The House passed legislation to defend the Postal Service, but unless the Senate takes action, the Postmaster General will be free to continue policies that have slowed the mail and raised concerns about mail-in voting.
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Less than two months after Trump ally and GOP megadonor Louis DeJoy took the helm of the U.S. Postal Service, the House of Representatives met in an emergency session to address widespread fears about potential sabotage of this vital public agency at a time when it is needed more than ever to deliver medicine and other essentials and to facilitate mail-in voting.
On August 22, 26 Republicans joined 231 Democrats to pass H.R. 8015, which addresses these concerns by: providing $25 billion in direct emergency relief for USPS, requiring all official election mail to be treated as “first-class mail,” and prohibiting the removal of mail sorting machines and mailboxes and reversing any already implemented changes that could delay mail delivery.
For these changes to become law, activists will need to keep up the pressure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not responded to calls for similar emergency action, including from some within his own party. Seven Senate Republicans have co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that would also provide $25 billion in postal aid, while other Republicans have put forward a scaled-down $10 billion proposal. With USPS forecasting Covid-related losses of up to $50 billion over the next decade, $10 billion in aid is insufficient to ensure that the Postal Service can continue to provide essential services during the pandemic and for years to come. Among ordinary Americans, 90 percent of Republicans and 96 percent of Democrats support a postal relief package.
Without the force of legislation, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is unlikely to address the concerns that have sparked more than 800 protests in every state. In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on August 21 and before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on August 24, DeJoy refused to reverse actions that have caused mail slowdowns and did not support the bipartisan Senate and House calls for $25 billion in crisis relief.
Leaked internal USPS documents reveal that DeJoy had detailed data showing significant increases in mail delays after his operational changes went into effect but did not share this information with members of Congress who requested it. DeJoy, a wealthy former CEO of a logistic corporation, reportedly continues to hold at least $30 million in stock in USPS contractor XPO.
At a Congressional Progressive Caucus hearing on August 20, former Postal Board of Governors Vice Chair David Williams said that a full investigation of DeJoy’s potential conflicts of interest was not conducted before he was hired.
In his Congressional testimony, DeJoy contradicted President Trump’s attacks on vote by mail by stating that USPS is fully capable of expediting mail-in ballots to ensure timely delivery. At the same time, however, he vowed to push forward on operational changes that have led to significant service delays. He continued to boast about forcing trucks to adhere to a rigid schedule in the middle of a pandemic-related package boom and staffing shortage. USPS managers warned from the outset that this would result in mail and packages being left behind.
DeJoy also refused to replace sorting machines and blue collection boxes that have been removed under his watch. In testimony before the Congressional Progressive Caucus on August 20, former Postal Board of Governors member David Williams pointed out that it costs money to remove and destroy machinery and that a USPS analysis of collection boxes concluded that reducing them wouldn’t save money.
When Senators asked DeJoy to provide analysis of potential impacts of his actions on seniors, veterans, and others who might suffer from delayed prescription deliveries, late fees on delayed bill payments, and other impacts, he refused, apparently because such analysis was not conducted. In the House hearing, DeJoy acknowledged that he had not consulted with unions or other stakeholders regarding the changes.
It was clear that DeJoy does not grasp that he is leading a public agency with a social mission and a universal service obligation. In Senate testimony, he confirmed a Washington Post report that he is considering further extreme cuts, and said that what he views as “unfunded mandates” are all potentially on the chopping block. Changes under consideration include raising package rates, particularly when delivering the last mile on behalf of big retailers (they’ve already announced holiday surcharges on commercial customers, which will likely be passed on to consumers); setting higher prices for service in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico; and curbing discounts for nonprofits.
The former CEO also repeatedly referred to the Postal Service as a business rather than a service in his Senate testimony and said he wants “pricing freedom” (i.e., the ability to hike rates). He claimed to be looking at ideas for revenue increases, but did not mention a single specific idea. The USPS Office of the Inspector General has estimated that expanding postal financial services such as check cashing, bill payment, and electronic money orders could generate as much as $1.1 billion in annual revenue while benefiting low-income Americans, particularly people of color, who now have to rely on predatory financial firms.
When pressed regarding Covid relief, DeJoy said during the Senate hearing that $10 billion would be sufficient — far less than the $25 billion the Postal Board of Governors requested earlier this year, which is the same amount in the just-passed House legislation and the bipartisan Senate bill.
For more on the actions that sparked the current postal crisis, key takeaways from DeJoy’s Congressional testimony, and the high stakes for workers, democracy, and all Americans in this debate, see this new “Explainer” from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center.
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Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is a co-editor of the IPS web site Inequality.org. Follow her at @SarahDAnderson1.
Featured image: Brentwood Post Office, Washington, DC, August 25, 2020. (Source: Inequality.org)
September 2nd, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice of intent to sue today over the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Revised Methods” for assessing pesticide risks to endangered species.
At the request of the pesticide industry, the EPA made extensive changes to the process set forth by the Obama administration — all of which would allow the agency to dismiss real-world impacts from pesticides. The new methods are designed to allow the EPA to ignore widespread harm from pesticides to most of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals, including American burying beetles, Rio Grande silvery minnows and Hawaiian hoary bats.
“The science is clear: Pesticides cause devastating harm to many of our most vulnerable plants and animals, and yet the EPA’s response is to issue new methods so it can cover its eyes and pretend everything’s fine,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center. “The EPA’s refusal to protect endangered species from pesticides and continued bowing to the pesticide industry is nothing less than a national disgrace.”
The Revised Methods purposefully ignore many common ways imperiled plants and animals are harmed and killed by pesticides. For example, under the Revised Methods, the EPA will not consider downstream runoff of pesticides into water bodies where endangered aquatic species, like fish and snails, live. The new rules also allow the EPA to deliberately ignore the impacts of pesticides on endangered plants that depend on insect pollination, but whose pollinators are imperiled by pesticides.
The EPA’s final Revised Methods are only slightly less harmful than its draft version, which was described by the attorneys general of 10 states and the District of Columbia as “antithetical to the plain language and purpose of the ESA.”
Despite heavy criticism, the agency finalized many of the key provisions it designed to reduce protections for endangered species, including limiting protection to species whose range overlaps less than 1% with a pesticide-treated area, even if that 1% is the species’ most essential habitat, such as spawning habitat for salmon.
To date the EPA has never completed a nationwide Endangered Species Act consultation on pesticides or implemented a single conservation measure for any endangered species developed through such consultations.
Instead the agency has disregarded the expert recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and undermined years of work by career scientists in order to prevent the implementation of common-sense restrictions on harmful pesticides.
“The EPA has fully embraced the worst tactics of the tobacco industry and climate-deniers, all so it can continue to ignore the serious harms it allows to be inflicted on endangered plants and animals,” said Burd. “We will not let the EPA get away with this.”
Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the new assessment methods were driven by political-level appointees at the EPA, Department of the Interior, Department of Commerce and the White House.
From 2013 to 2017, career scientists at the EPA and federal wildlife agencies worked to implement the recommendations of the National Academy of Science assessing the impacts of pesticides. This collaborative and transparent process was developed with hundreds of hours of stakeholder input but was halted when then acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was briefed on the results of the initial assessments in October 2017.
This unprecedented effort to scuttle endangered species consultations spurred the EPA and wildlife agencies to attempt to justify their failure to release the analysis and to demonstrate they are taking action to save endangered animals on the brink of extinction.
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As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.
Contrasting Cuban changes in medicine during the last 60 years with the US non-system of medical care gives a clear picture of why changes must be all-encompassing. The concept of Medicare-for-All is deeply intertwined with attacks on Cuba’s global medical “missions” and the opposite responses to Covid-19 in the two countries.
Going Forward or Going Backward?
Immediately after the 1959 revolution Cubans began the task of spreading medical care to those without it. This included a flurry of building medical clinics and sending doctors to poor parts of cities and to rural areas, both of which were predominantly black.
As the revolution spread medicine from cities to the country, it realized the need to expand medical care across the world. This included both sending medical staff overseas and bringing others to Cuba for treatment. Cuba spent 30 years redesigning its health care system, which resulted in the most comprehensive community-based medicine in the world.
Throughout the expansion of health care, both inside the country and internationally, Cuban doctors used “allopathic” medicine (based largely on drugging and cutting, which is the focus of US medical schools). But they simultaneously incorporated traditional healing and preventive medicine as well as respecting practices of other cultures.
Today, the most critical parts of the Cuban health care system include (1) everyone receives health care as a human right, (2) all parts are fully integrated into a single whole which can quickly respond to crises, (3) everyone in the country has input into the system so that it enjoys their collective experiences and (4) health care is global.
In contrast, the call for Medicare-for-All by the left in Democratic Party is a demand for Allopathy-for-US-Citizens. It would extend corporate-driven health care, but with no fundamental change towards holistic and community medicine. Though a necessary beginning, it is a conservative demand which does not recognize that a failure to go forward will inevitably result in market forces pushing health care backward.
There is already a right-wing effort to destroy Medicare and Medicaid in any form and leave people to only receive medical treatment they can pay for. It is part of the same movement to destroy the US Post Office and eliminate Social Security. It is funded by the same sources trying to get rid of public education except for a few schools that will prepare the poor to go to prison or be unemployed. These are neoliberals who believe that Black-Lives-Do-Not-Really-Matter. They hate all the gains won during the last century and a half and want to overturn any form of environmental protection, any workers’ rights, the eight-hour work day, child labor laws, and civil rights, including voting rights.
Destroying Health Care Advances of the Cuban Revolution
What does the Cuban health care have to do with Medicare-for-All in the US? Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the US while spending less than 10% per person annually on health care. It has provided medical education to so many from other countries that in 1999 it opened the Latin American School of Medicine to bring students from impoverished countries to study and become doctors. By 2020 it had trained over 30,000 doctors. It had also trained huge numbers of other health professionals from beyond its shores.
Even before Cuba brought in students, it sent its own professionals on “missions” to help those in other countries. Over the past six decades more than 400,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked in 164 countries and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
The US response to this incredible international medical revolution documents that it is not satisfied to stop medical care from improving but has an irresistable urge to reverse gains across the globe. The US government glommed onto complaints from physicians in multipe countries who whined because Cuban doctors would go to jungles and other dangerous areas where the the rich urban doctors refused to venture. Of course, the US had its own reasons to despise Cuban medical assistance.
Cuba has long done humanitarian work in education as well as medicine which puts its northerm behemoth to shame. Its actions expose that health care can be done vastly cheaper with better outcomes than corportate medicine, which traumatizes financiers of the sickness industry.
Republicans and Democrats are firmly united with corporate media in hiding Cuban medical accomplishments from the US population. They defnitely do not want other poor countries to replicate Cuba’s system. Horrifed at the prospect that Cuban health care would shine as an example, the US went to work to undermine and destroy Cuban medical internationalism in any way it could.
In August 2006 the George W. Bush administration began the “Cuban Medical Professional Parole” program to encourage Cuban medical staff on international missions to desert and move to the US, with no questions asked. Only 2-3% did so; but their departure left those poor countries with less care.
This is in line with any corporate goals to destroy local health care and replace it with profit-based health care across the globe. Driven by the same market factors that compel extraction, transportation and food production industries to go international, the US sickness industry likely feels the urge to create and control a global market of “health care providers.” One of its main obstacles will be community health systems, which actually work much better for poor people.
As the knowledge of the success of Cuba’s medical information spread, its detractors flew into a frenzy and clutched onto wild hallucinations. As accurately explained by Vijay Prashad, they fantasized that Cuba was engaging in “human trafficking” by forcing its doctors to work internationally. The accusation is blatantly absurd since Cuban doctors always have the choice of whether to broaden their medical knowledge by going abroad and treating diseases that have been eradicated in Cuba or to stay at home.
It is true that its doctors have incredibly low wages (as do all working people in Cuba) due to the destructive effects of the US embargo. In one of the great ironies of propaganda machines, the US seeks to criminalize Cuba in the eyes of the world by screeching that medical wages are low while itself being the cause of meager pay.
Results of this attacking Cuba during Covid-19 have been murderous. After Lenín Moreno became president of Ecuador in 2017 he abruptly veered from what he promised and ordered Cuban doctors to leave. At the same time Venezuela and Cuba had a total of 27 Covid-19 deaths, Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, had an estimated death toll of 7,600. Similarly, when the neoliberal Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil in 2019, he threw out Cuban doctors. This left the country with rising infant mortality and so unprepared for Covid that even inviting them back was unable to undo the damage. Following the 2019 anti-democratic coup in Bolivia, the ultra right-wing Jeanine Áñez had herself anointed as president and expelled Cuban doctors, which devastated that country’s health care system. Although Bolivia is a physically isolated country with a population of only 8.7 million it had 2200 deaths by June 2020.
Who Coped with Covid-19?
The fact that Cuba had gone far, far beyond Medicare-for-All is what allowed it to have such spectacular control over Covid. Its politicians unified behind the ministry of health which developed a national strategy. That strategy was in effect before the island’s first victim had succumbed to the disease. Social distancing, masks and contact tracing were universally accepted. According to Susana Hurlich, medical students went door-to-door collecting data, distributing homeopathic medication (PrevengHo-Vir), and, most important, finding out what problems people needed help with.
Neighborhood doctors collected data to send to polyclinics and helped make certain that residents’ medical and other needs were met. Clinic staff met needs that neighborhood doctors could not provide and sent patients they could not care for to hospitals. Hospital doctors slept at hospitals for 14 day shifts before being quarantined for another 14 days so they would not infect their families or communities.
On July 18, deaths from Covid-19 numbered 140,300 in the US and 87 in Cuba. Though its population is only 30 times that of Cuba, the US had 1,612 times as many deaths.
As US politicians conspired with corporations to see how much profit could be made from the pandemic, Cuban health care went international. When northern Italy became the epicenter of Covid-19 cases, one of its hardest hit cities was Crema. On March 26, 2020 Cuba sent 52 doctors and nurses. A smaller and poorer Caribbean nation was one of the few aiding a major European power.
On March 12, 2020 nearly 50 crew members and passengers on the British cruise ship Braemar either had Covid-19 or were showing symptoms as the ship approached the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation. During the next five days, the US, the Bahamas, and several other Caribbean countries turned it away. On March 18, Cuba became the only country to allow the Braemar’s over 1000 crew members and passengers to dock.
The incidents of Crema and the Braemar were hardly without precedent. They resulted from 60 years of medical internationalism by Cuba. Just as Cuba’s actions during Covid-19 reflected its development, so the horrible expansion of the disease in the US, Brazil and India showed the lack of concern under reactionary rule.
Capitalism has exterminated hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in order to consolidate growth and power. Whether enslaving Africans, or slaughtering native Americans to steal land, or experimenting with nuclear bombs during WWII, or destroying health systems that would prevent mass death during a pandemic, these are merely “costs of doing business” to capitalism. Driving native peoples off of land is not unique to US in the past, but continues today throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Trump has terribly bungled coping with Covid-19, but the approach of Democrats is not essentially different. Neither corporate party has any intention of providing Cuban-type care within the US. And they certainly do not even imagine putting protection of the world’s poor from Covid above profit potentials for US corporations. They never had any intention of telling US public that 72 countries had requested Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B for treating Covid-19. They wanted people to believe that only an American or European country could discover treatment.
Is Thinking Beyond Medicare-for-All Part of the Real World?
Is the idea of a radical health care transformation even worth talking about as right-wingers seem to be on the move across much of the world? Let’s remember our past. During the time the reactionary Richard Nixon was president (1969-1974), despite an overwhelming pro-war victory, the following were accomplished under his reign: declaration of an end to the Vietnam War, start of the Food Stamp program, decriminalization of abortion, recognition of China, creation of Environmental Protection Agency, passage of Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of FBI’s COINTEL program, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, formal ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act.
We have never won as many gains since then, even when there was a Democratic House, Senate and president. The essential difference between then and now was the existence of mass movements. Perhaps it is the time for today’s movements to ask if a fair and just payment of reparations by the US and western Europe for the pain and suffering they have caused throughout the world should include providing medical care for those billions of people who Cuba cannot afford to help. Health care is not genuine health care if it fails to be health-care-for-the-world.
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The announcement on 13 August that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will normalise relations, around the same as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was suspending plans to annex more areas of the West Bank that it seized during the 1967 ‘Six Dar War’, has naturally raised the adjunct question about what this deal means for the two powerhouses of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran? As with so many queries relating to the Middle East, the answer is not as straightforward as many might imagine, but it is outlined below. To begin with, the Israel-UAE deal is a lot more multi-layered than the simple announcement implies, which means that the response of Saudi and Iran to it is equally multi-faceted.
“More than any other outcomes from this deal, the UAE wanted to put itself firmly in the U.S.’s most-favoured allies for receiving future business and financing deals, as it suffered a big hit from the Saudi-led oil price war that just ended, and to be included in the U.S.-Israel intelligence and security network to protect itself from Iran,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union (EU) on energy security told OilPrice.com last week.
“This formal deal, though, just officially clarifies what has been happening for some time between Israel and the UAE in the field of intelligence co-operation to counteract Iran’s growing power in the region that has become more militaristic, given the increasing dominance of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] in Tehran,” he said.
A key part of this joint intelligence initiative between the UAE and Israel (and, by extension, the U.S.) has been the dramatic increase in the past two years of the purchase of commercial and adjunct residential properties in Iran’s southern Khuzestan province – a key sector for its oil and gas reserves – by UAE-registered businesses, particularly those based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, said the source.
“Around 500,000 Iranians left Iran around the time of the [1979 Islamic] Revolution and settled in Dubai, in the first instance, and then Abu Dhabi, and they have never been in favour of the IRGC having the key role in Iran, so some of them have been used to front businesses or commercial property developments in Khuzestan that are being funded from business registered in those two states of the UAE,” he added.
“However, these apparently Abu Dhabi and Dubai businesses are actually being funded from a major Israeli property company that in turn is funded from a Israel-U.S. operation specifically set up for this project, with a budget of US$2.19 billion,” he told OilPrice.com. “These businesses, and the additional property acquisitions for the individuals working for these business in Khuzestan, mean that not only is the native Iranian population being diluted by non-Iranian Arabs [although broadly Persian in demographic terms, indigenous Arabs make up around two per cent of Iran’s population] but also the opportunity for on-the-ground intelligence gathering has been dramatically enhanced,” he underlined. “Basically, Israel is doing through the UAE presence in southern Iran exactly what Iran has been doing to Israel through its presence in Lebanon and Syria.”
Given the obvious opportunities for increased intelligence-gathering and economic and political disruption within Iran’s borders stemming from the new Israel-UAE deal, Iran has been unsurprisingly hostile to it. Iranian Parliament Speaker’s Special Aide for International Affairs, Amir-Abdollahian, made a very public show shortly after the announcement, of meeting with Palestine’s Ambassador to Tehran, Salah Zavavi, and stated that:
“The UAE’s act to normalise relations with the Zionist regime is a strategic mistake, and the UAE government must accept responsibility for all its consequences.”
He added that Iran remains firmly behind the Palestinian people. Palestine’s Zavavi asked the speakers of all parliaments of Islamic countries to condemn the action of the UAE and to support the ‘inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’.
More indicative of future actions over and above just words was the subsequent high-level meeting of Iran’s Defence Minister, Brigadier General Amir Hatami, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoygu. Even publically, Hatami alluded to the new military deals reached with China and Russia – revealed exclusively by OilPrice.com – referring to the joint strategic, regional and international goals and interests between Tehran and Moscow, underlining the “developing mutual defence co-operation” between the two sides. Hatami then castigated the U.S.’s recent attempts to invoke a ‘snapback’ of full international sanctions against Iran through the United Nations Security Council:
“In recent years, Iran and Russia have launched a joint and purposeful effort to counter the unilateralism and bullying policies of the U.S. and the Trump administration in the region,” he noted. “The realistic response of the UN Security Council [UNSC] and the rejection of the recent U.S. anti-Iran resolution on extension of arms embargoes against Iran, once again, brought a major defeat for the U.S. and its regional allies and proved the global opposition to unilateralism,” he underlined.
“The guarantee of China and Russia’s support as two of just five Permanent Members on the UNSC was one of the absolutely key reasons why Iran agreed to the military elements of the 25-year deal it had made earlier with China,” said the EU source. Indeed, with this new Israel-UAE deal now formally announced, the IRGC (with the rubber-stamped blessing of Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) is fully set to allow the presence of Chinese and Russia naval assets in and around Iran’s key ports at Chabahar, Bandar-e-Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas, in line with the military element of the agreement, as from 9 November, a senior source who works closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week.
These deployments will be accompanied by the roll-out of Chinese and Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that will encompass each of the three key EW areas – electronic support (including early warning of enemy weapons use) plus electronic attack (including jamming systems) plus electronic protection (including of enemy jamming). Based originally around neutralising NATO’s C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems, part of the new roll-out of software and hardware from China and Russia in Iran will be the Russian S-400 anti-missile air defence system (“to counter U.S. and/or Israeli attacks”) and the Krasukha-2 and -4 systems (“as they proved their effectiveness in Syria in countering the radars of attack, reconnaissance and unmanned aircraft”).
So, what will Saudi Arabia’s position be in the wake of the Israel-UAE deal?
“Saudi Arabia, in particular, may be quietly supportive but is unlikely to normalise relations,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told OilPrice.com last week. “The clerical establishment has had a privileged role in the Kingdom since the eighteenth century, the king is the custodian of the two holy mosques, and Saudi Arabia is the founder of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,” he added.
‘Quietly’ is the operative word here as, according to the Iran source, currently 62 per cent of the aforementioned US$2.19 billion Israel-UAE property fund for new settlements of UAE citizens into Iran’s Khuzestan comes from “Saudi Arabian-connected organisations.”
This fits in with the widely held view among dedicated-Saudi analysts that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) is far more sympathetic to the agreement – and to the ultimate strategic aim of the U.S. and Israel of undermining the IRGC’s grip on the country – than his father, King Salman. King Salman told the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation just last year that the Palestinian cause remained a core issue and that the kingdom “refuses any measures that touch the historical and legal position of East Jerusalem.” On the other hand, he is 84 years old and in poor health and even Saudi’s Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, cautiously welcomed the Israel-UAE agreement, saying: “It could be viewed as positive.” It is also apposite to note that back in 2002 – not that long ago in global geopolitical terms – it was the Saudis who launched the ‘Crown Prince Abdullah Peace Plan’ at the Beirut Arab summit, offering Israel full recognition in exchange for a return to its pre-1967 borders.
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Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow.
American oil companies are keen to export more plastics to Africa through Kenya. According to the New York Times, a lobby group representing Big Oil and chemical companies, including Shell, Exxon and Total, has been pushing the US government to use a US-Kenya trade deal to dump petro-chemicals and plastics across Africa, to prop up Big Oil’s dwindling profits amidst a global pandemic and an oil crash.
Letters from the lobby group, identified by Unearthed, also call for the lifting of limits on the plastics waste trade, a move which experts say amounts to an attempt to legally circumvent existing law in Kenya banning plastics which could have a domino effect in many other countries across Africa that have banned the single-use of plastics.
In reaction to these developments, Landry Ninteretse, Africa Team Leader at 350.org, said:
“It’s not surprising that oil companies are feeling the heat, with science consistently demonstrating the link between fossil fuels and climate change. Big oil’s time is up; the world is moving away from oil and gas. This proposal by oil companies to use their oversupply of oil to manufacture plastics and dump them in Africa is completely unacceptable.
For decades, Big Oil has used its power and influence to deny climate change and exacerbate social injustices and inequalities. But its treacherous actions are now being exposed. Africa is not their garbage dump. Instead of bringing more pollution here, they must pay for years of damage already done. Africans are more vigilant than ever, and we will not accept any more destructive activities to take place across the continent – be it in Kenya, or any other country.
We strongly condemn the actions of the American Chemistry Council and the big oil companies behind this lobby group and call upon the Kenya and US governments to throw out this proposal. The same energy and resistance demonstrated against the proliferation of fossil fuels on the continent will be deployed to combat this unfortunate adventure of a declining industry.”
On February 6, President Trump and President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya announced their intent to begin free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations. If successful, it would be the first U.S. FTA with a country in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is now being hijacked by Big Oil.
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Leonardo Sakamoto reflects on the police killing of João Pedro Matos Pinto, a 14-year-old black boy, and one of many Brazilian George Floyds.
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João Pedro Matos Pinto was a 14-year-old black boy. On 18 May, he was playing with his cousins when the house in São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro state, was invaded by police. He was killed by a rifle shot that pierced his body from stomach to shoulder. The police claimed they were chasing suspects, but his family say the story is false. Community leaders counted 72 bullet holes in the house. João’s father said he only got good marks at school.
João Pedro is one of the many Brazilian George Floyds.
Black people accounted for 55 per cent of the country’s population, but more than 75 per cent of those killed in police operations between 2017 and 2018, according to the 2019 Yearbook of the Brazilian Public Safety Forum. Whites are around 44 per cent of the population but account for less than a quarter of victims of police killings. In Rio de Janeiro, black 21-year-olds are 147 per cent more likely to be killed by police than the rest of the population.
At the same time, the majority of Brazilians killed by Covid-19 are black. A survey commissioned by Épocamagazine shows that 61 per cent of the 54,488 victims who had died of the disease by the end of June, and whose race was identified, were black.
The problem is not genetic. It is related to lack of basic sanitation, food insecurity and difficulty in accessing medical care. Poverty is not colour-blind. By being more lethal to black and poor people, the pandemic parallels police violence statistics in cities like Rio de Janeiro.
There are no direct government orders to shoot black and poor people. But security forces are trained to defend the property and quality of life of those who live in the ‘postcard’ parts of major Brazilian cities while ‘containing’ those who don’t. Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel and President Jair Bolsonaro openly advocate that officers should not be held accountable for killings during police operations. This encourages them to shoot first and ask questions later.
Before the pandemic, Brazil’s black and poor population were already experiencing a massacre in the suburbs at the hands of drug traffickers and paramilitaries, as well as official police and military forces. Covid-19 made things worse, helped by Bolsonaro’s denial of its danger and lack of public policy responses to it.
This fits perfectly with what Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’ – where a government believes it can decide who lives and who dies. In Brazil, the government not only believes this; it actually makes those decisions.
Two days after João Pedro’s death, an 18-year-old black man called João Vitor was killed by police in Rio’s City of God – a district world famous for the movie of that name.
It happened while volunteers were distributing food to alleviate the suffering caused by Covid-19. The police accuse the dead young man of being a criminal. But he will never be able to tell his version of events.
Following these cases, Brazil’s Supreme Court banned police operations in favelas during the pandemic. But videos show that poor blacks are still victims of police brutality, leaving no doubt that there is a long way to go in the fight against the structural racism that defines us as a nation.
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Leonardo Sakamoto is a journalist, political scientist, director of Repórter Brasil and UN adviser.
Featured image: A man takes rest on the roadside in a Carapicuiba City favela. Image by Luiz Gonzaga De Souza/Pixabay
At times, meds are more dangerous than diseases they’re supposed to protect against or cure.
Independent experts agree that all vaccines are hazardous to human health because they contain mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol (antifreeze), and other toxins able to weaken and potentially destroy the human immune system.
Noted vaccine expert Dr. Viera Schiebner stressed that
“(t)here is no evidence whatsoever of the ability of vaccines to prevent any diseases.”
“To the contrary, there is a great wealth of evidence that they cause serious side effects.”
In her book titled “Vaccination 100 years of Orthodox Research,” she explained that vaccinations are biological weapons.
They can damage internal organs and leave children or adults vulnerable to severe autoimmune diseases – including diabetes, arthritis, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, polio and numerous others.
They’re dangerous and unreliable. Thousands of severe adverse reactions occur annually – including permanent disabilities, at times deaths.
Rushed to market coronavirus vaccines by Big Pharma will be especially hazardous and should be avoided to protect human health.
When available, a full COVID-19 vax treatment of millions of Americans would have a market potential dollar volume of around $150 billion of near-total profit, according to one estimate.
The global market potential is much greater — why the race is on to cash in big, with full support from policymakers in Washington.
There’s no need to be vaxxed when a known cure for COVID-19 already exists.
Big Pharma, establishment media and US policymakers are suppressing what everyone has a right to know because of a potential bonanza of profits once FDA-approved coronavirus vaccines are declared developed and ready for human use.
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) combined with either azithromycin or doxycycline and zinc are cheap, safe, and highly effective in curing the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19 when used early after infections are diagnosed.
Physicians using this protocol stress its effectiveness — why hazardous to human health vaccines aren’t needed and should be avoided.
Big Pharma’s FDA chief Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times (FT) that he’s “prepared to authorize a vaccine before phase three clinical trials (are) complete(d), as long as officials believed the benefits outweighed the risks (sic),” the broadsheet reported.
Without justification, he claimed rushed development is unrelated to boosting Trump’s reelection prospects — despite DJT saying he wants a vaccine available for human use pre-election, adding:
“It is up to the (drug company) sponsor to apply for authorization or approval, and we make an adjudication of their application.”
“If they do that before the end of phase three, we may find that appropriate. We may find that inappropriate. We will make a determination.”
Approving a likely hazardous substance for mass-vaxxing in the US and elsewhere is unacceptably playing Russian roulette with human health — what no public health official should authorize anywhere.
In early August, Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine was released for human use, following 20 years of research and development.
Despite years of research elsewhere, no successful coronavirus vaccines were ever developed, notably not in the West.
Highly promoted, rushed to the rescue Big Pharma COVID-19 vaccines for mass-vaxxing will be the largest ever public health experiment likely to go awry with potentially harmful consequences for untold numbers of victims.
Public health experts in the US and abroad warned that these vaccines “could be unsafe,” the FT reported.
Hahn ignored reality, claiming that approving a coronavirus vaccine for human use before completion of phase three trials is permissible by “emergency authorization” for certain groups, without further elaboration, adding:
“Our emergency use authorization is not the same as a full approval.”
“The legal, medical and scientific standard for that is that the benefit outweighs the risk in a public health emergency.”
Fact: Risks way outweigh the benefits of using vaccines for any purpose.
Fact: At times, the risk of causing diseases they’re supposed to protect against is unacceptably high.
The 2016 documentary film “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” discusses the link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism.
According to senior MIT research scientist Stephanie Seneff, autism at its current observed rate is projected to affect around half of vaccinated boys by 2025.
US major media journalists are instructed by the CDC on how to report on vaccines — what to say, what to suppress, ignoring scientific evidence.
Dr. Toni Bark called vaccine science “Frankenscience” for good reason.
Epigenetic researcher Dr. Mae-Wan Ho explained that
“vaccines…can be dangerous, especially live, attenuated viral vaccines or the new recombinant nucleic acid vaccines.”
“They have the potential to generate virulent viruses by recombination and the recombinant nucleic acids could cause autoimmune disease.”
Children’s Health Defense founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained that in 2017, the WHO “reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly (from a) vaccine strain,” adding:
“The WHO is a sock puppet for the pharmaceutical industry” — the same true for the CDC and other US public health agencies.
Mass-vaxxing advocate Bill Gates “serve(s) his personal philosophy that good health only comes in a syringe,” JFK Jr. explained.
Big Pharma’s interest is all about max-profiteering above all other considerations, no matter the risks to public health.
None of this gets publicly reported. Instead, the myth of safe vaccines and importance of getting them persists — despite clear evidence proving otherwise.
A Final Comment
Last weekend, Trump said the FDA is moving too slowly in approving a coronavirus vaccine for human use.
The FT reported that “(a) day later, Dr Hahn and Mr Trump jointly announced emergency authorization for convalescent plasma, which uses the plasma of recovered Covid-19 patients as a treatment” — with little of no evidence of its efficacy.
Hahn told the FT that he regretted saying plasma treatments would have saved many lives, adding:
“I certainly regret contributing to any misperception. I could have done a much better job…explaining relative risks.”
Anyone testing positive for COVID-19 should seek immediate treatment with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — combined with either azithromycin or doxycycline and zinc.
Avoid hazardous to human health vaxxing to stay safe.
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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.”
This article by Vietnam War Veteran, author, lawyer and peace activist Brian Willson was first published by Global Research in 2002. It outlines, what most people in America do not know regarding the long history of US crimes against humanity. It is of relevance to the ongoing Ukraine War. Who are the War Criminals?
***
North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three period of intensive bombings:
“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked,“Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”6 It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another.”
During The Second World War the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the US lost 0.32%. During the Korean war, North Korea lost 30 % of its population.
These figures of civilian deaths in North Korea should also be compared to those compiled for Iraq by the Lancet Study (John Hopkins School of Public Health). The Lancet study estimates a total of 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, following the US led invasion (March 2003- June 2006).
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, December 2, 2017, September 2, 2020
The demonization of North Korea by the United States government continues unrelentlessly. The wealthy oil and baseball man who claims to be president of the United States, used his first State of the Union address on January 29, 2002 to brand perennial enemy North Korea, along with former allies Iran and Iraq, as “the world’s most dangerous regimes” who now now form a threatening “axis of evil.” Unbeknown to the public, because it was intended to have remained a secret (whoops!), was the fact that this claimed president presented a “Nuclear Posture Review” report to Congress only three weeks earlier, on January 8, which ordered the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for use of nuclear weapons. The first designated targets for nuclear attack were his newly identified members of the “axis of evil,” along with four other lucky nations as well – Syria, Libya, Russia, and China. That this is nothing short of a policy of ultimate terror remains unaddressed in the U.S. media.
That Koreans are deeply concerned is an understatement. However, they understand the context in which their “evil” is being portrayed, not an altogether new threat levelled at them. However, the dangerous escalation of policy rhetoric following the 9-11 tragedy now boldly warns the world of virtual total war. Vice-president Richard Cheney, another oil man from Texas, declares that the U.S. is now considering military actions against forty to fifty nations, and that the war “may never end” and “become a permanent part of the way we live.”1 The Pentagon has declared that the widening gap between the “Haves” and “Have-nots” poses a serious challenge to the U.S., requiring a doctrine of “full spectrum dominance.” Thus, the U.S. demands total capacity to conquer every place and its inhabitants in and around the Earth, from deep underground bunkers, including those in North Korea and Iraq, through land, sea, and air, to outer space. All options for achieving global and spatial hegemony are now on the table. Already, the U.S. military is deployed in 100 different countries.2 Total war, permanent war. Terror!
Addiction to use of terror by the United States is nothing new. The civilization was founded and has been sustained by use of terror as a primary policy. For example, in 1779, General George Washington ordered destruction of the “merciless Indian savages” of upstate New York, instructing his generals to “chastize” them with “terror.” The generals dutifully carried out these orders. In 1866, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered “extermination” with vindictive earnestness of the Sioux. They were virtually exterminated. Secretary of War Elihu Root (1899-1904) under President’s McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, justified the ruthless U.S. military conduct in the Philippines that savagely killed a half-million citizens by citing “precedents of the highest authority:” Washington’s and Sherman’s earlier orders.3
War against nations around the world is not new either. The U.S., over its history, has militarily intervened over 400 times, covertly thousands of times, in over one hundred nations.4 Virtually all these interventions have been lawless. It has bombed at least eighteen nations since it dropped Atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. It has used chemical warfare against Southeast Asia, and has provided chemical warfare agents for use by other nations such as Iraq. It has used biological warfare against China, North Korea, and Cuba. The Koreans are quite aware of most of this history. Most U.S. Americans are not. But now the U.S. has declared a unilateral terrorist war on the whole world.5
Two of the interventions in the Nineteenth Century were inflicted against Korea, the first in 1866. The second, larger one, in 1871, witnessed the landing of over 700 marines and sailors on Kanghwa beach on the west side of Korea seeking to establish the first phases of colonization. Destroying several forts while inflicting over 600 casualties on the defending Korean natives, the U.S. withdrew realizing that in order to assure hegemonic success, a much larger, permanent military presence would be necessary. The North Korean people regularly remark about this U.S. invasion, even though most in South Korea do not know of it due to historic censorship. Most in the U.S. don’t know about it either, for similar reasons, even though in all of the Nineteenth Century, this was the largest U.S. military force to land on foreign soil outside of Mexico and Canada until the “Spanish American War” in 1898.
I believe it important for U.S. Americans to place themselves in the position of people living in targeted countries. That North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, i.e., one-twentieth the population of the U.S., many of them poor, a land slightly larger in area than the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, continues to be one of the most demonized nations and least understood, totally perplexes the Korean people. It is worthwhile to seek an understanding of their perspective.
I recently visited that nation and talked with a number of her citizens. I travelled 900 ground miles through six of North Korea’s nine provinces, as well as spending time in Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities. I talked with dozens of people from all walks of life. Though times have been hard for North Koreans, especially in the 1990s, they long ago proudly rebuilt all of their dozens of cities, thousands of villages, and hundreds of dykes and dams destroyed during the war.
