug policies. Students have also been penalized for such inane “crimes” as bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades.

A 13-year-old boy in Manassas, Virginia, who accepted a Certs breath mint from a classmate, was actually suspended and required to attend drug-awareness classes, while a 12-year-old boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project was charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug.

Acts of kindness, concern, basic manners or just engaging in childish behavior can also result in suspensions.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Screenshot from CBS News

In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to disturb a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”

Things get even worse when you add police to the mix.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003). What this means, notes Mother Jones, is greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.

The horror stories are legion.

One SRO is accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting in the cafeteria line. That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.

In Pennsylvania, a student was tased after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.

A 12-year-old New York student was hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. Another 12-year-old was handcuffed and jailed after he stomped in a puddle, splashing classmates.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

For example, a 4-year-old Virginia preschooler was handcuffed, leg shackled and transported to the sheriff’s office after reportedly throwing blocks and climbing on top of the furniture. School officials claim the restraints were necessary to protect the adults from injury.

A 6-year-old kindergarten student in a Georgia public school was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and charged with simple battery of a schoolteacher and criminal damage to property for throwing a temper tantrum at school.

This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.

Yet these police state tactics did not made the schools any safer.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, police state tactics never make anyone safer so much as they present the illusion of safety and indoctrinate the populace to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

Now with virtual learning in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, the stakes are even higher.

It won’t be long before you start to see police carrying out knock-and-talk investigations based on whatever speculative information is gleaned from those daily virtual classroom sessions that allow government officials entry to your homes in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It won’t take much at all for SWAT teams to start crashing through doors based on erroneous assumptions about whatever mistaken “contraband” someone may have glimpsed in the background of a virtual classroom session: a maple leaf that looks like marijuana, a jar of sugar that looks like cocaine, a toy gun, someone playfully shouting for help in the distance.

This may sound far-fetched now, but it’s only a matter of time before this slippery slope becomes yet another mile marker on the one-way road to tyranny.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

A Beijing-Brussels-Berlin special: that was quite the video-summit.

From Beijing, we had President Xi Jinping. From Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel. And from Brussels, President of the European Council Charles Michel and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. The Chinese billed it as the first summit “of its kind in history”.

It was actually the second high-level meeting of the Chinese and European leadership in two months. And it took place only a few days after a high-level tour by Foreign Minister Wang Yi encompassing France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, and the visit by the powerful “Yoda” of the State Council, Yang Jiechi, to Spain and Greece.

The Holy Grail at the end of all these meetings – face-to-face and virtual – is the China-EU investment treaty. Germany currently heads the EU presidency for six months. Berlin wanted the treaty to be signed at a summit in Leipzig this month uniting the EU-27 and Beijing. But Covid-19 had other plans.

So the summit was metastasized into this mini videoconference. The treaty is still supposed to be signed before the end of 2020.

Adding an intriguing note, the mini-summit also happened one day before Premier Li Keqiang attended a Special Virtual Dialogue with Business Leaders, promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It’s unclear whether Li will discuss the intricacies of the Great Reset with Klaus Schwab – not to mention whether China subscribes to it.

We are “still committed”

The mini EU-China video summit was quite remarkable for its very discreet spin. The EU, officially, now considers China as both an essential partner and a “strategic rival”. Brussels is adamant on its will to “cooperate” while defending is notorious human rights “values”.

As for the investment treaty, the business Holy Grail which has been under negotiation for seven years now, Ursula von der Leyen said “there’s still much to be done”.

What the EU essentially wants is equal treatment for their companies in China, similar to how Chinese companies are treated inside the EU. Diplomats confirmed the key areas are telecoms, the automobile market – which should be totally open – and the end of unfair competition by Chinese steel.

Last week, the head of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, threw an extra spanner in the works, telling Die Zeit that “we categorically condemn every form of oppression, forced labor and threat to human rights”, referring to Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

That caused quite a stir. At least 10% of Siemens business is generated in China, where the company is present since 1872 and employs over 35,000 people. Siemens was forced to publicly state that it is “still committed” to China.

China has been Germany’s top trade partner since 2017 – ahead of France and the US. So it’s no wonder alarm bells started to ring, on and off. It was in January last year that the BDI – the Federation of German Industries – first defined China as a “systemic competitor”, and not only as a “partner”. The concern was centered on market “distortions” and the barriers against German competition inside China.

The mini video-summit took place as the trade war unleashed by Washington against Beijing has reached Cold War 2.0 proportions. EU diplomats, uncomfortably, and off the record, admit that the Europeans are caught in the middle and the only possible strategy is to try to advance their economic interests while insisting on the same panacea of human rights.

Thus the official EU demand this Monday – unreported in Chinese media: allow us to send “independent observers” to Xinjiang.

Those Uighur jihadis

So we’re back, inevitably, to the hyper-incandescent issue of Xinjiang  “concentration camps”.

The Atlanticist establishment has unleashed a ferocious, no holds barred campaign to shape the narrative that Beijing is conducting no less than cultural genocide in Xinjiang.

Apart from United States government rhetoric, the campaign is mostly conducted by “influencer” US thinks tanks such as this one, which issue reports that turn viral on Western corporate media.

One of these reports quotes “numerous firsthand accounts from Uighurs” who are defined as “employed” to perform forced labor. As a result, the global supply chain, according to the report, is “likely tainted with forced labor”.

The operative word is “likely”. As in Russia is “likely” interfering in US elections and “likely” poisoning opponents of the Kremlin. There’s no way to verify the accuracy of the sources quoted in these reports – which happen to be conveniently financed by “multiple donors interested in commerce in Asia.” Who are these donors? What is their agenda? Who will profit from the kind of “commerce in Asia” they are pushing?

On a personal level, Xinjiang was at the top of my travel priorities this year – then laid to rest by Covid-19 – because I want to check by myself all aspects of what’s really goin’ on in China’s Far West.

As it stands, US copycat “influencers” in the EU are having free reign to impose the narrative about Uighur forced labor, stressing that the clothes Europeans are wearing “could” – and the operative word is “could” – be made by forced laborers.

Don’t expect the Atlanticist network to even bother to offer context in terms of China fighting terrorism in Xinjiang.

In the old al-Qaeda days, I visited and interviewed Uighur jihadis locked up in a sprawling prison set up by the mujahideen under commander Masoud in the Panjshir valley. They had all been indoctrinated by imams preaching in Saudi-financed madrassas across Xinjiang.

More recently, Uighur Salafi-jihadis have been very active in Syria: at least 5,000, according to the Syrian embassy in Beijing.

Beijing knows exactly what would happen if they return to Xinjiang, as much as Moscow knows what would happen if Chechen jihadis return to the Caucasus.

So it’s no wonder that China has to act. That includes closing madrassas, detaining imams and arresting – and “re-“educating” – possible jihadis and their families.

Forget about the West offering context about the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), which declared an Islamic Emirate, ISIS/Daesh-style, in November 2019 in Idlib, northwest Syria. TIP was founded in Xinjiang 12 years ago and has been very active in Syria since 2011 – exactly the same year when they claimed to be responsible for a terror operation in Kashgar which killed 23 people.

It’s beyond pathetic that the West killed and displaced Muslim multitudes – directly and indirectly – with the “war on terror” just to become oh so worried with the plight of the Uighurs.

It’s more enlightening to remember history. As in the autumn of 821, when princess Taihe, sister of a Tang dynasty emperor, rode in a Bactrian camel, her female attendants following her in treasured Ferghana horses, all the way from the imperial palace in Chang’an to the land of the Uighurs.

Princess Taihe had been chosen as a living tribute – and was on her way to wed the Uighur kaghan to cement their peoples’ friendship. She came from the east, but her dress and ornaments were from the west, from the Central Asian steppes and deserts where she would live her new life.

And by the way, the Uighurs and the Tang dynasty were allies.

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Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In a solemn ceremony at the White House today, President Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of UAE and Bahrain for the signing of the accord establishing formal diplomatic relations between the three countries.

Oman could be next in line as its late Sultan Qaboos had already hosted Israeli prime minister once before, though Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are unlikely to establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the near term, because being conservative monarchies, they are more receptive to mainstream Arab sentiment firmly against Israel for violating the rights of the Palestinians.

Existence of informal ties between the Gulf States and Israel is no secret. They’ve been fighting wars together in regional conflicts against Iran and allied forces, notably in Syria, for almost a decade. But it must’ve taken some persuasive skills by the Trump administration to convince Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin al-Khalifa to formally recognize Israel in the run-up to the US presidential elections slated for November 3.

Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened [1] that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.

Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in North America and Western Europe.

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report [2] authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the newly released book “Rage.”

Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.

Similarly, when King Abdullah’s successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of trillions of dollars to the Western economies.

Washington’s interest in Syria’s proxy war has been mainly about conceding to security concerns of the Gulf’s autocrats and ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [3] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State until October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a civil war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobby in Washington, however, the former Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Syrian government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Iranian resistance axis, which is comprised of Tehran, Damascus and their Lebanon-based surrogate, Hezbollah. During the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah and its patrons posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what would happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel. Therefore, the Zionist lobbies in Washington literally coerced then-President Obama to coordinate a proxy war against Damascus and its Lebanon-based surrogate Hezbollah in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of Syrian militants and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the eight-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [4] in January last year, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his shift in strategy in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [5] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel’s air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Though after Russia provided S-300 missile system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli incursion into the Syrian airspace, on September 2018, killing 15 Russians onboard, the Israeli airstrikes in Syria have been significantly scaled down.

Following the incident, though Israel has conducted occasional airstrikes in Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria and Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, Israeli airstrikes in northwest Syria, which is within the range of missile defense systems deployed at Hmeimim Air Base near coastal Latakia, have almost entirely ceased.

Taking cover of the Israeli airstrikes, Washington has conducted several airstrikes of its own on targets in Syria and Iraq and blamed them on Israel, which frequently mounts air and missile strikes against Iranian operatives and Hezbollah militia in Syria and Lebanon.

Besides the airstrikes on the missile storage facilities of Iran-backed militias in Iraq, it is suspected that the US air force was also behind an airstrike last year at the newly built Imam Ali military base in eastern Syria at al-Bukamal-Qaim border crossing alleged to be hosting the Iranian Quds Force operatives.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-warns-ofeconomic-fallout-if-congress-passes-9-11-bill.html?_r=0 

[2] The Obama administration’s arms sales offers to Saudi top $115 billion:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ

[3] The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report of 2012:

http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

[4] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html

[5] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/benjamin-netanyahu-admits-israel-to-blame-for-damascus-strikes-1.812590

Featured image: White House photo

Once again, the whispers of phantoms masquerading as administration officials have attempted to put Donald Trump on the defensive only two months before the fall election. And in typical fashion, the roused president has gone on an immediate rhetorical offensive.

Trump has doubled down on his affirmations towards the U.S. military and the American soldier, while simultaneously confronting the class of generals who command them.

“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me—the soldiers are,” Trump said at a Labor Day press conference. “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” 

This is a dramatic shift in perspective from the man who spent the first two years of his presidency surrounding himself with top brass like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and James Mattis (along with almost being beguiled into nominating David Petraeus as Secretary of State). Perhaps Trump learned the hard way that the generals of the forever wars don’t measure up to the twentieth-century soldiers he adulated growing up. 

For instance, when George Marshall oversaw the deployment of 8.3 million GIs across four continents in World War II, he did so with the assistance of only three other four-star generals. In retirement, Marshall refused to sit on any corporate boards, and passed on multiple lucrative book deals, lest he give the impression that he was profiting from his military record. As he told one publisher, “he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.”

The day before yesterday, Serbian President Vucic was ridiculed by signing an agreement in the White House without even knowing what said agreement contained. It was a dark day in the history of one of the most heroic peoples of the Balkans and of all Europe, and also constitutes a very serious warning to all the Balkan nations.

According to what we know so far, Serbia and Kosovo signed an economic cooperation agreement in the Oval Office of the White House in the presence of Trump. Serbia has said it is moving its Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and Kosovo is recognizing Israel and opening an embassy in Jerusalem. The two sides also denounced the actions of the Lebanese Hezbollah and agreed to participate in the international campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. The agreements were reached as part of a US-Israeli initiative to resolve the Kosovo issue, which includes measures against China (5G) and Russia (gas). In Serbia, however, President Vucic is already sharply criticized for the agreement as indirectly acknowledging Kosovo’s secession.

Any free and dignified man can feel only deep sorrow for the kind of humiliation these Serbian “leaders” have put on their people, the people who fought the Austrians almost alone in World War I, who resisted as few to both Hitler and Stalin, who resisted for ten years NATO’s imperialism and its bombing. For the people who founded Yugoslavia of self-management, seeking an alternative between Capitalism and Stalinism, Yugoslavia which was the pride of both East and West throughout the post-war period, starring in the Non-Aligned Movement, along with Soekarno’s Indonesia and Makarios’ Cyprus.

The agreement mercilessly illuminates the planned and already realized future of the entire Balkans, now turning into a zone of miserable American-Israeli protectorates, destined to be a giant military base against Russia and Islam, but also a wedge on the side of the “old” Europe. A pioneer in the emerging new Capitalism of Mafia and Crime, with a number of micro-states whose main economic activity tends to be all kinds of smuggling of products, weapons, drugs and people.

It would be interesting to hear from those who supported (from both the European Left and the European Right) the dismantling of Yugoslavia by Imperialism, with various arguments, supposedly “anti-nationalist” and “in defense of human rights” , for them to tell us how they regard this agreement. How do they comment on the practical conversion of a large part of all the Balkan peoples into defacto slavery? Do they like it? How do they see the prospect of a Europe surrounded by miserable protectorates?

The only hope now is that the Serbian people and the Serbian army again find the strength to overthrow those who “rule” their defeated nation, but it is not certain that they will succeed, nor that they still have the strength to do so.

In 1993, Serbian resistance to imperialism began to wake Yeltsin’s Russia to the West’s real intentions against it, although this awakening came too late and it was too reluctant to save Serbia. One can at least hope that the great geopolitical defeat Moscow is now experiencing in the Balkans from Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s action will cure it of some delusions quite common in Russia.

History is never a one-way street. The Americans managed to organize a coup in Kiev in 2013, forgetting that where evil grows, the means to fight it also appear (Henderlin). Two years later they saw the Russian army in Syria and they could not believe their eyes.

The (erroneous) sense of omnipotence that leads to such adventurism today is exactly what is preparing disasters for both the United States and Israel tomorrow. The real question is what cost humanity will have to pay to discover it.

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Dimitris Konstantakopoulos is a journalist, expert in geopolitics (Greece).

Featured image is from United World

Already strained EU relations with Russia potentially reached a new low over the great novichok poisoning of Alexey Navalny hoax.

On Tuesday, Russia’s EU mission challenged the bloc’s fake news about what happened to him, saying the following:

“In recent weeks, we have been witnessing a rapidly growing information campaign in the EU — both in official circles and media — over an incident which occurred with a Russian political activist and blogger Alexey Navalny on 20 August 2020,” adding:

“Not claiming to be experts in toxicology, we still consider it necessary to draw your attention to multiple inconsistencies regarding this case.”

“In the light of forthcoming debate in the European Parliament, we call on EU officials and MEPs to look into a number of following questions.”

“Would there be any rationale behind the Russian authorities’ alleged decision to poison Alexey Navalny with the use of a military-grade chemical nerve agent of the ‘novichok’ group, which falls under CWC ban, in a Russian city with half a million population and then to do their utmost to save his life and let him go for further medical treatment to Germany, where ‘ovichok’ could (allegedly) be identified?”

“What would be the reason for the Russian authorities to poison Alexey Navalny, taking into account that his actual popularity level hardly reaches 2%, according to the recent survey conducted in July 2020 by Levada Centre, an independent nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization?”

On the same day, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service head Sergei Naryshkin said the following:

Russian “medics at the Omsk hospital, who saved Alexei Navalny’s life, conducted a deep complex of examinations in a short time span, including examinations for presence of toxic and…poisonous substances.”

“These examinations were performed using the newest equipment and in compliance with the strictest medical protocols.”

Their comprehensive tests found no toxins of any kind in his blood, urine, liver, or elsewhere in his system — no traces of novichok or other nerve agent poisoning that would have killed him before boarding a flight from Tomsk, Russia to Moscow.

Naryshkin stressed that

“(w)e  have a lot of questions to the German side, and the Prosecutor General’s Office requested aid in the investigation twice, but there is still no response” — suggesting a cover-up by Berlin.

Russian lower house State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin called the Navalny incident an anti-Kremlin US-led Western provocation aimed at hampering Russian development by wanting construction of its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany halted.

Russian State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Leonid Slutsky said (unlawful) Western sanctions imposed on the country and/or its officials over the Navalny incident will amount to “dirty political scheming.”

He stressed that in 2017, the OPCW confirmed the entire elimination of Russia’s chemical weapons.

On October 11, 2017 in the Hague, Netherlands, during the organizatioin’s 86th Executive Council session, a ceremony was held to mark Russia’s achievement.

A statement by OPCW director general Ahmet Uzumcu “acknowledged the remarkable achievement by the Russian Federation and presented a memorable certificate to Deputy Minister Kalamanov marking the full destruction of the 39,967 metric tons of Russian chemical weapons.”

Separately on September 27, 2017, Uzumcu said the following:

“The completion of the verified destruction of Russia’s chemical weapons programme is a major milestone in the achievement of the goals of the Chemical Weapons Convention.”

“I congratulate Russia and I commend all of their experts who were involved for their professionalism and dedication.”

On Tuesday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell falsely accused Russia of poisoning Navalny despite no evidence suggesting it, adding:

The Navalny incident “will have an impact on European Union-Russia relations,” an issue to be “discuss(ed) in the next Foreign Affairs Council” meeting.

At a European parliament plenary session, Borrell defied reality by claiming “irrefutable evidence that a nerve agent of the novichok  group…was used to try to assassinate Mr Navalny (sic),” adding:

“I hope that what has happened to Mr Navalny will represent an encouragement for member states to…approv(e) (a) human rights sanctions regime…”

“(W)e could call it the ‘Navalny sanctions regime” — a way to continue unjustifiably bash Russia to undermine normalized relations with the EU.

On issues relating to Nord Stream 2, Borrell said it’s for nations involved in its construction to handle, not Brussels.

Will the Navalny novichok poisoning hoax undermine the nearly completed Russian gas pipeline to Germany, along with Kremlin/EU relations?

Will Berlin and other Western capitals shoot themselves in the foot to benefit imperial USA?

A Final Comment

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke to his German counterpart Heiko Mass on Tuesday.

According to a ministry press release they “focused on the state of and prospects for Russian-German relations, and the development of bilateral and international cooperation against the backdrop of the Alexey Navalny case,” adding:

Lavrov stressed that Moscow is willing to cooperate with Berlin on this issue.

It’s waiting for relevant German bodies to provide information requested by “the Russian Prosecutor’s Office on August 27 and September 14” so far not sent.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry explained that Moscow’s request is “in accordance with the European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters of April 20, 1959 and the additional protocols to it of March 17, 1978 and November 8, 2001,” adding:

“This legal agreement implies the transfer of the bio materials, test results, clinical analyses and medical documents required for a meticulous, comprehensive investigation into the reasons for Navalny’s illness and hospitalization, which (Western countries are) actively urging us to conduct in public.”

If Germany continues to stonewall Russia, it will clearly show “a lack of desire to establish the truth following an objective and comprehensive investigation into the incident.”

Lavrov called on his German counterpart Heiko Mass “to stop any further politicizing of the Navalny case,” adding:

Moscow rejects unacceptable claims about “the independence” of judicial bodies and need to request approval by Navalny and his family to release information Germany has about his medical condition.

This runs counter to the above-mentioned convention, said Lavrov.

As for involvement of the OPCW,  it’s unrelated to Russia’s request for Germany to provide relevant information on Navalny.

While bilateral differences weren’t resolved on Tuesday, both ministers agreed to continue dialogue on the Navalny and other international issues.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

That was one of the more extraordinary interviews we have done here at UnHerd.

Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO, lays out with typically Swedish bluntness why he thinks:

• UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
• The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
• This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
• The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
• The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
• The paper was very much too pessimistic
• Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
• The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
• The results will eventually be similar for all countries
• Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
• The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
• At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available

In just a few short months Anders Tegnell, architect of Sweden’s unique response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has gone from unknown physician and technocrat to a household celebrity in Sweden and in countries around the world. He is beloved by some (people have even had tattoos made with his face) and intensely disliked by others. Today he is suntanned and relaxed, having just returned from his summer holiday, and wearing an open-necked polo shirt. Here is a summary of what he said:

• In terms of migrants, travel and urban areas Sweden is more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than Norway or Finland
• Lockdown may have made a difference, but closing schools and people being out of work is also bad for public health
• Numbers of new infections arriving at the same time seems to make a big difference, so Stockholm half-term travellers to the Alps a big factor for Stockholm epidemic
• Eradication is not an option, ‘we have to learn to live with this disease’
• Evidence for masks still very weak, and they may yet be counterproductive. With all the trends going sharply down, it would make no sense to introduce them now
• Additional immunity such as T cells playing a substantial role in slowing spread
• ‘what we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else has changed.’
• Sweden will be better placed than other countries to limit further waves and outbreaks because of higher immunity
• IFR of Covid-19 in final account will be 0.1% to 0.5% “and that is not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu”
• Judge me in a year, he says.

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If you say “September 11” most people automatically think of the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What they probably don’t even remember happened on September 11, were the attacks on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

Once the Libyan Revolution began in February 2011, the CIA began placing assets in the region, attempting to make contacts within the region. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, whose name and image would soon become synonymous with the Benghazi attacks, was the first liaison between the United States and the rebels. The task before the American intelligence community at that time was securing arms in the country, most notably shoulder-fired missiles, taken from the Libyan military.

Eastern Libya and Benghazi were the primary focal points of intelligence-gathering in the country. But there was something else at work here: The CIA was using the country as a base to funnel weapons to anti-Assad forces in Syria, as well as their alleged diplomatic mission.

Early Rumblings of Disorder in Benghazi

Trouble started in April 2012. This was when two former security guards of the consulate threw an IED over the fence. No casualties were reported, but another bomb was thrown at a convoy just four days later. Soon after, in May, the office of the International Red Cross in Benghazi was attacked and the local al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility. On August 6, the Red Cross suspended operations in Libya.

This was all part of a troubling escalation of violence in the region. The British Ambassador Dominic Asquith was the victim of an assassination attempt on June 10, 2012. As a result of this and of rocket attacks on convoys, the British withdrew their entire consular staff from Libya in late June of that year.

American military and consular personnel on the scene were increasingly troubled by the situation and communicated their concerns to top brass through official channels. Two security guards in the consulate noticed a Libyan police officer (or at least someone dressed as one) taking pictures of the building, which raised alarms. Indeed, consular officials had been requesting additional security as far back as March.

On June 6, 2012, a large hole was blown in the wall of the consulate gate. It was estimated that 40 men could go through the hole in the wall. In July, the State Department informed officials on the ground that the existing security contract would not be renewed. On August 2, Ambassador Stephens requested additional security detail. The State Department responded by completely removing his security detail three days later. Three days after this, his security detail had left Libya entirely. On August 16, the regional security officer warned then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the security situation in Libya was “dire.”

The Day of the Attack on Benghazi: The Cover-Up Begins

The September 11, 2012 attack was actually two attacks by two separate militias. The first was the attack on the diplomatic mission, the second was a mortar attack on the CIA annex. But the attacks themselves were effectively watched in real time by the White House, thanks to security drones in the region. By 5:10pm ET, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta were watching real-time footage via a drone deployed to the area.

Half an hour later, the State Department officially refused to deploy the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST). FEST exists specifically for rapid response to terrorist attacks around the world and have special training with regard to defending American embassies. Within three hours, an Islamic group in the region had claimed responsibility for the attack. Approximately six hours after the first shots were fired, two former Navy SEALs who constituted the only serious defense forces for the consulate were killed by enemy fire. The surveillance drone had been watching them fight on their own for over two hours.

At 10:30 that night, Hillary Clinton nebulously blamed “inflammatory material on the Internet” for the attack. The notion that the attack was motivated by Innocence of Muslims was absurd: On the day before the attack, the leader of al-Qaeda in the region called for vengeance due to the death of his secretary. Three days after the attack, Stephens’ personal diary was found unsecured, along with all the other sensitive intelligence information in the compound.

For days, the film was blamed despite the White House having full knowledge that it was a terrorist attack. Indeed, on September 14, Barack Obama promised the father of one of the slain Navy SEALs not that he would bring to justice those who planned the attack, but the man who made the movie.

On September 20, 2012, the White House spent $70,000 on apology videos for the film. One day later, ten days after the attack, Clinton admitted to the public what she had known for over a week: That this was a coordinated terrorist attack. However, on the 25th, President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations once again blaming the video, giving what is perhaps one of the more memorable quotes of his presidency: “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”

On September 27, 2012, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested in Los Angeles for parole violations, all of which were related to his production of the film and served a year in jail. He was later sentenced to death in absentia by the Egyptian government.

Barack Obama did not attend his daily intelligence briefing for six consecutive days prior to the attacks, instead campaigning for re-election against Mitt Romney.

Susan Rice, then acting as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, made the rounds on no fewer than five major Sunday morning talk shows, a process known as “the Full Ginsburg.” On these shows, she was armed with a set of talking points from the CIA. These talking points included the false assertion that these were spontaneous protests inspired by similar protests against the American Embassy in Cairo, with no connection to institutional terrorism.

The Rice appearances and the talking points she was provided with further confirm a general pattern: The Obama Administration was fundamentally incapable of acknowledging who the real enemy was. And when things went wrong, the focus was not on setting them right to protect Americans in the future, but on protecting the image of the Obama Administration – most notably the President and the Secretary of State. Hence the blame was shifted from Islamic terrorist groups onto a YouTube video.

The (Seemingly Endless) Benghazi Investigations

There were no fewer than 10 investigations of the attack on Benghazi, none of which found evidence of wrongdoing, despite several of them having been run by Republicans.

However, the American public did get some valuable information out of these hearings, not least of all that Hillary Clinton doesn’t value the lives of American servicemen. For example, the attention of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails first came to the State Department and the United States Congress thanks to these investigations. Indeed, approximately 30 of the “gone with the wind” emails from her private, home-brewed server related to the non-response to the attack on Benghazi. This is according to the State Department itself.

But still the question remains: Why let these men die? And why lie about it for days after the fact?

The answer lies in two political concerns: First, the re-election of Barack Obama, second the planned candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

The date of the attack is very important: This was the final weeks of a presidential election campaign. And while Obama won handily (in no small part due to the aloof, patrician image of Bain Capital principal Mitt Romney), he is nothing if not a savvy politician. An attack on the United States Consulate in Libya was not something he wanted in public consciousness during an election season, not least of all if it were the result of a terrorist attack from what had formerly been a stable nation, slowly coming into the fold of what is euphemistically called “the International Community.”

For Clinton, the situation was even more dire. She effectively “owned” the situation in Libya, as the remaking (and ultimately destruction) of North Africa was one of the signature projects of her tenure at State. What’s more, she certainly owned the security situation on the ground, which likely was never secure.

The building was given the designation of “temporary,” largely to get around a number of regulations that apply to permanent State Department buildings. The request for more security from Ambassador Stephens might have been ill advised not because it was impossible to secure the location in any kind of long-term and sustainable way. The right move might very well have been to remove American personnel entirely, but this would have gone against the official narrative that everything was going swimmingly in Libya.

Other countries and organizations (such as the Red Cross) were leaving because they could not protect their people. The Clinton State Department saw this as unthinkable, because it would represent a failure and contradict the narrative.

And while Republican-led committees did not find any wrongdoing, it’s important to note that they also complained of being stonewalled by the administration at every turn. It’s hard to uncover evidence of wrongdoing when there is an institutional campaign to prevent you from getting any evidence at all.

A number of whistleblowers and other sources show that there were additional forces ready to go in the region to defend the consulate. So why were none of them deployed? Why were four American lives lost due to inaction at the highest levels of government?

Why no one was deployed is perhaps down more to incompetence and bad policy than any kind of a conspiracy. Our article on 9/11 is instructive on this matter: sometimes the cover-up is a conspiracy to conceal idiocy and failure of the actual event. In the case of Benghazi, while there is evidence to point toward a politically motivated cover-up, the actual event, like the 9/11 attacks, seems mostly to be a result of bad policy and incompetence rather than malice.

In this case, the bad policy was the Obama Administration’s desire to avoid even the appearance of “boots on the ground” and hand wringing about getting the permission of Libya (and about 12 other countries) to deploy assistance to the consulate. This was part of the general political philosophy of appeasement of Islamic terrorists that marked the Obama Administration.

This explains the stand-down orders which official sources have denied, but which have been confirmed by a number of whistleblowers and leaked documents since the attacks.

Both the President and the Secretary of Defense issued orders to deploy forces, but none were deployed. Once the Ambassador was confirmed as missing, a two-hour meeting ensued where top men within the Obama Administration came up with a number of action items, mostly revolving around the YouTube video (fully five of ten action items were related to the video) and hand wringing regarding a lack of permission from the Libyan government to protect our own forces.

The Americans in the CIA Annex were eventually evacuated to the airport by members of a militia comprised of former Qadaffi regime loyalists, notthe opposition militias that were nominally allied with the United States. Meanwhile, actual American forces spent a bunch of time putting on and taking off their uniforms and tactical gear because the instructions from Washington changed by the minute.

It was a total paralysis of action on the ground by the top brass in D.C., because they were afraid of it looking like ground forces were being deployed, both from the perspective of the political response at home and the political response in Libya. As a result, four Americans died and a massive cover-up was rolled out to protect those responsible for grossly negligent inaction.

After the fact, emails were sent out, the purpose of which was less about finding out what went wrong to prevent it from happening again and to assign responsibility, than it was about making sure everyone was on the same page with regard to talking points.

The attack on Benghazi, the deaths of four Americans and the ensuing cover-up are an insightful view into the reality lurking behind many so-called “conspiracy theories.” What began as bureaucratic bungling and ideologically driven hamfistedness became a cover-up and, in a sense, a conspiracy after the fact. None of this is meant to let Obama-Clinton off the hook. Indeed, none of the criticisms of Obama-Clinton become any less sharp when they are considered as incompetence and butt-covering.

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Featured image is from Ammo.com

The loud applause that followed the US-brokered Mideast “peace” deals between “Israel” on one hand and the UAE & Bahrain on the other is misplaced since there was never any real state of war between the “opposing” sides to begin with, but presenting these accords as a “breakthrough for peace” is meant to pressure those remaining countries that refuse to recognize the self-professed “Jewish State” by portraying them as “obstacles to peace” so that they too consider abandoning their principled support for Palestine in exchange for positive media coverage and other perks such as economic support.

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Hear from Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet speaking at the Keep Our NHS Public AGM 2020.

Horton asks and tentatively answers five questions:

1. What is the current situation with the pandemic with focus on the United Kingdom?
2. What lessons might we learn from the past eight months?
3. What could we have done better?
4. Will we have a vaccine? Not when will we have a vaccine.
5. What should the government do now?

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As I wrote last week, Kevin Zeese died unexpectedly in his sleep, likely from a heart attack, early in the morning on September 6. He had not shown signs of illness and was working until the end.

Many of you know Kevin from Popular Resistance, from his writing and podcast Clearing the FOG. He had a deep knowledge of history and the issues. He often spoke of his time working for Ralph Nader in 2004 when he wrote policy briefs as a “PhD in public policy.” Kevin understood how political power works.

Kevin’s work in activism spanned more than 40 years. He worked on political campaigns during high school in Queens, New York and protested the Vietnam War. When radical lawyers Ramsey Clark and William Kunstler spoke at SUNY Buffalo, where he was studying political science, Kevin was inspired to join the civil rights movement. He went to Boston to be a marshal for an anti-racism march and was attacked with others by police on horseback.

During law school at George Washington University, Kevin’s favorite class was on legal activism. He describes the experience in Americans Who Tell the Truth:

“‘We created a group SEXCE (Students for the Examination of Contraceptive Effectiveness) and got legislation introduced in Congress, got the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to correct their advertising, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to start a rulemaking process to correct their labeling. It was pretty amazing to see all of that come out of one law school course on Legal Activism.’ Through this project, Zeese says he ‘learned guerilla law and legal judo’—how to leverage the law with minimum cost and maximum impact.”

Kevin’s first internship was with the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) answering letters from prisoners. He said this gave him a deep understanding of the destructive impact the War on Drugs has on people and their families. After law school, Kevin worked as legal counsel for NORML and then as executive director. He was working to legalize marijuana when Reagan was president and popular opinion strongly supported the Drug War. Kevin sued the Drug Enforcement Agency three times over the reclassification of medical marijuana and won, but each time the decision was overturned on appeal.

During this time, Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee who worked with the racist head of the Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond, to push for a ‘drug czar’ (Reagan vetoed that) and for more severe punishments. Kevin called Biden the architect of the drug war and mass incarceration.

After NORML, Kevin created the Drug Policy Foundation, which later became the Drug Policy Alliance, and the Alliance of Reform Organizations, which brought all of the groups working on various aspects of the Drug War together as one movement. Kevin understood early on that popular power required building a movement of movements to be effective. He often worked to create unity and collaboration among people and organizations.

Arnold Trebach (left) and young Kevin Zeese (right) who founded the Drug Policy Foundation.

In his later years, Kevin’s advocacy work expanded to include peace, economic justice, election integrity, single payer health care and much more. He often recognized issues as important before they were popular and had the courage to take them on even when they were controversial. He had a moral clarity that was unwavering and told the truth even when it was not what people wanted to hear.

Kevin also saw the potential in people and wasn’t afraid to tell them. He touched the lives of and mentored countless people throughout his career. Kevin was the person many people turned to for guidance and assistance, whether it was helping them figure out what they want to do in life or what to do in a time of crisis or advice on strategy. People felt safe when Kevin was around because of his calm steadiness and he always seemed to know what to do. He was a gentle giant who looked out for everyone. He also had a great sense of humor and loved to laugh.

The weekend before his death, Kevin participated in an online rally about how to build power for the changes we need before and after the coming election. He spoke to us about what we must do (video and transcription):

Power to the people! We have the power to change if we stay united. We have incredible opportunity now. We see the movement’s growing, especially after the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention. The conventions showed us that those parties do not represent the people and that our power is not in elections. Our power is in building people power — and we see that happening.

We need to build power, so that in 2021 people can rule from below. So that we can call general strikes. So we can stop business as usual. That is the only way change will occur. It will not come from Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It will come from the people.

We also have to understand — and it’s often very hard for people to understand — that the only path to success is failure. We fail and fail and fail until we win. But every time we try, we build the movement. And we get stronger. We can never tell how close we are to success. It’s like we’re banging on a wall, pounding and pounding, and it’s not until that wall begins to crack and we start to see the light come through that we realize we’re getting close to that breakthrough moment when change can occur.

We see the 2020s as a decade of transformation. The movements have been growing since Occupy in 2011,  then the Black Lives Matter movement, Fight For 15 — all during the Obama era – and now the growing of the movements during the Trump era. We see the 2020s as a decade of social transformation. In order to have that transformation, we need to be organized and educated . . . It’s normal for us to not always be on a linear path to success. It’s a jagged path. We move up and down, we get stronger.

We all know that Donald Trump is terrible. The worst president of my life! His overt racism; his open support for violent white supremacists; his mishandling of the COVID-19 virus, causing more than 180,000 deaths so far and probably more than 200,000 by the time of the election; his poor response to the economic collapse. He’s leading us into another Great Depression, and he constantly puts in place laws for the wealthy — while poverty, homelessness, debt and joblessness increase.

But Biden is no better. And I mean no better. For 47 years he’s been wrong on every important issue. When I was in college going to an anti-racism demonstration in Boston in favor of school integration, at that time Biden opposed school integration. Then I worked on ending mass incarceration, ending the drug war, while Biden was passing laws to escalate the drug war, passing laws for mandatory sentencing to increase mass incarceration. He’s the architect of mass incarceration!

Later in his career Biden became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and led in not just voting for the Iraq War, but in the effort to make the Iraq War happen. As chair of Foreign Relations, he put in place massive military budgets, bloated corrupt budgets, while leading us into war after war. When it came to student bankruptcy, he led the effort to make it so students can’t get rid of student debt even in bankruptcy. Now he’s even calling for cutting Social Security when we should be doubling or even tripling Social Security payments.

So I’m going to vote against Trump by voting for what I believe in. There are more alternatives than the two parties. I’ll be voting for the Green [Party] candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, because I’m going to be voting for Medicare For All. I’m going to be voting for community control of the police, for the eco-socialist Green New Deal, for ending the wealth divide and ending the never-ending wars.

We all have the power to vote for what we believe in, for candidates [who] reflect the movement. There are many more choices than a few corrupt candidates of the millionaires. And we need to use what little power we have in the elections to send a message of what we are for, to show that those who speak for movement issues get the movement’s support. After we vote, we must build people power, so that people can rule from below.

We must build people power, so that no matter who’s in office, we can stop the government from operating. We can make the country ungovernable. We can put in place general strikes, so that our demands are heard and met. That is how we will win.

We have a lot to build on. . . . There have been over 900 wildcat strikes since March. The labor movement is growing. The climate justice movement is growing. The anti-racist movement is growing. The anti-inequality movement is growing. We have a lot to build on. The One Percent cannot defeat the 99%. So let’s not underestimate ourselves.

An online tribute to Kevin Zeese will be held on Saturday, September 19 at 3:00 pm Eastern/12 noon Pacific. Simultaneous translation will be provided in English and Spanish. It will be live streamed on Facebook and YouTube. Register at bit.ly/KevinZeese.

We created a Kevin Zeese Emerging Activists Fund to continue Kevin’s legacy by sponsoring young activists and front line grassroots organizations that work for economic, racial and environmental justice and peace. We can best honor Kevin by continuing to support new movement leaders and visionaries who recognize injustice before the rest of us do and have the courage to address it.

Americans Who Tell the Truth writes:

“Zeese sees one of his most important jobs as empowering people because ‘what we’re working on will not be resolved in my lifetime. Part of my job is to help others become their own powerful force that will continue the work after we’re gone…Economic democracy and system-wide political change are multi-decade challenges.’”

Now, more than ever, you are Popular Resistance. Kevin is gone but the work continues and so we need to carry on. Popular Resistance was created in part to inform about what people are doing to stop the machine (resistance) and create the new world (build alternative systems). If you see articles or have a press release from your local group on resistance, constructive programs or movement strategy, please share it with us at [email protected].

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On September 11, 2020, Bahrain announced that it had agreed to normalize relations with Israel, following a similar agreement by the United Arab Emirate (UAE). Both agreements are being packaged and sold as historic peace plans.

They’re Not Peace Plans

When President Carter brokered the peace plan between Israel and Egypt, that was a historic and significant achievement because every Arab-Israeli war up to that point was initially or primarily an Egyptian-Israeli war. For two countries to sign a peace plan, they have to have not already been in a state of peace. For two countries to sign a peace plan, they have to have been at war. But neither the UAE nor Bahrain have ever been at war with Israel. They have never been involved in a war with Israel. And, so, unlike Carter’s achievement, Trump’s achievement is not significant because it does not bring about a significant change in the Middle East. The relations that the agreements supposedly normalize have, covertly, been in the process of being normalized for a long time: a very long time.

Israel and the UAE have for a long time been engaged in commercial and security ties. In July, two Israeli defense companies signed agreements with an UAE tech firm that works in artificial intelligence. And, even before the new normalization of relations, senior Israeli officials had visited the UAE for a number of years. More importantly, according to Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, the UAE’s air defense system and missile defense system are manufactured in Israel. They are made by Raytheon, which is an American company, though they are largely made in Israel. And the ties between Israel and the UAE are not new. Reporting by UPI in January of 2012 had already revealed that the UAE had “discreet ties with private security companies in Israel to protect its oil fields and borders.” They report that ties between the UAE’s Critical National Infrastructure Authority and several Israeli companies may go back to as early as 2007. Shockingly, and little discussed, clandestine ties go back even further than that. According to intelligence columnist for Haaretz, Yossi Melman, Israel and the UAE established community ties at least as early as the 1970s. And, he says, “Every head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency since then has had a relationship with his counterpart in the UAE.”