U.S. interference into the sovereign life of Korea immediately upon the 1945 surrender of the hated Japanese, who had occupied the Korean Peninsula for forty years, is one of the major crimes of the Twentieth Century, from which the Korean people have never recovered. (SEE “United States Government War Crimes,” Spring 2002 – issue # 1 of Global Outlook). From a North Korean’s perspective they
(1) have vigorously opposed the unlawful and egregious division of their country from day one to the present,
(2) were blamed for starting the “Korean War” which in fact had been a struggle between a minority of wealthy Koreans supporting continued colonization in collaboration with the U.S. and those majority Koreans who opposed it,
(3) proudly and courageously held the U.S. and its “crony U.N. allies” to a stalemate during the “War,” and
(4) have been tragically and unfairly considered a hostile nation ever since. They have not forgotten the forty years of Japanese occupation that preceded the U.S. imposed division and subsequent occupation that continues in the South. They deeply yearn for reunification of their historically unified culture.
Everyone I talked with, dozens and dozens of folks, lost one if not many more family members during the war, especially from the continuous bombing, much of it incendiary and napalm, deliberately dropped on virtually every space in the country. “Every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village” was ordered bombed by General MacArthur in the fall of 1950. It never stopped until the day of the armistice on July 27, 1953. The pained memories of people are still obvious, and their anger at “America” is often expressed, though they were very welcoming and gracious to me. Ten million Korean families remain permanently separated from each other due to the military patrolled and fenced dividing line spanning 150 miles across the entire Peninsula.
Let us make it very clear here for western readers. North Korea was virtually totally destroyed during the “Korean War.” U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s architect for the criminal air campaign was Strategic Air Command head General Curtis LeMay who had proudly conducted the earlier March 10 – August 15, 1945 continuous incendiary bombings of Japan that had destroyed 63 major cities and murdered a million citizens. (The deadly Atomic bombings actually killed far fewer people.)
Eight years later, after destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, LeMay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”6 It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another.
Virtually every person wanted to know what I thought of Bush’s recent accusation of North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.” Each of the three governments comprising Bush’s “axis of evil” of course immediately condemned the remarks, North Korea being no exception. I shared with them my own outrage and fears, and they seemed relieved to know that not all “Americans” are so cruel and bellicose. As with people in so many other nations with whom the U.S. has treated with hostility, they simply cannot understand why the U.S. is so obsessed with them.
Koreans were relieved to learn that a recent poll had indicated eighty percent of South Koreans were against the U.S. belligerant stance against their northern neighbors. The North Korean government described Bush as a “typical rogue and a kingpin of terrorism” as he was visiting the South in February, only three weeks after presenting his threatening State of the Union address.7 It was also encouraging that the two Koreas resumed quiet diplomatic talks in March just as the U.S. and South Korea were once again conducting their regular, large-scale, joint military exercises so enraging to the North, and to an increasing number of people in the South among the growing reunification movement there.8
In the English-language newspaper, The Pyongyang Times, (February 23, 2002) there were articles entitled “US Is Empire of the Devil,” Korea Will Never Be a Threat to the US,” and “Bush’s Remarks Stand Condemned.” Quite frankly, all three of these articles relate a truth about the U.S. that would draw a consensus from many quarters around the world.
While in country, together we listened to Bush’s March 14 Voice of America (VOA) radio chastizement of North Korea. First, he stated that the North’s 200,000 prisoner population was proof of terrible repression. Though I had no way of knowing the number of prisoners in the North, any more than Bush did, I do know that the United States has 2 million prisoners which is similar in per-capita detention rate to that of North Korea if the 200,000 figure is accurate. Furthermore, the U.S. has a minimum of 3 million persons, mostly minority and poor, under state supervision of parole and probation. The U.S. sweeps its class and race problems into prison.
Second, Bush declared that half the population was considered unreliable and, as a result, received less monthly food rations. The Koreans are a proud people living in a Confucian tradition, having rebuilt their nation from virtual total destruction during the Korean war. I did not notice any obvious display of dissent. That some Koreans are desperate due to lack of food, water, and heat, especially in some rural areas, does not necessarily translate into dissent, though some are seeking relief by travel to neighboring countries.9
Third, Bush claimed that Koreans who listen to foreign radio are targeted for execution. Together we regularly listened to U.S.VOA radio broadcasts and they freely discussed the content of the broadcasts without fear of reprisals.
Fourth, Bush condemned the DPRK for spending too much on its military, causing food shortages for the people. Note: Again it must be remembered that it was the U.S. that unilaterally divided Korea following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, and subsequently ruled with a military occupation government in the south, overseeing the elimination of virtually the entire popular movement of (majority) opposition to U.S. occupation, murdering hundreds of thousands of people. The consequent Korean civil war that openly raged in 1948-1950 was completely ignored when the U.S. defined the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. The U.S. remains at war with the DPRK, never having signed a peace treaty with her. The war has left a deep scar in the Korean character with a memory that is regularly provoked by continued belligerance directed at the DPRK. The U.S. regularly holds joint military exercises with South Korean military forces aimed at the DPRK. The U.S. retains 37,000 military troops at 100 installations south of the 38th parallel. The U.S. has its largest Asian bombing range where it practices bombs five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, despite opposition from many South Koreans. And now Bush has identified North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” targeted for nuclear attack. This is no remote idea to North Koreans. The U.S. possesses nuclear weapons on ships and planes in the Pacific region surrounding North Korea. Virtually every nation in this perilous position would be concerned about their defense.
It is worth noting that the United States is the leading military spender in the world resulting in substantial underfunding of its own indispensable social programs.
Fifth, Bush accused the DPRK of selling weapons to other nations. That is like the pot calling the kettle black. The U.S. is by far the largest manufacturer of conventional, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the world. It is also the largest seller of these weapons, and has used conventional (against dozens of nations), biological (Cuba, China, Korea, perhaps others), chemical (Southeast Asia), and nuclear (Japan, and threatened to use them on at least 20 other occasions) weapons. In addition it has armed other nations with these weapons of mass destruction, including Iraq, one of those countries now identified as part of the “axis of evil.” In the year 2000, international arms sales were nearly $37 billion, with the U.S. being directly responsible for just over half of those sales. South Korea was the third largest buyer of weapons from the United States with $3.2 worth of military hardware.10 And in January 2002, South Korea was seriously contemplating purchasing an additional $3.2 billion worth of 40 F-X fighter jets from U.S. arms giant Boeing.
At the conclusion of this VOA radio broadcast, Koreans and I looked at each other in disbelief. But we also knew that we were in solidarity with each other as part of the human family. When I said goodbye to my new friends we embraced knowing that we live in a single world made up of a rich diversity of ideas and species. We know that we are going to live or die together, and hope that the arrogant and dangerous rhetoric and militarism of the United States will soon end so we can all live in peace. However, for that to happen, there will need to be a dramatic awakening among the people and a corresponding expression of massive nonviolent opposition that will make such threatening behavior impossible to carry out.
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S. Brian Willlson is a Vietnam veteran, long-time peace activist, and writer. He has visited a number of countries studying the impacts of U.S. policy. His essays are posted on his website, www.brianwillson.com. He published a small autobiography, On Third World Legs (Charles Kerr, 1992), which describes his ordeal of having been intentionally run over by a U.S. Government munitions train accelerating to over three times the 5 mph legal speed limit during a peaceful protest in California in 1987. He now walks on two prostheses after losing each leg below the knee. Brian Willson possesses two honorary Ph.D.s and a Juris Doctor degree.
Notes
1. Bob Woodward, “CIA Told To Do ‘Whatever Necessary’ to Kill Bin Laden,” The Washington Post, October 21, 2001.
2. Bradley Graham, “Pentagon Plans New Command For U.S. Four Star Officer, Would Over See Homeland Defense,” The Washington Post, January 26, 2002.
3. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building. New York: Schocken Books, 1990, p. 329.
4. B.M. Blechman and S.S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces As A Political Instrument. Wash., D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1978, Appendix B; Congressional Research Service (Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division), Instances of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1993. Wash., D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 1993; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995; John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1991.
5. William Blum, Rogue State. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000; Stephan Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.
6. Richard Rhodes, “The General and World War III,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p. 53.
7.”North Korea Calls Bush ‘Kingpin of Terrorism,” Reuters wire story, February 23, 2002.
8.”South Korea Envoy to Travel North,” BBC News Online: World: Asia-Pacific, March 25, 2002. Retrieved March 26, 2002, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1891000/1891457.stm
9. Ji-Yeon Yuh, “North Korean Enemy Should Be Made Friend,” The Baltimore Sun, February 27, 2002.
10. Thom Shanker, “Global Arms Sales Rise Again, and the U.S. Leads the Pack, ” The New York Times, August 20, 2001.
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We publish this incisive analysis by Dr. Marjorie Cohn with a view to encouraging debate on the 2020 elections. The broader issue is that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are a threat to democracy in the US.
***
For nearly four years, we have been laser focused on November 3, 2020, the day that Donald Trump could be voted out of office. In all likelihood, however, the election will not be decided that evening as it has in the past (with the notable exception of the 2000 election). That is because in order to protect themselves against COVID-19, a record number of people will forego the polls and mail their ballots, which take longer to count. There are several scenarios of what could transpire between November 3 and January 20. All of them are frightening.
Once again, Trump has deployed federal agents on U.S. soil over the objection of local authorities, in an apparent attempt to sow chaos and then claim he must be reelected to restore law and order. On August 26, Trump tweeted he would send “federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER” in the wake of protests against the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot in the back seven times by a police officer in the presence of Blake’s children. Blake, who remains in critical condition, was left paralyzed. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers declined the White House’s offer of federal assistance. Although Evers had deployed the National Guard the day before, Trump said, “Governor should call in the National Guard in Wisconsin.”
Trump had declared a national emergency and sent federal troops to Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, during anti-racism protests after the public police lynching of George Floyd.
Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice is reviewing presidential emergency action documents (PEADs). PEADs, which originated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to deal with a possible Soviet attack, have purported to authorize unconstitutional actions, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary detention and the declaration of martial law. They are so secret that not even Congress has seen them, but Freedom of Information Act requests have occasionally led to the revelation of their contents in public sources. PEADs could provide Trump with an unfettered opportunity to employ authoritarian, even military, tactics to maintain power.
Trump is preemptively sowing doubt about the outcome of the election. On July 30, he suggested delaying the election, although he does not have the legal authority to do so. And he has floated the idea of sending federal troops to the polls (to police nonexistent voter fraud) which would cause voter intimidation.
Citing no evidence, Trump declared on the first night of the Republican National Convention,
“[Democrats are] trying to steal the election.… The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”
Indeed, when Chris Wallace asked Trump on “Fox News Sunday” in late July, “Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?” Trump replied, “No. I have to see.”
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen likewise warned during his testimony last year before the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee,
“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” adding, “Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
It is no coincidence that since June 15, when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy assumed the reins, the USPS instituted several changes that have slowed down mail service, including the removal of 671 sorting machines. DeJoy, who had no prior experience with the Postal Service and has extensive conflicts of interest, is also a major Trump campaign contributor.
Post-Election Scenarios
The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) is a bipartisan organization of campaign chairs, academics and former government officials, established last year out of concern about the manipulation and disruption of the 2020 presidential election and transition. It was convened by Georgetown University Law Center professor Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman, former vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
In June, TIP conducted election crisis scenario exercises, called “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” to “identify risks to the rule of law or to the integrity of the democratic process” between Election Day and Inauguration Day. TIP assembled a group of more than 100 experts for the experiment. Calling the results “alarming,” TIP’s report assessed “with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape” and “Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.”
The report warned of “an unprecedented assault on the outcome” of the election. “Of particular concern is how the military would respond in the context of uncertain election results.” Most frightening is TIP’s warning, “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
TIP’s report noted,
“President Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for potentially ignoring or disrupting the voting process, by claiming, for instance, that any mail-in ballots will be fraudulent and that his opponents will seek to have non-citizens vote through fraud.”
Four scenarios developed by TIP were as follows:
(1) the winner was unknown the morning after the election and the race was too close to predict with certainty;
(2) Biden “won outright” the popular vote and the Electoral College;
(3) Trump won the Electoral College by a healthy margin but lost the popular vote by a healthy margin; and
(4) Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by narrow margins.
The report stated that in all four hypothetical exercises, Trump cast doubt on the official election results. The second scenario initially showed him alleging massive fraud, demanding investigations and appealing to the media to cast doubt on the result. He “later accepted a loss” once it became clear that his attempts to overturn the election results would not likely succeed. In the fourth scenario, Trump would not concede and set up a fierce competition that concluded with “an uneasy and combative but ultimately successful transition.”
In all four scenarios, Trump encouraged violence and chaos in the streets. His strategy called for recounts, investigations into “voting irregularities” to undermine public confidence in the results of the election, attempting to stop the counting of mail ballots — even ordering Barr to seize mail ballots — organizing his base to take to the streets, and relying on right-wing media to sow chaos and intimidate officials to side with Team Trump. When he trailed in the popular vote count, Trump challenged Biden to “prove a negative” — that there had been no voting fraud.
Participants in the exercises were particularly concerned about “the President’s ability to federalize the national guard; to deploy the military domestically; to launch investigations into opponents and to freeze their assets; and even to control communication in the name of national security.” Barr’s Justice Department “could provide legal cover for the President’s actions.” The report cited Trump’s prior appeals to “Second Amendment people” to defend their rights and his calls to supporters to “liberate” states with restrictive COVID-19 rules. Trump could initiate a foreign crisis after the election or during the transition. Barr might launch a bogus investigation of “terrorist ties” of members of Biden’s transition team to justify surveillance or a false flag operation before the election or in the contested period after the election.
In addition, Republican state legislators in swing states could refuse to certify a Biden victory in the face of Trump’s claims of fraud, according to Harvard government professor Daniel Carpenter. Vanita Gupta, former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, worries that Trump could “weaponize” COVID and use it as a pretext to issue stay-at-home orders to prevent people from going to the polls when the deadline for requesting absentee ballots has expired.
Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman posits a situation in which Congress must choose the victor and Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are deadlocked. The Presidential Succession Act would make Pelosi the president but is the Supreme Court likely to ratify that outcome? Meanwhile, there would be violence in the streets.
The TIP exercises did not really consider legal strategies both sides could employ, nor did they predict how “the media will shape and drive public opinion.”
What Can Be Done to Safeguard the Election Process?
TIP recommends that congressional leaders conduct oversight hearings and seek assurances from military and agency leaders about their contingency plans. “Military and law enforcement leaders need to plan now for these possibilities to avoid becoming unwitting pawns in a partisan battle,” the report concluded. As Veterans for Peace has urged, service members have a duty to obey lawful orders and a duty to disobey unlawful orders. Many would refuse orders to deploy to U.S. cities to help Trump illegitimately maintain power.
Ackerman proposes that Congress create a special election commission with five Supreme Court justices, comprised of two liberals, two conservatives and the chief justice. It would investigate election challenges and determine the validity of disqualifications.
Meanwhile, Facebook is taking steps to counter false claims of victory on the site by Trump supporters. It is planning for what to do if Trump tries to invalidate the election results with accusations that USPS lost mail ballots or other groups meddled with the vote. Facebook has considered a “kill switch” to stop political advertising from spreading misinformation after Election Day. Twitter and YouTube have also considered unspecified actions they might take after the election. The bottom line is that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter “have to potentially treat the president as a bad actor” who may subvert the democratic process, Alex Stamos, director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and former executive at Facebook, told The New York Times.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) will continue to dispatch legal observers to observe and document potentially unlawful or unjustified interference with demonstrators’ rights by law enforcement. NLG members provide legal support for those arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights. Organizations including the NLG, ACLU and Protect Democracy will ready their legal strategies for the battles in the courts.
Finally, the people must mobilize to mount mass actions to ensure the integrity of the election. Those of us who write and do media commentary should continue to educate people about the legal and political situation and organize resistance to attempts to undermine the veracity of the election results.
In light of the massive uprisings against white supremacy in response to the murder of George Floyd, and now the shooting of Jacob Blake, we can expect widespread popular resistance if Trump tries to hijack the election.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Prevê-se que o tráfego aéreo civil na Europa irá diminuir este ano 60% em comparação com 2019, devido às restrições ao Covid-19, colocando em risco mais de 7 milhões de empregos. Em compensação, aumenta o tráfego aéreo militar.
Na sexta-feira, 28 de Agosto, seis bombardeiros estratégicos B-52 da US Air Force sobrevoaram num só dia, todos os 30 países da NATO na América do Norte e na Europa, acompanhados nos diversos trajectos pr 80 caça-bombardeiros dos países aliados. Este grande exercício denominado “Céu Aliado” – disse o Secretário-Geral da OTAN, Jens Stoltenberg – demonstra “o poderoso compromisso dos Estados Unidos para com os Aliados e confirma que somos capazes de desencorajar a agressão”. É evidente a alusão à “agressão russa” na Europa.
Os B-52s, transferidos em 22 de Agosto da Base Aérea de Minot, no Dakota do Norte, para Fairford, na Grã-Bretanha, não são os velhos aviões da Guerra Fria usados apenas para as paradas militares. Continuamente modernizados, conservaram o seu papel de bombardeiros estratégicos de longo alcance. Agora ainda estão mais aperfeiçoados.
A Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos, com uma despesa de 20 biliões de dólares, equipará 76 aviões B-52s com motores novos, em breve, que permitirão aos bombardeiros voar 8.000 km sem reabastecimento durante o voo, cada um carregando 35 toneladas de bombas e mísseis convencionais ou nucleares.
A Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos, no passado mês de Abril, encarregou a Raytheon Co. de construir um novo míssil de cruzeiro de longo alcance, armado com uma ogiva nuclear, para os bombardeiros B-52.
Com esses e outros bombardeiros estratégicos de ataque nuclear, incluindo o B-2 Spirit, a US Air Force realizou pela Europa, mais de 200 surtidas desde 2018, principalmente sobre o Báltico e sobre o Mar Negro perto do espaço aéreo russo. Os países europeus da NATO participam nestes exercícios, em particular a Itália.
Quando, em 28 de Agosto, um B-52 sobrevoou o nosso país, os caças italianos juntaram-se a ele para simular uma missão de ataque conjunto. Imediatamente a seguir, os caça-bombardeiros Eurofighter Typhoon da Força Aérea Italiana partiram para instalar-se na base de Siauliai, na Lituânia, apoiados por cerca de cem soldados especializados. A partir de hoje, 1 de Setembro, irão permanecer lá durante 8 meses, até Abril de 2021, para “defender” o espaço aéreo do Báltico.
É a quarta missão de “polícia aérea” da NATO, realizada no Báltico pela nossa Força Aérea. Os caças italianos estão prontos 24 sobre 24 horas para lutar = ‘scramble’, para levantar voo ao sinal de alarme e interceptar aviões “desconhecidos”, que são sempre aviões russos a voar entre algum aeroporto interno e o enclave russo de Kaliningrado, através do espaço aéreo internacional sobre o Báltico.
A base lituana de Siauliai, onde estão instalados, foi modernizada pelos Estados Unidos, que triplicaram a sua capacidade investindo de 24 milhões de euros. O motivo é claro: a base aérea fica a apenas 220 km de Kaliningrado e 600 km de São Petersburgo, distância que um caça tipo Eurofighter Typhoon percorre em poucos minutos.
Por que é que a NATO está a intoduzir perto da Rússia, estes e outros aviões de capacidade dupla, convencionais e nucleares?
Claro que não é para defender os países bálticos de um ataque russo que, se acontecesse, significaria o início da guerra mundial termonuclear. O mesmo aconteceria se os aviões da NATO atacassem no Báltico, cidades russas limítrofes. A verdadeira razão para esta prática é aumentar a tensão, fabricando a imagem de um inimigo perigoso, a Rússia, que se prepara para atacar a Europa.
Esta é a estratégia de tensão concretizada por Washington, com a cumplicidade dos governos e dos parlamentos europeus e da própria União Europeia. Esta estratégia envolve um aumento crescente das despesas militares em detrimento das despesas sociais.
Um exemplo: o custo de uma hora de voo de um caça Eurofighter foi calculado pela mesma Força Aérea em 66.000 euros (incluindo a depreciação do avião). Montante, em dinheiro público, superior a dois salários brutos médios por ano.
Cada vez que um Eurofighter decola para “defender” o espaço aéreo do Báltico, queima dois empregos numa hora, em Itália.
Undoubtedly, Nigeria has entered a period of political uncertainty. With the next presidential election fast approaching, some politicians and experts are strongly advocating for, among others, a constitutional review considered as the best way to preserve peace and stability in the country. The reviewed constitution will take into account the ethnic diversity and provide for equal representation of southern and eastern regions in the federal system of governance.
In an early September interview, Maazi Oluchi Ibe, a historian and a former lecturer at Gregory University, a private educational institution named after Pope Gregory, located in Uturu, Abia State of Nigeria, talks to Kester Kenn Klomegah, about the political developments, the reasons for economic disparity and the Biafrans’ unquenchable desire for political freedom and self-determination.
Here are the interview excerpts.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah: Do you consider an urgent constitutional review as the first step towards national integration in the Federal Republic of Nigeria?
Maazi Oluchi Ibe: I think it is better to look at this issue from the perspective of who, in the present-day Nigeria, wants integration. If the Hausa, Fulani, or Yoruba want integration or re-integration for that matter, they are welcomed to it. There is a section of Nigeria that has long gone beyond the idea of integration. That part is the Biafra which has been under forceful military occupation by Nigeria since 1970. Biafra gave Nigeria a clear, unambiguous path to integration at Aburi in 1967. What Biafrans saw clearly in 1967 is what the rest of Nigeria is contemplating today. Biafrans are also telling Nigerians today that that we saw 53 years ago is no longer tenable. Possibly in a couple of decades, Nigeria will wake up to that reality too.
The net minimum for any look at the Nigerian constitution is a simple declaration for a plebiscite amongst the people of Biafra for self-determination. That remains the only basis. However, it is important we let those who feel concerned and who think that a mere constitutional review will solve the Nigerian quagmire, to know that history our guide. Every Nigerian constitution was watered on the blood of Biafrans. From 1945, to as recent as August 25th, 2020 when young Biafrans holding a peaceful meeting were shot to death at Emene Enugu, it has been genocide and countless killings of Biafrans. What then is the guarantee that the next constitutional review will not follow suit?
We will not cease saying that what ails Nigeria is beyond constitution making and reviews. What ails Nigeria is the forceful amalgamation of incompatible entities into a geographical expression. Is it not callous that pre-war Europe made up of multi-ethnic nations who were mired in ceaseless wars until they unbundled through the creation of ethnic nations will turn round in Africa and create exactly what made old Europe unstable for centuries? Even the two Germans that were separated in 1945 have joined back together as one nation. That is the natural order of things. Same Europeans came to African and forced ethnic nation, some as twice the population of an average European nation, into forceful unions with others as large and they think it will stand? No, it will not stand as the former USSR has proved, ditto, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and in Africa, Eritrea, and Sudan. To further muddle the waters, the British allowed two contentious expansionist religions that are almost equal in population to live in one geographical space called Nigeria. What sort of idiotic experiment was that? Imagine what it has caused since 1914 in terms of human lives, mainly the lives of innocent Biafrans. No, it is not a constitutional review matter.
KKK: Why are there rising blatant criticisms about the current constitution adopted in 1999?
MOI: Simply because Nigeria has never had a constitution. Even the so called ‘famed’ 1963 Republican constitution was a gross failure and that was why the army step in a mere three years after its proclamation. The current infamous 1999 constitution was merely a baring of the fangs that in the past were covered with a glove. The ‘good’ thing about this constitution was that its criminal creators did not hide the fact that it was a creation of a military decree. Imagine the impunity and the blood cuddling guts of declaring a military decree as emanating from ‘We the People!’ That very first statement in that piece of paper was and is a blatant lie and they are not hiding the fact.
KKK: What are the narratives and the reasons for underdevelopment in the Biafra State?
MOI: Some of the greatest disaster that befell Biafra from the war of independence were so subtle that an unconscious mind will hardly notice them, while many were so conspicuous that they scream to the high heaves for all to see. For instance, the divide and rule system introduced by the British colonizers where perfected by the Fulani oligarchy that took over Nigeria with Biafrans at the receiving end.
Across a once peaceful land compared to what was obtainable in other sections of Nigeria, the conquering caliphate army imposed all sorts of divisions, ethnic, geographic, demographic, and so on. That is why today, they would rather want Biafrans to fight within themselves over artificial boundaries they created to divide us, like their British did. Such externally imposed divisive tendencies does not call for economic development. But, we are more conscious of such subtleties now.
In addition, there is what Professor Chidi Osuagwu, defined as the deprivation of Knowledge and its concomitant effect over the decades on Biafran economy. Professor Chidi Osuagwu, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Imo state, had done an article on Igbo deprivations in Nigeria from where the excerpt on the missionary school’s take over came from. Immediately after the war, the Nigerian caliphate government struck at the lifeblood of Biafran development, that is, the Missionary Schools. They took over the mission schools after the war aimed at slowing down and degrading the booming educational Sector in Biafraland that was the driver of Biafran progress. Today, the state of education in Biafraland viz-a-viz what was obtainable pre-Biafran war of independence speaks volume.
By consciously shutting down economic activities in Biafraland through strangulatory policies, significant amongst them the £20 policy, that is, giving Biafrans only £20 without putting into consideration whatever holdings Biafrans held in their prewar bank accounts which the conquering army confiscated. Their nationalization decree of 1972 that turned over all major companies and conglomerated into the Nigerian caliphate governments’ hands. Other examples are the policy of importing from far away Lagos instead of nearby Port Harcourt and other natural seaports available in Biafraland. Mind you, Port Harcourt seaport was opened as far back as 1917, but today lies fallow. The cumulative effect of these policies was the forceful dispersal of Biafran youths from our homeland. Today they remain the largest economic migrant group the whole of Africa.
These glaring constraints naturally forced an implosion leading to insecurities which were in turn blamed on the people and used as an excuse to militarize the land. Biafra is the most militarized region today in West Africa, if not the whole of Africa. Why not militarize the North with an ongoing war that has lasted over ten years?
Let us also not forget that by consciously imposing political leadership akin to the warrant chiefs the British imposed on Biafraland during the colonial period, the present Nigerian system has a grip on what gets done and what does not in Biafraland. What brings home the truth of the parlous economic situation in Biafraland today is not to compare it with what obtains in Northern Nigeria but to recall the fact the pre 1967 economic indices showed the then Eastern region (Biafra) as the fastest developing economy in the world.
KKK: How do you envisage women’s role in the current struggle for freedom, peace, and development in Biafra State?
MOI: Biafran women are the most resilient in Africa if not world over. Possibly no other group of women have passed through what they did and are still passing through in contemporary history. These were women who lost children, siblings, husbands, fathers, and mothers in the genocidal war Nigeria imposed on Biafra in 1967. 53 years after they are still forced to endure rapine, and harassment in their very homes and farms by terrorist herdsmen buoyed by Nigerian government. Yes, they are very patient but whenever their patience dissipates as it has, you are going to be confronted with a different level of struggle. No other people know this more than the British who thinking that Biafran women were as docile as their British counterpart of the early 20th century crossed the invisible line. The now famous Aba women war of 1929, remember was fought solely by Biafran women based on same issues as has been confronting their nation since 1970.
It is only in this part of the world that you have women having equal if not superior rights to men. That was why when confronted by the British judicial panel over the Aba women’s war, on why the women listened to their menfolk and went on rampage, the angry women leaders of the revolution had retorted, ‘here, men do not speak for us!’ This, when published in the British press in the 1930s was picked up by British women suffragettes and became their catchphrase, ‘here men do not speak for us, as reported by Harry Gailey. Gailey authored “The Road to Aba: A Study of British Administrative Policy in Eastern Nigeria” and was published by New York University Press in 1970.
KKK: Is human rights violations becoming a thorny issue in Nigeria? Why armed northern Islamic attacks on Christian-dominated southwestern and southeastern States?
MOI: Human rights violations and armed Northern Islamic attacks on Christians have gone beyond the description, ‘thorny.’ It is now an existential threat. It is a choreographed, preplanned attempt at not just ethnic cleansing but a grand Islamization conquest in their quest to ‘deep the Koran into the Atlantic,’ as promised them by their forebears. This is happening with impunity with tens of thousands killed as the world watch without lifting a finger. What did we do? Is it wrong to be Christian and Biafran? What makes our own Christianity different from that of the rest of the world that they have refused to help? How come all the international news media have refused mentioning the daily carnage? Who says Biafra with its 95% Christian population, an ancient democratic and republican system, sharing the best of contemporary Western ideas cannot be helped to be a bastion against militant Islamism that poses a great threat not just to Biafrans but the rest of the world? It is unbelievable.
KKK: Does Buhari’s administration recognize all the issues you have discussed above?
MOI: How can someone who subscribes to the philosophy that ‘Western knowledge’ is bad recognize any of these issues? These issues are diametrically opposed to his ideals and what he has come to execute. He has been sincere in stating, in clear terms, all he has been doing are pro-militant Islam and anti-westernization and modernity. Buhari’s administration is completely blind to these important facts. The federal government would rather exacerbate them than otherwise.
KKK: What are the expectations from regional organizations, especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and of course, the African Union?
MOI: They do not exist. There is no point wasting energy on things that do not exist unless we want to get entangled in an empty academic exercise. When last for instance did ECOWAS or African union make a statement on the daily bloodshed in Nigeria?
Unfortunately for ECOWAS, Africa and the Western world that have refused to raise a finger and are all seating on the sideline waiting for Nigeria to implode, that implosion will come sooner or later and when 200 million refuges start streaming all over Africa and into the Western world, a world that could not handle six million Syrian refuges, maybe, then all our eyes will open. This is the time for the world to halt the recalcitrant marauding Nigerian legal and illegal security forces bent on decapitating everything on their path to the total domination of our space.
This is the time for the world to force Nigeria to a round table. This forced amalgamation of 1914 has not worked and will never work. Our situation is not that of a window dressed constitutional review. We are all worlds apart. There is simply two diametrically opposed cosmological views that cannot live side by side in this space. It happened in India and in 1947/8, the British did the right thing – separated Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan. That right thing – separation, is our minimum demand.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah is a passionate and frequent contributor to Global Research.
The debate over voting by mail in America in November generally is defined by the interests of the two major political parties. Democrats insist that such voting enfranchises large numbers of citizens who would not otherwise be able to vote and is also secure. The Republicans argue that a large volume of voting by mail will guarantee that the election results will not be known for some time after the election and also that casting a ballot without being physically present increases the possibility of fraud.
Beyond that, the recent use of largescale mail-in voting in New York State suggest that there can be considerable delays in the mechanics of actually counting the ballots, while many ballots were also completely invalidated for various reasons, but some states like Oregon and Utah have been successfully using mail-in for years. So essentially the argument is a political one. The Democrats are expecting that most voters who postal vote will vote for them while the Republicans would like to repress that type of voting precisely for the same reason, i.e. that it would likely benefit Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. There will certainly be both detected and undetected fraud in the voting, but the questions are “How much?” and “Will it affect any results?” If the fraud is not significant many would argue that it is a price that should be paid to improve voter turnout.
Elections are run at the state and county level in the United States, not nationally. A recent review of procedures to register and vote in my home state of Virginia determined that one can both register and vote without any human contact at all. The registration process can be accomplished by filling out an online form, which is linked here. Note particularly the following: the form requires one to check the box indicating U.S. citizenship. It then asks for name and address as well as social security number, date of birth and whether one has a criminal record or is otherwise disqualified to vote. You then have to sign and date the document and mail it off. Within ten days, you should receive a voter’s registration card for Virginia which you can present if you vote in person, though even that is not required.
It is important to consider no documents have to be presented to support the application, which means that all the information can be false. You can even opt out of providing a social security number by indicating that you have never been issued one, even though the form indicates that you must have one to be registered, and you can also submit a temporary address by claiming you are “homeless.” Even date of birth information is useless as the form does not ask where you were born, which is how birth records are filed by state and local governments. Ultimately, it is only the social security number that validates the document and that is what also appears on the Voter’s ID Card, but even that can be false or completely fabricated, as many illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. have discovered.
In a state like Virginia, the actual mail-in ballot requires your signature and that of a witness, who can be anyone. That is also true in six other states. Thirty-one states require your own signature while only three states require that the document be notarized, a good safeguard since it requires the voter to actually produce some documentation. Seven states require your additional signature on the ballot envelope and two states require that a photocopy of the voter ID accompany the ballot. In other words, the safeguards in the system vary from state to state but in most cases, fraud would be relatively easy.
Possible fraud in the voting not to mention delays in post office delivery of the mail-in ballots, have, not surprisingly, political consequences that are beginning to surface in discussions of what might actually happen the night of the election. If the civil disturbances that have been occurring over the past three months continue and the Republicans are successful in hammering on the law-and-order theme, it is likely that the results of the presidential vote will be much tighter than some current polls seem to suggest.
So, what happens on the day after? Well, the elections in 2000 and 2016 suggest that there might be problems. In 2000, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore even though the latter had more votes nationally. There was considerable fear that violence might result, but the issue was resolved by a recount in Florida followed by a Supreme Court ruling and Bush’s legitimacy, though questioned, was conceded. In 2016, of course, Hillary Clinton had 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but his large majority in the Electoral College meant that the result was largely unchallenged, though it was soon to be attributed to “Russian help.”
This year might be different due to the simmering anger over coronavirus measures as well as the racial turmoil. That might not matter much but for the fact that President Donald Trump has opened the door to discussion of possible fraud in the election and has also suggested that the result might not be legitimate. He has particularly focused on mail-in voting and it has been conjectured that he might be deliberately taking steps to hinder post office ability to deliver the ballots on time. The viral badinage appears to be working for the GOP as a recent opinion poll suggests that only 45% of prospective voters are confident of the integrity of election results.
What might be coming, from one perspective, is suggested by a Trump tweet from the November 2018 election in Florida, in which he declared “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
The president has also claimed repeatedly that the Democrats are trying to “steal the election.”
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has predictably made matters worse by asserting that
“…sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and honoring our Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the United States… They’re doing everything they can [to] suppress the vote with [their] actions: scare people, intimidate by saying law enforcement will be there, diminish the role of the postal system in all of this. It’s really, actually shameful.”
She called them “Enemies of the state,” a version of Hillary Clinton’s famous faux pas in declaring that Trump supporters in 2016 were “deplorables.”
Pelosi also has called for cancellation of the planned presidential debates between Trump and Biden, saying she does not want to legitimize any conversation with the president. She has also added fuel to the fire by claiming that Trump is “…welcom[ing], in fact, Russian intervention, letting Putin decide who will be President instead of the American people.” So, the stage is set for some very significant grievances to play out from either side. It is being suggested that Donald Trump might try to delay the election, which he does not have the power to do, or let it take place in expectation that he will have the lead in conventionally cast votes when the polls close and will be able to declare both victory and that the election is over without any further counting because of fraud on the mail-in ballots. If, on the other hand, Trump loses, the argument could be broadened, with the president calling the all of the voting invalid because of widespread mail-in fraud.
As more Americans than ever are frustrated and angry over the political system while also being ideologically divided into various camps characterized by hard core support of positions that are impossible to reconcile, the situation could explode. And, one must point out, more Americans are armed than ever before while they continue to buy weapons at a record rate. Throw into the mix a police force that is demoralized and evidently increasingly incapable of dealing with civil unrest and November 3rd’s election could well unleash forces that could make the rioting and violence that is sweeping across America currently look insignificant.
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Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The Black Lives Matter slogan and the demand for “racial justice” echo as the defining characteristic of the ongoing resistance from Portland to Kenosha. But the drama of the moment obscures the limitation of these demands. What we mean is those demands can be easily manipulated by the same forces the resisters in the streets believe they are in opposition to.
Private corporations such as Uber and Amazon and professional sports teams have contributed money and lined up behind the demand that “Black Lives Matter.” But as these private companies, the media and right-wing neoliberal politicians in the Democratic Party all line up in favor of racial justice, isn’t it wise for someone to inquire what exactly they are backing? This question is especially important in the midst of the pandemic, in which the non-white working-class populations are suffering and dying in disproportionate numbers, with hundreds of African/Black people dying every week.
Extrajudicial murders of Black people at the hands of U.S. police number fewer than 300 per year, on average. The opposition to murders at the hands of police is understandable, given African/Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but represent an average of 25 percent to 30 percent of lethal encounters with the police. These numbers don’t even account for the numbers of African/Black people shot and beaten by the police.
However, other disproportionalities are not being contextualized as racial justice issues. Astronomical rates of Black unemployment, Black people in lines for food assistance, Black people representing the most vulnerable so-called “essential” workers, Black people lacking health insurance, Black people impoverished and Black people unnecessarily dying during a pandemic are expressions of capitalist state violence. But they have been exempted from the category of racialized oppression.
This contradiction might explain why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos can make sure workers trying to organize themselves are fired, but then turn around and claim “Black Lives Matter.”
Black human-rights fighter Ella Baker famously said to Black people and to other oppressed people, “You and I cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism.” If the current demand for racial justice was identified with the position Ella Baker articulated, would the corporations, the media, liberal foundations, and right-wing Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris still support it?
The answer is obvious. That is why even the leading personalities of the Black Lives Matter movement have not publicly embraced Ella Baker’s position.
And that is why we have and must continue to develop a Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). Members of this alliance are clear there can be no justice, peace or human rights as long as this rapacious, inhumane colonial/capitalist system is allowed to reproduce poverty, war and the structures of white supremacy.
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A dangerous vehicle collision between U.S and Russian soldiers in Northeastern Syria on Aug. 24 highlights the fragility of the relationship and the broader test of wills between the two major powers.