The same is true of Bahrain: Israel and Bahrain began forging ties decades ago. Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, told me in a personal correspondence that there have been informal economic relations between Israel and Bahrain going back at least a couple of decades. Israel has reportedly sold spy software to Bahrain. According to reporting by the New York Times, Bahrain had already hosted an Israeli cabinet official as early as 1994. Three years ago, in 2017, Bahrain even sent a delegation to Israel. In the same year, at a security conference in Munich, Bahrain’s foreign minister approached Israel’s foreign minister to pass on a message from the king that he had already decided to “move towards normalization with Israel.” Bahrain is ruled by a US backed dictator whose family has ruled the kingdom for over two hundred years. The U.S. fifth fleet is based in Bahrain, making Bahrain one of the most crucial allies in the web of US allies. The US military actually controls about 20% of Bahrainian land.

Iran: They’re More About War than Peace

The deals are less about peace between the Gulf States and Israel than they are about war between the Gulf States and Israel and Iran.

In February of 2017, at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump declared that his “administration is committed to working with Israel and our common allies in the region towards greater security and stability.” Netanyahu then identified those common allies as “our newfound Arab partners.”

Three years earlier in a September 2014 speech at the UN, Netanyahu had been clearer about what was meant by “security and stability”: “After decades of seeing Israel as their enemy, leading states in the Arab world increasingly recognize that together we and they face many of the same dangers: principally this means a nuclear-armed Iran.” In November, 2017, Netanyahu claimed that “Iran is devouring one nation after the other…The good news is that the other guys are getting together with Israel as never before. It is something that I would have never expected in my lifetime.” He then added that Israel is “’working very hard’ to establish an effective alliance with ‘the modern Sunni states’ to condemn and counter Iranian aggression.”

Netanyahu was very clear that the road to the new peace plans was not about peace. It was about war: war with Iran. It is not at all surprising, then, that Trump used the promise of F-35 fighter jets and other advanced US weaponry to pressure the UAE and Bahrain into publicly recognizing Israel. The US administration also reassured a nervous Israel that the jets sold to the UAE “would not erode Israel’s edge as they would be used to defend against the common enemy of Iran.” The New York Times put this reassurance into context:

“Trump administration officials say the détente between the Emirates and Israel – and possibly future deals between Israel and other Arab nations – are also part of a wider effort to counter Iran. Administration officials have tried to placate Israeli concerns about an Arab nation getting the F-35 by emphasizing that the Emirates, like Israel, is an avowed enemy of Iran and that strengthening the Emirati military will help Israel’s security.”

The peace plans were not about peace between countries already at peace, they were about war with Iran, a country they were already essentially at war with. The peace plans contribute more to war than to peace.

Perhaps the most telling sign that the Israel/UAE agreement was always more about war with Iran than peace in the Middle East is that Brian Hook, the US envoy for Iran, accompanied Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to his meetings with Israel and the UAE. Hook promised that the Trump administration would help the UAE to defend itself against Iran while protecting Israel’s qualitative military edge. Speaking at the White House, Hook said that

“Peace between the Arabs and the Israelis is Iran’s worst nightmare… And what we see today is a new Middle East. The trend lines are very different today. And we see the future is very much in the Gulf and with Israel. In the past, it was with the Iranian regime.”

Bahrain is a 70% Shiite population ruled by a repressive, torturous US backed dictatorship. Bahrain’s geography is symbolic: it is attached to Saudi Arabia by a causeway and separated from Iran by a gulf. Located between Saudi Arabia and Iran, on the Strait of Hormuz, Bahrain is seen by the US as a crucially located check on Iranian influence and power. So, it is not surprising that the normalization of relations agreement has at least one eye on Iran.

In 2011, peaceful protests in Bahrain was brutally put down by Saudi Arabia. US weapons featured largely in that brutal suppression.

Last year, Bahrain made its relationships with Israel and Iran clear. As Israel bombed Bahrain’s fellow Arab states in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – states seen as allied with Iran – Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s foreign minister, sided with Israel over Iran:

“Iran is the one who declared war on us, with its Revolutionary Guards, its Lebanese party, its popular mobilization in Iraq, its Houthi arm in Yemen and others…Those who beat them and destroy their equipment are not to blame. It’s self-defense.”

Separate Peace: the Abandonment of the Palestinians

The UAE was aware of the need to package their normalization agreement with Israel a an advancement of, or at least consistent with, the Saudi Peace initiative that promises never to normalize relations with Israel until Israel has returned to the pre-1967 borders and granted a state to the Palestinians. The deal with Israel does not do that, but it was to made to look like it does that for consumption by the outside world and, especially, by the Arab world and the UAE’s own domestic population.

So, the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed packaged the plan and delivered it to his people and to the world as the attainment of the end of annexation of 30% of the West Bank.

But the agreement does not require Israel to “stop” annexation of the 30% of the West Bank promised to it in Trump’s Middle East peace plan. The text of the agreement says “suspend,” not stop. And “suspend,” according to Jared Kushner, means that the annexation won’t happen “for some time.” But any amount of time is some time. Trump explained it as “right now it’s off the table” and added that “I can’t talk about some time into the future.” American Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman was a lot clearer: “The word ‘suspend’ was chosen carefully by all the parties. ‘Suspend,’ by definition – look it up – means ‘temporary halt.’ It’s off the table now, but it’s not off the table permanently.”

Trump never actually asked Netanyahu to stop the planned annexation. According to a senior Israeli political source, the Trump administration asked only “that we temporarily postpone declaring [sovereignty over parts of the West Bank] in order to achieve the beginning of this historic peace agreement with the Emirates.”

The UAE/Israel agreement gave the Palestinians a suspended annexation that had already been suspended. Yisrael Katz, a member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, confirmed on Israeli media on Sunday, August 16 “that the annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank was already suspended before the announcement of a deal to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).” He then explained that “presenting the agreement as related to [the annexation] is more suitable to all Arab countries”.

The UAE agreement, for the first time, normalized relations with Israel while abandoning the promise to never to do so without addressing the Palestinian issue. But at least it was cognizant of the need to pretend.

The Bahrainian agreement doesn’t even pretend to keep one eye on Iran and one eye on the Palestinians. The agreement blatantly keeps both eyes on Iran and Bahrain’s own interests.

The text of the Joint Statement issued by Bahrain, Israel and the US says only that Israel and Bahrain will “continue in their efforts in this regard to achieve a just, comprehensive, and enduring solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to enable the Palestinian people to realize their full potential.” The only thing to continue, of course, is nothing.

Bahrain’s Information Minister promised that “All historical precedents confirm that all the Kingdom’s initiatives and decisions have always been in the interest of the Palestinian people and protecting them, and no one can outbid the Kingdom in this regard.” But there is nothing in this agreement that addresses “the interest of the Palestinian people.” There is only the betrayal of Bahrain’s previous position that it would never establish diplomatic ties with Israel as long as Israel had not signed a peace deal with the Palestinians that included a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 borders. Bahrain defended its position by suggesting that the agreement sends a “positive and encouraging message to the people of Israel that a just and comprehensive peace with the Palestinians is the best path forward and truly serves their interests.” But, in fact, it shows just the opposite: that Israel can negotiate a deal with the Gulf States that is in its interest without a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians.

Trump naively said that the “Palestinians [are] in a very good position, they’re going to want to come in because all of their friends are in.” The Palestinians, however, recalled their ambassador to Bahrain and called the deal “a “dangerous violation of the Arab Peace Initiative” and a “threat to Palestinian rights.”

Last year, Bahrain’s foreign minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa telegraphed his kingdom’s abandonment of the Palestinians. No longer keeping one eye on Palestine and the other on Iran and its own interests, he explained that

“We grew up talking about the Palestine-Israel dispute as the most important issue. But then at a later stage, we saw a bigger challenge. We saw a more toxic one, in fact the most toxic in our modern history, which came from the Islamic Republic, from Iran.”

The two peace agreements between the Gulf States and Israel have nothing to do with peace. They are between nations that were already at peace and offer no peace to the Palestinians, while they proliferate US arms in the region and have much more to do with the threat of war with Iran.

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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

September 15.  Central Criminal Court, London.  Today, witnesses appearing in the extradition trial of Julian Assange fleshed out some points touched upon the previous day: the fate awaiting the WikiLeaks publisher in the US prison system, and the political nature of process.  Before commencing, Judge Vanessa Baraitser was a touch peeved.  She noted that one defence witness who took the stand last week, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, had been drinking coffee during his testimony.  Such behaviour was “inappropriate” and future witnesses would be disallowed to do so while her court was in session.     

Coffee-less, defence witness and Reprieve’s board president Eric Lewis considered the timing of the Assange indictment “significant”.  The Obama administration had grown cool on the subject; the Trump administration renewed interest.  “The case was dormant when the Trump administration began.  The evidence hasn’t changed.  Witnesses haven’t changed.” 

The US Department of Justice had itself become politicised and could no longer be considered an independent arm, but rather the prosecutorial plaything of President Donald Trump.  Both US Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr had instituted a top-down structure condemned by former federal prosecutors for obstructing justice. 

“Jeff Sessions pressured the Eastern District of Virginia to bring the case.  I’m not saying individual prosecutors are acting in bad faith, I’m saying the department is highly politicised and many Americans would agree with that sentiment.”

Eric Lewis also referred to a 19-page memo authored by Barr pointing out that

“the attorney-general and his lawyers are the president’s ‘hand’.  It’s the unitary executive theory.  It’s a fringe theory this attorney general has articulated that it is his job to follow the president.”

Steep sentences for the Australian publisher were also suggested as probable outcomes, notably in light of the language used in the second superseding indictment.  A “base level” estimate should he be convicted of the alleged offences was somewhere between eight to 10 years.  His record, however, might come into play; Assange had previously pled guilty to 24 charges for hacking the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel. 

Throw in matters of organisational skill and leadership “of criminal activity that involved 5 or more participants,” and we were looking at a rather “expensive” ledger.  As the superseding indictment from the DOJ outlines conspiracy charges, adjustments might be made to lengthen the sentence.  An example was offered: that of Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, remunerated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct surveillance on WikiLeaks and convicted in Iceland on multiple charges.  Being both a minor at the time, and purportedly under Assange’s direction, would add to the ledger.

Eric Lewis also noted that having “special abilities that help [the accused] commit the crime” would encourage a stiffer sentence.  “I would think,” he ventured, “that Mr Assange’s technical proficiency would be adjustment.”  This could result in an increase of the sentence to 19 years and five months, if factoring the lower end, or 24 years and five months towards if the higher end of sentencing was applied.

Just to darken the prospects even more, the defence witness suggested that eluding the investigation of a crime and purportedly exposing the identities of intelligence sources or embassy officials both had a combined effect of a life sentence which, given the statutory maximum, would yield the grand total of 175 years.

James Lewis QC for the prosecution stayed on familiar terrain, the sort embraced by critics of WikiLeaks since its inception.  His first notable, and dangerous proposition for the court, was that the First Amendment did not bar a journalist from being prosecuted for the unauthorised publication of classified information.  “The right to free speech and the public’s right to know are not absolutes.”  Unfortunately for the prosecutor, no examples of doing so could be found.

Image on the right: Claude M. Hilton

Assange facing 175 years in prison on US soil was also said to be an arithmetical exaggeration, yet another fantastic claim on the part of the defence.  Eric Lewis marshalled a few salient facts to disabuse the prosecutor.  Consider which judge would be conducting the trial in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia: one Claude M. Hilton.  Mercy was not his forte. 

Hilton had already shown rough treatment towards Chelsea Manning, jailing her last year for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.  Doing so, as her lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen said at the time, was an act of needless cruelty.  As for her medical treatment, Judge Hilton considered US marshals more than competent to handle it.

Eric Lewis also drew attention to the vengeful flavour of the US case against Assange: that the leaks by the publishing organisation were considered by officials the biggest in history, a boon for adversaries of the US.  When compared to Manning’s own trial – resulting in conviction for 10 counts under the Espionage Act, as against 17 for Assange, the picture was a gloomy one.  The prosecution in Manning’s trial had asked for 60 years; the eventual sentence was pared down to 35.  Were things to go “brilliantly” for Assange, he might face a 20-year sentence.

Such comparisons irritated prosecutor Lewis.  He suggested that other cases involving the Espionage Act had not resulted in heavy sentences for the whistleblowers in question.  Former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling, former FBI employee Terry Albury, and NSA contractor Reality Winner were cited as glittering testaments of a generous justice system.  Sterling was unimpressed, tweeting that the prosecution’s referral to his “travesty case to assuage sentencing fears” was more than a tad disingenuous. 

“The prosecution was incensed I received 42 months, they wanted far more.  Tell the truth.”  For good measure, Sterling also scorned the prosecution effort to powder the US prison system with caring credentials.  “My sentence was 42 months and I could have died because of conditions and horrible medical care.”   

In the LA Progressive, Sterling reiterated the “deplorable living conditions, disregard for human life, and perpetual punishment” that marked the US prison system.  Only an intervention by a US senator on his behalf “to receive the health care … quite possibly saved my life.”  With Assange’s case,

“I fear there will be nothing reasonable with regard to any sentence to be imposed.”  Sterling’s case should not serve as a “benchmark” of reasonable sentencing, as James Lewis argued, but “a warning about how the perverse use of the Espionage Act started by the Obama administration and continued by the Trump administration to quell and silence dissent is a threat to free speech, not only in this country, and, as the extradition proceedings demonstrate, in the entire world.”

The conditions of confinement awaiting Assange was also revisited in Eric Lewis’s testimony.  In the pre-trial phase, he faced the euphemistically termed treatment of administrative segregation in Alexandria Detention Center, Virginia.  In his view, Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) would be applied during both pre- and post-trial processes, given Assange’s standing as a national security defendant.  Axiomatically, it followed that the defendant would be gagged and attorney-client confidentiality nullified.  Throw in the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) impairing the defendant’s means to inspect classified documents, and the situation would look parlous. The combination of both administrative segregation and SAMs would be akin to solitary confinement and present a danger to Assange’s psychological wellbeing. 

The second witness called by the defence was Thomas Durkin, a seasoned criminal defence attorney hailing from Chicago.  “I do not think,” he emphatically stated, “[Assange] would be able to get what I would consider a fair trial in the US.”  Such formidable impediments as CIPA would obstruct Assange’s access to classified documents necessary for his case.  On this point, Durkin noted that US assistant attorney Gordon Kromberg had been in error in assuming otherwise.  The testimony also served to underscore what has so far been said at this trial: that the resumption of interest by the Trump administration after the Obama administration’s reluctance to pursue Assange indicated political motivation.

Durkin’s testimony painted a picture of the grim world of pleadings. An incentive, known as a “trial tax”, formed part of the sentencing guidelines.  “You get penalized for going to trial.”  Guilty pleas would be encouraged to reduce sentences, and along with that, the sort of seedy cooperation with authorities amounting to betrayal (the revealing of sources, contacts and so forth).  The differences could be considerable: a 24-year sentence clipped by seven years; the difference between seeing one’s partner and children privately before one’s death or not.  Any ensuing sentence was bound to be heavy; the prosecution had taken the position that Assange was more culpable than Manning, leading Durkin to conclude that something more than the 60 years asked for Manning awaited the WikiLeaks founder. 

In his written submission, Durkin affirmed the position taken by other witnesses that the US justice system was woefully unprepared in dealing with the challenges of mental health.  Along with Assange’s reputation for having compromising information on powerful interests, the attorney had little confidence that Assange “will be safe from harm – whether inflicted by himself or others”.  

Again, the sessions were plagued by issues of connectivity and clarity.  The audio for Eric Lewis, for instance, was described by the tireless Kevin Gosztola as coming “from inside a wrapping paper tube.”  Journalists observing Judge Baraitser’s demeanour were also unimpressed.  All that mattered to her, for a change, was that these problems were happening to others. 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Activist Post

A high level Russian delegation met recently with President Assad in Damascus. In an effort to further understand the importance and implications of the meeting, Steven Sahiounie at MidEastDiscourse reached out to Andrey Ontikov, a Special Correspondent at Izvestia daily newspaper, in Moscow and a political commentator specializing in the Middle East.

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Steven Sahiounie (SS):  Recently, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and a delegation were in Damascus for a high level meeting. What was the outcome of this meeting?

Andrey Ontikov (AO):  To my mind those negotiations demonstrate a change in priorities of Russian policy in Syria. Now we see that most of Syrian territories are free from terrorists. Meanwhile Damascus is facing other threats and challenges. First of all, these are problems in the economy due to western sanctions and Caesar Act recently adopted in the US. And Moscow is ready to help Damascus. It was no coincidence that Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov headed the Russian delegation. And among the issues discussed were joint projects in various fields.

Another challenge for Syria is the continued US-presence in areas east of Euphrates and at the Al-Tanf base. We see that Washington helps the Kurds in every possible way in creating the so-called autonomous region. In other words, we are talking about supporting separatism in Syria, which poses a threat to the country’s territorial integrity. Of course, Russia will try to prevent this. We see this at least in the recent meeting between Qadri Jamil and Ilham Ahmed, which took place in Moscow. They signed a memorandum of cooperation. I think that the Russian Foreign Ministry has played an important role here. Russia also intends to facilitate dialogue between the central Syrian authorities and the Kurds and, in addition, intends to protect the rights of the Kurds in every possible way, but within the framework of a united Syria. Of course, all this does not mean that Moscow is abandoning the fight against terrorism. This threat persists primarily in Idlib, but also in other parts of Syria. Thus, the global goals remain the same: the restoration of Syrian sovereignty throughout the country and ensuring security there.

SS: As part of the UN resolution 2254, to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis, there have been a series of meetings to draft a new constitution, including a recent meeting.  How is the current status on this process?

AO:  The process is progressing slowly. But it was difficult to expect otherwise. Still, there are a lot of contradictions between the parties, besides, there is a strong foreign influence on some participants in the dialogue. However, it is important to understand that the situation is not in a deadlock. I would like to remind you that there were no significant advances until the beginning of 2018. But in January 2018, Russia hosted the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi. And thus the process of creating a constitutional committee was launched. Now this committee has been formed and started to work. As officials in Moscow point out, it would be wrong to set a time frame for its work. Ultimately, the Syrians need a constitution that will ensure the functioning of the state and the rights of various groups of the population. So in light of the difficulties that remain on the battlefield and in the political plane, it seems to me that progress is obvious. The main thing is that some countries that find themselves outside the process do not create artificial obstacles.

SS: What is the Russian role in the Syrian Mediterranean gas-field?

AO:  It can be said that gas in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the main reasons for the current stage in the Libyan conflict. It is no secret that in November 2019, Turkey signed an agreement on the division of maritime zones with the Government in Tripoli. This has become a serious challenge for the countries that are members of the East Mediterranean Gas Forum and are going to build a gas pipeline to Europe. Therefore, it is important for Ankara that the current government remains in Tripoli, under which the agreements will not be denounced. This is the reason for the ongoing escalation, sending Turkish military and Syrian militants to Libya. Russia, for its part, has been making efforts for a long time to resolve the situation in Libya peacefully. Moscow is also ready to mediate in the conflict between Turkey and Greece, since it has good relations with both countries. In any case, it is important for Moscow to overcome the conflict and stabilize the situation in the region.

SS:  There are tensions between the Russian military, who are in Syria legally, and the US military who are an occupation force in Eastern Syria.  How do you see this situation?

AO:  I have already mentioned that Russia insists on the withdrawal of US troops from Syria and the stop of support for separatist tendencies. And it will do everything to achieve these goals. At the same time, the Americans, apparently, will arrange provocations against the Russian military. And we have already seen them many times. The goal is to impose their own rules of the game in that part of Syria and to force Russia to retreat. So far, these attempts have been unsuccessful. Be that as it may, Moscow is somewhat limited in methods. It cannot enter into an open confrontation with the Americans, as it fought against terrorists. It can only act by diplomatic methods, exert informational pressure on the United States itself, promote dialogue between the Kurds and Damascus, and so on. At the same time, Syria itself has slightly more opportunities. In particular, the country’s authorities often talk about popular resistance against external occupiers. And it seems to me that developing the partisan movement could bring good results along this path. In fact, we already see how the local population east of the Euphrates from time to time oppose the American presence. In any case, if the Syrians manage to make the presence of the United States in Syria unprofitable for Washington, then it will immediately withdraw its troops. Russia will contribute to this in every possible way.

SS:  There is Russian and Turkish cooperation in Idlib, Syria. The agreement was supposed to result in a safe passage way on the M4 Highway from Latakia to Aleppo, but this has never been achieved.  What is the reason for this failure, and can it be achieved?

AO:  There are indeed problems. But, as is the case with the constitutional committee, the situation is not at a standstill. We see how Idlib is gradually being freed from terrorists. Who could imagine a year ago that free movement on the M4 would in principle be discussed? Nevertheless, the work here must be very clear, based on compromises. After all, Russia and Turkey have their own interests, often opposite. Therefore, it is necessary to look for common ground.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Sputnik International

United States’ government spokespeople are forever demonizing Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has proclaimed that Iran is the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. In keeping with this, the possibility of the U.S. waging war against Iran is very real.

We must remember that Iran has not invaded another country since 1798: yes, that is 222 years ago. The U.S. is currently bombing, or supporting the bombing, of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia. It is sanctioning Venezuela, causing untold suffering there, wanting ‘regime change’ in that nation also. And Pompeo has the temerity to say that Iran is the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. By any objective standard, that title must go to the U.S.

President Donald Trump and his cohorts continually raise the false flag of Iranian threats to the world, against all facts. This follows the centuries-old playbook of U.S. war-making: disagree with the policies of another nation, then create a narrative that positions that nation as a threat to the world or its own citizens; maintain that rhetoric until at least some people start to believe it, and then invade. And generally, the only people who really need to buy-in to this particular fairy tale are members of Congress who are very pliable when it comes to starting a war.

In 2015, Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States entered into an agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This agreement regulated Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for ending sanctions against Iran. The agreement was signed during the administration of President Barack Obama, and it is no secret that Trump has tried, during his nearly four years in the White House, to reverse anything and everything Obama accomplished.

From October 2015 to May 2018, United Nations inspectors were certifying Iranian compliance. As required by U.S. law, Congress was also certifying compliance to the President every 90 days. Trade between Iran and other nations grew, and it was generally considered that the world was a safer place, since Iran’s nuclear development activities were being closely monitored (it is important to note here that the government of Iran has always said, and continues to assert, that its nuclear development is for peaceful purposes. The same cannot be said about the United States’ nuclear program).

Trump criticized the law from its inception, calling it the ‘worst deal ever’. And once the anti-Iranian hawk John Bolton was appointed National Security Advisor, the agreement was doomed. Bolton declared that by February 11, 2019, the 40^th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, there would be ‘regime change’ in Iran. Indeed, he put in plans to make that happen, the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and reinstalling of sanctions being chief among them. During Bolton’s tenure as National Security Advisor, he was a major cheerleader for hostility towards Iran, running the false flag of Iranian aggression up every political flagpole he could find. His plans for Iran were thwarted, however; he, and many U.S. politicians, have never understood, or even attempted to understand, the nationalist fervor of the Iranian people and their pride in their revolution and their government.

Not only did Trump withdraw the U.S. from the agreement, he threatened economic sanctions against some of the U.S.’s oldest and most trusted allies if they continued to honor the agreement. Headed mostly by weak leaders, they crumbled under Trump’s threats. As a result, all the advantages that were promised to the Iranian people, and which they enjoyed for nearly three years, were lost.

Trump and his spokespeople have said that the Iranian government is harmful to its own people, but due to U.S. sanctions, the Iranian economy has been crippled, leaving countless people out of work. Trump’s assertions about the Iranian government constitute another false flag; it is the U.S. government, not the Iranian government, that is harming the Iranian people. Trump has even refused international appeals to the U.S. to at least temporarily suspend sanctions during the current pandemic. Sanctions, defined by some as a war crime, are a tried and true method of U.S. terrorism. For years, the U.S. flew the false flag of Iraqi threats. After years of sanctions against that country, it was estimated that at least 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result. In 1996, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl, a correspondent on the program ’60 Minutes’, about this. Stahl asked:

“We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded:

“I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

One wonders how deciding whether to kill half a million children is a ‘very hard choice’. Would any thinking, feeling human being ever need to think twice about this? But this is U.S. governance, and the achievement of U.S. geopolitical goals is worth any price, even the innocent blood of 500,000 children.

And what of sanctions against Iran, a nation with a population more than twice that of Iraq? The false flag of Iran’s threats to the world has been raised, and sanctions imposed. How many children will need to die for U.S. goals to be reached?

In June of 2017, I visited Iran where I spoke at conferences in Tehran and Mashhad. Both cities were busy, bustling and modern, although steeped in history. I have often wished more U.S. citizens would visit Iran. If they did, they would see who is suffering as a result of the sanctions.

Since the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA, aggression against Iran has only escalated, including the assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani, a blatant violation of international law. One can only imagine the U.S. response had Iran assassinated a prominent, beloved U.S. general.

Despite Trump’s many offensive words and gestures that have become business as usual during his presidency, his defeat in November is far from assured. And his likely opponent, former Vice-President Joe Biden, is hardly a dynamic agent of change who will usher in a new world order. A second term for Trump will undoubtedly bring the U.S. to war with Iran, a war that will be far more devastating to the world than the ignorant and uninformed Trump can possibly imagine. Such a war would engulf much of the world, with the potential to bring a level of suffering not seen since World War II.

The nations of the world must stand up to the United States. Avoiding such a catastrophic war should be everyone’s goal.

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Robert Fantina is an author and peace activist. His writing has appeared on Mondoweiss, Counterpunch and other sites. He has written the books Empire, Racism and Genocide: A  History of U.S. Foreign Policy and Essays on Palestine.

Featured image is from AHT

Turkish forces have been passing through hard times in northwestern Syria.

First a mysterious ‘heart attack’ that killed a Turkish general in Idlib. Then, Turkish military positions in the province of Aleppo were devastated by a series of rocket strikes. Rockets pounded the so-called ‘observation post’ of the Turkish military near the town of Xezwe on September 12. Later on the same day, when Turkish reinforcements deployed in the area, the Xezwe post was once again shelled by unguided rockets. Photos and videos from the ground showed that the strike caused notable damage, while pro-militant sources also claimed that several Turkish troops were injured.

The Turkish Armed Forces responded to the attack by striking positions of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Aqiybah, Sughanka and Burj al-Qas.

On September 13, the Afrin Liberation Forces, an armed group affiliated with the YPG, claimed responsibility for the strikes on Turkish positions. This group regularly conducts attacks on the Turkish Army and Turkish proxies in the region of Afrin. It did not reveal details of the operation, but pro-Turkish sources claim that Kurdish rebels may have carried out their attacks the area of Qala’at Kaluta near the town of Kabashin.

On September 12, two explosions hit the Turkish-occupied town of Ras al-Ayn in northeastern Syria. The first explosion caused by an improvised explosive device took place in the Haj Wassfi alley. The second explosion, a booby-trapped motorcycle, erupted near the central bakery. At least 4 civilians were killed.

Pro-Turkish sources accused the YPG of conducting this attack. However, this time the main suspect is ISIS. The YPG and its allied groups focus their attacks on mostly military targets.

On top of this, the Syrian Army and its allies carried out a series of rocket and artillery strikes on positions of Turkish-backed terrorists, mostly members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in the southern part of Greater Idlib on September 13 and 14.

According to pro-militant sources, government forces launched over 400 rockets and shells on terrorists’ positions near Fatterah, Kafar Aweed, Sufuhon, Kansafra, al-Bara, Shnan, Fleifel and Benin. Pro-government sources claim that a few dozen terrorists were eliminated or injured in the strikes.

Just a few days earlier, warplanes of the Russian Aerospace Forces bombed fortified positions and training camps of terrorists near Jisr al-Shughur and Sheikh Yusuf. Airstrikes by unidentified combat drones, most likely Iranian ones, also pounded a fortified point of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near al-Bara. Media outlets affiliated with terrorists or Turkey did not provide details regarding the real impact of the strike claiming that they targeted civilian targets only. Pro-Russian sources speculated that up to 100 Turkish-backed terrorists were eliminated. Nonetheless, this number is questionable.

Turkey is not hurrying up to fulfill its commitments under the Idlib de-escalation deal and neutralize al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in its area of responsibility. Instead, Ankara continues military and financial support to these groups aiming to turn the al-Qaeda-held part of northwestern Syria into a pseudo state under a Turkish protectorate or even annex this territory.

So, it seems that the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance has opted to take the initiative into its own hands and make real steps to deal with the terrorist threat in Idlib.

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In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential elections, Mitt Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him a phony and a fraud. When Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in an upscale New York restaurant, made him eat his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave the second most coveted appointment in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson. 

Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump’s vulnerable moment, when impeachment proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party president.

Trump is a typical Shylock of the Wall Street belonging to the American libertarian movement. Though his alt-right agenda has been scuttled by the deep state, his views regarding global politics and economics are markedly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.

Besides the admission that Trump knew coronavirus was deadly yet he deliberately downplayed the outbreak, Bob Woodward has made several other startling revelations [1] in his book “Rage” set to be released on September 15.

President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

“I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”

When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded:

“He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.

“And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” the president noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Trump for his fairly accurate interpretation of the Middle East’s politics and pragmatic relations of the business world. $400 billion he alluded to was likely the unprecedented arms package he availed for the US defense production industry during his maiden overseas visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017.

By virtue of their physical possession of the holy places of Islam – Mecca and Medina – the Saudi kings are the de facto caliphs of Muslims. The title of the Saudi king: “Khadim-ul-Haramain-al-Shareefain” (the servant of the house of God), makes him the vicegerent of God on Earth; and the title of the caliph of Muslims is not limited to a single nation state, the Saudi king wields enormous influence throughout the commonwealth of Islam, the Muslim Ummah.

The Shia Muslims have their Imams and Ayatollahs (religious authorities), but it is generally assumed about Sunni Islam that it discourages the authority of clergy. In this sense, Sunni Islam is closer to Protestantism, at least theoretically, because it prefers an individual and personalized interpretation of scriptures and religion. Although this perception might be true for educated Sunni Muslims, on the popular level of the masses of developing Islamic countries, the House of Saud plays the same role in Sunni Islam that the pope plays in Catholicism.

Left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and North African immigrants of the Gulf states. One-third of the Saudi Arabian population is composed of immigrants. Similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population is also comprised of expats from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

The rest of the Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, also have a similar proportion of immigrant workers from the developing countries. Unlike the immigrants of the Western countries, however, who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Seemingly, the Western powers support the Gulf’s autocrats because it has been a firm policy principle of the Western powers to promote “political stability” in the energy-rich Middle East instead of representative democracy. They are mindful of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against Western military presence and intervention in the Middle East region.

In addition, the Western policymakers also prefer to deal with small cliques of Middle Eastern strongmen rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level of the masses of the Middle East, certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of so-called pragmatic politicians and statesmen.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies in the time of global recession when most manufacturing has outsourced to China.

All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Wahhabi-Salafis of the Gulf petro-monarchies is much older. The British stirred up uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his struggle against the Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali because he was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabia, including the Arabian peninsula, Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a price for rebelling against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

As a consequence, Western powers dumped him, imposed Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to nomadic Sauds of Najd. King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the support of the British. However, by then the tide of British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former possessions and the rights and liabilities of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous Great Bitter Lake meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.

In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.

Furthermore, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[1] Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Crown Prince:

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-woodward-i-saved-his-ass-mbs-khashoggi-rage-2020-9

Featured image: President Donald Trump poses for photos with ceremonial swordsmen on his arrival to Murabba Palace, as the guest of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Saturday evening, May 20, 2017, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Convictions of Israelis for crimes against Palestinians are rare exceptions, not the rule — almost never against soldiers and other security forces.

According to Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights, violence by Israeli forces and settlers occurs daily, nearly always with no accountability.

Yesh Din’s data show that “the vast majority of investigation files regarding harm to Palestinians and their property are closed due to police failure to investigate properly,” adding:

“The deficiencies and flaws in the work of the police are present at every stage of the investigation, and police frequently fail to undertake basic investigative steps amounting at times to criminal negligence.”

“Investigation failures and the leniency displayed by both prosecution agencies and the courts in cases of ideologically motivated crime encourage such violence against Palestinians.”

In Occupied Palestine, crime without punishment by Jews against Palestinians is the rule, not the exception.

Occupying IDF soldiers ignore settler violence and vandalism against Palestinian civilians.

The practice known as “standing idly by” refers to witnessing crimes by settlers against Palestinians by Israeli security forces but doing nothing to prevent them or apprehend perpetrators.

In July 2015, extremist settlers set the Dawabsha family home ablaze, immolating 18-month-old Ali.

Husband and wife Saad and Riham later succumbed to third-degree burns that were too severe to save them.

Four-year-old Ahmad alone survived despite third-degree burns covering most of his body, requiring months of excruciating treatment — paid for by the PA because Israel nearly always doesn’t recognize victims of state-sponsored or settler terror.

To this day at age-10, Ahmad is still being treated for what happened over five years ago.

Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) attorney Dan Yakir called Israeli discrimination “another example of the intolerable disparity between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank in all areas of life.”

In response to the immolation of Dawabsha family members while they slept, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights “condemn(ed)” what happened “in the strongest terms.”

On July 31, 2015, extremist settlers set two Douma village houses ablaze.

Occupants of the second torched home were not harmed because they were in a Nablus apartment at the time.

Extremist settlers wrote racist slogans on walls of houses set ablaze.

Last May, settler Amiram Ben-Uliel was convicted on two counts of attempted murder, arson, and conspiracy to commit a hate crime for the Dawabsha family immolation incident.

On Monday, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 40 years and fined 258,000 shekels ($74,450) for Ahmad Dawabsha that can never compensate for loss of his family members.

Ahmad’s grandfather Hussein Dawabsha, his guardian since the 2015 incident, said “sentenc(ing) (Amiram Ben-Uliel) will not bring anything back.”

He quoted his grandson saying: “Why did they do this to me. Why am I not like other children.”

He lost an ear and his body is permanently scarred by what happened.

Ben-Uliel was a so-called “hilltop youth” group of radicalized settlers member, an anti-Palestinian terrorist organization.

Yet the Israeli court acquitted him on this count, what the Dawabsha family called disgraceful.

Still, Joint Arab List MP Yousef Jabareen said Ben-Uliel’s sentence “is significant for the family and for the Palestinian people, given that the majority of crimes committed by settlers against Palestinians never reach the courts,” adding:

“However, top government officials have led ongoing incitement campaigns agitating for political assassination and have generated an atmosphere of racist hatred. This ruling does not absolve them of responsibility for these acts.”

“The cruel occupation and settlement enterprise breeds hate crimes of this nature and until they end, hate crimes of this nature will continue to occur.”

At least two other settlers witnesses saw fleeing the crime scene remain unpunished.

Another youth involved was only charged with conspiring with the attack — despite evidence indicating otherwise.

Following Ben-Uliel’s conviction last May, a Dawabsha family statement said it’s “not enough.”

“One person was convicted … but the rest of them still live on illegal outposts surrounding our villages, posing a threat to our communities every day.”

Settler violence and vandalism against Palestinians most often go unpunished.

Ben-Uliel’s conviction and sentencing is a rare exception to the rule.

Lots more like him throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israeli security forces terrorize Palestinians unaccountably — what the scourge of illegal occupation and apartheid rule are all about.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from Ynetnews

The Irish doctor featured in the video below has 35 years’ experience as a practicing General Practitioner in Derry, Ireland.

She first knew the pandemic was “fake” when the WHO first declared pandemic with an announcement of 4,291 deaths globally. This, she says, represents 1 death per 1.8 million people. Context is important.

When rules were changed around Death Certificate coding, as happened in North America and beyond, it was the first time in her professional career that she had witnessed this. It meant that COVID data could not be compared to previous outbreaks, it couldn’t be compared to “what had happened before”.

Consistent with Canadian guideline changes as described by Rosemary Frei (1), definitions of COVID symptomology were broad and lacking in specificity.

“Anybody with temperature or cough prior to their death no matter what else was wrong with them was to be counted as COVID deaths.”

Heart disease, diabetes, cancer and myriad other co-morbidities were falsely deemed insignificant according to the “new rules”.

“Sick, frail, elderly were taken from hospital wards not operating at capacity and shoved into the care-home sector.”

She watched people dying alone, and flatly asserts that “what happened was barbarity.” This happened “lock-step” across Europe, she says. It also happened lock-step across North America.

Citing a British medical journal, she reports that 2 out of 3 “COVID” deaths were due to state-imposed “COVID measures”, in particular, lock-downs.

Bringing context to the debate again, she says that a person has a 0.0112% per cent chance of “Dying of COVID”, but the chances are much lower if a person is under 80 and free from co-morbidities.

Finally, she makes some important observations:

First, the global response to COVID is directed at every stage by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Second, Key funders to the WHO and to Research Centers that made grossly inaccurate pandemic modelling scenarios, are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Third, the person most vocal about the need for a vaccine is Bill Gates.

Fourth, pharmaceutical companies will profit most from vaccines, but they will not shoulder the risks. Governments will be liable for costs accrued to vaccine injuries.

Fifth, she predicts that there will not be a second wave. Viruses extinguish themselves (as SARS-1 did), and currently COVID is “clinically irrelevant”.

Finally, she predicts that there will be a “testdemic” as a pretext to locking people up again.

“We should be afraid,” she says, but “We are the many, they are the few.”

Video Dr Anne Mc Closkey

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

Note

(1) James Corbett, Rosemary Frei, and Mark Taliano Video: “How the High Death Rate in Care Homes Was Created on Purpose” Global Research, 21 June, 2020.
(https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-high-death-rate-care-homes-created-purpose/5716637 ) Accessed 15 September, 2020

Featured image is from the author

---

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During the weeks of uncertainty that followed the 2000 presidential election, as the tension grew amongst supporters of George W. Bush and Al Gore, my brother John Zogby conducted a poll to see how Democrats and Republicans were viewing the contested vote. Responses to one question, in particular, caught our attention.

John asked Republican voters if they would view Gore as a legitimate president should he be declared the victor. The reverse was asked of Democratic voters. The answers were disconcerting. Twenty-one per cent of Democrats said they would not see Bush as legitimate. More disturbing were the 67 per cent of Republicans who said they would not see Al Gore as a legitimate president.

That year, John coined the now often used term “Armageddon election” to describe feelings of both sides as they considered the consequences of that presidential contest. When we were discussing this last week, John joked that we have dredged up Armageddon to describe every election since 2000. While all of those contests have been both critically important and deeply fractious, there can be no doubt that the 2020 matchup between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is the real Armageddon election of our lifetime.

With every passing day it becomes clearer that we are in for a long and rocky ride between now and November. More troubling than the difficulties we will encounter along the way is what may occur after election day. There is legitimate fear that our very democracy, already compromised by hyper-partisanship, may be at risk.

More than just belonging to two opposing parties, we have become two countries comprised of distinct constituencies, each of whom see the world with radically different eyes. Polls show this divide not only on issues like race, gender equality, immigration, and the role of government. The differences are more fundamental with two wildly divergent views of the very idea of America, its history and its future. At times it feels as though the two camps are not only seeing different realities, but speaking different languages.

This is not merely a partisan divide. It is demographic. One side is dominated by older White voters, a disproportionately large number of whom are “born again” fundamentalist Christians. They are also more male and more rural. The other is largely comprised of more educated and urban voters, young people, and Blacks, Latinos and Asians.

One side sees promise in recapturing the lost glory of a romanticised past, and, feeling threatened by the “foreignness” of newcomers, seeks to deny entry to those who are seen as “different”. The other thrives on America’s diversity, feels comforted by the notion of integration, and is unafraid of change.

These two distinct worldviews were on display at last month’s Democratic and Republican conventions. Both parties used their week-long “made for television” infomercials to define America as they saw it and to project the America they hoped to create. Both also made crystal clear the dangerous consequences that would result if the other side were to win.

As described by Fintan O’Toole, in a brilliant New York Review of Books piece, the Democratic convention portrayed the stark choice in this election as an “existential struggle” between good and evil, light and darkness, between ending the racial divide, bringing about economic justice, celebrating diversity and creating a sense of common purpose, or exacerbating social tension and division, and sinking deeper into the muck of hatred, anger and chaos.

The choices for Republicans were equally existential. They were spelled out by Donald Trump Jr. when he described this election as being between “church, work, and school” and “rioting, looting, and vandalism. In this Republican view, Democrats are portrayed as being captive of extremist socialist forces, manipulated by people in the dark shadows”, seeking to promote social unrest, weaken police forces, and destroy the middle-class “life-style,” by building housing in White suburbs for poorer people of colour.

For Republicans, victory is seen as necessary to save White America, its culture, values and way of life. And the slogan “Make America Great Again” is understood not so much a vision of the future as it is a last ditch effort to salvage the lost glory of a fictional past.