According to White House reports and a Russian video that went viral this week, it appeared that as the two sides were racing down a highway in armored vehicles, the Russians sideswiped the Americans, leaving four U.S. soldiers injured. It is but the latest clash as both sides continue their patrols in the volatile area. But it speaks of bigger problems with U.S. provocations on Russia’s backdoor in Eastern Europe.
A sober examination of U.S. policy toward Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union leads to two possible conclusions. One is that U.S. leaders, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have been utterly tone-deaf to how Washington’s actions are perceived in Moscow. The other possibility is that those leaders adopted a policy of maximum jingoistic swagger intended to intimidate Russia, even if it meant obliterating a constructive bilateral relationship and eventually risking a dangerous showdown. Washington’s latest military moves, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, are stoking alarming tensions.
There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia’s western border. In addition, the United States initiated “rotational” deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative.
As if such steps were not antagonistic enough, both Bush and Obama sought to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The latter country is not only within what Russia regards as its legitimate sphere of influence, but within its core security zone. Even key European members of NATO, especially France and Germany, believed that such a move was unwise and blocked Washington’s ambitions. That resistance, however, did not inhibit a Western effort to meddle in Ukraine’s internal affairs to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russia president and install a new, pro-NATO government in 2014.
Such provocative political steps, though, are now overshadowed by worrisome U.S. and NATO military moves. Weeks before the formal announcement on July 29, the Trump administration touted its plan to relocate some U.S. forces stationed in Germany. When Secretary of Defense Mike Esper finally made the announcement, the media’s focus was largely on the point that 11,900 troops would leave that country.
However, Esper made it clear that only 6,400 would return to the United States; the other nearly 5,600 would be redeployed to other NATO members in Europe. Indeed, of the 6,400 coming back to the United States, “many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to Europe.” Worse, of the 5,600 staying in Europe, it turns out that at least 1,000 are going to Poland’s eastern border with Russia.
Another result of the redeployment will be to boost U.S. military power in the Black Sea. Esper confirmed that various units would “begin continuous rotations farther east in the Black Sea region, giving us a more enduring presence to enhance deterrence and reassure allies along NATO’s southeastern flank.” Moscow is certain to regard that measure as another on a growing list of Black Sea provocations by the United States.
Among other developments, there already has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft in that region. Most of the cases involve U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast—supposedly in international airspace. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception occurred on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Still others have taken place throughout mid-August. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation.
The growing number of such incidents is a manifestation of the surging U.S. military presence along Russia’s border, especially in the Black Sea. They are taking place on Russia’s doorstep, thousands of miles away from the American homeland. Americans should consider how the United States would react if Russia decided to establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia; Russia is not crowding the United States. Washington’s bumptious policies already have wrecked a once-promising bilateral relationship and created a needless new cold war with Moscow. If more prudent U.S. policies are not adopted soon, that cold war might well turn hot.
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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur (2019).
During his stint in power as Pakistan’s prime minister until July 2017, Nawaz Sharif had nurtured cordial working relationship with India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi. This, along with his role in Kargil conflict of 1999 with India, was precisely the reason why Pakistan’s military establishment turned against him and he was eventually disqualified from holding public office by a Pakistan’s apex court’s ruling in July 2017 acting on the instructions of the establishment.
Imran Khan is himself a secular liberal and is known to have cultivated close friendships with many Indian celebrities, including with glamorous “Khans of Bollywood,” during his cricketing career. He is also credited with inaugurating a Sikh Gurdwara at Kartarpur, to the opening ceremony of which former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was also invited, and for allocating land for a Hindu temple to be built in Islamabad since assuming premiership in August 2018.
Pakistan’s military is wary of pacifist tendencies of civilian politicians and jealously guards its traditional national security domain. Therefore, within months of Imran Khan being inaugurated as prime minister of Pakistan, a terrorist attack took place in Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir on the Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2019, inflicting 40 fatalities among Indian paramilitary forces. The vehicle-bound suicide attack was conducted by a Kashmiri native Adil Dar allegedly belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militant outfit operating from across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Candle Light March organised in Mehsana, Gujarat, India in wake of 2019 Pulwama attack (Source: Nizil Shah/CC BY-SA 4.0)
The timing of the terrorist attack was critical as it happened on the eve of Indian general elections due to take place in May 2019. Some sort of retaliation was obvious, but what Narendra Modi did, even Pakistani military strategists could not have anticipated it.
In a pre-dawn airstrike on February 26, 2019, 12 Indian Mirage 2000 fighter jets intruded into Pakistan’s airspace and dropped their payload on the top of a mountain at a terrorist training camp, allegedly belonging to the same jihadist group that had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir on February 14, 2019.
Although Pakistan military’s officials claimed after the Indian incursion that the Indian jets had intruded 3-4 miles in Muzaffarabad sector of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to location provided by local residents and subsequent news reports, the site of the airstrike was deep inside the Pakistani territory between Balakot and Mansehra in northwestern Pakistan. Thankfully, no loss of lives was reported as the bombs fell in the open and created four large craters.
In response, Pakistan’s air force struck six targets inside Indian-administered Kashmir the next day on February 27. Indian air force chased Pakistani aircrafts inside Pakistan-administered Kashmir where an Indian MiG-21 aircraft was shot down by Pakistan’s air force and an Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman was arrested, who was released a couple of days later on March 1, 2019, as a gesture of goodwill on the orders of Prime Minister Imran Khan, even though Pakistan’s military’s top brass had reservations against his unconditional release.
Although the military escalation between nuclear-armed rivals was amicably resolved, the confrontation soured the relationship between Imran Khan and Narendra Modi to the extent that Imran Khan began calling Modi a Hindu fascist and the latter in turn couldn’t stand the sight of Imran Khan.
The February 2019 face-off between Pakistani and Indian armed forces was reminiscent of another stand-off between the hostile neighbors a decade earlier in November 2008. In August 2008, Pakistan’s longtime dictator General Pervez Musharraf was ousted from power and a liberal and secular Pakistan People’s Party formed the government.
Wary of a rapprochement between civilian-led governments in Pakistan and India, Pakistan’s military establishment orchestrated another terrorist attack in November 2008 in which ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan, carried out twelve coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across the Indian metropolis Mumbai, inflicting 174 fatalities including nine attackers. One of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, was captured alive who was subsequently hanged in November 2012.
In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as the military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.
Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have institutional interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the 1960s was a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad was evidently a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again regarded as a liberal establishment.
Similarly, the Egyptian and Turkish military establishments also have a liberal outlook, but they are equally capable of forming alliances with conservatives if and when it suits the institutional interests of military. In fact, since military’s top brass is mostly groomed in urban milieus, therefore its high-ranking officers are more likely to have liberal temperaments.
The establishment does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weaknesses. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it would join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it would form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of the “deep state” on its traditional domain, the security and defense policy of a country.
The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies, but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals by their very training have a chauvinistic mindset and a hawkish temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.
All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were nurtured by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment in the 1960s as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League in the East Pakistan province of Pakistan, which is now a separate country Bangladesh, though the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) later turned out to be a fiercely anti-establishment political force under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto.
Similarly, Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the 1980s to offset the influence of Benazir Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party, which was deemed a “security risk” by the military’s top brass. And finally, Imran Khan was groomed by General Musharraf’s establishment to counterbalance the ascendancy of Nawaz Sharif, who had fallen out with the establishment after the Pakistani military’s ill-conceived Kargil operation in the Indian-administered Kashmir in 1999.
It’s quite ironic, however, that as soon as the establishment’s former protégés develop a political constituency for themselves, they opportunistically turn against their erstwhile patrons in the military and strive to monopolize power in the hands of their respective political organizations. It might take some time for the newly elected government of Imran Khan to cross swords with its rogue benefactors, but it is bound to happen sooner or later.
Regardless, Prime Minister Imran Khan is an educated, well-informed, articulate and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.
It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a liberal. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.
His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.
Finally, we need to bear in mind the fact that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women and youth voters. Both these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women which constitute more than 50% of population in every society.
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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.
Hikers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights found at least 5 armed and unguarded Merkava Mk. IV battle tanks.
The doors of the battle tanks were open with equipment and munitions left completely unguarded inside. The incident took place amid the growing tensions between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces in both the Golan Heights area and along the Israeli-Lebanese contact line.
During the past weeks, the Israeli military was actively deploying troops and equipment to reinforce their positions in these areas. It is highly likely that the abandoned battle tanks were a part of these reinforcements. So, if Israeli sources do not know how to explain this failure, they can easily blame Hezbollah.
Indeed, Israel is already taking steps to do this. On August 29, the Lebanese group’s Central Media released a video of the incident that took place about a week ago. The video showed a dummy soldier moving amid a cloud of thick smoke on the Israeli-Lebanese separation line. Two Merkava IV battle tanks of the IDF were guarding the “robot soldier.” The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) often use such “dummy targets” in an attempt to trick Hezbollah in times of tensions.
On August 26, IDF aircraft carried out several airstrikes on what it called “observation posts” of Hezbollah near the contact line in southern Lebanon. The IDF said the strikes were a response to a security incident, in which shots were fired at an Israeli force operating near the town of al-Manar. The incident, which took place at 22:40 on August 25, resulted in no casualties, according to the IDF’s statement.
“The IDF considers the Lebanese government responsible for what happens from its territory,” Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, a spokesman for the IDF, said, adding: “We view the incident with extreme seriousness, like every attempt to violate the sovereignty of the State of Israel, and our forces will remain in a state of great readiness to preserve the sovereignty of Israel and the security of the population as needed.”
Thus, the IDF reinforced its threats to carry out strikes on Lebanon in response to any attack or provocation from this direction. Apparently, the IDF sees the possible strikes on “dummy soldiers” intentionally put in danger areas on the contact line with Lebanon as one of such attacks. Lebanese sources claim that the IDF is intentionally seeking a pretext for military actions against Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Secretary-General of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah vowed that Hezbollah will kill an Israeli soldier every time the Israeli military kills one of his group’s fighters. The Lebanese leader made the new threat in a televised speech commemorating the 10th of Muharram, a holy Islamic day highly admired by Shiites, on August 30. The Hezbollah-Israeli tensions seem to be ready to explode with an open military confrontation at any moment.
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It does not seem possible that here in the United States, a country that has long prided itself on its humanity, a man could be serving a life sentence for stealing hedge clippers. Yet, shocking as it is, Fair Wayne Bryant’s story is the story of thousands of Americans whose lives have been decimated by draconian laws that disproportionately affect minorities.
Bryant, a black man, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers from a Louisiana carport storage room in 1997. He has already served twenty-three years for this petty crime, and on 31 July the Louisiana Supreme Court denied a request to review his life sentence. The denial followed a lower appeals court’s 2019 decision that concluded “his life sentence is final.”
The only judge on the Louisiana Supreme Court to dissent (or even issue an opinion) was Chief Justice Bernette Johnson. She wrote a stinging rebuke, observing that Bryant’s “life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose.” How is it possible that one judge after another could condemn a man to life behind bars for such an insignificant and non-violent transgression? One must conclude that these judges have lost their capacity for mercy – and what indeed is justice without mercy? As Shakespeare put it, “It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”
We cannot, however, simply condemn the judges who issue these cruelly harsh sentences. In over 80 percent of cases where the judge hands down a life sentence without parole – the harshest sentence that can be imposed short of the death penalty – for a non-violent offense, the judge has little alternative: the sentence is automatic and mandatory.
Image on the right: The Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans (Nolanwebb/Wikipedia)
Chief Justice Johnson points out that
“Mr. Bryant’s incarceration has cost Louisiana taxpayers approximately $518,667. Arrested at 38, Mr. Bryant has already spent nearly 23 years in prison and is now over 60 years old. If he lives another 20 years, Louisiana taxpayers will have paid almost one million dollars to punish Mr. Bryant for his failed effort to steal a set of hedge clippers.”
It is surely an absurd, extravagant, and shameful use of taxpayer funds. In fact, taxpayers spend nearly $2 billion a year to keep non-violent offenders locked away for life. So how does such a thing occur?
Bryant was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, under the habitual offender statute, due to four prior felony convictions. While an appellate court determined that to deny Bryant the possibility of parole was actually illegal, there are in fact over three thousand prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offenses. This is a human rights issue, and the shame of it should shock every American possessed of conscience. A 2013 ACLU report found that roughly seventy-nine percent of those 3,278 prisoners, “were sentenced to die in prison for non-violent drug crimes.” Other infractions were as minor as “siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts” or “breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch…”
Only the first of Bryant’s previous convictions was for a violent crime, a 1979 attempted armed robbery of a cab driver. Bryant pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. The other subsequent convictions were non-violent. In 1987, Bryant was convicted of possessing stolen goods worth over $500, for which he was sentenced to two years in prison. In 1989, he was convicted of attempted forgery of a check worth $150 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. And in 1992, he pleaded guilty to burglary of an inhabited dwelling and was sentenced to four years in prison. As Johnson points out,
“Such petty theft is frequently driven by the ravages of poverty or addiction, and often both. It is cruel and unusual to impose a sentence of life in prison at hard labor for the criminal behavior which is most often caused by poverty or addiction.”
Indeed, Bryant’s life sentence goes beyond draconian – it is an obscene parody of justice; it is in itself a crime against all that makes us human; for the law has in effect decided that this man’s life is without any value, that he is unworthy of humane consideration. Indeed, these unjust laws are an affront to the fundamental principle that every human being is possessed with inherent dignity and worth. When you punish petty theft with the same severity that murderers and rapists might receive, you make a mockery of justice and in fact weaken the significance of these far more serious transgressions.
Precedent set by the Louisiana Supreme Court established that while a sentence might be permissible under the habitual offender statute, it may still violate a defendant’s constitutional rights if it is excessive and “makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment.” Supposing that Bryant’s sentence was technically allowed, it was nonetheless plainly an infringement of his “right to humane treatment,” guaranteed by Article I, Section 20, of the Louisiana constitution; which forbids “cruel, excessive, or unusual punishment” and assures that “Full rights of citizenship shall be restored upon termination of state and federal supervision following conviction for any offense.”
Johnson goes on to argue that Bryant’s case is a modern manifestation of ‘pig laws’ which were “largely designed to re-enslave African Americans” following the Civil War, targeting such actions “as stealing cattle and swine – considered stereotypical ‘negro’ behavior – by lowering the threshold for what constituted a crime and increasing the severity of its punishment.”
To drive Johnson’s point home, we might note that the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Bryant is serving out his life sentence, was once the site of a slave plantation. Like the prison, the plantation was also known as Angola, after the African country from where the slaves originated. The Angola plantation was acquired by a major in the Confederate Army following the abolition of slavery. Inmates living in former slave quarters were subjected to a penal labor system in which prisoners could be leased out to private individuals, effectively maintaining slavery by other means. As Paul Gardullo, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, stated: “People – mostly young black men – were rounded up for petty crimes, and they were put to work as a way to control the newly free.”
Bryant’s case is by no means an isolated one. Excessive punishment, especially lengthy prison terms, is one of the major contributors to the “unprecedented rise of the prison population” and the distinctly American phenomenon of mass incarceration. Habitual offender laws, and harsh drug laws have been shown to be racially biased and ineffective (79.1 percent of the nearly 4,000 people incarcerated in Louisiana prisons as habitual offenders are black). In a 1994 interview John Erlichman frankly admitted that Nixon’s “war on drugs” was designed to criminalize black people.
So, Fair Wayne Bryant has spent most of his adult life in prison and may spend the rest of his life there for a petty theft. Since the death of George Floyd this country has been searching its soul, struggling to come to terms with its racist history, and searching for a path forward, a future in which there may indeed be “a new birth of freedom.” But if this nation is to overcome the plague of systemic racism, then we must revisit habitual offender statutes and end mandatory life sentences for non-violent offences. Bryant and thousands of others like him are being denied their fundamental right under the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution not to be subject to “cruel and unusual punishment.” This inhumanity chokes the cause of justice and hollows our commitment to human rights the world over.
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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Russia won the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. On August 11, its Sputnik V was registered for use by the Russian Ministry of Health.
Development of the vaccine followed 20 years of research, what its scientists called another “Sputnik moment” — referring to Russia’s 1957 first ever “successful launch (of a) man-made satellite by the Soviet Union.
According to US funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — part of its global propaganda media that broadcasts in 59 languages on radio, television, and online — the Trump regime “blacklist(ed) three Russian military and civilian scientific facilities, citing their alleged involvement in chemical and biological weapons research (sic),” adding:
Targeted facilities include a “Russian Defense Ministry facility that is involved in Russia’s attempts to develop the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine.”
The US Commerce Department said it’s blacklisting “60 entities in Russia, China” and elsewhere, falsely claiming:
Their activities are “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
The Commerce Department’s action means that nations, businesses, other entities or individuals engaging in normal activities with blacklisted facilities risk US sanctions.
Russian ones were targeted for being first to develop and have available for use a COVID-19 vaccine that can compete with Big Pharma’s aim for maximum vaccine market potential with minimal foreign competition.
In response to the unacceptable Trump regime actions against Russian scientific facilities, its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following:
“We find it outrageous that three Russian scientific research institutes have been included on the American blacklist,” adding:
“A particularly disturbing fact is that these sanctions precisely affect those scientists and specialists who…have been tirelessly laboring on the development of a Russian vaccine against COVID-19.”
“It is not clear how the American government is going to explain to its citizens this attempt to punish the people who are working successfully on a remedy against the disease, which has already taken the lives of over 180,000 US citizens.”
“We don’t believe that this is a step in the right direction in cooperating to fight the pandemic, the importance of which, we think, Washington cannot even deny.”
“Once again one gets the impression that the run-of-the-mill use of sanctions is a tool of pressure to thrust forward one’s own companies’ interests – right now pharmaceutical ones – which mirrors the continued push of its own natural gas into the European market.”
Russian research facilities and scientists involved in COVID-19 vaccine development are not involved in working on chemical and biological weapons of any kind, Zakharova stressed.
Unlike the US, Russia eliminated its entire CW arsenal in 2017.
“This is confirmed by the authorized international structure, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which includes 193 countries, among them the US,” she explained, adding:
“Russia continues to conscientiously carry out all of its responsibilities under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).”
“Washington…prefers to act not within the framework of international agreements, but at its own discretion” extrajudicially.
The US is the only CWC member-state that maintains an arsenal of banned chemical weapons.
Substances “are being patented in the US related to the use of full-fledged combat toxic substances, including nerve agents,” said Zakharova.
It operates facilities for the development and production of bioweapons.
“There are no grounds to assert that the activity of American biological labs fully complies with the provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC),” Zakharova stressed.
Trump’s Commerce Department blacklisted facilities of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Central Research Institutes No. 33 and No. 48, along with the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology.
These facilities have no involvement in developing banned chemical or biological weapons as the Trump regime falsely claimed.
Blacklisting them is part of Washington’s war on Russia by other means, along with wanting to give corporate America a competitive advantage over foreign competition.
A Final Comment
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the Trump regime’s blacklisting of Russian research facilities a “sanctions theater of the absurd,” adding:
“This is a follow-up to (US) sanctions dependence” against targeted nations, entities and individuals.
Peskov called Washington’s claim that targeted Russian facilities are covertly engaged in developing chemical and biological weapons “absolute nonsense,” adding:
“(T)his another example of uncovered and rampant non-competitive struggle” by the US.
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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.”
Canada is supporting US efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.
A recently leaked USAID document highlights “the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.” The stated aim is to replace president Daniel Ortega with “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” HighlightingWashington’s aim, Ben Norton notes, “the 14-page USAID document employed the word ‘transition’ 102 times, including nine times on the first page alone.”
Recently Canada’s representative to the Organization of American States, Hugh Adsett, joined five other countries in calling on the OAS’ Secretary General to organize a special session focused on human rights and democracy in Nicaragua. At the recent OAS meeting Adsett criticized Nicaragua, saying the Covid-19 pandemic “should not be used to weaken democracy”.
Ottawa has supported a number of OAS resolutions and initiatives targeting Nicaragua’s government. Along with the US, Paraguay, Jamaica and Argentina, Canada was part of the 2019 OAS High-Level Diplomatic Commission on Nicaragua, which Managua blocked from entering the country. The commission claimed there was an “alteration of constitutional order that seriously affects the democratic order” in Nicaragua. But, the group failed to win majority support at the OAS General Assembly.
Ottawa has severed aid and sanctioned officials from a government former US national security adviser John Bolton listed as part of a “troika of tyranny” (Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua). Ortega’s government is part of the Venezuela-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA), which is a response to North American capitalist domination of the hemisphere.
Since the Sandinistas’ won power in 2007 poverty rates dropped substantially in the nation of six million. The government expanded access to electricity in rural areas and doubled the proportion of electricity from renewable sources to over half. Access to drinking water has increased as have health indicators improved. Women’s role in parliament grew sharply and Nicaragua’s murder rate remained a fraction of its northern neighbours. According to a July 2019 UN report, there were 8.3 murders per 100,000 Nicaraguans compared with nearly 70 murders per 100,000 in El Salvador and Honduras.
A little more than a year after his third consecutive election victory a protest movement challenged Ortega’s presidency. Ostensibly what unleashed the uprising was a social security reform pushed by the International Monetary Fund. But, pension benefits were largely maintained with the government offloading most of the cost on to employers. Despite a relatively working-class friendly reform, many student organizations and NGOs aligned with the major employer federation, the wealthiest Nicaraguans and the conservative Catholic church to oppose the government. Many of these groups were financed and trained by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy, USAID and Freedom House, which is close to the CIA. The movement was greatly influenced by Washington, which has long been powerful in the small, impoverished, country.
The protests quickly turned violent. At least 22 police officers were killed and as many as 300 lost their lives in politically related violence during 2018. The North American media and internationally connected NGOs blamed the government for all the rights violations. But, this was absurd, as the death toll of police highlight. It was also public knowledge that opposition rebels had been attacking government supporters for years. In March 2016 the New York Times published a long sympathetic story headlined “Ortega vs. the Contras: Nicaragua Endures an ’80s Revival” about a small number of anti-government rebels targeting police stations and Sandinistas in rural areas.
Still, Canadian officials blamed the government — either implicitly or directly — for the violence. Between April 23 and July 18, 2018, Global Affairs put out at least four press releases critical of the situation in Nicaragua. Chrystia Freeland’s statements became steadily stronger with the former foreign minister eventually demanding an immediate end to the “violence, repression, arbitrary detentions and human rights violations” and for “the government of Nicaragua to help create the conditions for safe, peaceful, and constructive discussions.” Subsequently Canada’s foreign minister questioned Ortega’s democratic legitimacy. In June 2019 Freeland declared, “Canada will continue to stand with the people of Nicaragua and their legitimate demands for democracy and accountability.” But, Ortega won the election in a landslide and it’s hard to imagine that he suddenly lost all support.
In March 2016 the New York Times reported, “Mr. Ortega enjoys strong support among the poor” while eight months later The Guardian noted he “cementedpopular support among poorer Nicaraguans.” At the end of 2016 Ortega was re-elected with 72% of the vote in an election some in the opposition boycotted.
The Liberals raised the conflict in Nicaragua in international forums. At a Women Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Montréal in September 2018 Freeland said “Nicaragua” was one of “the pressing issues that concern us as foreign ministers.” The “situation in Nicaragua” was discussed between Freeland and foreign minister Aloysio Nunes at the third Canada-Brazil Strategic Partnership Dialogue a month later.
In August 2018 the Liberals officially severed aid to Nicaragua. Canadian funding for five major government backed projects was withdrawn.
Ten months later Canada sanctioned nine Nicaraguan government officials, including ministers and the president of the National Assembly. Individuals’ assets were frozen and Canadians were prohibited from dealing with said persons. The sanctions were adopted in co-ordination with Washington. “United States and Canada Announce Financial Sanctions to Address the Ongoing Repression in Nicaragua”, noted the US State Department’s release.
The Liberals’ stance towards Nicaragua contrasts sharply with its words and actions towards its Central American neighbour Honduras. While Canada condemned Ortega, severed aid and sanctioned officials, it maintained friendly relations and aid spending after Juan Orlando Hernandez defied the constitution by running for a second term as president and then brazenly stole the election.
The Liberals regime change efforts in Nicaragua are part of a broader pro-US/corporate policy in the hemisphere rife with hypocrisy.
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Featured image: A woman stands near a burning barricade holding Nicaraguan flag, April 2018 (Source: Yves Engler)
Politologist Georgii Bovt gave an interview recently in which he said: ‘A movement which doesn’t have a leader, program, or strategy, will die’. In fact, the expert gave the Belarus protest movement one more month at best. A pessimistic prognosis no doubt for the thousands who protested against the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko over the weekend; but nonetheless it remains to be seen how long the Belarussian opposition can encourage people out on to the streets. As the colder, autumnal weather sets in, will the people of Minsk be as keen to venture out in support of opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya?
This remains to be seen. For as Georgii Bovt aptly put it, this is an opposition movement which is lacking all the necessary components to enforce change. In any political or ideological campaign, one of the most important factors is leadership, and indeed the personality of the leader. As German political and social theorist Max Weber noted, a charismatic leader is vital for the success of political movements; in this case it is essential if one is intent on unseating an incumbent president of 26 years together with the system he has in place. It has been identified, for instance, that the success of the Bolshevik revolution was down to, in part, the immense role played by Vladimir Lenin. Charisma, energy, and drive are necessary traits of an effective leader, and typically, such charismatic individuals emerge at times of change, like the one Belarussians are experiencing now.
However, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is lacking all these qualities. In fact, her presentation is so poor it’s cringeworthy to watch. She looks positively bored when interviewed and has this annoying habit of sighing before answering the question, as if she genuinely can’t be bothered. In addition, she is nervous and unsure of herself, seeming incapable of answering questions without reeling off scripted answers. Her press conference last week was a prime example of this; in answer to two very separate questions she gave an identical response, which did not in fact answer the question. The only reply which appeared to reveal her own genuine thoughts was her answer to the final question asked, to which she expressed that she very much hoped that the President would listen to the Belarussian people:
‘You know, what I want to say is…I very much hope and I believe that the leadership will listen to its people, and the fact that we are always told that the President loves his people and country and what he sees just now will show him that people want change. And I hope he will come to his senses and the people will be listened to and he will come round to holding new, transparent elections.’
After these words, her press conference was abruptly, and unexpectedly cut short. It was as if she had strayed off target, had said something she wasn’t supposed to. And indeed she had. For the reality is that in this statement Tikhanovskaya reveals to us that she does not consider herself leader of Belarus, and has no interest in the position. She is simply a puppet; it’s just not clear who is pulling the strings. The very fact that she acknowledges the ‘leadership’ contradicts her assertions that she, not Lukashenko is the elected President. Her reference to the fact that Lukashenko ‘loves his people and country’ contrasts with her movement’s message that he is a brutal dictator. It is an extraordinary statement from an opposition candidate attempting to oust the President. It plainly contradicts her other, scripted, sleek videos in which she adopts a defiant, authoritative tone and doesn’t hold back in condemning Lukashenko.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is the most reluctant leader there ever was. But others are determined to push her into the limelight. Maria Kolesnikova, for example, who was at Tikhanovskaya’s side during the election campaign, is quite a different character, and much less modest. A musician and arts manager, she lived for 12 years in Germany and is described as having a ‘certain affinity for the West’. She has been involved in protests in Belarus for over a decade and was campaign manager for former presidential hopeful Viktor Babariko (arrested by the authorities on corruption charges and therefore unable to run in the election), with whom she worked at Belgazprombank. As she said in one interview: ‘I share his values completely — they’re exactly the same as mine’. Recently she presented a video instructing Belarussian civils servants and military personnel to reject orders, saying that they would be handsomely rewarded for doing so. Just exactly where the funding is coming from for such ‘bribes’ is not clear. But given her clear ideas, defiance and motivation for change in Belarus, it’s not clear why Kolesnikova herself is not presenting herself as a candidate. Is it because, unlike Tikhanovskaya, she lacks good spoken English, a desirable skill for communication with western diplomats?
Who knows. But the opposition will no doubt live to regret their decision to choose Tikhanovskaya to head up the movement. After three weeks of protests in Belarus, the government has made no concessions and no promise to hold new elections. Emmanuel Macron was in a weaker position in France back in 2018/19 when he was forced to concede to the Yellow Vests with promises of raising the minimum wage and cutting taxes. The momentum of the post-election demonstrations in Belarus has been lost. In one interview Tikhanovskaya was asked why people were not listening to her demands to strike; she responded by saying that people were striking. She isn’t in touch with reality, and the reality is that people need to put food on the table, and therefore need to keep working. Lukashenko knows this and so has the upper hand. Although he is unlikely to last in the long-term, Alexander Grigoryevich is going nowhere soon.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
US war on China by other means because of its growing prominence on the world stage has both countries on a potential collision course toward direct confrontation if cooler heads in Washington don’t step back from the brink.
Unacceptable US actions against China and its enterprises are reminiscent of FDR’s economic war on imperial Japan that led to full-blown global war.
In the age of super-weapons, another one could destroy planet earth and all its life forms if things go this far.
US imperial rage risks the unthinkable. Its aim for unchallenged global dominance threatens everyone everywhere.
Bipartisan US policy toward China is all about wanting its economic, industrial, and technological growth undermined, along with wanting the country isolated politically.
Beijing earlier vowed to retaliate against unacceptable US actions appropriately at a time and ways of its choosing.
Since Trump took office, scores of Chinese enterprises were blacklisted from the US market, notably communications and high-tech ones on the phony pretext of protecting national security.
The policy is all about aiming to give corporate America a competitive advantage — and not just against Chinese firms.
Blacklisted ones on the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (SIC) Entity List are barred from purchasing US technology with Washington’s permission.
The exclusionary list includes “businesses, research institutions, government and private organizations, individuals, and other types of legal persons — that are subject to specific license requirements for the export, reexport and/or transfer (in-country) of specified items.”
On Saturday, China announced tightened export controls on nearly two dozen cutting-edge technologies — the first such changes since 2008.
According to China’s Ministry of Commerce and Science and separate Technology Ministry, revised controls apply to nuclear equipment and materials, seaborne satellite launching pads, equipment used in building manmade islands, artificial intelligence interface, drone technology, ultra-high voltage transmission and clean coal power generation, quantum encryption and early warning technology, metal 3D printing, as well as advanced drilling tools and software used in oil and gas extraction.
Xinhua explained that new controls apply to China’s privately-owned TikTok video sharing firm that the Trump regime banned from operating in the US under ownership of its ByteDance parent company, adding:
If the firm intends “to export related technologies, it (must) go through licensing procedures” that can take up to 30 days for approval if granted.
TikTok’s technology in question is the company’s algorithm for its “For You” page that recommends more videos to watch based on known user preferences.
According to China trade expert Cui Fan, ByteDance will have to “consider whether it is necessary to suspend” TikTok’s sale to a US firm based on Beijing’s revised export controls.
China’s Foreign Ministry expressed strong opposition to Trump’s ban on TikTok, forcing the company to seek a US buyer so it can continue operating in the country.
China expert Gao Lingyun said tightened Ministry of Commerce and Science requirements were likely because of hardline Trump regime policies toward the country’s enterprises, adding:
They’re China’s response to the US Entity List.
The Wall Street Journal reported that new restrictions may “throw a wrench into talks between…ByteDance and potential buyers.”
So far the firm and the White House haven’t responded to Beijing’s new export requirements.
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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.”
33rd Anniversary of Brian’s Surviving the US Train Assault in California, September 1, 2020 in front of the US embassy, Managua, Nicaragua
Buenos dias. I am here today in front of the US Embassy in Managua to protest US intervention in Nicaragua and also to publicly deliver a letter in which I and others request a meeting with Ambassador Sullivan to denounce US intervention in Nicaragua.
I first came to Nicaragua in 1986 to study Spanish and to learn about the Nicaragua’s Revolution.
I came back three more times in 1986 and 1987 to document the criminal conduct of President Reagan’s so-called terrorist “Freedom Fighters”, trained, armed and funded by the US people through their Congress and President. Upon doing research, several of us discovered that most of the weapons – mortars, assault rifles, pistols, land mines, grenades, rockets, small arms ammunition, etc. – coming to El Salvador and Nicaragua, originated from the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station (CNWS). We acquired copies of the shipment orders.
In addition, we gained more information after young Nicaraguan soldiers shot down on October 5, 1986, a US CIA C-123 weapons supply plane with a surface-to-air missile (SAM), twenty miles from the Costa Rican border north of San Carlos, Nicaragua. One of the four crew members, mercenary Eugene Hasenfus from Wisconsin, USA, parachuted to safety before being captured. The three other crew members were killed in the crash. It was Hasenfus’ tenth air supply drop of weapons to awaiting Contra terrorists. The plane was carrying thirteen thousand pounds of military supplies, including sixty AK-47s, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, grenades and their launchers, jungle boots, and water packets originating from Brooklyn, New York. I and two other US military veterans were able to interview Hasenfus for several hours in his Tipitapa prison cell gathering many additional details of the US arms shipments.
The US continued to relentlessly fund the criminal terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people despite it being in violation of both international and US Constitutional law, and a ruling of the World Court. Thousands of people were murdered and maimed. The US Congress and President have never been held to account for these vicious crimes, enjoying virtual immunity. Thus, some of us US citizens chose to act in direct efforts to stop the US murder policy being conducted in all of our names as US citizens.
Thirty-three years ago, on a bright sunny day on September 1st, 1987, I went to the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station (the Pentagon’s largest storage arsenal on the US West Coast) at about 11 am, with two other military veterans, along with about 50 supporting witnesses. We took our positions to begin our permanent human blockade ON the Station’s railroad tracks. Everyday, locomotives hauled boxcars full of various armaments from the interior storage bunkers carried on three miles of tracks to be loaded on ships in the Sacramento River. Destination: To murder peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, 3,500 miles further south.
This US Navy base had a history of citizen civil disobedience. It had been used during the unpopular US War against Viet Nam sending armaments to Asia where many civil blockades had attempted to interfere with movement of those weapons. There was an official protocol for the military to call local police to make arrests, before moving the weapons train whose legal speed limit was but 5 mph. We had notified the US military authorities in writing, and in person, several days in advance of September 1, and again on that day, of our plans for beginning our veteran’s blockade. The large sign posted within a few feet of the location of our human blockade warned of the penalties for interfering with movement of munitions: one year in prison and a $5,000 fine. We expected that sooner or later we would be arrested and imprisoned.
There was a contingent of armed US Marines who protect the base grouped some 30 feet from our position. And there was mumbling from them about “we hear there is going to be violence today”. We said, “no, we are nonviolent”.
Near High Noon, the first weapons train became visible some 700 feet or so down the tracks. The other two veterans and I took our firm positions between the rail’s two tracks, to wait for our arrests. I was sitting in a lotus position, the other two were crouched but firmly planted on their feet. Our many witnesses were observing along the outside of the tracks, including one friend with a video camera who was to document our treatment by police during the arresting process. As the train came closer and closer, it appeared that it might be accelerating above its 5-mph speed limit, but that seemed extraordinarily unlikely in light of official protocol and violation of security requirements operating this dangerous munitions train.
But, as fate would have it, the train was accelerating, and as it got closer and closer to our human blockade, it was clear it had no intention of stopping. Our autonomic nervous system urgently responded with adrenalin, and our bodies moved accordingly. One veteran jumped at the last second to the left off the tracks. The second veteran, 67 years old, jumped straight up in the air and grabbed onto the railing above the cowcatcher platform where two train spotters were standing in phone contact with the operating engineer at the rear of the locomotive. As I had been sitting, I tried to bolt to the right off the tracks but was too late and my body went completely under the locomotive and its trailing boxcars. The train continued for another 500 feet before it stopped and was surrounded by dozens of armed US Marines.
I spent one month in the hospital recovering from my injuries – double leg amputations below the knee, fractured skull with destruction of right frontal lobe, facial reconstruction including re-attaching severed outer left ear, two broken elbows, broken right wrist, many cracked ribs, broken right shoulder blade, damaged right kidney, and many skin abrasions, including 100 stitches inside my mouth. I left the hospital with two prosthetic legs and a walker.
We learned that the FBI had investigated me and one of the other two veterans as “domestic terrorist suspects” since 1986. A local Sheriff investigation claimed a fear that we were planning to hijack the train, and that the three-man train crew was ordered that day to NOT stop the train. A formal Navy investigation concluded that the train was accelerating to 17 mph, more than three times its legal speed limit. At the time of impact; that the crew could see us for at least 650 feet, but they never attempted to brake the train, which was what I expected (naturally) per protocol and legal regulations. I had no intentions to play chicken with a 200,000-pound locomotive.
The US never apologized, and no local, state, or national agency ever brought criminal charges against the navy or its train crew. After a three-year series of motions and countermotions, a court settlement was reached.
Current US Criminal Plans to overthrow the Democratically elected, sovereign Nicaragua government.
Examining US State Department, NDI (National Democratic Institute) and USAID (US Agency for International Development) and NED (National Endowment for Democracy) communications from 2010 to 2018, it is clear that the US has been preparing for an illegal change of government before, but no later than, the 2021 elections. Their extensive and continuous communications reveal:
“final goals” of “regime change” to a government “akin to the interest of the US government”;
“promote mobilizations against the government of Daniel Ortega”;
“the US government, through its Embassy and the USAID have been preparing the conditions to carry out a non-violent coup d’etat against the Nicaraguan government”;
“create a mass of young people critics of the government”;
“create a negative opinion about Daniel Ortega”;
“discredit the electoral process”;
“promote antigovernment awareness in vulnerable sectors of the society”;
“training young leadership and exerting control over the ‘independent’ means of communication…. looking out on the 2021 elections”;
“undermining the image of the Nicaraguan government”;
“strengthening the civil society organizations, the media war and the creation of a platform for young leaders, and, at the same time, guaranteeing an international following”; and
“training in data journalism and data visualization…to influence on the Nicaraguan public opinion and to create a negative opinion about the Daniel Ortega’s government”, using funds from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
On July 31, 2020, we learned that the US has launched a new brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government. A well-orchestrated plan financed by the United States to launch a coup d’état in Nicaragua over the next two years was leaked in a document from the US embassy. US official are fearful that President Ortega and the FSLN will win the 2021 scheduled elections. The document’s title is RAIN, Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, and indicates an intention to contract a US company (Blackwater or its successor?) to take charge of carrying out the coup. The plan’s criminal purpose is to “destroy public order” and “do other violent actions” before, during and/or after the 2021 elections. The funds to implement this plan are or have been allocated through the International Development Agency (AID) which is also the US institution that has provided the most money openly in recent years to the Nicaraguan opposition for coup activities. USAID will fund these destabilizing activities, using local partners: public opinion analysts, media, businesspersons, NGOs, students, and social networks to orchestrate false news reports. USAID provided millions of dollars to fund the 2018 US-attempted coup operators against Nicaragua.
The new coup government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions. The document seeks to aggravate the COVID 19 pandemic, which is well under control at present, unlike in the United States, despite US sanctions. The opposition has already received more than $31 million from the United States between the end of 2017 and May 1, 2020. The document also details the participation of the US Embassy in Managua, currently under leadership of US Ambassador Kevin K. Sullivan, who will be in charge of executing a series of diplomatic actions such as the creation of a commission to delegitimize the ousted government while legitimizing the new government imposed by a coup d’état.
Therefore, today, a group of US citizens and Nicaraguans are requesting a meeting with Ambassador Sullivan, to ask him to denounce the RAIN coup plan, or any other plan to destabilize the Nicaragua society and government. We want to also remind him of the laws being violate by current US foreign policy against Nicaragua. These laws include:
United Nations Charter [Article 2(4) reads as follows: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations], and [51: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security”].
II. Any United States military and paramilitary intervention in the affairs Nicaragua is illegal under domestic law, specifically the War Powers Resolution, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Neutrality Act, and the United States Constitution [US Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
III. 1956 Treaty of Friendship with Nicaragua.
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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.
I set out to write a commentary on current economic events for this engagement, with a focus on monetary issues. But the current nightmarish scenario in the U.S. is so confusing and is moving at such a rapid speed, that I decided to offer a broader perspective. However, I don’t believe anyone knows how our unfolding national catastrophe is going to be resolved, or what the U.S. will look like even a year or two from now, or even if there will be a U.S.
The situation may actually be far more serious than most of us think. Are we seeing the last days of the American republic? Many would dismiss such a question as unduly alarmist. But to one who has studied history, events seem eerily similar to the end of the German Weimar Republic in in 1933.
Who can any longer doubt that we have our own fascist cabal ready to strike? Many people in Germany laughed off Hitler and the Nazis until it was too late. So we shall see. We now have “our own” named Donald Trump and “the Republicans”. In my opinion, we’ve already had rehearsals with the carefully staged Reagan takeover of 1980 and the Bush-Cheney putsch of 2000, with complicity going all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Are we awaiting another “Reichstag fire”—like 9/11—with the provocations being staged by hidden forces “rioting” in Portland and elsewhere as a prelude? We also have the deliberate destruction of the U.S. Postal Service by the Trump administration taking place in full public view, with the obvious aim of discrediting and canceling an anti-Trump vote in the November general election based on mailed-in ballots if Biden should win. Another thing history teaches is that aggressors usually announce their intentions beforehand.
“Democracy” is certainly no safeguard. U.S. presidents are always elected by a minority of the total population, Do the math—in 2016, Trump was elected by 19% of the people living in the U.S.—63 million votes out of a population of 326.7 million. Elections today are won by craft, guile, money, false flag events, and propaganda—above all, by propaganda. The Republicans are masters in this arena, especially when they have a sitting president.
But this history focuses on money. I do think I have something to say in this forum, because, since retiring as an analyst with the U.S. Treasury Department, I have played a public role in the monetary debate for quite a few years. So I am going to focus my remarks on my own personal journey and what I feel I have learned and experienced along the way. I will also talk quite a bit about public events as I have seen them. So please bear with me.
I feel an affinity with Edward Snowden. When I read Snowden’s account of his revelations of the government’s pervasive and unconstitutional collection of electronic information on all U.S., citizens, it struck me that Snowden, now in exile in Russia, was descended from some of Maryland’s earliest settlers. The family dutifully served our country as soldiers and public servants as far back as the Continental Army. Ironically, the National Security Agency, whose lawlessness Snowden exposed, is located at Fort Meade, Maryland, on land the Snowdens once owned!
My own ancestors, mostly English, have also been in North America for a long time. On my father’s side, I am descended from an English settler named Thomas Bliss, who arrived in 1635 at the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts. His grandfather and namesake was a prominent Puritan dissenter who was dragged by a mule through the streets of London on orders of Archbishop Laud, then thrown into prison. It was a quest for religious freedom that got us here.
In America the family grew and moved west, migrating from New York to Illinois, and eventually to Oklahoma. My male ancestors served in many of America’s wars. In Illinois, my ancestor got land as payment for serving in the army during the War of 1812. Ancestors on both sides of the family fought for the Union in the Civil War. My great great grandfather’s New York Heavy Artillery unit was with General Grant at Appomattox. My two grandfathers both served during World War I, and my father was in the Navy in World War II.
My maternal grandfather was of French-Canadian descent. We have Native American ancestry through him. My great-grandfather on my father’s side rode in the 1889 Oklahoma land rush and ran a general store that traded with the Indians. He was especially close to the Shawnee, the tribe of the great Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet.
I was born in Missoula, Montana, and grew up in Midland, Michigan, where my father was a chemist with Dow Chemical. When I was in the 9th grade, we moved to Williamsburg, Virginia. The big event during my high school years was the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. This was deeply scarring personally but got me to look beneath the surface of things.
It wasn’t too many years before I stopped believing the government’s cover story of a lone assassin, thanks to Mark Lane’s book, Rush to Judgment. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, with its cover-up, was a crime committed by the U.S. national security apparatus with participation by foreign parties. This crime has never been atoned for and is still part of the karmic baggage of the nation that so many people are blind to. People on the government payroll think they can perpetrate something like this without consequence? Incredible.
It wasn’t long after Kennedy’s death that the Vietnam War got going in a big way. War has always been a very big deal in the U.S., and it was in the 1960s, but I personally never much cared for it, to say the least. I have always found the militaristic mentality repugnant. By this I mean the idea that use of military force is an “option” to be exercised by rational human beings to achieve policy goals. Rather we should do everything possible between and within human communities to resolve our differences openly, peacefully, and fairly. There should be no hidden agendas, no jockeying for advantage. There should be no prejudice and no assumptions that one particular group is a “chosen” or “exceptional” party.
Those we perceive as “different” should be treated with respect. Physical force should be a last resort and should cease once stability in relationships is restored. Even “justice” is too nebulous a concept, as justice often means no more than “an eye for an eye.” Justice without mercy and forgiveness leads to the cruelty of the jungle.
I also believe deeply in the sanctity of “The Family of Man,” which was the title of a famous book of the 1950s and 60s. I feel this concept is particularly necessary in a nation as racially and socially diverse as the U.S., with its history of oppression and genocide against Native Americans, African-American slaves, and conquered peoples in places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
In high school, I wanted to become a diplomat. I made a start in being accepted at Yale. But due to personal and family circumstances, I dropped out after a few weeks. This caused me little heartburn, as I did not feel comfortable at all in a privileged bastion of American Cold War ideology. After leaving Yale, I attended the College of William and Mary in my home town of Williamsburg, where I studied literature. I now wanted to be a writer.
But I also wanted to move to Washington, D.C., and needed a paycheck. I was able to get a job as a report writer with the federal government, going to work in 1970 as an analyst with the U.S. Civil Service Commission. I then taught history at a private high school in Washington, D.C., for two years, then went back to the Commission. After that I worked at the Food and Drug Administration for two more years in the office of Commissioner Donald Kennedy, then served on special assignment in the Jimmy Carter White House.
I’d like to dwell a bit on what was going on in the U.S. when I went to work at the Carter White House in 1979-80. The Vietnam War, thank God, was over. Nixon and Ford were gone, and Carter had been elected in 1976 in what we thought was a return to normalcy. But it was not to be.
Carter was a good man who wanted to be a peacetime president. His first act on assuming office was to issue a blanket pardon for all Vietnam draft dodgers. But he was no match for the powerful forces that wanted to get rid of him. They came up with Ronald Reagan, a mediocre but glib movie actor who had become a right-wing figurehead as governor of California.
Reagan was maneuvered into the White House through a recession engineered by the Federal Reserve starting in 1979-80, combined with the plot to discredit Carter as a weakling after the Iranian seizure of American hostages in their Islamic revolution. As an aside, Carter was made to look bad by Reagan’s debate performances after his followers stole Carter’s debate notebook. Reagan and his ilk were disgusting. I agreed with Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill when he said of Reagan, “It’s sinful that this man is president of the United States.”
I continued working in the White House office while all this was going on. I had thought about volunteering for Carter’s presidential campaign, but was glad I didn’t. Instead, I was able to keep my civil service appointment and was assigned to do PR chores on Reagan’s behalf until I couldn’t stomach it any more and quit the government in 1983. I moved with my family to a small farm we had purchased in West Virginia. I was now completely disenchanted with government.
Despite all this, it was during my brief stay in the Carter administration that I discovered the world of monetary reform.
I was an avid student of history who, like many others, was baffled by the disasters of the 20th century. The usual explanations, including those of Marxism, failed to satisfy me. In my reading, I came across the ideas of a Scottish engineer named Major Clifford Hugh (C.H.) Douglas. A prominent figure in the U.K. in the 1920s, Douglas pointed out a key fact: that the source of economic instability in modern western industrial nations is the fact that national production consistently outpaces the availability of collective income to purchase it. The primary cause is not just underpayment of workers, as Henry Ford realized, but the withdrawal of income from sales for purposes of savings, hoarding, and reinvestment.
JM Keynes
This “gap” between production and income had also been discovered by John Maynard Keynes, whose entire program was built upon making up the difference by government borrowing. Because this debt-based solution was so appealing to creditors; i.e., the banks, it was that set of policies that became enshrined within the capitalist world of macroeconomics. “Keynesian Economics” was the answer, except it didn’t work.
Douglas, by contrast, argued that the “gap” actually showed the strength of the producing economy and should be filled by a “national dividend” paid directly to individuals. He called his system “Social Credit.” Political movements based on Douglas’s ideas were started in Canada and New Zealand. In New Zealand today, there is a political party devoted to Social Credit.
Douglas’s idea of a national dividend is similar in some respects to today’s proposals for a universal basic income. It is an idea deeply respectful of the spiritual autonomy of individuals, which neither Marxism nor market capitalism offers.
Without such a measure, Douglas explained, nations would try to fill the production-income gap by consumer and government debt, which the banks obviously clamored for, or by a favorable balance of trade, where the gap would be filled either by sales of products to other nations or by their purchase of the debt instruments of debtor nations. With such an imbalanced system, the obvious result would be endless war.
As far as I was concerned, Douglas had explained the 20th century: why it was so awful and what could have been done about it. I convened a meeting of friends and colleagues at the Executive Office Building but no one else was able to understand what Douglas was talking about. Soon events had overtaken me with the 1980 election. So I put Douglas’s ideas on the back burner for the time being. But I was grateful to have learned from him that economics should be oriented to respect the spiritual autonomy of the human individual.
Returning to the early 1980s, there we were, living on a small farm in Union County, West Virginia, where I was going broke. So we sold the farm and got ready to move back to Washington. After doing some work for a temporary agency, I was surprised to be offered a job as an analyst on NASA’s space shuttle staff. This was new and different. Back in the government and working for NASA to boot!
As fate would have it—and I do believe in fate—my first assignment was to interview the engineers for the space shuttle solid rocket boosters and find out what was going on with problems with the “O-rings.” I did find out. For years, these round rubber washers that fit between rocket segments had been showing signs of burning through during flights. A complete burn-through would mean the shuttle would blow up and all the astronauts would die. NASA was keeping this a secret while they tried to redesign the rocket joints. In the meantime, on January 28, 1986, there was a burn-through, and Challenger did blow up with its seven-member crew. A cover-up then began.
For whatever reasons, I felt I could not go along with the cover-up and gave a collection of O-ring papers to the New York Times. My name got in the news, and I testified that NASA had known about this problem for quite a while. I never returned to NASA, though I published some newspaper articles of my own and gave a few interviews. A journalist told me, “They’ve killed people for less than what you did.” But within a week of my testimony I had transferred to a very obscure job in the U.S. Treasury Department, where I stayed for 21 years. The job was not all that demanding, so I had plenty of time to study the machinations of government finance and its relation to private sector economics. Eventually I was teaching training courses for Treasury on U.S. financial history.
Life went on as I commuted to Washington from a small farm we had bought in Virginia a couple of hours from the city. I spent time with my kids as they grew up, including a lot of camping and backpacking trips. I grew vegetables, raised poultry, and drove a vanpool to work. Life was starting to seem somewhat normal. I was even able to pursue my spiritual interests by trying to learn meditation.
But the world was changing.
The turning point had come in 1979-80, when the Federal Reserve, under David Rockefeller’s protégé Paul Volcker, crashed the producing economy with interest rates in excess of 20 percent. This was supposedly to fight inflation, but the real reason was to reduce our industrial core to rubble for hidden political and financial motives.
The actions of the Fed were documented brilliantly in William Greider’s landmark book, The Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. Small business in particular was devastated, and the planned hollowing out of America’s industrial cities was underway. Vast stretches of our urban landscape eventually became what are still aptly called “Death Zones.”
Through the so-called “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s that followed the Fed’s mischief, we saw the complete takeover of the U.S. economy, along with much of the rest of the world, by the Money Power that owns the banks, investment houses, hedge funds, and other controlling institutions. It was the Republican Party, now with Reagan as its figurehead, that was the instrument of the Money Power, as it had been since it was founded in the late 1850s.
Let’s pause for a moment to make note of the fact that the Money Power exercises its control through the practice of usury. The ancient Hebrews and the early Christians, as well as many in the Greek and Roman world, saw usury as ruinous to individuals, to nations, and to civilization as a whole. Some even saw usury as equivalent to murder.
Yet the whole of the Western economic system has been turned over to banks and other financial institutions that live off interest charged to businesses and consumers for almost everything. The burden on society is enormous, amounting cumulatively of to up to 40 percent of the costs of all goods and services, according to some estimates. Any moron can see that the unrestrained result of interest compounded at regular intervals will be the gradual accumulation of all of society’s wealth in the hands of the money-lenders. So why won’t economists admit this?
Jesus said to lend freely to our neighbor in need but without asking anything in return. For almost 1400 years, the Christian world outlawed usury. The Islamic world continues to outlaw it today. Contrary to what many believe, usury didn’t sneak into Western culture through the agency of the Jews. Yes, there were Jewish money-lenders during the Middle Ages, but they were small scale. Usury became the norm in Western capitalist society through the practices of the Roman Catholic Church led by the Renaissance Popes in league with the merchant banks of Florence and other Italian city-states. Many Catholic priests even ran pawn brokerships. From there the contagion spread throughout Europe. It took over much of Germany through the Fugger banking family and Great Britain through the Bank of England, established in 1694. The usurers’ control gradually gained ground in the U.S. until the final takeover through the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
Back to the 1980s, which also saw the militarization of the economy hit high gear with Reagan’s trillion-dollar military buildup, claiming an increased threat from the Soviet Union at a time when U.S. intelligence knew the Soviet empire was in steep decline. In collusion with the Reagan White House, the CIA under William Casey and his protégé Bob Gates falsified intelligence reports to make the Soviet Union seem a far more formidable power than it really was. (See Whistleblower at the CIA by Melvin Goodman.) While he was expanding military spending, Reagan gave huge tax cuts to the rich.
By destroying the savings and loans, the deregulated banks now took over mortgage lending. With the later repeal of Glass-Steagall, the commercial banks could lend in the investment markets, leading to entire industries going on the sales block and the export of millions of jobs overseas. In order for Americans to save for retirement, they had to turn their money over to the stock brokers who managed the IRAs. To buy anything substantial meant massive consumer lending. Today kids can’t even go to college without ruinous debt.
With their financial control, the Money Power, aka Wall Street, sealed its grip on the political life of the nation, including both major political parties. The Democratic Party was once the party of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Under Bill Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, and the Democratic Leadership Council, they became “Republicans Light.” Both the Republicans and Democrats now base their programs on trickle-down, or “supply-side” economics, where the working class is expected to live on what is left after the Money Power skims its take from the producing economy.
This is why it is so imperative for politicians to demand economic “growth.” The worst calamity that can befall a nation is “negative growth,” or recession. Never mind that this growth never creates the purchasing power needed to buy the increased output. So the banks then step in with more and more lending, as inflation, bankruptcies, and war all ramp up as natural consequences of the production-income gap I had learned about by studying C.H. Douglas. Of course governments love all these things as it gives them more work to do and increases taxes along with their power.
It is through the Money Power that St. Paul’s maxim is expressed most vividly: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” They would deny it, but if you examine the psychology at work, I think you would agree that the Money Power could only operate as they do through an abiding hatred of those they exploit, including the growing army of homeless, those kicked out of their homes through the now common practice of foreclosure, and the victims of wars abroad, especially after 9/11.
The Money Power despises all those who actually work honestly for a living, even though the workers at the bottom of the heap generate the production the world needs for daily life. Marx was right in pointing this out, though wrong in proposing just another totalitarian system as a solution.
My study of U.S. financial history showed me that today’s ruling paradigm had kicked into high gear when the Money Power took over the U.S. through the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Leading the charge was J.P. Morgan’s Money Trust, a bastion of Republican Party strength, though they had to call in German bankers such as Paul Warburg to dupe American politicians like Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. The coup was facilitated by the Schiff banking family that had set up shop on Wall Street in the late 19th century.
It was then that a collection of sinister forces gained control of the U.S., as they already had in Great Britain through the Bank of England and the 19th century takeover of Britain by the Rothschilds. Soon came World War I, a conflict among nation-states and ideologies that has been continuous through today.
It was also the American Money Power, particularly the Schiffs, who financed Lenin and Trotsky in perpetrating the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1918 and financing the Red Army’s victory in the Russian Civil War. In the 1930s, it was the American Money Power who financed Hitler’s rise to power, allowing Hitler’s rearming of Germany. These financiers grew even richer as they watched the start of World War II then Hitler’s launch of the suicidal German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Money Power aims at one thing: to rule the world and destroy anyone who stands in their way. They exercise this power in both communist and capitalist societies, as well as today’s system which is a hybrid of both. Of course Jesus foresaw all this when he threw the money changers out of the Temple and called the powerful of his day hypocrites and murderers. I think we can fairly call the ruling class of the U.S. and most other nations the same. Jesus also spoke of, “Your father the devil.” These words are also applicable.
You can see the effects of these malignant forces worldwide during the past century or more, including, as I said, not only the emergence of communism and its millions of victims but also the ravages of market capitalism. Evil is metaphysical, though it’s still the fault of human individuals who allow their will to be taken down wrong paths. And real religion has faded away proportionate with the assaults from materialistic philosophies. Instead, we have today’s fundamentalist pseudo-religions that use their creeds to mask their delusions. Evangelical fascism has been the result. So have the preachers and churches that depend on a steady flow of cash for their survival. Probably the best example of this corruption is what is going on today with Liberty University.
Back to the chronology: 9/11 came. 9/11—another massive crime against the nation and humanity. Another conspiracy, another cover-up. The karma that few acknowledge remains and acts on us every day, especially through the massive military build-up, similar to Reagan’s perpetrated through the criminal Bush-Cheney cabal.
By the Friday after 9/11, at a memorial service that should have been, but was not, denounced by church leaders, Bush was calling for war against—who knows whom? I knew something deeply wrong had happened, but not the way the government claimed. I had to find out what was going on. The U.S. had again been taken over—by something very ugly. Today, through reports appearing only in Veterans Today, we know how the false-flag event was carried out and by whom.
I next returned to the study of monetary theory I had started years before. About this time I read Stephen Zarlenga’s book The Lost Science of Money which particularly called into question fractional reserve banking. I contacted Zarlenga and soon we were in regular touch. I invited him to Washington to speak with Treasury officials, none of whom understood what he was talking about, especially in his critique of the Federal Reserve.
Zarlenga asked me to help him write a draft of legislation that would implement his ideas. This became the American Monetary Act. I also suggested that he contact Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who eventually got on-board with monetary reform, especially after I gave him an hours-long briefing on U.S. monetary history focusing on the damage done through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
The one area where Zarlenga and I disagreed was on insistence that monetary reform include a citizens’ dividend along the lines of C.H. Douglas’s Social Credit. Despite our differences, we remained in close touch as long as I continued to work for the government, including my attendance at some of Zarlenga’s American Monetary Institute conferences in Chicago.
My book on the Challenger disaster was published in January 2007, shortly after my retirement after 32 years of federal service. The title was Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age. I concluded that the underlying cause of the Challenger disaster, and the reason so many shortcuts were taken, was the militarization of the space shuttle program to service Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative boondoggle—“Star Wars.” The trigger for the decision to launch Challenger in cold weather against engineers’ recommendations, was to have the shuttle with the Teacher-in-Space, Christa McAuliffe, in orbit in time for Reagan’s state of the union speech that night.
I would also like to mention two developments I witnessed at the U.S. Treasury Department of major historic import that affected my writing and analysis. The first was the conversion of all financial transactions in the government and indeed in the broader society to electronic funds transfer that took place at breakneck speed in the 1990s. Treasury promoted this conversion for its own purposes in being able to move its financial balances into the Federal Reserve nightly and thereby receive interest payments, while at the same time cutting staff and saving on its payroll budgets by eliminating manual or human-aided processing as much as possible.
But beyond its self-interest, Treasury also facilitated conversion to EFT for the Federal Reserve and the private sector. This vastly increased the power and reach of the Money Power and the global banking industry. Without EFT, money laundering would never have come into its own as a staple of organized crime, nor would the world of derivatives and hedge funds come into being. With he imposition of these processes on the producing economy, where money is a mere electronic blip, and the creation of money out of thin air through bank lending, today’s system is the greatest act of grand larceny the world has ever known. It destroys nations and individuals. Nixon had opened the door to this tsunami of unsecured bank-created credit by taking the U.S. off the international gold standard in 1972.
I also witnessed, following 9/11, an entirely new and extremely comprehensive focus on real and imagined security measures, including the designation of the financial system of the United State as “critical infrastructure.” This designation entitled the Money Power, and its banking cartels, to protection and promotion from the military and the national security state. The banking system now became a means of waging war against enemies of the U.S. and its corporate/financial structure. We have seen this in the last two decades in the constant imposition of financial “sanctions” against our declared “enemies,” especially Russia, Iran, and China. It is interesting that the U.S. labels as “authoritarian” any nation that utilizes the power of its central government to prevent takeover and domination by the Money Power, such as happened to Iraq after it was conquered by the U.S. in 2003 and Libya by NATO in 2011.
Returning to where I was in 2007 after my Challenger book came out, I began publishing articles on economics and monetary reform on the internet, with the most receptive site being Global Research, run by Michel Chossudovsky out of Canada. By mid-year I had compiled enough material to package it in book form and found a publisher who came out with We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform the following year. I also began annual trips to New York to make presentations for the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, where I introduced them to the work of C.H. Douglas.
Unfortunately, I was not making much money as a writer. Though my Challenger book was to be recognized by some as the definitive work on the Challenger disaster, it was ignored by the mainstream press that only had eyes for works flattering to the national security state. So I decided to return to my old home town of Williamsburg, where I lived with my mother for a couple of years while I continued to write. In 2008 I met my wife Karen. The following year we decided to move to Roanoke, Virginia, where we bought a house in the Grandin Village neighborhood of the city.
Roanoke was a lot of fun. We spent time roaming the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains, and guided people in meditation at the Lifestream Center and our home. We rented out the upper floors of our home, managed a rental house, and I did maintenance work for local realtors while We also flipped a couple of houses that we had rehabbed.
We also traveled—to Ireland, to Mexico, where I gave the keynote address on the benefits of the barter economy at the annual meeting of the International Reciprocal Trade Association, and to various other places for short vacations. I also traveled to California in 2011 to speak at the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster at Chapman University and later to San Rafael to speak on universal basic income at the annual meeting of the Public Banking Institute. I continued to publish articles, broadening my scope to a range of political issues, and made the acquaintance of numerous readers around the world. Particularly rewarding was contact with monetary reformers in New Zealand, who I found to have a stronger understanding of the fallacies of bank-based monetary systems than almost anyone on the globe.
Also during our Roanoke days, the work I had done with Steve Zarlenga came to fruition in 2011 when Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced the NEED Act in Congress. This stood for the National Emergency Employment Defense Act.
The NEED Act was based on the American Monetary Act I had helped Zarlenga draft five years earlier. The NEED Act would replace the Federal Reserve System with a central federal monetary authority having the power to enter money directly into circulation through federal expenditure. It would abolish fractional reserve banking but would allow lending of money borrowed by banks from the central authority. The entire banking system would thereby be managed as a public utility. The NEED Act also included a citizens’ dividend similar to a basic income guarantee. Unfortunately, soon after introducing the Act, Kucinich’s congressional seat was gerrymandered out of existence.
Note that this new financial system would be perfectly compatible with our market economy and would allow businesses and individuals to save for the future.
The new system would remove the monetary system from the realm of larceny and greed that is helping destroy our nation and the world. It would modify or eliminate credit bubbles and their deflation. It would eliminate most of the problems that make life in the U.S. a financial hell for much of our population.
The temptation, of course, would be for the government itself to create money for non-legitimate purposes, such as its usual menu of wars of aggression. One shudders to think what might happen if the sovereign power of currency creation lay unrestrained in the hands of madmen like Trump. But this temptation will always exist. It’s what got European governments so deeply in debt to the Money Power in the first place. But in the end, the only thing that can ensure the health and survival of any nation is the character and virtue of its citizens. Once that is gone, the nation is gone, regardless of the system it operates under. So no monetary system is a panacea. But we can do much better than what we have today.
We stayed in Roanoke for about four years. But we found we were too far from our grown kids and siblings in the Washington area, so we decided to move back. We found a small stone cottage in Washington County, Maryland, near the Antietam battlefield, where we continue to live today. So we still reside in the Blue Ridge Mountains as we did in Roanoke, but now four hours to the north.
We have been here now for six years where I work on our house and property. We have done a major renovation while trying to retain the qualities of the 200-year-old structure. My writing has slowed down, though it is still going on, and I have also worked during the summers at a local state park as a part-time interpreter. This has involved presentations on geology and history to local groups, including a slide show on Native American heritage.
In the meantime, I have done my best to separate myself mentally from the ongoing disaster that the U.S., has turned into. I do not see any reason to hope that the U.S. will reform or redeem itself before the onset of worldwide catastrophe, perhaps the world war against Russia and China that already seems to have been decided upon. Maybe this war is inevitable. But I am not going to worry about it.
The U.S. carries overwhelming karma, but “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” In the meantime, at age 73, I will do everything I can to help my friends and family, live my life, tend my garden, and stay out of the way. But my admiration and support for those in younger generations who are fighting the battle for truth and compassion has no bounds. And for anyone who cares to listen I would say forget about your prayers for the future of this nation if you are not willing to change the system right now.
The question remains, though, where do we look for inner strength and inspiration? Increasingly, and perhaps ironically, I look to Germany. I have family members in Germany and have traveled there a bit, as well as to Austria and Switzerland. This has motivated me to undertake a deep study of German history and culture, including revisionist history of World Wars I and II. I have concluded that Germany has been given a raw deal. The world wars of the 20th century have as their root cause, in my opinion, the drive of Great Britain, the U.S., and, increasingly today, Israel, for world domination. Germany certainly had its own ambitions, but was eliminated as a competitor through two world wars that weren’t all its own fault. In fact the destruction of Germany as a cultural entity was probably the main goal of the Money Power during much of the 20th century.
I won’t dwell on specifics here, and will certainly point out the wrong turn Germany took with Hitler in charge—but I will not say the German people as a whole chose that path. Beneath the unhappy events of 1917-1945 lay an ancient and deeply spiritual culture that manifested through such figures as Meister Eckart, Wolfram von Eschenbach, theTheologia Germanica, Martin Luther, Johann Arndt, Jakob Boehme, Emanuel Kant, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse, Karl Barth, Bô Yin Râ, Eckart Tolle, and many others. These are the teachers I study today. This culture lives on, and now as a linchpin of the European Union the German heritage can help guide the West to a better fate, while the English-speaking powers are bankrupt, morally, spiritually, and increasingly economically.
Let’s hope the U.S. can eventually be part of a better fate as well, but not given its current direction and leadership and not with its unpaid karmic debts. Will there even be a U.S. much longer? No one really knows. The U.S. government is collapsing, its moral authority is gone, and it is not difficult to see why. Least of all is the utter state of dishonesty at all levels and in all sectors in a failed attempt to hide that it serves mainly the rich, powerful, and influential—and Israel.
Lately this situation has been brought home to me as I have been reading several books by Melvin Goodman, including Whistleblower at the CIA, an amazingly revealing work. Goodman provides first-hand documentation of how, starting with the Reagan administration, the CIA ceased providing objective analysis of contemporary events, and began falsifying intelligence to satisfy the political desires of the White House.
The leaders of the CIA at the time were William Casey and his top aide Robert Gates, later made CIA director by George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The administrations most eager for skewed intelligence were Reagan’s and that of Bush/Cheney, particularly after 9/11. But the corruption continues today, particularly after Obama’s CIA director John Brennan combined that agency’s operational and analytical directorates, removing its last vestige of independent thinking
I am not the only one to say we are looking at a failed state. The U.S. government has squandered any natural affection our populace or that of other nations may once have had for it. The U.S. government at all levels now rules primarily by bureaucratic rules at home and violence abroad—i.e., by fear. But authority divorced from honesty and compassion cannot last long. The U.S. is on a downward trajectory in a descent into a totalitarian police state. It has been captured by a criminal gang led by lying gangsters like Trump—and Netanyahu. And if things do go over the brink, “We the People” have stood by and watched it happen.
It’s a good time to remember the words of the song, “The Gambler”: “Sometimes you hold ‘em and sometimes you fold ‘em. Sometimes you walk away, and sometimes you run.” Your choice.
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Richard C. Cook is a retired federal analyst who served in the executive branch of the federal government for 32 years, retiring in 2007. Cook worked in several agencies, including the Jimmy Carter White House. He worked at NASA at the time of the Challenger disaster, where he became a well-known whistleblower for his testimony on NASA’s past knowledge of the flaws that destroyed the space shuttle in January 1986. After leaving NASA, Cook spent the next 21 years with the U.S. Treasury Department, working at all levels of policy and operations, and spending much time learning and teaching about the history of U.S. financial systems. When he retired, he published his massive history of the Challenger disaster entitled, “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.” He predicted the financial collapse of 2007, and over the next several years, wrote on financial and political issues, including his book, “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an informal advisor to Stephen Zarlenga, head of the American Monetary Institute, and to Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Cook is an advocate for a basic income guarantee and is in close touch with monetary reformers around the world, including members of the Green Party in the U.S. and Ireland. Most of his articles are available on the website of Global Research.
Si prevede che il traffico aereo civile in Europa calerà quest’anno del 60% rispetto al 2019, a causa delle restrizioni per il Covid-19, mettendo a rischio oltre 7 milioni di posti di lavoro. Cresce in compenso il traffico aereo militare.
Venerdì 28 agosto, sei bombardieri strategici B-52 della US Air Force hanno trasvolato in un solo giorno tutti e 30 i paesi della Nato in Nordamerica ed Europa, affiancati nei diversi tratti da 80 cacciabombardieri dei paesi alleati. Questa grande esercitazione denominata «Cielo Alleato» – ha dichiarato il segretario generale della Nato Jens Stoltenberg – dimostra «il potente impegno degli Stati uniti verso gli Alleati e conferma che siamo in grado di scoraggiare l’aggressione». Evidente l’allusione alla «aggressione russa» in Europa.
I B-52, trasferiti il 22 agosto dalla base aerea Minot in Nord Dakota a quella di Fairford in Gran Bretagna, non sono vecchi aerei della Guerra fredda usati ormai solo per le parate. Continuamente ammodernati, hanno conservato il loro ruolo di bombardieri strategici a lungo raggio. Ora vengono ulteriormente potenziati.
La US Air Force, con una spesa di 20 miliardi di dollari, doterà tra breve 76 B-52 di nuovi motori, che permetteranno ai bombardieri di volare per 8.000 km senza rifornimento in volo, trasportando ciascuno 35 tonnellate di bombe e missili a testata convenzionale o nucleare.
La US Air Force, lo scorso aprile, ha affidato alla Raytheon Co. la costruzione di un nuovo missile da crociera a lungo raggio, armato di testata nucleare, per i bombardieri B-52.
Con questi e altri bombardieri strategici da attacco nucleare, compresi i B-2 Spirit, la US Air Force ha effettuato sull’Europa dal 2018 oltre 200 sortite, soprattutto sul Baltico e il Mar Nero a ridosso dello spazio aereo russo. A queste esercitazioni partecipano i paesi europei della Nato, in particolare l’Italia.
Quando il 28 agosto un B-52 ha sorvolato il nostro paese, gli si sono affiancati caccia italiani per simulare una missione congiunta di attacco. Subito dopo cacciabombardieri Eurofighter Typhoon dell’Aeronautica italiana sono partiti per schierarsi nella base di Siauliai in Lituania, supportati da un centinaio di militari specializzati. A partire da oggi 1° settembre vi resteranno per 8 mesi, fino all’aprile 2021, per «difendere» lo spazio aereo del Baltico.
È la quarta missione Nato di «polizia aerea» effettuata nel Baltico dalla nostra Aeronautica. I caccia italiani sono pronti 24 ore su 24 allo scramble, al decollo su allarme per intercettare aerei «sconosciuti», che sono sempre aerei russi in volo tra qualche aeroporto interno e l’exclave russa di Kaliningrad attraverso lo spazio aereo internazionale sul Baltico.
La base lituana di Siauliai, in cui sono schierati, è stata potenziata dagli Stati uniti, che ne hanno triplicato la capacità investendovi 24 milioni di euro. Il perché è chiaro: la base aerea dista appena 220 km da Kaliningrad e 600 da San Pietroburgo, distanza che un caccia tipo l’Eurofighter Typhoon percorre in pochi minuti.
Perché la Nato schiera a ridosso della Russia questi e altri aerei a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare?
Non certo per difendere i paesi baltici da un attacco russo che, se avvenisse, significherebbe l’inizio della guerra mondiale termonucleare. Lo stesso avverrebbe se gli aerei Nato attaccassero dal Baltico le città russe limitrofe. La vera ragione di tale schieramento è quella di accrescere la tensione, fabbricando l’immagine di un pericoloso nemico, la Russia, che si prepara ad attaccare l’Europa.
È la strategia della tensione attuata da Washington, con la complicità dei governi e dei parlamenti europei e della stessa Unione europea. Tale strategia comporta un crescente aumento della spesa militare a scapito di quella sociale.
Un esempio: il costo di un’ora di volo di un caccia Eurofighter è stato calcolato dalla stessa Aeronautica in 66.000 euro (compreso l’ammortamento dell’aereo). Una somma, in denaro pubblico, superiore a due retribuzioni medie lorde annue.
Ogni volta che un Eurofighter decolla per «difendere» lo spazio aereo del Baltico, brucia in un’ora, in Italia, due posti di lavoro.
Todos somos testemunhas de como a China planeja meticulosamente seus principais movimentos geopolíticos e geoeconômicos até 2030 e além.
O que lerão a seguir teve origem numa série de discussões privadas multilaterais entre analistas de inteligência e pode ajudar a traçar os contornos do panorama geral.
Na China, o caminho claramente aponta para aumento da demanda interna e para a mudança da política monetária para criar crédito que consolide a construção de indústrias domésticas de renome internacional.
Paralelamente, há debate sério em Moscou no sentido que a Rússia deva seguir o mesmo caminho. Nas palavras de um analista, “a Rússia não deve importar coisa alguma, além da tecnologia absolutamente necessária, e só até que possa criá-la. Além disso, deveria exportar exclusivamente o petróleo e gás imprescindíveis para pagar por importações – que devem ser severamente limitadas. A China ainda necessita de recursos naturais, o que faz dos dois países aliados especiais. Todas as nações devem ser tão autossuficiente quanto possível.”