For Democrats, victory is seen as essential to protect America from incivility, racial hatred, and a dangerous drift towards authoritarian rule.

So for both sides, the stakes are not only high, they are polar opposites. It is if they are saying “should the other side win, all is lost”, it will be “the end of the world” or Armageddon.

More ominous still, President Trump has used Twitter to promote conspiracy theories about dark, shadowy wealthy people working to undermine his presidency and the country. In a recent interview, he declared, without evidence, that he had heard reports of a plane-load of men in dark uniforms, whom he described as “looters, anarchists, rioters…looking to cause trouble”. And, he has taken to retweeting or paraphrasing conspiracy-oriented messages from QAnon, the cult-like group which originated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy that a Washington pizza restaurant was serving a front for a child sex-slave operation run by the Clintons.

As worrisome, are the president’s increasingly frequent charges that this election will be marred by voter fraud. He has repeatedly claimed that the only way he can lose is if the vote were “rigged” against him. A recent poll shows that already one-third of both Democrats and Republicans are expressing serious concern about the legitimacy of the vote. And he has suggested that in the case of a rigged election his supporters may need to rise up to defend themselves and his presidency from the looters, rioters, and chaos-makers seeking to unravel our country.

In the past few months, we have seen signs of where this might take us. When several states announced strict measures to control the spread of the novel Coronavirus, Trump urged his supporters to storm state capitols to defend their freedom against “lockdowns”. Because he added “defend the Second Amendment”, some demonstrators came armed with semi-automatic weapons of war.

In mid-summer, there was a national mobilisation of mostly peaceful protests against the all-too-frequent police shootings of Black Americans. In some cities, these demonstrations devolved into sporadic violent looting and vandalism. Sometimes these incidents were spontaneous, in other cases they appeared to be egged on by left- or right-wing extremists, seeking to create further unrest. This played into the president’s hands. He defended the police and derided the Democratic city and state officials whom he described as “weak”. Once again, we witnessed the appearance of armed White counter-protesters and we heard the president embrace these paramilitary elements as “Great Patriots”.

In response to the violence, Biden issued a balanced denunciation saying, “I want a safe America. Safe from Covid, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops…safe from four more years of Donald Trump.”

For its part, the Trump campaign said, “No one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America…[He will] surrender America and its citizens to the violent left-wing mob…and abolish the American Way of Life.”

All of this serving as evidence of a deeper and more dangerous polarisation in American society.

After Trump’s inauguration in January of 2017, millions demonstrated their disapproval. We can expect the same, no matter how this election turns out.

With both sides framing this election in “end of the world” terms; with the president calling into question the legitimacy of the vote, even before it happens; and with the president warning his supporters that they may have to take up arms to defend him, we have a recipe for disaster that may occur in the days that follow this election. This may very well be the Armageddon election of our lifetime.

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James J. Zogby is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.

Featured image is from Sky News

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How the USA and Turkey Plunder and Loot Syria with Impunity

By Rick Sterling, September 15, 2020

In October 2019 Turkish forces invaded Syria and now occupy a strip of land in north east Syria. The area is controlled by the Turkish military and pro Turkish militia forces misnamed the “Syrian National Army”. Turkish President Erdogan dubbed the invasion “Peace Spring” and said the goal was to create a “safe zone”. The reality was that 200 thousand Syrians fled the invasion and over 100 thousand have been permanently displaced from their homes, farms, workplaces and livelihoods.

Germany, France and the EU Succumb to US Digital Hegemony

By Dr. Thorsten Pattberg, September 15, 2020

It is official. President of France, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday 14, 2020, conceded that Europe has lost the battle for data security and cloud computing. The continent cannot compete against America. Not that France could have asserted any claims to power; the fate of Europe was decided in Germany.

2020 Elections: Democrats Go All-Out for Israel

By Philip Giraldi, September 15, 2020

Those of us who have longed for an end to America’s military engagement in the Middle East have hoped for a candidate who was not tied hand and foot to Israel, which is the root cause of the badly-broken and essentially pointless U.S. foreign policy in the region. But the real tragedy is that in spite of Israel’s near-constant interference in government process at all levels in the United States, no candidate will mention it except in the most laudatory fashion. It will be praised as America’s best friend and closest ally, but the price the U.S. has paid for all that balderdash while it has simultaneously been turning itself into the slave of the Jewish state will never surface.

Public Debt Is the Real Pandemic: $3.3 Trillion Federal Deficit, Largest in US History ….

By Rep. Ron Paul, September 15, 2020

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030.

Dark Web Voter Database Report Casts New Doubts on Russian Election Hack Narrative

By Gareth Porter, September 15, 2020

Democratic politicians and corporate media pundits have long accepted it as fact that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016. But the Kommersant report shows that those state registered voter databases were already available to anyone in the public domain, eliminating any official Russian motive for hacking state websites.

US Planned Nuclear Attacks on Every City in the USSR and China

By Shane Quinn, September 15, 2020

In mid-December 1960, a conference was held at Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, to outline America’s nuclear war strategy. During the meeting, plans were revealed whereby Moscow alone would be hit by 40 megatons of nuclear weapons. That is: about 4,000 times the force of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945.

Adverse Health Effects of Electromagnetic Field Exposure: To Bee, or Not to Bee, that Is the Five “G” Question

By Olle Johansson, September 14, 2020

The collective evidence we can draw from the current scientific status regarding adverse health and biological effects of artificial electromagnetic field exposures, such as from cell phones, antennas/base stations, TV and radio towers, babyalarms, smart meters, powerlines, and WiFi routers, points to that we may be jeopardizing more than our own health and behaviour. Bacteria, plants, birds, frogs, and pollinating insects, may all be targeted, and it is obvious we must proceed with the highest caution before immersing the citizens and our wildlife in more and more artificial electromagnetic fields. We may, as a matter of fact, already be gravely endangering our current as well as coming generations. To not act today, may prove a disaster tomorrow, and such lack of action may again result in the classical “late lessons from early warnings”, or – even worse – “too late lessons from early warnings”.

Emma Arbuthnot é a Magistrada (Chief Magistrate) que, em Londres, instruiu o julgamento de extradição de Julian Assange para os Estados Unidos, onde aguarda uma condenação de 175 anos de prisão por “espionagem”, ou seja, por ter publicado, como jornalista investigador, provas dos crimes de guerra dos EUA, incluindo vídeos das mortes de civis no Iraque e no Afeganistão.

No processo, atribuído à Juíza Vanessa Baraitser, todos os pedidos de defesa foram rejeitados. Em 2018, depois das acusações de agressão sexual na Suécia caducarem, a Juíza Arbuthnot recusou-se a anular o mandado de prisão, para que Assange não pudesse obter asilo no Equador.

Arbuthnot rejeitou as conclusões do Grupo de Trabalho das Nações Unidas sobre a detenção arbitrária de Assange. Também não foram escutadas as do responsável da ONU contra a tortura: “Assange, detido em condições extremas de isolamento injustificado, mostra os sintomas típicos de uma exposição prolongada à tortura psicológica”.

Em 2020, enquanto milhares de detidos foram transferidos para prisão domiciliária como medida anticoronavírus, Assange foi deixado na prisão, exposto ao contágio em condições físicas comprometidas. No tribunal, Assange não pode consultar os advogados, mas é mantido isolado numa gaiola de vidro blindada e ameaçado de expulsão se abrir a boca. O que está por trás dessa persistência?

Arbuthnot tem o título de “Lady”, sendo consorte de Lord James Arbuthnot, um conhecido “falcão” Tory, anterior Ministro das Compras da Defesa, ligado ao complexo militar-industrial e aos serviços secretos. Lord Arbuthnot é, entre outras coisas, Presidente do Conselho Consultivo britânico da Thales, uma multinacional francesa especializada em sistemas militares aeroespaciais e membro da Montrose Associates, especializada em inteligência estratégica (cargos altamente pagos). Lord Arbuthnot faz parte da Henry Jackson Society (HJS), um influente think tank transatlântico ligado ao governo e aos serviços secretos dos EUA.

Em Julho passado, o Secretário de Estado norte-americano, Mike Pompeo, falou numa mesa redonda do HJS em Londres: desde 2017, quando era Director da CIA, ele acusa o WikiLeaks, fundado por Assange, de ser “um serviço de espionagem inimigo”. A mesma campanha é conduzida pela Henry Jackson Society, acusando Assange de “semear dúvidas sobre a posição moral dos governos democráticos ocidentais, com o apoio de regimes autocráticos”. No conselho político da HJS, ao lado de Lord Arbuthnot, estava até recentemente, Priti Patel, a actual Secretária do Interior do Reino Unido, responsável pela ordem de extradição de Assange.

A campanha de extradição de Assange, dirigida por Lord Arbuthnot e outros personagens influentes, está essencialmente ligada a Lady Arbuthnot.

Foi nomeada pela Rainha como * Magistrada Chefe, em Setembro de 2016, depois do WikiLeaks ter publicado, em Março,  os documentos mais comprometedores para os EUA. Entre estes, os emails da Secretária de Estado, Hillary Clinton, que revelam o verdadeiro propósito da guerra da NATO contra a Líbia: impedir que a Líbia usasse as suas reservas de ouro para criar uma moeda pan-africana alternativa ao dólar e ao franco CFA, a moeda imposta pela França às 14 antigas colónias.

O verdadeiro “crime” pelo qual Assange é julgado é o de ter aberto fissuras na parede de silêncio político-mediática que cobre os verdadeiros interesses das elites poderosas as quais, operando no “Estado profundo”, jogam a carta da guerra. É esse poder oculto que sujeita Julian Assange a um processo judicial, instruído por Lady Arbuthnot que, como tratamento ao acusado, recorda os da Santa Inquisição.

Se for extraditado para os EUA, Assange será submetido a “medidas administrativas especiais” muito mais duras do que as britânicas: ficará isolado numa pequena cela, não poderá contactar a família nem falar, nem mesmo por meio de advogados que, se levarem uma mensagem sua, serão incriminados. Por outras palavras, será condenado à morte.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Chi c’è dietro la giudice che processa Assange

il manifesto, 15 de Setembro de 2020

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Emma Arbuthnot è la giudice capo che, a Londra, ha istruito il processo per l’estradizione di Julian Assange negli Usa, dove lo attende una condanna a 175 anni di carcere per «spionaggio», ossia per aver pubblicato, quale giornalista d’inchiesta, prove dei crimini di guerra degli Stati uniti, tra cui video sulle stragi di civili in Iraq e Afghanistan. Al processo, assegnato alla giudice Vanessa Baraitser, è stata respinta ogni richiesta della difesa.

Nel 2018, dopo che è caduta l’accusa di violenza sessuale da parte della Svezia, la giudice Arbuthnot ha rifiutato di annullare il mandato di arresto, così che Assange, non potesse ottenere asilo in Ecuador.

Emma Arbuthnot ha respinto le conclusioni del Gruppo di lavoro delle Nazioni Unite sulla detenzione arbitraria di Assange. Inascoltate anche quelle del responsabile Onu contro la tortura: «Assange, detenuto in condizioni estreme di isolamento non giustificate, mostra i sintomi tipici di un’esposizione prolungata alla tortura psicologica». Nel 2020, mentre migliaia di detenuti sono stati trasferiti agli arresti domiciliari quale misura anti-Coronavirus, Assange è stato lasciato in carcere, esposto al contagio in condizioni fisiche compromesse. In aula Assange non può consultarsi con gli avvocati, ma viene tenuto isolato in una gabbia di vetro blindato, e minacciato di espulsione se apre bocca. Che cosa c’è dietro tale accanimento?

Arbuthnot ha il titolo di «Lady», essendo consorte di Lord James Arbuthnot, noto «falco» Tory, già ministro degli appalti della Difesa, legato al complesso militare-industriale e ai servizi segreti. Lord Arbuthnot è tra l’altro presidente del comitato consultivo britannico della Thales, multinazionale francese specializzata in sistemi militari aerospaziali, e membro di quello della Montrose Associates, specializzata in intelligence strategica (incarichi lautamente retribuiti).

Lord Arbuthnot fa parte della Henry Jackson Society (HJS), influente think tank transatlantico legato al governo e all’intelligence Usa. Lo scorso luglio, il segretario di stato Usa Mike Pompeo è intervenuto a Londra a una tavola rotonda della HJS: da quando era direttore della Cia nel 2017, egli accusa WikiLeaks, fondata da Assange, di essere «un servizio di spionaggio del nemico». La stessa campagna conduce la Henry Jackson Society, accusando Assange di «seminare dubbi sulla posizione morale dei governi democratici occidentali, con l’appoggio di regimi autocratici». Nel consiglio politico della HJS, a fianco di Lord Arbuthnot, è stata fino a poco tempo fa Priti Patel, l’attuale segretaria agli Interni del Regno Unito, cui compete l’ordine di estradizione di Assange.

A questo gruppo di pressione che conduce una martellante campagna per l’estradizione di Assange, con la regia di Lord Arbuthnot e altri influenti personaggi, è sostanzialmente collegata Lady Arbuthnot. È stata nominata dalla Regina magistrato capo nel settembre 2016, dopo che WikiLeaks aveva pubblicato in marzo i documenti più compromettenti per gli Usa. Tra questi le email della segretaria di Stato Hillary Clinton che rivelano il vero scopo della guerra Nato alla Libia: impedire che questa usasse le sue riserve auree per creare una moneta pan-africana alternativa al dollaro e al franco Cfa, la moneta imposta dalla Francia a 14 ex colonie.

Il vero «reato» per cui Assange viene processato è quello di aver aperto crepe nel muro di omertà politico-mediatica che copre i reali interessi di potenti élite le quali, operando nello «Stato profondo», giocano la carta della guerra. È questo potere occulto a sottoporre Julian Assange a un processo, istruito da Lady Arbuthnot, che come trattamento dell’imputato ricorda quelli della Santa Inquisizione.

Se estradato negli Usa, Assange verrebbe sottoposto a «misure amministrative speciali» molto più dure di quelle britanniche: verrebbe isolato in una piccola cella, non potrebbe contattare la famiglia né parlare, neppure tramite gli avvocati che, se portassero un suo messaggio, verrebbero incriminati. In altre parole, sarebbe condannato a morte.

Manlio Dinucci

While President Trump lashes out at rioting and looting in Portland and Kenosha, half way around the world, the USA and Turkey are plundering and looting Syria on a vastly greater scale with impunity and little publicity.

Turkey Loots Syria, then Disrupts Safe Water Supply  

Turkey has been plundering the Syrian infrastructure for years.  Beginning in late 2012 and continuing through 2013 some 300 industrial factories were dismantled and taken to Turkey from Aleppo, the industrial capital of Syria. “Machinery and goods were loaded on trucks and carried off to Turkey through the Cilvegozu and Ceylanpinar crossings. Unfortunately, ‘plundering’ and ‘terror’ have become permanent parts of the Syrian lexicon when explaining their saga.”

In October 2019 Turkish forces invaded Syria and now occupy a strip of land in north east Syria. The area is controlled by the Turkish military and pro Turkish militia forces misnamed the “Syrian National Army”. Turkish President Erdogan dubbed the invasion “Peace Spring” and said the goal was to create a “safe zone”. The reality was that 200 thousand Syrians fled the invasion and over 100 thousand have been permanently displaced from their homes, farms, workplaces and livelihoods.

The industrial scale looting continues. As reported recently in the story headlined Turkish-backed factions take apart power pylons in rural Ras Al-Ain: “Reliable sources have informed SOHR that Turkish-backed factions steal electricity power towers and pylons in ‘Peace Spring’ areas in Ras Al-Ain countryside.”

Turkey now controls the border city of Ras al-Ain and the nearby Allouk water treatment and pumping station.  This is the water station supplying safe water to the city Hasaka and entire region. The Turkish forces are using water as a weapon of war, shutting down the station to pressure the population to be compliant.  For over two weeks in August, with daily temperatures of 100 F,  there was no running water for nearly one million people.

With no tap water, civilians were forced to queue up for hours to receive small amounts from water trucks. Unable to buy the water, other civilians took their chances by drinking water from unsafe wells. According to Judy Jacoub, a Syrian journalist originally from Hasaka,

“The residents of Hasaka and its countryside have been pushed to rely on unsafe water sources ….Many residents have been suffering from the spread of fungi, germs and dirt in their hair and bodies as a result of using well water that is not suitable for drinking and personal hygiene. The people of Hasaka remain vulnerable to diseases and epidemics because of the high temperatures and spread of infectious diseases. If the situation is not controlled as soon as possible, the spread of Corona virus will undoubtedly be devastating.“

A hospital medical director says many people are getting sick from the contaminated water.

Judy Jacoub explains what has happened most recently:

“After Syrian and international efforts exerted pressure on the Turkish regime, 17 wells and three pumps were started . The main reservoirs were filled and pumping was started toward the city neighborhoods.  However, despite the Turkish militia’s resumption of pumping water again, there is great fear among the citizens.” 

USA Loots Syrian Oil and Plunders the Economy

The USA also has occupying troops and proxy / puppet military force in north east Syria. The proxy army is misnamed the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF). How they got that name is revealing. They took on this name as they came under the funding and control of the US military. As documented here, US Army General Ray Thomas told their leadership, “You have got to change your brand. What do you want to call yourselves besides the YPG?’  Then, he explained what happened: “With about a day’s notice they declared that they are the Syrian Democratic Forces. I thought it was a stroke of brilliance to put democracy in there somewhere.”

There are numerous parties and trends within the Syrian Kurdish community. The US has been funding and promoting the secessionist element, pushing  them to ally with Turkish backed  jihadists against the Damascus government.  The violation of Syrian sovereignty is extreme and grotesque.

Prior to the war, Syria was self-sufficient in oil and had enough to export and earn some foreign revenues. The primary oil sources are in eastern Syria, where the US troops and proxy forces have established bases. It is desert terrain with little population.

To finance their proxy army, the US has seized control of the major Syrian oil pumping wells. It is likely that President Trump thinks this is brilliant bold move – financing the invasion of Syria with Syrian oil.

In November 2019 President Trump said, “We’re keeping the oil… The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”  Recently, it was revealed that a “Little known US firm secures deal for Syrian oil“. Delta Crescent Energy will manage and escalate the theft of Syrian oil.

What would Americans think if another country invaded the US via Mexico, set up bases in Texas, sponsored a secessionist militia, then seized Texas oil wells to finance it?  That is comparable to what the US is doing in Syria.

In addition to stealing Syria’s oil, the US is trying to prevent Syria from developing alternate sources. The “Caesar sanctions” on Syria threatens to punish any individual, company or country that invests or assists Syria to rebuild their war damaged country and especially in the oil and gas sector.

The US establishment seems to be doing everything it can to undermine the Syrian economy and damage the Syrian currency. Due to pressure on Lebanese banks, plus the Caesar sanctions, the Syrian pound has plummeted in value from 650 to 2150 to the US dollar in the past 10 months.

North east Syria is the breadbasket of the country with the richest wheat and grain fields. There are reports of US pressuring farmers to not sell their wheat crops to the Syrian government. One year ago, Nicholas Heras of the influential Center for New American Security argued “Assad needs access to cereal crops in northeast Syria to prevent a bread crisis in the areas of western Syria that he controls….Wheat is a weapon of great power in this next phase of the Syrian conflict.”   Now, it appears the US is following this strategy. Four months ago, in May 2020,  Syrian journalist Stephen Sahiounie reported, “Apache helicopters of the US occupation forces flew low Sunday morning, according to residents of the Adla village, in the Shaddadi countryside, south of Hasaka, as they dropped ‘thermal balloons’, an incendiary weapon, causing the wheat fields to explode into flames while the hot dry winds fanned the raging fire.

After delivering their fiery pay-load, the helicopters flew close to homes in an aggressive manner, which caused residents and especially small children to fear for their lives.  The military maneuver was delivering a clear message: don’t sell your wheat to the Syrian government.”
To better loot the oil and plunder the Syria economy, in the past weeks the US is sending more heavy equipment and military hardware through the Kurdish region of Iraq.

In the south of Syria, the US has another base and occupation zone at the strategic Al Tanf border crossing. This is at the intersection of the borders of Syria, Iraq and Jordan. This is also the border crossing for the highway from Baghdad to Damascus. The US controls this border area to prevent Syrian reconstruction projects from Iraq or Iran. When Syrian troops have tried to get near there, they have been attacked on their own soil.