Acontece que essas declarações espelham perfeitamente a estratégia do Partido Comunista Chinês, como delineado pelo Presidente Xi Jinping na reunião do Comitê Central em 31 de julho passado. Também vai de encontro a uma robusta ala neoliberal no PC Chinês – colaboracionistas? – que sonham com converter o partido à democracia no estilo ocidental, subserviente aos interesses do capital ocidental.
Comparar a velocidade econômica de China e de EUA é comparar um Maserati GranTurismo Sport (equipado com motor V8 Ferrari) e um Toyota Camry. Proporcionalmente, a China tem enorme reserva de gerações jovens muito bem educadas; migração acelerada do ambiente rural para o urbano; erradicação crescente da pobreza; mais poupança; sentimento diferenciado de satisfação; mais disciplina social – confucionista; e respeito infinitamente maior pela mente racionalmente educada. Na China, o processo de crescimento do comércio interno será mais que suficiente para manter a dinâmica, em andamento, do imprescindível desenvolvimento sustentável.
O fator hipersônico
Enquanto isso, no front geopolítico, o consenso em Moscou – do Kremlin ao Ministério do Exterior – é que a administração Trump é “incapaz para acordos”, eufemismo diplomático para se referir ao que se descreve também como bando de mentirosos; e também “incapaz para a legalidade”, outro eufemismo, desta vez para designar, por exemplo, o lobby para forçar que os EUA disparem o gatilho das sanções, quando se sabe que Trump já abandonou há tempos o JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, também “Plano de Ação Conjunta Global”).
Recentemente, o Presidente Putin comentou que negociar com a equipe de Trump é como jogar xadrez com um pombo: o pombo anda pelo tabuleiro e espalha merda, derruba peças, declara vitória e some.
Por outro lado, os mais altos níveis do governo russo empenham esforço concreto para consolidar uma aliança eurasiana definitiva, unindo Alemanha, Rússia e China.
Mas essa aliança consolidada só será possível na Alemanha, depois de Merkel. De acordo com um analista (norte)americano, “o que segura a Alemanha é o medo de perder suas exportações de automóveis e outros bens para os Estados Unidos, mas não é difícil explicar que isso acontecerá em breve, por causa da taxa de câmbio dólar/euro, com o euro cada vez mais caro.”
No front nuclear, para além da situação dramática na Bielorrússia – já que não haverá Maidan em Minsk – Moscou já tornou bem claro, em termos contundentes, que qualquer ataque de mísseis da OTAN será interpretado como ataque nuclear.
Acredita-se que o sistema de mísseis defensivos russos – dentre eles o já testado sistema S-500, e a seguir o sistema S-600, já projetado – possa ser 99% efetivo. Significa que a Rússia ainda sofrerá danos, em caso de ataque. Não por outra razão, a Rússia construiu uma extensa rede de abrigos antibombas nucleares nas grandes cidades, com capacidade para pelo menos 40 milhões de pessoas.
Analistas russos veem a mesma tendência também na atitude chinesa de defesa. Pequim pode desenvolver – se já não o fez – um escudo defensivo; e mesmo assim preservar a possibilidade de contra-atacar os Estados Unidos com mísseis nucleares.
Os melhores analistas russos, dentre eles Andrei Martyanov, sabem que as três principais armas em uma suposta guerra no futuro serão os mísseis ofensivos/defensivos e submarinos combinados com capacidades para guerra eletrônica.
Atualmente, a principal arma – e os chineses compreendem-no muito bem – são os submarinos nucleares. Os russos observam como a China constrói sua frota de submarinos – carregados de mísseis hipersônicos –, mais rapidamente que os Estados Unidos. Frotas de superfície estão obsoletas. Uma alcateia de submarinos chineses pode derrotar facilmente um porta-aviões e respectivo grupo de combate. De fato, todos os 11 porta-aviões dos EUA já são obsoletos.
Assim, na possibilidade horrenda de que se torne impossível navegar por mar, no caso de EUA, China e Rússia bloquearem todo o tráfego marítimo, pode-se ver a principal razão estratégica pela qual a China optou por manter por terra, a partir da Rússia, as rotas pelas quais circulam muitos de seus recursos naturais.
Dutos de transporte terrestre de petróleo e gás podem ser rapidamente reparados, no caso de serem bombardeados. Essa é a enorme importância que tem, para a China, o gasoduto Poder da Sibéria – e também da gama estonteante de projetos da empresa russa Gazprom.
O fator Ormuz
Segredo guardado a sete chaves em Moscou é que, logo depois de a Alemanha ter imposto sanções em função da Ucrânia, um grande operador global de energia apresentou proposta, à Rússia, para desviar para a China nada menos que 7 milhões de barris diários de petróleo, além de gás natural. Aconteça o que acontecer, essa impressionante proposta permanece sobre a mesa de Shmal Gannadiy, alto conselheiro do Presidente Putin para assuntos de petróleo e gás.
No caso de a proposta vir a ser implementada, a China assegura-se de que receberá, a partir da Rússia, todos os recursos naturais de que precisa. Nessa hipótese, reação lógica da Rússia seria contornar as sanções da Alemanha e levar suas exportações de petróleo para a China, a qual, do ponto de vista russo, tem tecnologia de consumo melhor que a Alemanha.
Claro que tudo isso pode mudar com a iminente conclusão do Gasoduto Ramo Norte 2 (ing. Nord Stream 2) – apesar de a equipe Trump manter sua política de não carregar prisioneiros, ao sancionar tudo e todos relacionados ao assunto.
Conversas de inteligência nos bastidores deixam bem claro para os industriais alemães que, se a Alemanha perder sua fonte russa de energia em petróleo e gás natural, combinado com o eventual bloqueio do Estreito de Hormuz, no caso de ataque (norte)americano contra o Irã, a economia alemã pode simplesmente colapsar.
Conversas de inteligência acontecem por todo o país, sobre alguma possível Surpresa de Outubro patrocinada pelos Estados Unidos – um ataque sob falsa bandeira pelo qual o Irã seria responsabilizado. A equipe de “pressão máxima” da administração Trump contra o Irã nada tem a ver com o JCPOA. O que importa é que, mesmo indiretamente, a parceria estratégica Rússia/China tornou claro que Teerã será protegida como ativo estratégico importante – e ponto crucial da integração da Eurásia.
As considerações de inteligência centram-se no possível cenário da – muito improvável – queda do governo iraniano. Neste caso, o primeiro movimento de Washington seria desconectaro sistema SWIFT de compensações bancárias internacionais. O alvo seria a economia russa, para ser destroçada. Por isso Rússia e China estão trabalhando aceleradamente para inaugurar e pôr em operação seus próprios sistemas de compensação: MIR russo e CIPS chinês. E para deixar de lado o dólar, no seu comércio bilateral.
Pequim já percebeu que caso se confirme este cenário, a China pode perder de uma só vez dois aliados cruciais; nesse caso, estaria sozinha para enfrentar Washington, apanhada em estágio no qual pode não ser capaz de assegurar o fornecimento dos recursos naturais que tanto necessita. Trata-se de ameaça existencial real. Isso explica o raciocínio por trás da crescente interconexão na parceria estratégica entre China e Rússia, e o acordo com duração de 25 anos no valor de $400 bilhões de dólares, com o Irã.
A volta de Bismarck
Outro possível acordo secreto já discutido nos mais altos escalões da inteligência é a possibilidade de um Tratado de Resseguro Bismarckiano, a ser estabelecido entre Alemanha e Rússia. A consequência inevitável seria uma aliança de fato Berlin-Moscou-Pequim abrangendo a Iniciativa Cinturão e Estrada, com criação simultânea de uma nova moeda – digital? – para toda a aliança eurasiana, que incluiria atores periféricos, mas importantes, como França e Itália.
Muito bem. Pequim-Moscou está feito. Pequim-Berlin é trabalho em andamento. Falta cuidar do Berlin-Moscou.
A situação representa não só tremendo pesadelo para a elite anglo-norte-americana infartada de Mackinder, mas na realidade, implica também a passagem do bastão geopolítico, da mão dos impérios marítimos, de volta à mão da massa terrestre da Eurásia interior.
Deixou de ser ficção. Está sobre a mesa.
Aproveitando o ensejo, voltemos um pouco no tempo, até o ano de 1348.
Os mongóis da Horda Dourada estavam na Crimeia, sitiando Kaffa – porto comercial no Mar Negro controlado pelos genoveses.
De repente, o exército mongol começa a ser dizimado pela peste bubônica. E passa a catapultar cadáveres contaminados, para dentro da cidade da Crimeia.
E o que aconteceu, quando os navios começaram a navegar, de Kaffa para Gênova? Levaram a praga para a Itália.
Em 1360, a Morte Negra estava literalmente em toda parte – de Lisboa a Novgorod, da Sicília à Noruega. Talvez tenha dizimado cerca de 60% da população da Europa – mais de 100 milhões de pessoas.
Pode-se argumentar que a peste teria retardado por um século o Renascimento.
Covid-19 não é peste medieval, longe disso. Mesmo assim, cabe perguntar: que Renascimento estaria sendo retardado?
Bem, o que se pode dizer é que, na realidade, a pandemia de Covid-19 já está fazendo avançar o Renascimento da Eurásia. Ocorre justamente quando o Hegemon, ex-“fim da história”, explode internamente [“Sobre faces tensas repuxadas pelo tempo”] “Distraída da distração pela distração” [“Cheias de fantasmagorias e ermas de sentido]”,[3] para citar T. S. Eliot. Atrás do nevoeiro, nas excelentes pastagens à sombra, os movimentos vitais para reorganizar a massa terrestre do interior da Eurásia já estão em movimento.
[1] Ver Pepe Escobar, “Teatro de sombras: O Novo Grande Jogo na Eurásia”, 10/1/2017, Blog do Alok, orig. Asia Times(NTs).
[2] T. S. Eliot, Quatro Quartetos, parte V, BURNT NORTON, in T.S.Eliot, Poesia. Tradução Ivan Junqueira. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981.
[3] T. S. Eliot, “Quatro Quartetos”, parte III, BURNT NORTON, in ELIOT, T.S. Poesia. Tradução Ivan Junqueira. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981. p.199-204.
South Korea has been the object of praise and envy of the world for its great success in anti-virus war, off-line presidential election despite the virus crisis and the best performance in GDP growth among the OECD countries. In fact, the year on year GDP growth in the second quart of 2020 was -3.2% for Korea as against – 9.8% for the whole of OECD and even -24.2% for the UK.
Unfortunately, South Korea may have to go back to day-one of the anti-virus war started in January. This time, the propagation wave of the virus is, most likely deliberately, planned by the far-right coalition of the conservatives.
On August 15, at the Gwang-hwa-moon Square near the Seoul city hall, there was a huge rally of 20,000 people who were against the progressive government of Moon Jae-in. Most of the participants did not wear masks; they ignored social distancing. Many of them had been already infected but they came; they shouted; they sang; they did spit at the personnel of the public health bureau. The obvious objective was to spread the virus as much as possible.
The rally was forbidden by the Korean Centers for Disease Control (KCDC), but the court allowed knowing very well the danger. It is suspected that the judge who allowed the rally was a member of the conservative force which tries to discredit the progressive government of Moon Jae-in
What is happening is, perhaps, a major battle between the conservative oligarchy and the progressive people of Korea. The outcome of this battle will surely affect not only the peace process in the Korean peninsula but also the regional security.
The rally was organized by the conservative oligarchy led by a self-ordained pastor called Jun Kwang-hoon. Since the rally, the cumulated cases of infection have increased from 12,410 on August 15 to 15,502 on August 26, a daily increase of 281. On August 14, only 85 new cases were reported.
This paper has three parts.
First, the paper analyses the dynamics of the inter-force fight, especially, the formation and the evolution of these forces.
Second, the paper looks into how the inter-force can affect the corona-virus war. The conservative oligarchy is doing its best to spread the virus in order to topple the progressive government of Moon Jae-in. As for the progressive force, it is trying hard to win the anti-virus war without lockdown and the use of police power.
Third, the paper argues that the fierce inter-force fight in Korea will have significant implications not only for the peace on the Korean peninsula but also for the regional security and even world peace.
1. The Dynamics of the Inter-Force Fight
1.1. The conservative Oligarchy
The conservative oligarchy is composed of conservative party, the Unified Future Party (UFP), far-right protestant church, new-right intellectuals, conservative media, the conservative judiciary system, and the Chaebols (large industrial and financial conglomerates).
All these groups have one thing in common; they are all pro-Japan, anti-North Korea and anti-progressive government. This oligarchy is a powerful vested-interest group with enormous wealth and privileges cumulated since seventy years through illegal and immoral activities.
The oligarchy forms a tightly interconnected corrupted community, the function of which is to protect and expand their vested interests at the expense of the welfare of the people.
The Conservative Political Party: The present conservative party, the UFP, is the linear descendant of the long line of dictatorship: the police dictatorship of Rhee Syngman (1948-1960) (right), the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee (1962-1979) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1987). The government of Lee Myung-bak (2008-2012) and that of Park Geun-hye (2013-2017) were constitutionally democratic governments, but, in reality, the presidents acted as de facto dictator through the complete control of the legislative, the judiciary and the executive and, of course, the media.
The Protestant Church: The unfortunate part of Korea’s history is the North-South division of the country and pathetic reaction of the protestant church. The protestant church came to Pyongyang in North Korea during the 19th century and flourished until 1945, when the country was divided and North Korea was occupied by communist Russia which treated religion as poison. There was one protestant pastor, Rev. Han Kyun-jik, who found himself obliged to close his church and flee with his followers to the South, where he created a church called Young-rak Church, now, one of the largest protestant churches in Korea.
Han sent some of his English speaking members to the American military government and the government of Rhee Syngman. Han and Rhee had one thing in common, the hatred for communism and North Korea. Rhee needed someone who could get rid of those who were not with his dictatorship. Rhee then decided to label those who were not with him as communists. Rev. Han formed a terrorist gang with his young and tough church members called “Seo-buk Youth Gang-the North-West Youth Gang” , which took part in most of the killing fields ordered by Rhee.
The youth gang of Rev. Han were brainwashed to believe that the communists were red-faced devils who challenged the angel of God, the Church. There are these passages in the Book of Revelation, the last Book of the Bible (12:3 and 7).
“There was a huge ‘red’ dragon with seven heads…Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon who fought back with his angels; but the dragon was defeated.”
Here, the red is communism which must be condemned just like the red dragon was condemned. Hence, it is the duty of Christians to kill communism. No doubt, the brainwashed terrorist youth believed this and President, Rhee Syngman was more than happy to use this group to liquidate those who were against his dictatorship.
The protestant church goers who participated at the 8.15 rally believe that North Korea is the biblical red dragon and that Moon Jae-in is the defender of the red dragon.
The Intellectuals: Most of the Korean conservative intellectuals are those who have studied abroad with money coming from pro-Japan parents who had acquired huge wealth by receiving the Japanese colonial assets distributed by the American military government and Rhee’s government.
At present, many of them receive huge funds from Japan for studies designed to justify and glorify the Japanese invasion in Korea. One of the channels of transmission of Japanese money to Korea is the Center for Academic Studies which is installed in one of the leading universities in Seoul. This study center would have received US $ 30 million from Japan.
The conservative intellectuals have organized a group called “New Right” with the mission to rewrite, in Japan’s favour, the Japanese colonial history. In fact, a book was completed in which Japan was described as a benevolent power which came to Korea for the good of Koreans. Fortunately, as soon as Moon Jae-in took over the power in 2017, the book was abolished.
The Media: The role of the media in Korea has little to do professional journalism; they do not investigate; they write and say what the money provider asks; they are a profit seeking business. To be more precise, they are there to make money by fabricating stories, making lies to protect the vested interests of the conservative oligarchy in exchange of fat bribe money.
The media is the most corrupted entity led by the ardent pro-Japan media giants comprising the Chosun Ilbo, the Dong-ah Ilbo, which were created and flourished during the Japanese occupation owing to their collaboration with the Japanese colonial government in justifying the Japanese occupation and helping the fight against Korean patriots. In addition, there is the Joong-ang Ilbo created by the Samsung Group. In Korea, these journals are labelled as Cho-Joong-Dong which are the most pro-Japan and which are the most effective guardian of the conservative oligarchy’s vested interests.
Most of the journals, TV stations with the exception of KBS, MBC and other government funded TV stations are funded by the Chaebols led by Samsung, construction firms and other members of the oligarchy.
The Judiciary System: The corrupted oligarchy has survived all these years owing to the protection of the corrupted judiciary system. The wrong doings of the oligarchy are ignored, while a slight anti-oligarchy activity is punished. The media report what the prosecutor’s office dictates; they seldom investigate the story; they write or they say what the Prosecutor dictates; they are simply the Prosecutor’s parrot.
The Chaebols: In the dynamics of the conservative oligarchy, the role of the Chaebols is of paramount importance. Over the years, the Chaebols have played the central role in the oligarchy; the Chaebols have provided unlimited amount of bribe money for the key member of the oligarchy in exchange of political and judicial favours. The head of the Chaebols seldom go to prison for their crimes; even if they are imprisoned, they are quickly pardoned by the president of the country.
1.2. The Progressive Political Force
The progressive political force has been formed through enormous sacrifice of Korean people. Right from the beginning of the post-war era, Korean people were alienated and treated by the conservatives as enemy and, as a result, they were victims of massive murders, illegal incarceration and torture; they were excluded from decent jobs. Nobody knows how many Koreans were murdered by the conservative oligarchy, but no doubt, several hundred thousand souls were sacrificed.
In particular, those patriots who fought against Japan were identified and completely blocked from making decent living. One of the poorest groups in Korea up to now is the group of the patriots’ descendants. They have been denied the right to have descent job; they were made so poor that their children could not have descent education; they were constantly harassed by the police; they had to deny their family identity.
The government of Moon Jae-in has been doing a lot in honouring and helping the patriots and their descendants. But, nothing can compensate for their suffering imposed by the conservative oligarchy.
Despite the fearful police and military dictatorship, Korean people have fought back with bare hand against the conservative oligarchy through the following massive popular uprisings; the 4.19 Revolution (April 19, 1960), the 10.16 Bu-Ma Democratic Protests (October 16, 1979), the 5.18 Kwang-ju Uprising (May 18, 1980), the 6.10 Struggle (June 10, 1987) and the Candlelight Revolution (October 26, 2016-April 29, 2017). Perhaps 30 million people went down the street to fight against the corrupted conservative oligarchy.
The progressive force was able to form a government twice in the past and the third is that of Moon Jae-in. The first progressive government of Kim Dae-jung (1997-2003) made a series of social reform but could not resist successfully the wrong doings of the powerful conservative oligarchy. The second progressive government of Rho Moo-hyun (2003-2008) was successful in making the government less bureaucratic. Moreover, it created a mechanism through which the ordinary people could come to the Blue House (Korean White House) meet the president and talk to him. He wanted to return the country to the people, the country which had been stolen by the pro-Japan conservatives for their own interests.
President Rho Moo-hyun was the target of a bribery scandal fabricated by the government of Lee Myung-bak, the Prosecutor and the media. He killed himself to free his family from suffering. President Rho has left the most powerful political and ideological legacy, the legacy of just society where the government exists only for the people and where every person is important and deserves respect, dignity and love.
2. Impact of the Inter-force fight on the COVID-19
The power and the glory of the conservative oligarchy is now threatened after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in 2017; Park was taken out of her office for her corruption and her abuse of power. She is now in prison for 15 years.
On the other hand, the reputation of President Moon Jae-in is rising in Korea for his love of people, a government devoid of corruption, the promotion of more equitable income distribution, the development of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which had been exploited with no pity by the Chaebols, the victory over the corona-virus without lockdown, the peaceful off-line general election in the midst of the virus crisis. Furthermore, he is highly respected throughout the world for his leadership in the North-South peace dialogue and the productive mediation role for the Pyongyang-Washington peace dialogue.
The brilliant success of the Moon jae-in government threatens the very survival of the conservative party and the conservative oligarchy. As expected, the UFP has been doing, for last three years, everything possible thing to discredit the Democratic party of Korea (DPK) and President, Moon.
Here is what the conservative party, UFP, has been doing to discredit the government of Moon Jae-in:
The FUP has blocked since three years through the Judiciary Committee of the National Assembly most of laws related to the welfare of the people and the North-South peace Dialogue in order to tell the people that the progressive party (DPK) and the Moon’s government are incompetent to govern and look after the people.
The second political tactic of the conservatives consists in discrediting and dishonouring important leaders of the progressive force. The popular tricks often used consist in accusing the leaders for fabricated sexual abuse or involvement if bribery scandal. The Prosecutor intervenes to make the impression that the scandal deserves investigation. By the time the truth is revealed, it is too late to recover the damaged reputation and the integrity of the falsely accused. In this process, the role of the media is crucial; they publish or broadcast what the Prosecutor says; they never verify if the accusation is justified.
The most known case is that of Professor Cho Guk who is the most respected expert in judicial matters and served as one of the advisor to President Moon. A year ago, he was appointed as Justice Minister with the mission of reforming Korea’s judiciary system, in particular the reform of the Prosecutor which had been abusing its unlimited power, criminally protecting the interests of the conservative oligarchy and even challenging the authority of the president.
The conservative oligarchy funds a great number of individual you-tube facilities and manufactures fake news and events in order to give the impression that the policy of Moon’s government is failure. For instance, they say that Korea’s economic behaviour is the worst among the OECD countries; the truth is the other way around; for the second quarter of 2020, Korea’s GDP fell by 3.2% as against a decrease of more than 20% in many other OECD countries. Among other things, the conservative oligarchy fabricates false news about North Korea’s threat in order to give the impression that Moon’s government is incapable of assuring the national security. For instance, they fabricate a story that a North Korean military unit invaded a certain place in South Korea.
All these efforts and plots to discredit the government of Moon Jae-in have failed. Then, there appeared unexpected ally for the conservatives, namely, the corona virus. The plan of the conservative oligarchy was to spread the virus intentionally to prove the present government’s failure in handling the virus. The conservatives even mobilized the cult Shincheonji in March to spread the virus. But, the cult Shincheonji was soon under control and the virus crisis was almost terminated.
The conservative oligarchy lost the general election in April allowing the DPK to win almost two-third of seats in the National Assembly. What was left for the oligarchy was the huge rally at the Kwang-hwa-moon Square on August 15 mobilizing twenty thousand people from all over the country. The objective of the rally was to use the virus as terror weapon to kill the progressive force.
The August 15 rally was the well planned virus war declared by the conservative oligarchy against the progressive force led by Moon Jae-in. The principal leader was Jun Kwang-hoon who represents a radical ultra-right faction of the Protestant Church in Korea. He is one of those who seem to believe that the communism is the biblical red dragon and his church is the angel Michael. Jun argues that Moon Jae-in is trying to convert South Korea into a communist country and, therefore, his government should be destroyed.
The oligarchy has adopted the following tactics in relation to the 8.15 rally.
It mobilized the brain-washed elderly from all over the country. The strategy was planned for long time. They came by chartered buses; they were amply paid by the oligarchy. They were instructed to do the following
Thy should believe that the virus would not infect the selected Christians
If they die because of the virus, they are martyrs.
They should not go to the government-run KCDC for test, because the government is the enemy of Christians.
They should close all mobile phones so that the KCDC cannot track the rally participants.
They should not tell even the family about their rally participation
Even if they are inflicted they should travel freely
Many of the participants had already been infected before coming to the rally so that the virus can be transmitted to as many people as possible.
Some of the participants spat at the KCDC team members so that the virus can be transmitted from the local offices of he KCDC.
The organizers, especially, the Sarang-jeil church led by Jun Kwang-hoon, refuse ot provide the list of the participants. Even worse, the list made available was intentionally fabricated including the names of persons who do not exist.
One thing is clear. The ultimate objective of the 8.15 rally and many other events and manoeuvres organized by the conservative oligarchy is the destruction of the progressive regime and retake the power at the next presidential election in 2022.
The interesting question is why the conservatives are so desperately determined to destroy the progressives. The answer is simple and strait; it is the matter of preserving their vested interests which include wealth, privileges, prestige, envy, protection from judicial punishment for their crimes, sharing of government positions and many other advantages given to them. These vested interests are so precious that they are ready to do anything to topple the progressive government which is threatening heir interests.
The damaging impact of the inter-force conflict on the corona-virus crisis is very serious. Since the 8.15 rally, as we saw above, every day, hundreds of infections are reported and there is a great danger of community propagation.
President Moon has spent all his life for the promotion of human right; he hates to use force to fight the virus. But, he announced, on August 25th, his intension of using police forces to solve the virus war declared by the conservative oligarchy.
3. Impact of Inter-Force Fight on the Regional Security
No doubt, the fight between the conservatives and the progressives has become an open war and there is no guarantee that the progressives will win the war. There are three reasons. First, this time a good part of brainwashed radical Protestant Church members are leading the virus war. There are several millions of Protestant Christians in Korea. Second, the Chaebols are at the center of the oligarchy with unlimited funds. Third, the medical doctors have declared work stoppage and their motivation is suspected to have a link with the virus war; they are suspected to support the conservative oligarchy.
The government has to win the new virus war at all cost. President, Moon Jae-in may have to declare even the emergency of level 3 which means a total lockdown never used so far.
In this conjuncture, the interesting question is about the impact of the possible outcome of the 2022 election on the peace in the Korean peninsula and the regional security.
If the conservative oligarchy wins, we may have to face the following consequences.
North-South peace dialogue will become difficult leading to renewed danger of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula.
The tension Pyongyang-Washington will increase and the presence of American military force including the additional deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) will be enforced.
Seoul-Beijing relations will become more tense and the whole regional security will become uncertain.
In Japan, the possibility of the far-right political force represented by Abe Shinzo to go through the amendment of the pace constitution will increase. And, Japan will try to colonize again South Korea through political and economic and financial influences, if not military invasion, in close complicity with Korean conservative oligarchy. If this happens, the whole regional security will be adversely affected, given the Japan’s ambition to restore its former power and glory.
On the other hand, if the progressive force wins the 2022 election after having successfully dealt with the second virus crisis, the following results are expected.
The North-South peace dialogue will continue and even the inter-Korea economic cooperation will become possible, which will lead to the common prosperity to the North and the South.
The peace on the Korean peninsula and North-South economic integration may allow Korea to play key role in the formation of the East-Asian regional globalism.
The peace on the Korean peninsula may weaken the justification of the large presence of American military strength in the region. This will attenuate the danger of Sino-U.S. armed conflict.
The peace on the Korean peninsula will weaken the justification of the amendment of the peace constitution and decrease the danger of armed conflict Sino-Japan and Korea-Japan.
To sum up, what is happening in Korea can happen in many other democratic countries. That is, the virus can be deliberately propagated in order to protect the vested interests of corrupt politicians. If there is any way to prevent it, it is the strong will of the united citizens supported by the people around the world.
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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the Observatoire de l’Asie de l’Est (OAE) of the Centre d’Études sur l’Intégration et la Mondialisation (CEIM), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
When President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination for another term last night at the Republican National Convention, he pledged that the push by his administration’s Operation Warp Speed to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine would succeed “before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner.”
That promise concerns many vaccine veterans. They worry that political forces—the U.S. presidential election on 3 November, nationalistic pride to “win” a race, the need to resuscitate economies—could lead to premature and dangerous approvals under mechanisms such as the emergency use authorization (EUA), a pathway used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow rapid access to diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. Long a bastion of regulatory rigor that many other countries look to for guidance, FDA has been criticized for issuing EUAs for two COVID-19 treatments, convalescent plasma and hydroxychloroquine, based on scant data and apparent political pressure. (The hydroxychloroquine EUA has since been revoked.) Paul Offit, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of a group that advises FDA about its vaccine decisions, suspects the Trump administration might seek a COVID-19 vaccine EUA before the elections and say: “We Warp Speeded our way to a vaccine.”
China and Russia already have approved limited use of COVID-19 vaccines outside of clinical trials, offering baffling—and sharply criticized—rationales. In the United States, Operation Warp Speed, as its name implies, hopes to move vaccine candidates forward more quickly than ever before. It has invested more than $10 billion in developing eight different COVID-19 vaccines, with much of that money pre-purchasing hundreds of millions of doses so they will be at the ready if an FDA approval comes through. Three of the Warp Speed-backed vaccines have entered efficacy trials, and one manufacturer has pledged to start delivering the first of 300 million doses as early as October—though one person close to Operation Warp Speed says, “There won’t be enough vaccine in October to create anything other than a news story.”
FDA officials have insisted they have “unwavering regulatory safeguards” and will not cut any corners. “The acceleration is really around taking financial risk [with regard to] the development process,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at a U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing about the country’s COVID-19 response in June. “We will rely upon data and science when it comes to that decision about an EUA.”
Peter Marks, who runs the FDA division that oversees vaccine approval, has vowed that he would resign if the Trump administration pushed through a vaccine that was not clearly safe and effective. And he insists that FDA will consult with the Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which Offit sits on, to publicly discuss data related to any approval request. “Approval should be something that we can make transparent, and to do anything less than that is really a disservice to people,” Marks says. VRBPAC’s next meeting is scheduled for 22 October, 12 days before the presidential and congressional elections.
Science spoke with a range of researchers and regulators about how a COVID-19 vaccine approval might be accelerated and the potential consequences.
What’s the traditional vaccine approval pathway?
After initial laboratory and animal tests, vaccines enter phase I human trials that typically have about 20 to 100 people and primarily analyze safety and immune responses. Phase II studies are larger versions of phase I trials. Phase III studies attempt to determine whether a vaccine works by comparing people who receive it with those who are given a placebo shot and, over several months or years, seeing how many in each group get infected. For COVID-19 vaccines these trials involve anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 people and will need a total of about 150 cases of disease to determine whether a candidate works. Once the trial endpoints are met, a vaccine developer seeking FDA approval would file a biologics license application; VRBPAC would review the data at a public meeting, then vote on whether the vaccine should receive approval—a recommendation FDA normally follows. The approval process, which involves inspecting the vaccine’s manufacturing plants, can often take 1 year.
How does an EUA work?
An EUA in the United States, and similar regulatory pathways in many countries, allows use of an unlicensed vaccine outside of a clinical trial. The EUA could stipulate the use of the vaccine in a limited population, for example, health care workers or the elderly. Or it could be for the general population. An EUA offers liability protections to vaccinemakers, and it remains in effect as long as there is a public health, military, or national security emergency. When the emergency ends, so does the approval.
What safety and efficacy evidence would FDA require before issuing an EUA?
FDA issued a “guidance for industry” in June that says any emergency decision on a COVID-19 vaccine would be based on factors such as “the target population, the characteristics of the product, [and] the preclinical and human clinical study data.” The guidance specifies that FDA will only approve an EUA for a vaccine that has at least 50% efficacy. But estimates of efficacy have error bars of sorts; for a COVID-19 vaccine, FDA wants 95% confidence that efficacy is no lower than 30%. The decision to consider an EUA request would likely be based on data reviewed by the independent boards, set up by the vaccine’s sponsors or clinical trial investigators, that monitor safety and efficacy during the study.
What harm could an EUA do?
Public Citizen, a public advocacy group, has argued that regardless of whether a COVID-19 vaccine is effective, an EUA could fuel existing vaccine hesitancy. “The ‘logic’ of saving several months by a faster but riskier EUA pathway will surely be outweighed by the loss in public confidence in the vaccine, accompanied by decreased willingness to be vaccinated,” Public Citizen warned in a 6 August letter to Marks and his superiors. An EUA for a vaccine might also make it more difficult to recruit people for clinical trials of that vaccine and others, because participants might not want to take the risk of receiving a placebo when they can get a shot of a product that’s authorized for use.
What if the vaccine doesn’t work well or causes harm?
Vaccines go into healthy people, so putting them into use before fully assessing their risks and benefits is a bigger gamble than issuing an EUA for an experimental treatment for someone already ill. If a hastily approved COVID-19 vaccine candidate proves ineffective or has serious side effects, confidence in what many see as the best hope to ending the pandemic could plummet. The Solidarity Vaccines Trials Expert Group of the World Health Organization (WHO) argued in an editorial published in TheLancet yesterday that a weakly effective vaccine could actually worsen the pandemic if it induced authorities to relax control measures, such as mask wearing, or if vaccinated people believed they were immune and increased their risk-taking behavior.
Has an EUA ever been used for a vaccine?
Yes. In 2005 FDA granted an EUA for an anthrax vaccine for people who the military determined were at high risk of attack from anthrax used as a biological weapon. The episode provoked lawsuits claiming there was no evidence that the vaccine, which the military required soldiers to get, worked against the type of inhalational anthrax used in bioweapons. A judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but by then the vaccine had become voluntary.
What’s the difference between FDA’s expanded access program and an EUA?
Typically expanded access, also called compassionate use, covers treatments, not vaccines, in the United States. It’s for individuals who have a life-threatening condition and no alternatives or for small groups of sick people when a treatment has promising evidence but efficacy has not been proven yet. Anyone who receives the experimental medicine signs an informed consent form, and institutions that provide it have to seek permission from FDA, submit a protocol, report adverse events, and do continued safety monitoring. An EUA eliminates these requirements. FDA allowed nearly 100,000 people to receive convalescent plasma through expanded access—an unusually large instance of compassionate use—but last week granted an EUA that proponents said would cut paperwork. The Democratic Republic of the Congo used its own expanded access regulation to allow more than 300,000 people to use an unlicensed Ebola vaccine.
Does Europe have a similar emergency approval process?
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) can issue “conditional approval” for a vaccine during a pandemic. Under a rolling-review process, companies continue submitting data as they becomes available. The United Kingdom, which will be leaving the EMA’s authority because of Brexit, today issued a consultation for public comment on how its regulatory agency might issue its own temporary authorization of an unlicensed COVID-19 vaccine.
How did China and Russia speed approval of their COVID-19 vaccines?
China on 25 June gave CanSino a 1-year approval to use its COVID-19 vaccine in the Chinese military, although there is no evidence beyond statements by company officials that anyone has received it. On 22 July, China also allowed Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group Company to give its COVID-19 vaccine to health care workers, customs workers, and others in “high-risk” professions. Both vaccines are still in phase III efficacy trials. CanSino also reportedly is in discussion with regulators in Pakistan and unnamed Latin American countries about early approval of its vaccine.
Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow on 11 August received a “registration certificate” to give a COVID-19 vaccine to what a Ministry of Health spokesperson described as “a small number of citizens from vulnerable groups,” including medical staff and the elderly. Dubbed Sputnik V, a clear reference to the U.S.-Soviet space race, the product is billed as “the first registered COVID-19 vaccine.” The registration says it cannot be used widely until after 1 January 2021, but President Vladimir Putin said, “I hope we can start a massive release of this vaccine soon.”
Many countries do not have strong regulatory agencies. How do they decide whether to use a COVID-19 vaccine that is not licensed?
WHO has what it calls an Emergency Use Listing, which many low- and middle-income countries have relied on in the past. “We can give a benefit/risk decision on a product and specify the conditions under which it should be used,” says Emer Cooke, director of WHO’s Regulation of Medicines and other Health Technologies. “We act like a regulatory body, but we’re not a regulatory body.” Cooke, who recently was elected to head EMA later this year, says their job is especially complex now because of the flood of COVID-19 vaccine candidates and the intense pressure to find one that is safe and effective. “I think we are seeing more political influences now than we would normally see,” she says.
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Years of US support to Al-Qaeda and ISIS and efforts to effect regime change in the country have culminated in the theft of Syria’s oil, but is that really America’s coup de grâce in Syria?
Near the end of July, one of the most important recent developments in U.S. foreign policy was quietly disclosed during a U.S. Senate hearing. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody talked about it and most are still completely unaware that it happened.
Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confirmed that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria. The area is nominally controlled by the Kurds, yet their military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was formed under U.S. auspices and relies on an American military presence to secure its territory. That military presence will now be charged with protecting an American firm from the government of the country that it is operating within.
Pompeo confirmed that the plans for implanting the firm into the U.S.-held territory are “now in implementation” and that they could potentially be “very powerful.” This is quite a momentous event given its nature as a blatant example of neocolonial extraction, or, as Stephen Kinzer puts it writing for the Boston Globe, “This is a vivid throwback to earlier imperial eras, when conquerors felt free to loot the resources of any territory they could capture and subdue.”
Indeed, the history of how the U.S. came to be in a position to “capture and subdue” these resources is a sordid, yet informative tale that by itself arguably even rivals other such colonial adventures.
To capture and subdue
When a legitimate protest movement developed organically in Syria in early 2011, the U.S. saw an opportunity to destabilize, and potentially overthrow, the government of a country that had long pushed back against its efforts for greater control in the region.
Syria had maintained itself outside of the orbit of U.S. influence and had frustratingly prevented American corporations from penetrating its economy to access its markets and resources.
As the foremost academic expert on Middle East affairs, Christopher Davidson, wrote in his seminal work,
“Shadow Wars, The Secret Struggle for the Middle East,” discussing both Syria and Libya’s strategic importance, “the fact remained that these two regimes, sitting astride vast natural resources and in command of key ports, rivers, and borders, were still significant obstacles that had long frustrated the ambitions of Western governments and their constituent corporations to gain greater access.”