Meanwhile, international funds donated for “Syrian relief” are disproportionally sent to support and assist the last strong-hold of Al Qaeda terrorists in Idlib on the north west border with Turkey.  The US and its partners evidently want to sustain the armed opposition and prevent the Syrian government from reclaiming their territory.

Flouting International Law and the UN Charter

The USA and Turkey have shown how easy it is to violate international law. The occupation of Syrian land and attacks on its sovereignty are being done in broad daylight. But this is not just a legal issue. Stopping the supply of safe drinking water and burning wheat fields to create more hunger violate the most basic tenets of decency and morality.

With supreme hypocrisy, the US foreign policy establishment often complains about the decline in the “rule of law”. In actuality, there is no greater violator than the US itself.

In his speech to the UN Security Council,  Syrian Ambassador Ja’afari decried this situation saying “international law has become like the gentle lamb whose care is entrusted to a herd of wolves.”

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Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

Libya is a country of particular economic and political importance for Italy. The geographical proximity ­and the historical ties between both nations make the African country a strategically important state for Rome. But the violent instability that has been hitting Libya in recent years has increasingly isolated Italy from effective participation in the Libyan political scenario.

Italy’s natural interests in Libya do not correspond to the European country’s performance in the Maghreb. Since the end of World War II, when Italy lost its territories abroad, Rome’s colonial rule over Libya ended, however, many Italian communities remained in the country until they were expelled by Muammar Gaddafi after the 1969 Revolution. However, despite political tensions between both countries generated by the Revolution, the economic cooperation has always been very intense and profitable. For example, Libya has been one of the largest suppliers of oil to the Italian market since the 1950s, being one of the largest strategic partnerships between a North African country and a European state.

Due to the historical ties between both States, it was expected a more significant and incisive participation by Italy in the political life of the neighboring country, but several factors have prevented such participation. The first fact to be highlighted is that Italy participated in the so-called “Operation Odyssey Dawn” against Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011, breaching a bilateral friendship and cooperation treaty between both states signed a few years earlier, in 2008. Since the violation of the treaty, the credibility of the Italian government in Libya has been completely undermined, not only among Gaddafi’s supporters, but even among his opponents, and the act was considered a real betrayal against the Libyan people. Due to this scenario of collective distrust of Italy, Rome’s participation in Libya was limited to the Operation, with no involvement of the European country in the political situation of Tripoli after 2011. In a general context, the conflict in Libya currently can be defined in the confrontation between the Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Libyan National Army (LNA). The US supports the GNA, but without direct intervention in the conflict. Several other nations and organizations have direct or indirect involvement in Libya. France, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, for example, act effectively in the civil war, through military, diplomatic or economic means.

None of these countries directly involved in the Libyan conflict has as strong historical ties to the country as Italy, which remains passive. In the nine years since Gaddafi’s death, Rome has failed to develop a clear strategy for the Libyan issue. At first, Italy supported the GNA, with an agreement between both governments being signed in 2017, providing for economic cooperation and training of Libyan military personnel by the Italian armed forces. But a scandal of violence against immigrants by Libyan and Italian troops put an end to the project of training and cooperation. In addition, the growth of the LNA and Turkish support for the GNA made Rome retreat to any form of participation in Tripoli – Italy has several disagreements with Ankara and fears reprisals and attacks by the LNA.

All of this has further damaged Rome’s image in Tripoli and Italy has come to be seen as an increasingly less reliable country. But, in fact, the reasons for understanding these attitudes are simple. Italy has been experiencing a serious political and economic crisis since the beginning of the Libyan civil war. Since 2011, six prime ministers have led the Italian government, creating a great scenario of instability. In addition, there is a fundamental issue, which is Italian military weakness. In fact, the country does not currently have strength enough to defend, if necessary, its positions in Libya.

However, this year, Italy has shown little interest in recovering its ties with the African country. Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi di Maio, met LNA leader Haftar earlier this year and made several statements saying that Rome will no longer tolerate foreign intervention in Libya. Months later, in a conversation with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Italian chancellor defended the same positions and reaffirmed Italy’s interest in Libyan peace. It seems that Rome’s intention currently is to work as a pivot in the negotiations for a permanent peace agreement in Tripoli. Having realized that it cannot explicitly support one side because of its military weakness, Italy is betting on diplomacy and dialogue with all parties involved in the conflict as a way of seeking a real solution and defending its interests.

It remains to be seen whether Italy’s image among Libyans can be recovered. After two episodes being interpreted by Tripoli as acts of betrayal, it is likely that it will be a long time before relations between the two countries are fully restored. Above all, Italy needs to firmly defend its positions and not retreat again under foreign pressure. The Italian strategy for Libya must be developed exclusively in Rome.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

It is official. President of France, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday 14, 2020, conceded that Europe has lost the battle for data security and cloud computing. The continent cannot compete against America. Not that France could have asserted any claims to power; the fate of Europe was decided in Germany.

The German government last year announced Berlin’s own “European cloud service” called Gaia-X. Economy Minister Peter Altmaier praised the move as Europe’s first step towards “digital sovereignty.” But not so fast: German top officials love to impersonate Europe. That and the fact that Germany and the European Union may never achieve independence. The game is rigged in favor of their masters in America.

The price to pay for US domination was not immediately felt after the collapse of the German Reich (1871 – 1945) and the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). “Germany since 1945,” the late Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble reiterated on state-TV: “was never again a sovereign nation.” That is not to say that there are no advantages to being part of “the West,” being part of the US Empire.

It starts with legitimacy. The German Grundgesetz [Basic Law] was largely dictated by the victorious Allies. And so was the BRD’s foreign policy – membership in NATO, UN, WTO, IMF, Trans-Atlantic Bridge, hundreds of unfair treaties, and thousands of pro-US NGOs and think-tanks.

The downsides were also felt: For example, any German company that engages in business with an American anywhere in the world is subject to US law. That’s why German Volkswagen, BMW, Bayer, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank are constantly sued, extorted and abused – paying hundreds of millions euros in fines and fees to appease American interest groups, lawyers and tax collectors. Also, the US calls Germany’s federal elections, installing de-facto puppet regimes – from Konrad Adenauer to Angela Merkel.

Seventy-five years after the Great War, Germany is still occupied, under whatever pretext is given: First, to guard against the Soviets, next Islamic terrorists, then Iran and North Korea, now Russia and China. And although the number of US soldiers stationed in Germany was reduced to 35,000 in 2020, their arsenal of assassination drones and atomic bombs is spic-a-span top notch.

Berlin is surveilled by US intelligence services CIA and NSA. Banking, payment services, shipment and financial transactions, even social media data are stored in the US or anywhere under US-jurisdiction. All key media are pro-US. Journalists at the Springer Group, Europe’s largest propaganda press, have to sign a letter of US-allegiance. The press mirrors US media 1:1, but of course most Germans citizens have no idea.

What they have an idea about, however, is their daily life-styles. The average German owns an iphone, sees Tesla ads, navigates with GPS, shops at Amazon, pays via Visa, Mastercard or Paypal, watches Netflix or HBO series, loves the Simpsons and South Park, and uses Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter services. He also video-chats via WhatsApp, Skype or Zoom, buys on Ebay and rents on Uber.

Music, film and academia are completely American, or are a German rip-offs. Germany has no global banks (Deutsche bank is largely American-owned), no tech-giants (Wirecard just went bust) and no world-class universities (Munich ranks 57th). The German education system – technically an 18th century Prussian invention – was abandoned in 2004: The state now awards US-compatible BAs, MAs and PhDs. All German pupils must learn English, the language of their masters, although the kids are told it is “the international language.”

Because of this dependency, the Germans and Europeans have unlearned to fend for themselves. So, while China opened up in the Deng Xiaoping era, prospered during the Hu Jintao era, and became a superpower under Xi Jinping, the Germans fell behind in their inventiveness. Their world share of GDP dropped significantly, from 3.2% in 1900 to 1.07% in 2019. Germany DAX-100 companies are 80% foreign-owned. Germany has slept into the digitization age.

The US and China didn’t. They worked relentlessly on creating national champions. Still, the US takes Germany and Europe for granted as Lebensraums [living space] for American expansion, while Chinese expansion is heavily sanctioned, blocked, rejected. This is all the more lamentable, because Germany’s social democracy potentially harmonizes with “China’s communism”.

So back to the European Cloud Service Gaia-X. Do we really believe that Germany, France and the EU being caged up by the US on earth would not be caught getting their heads up on digital freedom? No, and already US multi-billion-dollar tech-giants Microsoft and Amazon have signaled their “interest” in Gaia-X, and Washington demanded that such EU clouds have to be “technically compatible with US global standards” (such as the US Cloud Act), or else…

Make no mistake: The German-Euro reliance and dependence on the US is depressing. France is a non-player and Germany a push-over. A declaration of independence – as the US once decoupled itself from the British Empire for example – seems unlikely. The best Europe can do is to carefully consider the China model of self-sufficiency and sovereignty.

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Dr. Thorsten Pattberg is a German cultural critic and political commentator on Sino-Western relations.

On Monday, Vladimir Putin met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi, Russia.

Both leaders are united against the diabolical made-in-the-USA attempt to transform Belarus into another US vassal state.

On the President of Russia website, Putin said the following:

“I have already congratulated you on your victory in the presidential election, but I did so in writing and over the telephone.”

“Now, I am delighted to have the opportunity to do so in person. I would like to wish you all the best and every success.”

“(W)e are aware of the internal political developments in Belarus related to these elections.”

“You are well aware of our position: we are for the Belarusians themselves, without any suggestions or pressure from outside…”

“Russia remains committed to all our agreements, including the agreements arising from the Union State Treaty and the CSTO Treaty.”

We regard Belarus as our closest ally and, of course, as I have told you many times in our telephone conversations, we will honor all our commitments.”

“We agreed that during this complicated period, Moscow would grant Minsk a state loan of $1.5 billion and we will do this.”

“We will have to continue our cooperation in defense…”(T)oday we start the military exercises that were planned last year, which are scheduled to run for several days.”

Separately, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov affirmed that Lukasheko “is the legitimate(ly) (reelected) president of the Republic of Belarus,” adding:

“As President Putin has said from the very beginning, we want everything that happens in Belarus to happen not in some non-constitutional form, but within a legal framework.”

In response to defeated US sponsored candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya saying Lukashenko will have to repay the Russian loan himself, Peskov said her remark is “fundamentally wrong,” adding:

“The loan is issued not to President Lukashenko, but to Belarus, our big ally and a brotherly nation for us.”

It “must in no way be interpreted as interference in (the country’s) internal affairs.”

Both leaders discussed “bilateral relations, trade and economic cooperation,” along with US-orchestrated street demonstrations that are all about illegally seeking regime change.

Discussing joint military exercises this month was not on the agenda in Sochi, Peskov noted, adding:

Lukashenko “confirmed his intention to move forward with constitutional changes.”

He “informed (Putin) about his intention to form an appropriate working structure and launch a full-scale process of constitutional changes.”

“(W)e want everything that happens in Belarus to take place not in the form of unconstitutional maneuvers, but legally.”

Putin stressed that it’s for Belarusians to resolve what’s going on in the country post-August 9 election with no foreign interference as mandated by international law.

Peskov stressed the point, saying “no one should interfere in (Belarus) in any way — neither Moscow” nor the West.

Putin noted that when joint military exercises are completed, Russian forces “will return to their permanent deployment locations” back home.

Following Monday Putin/Lukashenko discussions, it was agreed that Russia will disband its law enforcement reserve unit and National Guard forces positioned along the border between both countries.

Last month, Putin said it was formed in accordance with Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) obligations — a 1992 seven-nation Commonwealth of Independent States defense alliance (including Russia and Belarus) against foreign aggression.

Russian security forces would only be used in Belarus if elements in the country “cross certain lines (by) torch(ing) houses, banks, (and) trying to seize administrative buildings,” Putin explained last month.

He’s hopeful that getting involved in Belarus this way won’t be needed.

Separately in a Monday Washington Post op-ed — written by her US handlers — Svetlana Tikhanovskaya tried reinventing history by falsely claiming victory on August 9.

Lukashenko decisively trounced her by a legitimate near-62% – 25% victory margin — that was unnecessarily inflated to an 80% – 10% triumph.

Either way, he won. She was soundly defeated.

Things are never simple when a US color revolution attempt is initiated, this one on the back foot with Belarusian security forces loyal to Lukashenko having the upper hand.

Defying reality as directed by her US handlers, Tikhanovskaya falsely claimed that she “won the majority of the votes in the Aug. 9 presidential election (sic).”

Her dubious source: a so-called “detailed analysis (sic) of the election results by several independent groups (sic), which managed to scrutinize voting records in a large number of precincts (sic) despite massive government fraud (sic).”

Her claim doesn’t pass the smell test. Nor is Lukashenko being “assisted by Russian-supplied journalists’…lies and propaganda.”

Claiming that “it is only a question of time until he leaves power” isn’t borne out by reality on the ground.

Indeed one day another Belarusian leader will succeed him. It’s for voters in the country to decide who’ll lead them, not a foreign power wanting its puppet installed in office.

Tikhanovskaya is a housewife with no political experience. Does she understand how US dark forces are manipulating her and other Belarusians in pursuit of their interests?

The propaganda piece WaPo published in her name — written by her US handlers — expresses their views in their words under her byline.

She’s an imperial tool to be discarded if and when no longer useful to the US.

Supported by Russia, Lukashenko is holding firm against the US plot to topple him.

What’s going on in Belarus may continue for some time.

As things now stand, Lukashenko has the upper hand with Russia’s backing.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Those of us who have longed for an end to America’s military engagement in the Middle East have hoped for a candidate who was not tied hand and foot to Israel, which is the root cause of the badly-broken and essentially pointless U.S. foreign policy in the region. But the real tragedy is that in spite of Israel’s near-constant interference in government process at all levels in the United States, no candidate will mention it except in the most laudatory fashion. It will be praised as America’s best friend and closest ally, but the price the U.S. has paid for all that balderdash while it has simultaneously been turning itself into the slave of the Jewish state will never surface.

The Democratic Party leadership is owned by Israel through its big Jewish donors whose billions come with only one string attached, i.e. that the Jewish state must be protected, empowered and enriched no matter what damage it does to actual U.S. interests. Number one Israeli-American billionaire donor Haim Saban has said that he has only one interest, and that is Israel. How such a man can have major influence over American foreign policy and the internal workings of one of its two major parties might be considered the death of real democracy. At the Israel America Council’s National Conference Nancy Pelosi explicitly put Israel’s interests before America’s:

“I have said to people when they ask me if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.”

Jews are not surprisingly considerably over-represented in the Democratic Party Establishment. The influence of powerful Jewish Democrats recently insured that there would be no criticism of Israel, nor mention of Palestine, in the party platform for November’s election. So extreme is the virulence of some Jews against the Palestinians that a liberal Zionist Rabbi Mark Winer speaking at a Joe Biden rally in Florida recently denounced “progressives” as infected with the “anti-Semitism virus” over their support for Palestinian rights and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. No one even sought to challenge him. Another progressive Zionist Rabbi Jill Jacobs tweeted about how liberals have to embrace Israel to avoid offending Jews. She wrote:

While Israel is likely the most divisive issue in the progressive world, setting a litmus test that one cannot consider oneself pro-Israel, or support two states, would divide the vast majority of Jews from the left. Not what we need when fighting white nationalism.

So-called white nationalists therefore appear to be the preferred enemies of progressive Jews, requiring one to close ranks even – or perhaps especially – when Palestinians are being brutalized. Joe Biden does not venture into that extreme-think zone, but he has made his loyalties clear. He has said that “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist. I am a Zionist.” More recently he has denounced Trump as “bad for Israel.” And to demonstrate his bona fides, he kicked Democratic Party Palestinian-activist Linda Sarsour under the bus when she appeared on a DNC convention panel discussing how to appeal to Muslim voters. Biden’s campaign office issued a statement saying that he “…has been a strong supporter of Israel and a vehement opponent of anti-Semitism his entire life, and he obviously condemns her views and opposes BDS, as does the Democratic platform. She has no role in the Biden campaign whatsoever.”

With that lead in, it is difficult to imagine how Biden would suddenly recognize the humanity of the long-suffering Palestinians, to include those who are, like he claims to be, Catholic. Biden is close to AIPAC and has spoken at their annual convention a number of times. He is opposed to putting any pressure on the Jewish state at any time and for any reason, which presumably includes not even protecting U.S. interests or the lives and property of American citizens.

Biden also worked for President Barack Obama and was a colleague in office of Hillary Clinton. Both did the usual pander to Israel and neither was particularly well disposed to the Palestinians, though Obama talked the talk of a man of peace so effectively that he was awarded a Nobel Prize. Bear in mind that Obama personally disliked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he increased the money from the U.S. Treasury going directly to Israel to $3.8 billion per annum and guaranteed it for ten years, an unprecedented move. The fact is that money was and is illegal under American law due to the 1976 Symington Amendment, which banned any aid to any country with a nuclear program that was not declared and subject to inspection under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obama, who claims to be a “constitutional lawyer,” surely was aware of that but rewarded Israel anyway.

One can expect nothing from Kamala Harris. Her husband is Jewish and she has made her career in California by sleeping with power brokers and pandering to Israel. She, like Biden, has been a fixture at the AIPAC annual conference. She has already made her mark with the party’s pro-Israel crowd by having a conference call with 1800 Jewish Democratic donors, during which she repeatedly assured them a Biden-Harris Administration will never resort to cutting current levels of aid over any “political decisions that Israel makes,” adding personally “…and I couldn’t agree more.” She promised to demonstrate what she described as “unwavering support” for Israel. She also reminded the donors that Joe Biden had been behind the “largest military aid package” to any country ever when President Obama signed off on the $38 billion package in 2016.

Optimists point to the fact that the Democrats have now elected a number of congressmen who are willing to criticize Israel and they also cite opinion polls that suggest that a majority of registered Democrats want fair treatment for the Palestinians without any major bias in favor of the Jewish state. In spite of a news blackout on stories critical of Israel, there is broad understanding of the fact that the Israelis are serial human rights abusers. But those observations matter little in a situation in which the top of the party, to include those who manage elections and allocate money to promising prospective candidates, identify as strongly and often passionately friends of Israel. That is not an accident and one can assume that major effort has gone into maintaining that level of control.

How exactly this fissure in the Democratic Party will play out after November is anyone’s guess and, of course, if Trump wins there will be an autopsy to find out who to blame. Israel certainly won’t be looked at because no one is allowed to talk about it anyway, but some progressives at least will demand a review of a foreign policy platform that was heavy on intervention and global democracy promotion and light on getting along with adversaries, making it largely indistinguishable from that of the Republicans.

Israel for its part has played its cards carefully. It knows that either Biden or Trump will do whatever it wants, but it has deferred its planned annexation of much of the Palestinian West Bank, which will now take place after the election. It did that knowing that otherwise some liberals in the Democratic Party might try to turn Israel into an issue and split the Jewish community while also alienating Jewish donors and some Jewish voters if the annexation had taken place. After November 3^rd, no matter who wins Israel will benefit and will have a free hand to do anything it wishes to the Palestinians. Or perhaps one should say the “remaining Palestinians” until they are all gone.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

Featured image is from Flickr

With Boris Johnson now U-turning on the Withdrawal Agreement he signed with the EU in December, Alex Andreou argues how the entire Brexit project “never made any sense” from the very start

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“There is no plan for ‘no deal’ because we are going to get a great deal.”

These were the words of the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in the House of Commons, when he was challenged on a lack of preparation for a Brexit deal in July 2017. Today, the same Boris Johnson is telling the country that he has “said right from the start” that a ‘no deal’ “would be a good outcome for the UK”.

This, combined with news that the forthcoming UK Internal Markets Bill will seek to undermine parts of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement – which Johnson himself signed and Parliament ratified only 10 months ago – signify an intensification of the rhetoric surrounding the eighth, and last, round of UK-EU negotiations due to take place this week.

Several things may be going on and they are not mutually exclusive – all these hares may be running concurrently.

First, there is a predictable level of sabre-rattling which always precedes such negotiations.

Second, there may be a level of expectation management, so that if a deal does eventually materialise, however thin and awful, it can be presented as a magnificent achievement.

Third – and this has been a classic Dominic Cummings technique – there may be an effort to create a more chaotic atmosphere, in order to create disorder on the EU side and disrupt its advantage. If this was partly the aim, it has not worked. The reaction from the EU has been, for the most part, a weary roll of the eyes and steely determination.