“With Syria,” Davidson wrote, “having long proven antagonistic to Western interests… a golden opportunity had presented itself in 2011 to oust [this] administration once and for all under the pretext of humanitarian and even democratic causes.”
The U.S., therefore, began organizing and overseeing a militarization of the uprising early on, and soon co-opted the movement along with allied states Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Writing at the end of 2011, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad explained how there was no longer any doubt that “the Syrian popular struggle for democracy [has] already been hijacked,” given that “the Arab League and imperial powers have taken over and assumed the leadership of their struggle.”
Soon, through the sponsoring of extremist elements, the insurgency was dominated by Salafists of the al-Qaeda variety.
According to the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by 2013 “there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad” and “the U.S. was arming extremists.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that “although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists,” still “the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming.”
When ISIS split off from al-Qaeda and formed its own Caliphate, the U.S. continued pumping money and weapons into the insurgency, even though it was known that this aid was going into the hands of ISIS and other jihadists. U.S. allies directly supported ISIS.
U.S. officials admitted that they saw the rise of ISIS as a beneficial development that could help pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give in to America’s demands.
Leaked audio of then-Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that “we were watching… and we know that this [ISIS] was growing… We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage — that Assad would then negotiate.” As ISIS was bearing down on the capital city of Damascus, the U.S. was pressing Assad to step down to a U.S.-approved government.
Then, however, Russia intervened with its air force to prevent an ISIS takeover of the country and shifted the balance of forces against the jihadist group. ISIS’ viability as a tool to pressure the government was spent.
The arsonist and the firefighter
So, a new strategy was implemented: instead of allowing Russia and Syria to take back the territories that ISIS captured throughout the war, the U.S. would use the ISIS threat as an excuse to take those territories before they were able to. Like an arsonist who comes to put out the fire, the U.S. would now charge itself with the task of stamping out the Islamist scourge and thereby legitimize its own seizure of Syrian land. The U.S. partnered with the Kurdish militias who acted as their “boots on the ground” in this endeavor and supported them with airstrikes.
The strategy of how these areas were taken was very specific. It was designed primarily to allow ISIS to escape and redirect itself back into the fight against Syria and Russia. This was done through leaving “an escape route for militants” or through deals that were made where ISIS voluntarily agreed to cede its territory. The militants were then able to escape and go wreak havoc against America’s enemies in Syria.
Interestingly, in terms of the oil fields now being handed off to an American corporation, the U.S. barely even fought ISIS to gain control over them; ISIS simply handed them over.
Syria and Russia were quickly closing in on the then-ISIS controlled oilfields, so the U.S. oversaw a deal between the Kurds and ISIS to give up control of the city. According to veteran Middle East war correspondent Elijah Magnier, “U.S.-backed forces advanced in north-eastern areas under ISIS control, with little or no military engagement: ISIS pulled out from more than 28 villages and oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates River, surrendering these to the Kurdish-U.S. forces following an understanding these reached with the terrorist group.”
Sources quoted by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that ISIS preferred seeing the fields in the hands of the U.S. and the Kurds rather than the Syrian government.
The rationale behind this occupation was best described by Syria expert Joshua Landis, who wrote that the areas of northern Syria under control of the Kurds are the U.S.’ “main instrument in gaining leverage” over the government. By “denying Damascus access to North Syria” and “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources” “the U.S. will be able to keep Syria poor and under-resources.” So, by “promoting Kurdish nationalism in Syria” the U.S. “hopes to deny Iran and Russia the fruits of their victory,” while “keeping Damascus weak and divided,” this serving “no purpose other than to stop trade” and to “beggar Assad and keep Syria divided, weak and poor.”
Or, in the words of Jim Jeffrey, the Trump administrations special representative for Syria who is charged with overseeing U.S. policy, the intent is to “make life as miserable as possible for that flopping cadaver of a regime and let the Russians and Iranians, who made this mess, get out of it.”
Anchoring American troops in Syria
This is the history by which an American firm was able to secure a contract to extract oil in Syria. And while the actual resources gained will not be of much value (Syria has only 0.1% of the world’s oil reserves), the presence of an American company will likely serve as a justification to maintain a U.S. military presence in the region.
“It is a fiendishly clever maneuver aimed at anchoring American troops in Syria for a long time,” Stephen Kinzer explains, one that will aid the policymakers who hold “the view that the United States must remain militarily dominant in the Middle East.”
This analysis corroborates the extensive scholarship of people like Mason Gaffney, professor of economics emeritus at the University of California, who, writing in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, sums up his thesis that throughout its history “U.S. military spending has been largely devoted to protecting the overseas assets of multinational corporations that are based in the United States… The U.S. military provides its services by supporting compliant political leaders in developing countries and by punishing or deposing regimes that threaten the interests of U.S.-based corporations.”
In essence, by protecting this “global ‘sprawl’ of extractive companies” the U.S. Department of Defense “provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas,” one that is paid for by the taxpayer, not the corporate beneficiaries. It is hard to estimate the exact amount of money the U.S. has invested into the Syria effort, though it likely is near the trillion dollar figure. The U.S. taxpayer doesn’t get anything out of that, but companies that are awarded oil contracts do.
What is perhaps most important about this lesson however is that this is just a singular example of a common occurrence that happens all over the world. A primary function of U.S. foreign policy is to “make the world safe for American businesses,” and the upwards of a thousand military bases the U.S. has stationed across the globe are set up to help protect those corporate investments. While this history is unique to Syria, similar kinds of histories are responsible for U.S. corporation’s extractive activities in other global arenas.
So, next time you see headlines about Exxon being in some kind of legal dispute with, say, Venezuela, ask yourself how was it that those companies became involved with the resources of that part of the world? More often than not, the answer will be similar to how this U.S. company got involved in Syria.
Given all of this, it perhaps might seem to be too mild of a critique to simply say that this Syria enterprise harkens back to older imperial eras where conquerors simply took what they wished: the sophistication of colonialism has indeed improved by leaps and bounds since then.
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Steven Chovanec is an independent journalist based in Chicago, IL. His writings have appeared in outlets such as The Hill, teleSUR, Truthout, MintPress News, Insurge-Intelligence, and others. Follow him on Twitter @stevechovanec
A coalition of 27 U.S. states, commonwealths, territories, counties, and cities filed a federal lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s “unlawful, unjustified, and sweeping revisions” to a 50-year-old law that the president claimed would “streamline” infrastructure projects by limiting environmental reviews.
After revealing plans to alter the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in January, President Donald Trumpannounced what critics called “reckless and unprecedented” changes during a July campaign stop. The revisions, detailed in a final rule released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), swiftly provoked legal threats from advocacy organizations.
The lawsuit (pdf) filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, follows a similar challenge to the NEPA changes from national environmental groups, filed in the same court last month.
“NEPA is an unsung hero of environmental protection that protects our shared environment,” Ferguson said in a statement. “NEPA allows our voices to inform public decisions, provides a tool for holding the government accountable, and builds transparency into the federal decision-making process to build trust.”
“This administration’s insidious attack on one of our most important environmental laws is an attack on the democratic process itself,” the Washington attorney general declared. “I will fight to make sure the people are heard.”
Becerra put the rollback and subsequent suit in the context of Trump’s broader deregulatory agenda targeting environmental protections and how states and local governments—often led by Democratic elected officials—have fought against it.
“The Trump administration has spent the better part of four years trying to roll back critical protections and undo hard-fought progress, particularly when it comes to our environment, public lands, and natural resources,” Becerra said. “But we haven’t let this unlawful conduct go unchecked. We’ve fought back—and won.”
“Today, we’re filing our 100th lawsuit against the Trump administration,” he noted. “With today’s challenge, our goal is simple: preserve the public’s voice in government decision-making as federal projects threaten to harm the health of our families in our own backyards.”
The Trump Admin spent the last four years rolling back critical protections and undoing hard-fought progress, particularly for our environment.
Now @RealDonaldTrump is gutting the National Environmental Policy Act—one of our bedrock environmental laws.
David J. Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law, said in response to the suit that “state attorneys general again are stepping up, this time to stop the Trump administration from going back on the basic ‘good government’ promise that before federal officials approve major projects, they must review potential adverse impacts, make them public, and hear the views of affected citizens.”
“We should not need to rely on our last line of defense—state attorneys general—to enforce the rule of law,” added Hayes, former Interior Department deputy secretary in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “But here we are again, needing to turn to state legal officers and the federal courts to right the latest national environmental wrongs that the Trump administration is imposing on the American people.”
In March, Becerra co-led a coalition of 20 attorneys general who argued in a letter that the administration’s proposed rule violated both NEPA and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA); relied on a deficient rulemaking process; restricted the scope of impacts considered in environmental reviews; and unlawfully and without justification limited the requirement that an agency evaluate reasonable alternatives.
As the California attorney general’s office explained Friday, the lawsuit argues that the final rule violates NEPA and APA because it:
is contrary to NEPA’s language and purpose and exceeds the Council on Environmental Quality’s statutory authority;
is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with law; and
was promulgated without preparing an Environmental Assessment or an Environmental Impact Statement evaluating the rule’s environmental and public health impacts.
As Hayes put it:
“The administration’s final NEPA rule shatters that long-standing legal promise embedded in one of our nation’s earliest and most important environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act.”
“In particular, the final rule abandons any environmental review for broad categories of project approvals that will leave our most vulnerable citizens—including many already impacted by historic, unjust environmental harms—voiceless and at the mercy of an administration that favors industry profits over Americans’ health and well-being,” he said. “And when reviews are begrudgingly undertaken, the new rule enables officials to downplay or skip altogether serious analyses of climate impacts and health dangers associated with proposed projects and connected activities.”
Ferguson and Becerra were joined in the filing by the legal representatives for Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia, the territory of Guam, the city of New York, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and Harris County, Texas.
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Featured image: Activists gather outside of the Alliance Center in Denver across the street from a public hearing by the Council on Environmental Quality’s proposed update to NEPA Regulations on February 11, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
On August 1, a rare in-depth investigative piece appeared on the BBC News website based on credible and serious allegations that UK Special Forces had executed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. The BBC article was produced in tandem with a report, ‘”Rogue SAS Afghanistan execution squad” exposed by email trail’, published by the Sunday Times.
Special Forces are the UK’s elite specialist troops, encompassing both the SAS (Special Air Service) and the SBS (Special Boat Service). The allegation, by two senior officers, is that there was a ‘deliberate policy’ of British Special Forces illegally killing unarmed men in Afghanistan under the pretext of assassinating Taliban leaders.
The new revelations were based on documents recently released to solicitors Leigh Day as part of an ongoing case at the High Court brought by an Afghan man, Saifullah Ghareb Yar. He says that four members of his family were shot dead in rural Helmand in a ‘night raid’ in the early hours of 16 February 2011.
The UK government claims that the family members were ‘killed in self defence.’ But the newly-released documents contradict this assertion. As the BBC article noted:
‘Just hours after the elite troops had returned to base, other British soldiers were exchanging emails describing the events of that night as the “latest massacre”.’
In other words, this was not the first such case where killings of unarmed civilians by Special Forces had taken place.
Saifullah’s family were asleep at 1am when they woke suddenly to the sound of helicopter rotors, followed by shouting through megaphones. Saifullah was a teenager, caught in the middle of a Special Forces ‘kill or capture’ mission. He told the BBC what happened:
‘My whole body was shaking because of the fear. Everyone was frightened. All the women and children were crying and screaming’.
His hands were tied and he was put in a holding area with the women and children.
The BBC report continued:
‘He had not been there for long when he heard gunfire.
‘After the troops had left, the bodies of his two brothers were discovered in the fields surrounding their home. His cousin had been shot dead in a neighbouring building.
‘Going back into his house, Saifullah found his father, lying face down on the ground.
‘“His head, the forehead area, was shot with many bullets, and his leg was completely broken by the bullets’.”
The official UK Special Forces report on the killings claimed that the British soldiers had been threatened by the Afghan men brandishing weapons. In particular, the official report claimed that after initially securing the compound they went back in to search the rooms with one of the men they had detained. This man, said Special Forces, suddenly reached for a grenade behind a curtain. Their report stated:
‘He poses an immediate threat to life and is engaged with aimed shots. The assault team members take cover. The grenade malfunctions and does not detonate’.
Another of the four Afghan men was killed when told to go into another building to open the curtains, said Special Forces. He supposedly emerged with a rifle and was then shot dead.
The official account of the killings, noted the BBC, was ‘met with suspicion by some in the British military.’ The more detailed article in the Sunday Times includes the disbelieving response of a senior officer reading the Special Forces’ version of events:
‘Basically, for what must be the 10th time in the last two weeks, when they sent [an Afghan man] back into the [building], to open the curtains(??) he re-appeared [sic] with an AK [AK-47 assault rifle].’
An internal army message included a summary of the official Special Forces report and concluded by saying: “You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”
However, it appeared as though Special Forces had made it up.
The serious allegations in the BBC and Sunday Times articles followed a Panorama programme, ‘War Crimes Scandal Exposed’, last November in the wake of the government’s announcement that investigations into alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan would be closed, before a single soldier had even been prosecuted. Panorama worked with the Sunday Times Insight team, revealing ‘evidence of a pattern of illegal killings by UK Special Forces.’
In the programme, BBC reporter Richard Bilton met UK detectives, formerly of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), who spoke for the first time about how they were prevented from prosecuting soldiers suspected of serious crimes. These detectives believe that the Ministry of Defence and senior military officers were involved in the cover-up of torture and illegal killings. This happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
IHAT was set up by the Labour government in 2010. But, as Bilton noted for Panorama:
‘Despite years of work, not a single one of the almost 3,400 allegations against British troops [in Iraq] was prosecuted.’
He continued:
‘Then, in 2017, the Conservative government shut IHAT down. The government claimed it was down to the actions of one solicitor. Phil Shiner ran Public Interest Lawyers, a legal firm that brought over a thousand cases to IHAT. He was struck off following allegations he had paid fixers to find clients in Iraq.’
In her speech to the Conservative party conference that autumn, Prime Minister Theresa May, proclaimed to great applause that:
‘we will never again in any future conflict let those activist left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave, the men and women of our Armed Forces’.
But, as one former IHAT detective told Panorama:
‘It was helpful to close IHAT down, wasn’t it? [ironic tone]. You don’t need an excuse. All you’re going to say is, “Right, everything’s now tainted. We can bin all that. Yippee.” It was a whitewash. Public Interest Lawyers and Phil Shiner – that was used as an excuse to get rid of a lot of jobs and say: “IHAT, you’re finished”.’
As Bilton observed:
‘Phil Shiner broke the rules. But that doesn’t mean all the allegations made by Iraqi civilians were untrue. The detectives we’ve spoken to say IHAT was shut down for political reasons. It was a cover-up.’
He added:
‘IHAT detectives say the government never wanted any soldiers prosecuted, no matter how strong the evidence.’
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, at the same time that the government announced IHAT would be shut down, it also decided to end an investigation, Operation Northmoor, into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
Bilton:
‘Northmoor’s team of detectives had been investigating allegations of executions by British Special Forces. They had linked dozens of suspicious killings on night raids. But Northmoor was closed before they even interviewed key Afghan witnesses.’
He added:
‘Some of those killed were undoubtedly members of the Taliban. But the UN has concluded that Coalition forces killed more than 300 innocent civilians.’
This is a shocking statistic. Perhaps the most appalling case Panorama investigated was the brutal killing of four boys in the Helmand village of Loy Bagh in October 2012, shot dead while they were sitting drinking tea. Bilton reported:
‘Detectives discovered Special Forces didn’t tell the truth about the raid. The first military reports failed to disclose British involvement.’
Instead, they attempted to pin the blame on Afghan forces; a common evasive tactic.
‘Detective say UK forces were falsely attributing suspicious deaths to Afghan forces, so British troops wouldn’t be investigated.’
The British soldier who shot the four boys later claimed to UK detectives working for IHAT that he shot two of the boys because they were standing and pointing weapons at him, and he shot at the other two ‘when they appeared out of the shadows’.
But the evidence of bullet holes low down in the room was inconsistent with his account. The boys had been sitting, just as claimed by Afghan witnesses, not standing.
Such clashes with evidence and testimony from the scene of killings fit a pattern of official accounts of raids written up afterwards by UK Special Forces alleging ‘self defence’. Former intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge told Panorama that the night raids were a ‘perpetual motion machine of killing and capturing’. Former Operation Northmoor detectives believe the case brought by Saifullah Ghareb Yar (see above) is part of a pattern of cover-ups they were investigating. They allege that the British military and the government have covered up numerous murders by closing down IHAT (in Iraq) and Operation Northmoor (in Afghanistan).
Mark Urban, Defender Of The Faith
The new BBC online investigative piece, published on August 1, together with the Panorama progamme last November, are rare examples of serious public-interest BBC journalism attempting to hold the UK military and government to account. Will other BBC journalists, with responsibility for ‘defence’ and foreign affairs, pursue the latest revelations regarding the case of four members of Saifullah Ghareb Yar’s family being executed in Helmand province?
Consider, in particular, Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Newsnight, who has spent years reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan, very much from within a propaganda framework aligned with UK government policies and interests. For example, in a 2015 comment piece in the Evening Standard, Urban was happy to amplify the Cold War narrative spun by former top-ranking UK military officials:
‘Speaking to Britain’s former top military leadership, you find General Shirreff, or former Chief of the General Staff Gen Sir Peter Wall, arguing that Russia is the principal worry. Lt Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, former Director of Special Forces, or General Lord David Richards (former Chief of the Defence Staff) believe the Islamic State is the real game changer. Talk to some of the US military leaders or intelligence people and they are more worried about China.
‘Either way, the ability of countries such as the UK to do something about these emerging threats is limited by the dramatic cuts enacted after the Cold War.’
For Urban, there was no need to insert ‘emerging threats’ in inverted commas; it was simply a given that China and Russia threaten the UK. The possibility that it could be the West that is threatening China and Russia is presumably unthinkable.
As John Pilger writes in a new piece commemorating the victims of the US atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, intended as a show of strength to show the Soviet Union who was the world’s boss:
‘Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S. strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.’
But, as ever for compliant Western propagandists like Urban, the Orwellian framework that ‘we’ are only ‘defending’ ourselves is deeply embedded in establishment-friendly ‘journalism’.
As we have previously noted, Urban is a former defence correspondent at the Independent. He served in the British Army, both as a regular officer for nine months as well as serving four years in the Territorials. He has hosted a series of virtual reality war games on the BBC, Time Commanders, re-enacting key battles. He is also the author of several books:
Soviet Land Power (1985)
War in Afghanistan (1987)
Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the secret struggle against the IRA (1992)
UK Eyes Alpha: Inside British Intelligence (1996)
The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell (2001)
Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters (2003)
Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World (2005)
Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America (2007)
Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the Secret Special Forces War in Iraq (2010)
The Tank War: The British Band of Brothers – One Tank Regiment’s World War II (2014)
The Edge: Is The Military Dominance Of The West Coming To An End? (2015)
The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy (2018)
On August 3, we checked Urban’s Twitter account and noted that he had made only the most cursory reference to the allegations regarding Special Forces in Afghanistan in a replyto someone called Henry Hyde who had flagged them up to him.
‘Yes Henry. It gives a fuller version of allegations previously reported by the paper in relation to a particular squadron of 22 SAS during its tour in Afghan.’
Why are you not drawing attention to these important allegations of UK Special Forces executing unarmed civilians?’
Urban did not reply. This contrasts with the early years of Media Lens when Urban – as well as other high-profile ‘mainstream’ journalists – would engage in substantive email exchanges with us. In 2007, for example, we critiqued his assertion in a BBC report that US troops were ‘here to help’ in Iraq. This, of course, was the propaganda line that the US and its allies were desperate to sell to the public following the bloodbath of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation.
To his credit back then, Urban replied to us, although he disparaged our analysis as being:
‘put together by you sitting at home, sifting current events through a dense filter of ideology.’
The implication was, of course, that Urban – as an ‘impartial’ BBC News correspondent – was subject to no ‘filter of ideology’ at all. Long-term readers may recall Andrew Marr’s similar assertion in the Daily Telegraph back in 2001 that when he joined the BBC as political editor, his ‘Organs of Opinion were formally removed’.
Ironically for Urban, our analysis that had been ‘put together by [us] sitting at home’, was supported in 2007 by a serving British Army officer who had read the exchanges with Urban in our media alerts, and had then written to him. The anonymous officer said that the view that the war had been ‘illegal, immoral and unwinnable’ was ‘the overwhelming feeling of many of my peers’.
As a result of these exchanges involving Media Lens, the British army officer’s views were reported on Newsnight; one of the vanishingly rare occasions in which the ‘mainstream’ media have so much as mentioned us. At that time, the Newsnight editor was Peter Barron, with whom Media Lens had had several polite and respectful email exchanges.
We had a further lengthy exchange with Urban in 2009 following this extraordinary claim about anti-war protesters in his BBC ‘War and Peace’ blog that:
‘it was their hand wringing and magnification of every set back or mis-step that played a key role in undermining the political will to achieve more in southern Iraq.’
‘You have misunderstood the whole basis of the anti-war protest. The argument is that the invasion was illegal, in fact a classic example of the supreme war crime – the waging of a war of aggression. The Nuremberg trials were clear that it makes not a jot of difference whether such criminality has positive outcomes – the waging of aggressive war is illegal.’
This entirely rational and well-established point, rooted in international justice, was apparently incomprehensible to Urban who replied:
‘Are you comparing British soldiers to Nazis? I cannot see the comparison; either in legal or moral terms.’
This standard ‘mainstream’ resort to ‘moral equivalence’, when the crimes of the West are raised, has been demolished by Noam Chomsky who once told BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian:
‘Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible… Minimal moral integrity requires that if we think something is wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.’
In late 2009 and early 2010, the Sunday Times published articles by its reporter Jerome Starkey detailing the killing of eight Afghan schoolboys in a night raid by US-led troops. We wrote two media alerts at the time (here and here), highlighting how a Nato spokesperson had initially denied that schoolchildren had been shot in the head – several of them after first being handcuffed – and then retracting their cover story. Western authorities later offered relatives ‘compensation’ of US$2,000 for each life taken. We noted the dearth of follow-up ‘mainstream’ interest to Starkey’s courageous reporting, including the BBC’s failure to report the allegations fully and responsibly.
Without access to all of Newsnight’s broadcasts during this period, it is not possible to categorically say whether the programme reported much of this, if anything. As the usual correspondent for reporting from Afghanistan, it would most likely have fallen to Mark Urban to cover it.
Following the latest revelations on August 1 on the killing of four of Saifullah Ghareb Yar’s relatives in Helmand (see above), an anodyne piece by Urban appeared on the BBC News website on August 3, blandly titled, ‘Defence Secretary to review SAS Afghanistan emails’. This was later on the same day that we had tweeted him. Arguably, this means he had been too busy to respond; though surely a short reply would have taken him just a few seconds. However, the focus of Urban’s piece was not the shocking execution of unarmed civilians, but on how the revelation of secret emails about Special Forces operations in Afghanistan was:
‘causing recriminations within the Ministry of Defence, with a process starting this week to re-examine how ministers were kept in ignorance of their content.’
The emphasis of his report was the ‘fresh worries’ in the Ministry of Defence about the revelations and the stressful impact on army veterans:
‘The allegations about D Squadron’s tour – each of 22 SAS’s sub-units rotated through Afghanistan in turn for 3-4 months – are not new.
‘They have already been investigated by the Royal Military Police under Operation Northmoor, a prolonged inquiry that ended without any soldiers being charged.
‘Veterans of the regiment have complained about the stress of such prolonged enquiries.’
The piece mentions allegations of ‘a deliberate policy… to engage and kill fighting aged men on target even when they did not pose a threat’, but was shorn of details of the killing of unarmed civilians. This fits a pattern of Urban’s reporting. We have been unable to find anything substantive about the impact of Special Forces’ operations on Afghan and Iraqi civilians in his Twitter timeline, his BBC blog, or anything he has published online or in any newspaper. It is almost impossible to give a definitive set of search results with 100 per cent confidence. But, as an example, if one searches the BBC News website using the search terms “Mark Urban” + “Special Forces” + “civilians” only a handful of results are returned; and nothing of substance in which the emphasis is on civilian victims.
For instance, in a 2011 BBC News website piece by Urban, titled ‘Impact on special forces of Navy Seals helicopter loss’, there was a token mention in the final paragraph of the occasions when ‘Afghans report civilians being killed’. This encapsulates Urban’s propaganda journalism as a whole: overwhelming weight is given to the priorities of the UK establishment and the military, with only passing mention of the destructive impact of UK policy and actions on the victims.
Admittedly, we have not read Urban’s books in the lengthy list above. But would it be at all likely that his reporting in book form would suddenly shift by one hundred and eighty degrees to focus, not on British armed forces, but on their victims? In a review of Urban’s book, ‘Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the Secret Special Forces War in Iraq’, Observer foreign correspondent Jason Burke noted:
‘Few reporters succeed in cultivating any sources within the closed world of the British special forces; Urban has found dozens who have spoken with unprecedented candour.’
Given Mark Urban’s history of ‘cultivating’ sources within British special forces, and his privileged extensive access to UK military and intelligence agencies, how likely is it that he would not have known about the serious allegations of the execution of innocent civilians going back many years? His unwillingness to seriously explore allegations of this kind is hugely significant.
Burke notes that Urban ‘had to battle with the Ministry of Defence’ to have the book published, but then adds:
‘one wonders what reception a work more critical of British special forces’ operations might have received in Whitehall. The author’s personal admiration for the men who constitute his subject is clear. Language veers from the breathless – “Britain’s hand-picked troops”, the “SAS had got its man”– to the soldierly – firefights are “epic”, problems are “aggro”.’
Would the author’s ‘personal admiration’ for these men be so high if he had investigated and reported the many credible accounts of unarmed civilians being killed by Special Forces, followed by cynical attempts at cover-ups aided, if not directed, by senior figures within the Ministry of Defence?
Remarkably, in November 2010, almost one year after the killing of eight schoolchildren by Nato-led forces had been reported by the Sunday Times, Urban had told Newsnight viewers:
‘The biggest mistake of the coalition’s early years here was under-investment in the Afghan forces.’
It takes a particularly ‘dense filter of ideology’, to use Urban’s own words, to devote scant attention to Western crimes in the killing of schoolchildren, and other unarmed civilians, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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The US presidential elections coming this November will determine whether the current President Donald Trump or the Democratic nominee Joe Biden (if his mental capabilities are still intact) will run the White house.
But whether Trump or Biden becomes president, Israel is the real winner in all of this. Trump is no doubt already controlled by the neocons and his relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is close, but Joe Biden who declared he was a Zionist back in 2008 is trying to win Israel’s support once again. Here is his interview with Shalom TV:
Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo is a neocon and Israel’s lead spokesperson who addressed the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem said that “I’m speaking to you from beautiful Jerusalem, looking out over the old city.” Pompeo praised Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. Pompeo claimed that Trump “squeezed the Ayatollah, Hezbollah and Hamas.”
Pompeo also mentioned Trump’s decision when he authorized a missile strike murdering one of Iran’s top generals, Qasem Soleimani when he said that “in the Middle East, when Iran threatened, the president approved a strike that killed the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani.” Soleimani was the same man who fought against the US-backed Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and against Al-Qaeda during the September 11th attacks, but that is obviously forgotten in the mainstream media. Trump has imposed Israel’s agenda by relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump has also recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory even though it is Syrian territory and he imposed a one-sided so-called “peace plan” with the Palestinians with his Zionist son-in-law Jared Kushner with no Palestinian input into the plan. Trump’s peace deal between the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a Western puppet state and Israel did not change Netanyahu’s commitment to annexation plans in the West Bank which according to him was “still on the table.”
Under Trump’s first term, Israel has gained an edge politically over the Palestinians and has created more tensions between Israel and Iran. But the Democrats with Joe Biden and his vice-president nominee Kamala Harris are leading the charge and are fighting hard to win Israel’s support. Harris recently said that “Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” during a virtual fundraiser with potential Jewish-American voters.
Harris repeated what almost every American politician had said since Israel’s creation in 1948
“I pledge to you the Biden-Harris administration will sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security, including the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation pioneered during the Obama-Biden administration and the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”
Before Barack Obama left office in 2016, he signed a $38 billion memorandum of assistance to Israel over a 10-year period.
No matter who wins the elections come this November, Israel wins and the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East lose. The Israel lobby known as the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), is one of the most powerful lobbyists’ in Washington D.C. (besides Big Pharma and Big Oil) is an influential group of Zionists who have an agenda to erase the Palestinians and their history from their lands and expand its territory in the Middle East like they did with the Golan Heights under Trump.
Democrat or Republican, both sides have blood on their hands when it comes to the Palestinians and all of the wars in the Middle East. Unfortunately, another major loser in all of this pandering to the Israelis is of course the American taxpayer, something both sides of the political spectrum ignore. With a Biden-Harris presidency or the current status quo with Trump-Pence, the Middle East will once again be in turmoil after the November elections and that’s a fact the world cannot ignore.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The critical assessment of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) last month by the influential Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies coupled with India’s eagerness all summer to court the Eurasian Great Power into joining its so-called “Indo-Pacific” projects have combined to create the impression that Russia might be backtracking on President Putin’s previously expressed intention last year to integrate his country’s Greater Eurasian Partnership with the New Silk Road.
Debunking The Dogma
Many independent and alternative reports believe that Russia and China are working closely with one another on all levels in order to advance their shared grand strategic interest of accelerating the emergence of the Multipolar World Order.
This naturally presupposes that they’re continuing to make progress on President Putin’s previously expressed intention last year to integrate his country’s Greater Eurasian Partnership with the New Silk Road, but recent developments are creating the impression that Russia might actually be backtracking on China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI).
These are the critical assessment of BRI last month by the influential Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies and India’s eagerness all summer to court the Eurasian Great Power into joining its so-called “Indo-Pacific” projects.
Russia’s Critical Assessment Of BRI
About the first of these two developments, Alexey Maslov‘s Russian-language interview to Interfax should be Google Translated and read in full by anyone interested in learning more about Russia’s evolving views towards BRI. He was surprisingly candid for a Russian expert of his caliber in discussing the challenges inherent to this global series of megaprojects, as well as China’s grand strategic motivation in pursuing them in the first place. Maslov also implied some criticisms of it when sharing his assessment that China basically wants to take control of the global economy through these means, which also includes the use of so-called “debt traps”.
Even more interestingly, he claimed that Russia isn’t a part of BRI contrary to conventional belief, but nevertheless seeks to pragmatically cooperate with it. Maslov then elaborated on why this is so, focusing on the problems related to their bilateral trade and investment relations. Altogether, his interview is extremely insightful and should be taken seriously due to the influence that he wields over Russian policy by view of his esteemed position.
The “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor”
The second development is less surprising since it’s been tracked for a while now, and that’s India’s eagerness to court Russia into joining its so-called “Indo-Pacific” projects. What was unexpected, however, was the spree of proposals that were made all summer.
The first move came during the joint online conference between the Russian International Affairs Council and the Indian Council of World Affairs in mid-July. The Indian Ambassador to Russia encouraged his host country to work more closely with his homeland in this trans-oceanic sphere, provocatively drawing particular attention to safeguarding “international rules and law” in the South China Sea where both have invested in Vietnamese offshore energy deposits contested by China. A suggestion was also made to undertake joint projects in Asia and Africa, which hints at Russia joining the Indo-Japanese “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC) like the author previously proposed. ThePrint.In reported in late July that the Indian Ambassador reiterated such cooperation proposals to Russian officials during that time.
India’s Military & Diplomatic Outreaches To Russia
India’s envisioned “Indo-Pacific” partnership with Russia isn’t just economic, but also carries with it very important military and diplomatic dimensions. The Economic Times reported in late July that the two countries might sign a LEMOA-like military logistics pact by the end of the year, the possible implications of which the author analyzed in December 2018 in his piece about how “A Russian-Indian LEMOA Could Lead To Logistics Pacts With Other Littoral States”. The other related development was Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla officially discussing “the proposal for a Russia-India-Japan trilateral mechanism with the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Igor Morgulov, on August 4.” While the official purpose of such a structure would likely be presented as advancing Russia’s possible participation in the AAGC, there’s no doubt that it would be perceived in practice as a “passively aggressive” move by China considering the context of its ongoing rivalry with those two Asian Great Powers.
World War C & The “New Detente”
The reason why all of this is happening so fast is likely due to WorldWarC, the author’s neologism for the full-spectrum paradigm-changing processes unleashed across the world as a result of the international community’s uncoordinated efforts to contain COVID-19. One of the most immediate consequences was that Russia and China began to look askance at one another, which the author elaborated upon in his analysis earlier this year titled “Rare Wrinkle Or Growing Rift?: Russia & China Exchange Criticisms Over World War C”. In connection with this, Russia also sought to make progress on its “New Detente” with the US (the author’s neologism for ultimately reaching a series of “compromises” on a wide range of international issues) through its counter-COVID aid to America and their joint efforts to revive OPEC+. Taken together, these two pressing influences might have contributed to Russia’s changed attitude towards BRI, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing or anything to be seriously concerned about so long as Moscow manages to keep up its 21st-century “balancing” act.
Russia’s “Balancing” Act Between China & India
The author has written extensively about Russia’s “balancing” act between China and India, but warned back in November in response to Russia’s perceived “tilt” at the time towards the latter that “Improved Russian-Indian Ties Must Be Balanced With Improved Russian-Chinese Ones”. Failure to do so would risk sparking a “strategic dilemma” with China, one which would be to both it and Russia’s detriment while definitely being to the decisive advantage of India and its new American patron. One unique proposal that the author made in a jointly authored academic article in May for the official journal of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) concerns “The Prospects Of Russia And India Leading A New Non-Aligned Movement”, though the subsequent Galwan Incident makes it unlikely that Moscow will make any tangible progress on this front for the foreseeable future out of fear of triggering the aforesaid “strategic dilemma”. In fact, it can be argued that agreeing to any of India’s recent proposals without committing to symmetrical Chinese ones would lead to the same outcome.
Breaking The “Balancing” Act?
Therein lies the challenge at the core of Russia’s grand strategy since it’s a lot easier to talk about “balancing” than actually doing it, let alone well enough to the point where neither party suspects the “balancing” state of ulterior motives. In the current context, if Russia joined the AAGC, agreed to a LEMOA-like pact with India, and/or participated in a trilateral mechanism alongside Japan, it might give rise to Chinese suspicions about Moscow’s true long-term intentions towards the People’s Republic. Under such circumstances, China would have no reason pay much attention to its prior plans of building the Eurasian Land Bridge through Russia en route to the EU since it already has several complementary corridors that it can rely on instead such as the “Polar Silk Road”, the “Middle Corridor”, and BRI’s flagship project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its related branch routes that the author describes as CPEC+. That in turn could undermine Russia’s ongoing systemic economic transition away from energy exports and towards becoming an East-West bridge for trade.
The Strategic Importance Of Clear Communication
It’s difficult at this moment to predict whether Russia will agree to all of India’s proposals, and if it does, whether it would also commit to any symmetrical Chinese ones to “balance” them out. The latter could prospectively see it loudly reaffirming its involvement in BRI by also making progress on the “Meridian Highway” segment of the Eurasian Land Bridge, reaching a LEMOA-like agreement with China, and pioneering a G2 mechanism for coordinating their policies all across Eurasia. Regardless of what Russia ends up doing, it mustn’t forget the strategic importance of clear communication in expressing its intentions towards China and India. Some of the constructive criticisms that the author recently made about Russian strategy is that the country never articulated its “balancing” act and oftentimes takes its partners for granted, which is why it must proudly embrace “balancing” by explicitly making it the basis for its dealings with China and India as well as being open to “compromising” with each of them as regards their concerns about its ties with the other.
The Pakistani Solution
In his debut analysis for the Valdai Club about “How Russia Can Lead Eurasia’s Consolidated Response To The Economic Crisis”, the author proposed that the creation of a Russian-Pakistani trade corridor (“RuPak”) could help Moscow better manage its tricky “balancing” act with China and India. RuPak’s importance in this respect was explained at length in the author’s joint academic article about “Pakistan’s Role In Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership” that was published at the Russian International Affairs Council in June, which built upon his work the month prior about how “Improved Russian-Pakistani Relations Will Help Moscow Balance The New Bipolarity” between the US and China on the global level but also between China and India as regards their overlapping “spheres of influence” in Asia. As Russia begins to visibly backtrack on BRI due to World War C and the “New Detente” in parallel with seriously considering India’s economic, military, and diplomatic outreaches, it’s absolutely imperative that it retains its hard-earned goodwill with China, which it can do through RuPak.
Concluding Thoughts
After closely analyzing the drivers behind Russia’s newfound critical stance towards BRI as expressed by the influential director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies and its interest in possibly agreeing to India’s comprehensive outreaches over the summer, it begins to seem like Moscow isn’t backtracking on BRI as much as it’s clarifying the true relationship that it’s had all this time to this global series of megaprojects. President Putin’s “wishful thinking” for the future notwithstanding, it appears as though Russia’s involvement in China’s worldwide initiative wasn’t ever as extensive as the Alt-Media Community portrayed it as, which might understandably disappoint those countries’ supporters. Nevertheless, it’s important that everything is becoming much clearer nowadays since this recently revealed insight can assist analysts in better forecasting the course of their relations, as well as the next thrust of Russian foreign policy, which might potentially be towards Pakistan via RuPak in order to maintain Moscow’s tricky “balancing” act.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
War goddess Hillary never left the political stage gently into that good night.