The resignation of Sir Jonathan Jones, the head of the Government Legal Service on Tuesday morning, after a reported major spat over Johnson trying to undermine or circumvent the Withdrawal Agreement the UK signed in December, would hint that there is more going on.

The final scenario is the most worrying of all. As Peter Foster observed in July, the UK negotiator David Frost’s fundamental problem was that he was unable to present a clear position on the future UK regulatory environment because the debate in London was still going on. Hard Brexiters, led by Cummings, wanted a light-touch regime. It is possible that the hardliners have won the point and that a ‘no deal’ is now actively the aim.

Concerns about rules on state aid seem to me to be bogus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rules still applied to the UK and several subsidies which would qualify as state aid were notified to the European Commission – just as they were by every EU member state – without it being a problem.

This is deeper and ideological.

If the UK is to ‘go rogue’ and turn into a market disruptor – a notion with which Cummings’ rambling blogs often flirt – it must have become clear that this would not be possible if the UK remained part of any rules-based structure, and its actions subject to arbitration.

Whatever the reasoning, the reputational damage the UK will suffer, if its Government chooses to renege on a treaty it signed less than a year ago, will be immeasurable. It will go into the world, looking to sign treaties, with every single potential partner knowing that the UK’s promises are, quite literally, not worth the paper they are written on. As Ian Dunt observes, it is much easier to throw a good reputation away than it is to create it.

Appointments like that of the disreputable Tony Abbott as a trade advisor to the Government, only compound the sinking sense that the UK, like an impressionable teenager, has fallen in with a bad crowd. It risks becoming an international pariah.

The first problem the UK is likely to encounter is with the US. The Democrat-controlled Congress has made it abundantly clear that it will not approve any trade deal if Brexit undermines the commitments of the Good Friday Agreement. Many such correctives to our inflated national ego will follow.

A Con from the Start

It is difficult to understand the issue at the heart of these diplomatic spasms, without revisiting the 2016 referendum.

What was promised was undeliverable: the same level of access to the Single Market that the UK enjoyed as an EU member, with no tariffs, no quotas, no barriers, and no disruption, while being free from any of the responsibilities and rules that come with membership. It was never going to happen. It was always a lie.

What we are witnessing now is the Leave camp finally having to choose between a level of access that necessarily entails a level of involvement, or neither. The UK opted for a worse deal than it had. All that remains is to find out how much worse. This is the inalienable truth of Brexit. The rest is spin.

Those of us who warned that this was always a likely outcome, were dismissed as fear-mongers. For four years now, expectations have been lowered, ‘project fear’ has become a reality and voters have been battered with lie after lie and spurious argument after spurious argument, until they can no longer follow proceedings or have lost any desire to.

The right-wing press has set about methodically normalising a ‘no deal’ Brexit to its hypnotised audience. “Boris’s deal is the only game in town,” wrote former MEP John Longworth in his Telegraph column in December 2019. “It is vital my fellow Brexiteers vote Conservative.” By August 2020, his position had shamelessly mutated to: “Once people realise what Boris’s deal means, they’ll want a cleaner break.”

At the core of this mess, is a catastrophic misconception: for four years, the UK hasn’t grasped that the EU is, above all else, a rules-based structure. The legal framework is not an inconvenience, but the beating heart of the union. It is designed to fetter power. Then again, why would the UK now understand something which it failed to during four decades of membership?

A ‘Bonkers’ Mindset

I cannot conceive of any behaviour that the EU would find more incomprehensible and reprehensible, than the unilateral trashing of a hard-fought compromise, freely agreed to and enacted into law by the UK Government only months ago.

I cannot conceive of any behaviour more disrespectful to the 27 EU member states which worked hard and swallowed the UK’s disrespect, so that an agreement could be reached. It doesn’t spell ‘tough’ to them. It spells ‘dishonest’.

Brexiters keep banging on about sovereignty. But sovereignty is not merely a set of freedoms – it also comprises responsibilities. Sovereignty is being free to sign deals, but also standing by them. “The deal never made any sense”, says Johnson now – as if his very own signature is not on the document; as if it wasn’t him who commended it to the House of Commons only last December as “a great deal for our whole country”.

The UK’s chief negotiator and occasional pez-dispenser of pound shop psychoanalysis, David Frost suggested in July that the EU had not “internalised and accepted” the fact that the UK was now an independent state. On the contrary, this latest behaviour betrays the fact that it is the UK that has not accepted its new status – otherwise it would know that the toddler tantrums it got away with as a member of the EU, are likely to meet with a different response when it is a third-country supplicant asking for access.

The Prime Minister has set – randomly, of course – a deadline of 15 October for a deal to be done, threatening to otherwise walk away.

“I don’t understand why we keep using this slightly bonkers language, where we try to make out it’s some sort of fight to the death,” says former Conservative MP and now Baron Ed Vaizey.

Instead of trying to work out what four-dimensional chess game is being played, it may be time to consider the possibility that we use ‘bonkers language’ because we are ‘bonkers’.

“Deadlines do tend to focus minds,” mused the Telegraph’s Madeline Grant. This implies that, if only everyone on the EU side focused, they might be able to bring into being the impossible dream cynically promised to the British people in 2016. They cannot. Nobody can.

Johnson can drive a digger through any number of walls made up of empty cardboard boxes. It is a poor rehearsal for what happens when he meets the all-too-solid wall of reality.

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May 2020 article in the British Medical Journal

Only a third of the excess deaths seen in the community in England and Wales can be explained by covid-19, new data have shown.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data,[1] which cover deaths in hospitals, care homes, private homes, hospices, and elsewhere, show that 6035 people died as a result of suspected or confirmed covid-19 infection in England and Wales in the week ending 1 May 2020 (where deaths were registered up to 9 May), a decline of 2202 from the previous week.

Although the number of deaths in care homes has fallen for the second week in a row, more covid related deaths are being reported in care homes than in hospitals and are tailing off more slowly.

However, David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that covid-19 did not explain the high number of deaths taking place in the community.

At a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre on 12 May he explained that, over the past five weeks, care homes and other community settings had had to deal with a “staggering burden” of 30 000 more deaths than would normally be expected, as patients were moved out of hospitals that were anticipating high demand for beds.

Of those 30 000, only 10 000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis,

“the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”

He added that many of these deaths would be among people “who may well have lived longer if they had managed to get to hospital.”

Underlying causes

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030.

The CBO update also shows that the Social Security, Medicare, and highway trust funds will all be bankrupt by 2031. This will put pressure on Congress to bail out the trust funds thus further increasing the debt.

This year’s spike in federal spending was caused by the multi-trillion dollar coronavirus relief/economic stimulus bills passed by Congress and signed by the president. However, spending had already increased by $937 billion from the time President Trump was sworn in until the lockdown.

Federal spending is unlikely to be reduced no matter who wins the presidential election. Former Vice President Joe Biden has proposed increasing spending on everything from Obamacare to militarism to “green” cronyism. Yet some progressives are attacking Biden for being to “stingy” in his spending proposals. Even more distressing is how few progressives are critical of Biden’s support for increasing the military budget.

With some notable exceptions, such as his infrastructure plan, President Trump is not proposing any massive new spending programs. However, he Is not promising to stop increasing, much less cut, federal spending.

Most Republicans have abandoned their Obama-era opposition to deficit spending to support President Trump’s spending increases. This repeats a pattern where Republicans oppose deficit spending under a Democrat president but decide that “deficits don’t matter” when a Republican is sitting in the Oval Office. If Biden wins in November, Republicans will likely once again discover that deficits do matter, especially if Democrats also gain control of the Senate.

Government spending forcibly takes resources from the private sector, where they are used to produce goods and services desired by consumers, and puts them in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. This distorts the market, reducing efficiency and lowering the people’s standard of living. This, combined with pressure to monetize the federal debt, causes the Federal Reserve to pump money into the economy leading to a boom-bust business cycle.

Unless Congress begins reducing spending, the coming economic crisis will be even worse. The logical place to start cutting spending is ending all unnecessary overseas commitments, corporate welfare, and shuttling down all unconstitutional federal agencies — starting with the Department of Education.

The savings from these cuts can be used to start paying down debt and providing for those truly dependent on the current system while we transition away from the welfare state. Private charities, including ones run by religious organizations, are better than government bureaucracies at providing effective and compassionate aid to those in need.

Most politicians will not vote to curtail the welfare-warfare state unless their constituents demand it. The people will not demand an end to big government as long as so many believe that the government has a moral responsibility to, and is capable of, providing them with economic and personal security.

Therefore, our priority must be on getting people to reject the entitlement mentality and embrace the philosophy of liberty and personal responsibility. This will enable us to build a movement capable of convincing politicians to stop voting for more spending and debt and instead vote to respect the Constitutional limitations on government in all areas.

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Things became not merely dramatic in the Assange courtroom today, but spiteful and nasty. There were two real issues, the evidence and the procedure. On the evidence, there were stark details of the dreadful regime Assange will face in US jails if extradited. On the procedure, we saw behaviour from the prosecution QC that went well beyond normal cross examination and was a real attempt to denigrate and even humiliate the witness. I hope to prove that to you by a straightforward exposition of what happened today in court, after which I shall add further comment.

Today’s witness was Eric Lewis. A practising US attorney for 35 years, Eric Lewis has a doctorate in law from Yale and a masters in criminology from Cambridge. He is former professor in law at Georgetown University, an elected member of both the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He is Chairman of Reprieve. He has represented high profile clients in national security and terrorism cases, including Seymour Hersh and Guantanamo Bay internees.

Image on the right: Edward Fitzgerald

Lewis had submitted five statements to the court, between October 2019 and August 2020, addressing the ever changing indictments and charges brought by the prosecution. He was initially led through the permitted brief half hour summary of his statements by defence QC Edward Fitzgerald. (I am told I am not currently allowed to publish the defence statements or links to them. I shall try to clarify this tomorrow).

Eric Lewis testified that no publisher had ever been successfully prosecuted for publishing national security information in the USA. Following the Wikileaks publications including the diplomatic cables and the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, Assange had not been prosecuted because the First Amendment was considered insuperable and because of the New York Times problem – there was no way just to prosecute Assange without prosecuting the New York Times for publishing the same material. The New York Times had successfully plead the First Amendment for its publication of the Pentagon Papers, which had been upheld in a landmark Supreme Court judgement.

Lewis here gave evidence that mirrored that already reported of Prof Feldstein, Trevor Timm and Prof Rogers, so I shall not repeat all of it. He said that credible sources had stated the Obama administration had decided not to prosecute Assange, notably Matthew Miller, a highly respected Justice Department figure who had been close to Attorney General Holder and would have been unlikely to brief the media without Holder’s knowledge and approval.

Eric Lewis than gave testimony on the change of policy towards prosecuting Assange from the Trump administration. Again this mostly mirrored the earlier witnesses. He added detail of Mike Pompeo stating the the free speech argument for Wikileaks was “a perversion of what our great country stands for”, and claiming that the First Amendment did not apply to foreigners.

Attorney General Sessions had accordingly stated that it was “a priority for the Justice Department” to arrest Julian Assange. He had pressured prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia to bring a case. In December 2017 an arrest warrant had been issued, with the indictment to be filled in later. The first indictment of a single count had been launched in March 2018, its timing possibly dictated by a limitation deadline.

In May 2019 a new superseding indictment increased the counts from one to eighteen, seventeen of which related to espionage. This tougher stance followed the appointment of William Barr as Attorney General just four months previously. The plain intention of the first superseding indictment was to get round the New York Times problem by trying to differentiate Assange’s actions with Manning from those of other journalists. It showed that the Justice Department was very serious and very aggressive in acting on the statements of Trump administration officials. Barr was plainly acting at the behest of Trump. This represented a clear abuse of the criminal enforcement power of the state.

The prosecution of a publisher in this way was unprecedented. Yet the facts were the same in 2018 as they had been in 2012 and 13; there was no new evidence behind the decision to prosecute. Crucially, the affidavits of US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg present no legal basis for the taking of a different decision to that of 2013. There is no explanation of why the dossier was lying around with no action for five or six years.

The Trump administration had in fact taken a different political decision through the Presidential spokesperson Sarah Sanders who had boasted that only this administration had acted against Assange and “taken this process seriously”.

Edward Fitzgerald QC then turned to the question of probable sentencing and led Lewis through his evidence on this point. Eric Lewis confirmed that if Julian Assange were convicted he could very probably spend the rest of his life in prison. The charges had not been pleaded as one count, which it had been open to the prosecution to do. The judge would have discretion to sentence the counts either concurrently or consecutively. Under current sentencing guidelines, Assange’s sentence if convicted could range from “best case” 20 years to a maximum of 175 years. It was disingenuous of Gordon Kromberg to suggest a minimal sentence, given that Chelsea Manning had been sentenced to 35 years and the prosecution had requested 60.

It had been a government choice to charge the alleged offences as espionage. The history of espionage convictions in the USA had generally resulted in whole life sentences. 20 to 30 years had been lighter sentences for espionage. The multiple charges approach of the indictment showed a government intention to obtain a very lengthy sentence. Of course the final decision would lay with the judge, but it would be decades.

Edward Fitzgerald then led on to the question of detention conditions. On the question of remand, Gordon Kromberg had agreed that Julian Assange would be placed in the Alexandria City Jail, and there was a “risk” that he would be held there under Special Administrative Measures. In fact this was a near certainty. Assange faced serious charges related to national security, and had seen millions of items of classified information which the authorities would be concerned he might pass on to other prisoners. He would be subject to Special Administrative Measures both pre and post conviction.

After conviction Julian Assange would be held in the supermax prison ADX Florence, Colorado. There were at least four national security prisoners currently there in the H block. Under SAMS Assange would be kept in a small cell for 22 or 23 hours a day and not allowed to meet any other prisoners. He would be allowed out once a day for brief exercise or recreation excluded from other prisoners, but shackled.

Fitzgerald then led Lewis to the 2017 decision by the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, in which the evidence provided by the Wikileaks release of US war logs and diplomatic cables provided essential evidence. This had been denounced by Trump, John Bolton and Pompeo. The ICC prosecutor’s US visa had been canceled to hinder his investigation. An Executive Order had been issued imposing financial sanctions and blocking the banking access of any non US national who assisted the ICC investigation into crimes alleged against any US citizen. This would affect Julian Assange.

At this point, the half hour guillotine imposed by judge Baraitser on defence evidence came down. Fitzgerald pointed out they had not even reached the second superseding indictment yet, but Baraitser said that if the prosecution addressed that in cross examination, then the defence could question on it in re-examination.

James Lewis QC then rose to cross examine Eric Lewis. Yet again, he adopted an extremely aggressive tone. This is perhaps best conveyed as a dialogue.

NB this is not a precise transcript. It would be illegal for me to publish a transcript (of a “public” court hearing; fascinating but true). This is condensed and slightly paraphrased. It is I believe a fair and balanced representation of what happened, but not a verbatim record.

Eric Lewis was appearing by videolink and it should be borne in mind that he was doing so at 5am his time.

James Lewis QC Are you retained as a lawyer by Mr Assange in any way?
Eric Lewis No.
James Lewis QC Are you being paid for your evidence?
Eric Lewis Yes, as an expert witness. At a legal aid rate.
James Lewis QC Are you being paid for your appearance in this court?
Eric Lewis We haven’t specifically discussed that. I assume so.
James Lewis QC How much are you being paid?
Eric Lewis £100 per hour, approximately
James Lewis QC How much have you charged in total?
Eric Lewis I don’t know, haven’t worked it out yet.
James Lewis QC Are you aware of the rules governing expert witnesses?
Eric Lewis Yes, I am. I must state my qualifications and my duty is to the court; I have to give an objective and unbiased view.
James Lewis QC You are also supposed to set out alternative views. Where have you set out the arguments in Mr Kromberg’s five affidavits?
Eric Lewis The court has Mr Kromberg’s affidavits. I address his arguments directly in my statements. Are you saying that I should have repeated his affidavits and all the other evidence in my statements? My statements would have been thousands of pages long.
James Lewis QC You are supposed to be unbiased. But you had previously given views that Mr Assange should not be extradited.
Eric Lewis Yes, I published an article to that effect.
James Lewis QC You also gave an interview to an Australian radio station.
Eric Lewis Yes, but both of those were before I was retained as an expert witness in this case.
James Lewis QC Does this not create a conflict of interest?
Eric Lewis No, I can do an objective analysis setting aside any prejudice. Lawyers are used to such situations.
James Lewis QC Why had you not declared these media appearances as an interest?
Eric Lewis I did not think perfectly open actions and information needed to be declared.
James Lewis QC It would be much better if we were not forced to dig out this information. You give opinions on law. You also give opinions on penal conditions. Are you an expert witness?
Eric Lewis I am very familiar with prison conditions. I visit prisons. I studied criminology at Cambridge. I keep up to date with penology. I have taught aspects of it at university.
James Lewis QC Are you a qualified penologist?
Eric Lewis I think I have explained my qualification
James Lewis QC Can you point us to peer reviewed articles which you have published on prison conditions?
Eric Lewis No.
James Lewis QC Have you visited ADX Colorado?
Eric Lewis No, but I have had a professional relationship with a client in there.
James Lewis QC Have you represented anyone in Alexandra Detention Centre?
Eric Lewis Yes, one person, Abu Qatada.
James Lewis QC So you have no expertise in prisons?
Eric Lewis I have visited extensively in prisons and observed prison conditions. I have read widely and in detail on the subject.
James Lewis QC Abu Qatada was acquitted of 14 of the 18 charges against him. Was that not acquittal by the same jury pool that would try Julian Assange?
Eric Lewis No. That was Colombia, not Eastern Virginia. Very different jury pools.
James Lewis QC The prosecutors withdrew capital charges. You said that was a courageous but correct decision?
Eric Lewis Yes.
James Lewis QC So what was Qatada’s sentence and what was the maximum?
Eric Lewis The government asked for life but to my mind that was not legal for the charges on which he was convicted. He got 22 years. That was much criticised as harsh for those charges.
James Lewis QC Was the Abu Qatada trial a denial of justice?
Eric Lewis No
James Lewis QC Abu Qatada was held under Special Administrative Measures. Did that prevent you from spending many hours with him?
Eric Lewis No, but it made it extremely difficult. The many hours were spread out over a long period. That is why remand lasted for three years.
James Lewis QC Were your meetings with him monitored?
Eric Lewis Yes.
James Lewis QC But not by the prosecution.
Eric Lewis It was all recorded by the authorities. We were told that nothing would be passed to the prosecution. But from many other reports I am not convinced that is true.
James Lewis QC What jury pool was Zacarias Moussaoui convicted by?
Eric Lewis He was not convicted by a jury. He plead guilty.
James Lewis QC But the jury decided against the death penalty.
Eric Lewis Yes.
James Lewis QC What about Maria Butina? She was charged with being an agent of the Russian Federation but received a light sentence?
Eric Lewis That was a very weird case. She did no more than cultivate some figures in the National Rifle Association. She was sentenced to time served.
James Lewis QC But she only got 18 months when the maximum was 20 years?
Eric Lewis Yes. It was not a comparable case, and it was a plea deal.
James Lewis QC You have addressed prison conditions because the defence argue that Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights will be breached. You consider the case of Babar Ahmed. You state that it is “almost certain” that Julian Assange will be subject to administrative segregation. What is the procedure for administrative segregation?
Eric Lewis The bureau president will decide depending upon various factors including security risk, threat to national security, threat to other prisoners, seriousness of the charge. My experience is that national security charged prisoners go straight into administrative segregation.
James Lewis QC (very aggressive) What are you reading?
Eric Lewis Pardon?
James Lewis QC You are reading something there. What is it?
Eric Lewis It is my witness statement. (Holds it up). Is that not OK?
James Lewis QC That is alright. I thought it was something else. How many categories of administrative detention are there?
Eric Lewis I just went through the main ones. National security, serious charge, threat to other prisoners.
James Lewis QC You do not know the categories. They are (reels off a long list including national security, serious charge, threat to others, threat to self, medical custody, protective custody and several more). Do you agree there is no solitary confinement in administrative segregation and Special Administrative Measures?
Eric Lewis No
James Lewis QC US Assistant Attorney Kromberg states in his affidavit that there is no solitary confinement
Eric Lewis It is solitary confinement other than in the vernacular of the US prison service
James Lewis QC In that case it is also not solitary confinement in the vernacular of the English High Court, which has accepted there is no solitary confinement
Eric Lewis It is solitary confinement. When you are kept in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day and allowed no contact with the rest of the prison population even during the one hour you are allowed out, that is solitary confinement. The attempt to deny it is semantic.
James Lewis QC Was Abu Qatada in solitary confinement? When he was permitted unlimited legal visits?
Eric Lewis They were not unlimited. In reality there were practical and logistical obstacles. There was a single room that could be used, for the entire prison population. You had to get a booking for that one room. You had to book translation services. The FBI oversaw the visits and listened in. Now with Covid there are no visits at all. Theoretically visits are “unlimited” but in practice you do not get nearly as much time with your client as you need.
James Lewis QC You said that he would be held in solitary confinement. But is it not true that even prisoners under SAMs get a break schedule?
Eric Lewis There is a break schedule but it requires no other prisoner to be in the communal areas to have contact with the prisoner under SAM. So in practice the “one hour break” would typically be scheduled between 3am and 4am. Not many prisoners wanted to get out of bed at 3am to walk around a cold and empty communal area.