Eager to avenge her loss to Trump in 2016, she keeps resurfacing instead of fading away like old soldiers.
With Biden holding a commanding lead in most polls through late August, she went public again last week, saying the following:
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” adding:
“I think that (Republicans) have a couple of scenarios that they are looking toward. One is messing up absentee balloting.”
“They believe that helps them so that they then get maybe a narrow advantage in the Electoral College on Election Day.”
“So we’ve got to have a massive legal operation, and I know the Biden campaign is working on that.”
“We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places.”
Political dirty tricks in the US cut both ways, a process profoundly not open, free and fair under one-party rule with two right wings.
Independent candidates are virtually shut out of contention, given no chance to compete on a level playing field.
According to investigative journalist Gregg Palast, “22% of all mail-in ballots don’t get counted,” citing a 2016 MIT study, adding:
The “safest way to vote” by absentee ballot is requesting one “2 months in advance.”
If doesn’t arrive by mid-October, pick one up “at your county board of elections, fill it out, and return it right there…and demand validation of your signature.”
“Don’t go postal.”
“In 2016, more than 141,000 ballots were rejected because someone challenged the signature.”
Voter suppression is longstanding practice in the US, today done with electronic ease on corporate-controlled voting machines.
In his book titled “How Trump Stole 2020,” Palest said “Trump & Co are stealing the election right now (by) ballot bandit(ry),” claiming he “stole 2016 and they’re at it again.”
US 2020 elections will be unlike any others in modern times with many, maybe most, voters exercising their franchise by mail – even though it’s as safe to show up at polling stations as go grocery shopping most people do regularly.
Weeks earlier, Trump falsely claimed mail-in ballots are “rigged,” refusing to say that he’ll accept November 3 election results if Biden wins, adding:
“I’m not a good loser, I don’t like to lose.” Depending on how things turn out, he’ll decide post-election whether to accept the result, saying:
“I have to see…I’m not just going to say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”
His campaign manager Tim Murtaugh said
“(w)e won’t know what kind of shenanigans (Dems) will try leading up to November” — claiming if things are “free and fair…Trump will win.”
In July, Biden accused Trump of trying to “indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work,” adding:
He’ll claim “they’re not real…not fair.” He might try to delay the election if polls show him way behind close to November 3, said Biden.
Last week Trump claimed the only way he’d lose is if things are rigged.
A statement by his campaign denied that he’ll try to hijack the election.
His campaign lawyer Matthew Morgan slammed Hillary’s remarks quoted above, saying she’s “trying to lay the groundwork for Joe Biden to deny the election results when…Trump wins.”
Separately, Speaker Pelosi urged Biden not to debate Trump, saying he hasn’t “comported himself in a way that has any association with truth, evidence, data, and facts.”
Farcical US political debates are scripted theater without substance.
They feature well-rehearsed posturing, slogans, and one-liners over solutions to cutting-edge domestic and geopolitical solutions — along with promises made to be broken if elected.
On issues relating to war and peace, corporate empowerment, neoliberal harshness, and police state crackdowns on nonbelievers, both right wings of the US one-party state are on the same page.
Their rhetoric, style and party labels alone differ. In office they’re much the same on issues mattering most.
Whenever US elections are held, dirty business as usual continuity always wins. It happens every time the same way.
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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.”
US hostility toward China’s growing political, economic, technological, and military prominence risks possible direct confrontation between both nations.
China seeks peace and cooperative relations with other countries in stark contrast to Washington’s aim for unchallenged dominance by whatever it takes to achieve its aims.
Last week, Trump regime envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea said (nuclear-capable) intermediate-range missiles may be deployed in the Indo-Pacific close to China’s territory.
Its Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian denounced what’s likely coming, saying the following:
“China decisively condemns the US’s plans to deploy intermediate-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific Region, and expresses its sharp displeasure with constant pressure on China and the neighboring countries, as well as with constant provocations at China’s borders.”
Noting that deployment of these missiles will affect Russia’s security, its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed concern, saying:
“We must also take into account that such armaments will also create additional risks for our territory as well, including objects of strategic importance, which would naturally require taking necessary response measures – which I would call compensatory.”
On August 2, 2019, Trump formally abandoned the landmark 1987 INF Treaty — based on phony accusations of Russian violations, invented ones because no real ones exist.
Responding to the unacceptable Trump regime action, Sergey Lavrov said the US began violating the INF Treaty “in 1999 when it began trials of combat unmanned flying vehicles with specifications similar to those of ground-launched cruise missiles banned by the treaty,” adding:
“Later it started using target missiles, ballistic target missiles, for testing its missile defense system, whereas starting in 2014 it began deploying in Europe launching pads for its positioning areas of missile defense – Mk 41 launching pads, which may absolutely be used without any changes and to launch Tomahawk medium-range cruise missiles.”
“That is a direct violation of the treaty. Such systems have already been deployed in Romania, are being prepared for deployment in Poland, as well as in Japan.”
The US under Republicans and Dems is a serial violator of treaties, conventions, bilateral and multilateral agreements, as well as the rule of law overall domestically and geopolitically.
Its provocative actions threaten world peace and stability.
In response to the likely deployment of US intermediate-range missiles close to the borders of China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific, Vladimir Putin said this action will result in a symmetrical response and create new threats.
On Friday in response to repeated US anti-China provocations, PLA spokesman Senior Col. Li Huamin said the following:
“Ignoring the rules of international law, the US side has repeatedly provoked troubles in the South China Sea, exercising navigational hegemony under the pretext of ‘freedom of navigation,” adding:
“We urge the US to stop such provocative behavior and restrict its maritime actions to avoid possible military accidents.”
What the Pentagon calls “routine freedom of navigation” is highly provocative in the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf, and other international waters close to the territory of nations it wants transformed into US vassal states.
On August 26, the PLA launched two missiles into the South China Sea, including an “aircraft carrier killer,” in response to unacceptable Pentagon aerial spying in no-fly-zone airspace during live-fire Chinese military exercises.
China’s Foreign Ministry called the US action a “naked provocation” that risked a possible “accident,” adding:
The PLA “will not dance to the US’ tune,” stressing that it should “pull itself out of the swamp of anxiety and paranoia.”
Time and again, provocative US intrusions occur in parts of the world not its own that heighten tensions and risk direct confrontation with nations it doesn’t control.
On Friday, the PLA said it expelled the USS Mustin guided missile destroyer from Chinese territorial waters near its Xisha Islands.
The PLA accused the Pentagon of breaching international law by its South China Sea provocations on the phony pretext of freedom of navigation — adding that its actions threaten China’s sovereignty and security.
According to China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet on Friday, the Pentagon unacceptably “sent military aircraft to the region more than 2,000 times in the first half of this year alone,” adding:
“The US tries to drive wedges between China and related Southeast Asian nations, push those countries to the front, and enlist them as pawns in its anti-China agenda.”
“Washington’s malign scheme to make the South China Sea another anti-China battleground will certainly fail.”
The US is a warmaker, not a peacekeeper in the Indo-Pacific or anywhere else.
The South China Sea and Persian Gulf are the world’s top hot spots.
If global war occurs by accident or design, it’ll likely be launched by the US in one or both of these areas.
What’s unthinkable is possible because of US rage for global dominance — pursued by endless wars by hot and other means that risk destruction of planet earth and all its life forms if things are pushed too far.
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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.”
Russia won the race to develop the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus. The United States has responded by slapping sanctions on a Russian research facility involved in creating it.
The US government has blacklisted several Russian scientific institutes, including the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute, which has worked with other non-military medical centers to develop and test the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine.
In April, a Russian company sent ventilators to the United States as a form of humanitarian aid, to help overwhelmed hospitals treat coronavirus patients. It was later revealed that this Russian firm had been under US sanctions since 2014.
State-led Covid-19 vaccine research in Russia, China, Cuba beat US ‘public-private partnership’
The Russian government announced this August that it had registered the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V.
Sputnik V was developed by the Russian Health Ministry’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. This scientific facility created the vaccine in a joint research project with the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute.
On August 27, the US Commerce Department imposed sanctions on Russia’s 48th Central Research Institute, blacklisting the scientific body.
While Russia took a state-led approach to create a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration announced a “public-private partnership” in May. The program, called “Operation Warp Speed,” saw the US government dole out billions of tax dollars to Big Pharma companies.
The Trump administration awarded massive contracts to private corporations like Novavax, Pfizer, and Moderna, while Trump reportedly offered “large sums of money” for exclusive rights to a vaccine being developed by a German firm so it could be sold for profit.
But the US public-private partnership was unable to develop a vaccine before foreign countries with government-led research efforts did. Besides Russia, a state-owned Chinese company says its vaccine will be ready by the end of 2020, while Cuba is doing clinical trials for a vaccine of its own.
US blacklists Russian research institutes
The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced a series of new sanctions measures on Russian research centers in the US government’s federal register on August 27.
Washington accused the blacklisted institutes of being associated with Russian chemical and biological weapons programs. The Kremlin denied this, calling the accusation “absolute nonsense.”
Russia won the race to develop the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus. The United States has responded by slapping sanctions on a Russian research facility involved in creating it.
The US government has blacklisted several Russian scientific institutes, including the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute, which has worked with other non-military medical centers to develop and test the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine.
In April, a Russian company sent ventilators to the United States as a form of humanitarian aid, to help overwhelmed hospitals treat coronavirus patients. It was later revealed that this Russian firm had been under US sanctions since 2014.
State-led Covid-19 vaccine research in Russia, China, Cuba beat US ‘public-private partnership’
The Russian government announced this August that it had registered the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V.
Sputnik V was developed by the Russian Health Ministry’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. This scientific facility created the vaccine in a joint research project with the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute.
On August 27, the US Commerce Department imposed sanctions on Russia’s 48th Central Research Institute, blacklisting the scientific body.
While Russia took a state-led approach to create a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration announced a “public-private partnership” in May. The program, called “Operation Warp Speed,” saw the US government dole out billions of tax dollars to Big Pharma companies.
The Trump administration awarded massive contracts to private corporations like Novavax, Pfizer, and Moderna, while Trump reportedly offered “large sums of money” for exclusive rights to a vaccine being developed by a German firm so it could be sold for profit.
But the US public-private partnership was unable to develop a vaccine before foreign countries with government-led research efforts did. Besides Russia, a state-owned Chinese company says its vaccine will be ready by the end of 2020, while Cuba is doing clinical trials for a vaccine of its own.
US blacklists Russian research institutes
The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced a series of new sanctions measures on Russian research centers in the US government’s federal register on August 27.
Washington accused the blacklisted institutes of being associated with Russian chemical and biological weapons programs. The Kremlin denied this, calling the accusation “absolute nonsense.”
The Russian research institutions sanctioned by the US government on August 27, 2020
A spokesperson for the Russian government called the decision “the sanctions theater of the absurd.” A Kremlin press release blasted Washington for being unable to “live without sanctions and without declaring restrictions for anyone every day.”
“Given the scientific research of one of the institutes [which is engaged in developing Russia’s coronavirus vaccine] we cannot rule out that this is another example of uncovered and rampant non-competitive struggle,” said the Russian government spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.
The US government’s media arm, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), accused these Russian research facilities of developing chemical and biological weapons.
RFE/RL explained, “Formally, the move imposes new licensing restrictions on U.S. companies that seek to do business with the blacklisted companies in Russia or elsewhere.”
U.S. authorities have blacklisted three Russian military and civilian scientific facilities, citing their alleged involvement in chemical and biological weapons research. https://t.co/OdWrefBfas
Russian state media noted that, in addition to being used to conduct clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccine, the Defense Ministry’s newly blacklisted 48th Central Research Institute is “where vaccines against Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), as well as a universal flu vaccine, had been studied and successfully tested.”
The US sanctions were imposed on the following Russian research institutions:
33rd Scientific Research and Testing Institute
48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Kirov
48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Sergiev Posad
48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Yekaterinburg
State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology
As the US Commerce Department blacklisted these Russian research facilities, it imposed additional sanctions on two dozen Chinese institutions – mostly construction, technology, and communications companies – accusing them of “engaging in activities contrary to U.S. national security interests.”
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Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
Featured image is from The US Department of Commerce (Photo credit: Flickr / Ken Lund)
Insecticidal Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton is the first and only GM (genetically modified) crop that has been approved in India. It has been cultivated in the country for more than 20 years. In a formal statement to the Supreme Court of India, the Indian government has asserted that hybrid Bt cotton is an outstanding success. It therefore argues that Bt cotton is a template for the introduction of GM food crops.
However, over the last week, two important webinars took place that challenged the government’s stance. The first was on Bt cotton and involved a panel of internationally renowned scientists who conclusively debunked the myth of Bt cotton success in India. The webinar, organised by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture and Jatan, focused on an evidence-based evaluation of 18 years of approved Bt cotton cultivation in India.
The second webinar discussed the case of Bt brinjal, which the country’s apex regulatory body, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), has brought to the brink of commercialisation. The webinar highlighted deep-seated problems with regulatory processes in India and outlined how the GEAC is dogged by secrecy, conflicts of interest and (scientific) fraud: participants outlined how the GEAC has been colluding with crop developers and seed companies to drive GM crops into agriculture.
Bt cotton failure
The panel for the Bt cotton webinar (YouTube: Bt Cotton in India: Myths & Realities – An Evidence-Based Evaluation) on 24 August included Dr Andrew Paul Gutierrez, senior emeritus professor in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley; Dr Keshav Kranthi, former director of Central Institute for Cotton Research in India; Dr Peter Kenmore, former FAO representative in India, and Dr Hans Herren, World Food Prize Laureate.
Dr Herren said that “the failure of Bt cotton” is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to.
He explained:
“Bt hybrid technology in India represents an error-driven policy that has led to the denial and non-implementation of the real solutions for the revival of cotton in India, which lie in HDSS (high density short season) planting of non-Bt/GMO cotton in pure line varieties of native desi species and American cotton species.”
He argued that a transformation of agriculture and the food system is required; one that entails a shift to agroecology, which includes regenerative, organic, biodynamic, permaculture and natural farming practices.
Dr Kenmore said that Bt cotton is an aging pest control technology:
“It follows the same path worn down by generations of insecticide molecules from arsenic to DDT to BHC to endosulfan to monocrotophos to carbaryl to imidacloprid. In-house research aims for each molecule to be packaged biochemically, legally and commercially before it is released and promoted. Corporate and public policy actors then claim yield increases but deliver no more than temporary pest suppression, secondary pest release and pest resistance.”
Recurrent cycles of crises have sparked public action and ecological field research which creates locally adapted agroecological strategies.
He added that this agroecology:
“… now gathers global support from citizens’ groups, governments and UN-FAO. Their robust local solutions in Indian cotton do not require any new molecules, including endo-toxins like in Bt cotton”.
Prof Gutierrez presented the ecological reasons as to why hybrid Bt cotton failed in India: long season Bt cotton introduced in India was incorporated into hybrids that trapped farmers into biotech and insecticide treadmills that benefited GMO seed manufacturers.
He noted:
“The cultivation of long-season hybrid Bt cotton in rainfed areas is unique to India. It is a value capture mechanism that does not contribute to yield, is a major contributor to low yield stagnation and contributes to increasing production costs”.
Prof Gutierrez asserted that increases in cotton farmer suicides are related to the resulting economic distress.
He argued:
“A viable solution to the current GM hybrid system is adoption of improved non-GM high-density short-season fertile cotton varieties.”
Presenting data on yields, insecticide usage, irrigation, fertiliser usage and pest incidence and resistance, Dr Keshav Kranthi said that a critical analysis of official statistics (eands.dacnet.nic.in and cotcorp.gov.in) shows that Bt hybrid technology has not been providing any tangible benefits in India either in yield or insecticide usage.
He said that cotton yields are the lowest in the world in Maharashtra, despite being saturated with Bt hybrids and the highest use of fertilisers. Yields in Maharashtra are less than in rainfed Africa where there is hardly any usage of technologies such as Bt, hybrids, fertilisers, pesticides or irrigation.
It is revealing that Indian cotton yields rank 36th in the world and have been stagnant in the past 15 years and insecticide usage has been constantly increasing after 2005, despite an increase in area under Bt cotton.
Dr Kranthi argued that research also shows that the Bt hybrid technology has failed the test of sustainability with resistance in pink bollworm to Bt cotton, increasing sucking pest infestation, increasing trends in insecticide and fertiliser usage, increasing costs and negative net returns in 2014 and 2015.
Dr Herren said that GMOs exemplify the case of a technology searching for an application:
“It is essentially about treating symptoms, rather than taking a systems approach to create resilient, productive and bio-diverse food systems in the widest sense and to provide sustainable and affordable solutions in it’s social, environmental and economic dimensions”.
He went on to argue that the failure of Bt cotton is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and a faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to:
“We need to push aside the vested interests blocking the transformation with the baseless arguments of ‘the world needs more food’ and design and implement policies that are forward looking… We have all the needed scientific and practical evidence that the agroecological approaches to food and nutrition security work successfully”.
Bt brinjal – the danger is back
The government’s attempt to use a failed technology as a template for driving GMOs into agriculture has been exposed. Nevertheless, the GEAC has been moving forward with late-stage trials of Bt brinjal, while ignoring the issues and arguments against its commercialisation that were forwarded a decade ago.
In February 2010, the Indian government placed an indefinite moratorium on the release of Bt brinjal after numerous independent scientific experts from India and abroad had pointed out safety concerns based on data and reports in the biosafety dossier that Mahyco, the crop developer, had submitted to the regulators.
The then Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh had instituted a unique four-month scientific enquiry and public hearings. His decision to reject the commercialisation of Bt brinjal was supported by advice from the renowned scientists. Their collective appraisals demonstrated serious environmental and biosafety concerns.
Jairam Ramesh pronounced a moratorium on Bt brinjal in February 2010 by stating:
“it is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary principle-based approach and impose a moratorium on the release of Bt brinjal, till such time independent scientific studies establish, to the satisfaction of both the public and professionals, the safety of the product from the point of view of its long-term impact on human health and environment, including the rich genetic wealth existing in brinjal in our country.”
The moratorium has not been lifted and the conditions he set out have still not been met. Moreover, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops in India. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (2013) was scathing about the prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies. The TEC went a step further by recommending a 10-year moratorium on the commercial release of all GM crops.
The regulatory process was shown to lack competency, possessed endemic conflicts of interest and demonstrated a lack of expertise in GMO risk assessment protocols, including food safety assessment and the assessment of environmental impacts.
Ten years on and regulators have done nothing to address this woeful state of affairs. As we have seen with the relentless push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems persist. Through numerous submissions to the Supreme Court, Aruna Rodrigues has described how GM mustard is being forced through with flawed tests (or no tests) and a lack of public scrutiny. Regulators are seriously conflicted: they promote GMOs openly, fund them and then regulate them.
And this is precisely what the webinar ‘Bt brinjal – the danger is back’ (watch on YouTube) discussed on 27 August. Organised by the Coalition for a GM-Free India, the webinar was arranged because the regulators have again brought to the brink of commercialisation a new Bt brinjal ‘event’ – a different Bt brinjal than the 2010 version. Also included in the webinar were the experiences of Bt brinjal introduction in Bangladesh.
Dr Ramanjaneyulu (Centre for Sustainable Agriculture) highlighted how need has never been established for Bt brinjal of which India is a recognised centre of diversity. The argument for Bt brinjal in the run-up to Jairam Ramesh’s moratorium was that pesticide use is a problem in containing the brinjal fruit and shoot borer. He noted that Bt brinjal was promoted by Monsanto, USAID and Cornell University, but serious protocol violations, environmental contamination concerns and potential adverse health impacts were discovered.
He outlined simple non-pesticidal, agroecological management practises that can and are being used to deal with the brinjal fruit and shoot borer.
Farida Akhter of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternative) outlined how the introduction of Bt brinjal in Bangladesh was not needed but imposed on the country, which has 248 varieties of brinjal. Where pesticide use is problematic, she argued that it concerns hybrid varieties rather than traditional cultivars of which 24 varieties are resistant to fruit and shoot borer.
Akhter said that poor quality brinjal and financial losses for farmers have been major issues. Many have abandoned Bt brinjal, but farmers have received incentives to cultivate and where they have done so, fertiliser use has increased and there have been many pest attacks, with 35 different types of pesticides applied.
The Bill Gates-funded Cornell Alliance for Science, a public relations entity that promotes GM agriculture, and USAID, which serves the interests of the GMO biotech sector, tried to sell Bt brinjal on the basis it would ‘save’ people from the overuse of pesticides and related illnesses. But Akhter argued that Bangladesh was targeted because the Philippines and India had rejected Bt brinjal. Again, protocol violations occurred leading to its introduction and Akhter concluded that there was no scientific basis for Bt brinjal: its introduction was political.
As for India, event EE1, the initial Bt brinjal, has now been replaced by event 142, a different Bt brinjal. Kavitha Kuruganti (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture) explained this in the webinar and notes that the GEAC, immediately after the 2010 moratorium was announced, went straight ahead and sanctioned new trials for this Bt brinjal. The GEAC basically stated that the moratorium did not apply to this version, while ignoring all the criticisms about lack of competence, conflicts of interest, non-transparency and protocol violations. It was effectively business as usual!
With event EE1, Kuruganti implied that the GEAC acted more like a servant for Mayco and its Monsanto master. Nothing has changed. She noted the ongoing revolving door between crop developers (even patent holders) and regulators. As before, developers-cum-lobbyists were actually sitting on regulatory bodies as event 142 was proceeding.
Under public-private-partnership arrangements, event 142 has been licensed to private companies for biosafety testing/commercialisation. Despite major concerns, the GEAC has pressed ahead with various trials. In May 2020, under lockdown, Kuruganti notes that the GEAC held a virtual meeting and sanctioned what were effectively final trials prior to commercialisation. She explains that important information and vital data is not in the public domain.
According to Kuruganti, the regulator sits with the crop developer and the companies and grant biosafety clearance, claiming all tests (soil, pollen flow, toxicity, etc) are complete. What is also disturbing is that these licensed companies have closed and opened under new names (with the same people in charge), thereby making accountability and liability fixing very difficult if something were to go wrong further down the line.
She concludes that the story of event 142 is even worse than event EE1:
“Once again, they are certainly hiding things that they don’t want conscientious scientists and aware citizens to see and know.”
Taken together, the two webinars highlighted how hybrid Bt cotton is being deceptively used as a template for rolling out GM food crops: a fraud being used to promote another fraud in order to force unnecessary GMOs into Indian agriculture.
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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
Tortilla con Sal: We’re here with Brian Willson, Viet Nam veteran and onetime criminal lawyer. Brian has written extensively about US imperialism and its effects around the world and what people in Nicaragua are especially interested in right now Brian is what’s happening in the United States as a result of the murder on May 25th of George Floyd. What’s your take on that?
Brian Willson: Well I think that 8 minute 46 second video focused on that policeman with his knee on George Floyd’s neck and his hand in his pocket as he’s looking at the camera, I think that picture finally disclosed viscerally 400 years of white exceptionalism in a way that people could feel, viscerally, that this is what people had been going through through our entire history in the United States and before it even became the United States. It exposed the fake identity of white supremacy in a way that nothing else has been able to do like that video.
And it changed the whole culture in a way. It affected everybody, not just in the United States but in the world. These demonstrations against police violence are happening all over the world, not just in the United States. Now I’m a white male, who because of that has been privileged and I discovered in Viet Nam that that privilege had become a disability because it had made me in a way, stupid. It had made me so comfortable in a sense that I didn’t need to ask serious, penetrating, critical questions about the war, or about my history. But there came a time in Viet Nam where I realized that I am living with a fake identity which was interfering with my capacity to see clearly, think clearly and to operate in a way that represented me as a human being, the way I would think that I wanted to be as a human being.
So what happened on May 25th I think was like a lightning bolt that struck the hearts and minds of virtually everybody in the United States and around the world and including the white supremacists who now know that their fake identity has been exposed and that makes them more violent. Because I know from my experience when I lost my fake identity in Viet Nam, I was suicidal. I took my own pistol and put it to my head because I’d been living a lie and how is that…how is that possible? That everything I had been taught in school, in church, at home, in the community, was not true…
That’s an astounding revelation to deal with and it has huge emotional repercussions… of being worthless, of shame, shame is something that I realized that my society had never experienced after genocides against the indigenous and the blacks. And if you can’t experience shame, you can’t grow. Your development is stopped because you don’t find your empathy. Empathy is critical to being a human being, to being in a collective society. So from that experience I felt that what happened in May and is still happening in Portland for example where I lived for 12 years and still have a home. I think they’re in their 86th day of protesting police violence every day. And many other cities the same, it’s just not as intense as in Portland.
I think there are several cops in Seattle who have just quit saying we just can’t do this every night, we can’t be putting up with these protests against police brutality. These young people, the young people who are leading these protests in Portland and elsewhere know that they have no future in the United States, they know that protests and the First Amendment means nothing if your going to say something that’s really poignant about society it’s not protected. If you’re going to talk about police brutality, it’s not protected because police brutality has been the norm for the whole society in our whole history because policemen have been designed to protect private property.
TcS: Could you talk a bit about the historical development of policing in the United States and how that lead to what happened on May 25th?
Brian: Well the concept of police, even before the the word policing, when they had guards or Pinkertons, they were hired to preserve the property of the property owners and of course originally the property owners owned human beings called slaves. So the original systemic version of police was to police human beings meaning that if you ran away, we’re going to come and get you, we will kill you if we need to but we will certainly bring you back to your slave master.
After the civil war, basically wage slavery replaced chattel slavery and so we had the rapid development of factories and the robber barons. They all had private, originally, police to maintain order in the factories and if there was any labor union activity of course that was immediately repressed and the history of the United States is that over 800 labor union organizers have been murdered, more than in any other country really. So all through from the 1860s into the 1930s the police were primarily protecting the coal mines, the gold mines, the factories.
Then we had people in cities that said “well maybe we need to protect our neighborhoods” and so they actually hired policemen with uniforms on the public payroll. Then the policemen formed unions and the union heads of all the police departments in the United States are paid from the public police budget. So in a sense police accountability is pretty much neutralized by virtue of police unions which are funded by the public because the union head is paid out of the police budget. So starting in the late ’60s the development of SWAT teams appeared.
These were super groups of cops, heavily armed, masked, body shields and they were dealing with the black uprisings in the cities, especially the Black Panthers.
TcS: Would you say the ’60s was the moment when the US police began to be seriously militarized?
Brian: Yes. And then subsequent to that the United States Congress has passed several Bills that authorize the military, the Defense Department, the Offense Department to give to police departments all over the United States, free, armored personnel carriers, jeeps, even tanks. So now we have a totally militarized police, even in small cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee. All police departments are militarized. In fact, increasingly now when the police show up when there’s a demonstration, the police themselves are the provocateurs of the uprisings because they are like Martians.
They’re so decked out in black and you can’t see their faces, you can’t see their shields, their IDs. And in Portland now, for 85 or 90 straight days, the police no longer wear their name tags. They use various kinds of projectiles, every day, every night… concussion grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets which really are metal with a rubber covering the metal. There’s been several dozen people seriously injured by the police.
TcS: Have any police been killed in Portland?
Brian: No police have been killed so far. The federal thugs have been there. You know Trump’s federal thugs came to Portland in early July. And they lasted abut three weeks and then they realized that well, this could go on forever and people were saying that those thugs were so brutal that they were creating the violence. Well, they left and the Portland police are worse. They literally are worse.
TcS: You’re a member of Veterans for Peace and one of your colleagues in the Veterans for Peace movement, Mike Hastie, was badly attacked by the Portland police, was he not?
Brian: Yes. He’s been attacked twice. He was a medic in Viet Nam. He’s been in the peace movement for at least 20 years. And he’s a photo journalist so he always has two cameras with him with two different lenses and he’s quick to go from one camera to the next depending what kind of a shot he wants. He has taken incredible shots every night of what’s happening. He was talking… this was with the federal thugs, before they left, he was talking to them up close, about 8 of them. You can’t see their faces. You can’t see their name tags because they don’t have a name tag on them, or it’s covered.
He was telling them that this was like Viet Nam and he said that in Viet Nam we committed atrocities every day, every day we were committing atrocities in Viet Nam and you are doing the same with the people of Portland. And then out of the blue, out of the left side of his body one of these thugs, about 12 inches from his face hit him head-on with tear gas, knocked his glasses off. And he kept talking, he kept saying “atrocities this is what we’re all about, atrocities, atrocities, atrocities, do you understand? You don’t know, this is what it’s all about…” and then they left and then the medics of the peace movement then helped him wash out his eyes. he couldn’t see for about a day and-a-half.
And then about a week or two after that, he was getting close-ups of the Portland police. They love to use their batons. After they’ve used the tear gas, after they’ve used the concussion grenades when people are coughing and choking and bending over they come and club you over and over and over again. And he was filming them doing that and the police just en masse rushed against him and several other people who were also taking pictures and they knocked them on the ground and several cops smashed his face with their feet just as he was on the ground holding his cameras, trying to protect his cameras. He didn’t get a a fractured skull, but he got a very severe right eye injury.
Other people, by the way, have had fractured skulls from the rubber bullets, going into the skull. A rubber bullet is still a metal bullet with rubber on the outside and they can penetrate the brain and paralyze you and the wound is not operable. I saw this in the West Bank when I was there and I saw the rubber bullets in people’s brains. I went to the hospital to look at the x-rays.
So these demonstrations are happening all over the United States. Portland just happens to be the flashpoint and the young people… well there’s moms that are out there together in yellow shirts. There’s vets that are out there in a different color shirt and then there’s people, the leaf blowers, they push the tear gas back to the police so they have a lot of leaf blowers now. And the young people that are on the front lines, they look like gladiators. They have chest protectors. They have shin guards. They have kidney protectors around their mid-section. They have helmets. They have gas masks. They are there to take the blows. Every night.
And these people know that there’s 50 million people unemployed in the United States right now. There’s 40 million people about to be evicted. There’s no future for these young people. Half of the small businesses will never come back to business. The United States government is doing nothing to help them and meanwhile the ten richest people in the world, the billionaires, the ten most rich billionaires together now own US$1.1 trillion while more and more people are homeless, more and more people are out of work.
And these young people know, this is our last stand. There’s nothing more for us. The government is rigged. The politics are fixed. They’re not broken. They’re fixed. Fixed in favor of the rich. And we know. We now know it. And that May25th video of the cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck really unleashed a kind of visceral energy that can’t be stopped. It’s not possible to stop it because it’s so clear, emotionally as well as intellectually that this society has always been this way for anybody but the white middle class. And the white middle class has only been prevalent since World War 2 for about 25 years. So they know it’s done. The United States is done basically. there’s no more normality.
TcS: Brian, you were here during failed coup attempt in 2018 so you were very aware of what was going on here during that time. Is it possible, or fair to ask you to offer some kind of comparison between or contrast perhaps between what was happening here in Nicaragua during April to July 2018 and what you have been witnessing and learning about from your friends in Portland?
Brian: Well I was getting ready to go to the hospital on April 18th. I was still at home waiting for my operation date. When the news came out on the 18th that the police had massacred the students, that news came on the 18th. It wasn’t true but it was announced on the news on Channel 63 and Channel 10, Channel 12 and I said to Ulda my partner “there’s no way the Nicaraguan police massacred students unless the police were being shot at”. It just wouldn’t happen. There would be no motive for the Nicaraguan police to shoot students.
And then by the 20th and the 22nd, the 23rd, there were multiple shooting in 8 different cities in Nicaragua. And I said this has been concocted with lies and yes people have died but the description and the narrative around what’s happening is not what’s really happening and the brutality of the opposition in Nicaragua was grotesque. They were filming themselves and putting it on Facebook. I don’t use those others like Twitter or Instagram and so forth. I only use Facebook which is bad enough.
And they were showing, I guess to scare the Nicaraguan people that this is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t join us. I thought and I told Ulda, this kind of thinking that these opposition people have, they’re brain washed by the people in the United States. Because this is the kind of stuff that the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA and USAID, they would think of things like this. Because they only know how to destroy and be deceitful. In Portland the police keep saying that what the people are saying about the police behavior, police brutality isn’t true, and it’s all on camera and the police are grotesque.
So anyone in Nicaragua who still listens to their orders from the US, then you know it has an agenda of destroying, not of building. So I’m afraid that money does speak and you bribe people and by the way I failed to mention there are provocateurs in Portland, paid by the police to cause… to commit crimes actually that justify the police coming down even harder. Some of the police have been caught looting and arsoning and smashing windows.
TcS: Sounds very similar to Chile.
Brian: So something has happened in the United States that can’t be reversed. It’s not just the virus for which the United States is the worst case for responding to the virus in the world , partly because white exceptionalism makes people in the United States think they’re invincible. This is a disease, a dis- ease, that permeates the culture. They weren’t prepared for the virus and as the President said, it’s just going to go away, it’s not going to be a big problem. So, you add the virus, the police brutality and Trump in a way gifting the nation with a real truth about American culture, US American culture, without any cosmetic cover.
The disguise is gone. The virus is ruining the economy. The police brutality is so obvious and young people know that there’s no future. And now you have Republican and Democrat conventions going though the theater of the absurd, trying to distract people from the fact that we still spend US$1.25 trillion a year on the military all over the world and not at home. It’s so insane.
TcS: One of the thing about the grass roots movement in Portland, Brian is that they’re very conscious of the broader reality of United States politics and culture and they want to change it and one of the things that they’ve been talking a lot about is how to develop more community based policing and how to replace the current police culture like this movement to defund the police I think they call it. Do you think Nicaragua has anything to offer people in Portland by way of examples they might try to set up and follow?
Brian: Well I think community policing requires a trust in the population of the government, a basic trust. In the United States there’s absolutely no trust in the government. There’s no trust in the media. There’s no trust in the health care system because there isn’t really a health system. It’s a private system that has some public components but never a guarantee of health care. So defund the police and defund the military are both very appropriate slogans but they are not going to be achieved in my opinion through voting or legislation.
It’s going to be because people stay in the streets indefinitely for months and months and months and months until there is some space for a discussion about the destruction of capitalism for profit, of an economic system designed for profit rather than for the needs of the people. I don’t see any future in legislation, in other words through the political system or through voting in the political system, which itself is a rigged system, voting.
But it means people have to be in the streets and the question is whether people have the ideology of solidarity with other people around the world and enough tenacity and enough strategy and discipline to remain in the streets indefinitely throughout the country. And there’s people in the streets even in Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. It’s not just Portland. Portland happens to have a lot of activists that live in Portland. It’s a white city. It’s predominantly a white city. But their motto now is Black Lives Matter.
So the young people know that all of our lives now are impacted by the collapse of capitalism, which the virus has shown, which police brutality has shown, as President Trump has shown. President Trump really has revealed the true nature of our culture, of United States culture.
TcS: And do you think there’s a chance that at a state level or perhaps at a community level that it may be possible to build a movement for community policing? Because here in Nicaragua community policing focuses on youth and they treat youth, they don’t see young criminals as delinquents. They see them as “youth at risk”. Do you think there’s any chance that that culture might take root and develop albeit in a limited way in one place or another in the US?
Brian: It’s possible but really what’s happening means there has to be a whole change in the consciousness of the culture. Nothing’s going to work now without a change. That’s why the explosion of empathy from the knee on the neck, that knee is on all our necks now. That’s metaphorically I think how people experience it. “Holy shit! We’ve all got that knee on us! It’s been on us all along but we pretended that we were supreme as white people…”
And that’s gone. So I think that it’s very likely that new models will emerge of bio-regionalism where sections of the country that have good fertile soil and enough rain will create local economies without supply chains, without long supply chains. That would be what I would call an indigenous model or an early neolithic model. But it would be a local model. It would be de-dollarizing and de-globalizing into a more local community where familiarity is the primary accountability mechanism, not law, but familiarity.
I think that is logically something that would evolve out of the calamity of capitalism which is as far as I’m concerned now is never going to recover. Fortunately. It’s a terribly destructive system. And you know that the Iroquois who were destroyed pretty much by George Washington during the 1770s and 1780s during the revolutionary war. I happen to have been born in Iroquois country. The Iroquois chiefs in 1790 called George Washington who was the first elected President, as we call him. They called him the Town Destroyer because he destroyed every Iroquois village to ashes, one of which was my village.
I was born in Geneva, New York, at that time it was called Kanadesaga. And I think the United States has always been the Town Destroyer. That’s how we formed as a nation. We stole the land from the Indians. We stole the labor from the Africans. And we called ourselves exceptional. And we have played this game with ourselves for 400 years and it’s now crashed. And that’s why I think that May 25th video is so important because in one 8-minute video you see a picture of 400 years of persecution of whites, indians, poor whites, women, blacks by the whites that feel that they’re superior. And you see how sick that is. It’s really sick.