At this point there was a break. James Lewis QC used it forcefully to complain to Baraitser about the four hour limit set on his cross-examination of Eric Lewis. He said that so far he had only got through one and a half pages of his questions, and that Eric Lewis refused to give yes or no answers but instead insisted on giving lengthy explanations. James Lewis QC was plainly extremely needled by Eric Lewis’ explanations of “unlimited visiting time” and “no solitary confinement”. He complained that Baraitser was “failing to control the witness”.

It was plain that James Lewis’ real aim was not to get more time, but to get Baraitser to curtail Eric Lewis’s inconvenient answers. It is of course amazing that he was complaining about four hours when the defence had been limited to half an hour and had not even been permitted to get to the latest superseding indictment.

Baraitser, to her credit, replied that it was not for her to control the witness, who must be free to give his evidence so long as it was relevant, which it was. It was a question of fairness not of control. James Lewis was asking open or general questions.

James Lewis responded that the witness refused to give binary answers. Therefore his cross examination must be longer than four hours. He became very heated and told Baraitser that never in his entire career had he been subject to a guillotine on cross examination, and that this “would not happen in a real court”. He very definitely said that. “This would not happen in a real court”. I have of course been arguing all along that this is not a genuine process. I did not expect to hear that from James Lewis QC, though I think his intention was just to bully Baraitser, which was confirmed by Lewis going on to state he had never heard of such a guillotine in his capacity of “High Court Judge”. I find that Lewis is listed as “deputy high court judge”, which I think is like being 12th man at cricket, or Gareth Bale.

Baraitser only conceded very slight ground under this onslaught, saying she had never used the word guillotine, that the timings had been agreed between parties, and she expected them to stick to them. James Lewis said it was impossible in that way adequately to represent his client (the US government). He said he felt “stressed”, which for once seemed true, he had gone purple. Baraitser said he should try his best to stick to the four hours. He fumed away (though at a later stage apologised to Baraitser for his “intemperate language”).

James Lewis QC’s touting for business webpage describes him as “the Rolls Royce of advocates”. I suppose that is true, in the sense of foreign owned. Yet here he was before us, blowing a gasket, not getting anywhere, emitting fumes and resembling a particularly unloved Trabant.

Image below: James Lewis

Cross-examination of Eric Lewis resumed. James Lewis QC started by reiterating the criteria and categories for Administrative Segregation after conviction (as opposed to pre-tral). Then we got back into questioning.

James Lewis QC Gordon Kromberg states that there is no solitary confinement in ADX Colorado.
Eric Lewis Again this is semantic. There is solitary confinement.
James Lewis QC But there is an entitlement to participate in three programmes a week
Eric Lewis Not in Special Administrative Measures
James Lewis QC But which of the criteria for Special Administrative Measures might Julian assange fall into?
Eric Lewis Criteria 2, 4 and 5, at least.
James Lewis QC Can we agree there is a formal procedure?
Eric Lewis Yes, but not worth the name.
James Lewis Your opinion is based on one single client in ADX Colorado
Eric Lewis Yes, but the system is essentially the same as other supermaxes
James Lewis At para 14 of your report you state that the system lacks procedural rights, and is tantamount to solitary confinement. Had you read the Eurpopean Court of Human Rights judgement on Barbar Ahmed when you wrote this.
Eric Lewis Yes
James Lewis That judgement specifically rejects the same claims you make.

James Lewis QC refers to a number of paragraphs in the original UK District court decision in the case of Babar Ahmad. Eric Lewis asks for more time to find the document as “I only received these documents from the court this morning”.

James Lewis QC But Mr Lewis, you have testified on oath that you had read the Babar Ahmad judgement.
Eric Lewis I have read the final judgement of the European Court of Human Rights. I had not read all the judgements from lower courts. I received them from the court his morning.
James Lewis QC The senior district judge ruled that although Special Administrative Measures were a concern, they did not preclude extradition. There were various safeguards to SAMs. For example although attorney/client conversations were monitored, that was only for the purpose of preventing terrorism and the FBI did not pass on the recordings to the prosecution. The judge rejected the idea that SAMs amounted to solitary confinement. The High Court upheld the District judge’s ruling and the House of Lords rejected Babar Ahmad’s application to appeal. In its ruling on admissibility of the case, the European Court of Human Rights considered six affidavits from US attorneys very similar to that submitted by Eric Lewis in this case. This included the affirmations that it would be “virtually certain” that Babar Ahmad would be subject to SAMs, and that these would interfere directly with the right to a fair trial, and would constitute cruel and degrading treatment. The ECHR found in relation to pre-trial detention that these allegations were wrong in the Babar Ahmad case.
Eric Lewis But that was a terrorism case, not a national security case. SAMs apply differently in national security cases. This is about a million classified documents. Different cases had to be considered each on their merits.
James Lewis QC In the Babar Ahmad case, the defence submissions were that the regime was harsh, amounted to solitary confinement nearly 24 hours a day, with one phone call every two weeks and one family visit a month. Is that not almost identical to your evidence here?
Eric Lewis Each case must be considered on its merits. There are key differences. Assange is charged with espionage not terrorism, and possession of classified intelligence is a factor. Mental health issues are also different. Under SAMS there is no intenet access and no access to any news source. Only approved reading material is allowed. These would be particularly hard for Assange.
James Lewis QC But the Babar Ahmad case does specifically deal with mental health issues, between Babar and co-defendants these include clinical depression, suicide risk and Asperger’s. The court agreed that SAM’s would be likely to be applied both before and after trial. But it ruled that the American government had good reasons for imposing SAMs, were entitled to do so, and that there was a clear and non-arbitrary procedure for implementing them.
Eric Lewis replied that he disagreed that would be true in this case. SAM’s could be applied without procedure, by the US Attorney-General, and William Barr would do that in this case, on the basis of statements by Trump and Gina Haspel. In practice, SAMs had never been overturned whatever the claimed procedure. Eric Lewis did not agree they were not arbitrary.

There now followed an episode where James Lewis QC successfully tripped up Eric Lewis by quoting a passage from an Ahmad case judgement and then confusing him as to whether it was from the final ECHR judgement, which Eric Lewis had read, or from an earlier English court judgement or the ECHR prior judgement on admissibility, which he had not.

James Lewis QC So the ECHR viewed the argument that the SAM regime in pre-trial detention breaches Article 3 as ill-founded and inadmissible. Do you agree with the European Court of Human Rights?
Eric Lewis They found that in the Babar Ahmad admissibility decision in 2008. New information and evidence and changes to the regime since then might change that view.
James Lewis QC What are the defence issues that Assange will raise that you say makes proper consultation under the SAM regime impossible?
Eric Lewis Well I don’t know the precise details of what his defence will be but…
James Lewis QC [interrupting] Well how can you possibly know what the issues will be if you do not know the case?
Eric Lewis Because I have read the indictment. The issues are very wide ranging indeed and involve national security documents.
James Lewis QC But you don’t know what defence at all will be put forward, so how can you opine?
Eric Lewis The charges themselves give a fair idea what might be covered
James Lewis QC Turning to the Babar Ahmad final judgement on post trial incarceration at ADX Colorado. Have you read this (sarcastic emphasis) judgement? Of 210,307 federal prisoners, only 41 of these had SAMs. 27 were in ADX Colorado.
Eric Lewis The Warden of ADX Colorado himself had stated that it was “not fit for humanity” and “a fate worse than death”.
James Lewis QC The ECHR said that SAMS was subject to oversight by independent authorities who looked after the interests of prisoners and could intervene.
Eric Lewis Since that ECHR judgement, a new US judgement had stated that prisoners have no Fifth Amendment right to appeal against the conditions of their incarceration.
James Lewis QC The ECHR found that the US prison authorities took cognisance of a prisoner’s mental state in relation to SAM measures
Eric Lewis Things have also moved on there since 2012. He referenced details from his written evidence.
James Lewis QC The ECHR also found that “the isolation experienced by ADX inmates is partial and relative. The court notes that their psychiatric conditions have not prevented their high security detention in the United Kingdom.” Do you accept that in 2012 the ECHR made a thorough finding?
Eric Lewis Yes, on the basis of what they knew in 2012, but much more information is now available. And there are specific reasons to doubt Mr William Barr’s impartiality.
James Lewis QC You say that Mr Assange will not receive adequate healthcare in a US prison. Are you a medical expert?
Eric Lewis No
James Lewis QC Do you hold any medical qualification?
Eric Lewis No
James Lewis QC What published statement gives the policy of the Bureau of Prisons on Mental Health?
Eric Lewis I was relying on the published statement of the US Inspector of Prisons and the study by Yale Law School of mental health in US prisons. The US Bureau of Prisons states that 48% of prisoners have serious mental health problems but only 3% receive any treatment. The provision for mental healthcare in jails has been cut every year for a decade. Suicides in jail are increasing by 18% a year.
James Lewis QC Have you read “The Treatment and Care of Prisoners with Mental Illness” by the US Department of Health?
Eric Lewis Yes.
James Lewis QC You purport to be an expert. Without looking it up what year was it published? You don’t know, do you?
Eric Lewis Could you be courteous. I have been courteous to you. Can you refer me to a relevant question?
James Lewis QC The policy has had eight changes since 2014. Can you list them?
Eric Lewis I am trying to testify on my experience and my knowledge in dealing with these questions on behalf of the may clients I have represented. If you are asking me am I a prison psychiatrist, I am not.
James Lewis QC Do you know the specific changes made since 2014 or not?
Eric Lewis I know that there were new regulations stipulating 1 mental health professional for every 500 inmates and guidelines for an increase in accessility, but I also know those have not in fact been implemented due to lack of resources.
James Lewis QC (smirking) How many levels of psychiatric assessment are there? What is level number three? What are you reading? You are reading! What are you reading! What are you reading! [Yes, this is not a mistake. He did pull this stunt again]
Eric Lewis I am looking at my own witness statement (shows it to camera).
James Lewis QC You are not a genuine expert witness you have no expertise in these matters. As you are being paid to give evidence and are not an expert, that is something the court will have to take account in deciding what weight, if any at all, to give to your evidence.

Before Eric Lewis could respond, the video link broke down, rather bizarrely broadcasting a news item about Donald Trump attacking Julian Assange. It could not be restored all day, so that was the end of proceedings, for which my note taking hand was not ungrateful. The link could be restored in the adjacent courtroom, which indicates the problem was very local. he judge considered changing courts but it was considered too difficult to move everyone and the great mounds of files and equipment. This hearing has frequently been interrupted by the strange incompetence of the Ministry of Justice in establishing simple videolinks.

James Lewis QC’s conduct was very strange. It really is not normal courtroom behaviour. Were there a jury, they would completely have written him off now as rude and obnoxious, and even Baraitser finally seems to have found her limit of being pushed around by the prosecution. Ivan Lewis is obviously a very distinguished man and a lawyer with immense experience of the US system. Trying to claim he has no expertise because he is not a psychiatrist or an academic in penology is no more than a shoddy trick, performed in a manner designed to humiliate.

The asking for the precise title of one particular Department of Health Pamphlet or for a specific point in it, as though that were a way of invalidating all that Eric Lewis knows, is so transparently invalid as a test of worth that I am astonished Baraitser let James Lewis pursue it, let alone the histrionic accusations about “reading”. This was really hard to sit through silently for me; goodness knows what it was like for Julian.

The mainstream media are turning a blind eye. There were three reporters in the press gallery, one of them an intern and one representing the NUJ. Public access continues to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online. It has taken me literally all night to write this up – it is now 8.54am – and I have to finish off and get back into court. The six of us allowed in the public gallery, incidentally, have to climb 132 steps to get there, several times a day. As you know, I have a very dodgy ticker; I am with Julian’s dad John who is 78; and another of us has a pacemaker.

I do not in the least discount the gallant efforts of others when I explain that I feel obliged to write this up, and in this detail, because otherwise the vital basic facts of the most important trial this century, and how it is being conducted, would pass almost completely unknown to the public. If it were a genuine process, they would want people to see it, not completely minimise attendance both physically and online.

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Featured image is by Elekhh – CC BY-SA 3.0

Human calamities abound. The unrelenting coronavirus pandemic has already claimed more than 900,000 lives worldwide. The images of exploding wildfires from the American Southwest—California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—look apocalyptic. Racial injustice and inequity in the United States marches on. And, the economic suffering?—painful.

In this moment of so much death and suffering—do we even have the capacity to extend our care, our love for nonhuman kin—bears, bees, bugs, butterflies, and all the other nonhuman animals and plants with whom we share this Earth? Perhaps, for most, not, or not that much. And yet, there are committed people all over the world who have long fought for, and will continue to fight for, the natural world, which is really a fight for our survival too.

But let us peek into the nonhuman world for a moment, which is also our world.

The Living Planet Report 2020 is out now. Two years ago, in an article, “Biological Annihilation: A Planet in Loss Mode,” I had summarized the findings in the Living Planet Report 2018 with the following words:

As a comprehensive survey of the health of our planet and the impact of human activity on other species, its key message was grim indeed: between 1970 and 2014, it found, monitored populations of vertebrates had declined in abundance by an average of 60% globally, with particularly pronounced losses in the tropics and in freshwater systems. South and Central America suffered a dramatic loss of 89% of such vertebrates, while freshwater populations of vertebrates declined by a lesser but still staggering 83% worldwide.

The Living Planet Report 2020 updates those numbers with two additional years of data. Between 1970 and 2016, monitored populations of vertebrates—or amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals, and reptiles—have declined in abundance by an average of 68% globally, up from 60%; in South and Central America, the loss is still most pronounced: at 94%, up from 89%; and for freshwater species globally: 84% decline, up from 83%.

In other words, our nonhuman relatives are vanishing at an extraordinary scale and pace. But that tragedy is not yet registering in our collective imagination.

Have you witnessed, or organized a collective mourning to honor our dead nonhuman relatives? Have you seen any flowers, real or plastic, placed by the roadside, or at a city square to honor the dead bears, bugs and bees?

While the Living Planet Report serves up, every two years, a health assessment of our living Earth—the present compared to the recent past—another report, the landmark May 2019 UN biodiversity assessment offered a glimpse of where we are headed: one million animal and plant species face extinction, many within decades, due to human activity.

Are we even awake to the fact that we are doing our damnedest to ensure that our nonhuman relatives don’t have a snowball chance in hell to survive on this planet?

That is only half of the story, however.

Many committed people around the world—Indigenous land, water and species protectors; biologists and ecologists; the species conservationists; policy makers; artists; writers; educators; and community organizers—are all working hard to chart more-just and livable multispecies futures.

The crisis of biological annihilation, which includes human-caused species extinctions, mass die-offs and massacres, is as much a scientific issue as it is cultural and political.

War on Biological Nurseries and Conservation Laws

How has the United States’ White House responded to the intensifying biodiversity crisis since President Trump took office in January 2017?

The answer: By waging an all-out war on nonhuman lives.

Shortly after assuming office, President Trump announced his intention to make America “energy dominant” and, then Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke suggested that that dominance would come from drilling for oil and gas in Alaska, including in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge is a biological nursery of global significance, and a place the Indigenous Gwich’in people call Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (“the sacred place where life begins”). The Trump administration also proceeded to expand oil and gas development around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, a place considered sacred by the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest. In response, I convened a national conference, the last oil: a multispecies justice symposium in February 2018.

Things are heating up on the Arctic Refuge issue. Last month, the Trump administration “finalized its plan to open up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development, a move that overturns six decades of protections for the largest remaining stretch of wilderness in the United States,” the New York Times reported on August 17. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is hopeful that “there could be a lease sale by the end of the year.”

But licking your chops doesn’t always lead to eating.

On Wednesday, September 9, Gwich’in Tribal governments continued their decades-long fight to protect the Coastal Plain from fossil fuel development by filing suit against the Interior Department.

Additionally, fifteen state governments, led by the State of Washington’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson, stood alongside the Tribes and filed a separate lawsuit in the federal district court in Alaska.

Two years ago, when I was in Washington, DC, for a two-day Arctic Refuge campaign strategy workshop—the morning started with New Mexico’s Senator Tom Udall addressing us. Sen. Udall has long been our champion in Congress to protect the Arctic Refuge, and a true friend to the Gwich’in Nation. After all, it was his uncle, Arizona Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall who was one of the principal architects of the most expansive environmental protection laws in U.S. history—the 1980 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act (ANILCA), which doubled the size of the original Arctic National Wildlife Range, renamed it a Refuge, and granted subsistence rights to the Indigenous peoples, including inside designated wilderness.

Back to Trump’s war on conservation.

On July 15, 2020, President Trump “unilaterally weakened one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines,“ the New York Times reported.

Earlier this year, when the Trump administration was moving to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, Sen. Udall called “move to gut NEPA is one of the worst decisions made by the worst environmental administration in history. … At a time when we are staring down the serious threat of climate change to our way of life—especially in states like New Mexico—and are in peril of another mass species extinction, NEPA is one of the few tools we have to limit further damage to our environment.”

After all, NEPA was established during the tenure of the Senator’s father, Stewart Udall, a passionate conservationist who served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior during the 1960s.

And, how did the Trump administration respond last year to the landmark May 2019 UN biodiversity assessment which warned that one million animals and plant species face extinction due to human activity?

Three months later, on August 12, 2019, the Trump administration announced its intention to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the hallowed legal framework to protect imperiled species.

The community members in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands had offered a different kind of response last Fall to the UN biodiversity assessment. Artists and academics across the Rio Grande watershed, from southern Colorado to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, responded creatively by organizing more than a dozen exhibitions and programs that expressed both sorrow and hope, our connection to the living earth and need for action.

“This may be the first time that communities across a large region spanning two nations have engaged the biological crisis in such an expansive and distributed manner with a shared concern and generosity,” I wrote in the exhibition catalog essay.

During the same time, responding to a call from scientists, in October 2019, Sen. Udall co-sponsored the Thirty by Thirty Resolution to Save Nature, which calls on the federal government to establish a national goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the land and the oceans within the territory of the United States by 2030. The following month, in November, Sen. Udall sponsored the Tribal Wildlife Corridors Act which would support wildlife management efforts by tribal governments.

And, on February 7, 2020, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland with support from her colleagues, introduced a companion Thirty by Thirty Resolution to Save Nature in the House.

Building on the foundations of these community-engaged and culturally inclusive creative and federal policy initiatives, Sen. Udall and I will be co-hosting UNM Biodiversity Webinar Series—Fall 2020, which will launch on Monday, September 14, and will conclude on Thursday, December 3. The webinar series will foster conversations on the escalating biodiversity crisis and inspire public participation to mitigate the tragedy. This online symposium is FREE and open to the public, but registration is required. I hope to see you at the inaugural webinar on Monday.

These times can seem bleak, but we take inspiration in the endurance of people like the Gwich’in and members of the Udall family, who resolutely maintain the struggle to better protect the natural world. Our nonhuman relatives need us and, we need them.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Subhankar Banerjee works closely with Indigenous Gwich’in and Iñupiat community members and environmental organizations to protect significant biological nurseries in Arctic Alaska. Author of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (Mountaineers Books, 2003), and editor of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (Seven Stories Press, 2013), Subhankar is currently completing two books: coeditor (with T.J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott) of Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change(Routledge, Spring 2021), and coauthor (with Ananda Banerjee) of Biological Annihilation (Seven Stories Press, Spring 2022). Subhankar serves as the founding Director of the Species in Peril project at UNM.

Featured image: A polar bear keeps close to her young along the Beaufort Sea coast in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo: Susanne Miller/USFWS/Flickr)