So I’m not particularly hopeful or not hopeful. Or optimistic or pessimistic. I think the reality is that the system is no longer going to be functioning and the question is, is there going to be enough of a revolutionary movement to create the space to recreate something different such as a social democracy committed to producing for the needs of the people. And that might be of a bio-regional nature, especially as climate catastrophe becomes more intense.
In other words, the areas that are going to be more habitable will be the areas where there’s a temperature that’s bearable and that has enough moisture. And that’s going to be more limited as the next five, ten years go by. But there will be places that are habitable and those are the areas that might create or recreate the model that we originally destroyed when the Eurocentrics came to the New World and destroyed the indigenous lifestyle. But it’s clear now to most people in the United States that something has happened that can’t be reversed.
TcS: Brian, in a few days time it’s going to be the 33rd anniversary of the terrible attempt against your life that took place when you were protesting against armaments being sent to the war in Nicaragua. You suffered very very severe injuries and people were amazed that you survived…
Brian: I am too…
TcS: But in all that time you’ve continued to show solidarity with victims of anti-imperialism around the world, but especially Nicaragua. You’ve always maintained your strong attachment and affection and admiration for Nicaragua and its Sandinista Revolution, could you talk to people about why you feel that?
Brian: My own personal revolution started in April 1969 in Viet Nam. That’s when I had this epiphany that really affected my whole being. It’s when I discovered that I really had empathy and I didn’t know much about it. I was getting prepared to go to law school. I got drafted out of law school. Had to do my time. I was just going to resume being a lawyer. So something happened in Viet Nam that made me realize that all people are connected and that I fell in love with the Vietnamese Revolution. I didn’t even realize it was a revolution until I had my epiphany. “Oh I am dealing with a revolution and I am on the wrong side. I am an invader.”
So that kind of awakened me in general to conditions in the world. And in 1986 I had my first opportunity to come to the quote unquote Third World outside of Vietnam when I got a scholarship to study Spanish at the Nica School in Estelí. So I came to Nicaragua in 1986 and I spent two months in Estelí studying Spanish even though I didn’t learn it very well. And I was taken by the revolution that I had been reading about. I was living with two families in those two months, watching them in their literacy campaign, studying every night reading and writing on a chalk board, both families with children diligently studying every extra moment.
And knowing that the United States was trying to destroy the revolution, I just became more committed to not only supporting a popular revolution that helps people’s lives but to work against my own country’s policies that destroy aspirations of people because they’re not willing to kiss Uncle Sam’s ass in the way Uncle Sam wants them to live and to economically survive according to US rules. And I had learned that from the Vietnamese and I’d also been in El Salvador with the guerrillas, the same kind of a struggle against centuries of oppression.
And I knew how much money the United States was giving to El Salvador every day and I knew how much money the US was giving to the Contras every day because I was following the news, I was following it. I had many file folders of notes and articles. And I was following what was happening in Guatemala. Then in 1994 I went to Chiapas after the uprising in Chiapas after NAFTA. And I had already gone to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. I had been to Iraq after the bombings.
I had been in Haiti before Aristide was overthrown the first time. In fact I arrived in Baghdad after I had been in Haiti to read the headline in the one English language newspaper in Baghdad, called the Baghdad Observer : “Aristide Overthrown in Coup”, and I thoughT you know I can’t go any place without being reminded that the United States is just messing with everybody. And so in some way my motivation is that I can’t stand the suffering. It’s my suffering.
I still hear in the villages in Viet Nam after we left the villages after bombing them I still hear the moaning of the people that weren’t yet dead. Some nights I wake up crying, hearing that moaning. And we just left them to die without any medical care at all. What kind of a human being is involved in this kind of behavior? So you know it really required me to look at myself and realize that my white identity was a disability. Because I had internalized it like most of us have. It was our life. We were lucky. We were white. White males. We didn’t even have to work hard to get anything.
And it meant that I couldn’t critically think or see what was really happening. And that’s what happened to me. That’s why I put the pistol to my head in Viet Nam. I thought “Oh my God. I’m a fake. I’m like an ideological robot”. And so Nicaragua was a real live revolution when I came here and my country was trying to destroy it. And am I going to support the destruction of a revolution? or am I going to support the revolution? It’s kind of a no brainer, once you have had that awakening. I didn’t expect to live this long. But here I am talking about it.
TcS: Your support has been very important, especially over the last two, three years over what has been a very difficult time for Nicaragua with so many falsehoods spread about what’s been happening in Nicaragua. Do you think that that epiphany that you had those many years ago…
Brian: April 1969
TcS: has made it possible for you to see through all the falsehoods that have been put about…
Brian: Oh yeah… all I see is falsehoods. Then I studied history and the United States is built on falsehoods. It’s a whole fake history that we learn. So everything that we learn in the West and certainly in the United States is not true. So we have to keep telling lies to keep concealing the original lie, in order to feel ok. So now I knew it was all bull and I haven’t taken LSD and I haven’t taken a lot of drugs. It was a raw, raw experience that I was right in the midst of and like my brother said as I put in his obituary, after my parents died, who were very right wing, one of our good friends said to my brother and I “how did you two boys come out of those two parents?” And my brother right away, I didn’t have anything to say particularly, my brother right away said “we discovered we had a brain!”
Oh ok… maybe that’s true… But we also discovered that we had a heart and my brother later told me the reason he was so anti-racist is that in third grade there was one black girl in his class. This was in Geneva, New York. And the teacher who was our next door neighbor called the black girl up to the class to do something on the blackboard and she didn’t get it right and the teacher hit her with a yardstick. And my brother never forgot that. He would talk about it, he said, “from that moment on, I knew something was really wrong with how we’re trained, how we’re educated”.
He was nine and a half years older than me so he kind of led the way for me to have a break from our parents who were very strict, Republican reactionaries, really racist. So my brother who died this last Sunday, his time was due. But knowing he’s not around has been really hard for me, realizing that he’s no longer somebody I can touch. This happens to everybody in the world, I know, all the time, but I’ve had a lot of death in my life and I’ve never felt it like I have with my brother, my sibling. 79 years I’ve been his younger brother.
TcS: Brian, do you think it’s fair to say that your understanding and what you’ve come to know and learn about the way Nicaragua’s revolution has really and truly focused on – while they may not have got everything right – but their focus has been on improving the lives of their impoverished majority. Would you say that knowing that and experiencing it in its different phases over the last 30 or forty years has been a source of moral strength to you in terms of confirming your feelings about your epiphany and your feelings about your brother and what your brother thought was right. Is there any correspondence between what you know about Nicaragua and all this stuff that you’ve been talking about?
Brian: Well all through the ’80s, at least after I was coming to Nicaragua after 1986, ’87, ’88, ’90, every time I had a chance to speak here and in the United States I’d say “the Nicaraguan Revolution is as important to the people of the United States as it is to the Nicaraguans” because we need a revolution. We, the United States. We may… You see we’ve never had a real revolution. We haven’t had the first one yet. We may have it now. Or we may just go extinct.
But yes, experiencing a real revolution with all of its mistakes but an effort, an earnest effort to bring health care and education and literacy to campesinos, I mean, what’s more revolutionary than that? Just bringing some very tangible kinds of help and support to people who otherwise would just be forgotten. Like the indigenous in the United States who are totally forgotten. They’re worse off than the blacks in terms of their conditions. 80% unemployment. 70% alcoholism. And it was their land…
It’s like we are so contaminated with our violence and our lies that it really does require a revolution to break through just like the Sandinista Revolution broke through the Somoza mentality and the Somoza policies. There has to be a break in the way of people’s thought process and for me that did happen in Viet Nam. It happened to a lot of vets, not the majority of them but some and I think the May 25th video was the beginning, along with the virus, along with Trump is… it’s over. The honeymoon is over. The white exceptionalism, phony identity is done.
It may lead to a civil war, because the white males are armed to the teeth and they want to defend their fake identity. Because I know in Viet Nam when I realized I had a fake identity I was thinking about committing suicide… I mean, losing your identity? As a 27 year old or a 30 year old or a 16 or 15year old…that’s a tough thing to go through. I mean…everything I’ve been taught is bull? What! You mean my priest is telling lies? My teacher’s telling me lies? My parents are telling me lies? My school books are telling me lies? How can that be?
And yet, the whole history that we learn about the United States is fake. That’s the book I’m writing now. The fake history of the United States. And it’s screwed us up completely. We can’t see clearly. We can’t relate to people in any just way because it’s our way or no way. And it’s blinded us and so I’m glad I’m 79. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen except I know there’s not going to be any return to normality and that is good. Because normality in the United States was horrible.
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The massive explosion which devastated Beirut earlier this month was nothing short of a catastrophe. Some 220 people lost their lives and, according to the BBC, as many as 300,000 people are now homeless as a result. This is a devastating blow from which it will take Lebanon’s capital city a long time, probably years, to recover.
Among the most nauseating of responses to the blast was seeing representatives of the state of Israel sending “condolences” and fake offers of humanitarian assistance. As my colleague at The Electronic Intifada,Tamara Nasser, put it: “Israel, the destroyer of Lebanon was attempting to pose as its saviour.”
This ghastly vision was utterly contemptible for anyone who knows the history of Israeli involvement in Lebanon. The Zionist state has left a long, bloody trail of dead bodies, displaced people and shattered lives, having invaded its northern neighbour many times since the settler-colonial entity established itself — upon the mass graves of Palestinians — in 1948.
In the 1950s, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, secretly articulated plans to occupy Lebanon by force and transform it into a puppet sectarian state ruled as a Christian supremacist entity in alliance with Israel, the Jewish supremacist entity.
In order to meddle in and stoke the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Israel armed, trained and supplied puppet Christian Maronite militias in Lebanon, including the brutal sectarian Lebanese Forces led by Bashir Gemayel. In 1978, Israel invaded directly in order to attack the Palestine Liberation Organisation, occupying much of South Lebanon. Israeli forces were soon forced out after stiff resistance by Palestinian fighters, but they soon headed back across their northern border.
In 1982, Israel carried out a full scale invasion of Lebanon in an attempt to crush the PLO’s military, political and cultural presence once and for all. More than 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people were killed during this brutally aggressive war, including as many as 3,000 Palestinian refugees who were butchered by Israel’s Maronite allies in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under the watchful eye of Israeli troops, who fired flares into the night sky to light the militia’s way. Minister of Defence, later Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was found by an Israeli Commission of Inquiry to have “personal responsibility” for allowing this massacre to take place.
The Israelis reached and laid siege to Beirut, before being pushed back by stiff resistance and diplomatic pressure. However, South Lebanon remained illegally occupied by Israel until 2000, when the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah drove its forces out once and for all. Nevertheless, in 2006, Israel attacked Lebanon yet again, and another 2,000 people were killed in the massive offensive. Hezbollah succeeded in driving the Israeli troops out of Lebanon once more, but the country was again devastated.
Since then, Israel has carried out almost daily border violations, including fly-overs with drones and warplanes. Israeli politicians frequently threaten to bomb Lebanon “back to the Stone Age”, kill civilians and systematically eradicate the country’s civilian infrastructure, all of which are classed as war crimes.
On top of all of this, Israel’s spy agencies have now been planting stories in the international media pushing the dubious and unproven conspiracy theory that the explosion in Beirut this month was caused by Hezbollah. As investigative journalist Gareth Porter explains in his most recent article: “Israeli officials have exploited the massive explosion at the Port of Beirut this August to revive a dormant propaganda campaign that had accused the Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah of storing ammonium nitrate in several countries to wage terror attacks on Israelis.”
Israeli spy agencies, wrote Porter, have “planted a series of stories from 2012 to 2019 claiming Hezbollah sought out ammonium nitrate as the explosive of choice for terrorist operations. According to the narrative, Hezbollah planned to covertly store the explosive substance in locations from Southeast Asia to Europe and the US — only to be foiled repeatedly by Mossad.”
There is a slight problem with this Israeli narrative: none of it seems to be true. “In each one of those cases, however, the factual record either contradicted the Israeli claims or revealed a complete dearth of evidence,” insisted Porter, whose entire article is well worth reading.
In the wake of the Beirut explosion, global and regional powers – the US and Israel first among them – are exploiting the febrile atmosphere in the country, and the understandable anger of the Lebanese people at their politicians, in order to push for Hezbollah to disarm. This is a longstanding goal in any case.
However, as veteran Palestinian journalist and commentator Abdel Bari Atwan wrote recently, “Like the Syrian regime, Hezbollah will prove impervious to pressure to disarm or exit the political scene.”
Hezbollah has arms and fighters because there is a pressing and urgent need to defend Lebanon against Israel’s military invasions and incursions. This is something that the Lebanese army simply cannot do.
Only a couple of weeks before the Beirut explosion, Israel’s highly undiplomatic Ambassador to the United Nations made a thinly veiled threat to destroy the very same port that was devastated by the blast during his country’s next war with Lebanon. Moreover, Moshe Feiglin, the appalling former deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, reacted with obvious joy to the deadly blast, calling it a “spectacular pyrotechnics show” and a “wonderful celebration”.
So who were the Israeli President and army trying to fool when they claimed with characteristic hypocrisy that they wanted to “reach out” and “transcend conflict” by helping Lebanon to recover from the Beirut explosion? Whoever the intended audience was, very few people in Lebanon believed them, that’s for sure.
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Featured image: A damaged car and building are seen after a fire at a warehouse with explosives at the Port of Beirut led to massive blasts in Lebanon, 14 August 2020 [Enes Canli/Anadolu Agency]
Carlos Mendoza Potella is an economics professor at Venezuela’s Central University and advisor to Venezuela’s Central Bank. He recently spoke to Venezuelanalysis about the origins of the crisis in the country’s oil industry and what that means for its future.
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You have been working on the idea of long-standing “promotion of ignorance” in Venezuelan society in relation to the oil industry. This was done to favor private interests in the disposition of a resource that is state property. Chavez tried to turn this around by educating people. However, the Venezeulan population still has few tools to understand the oil industry and the policies that pertain to it. Can you explain your idea and its implications?
Hiding reality from a country’s citizens is a general problem in any state. Governments point to issues of national security or reasons of state to justify opacity and privilege particular interests. Occasionally there may be legitimate reasons for doing so, but in the case of the oil industry, more often than not, there is an illegitimate “promotion of ignorance” to cover up projects that are not viable, projects that are not favorable to the society as a whole although they may be very juicy for those who promote them.
The “promotion of ignorance” [also occurs in] an educational system with its back turned to the Venezuelan economy, which has been almost fully dependent on the oil industry until recently. This makes people unable to react when projects, though justified with technical or esoteric arguments, go against the interests of the society.
Now, this is nothing new, and we can find its roots in longstanding geopolitical relations of force. I have long argued that the development of the Orinoco Oil Belt [FPO], with its extra-heavy crude oil, didn’t coincide with the interests of the nation and, particularly, those of the Venezuelan people.
Developing the FPO, with truly pharaonic investments over time, dates back to 1972. The Middle East wars and conflicts in the Cold War were causes of concern to the Western powers, since they relied heavily on Middle East countries for oil supply. With this in mind, the US Congress and the energy agencies developed an energy security plan based on expanding production in both Canada and Venezuela’s FPO.
James Akins, US Energy Secretary under Richard Nixon, came to Venezuela and convinced President Rafael Caldera [1969-1974] to develop the FPO. Between 1983 and 2000, some hundred billion USD were invested!
Did that policy shift after President Chavez came to power?
Around 2000 Chavez got OPEC to work more on defending oil prices. However, that policy was weakened around 2005, with the reactivation of the FPO. With this initiative, a contradictory discourse got going: on the one hand support for OPEC and its practices to defend oil prices, on the other FPOplanning and investments that would increase production to 5 to 6 million barrels per day (bpd) or more.
There were huge investments in extra-heavy oil processing infrastructure, which led in turn to the abandonment of our conventional oil refineries and fields. This is an important cause of the catastrophic drop in production that we are facing today, which has also been negatively impacted by the US sanctions.
Left: Average BPD produced between 1917 and 2019 (OPEP and PDVSA data) / Right: Average BPD produced month by month between January and June 2020 (PDVSA and AFP data)
Oil production in June was 393,000 bpd, the lowest in Venezuelan history since February 1943. There are a multiplicity of factors, from the overemphasis on the FPO (only profitable during an oil boom) to the criminal blockade, from management problems to loss of qualified personnel. Could you help understand this complex situation?
As you point out, there are a multiplicity of internal and external factors. In the ‘80s, the strategic objectives that oriented the Venezuelan oil industry went against our national interest. That was followed by the “Apertura Petrolera” [literally “Oil Opening,” a 1992-1999 policy that opened the door to creeping privatization of the oil industry], leading to an important loss in sovereignty. In the early 2000s, there was a recovery of oil sovereignty, but this project lost ground when the Orinoco Belt became central again.
A lack of humility and a poor understanding of the global situation led to this decision, but of course, the Orinoco Belt path also involved huge economic transactions, procurements, and investments with juicy deals on the side. In fact, around that time, large sums of money were allocated not only for extra-heavy oil exploitation and processing infrastructure, but also for purchasing international assets. Of course, when oil prices plummeted [2014], we were in trouble.
The situation deteriorated further with the US sanctions [financial since August 2017 and oil embargo since January 2019], although the US’ aggressive policy against the Chavista administration actually began in 2000. With the Trump presidency, however, things reached another level. On his first day in office, Donald Trump characterized Venezuela, Russia, and Iran as “failed states,” stating that the US would fight against those nations. In the Venezuelan case, which the White House considers its back patio, the sanctions have accelerated the crisis that was brewing.
We failed to maintain our refineries engineered for lighter crude oil for years because we were dreaming of infrastructure to process the extra-heavy FPO oil. With conventional crude oil production stalled due to poor maintenance and with access to additives and other inputs needed to improve extra-heavy oil blocked, production is close to coming to a halt. In other words, we are not able to consume Venezuelan gasoline not only because the refineries are not working, but also because we cannot purchase the additives needed to create regular gasoline for commercial use.
These enormous investments, based on dreams, yielded practically nothing except juicy deals for some. Now there are some PDVSA managers behind bars, paying for the sins of others. However, the responsibility is really with the upper echelons, where the decisions for the strategic orientation of Venezuela’s oil industry were taken.
Left: Three images of the Orinoco Oil Belt (PDVSA) / Right: Orinoco Oil Belt map, blue section (Wikipedia)
I suppose that the personnel situation – the industry is understaffed due to workforce drain and workers are underpaid – must also impact the industry.
The conditions of PDVSA workers are dismal and, of course, that has affected production. Their salaries are a minuscule fraction of those in the industry elsewhere, and that has led many qualified workers to leave the country. Those who have stayed in Venezuela are heroes, but they are grossly underpaid and without support. Their plight is part of the overall deterioration of the industry.
Are there any options to come out of the crisis for Venezuela’s oil industry?
There are many circumstances that have taken us where we are, but there is only one thing that can keep the industry from coming to a total halt: end the blockade. We need the embargo to be lifted, and this has to happen soon!
Additionally, we have to reorient our strategic goals. First, we have to come to terms with the fact that we have to start from practically zero. That being so, we have to evaluate our real potential in the global context, which means placing the focus on conventional oil production and refining. There are conventional fields and infrastructure that have not been maintained. Recovering those should be our first objective.
We have to come to terms with the fact that investment in non-conventional fields no longer makes sense. We can project some twenty years until there is an energy consumption pattern shift, and we have to understand that the global crisis is leading oil exploration projects around the world to close down. We cannot be dreaming about producing five or six million barrels per day.
We do have, however, the potential to produce oil in modest quantities to supply our internal needs and generate moderate exports. That would allow us to put hard currency into the nation’s budget, thus helping our economy, which is in dire straits.
For some time, the government has promoted “strategic alliances” that are controversial because they stand on questionable legal ground. More recently, there have even been closed-door discussions about changing the country’s legal framework based on an alleged need to “reactivate and modernize” the oil industry. While admitting that some modifications and concessions may be necessary, you argue that the changes being considered – which resemble the 1990s “Apertura Petrolera” – threaten Venezuela’s sovereignty. Can you tell us about what is at stake?
The threats to national sovereignty are immediate. There are projects for legal and constitutional changes that are absolutely damaging to the national interest. And when I talk about the nation, I’m talking about the “eternal nation,” about the future generations.
We should understand that oil is not a panacea: the rent machine can’t fuel the rest of the economy. But we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and disregard valuable resources which can serve many generations because of their strategic magnitude. This generation doesn’t have the right to squander resources or sovereignty.
We can make temporary agreements for oil exploitation and processing. We could do it to guarantee internal consumption and to ensure a moderate level of exports. We have to administer what there is, both resources and sovereignty. We don’t have the right to use up what there is. That is precisely why the constitutional declares our resources to be a “national good,” and here I stress the idea of national good. A national good doesn’t belong to the Venezuelans that are alive today to say nothing of individual citizens. A national good belongs to the eternal nation and citizens cannot simply divvy up the patrimony among those who are alive today to the detriment of future generations.
For two weeks oil has been spilling from El Palito refinery onto the coasts of Carabobo and Falcon states, including Morrocoy National Park. (El Carabobeño)
In recent months there have been some accidents in PDVSA, such as the oil spill in El Palito refinery. There have also been complaints about high-risk situations, because of failure to maintain infrastructure. For example, a group of PDVSA Oriente workers warned that a tanker ship storing more than 1.2 million barrels in the Gulf of Paria is leaking and tilting.
The overall decay of the infrastructure could have catastrophic consequences. As you explained previously, there are multiple factors that lead to the deterioration of the infrastructure. However, this grave situation needs to be discussed.
There is no way to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. It is due, as I said before, to an erroneous geostrategic project. Nonetheless, this generation has an urgent task: it has to turn the situation around, and it must do so with its feet on the ground.
In any fortress under siege, the first obligation is to survive. With this in mind, we have to try to resolve the political circumstances that maintain us isolated and under siege, and unlock as many doors as possible. This means exercising political intelligence to ensure that the other side won’t finish us off. We also have to develop a realistic recovery plan that must be modest but sovereign.
To do things with modesty, first we have to understand where we are. We have to understand our resources in a global context tending towards a “green” pattern of consumption. Finally, we have to understand that we will have to negotiate with international capital, but this must be done maintaining our integrity and sovereignty.
Additionally, we must understand that the oil rent as the key element of our economy is history. In fact, the oil rent factor began to disappear a few years ago because growing production costs and the dwindling prices meant that the profit margin could no longer be considered a rent [i.e. a profit that is captured on the market and not generated through production], and it could no longer buoy the rest of the economy.
That, from my point of view, is the way out of the current crisis. However, we also have to begin to build an alternative now. We have to begin to build the long-hailed post-petroleum Venezuela. We must develop the economy on the base of our resources, our productive forces, our capacities, our will.
Agriculture, livestock farming, and fishing – those are areas with enormous potential, but we also have steel mills and the capacity to process iron. In fact, an agronomy professor told me that according to the data, Venezuela has the capacity to feed four countries its size.
First, of course, we have to feed our people, and we cannot count on the oil rent to do this. To do so, we will have to begin from the trenches. We have to climb out of the ditch and reach the ground, and from there we will have to learn to stand again. And yes, as we do this we will have to negotiate, but we have to do so under conditions of sovereignty.
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The Wall Street Journal scoop on the details of the Trump administration’s troop withdrawal from Iraq is welcome news. Reportedly, President Donald Trump is cutting U.S. troop levels by one- third, to about 3,500 troops from 5,200. This move would bring force levels back to where they were in 2015, at the height of the war against ISIL, which in and of itself demonstrates how unnecessary the troop level increases have been mindful of the decimation of the Islamic State.
Yet, the Journal — and the media narrative around this in general — frames this solely as a decision born out of political pressures in Iraq and the United States. The Iraqi public wants the United States to leave — as demonstrated by the Iraqi parliament voting to expel U.S. troops earlier this year – and Trump seeking to deliver on his campaign promise to end the endless wars.
“But both governments have faced political pressures at home from critics who have complained that the U.S. may be engaged in an open-ended mission,” the Journal reports.
While political pressures for bringing American service members home certainly exist — a poll conducted by the Charles Koch Institute last month revealed that three-quarters of the public support bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan —the media is mistaken in presenting this decision solely as a populist move devoid of a compelling strategic rationale. Indeed, America’s global military domination and endless wars are the baselines; it’s the decision to end wars and bring troops home that faces scrutiny, not deciding to wage war in perpetuity.
In reality, the strategic rationale for a withdrawal from Iraq is arguably the stronger card. After all, the withdrawal should take place even if public support for it was absent.
First, rather than fighting ISIL — which was the original rationale for the troop deployment in 2014 — Washington’s unhealthy obsession with Iran keeps the American military stuck in Iraq and Syria. (Incidentally, there is no congressional authorization for Trump’s flirtation with war with Iran). The Iran obsession, in turn, has taken resources and attention away from the fight against ISIL.
“The threat against our forces from Shiite militant groups has caused us to put resources that we would otherwise use against ISIS to provide for our own defense and that has lowered our ability to work effectively against them,” U.S. Central Command head Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said at an U.S. Institute for Peace event this month. “Over the last seven or eight months, we have had to devote resources to self-protection that we would otherwise devote for the counter-ISIS fight.”
Moreover, the Iraqis insist that they don’t even need the U.S. active military’s help against ISIL in the first place.
“We definitely don’t need combat troops in Iraq, but we do need training and capacity enhancement and security cooperation,” Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimitold reporters in Washington last week following a White House meeting with President Trump.
Nor are U.S. troops needed to check Iran’s influence in Iraq. That is, first of all, an Iraqi problem and American service members should not be put in harm’s way to resolve regional quarrels that have little bearing on U.S. national security. Secondly, as my QI colleagues and I wrote in a report released this past summer:
“Rather than expanding Iranian influence in Iraq, the withdrawal of American troops will likely provide more room for Iraqi nationalism to unite Iraqi political factions against an outsized Iranian influence in the country. Currently, America’s military presence tempers this natural desire for greater independence from Iran, as many political factions view Iran as a necessary partner to balance and contain America’s military influence in Iraq.”
Indeed, keeping U.S. troops in Iraq appears to prolong and expand Iran’s influence in Iraq while our obsession with Iran is turning Iraq into the battlefield between Washington and Tehran in a confrontation that neither serves U.S. interests nor Iraqi or regional stability.
U.S. troops in Iraq are practically sitting ducks. Contrary to Trump’s claims, the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani has not deterred Iran, as evidenced by rocket attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq by Iran-aligned paramilitary groups on January 15, March 11, June 13, July 27 and August 15. Instead, the American troop presence has only put the U.S. one rocket attack away from a full-scale war with Iran.
Trump may very well be solely motivated by showcasing his base that he is ending the endless wars. But it still lies in America’s national interest to bring the troops home.
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The Trump International Hotel in Vancouver has closed permanently just three years after opening, and the management company that owns it has filed for bankruptcy, The Hill reported.
Hotel operator TA Hotel Management Partnership Ltd. filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, according to documents obtained by CBC News.
The front entrance to the hotel has since been boarded up. Workers at the front concierge desk told the Canadian outlet that the hotel is empty and staff is gone.
A union representative for hotel staff told CBC the news came as a shock and staff learned of the closure from media reports.
The land and building is owned by TA Global Berhad, a multinational Malaysian property company headed by Tiah Joo Kim, who pays Trump’s company to operate the hotel and license the Trump name.
The bankrupt filing showed TA Hotel Management had assets of $1.1 million and debts of $4.8 million. Grant Thornton Ltd. was named bankruptcy trustee.
TA Global has cited the pandemic for the shuttering of the hotel. More than 200 employees were laid off in April at the onset of the health crisis.
The $360-million complex featuring the 147-room hotel opened just weeks after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The February 2017 ribbon cutting featured three of the president’s children — Donald Jr. Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump.
The Hill has reached out to TA Global and the Trump Organization, owned by the US president but run day-to-day by his eldest sons, for comment.
The hotel was deeply unpopular among locals, and protesters often gathered outside, including on its opening day.
Gregor Robertson, who was Vancouver mayor at the time, asked for the name of the US president to be removed, saying at the time that there was “no more place on Vancouver’s skyline than his ignorant ideas have in the modern world.”
This is the third Trump-branded hotel to have cut ties with the US president’s brand since he entered office. The owners of the Trump hotels in Panama, Toronto and Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood have all since re-opened under new names.
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Twenty Saudi soldiers arrived this week at a U.S. military base close to an oilfield in northeastern Syria, according to Iranian media, which cite a report from a Lebanon-based Arabic-language TV channel.
At the end of last year, Saudi troops were also reportedly stationed near Syria’s largest oilfield, Al-Omar in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region, in what was thought to be Saudi protection for experts of Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco. According to the report of the Arabic service of Turkish news agency Anadolu at the time, the arrival of the Saudi soldiers at Syria’s biggest oilfield coincided with the arrival of around 30 trucks carrying drilling and digging machinery.
Incidents and altercations between the superpowers backing different sides in the Syrian conflict continue. Just this week, U.S. soldiers were injured in a skirmish with Russian troops, two U.S. officials told The New York Times, noting that the injuries were the result of a collision between vehicles, not gunfire.
After a surprise announcement of pulling the U.S. troops out of Syria in October last year, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the United States would protect Syrian oil fields from ISIS.
President Trump claimed that the U.S. had taken control of the oil in the Middle East, tweeting that
“The U.S. has secured the Oil, & the ISIS Fighters are double secured by Kurds & Turkey.”
The President did not elaborate on what he meant by “securing the oil,” but speculations about the President’s statement assume he was referring to the U.S. special forces that have been—and will continue to be—in control of oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzor, Syria’s oil region.
President Trump has vowed to protect Syrian oil fields from ISIS, and the United States may leave 500 troops in northeastern Syria and send in battle tanks and other equipment with the purpose to help the Kurds in the area to protect oil fields that used to be controlled by Islamic State during its so-called caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
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Josh Owens is the Content Director at Oilprice.com. An International Relations and Politics graduate from the University of Edinburgh, Josh specialized in Middle East and U.S. relations. He has written and curated oil, gas and renewable energy content for oilprice.com for the last four years.
China’s military has warned of an unintentional military confrontation with the US if it does not halt its naval operations in the South China Sea, insisting that recent US activities in the region are instigating such hostilities.
The warning came after the spokesman for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) announced that a US warship had intruded into China’s territorial waters without authorization.
“We urge the US to stop such provocative behavior and restrict its maritime actions to avoid possible military accidents,” said Senior Colonel Li Huamin.
Li’s remarks came a day after PLA forces warned off a trespassing American guided missile destroyer USS Mustin in territorial waters of China’s Xisha Islands, close to an area where the Chinese military was holding military drills that reportedly included live fire anti-ship ballistic missile launches.
The PLA spokesman said the American forces has ignored international law by repeatedly stirring up troubles in the South China Sea and claimed navigational hegemony in the name of “freedom of navigation,” seriously undermined Beijing’s sovereignty and security interests in the region.
Li reiterated China’s “undisputable sovereignty” over the islands in the South China Sea and their adjacent waters in the region, insisting that Chinese troops are always on high alert to resolutely protect national sovereignty and safeguard peace and stability in the area.
The US Navy claimed that the USS Martin had conducted a “routine” operation in the region, again invoking its self-proclaimed “freedom of navigation” principle to justify the move.
The development came after China’s Defense Ministry declared on Thursday that Beijing would not “dance to the tune” of the US or allow it to “cause trouble,” as Washington continues its operations in the South China Sea.
Washington and Beijing are currently at loggerheads over a host of issues, including trade, technology, Hong Kong, Taiwan, navigation in the East and South China Seas, and most recently, the coronavirus pandemic.
The South China Sea has recently become a flashpoint.
The United States has been trying to push back against what it views as China’s rising influence in the resource-rich South China Sea. Washington has sided with China’s rivals in maritime disputes in the sea and been routinely sending warships and warplanes to the region.
China said on Tuesday that the US had flown a spy aircraft into a Chinese no-fly zone during live-fire military drills, slamming the move as “naked provocation.”
The Chinese military launched two ballistic missiles into the South China Sea on Wednesday, in a clear warning to the United States.
The move came right after the US blacklisted 24 Chinese companies and individuals over their alleged involvement in construction efforts in disputed islands in the South China Sea.
On Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry censured Washington’s sanctions against the Chinese companies.
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Featured image: This file photo shows US guided missile destroyer USS Mustin, which intruded into Chinese territorial waters in South China Sea.
Nearly always, EU countries are subservient to Washington’s geopolitical agenda — no matter how unlawful.
Support by Britain, France, Germany (the E3), and Brussels for Iran’s right to buy and sell conventional arms once the UN embargo on the practice expires in October and their support for preserving the JCPOA in defiance of Trump regime opposition on these issues are aberrations in US/European relations.
Despite expressing rhetorical and Security Council support on both issues, it’s unclear whether the E3 and Brussels will hold firm against heavy US pressure and threats — demanding the bloc shift policy and bend to its will against Iran.
The jury is very much out on this issue and may be for some time.
The prospect of Biden perhaps defeating Trump in November, taking office in January, and going along with the E3 and Brussels on Iran may give the bloc reason to hold firm against Trump regime pressure and threats.
As explained in a previous article, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was overwhelmingly reelected on August 9 by a near-62% majority — not the officially reported/inflated 80% figure.
Political nobody/US designated puppet Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was soundly defeated, getting only 25% support, more than the officially reported 10%.
Claims or insinuations by Trump regime hardliners and EU officials that Lukashenko stole the election have no merit.
On Friday, Trump regime Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun falsely called Belarusian election results “fraudulent,” adding:
“(T)here were convincing reports of serious irregularities with ballot counting and reporting of election results (sic).”
By whom, he failed to explain, another example of Washington’s practice of making accusations without evidence backing them — phony Russian US election meddling the most prominent example.
When foreign elections don’t turn out as the US wishes, claims of fraud sans evidence follow time and again.
There’s no ambiguity about Lukashenko’s reelection — other than the unnecessarily inflated margin of victory.
Under UN Charter and other international law, no nation may legally interfere in the internal affairs of others.
It’s what the US does repeatedly, what it’s doing in Belarus, wanting the country transformed into a client state — the EU going along in defiance of international law.
Belarusian ruling authorities and Russia support the country’s sovereignty — free from US-led Western meddling in its internal affairs.
So far, the Trump regime’s color revolution plot in Belarus isn’t going as planned.
Its authorities supported by Russia have the upper hand.
On Friday, EU foreign ministers announced sanctions on around 20 so far unnamed Belarusian officials over phony claims of election-rigging the bloc consistently ignores when occurs for real in nations where pro-Western candidates win.
The double standard is breathtaking, notably given how EU countries are allied with Washington’s imperial project, including its wars of aggression on nonbelligerent states.
Their alliance with the US against Belarus is further proof that all Western and Eastern European countries are fantasy democracies, none the real thing — on most issues operating as virtual US colonies, clearly the case on Belarus.
On Friday following a bloc meeting in Berlin, Czech Republic Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek said “(w)e have general agreement on how the (sanctions) list will be structured and who will be, more or less, on” it — Lukashenko most likely included initially or at a later time.
Asked about his inclusion, Petricek said he “should be on the list,” adding:
“The question is whether in the first stage, or a later stage if there is no progress.”
US puppet president in Kiev Vladimir Zelensky froze relations with Minsk — likely on orders from Trump regime hardliners, his foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba saying:
“We put all contacts on pause until the situation in Belarus stabilizes.”
Ignoring Russia’s obligation to Belarus as a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member, Germany’s Angela Merkel unjustifiably criticized Putin for saying the following on Russian television:
On Lukashenko’s request based on Belarusian CSTO membership, he formed and offered to send “reserve police” to the country if needed, adding:
He’ll refrain from taking this step unless “the situation gets out of control, and (if) extremist elements, hiding behind political slogans, cross certain boundaries such as looting, setting fire to cars, seizing administrative buildings and so on.”
No need exists to act at this time. Putin hopes Belarusians will resolve things on their own with no need for Russian help.
On Friday, BelTA (the Belarusian Telegraph Agency) news website reported Lukashenko saying the following:
“We are going to show them what sanctions are. They (Poles and Lithuanians) transited our territory to trade with China and Russia.”
“Now they will fly either through the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea to trade with Russia and so on.”
“In terms of the embargoed products (food products embargoed by Russia) I suggest they forget about them. We will show them what sanctions are.”
“They have an exaggerated sense of self-worth and have forgotten what Belarus is.”
“They think they can threaten us with tanks, missiles.”
“We will see who will be left scared. We will show them what sanctions are.”
“I have instructed the government to work out measures to redirect all trade flows from Lithuanian ports to others.”
“We will see how they will be doing after that. The transit of our cargo flows generates 30% of the Lithuanian budget.”
“What else do they need? They think too much of themselves. We will show them their place.”
“We survived” earlier imposed Western sanctions. “We will survive this time as well. The world is no good without good people. It is useless to scare us.”
Saturday on Rossiya 1 television, Putin said “Belarusian authorities invited the OSCE ODIHR (Office for Democratic Instructions and Human Rights) to monitor” the August 9 presidential election, adding:
“Why did it not come? This immediately makes us think that, in fact, a position on the results of these elections had already been formulated” between the US and EU.
“Therefore, someone may doubt the results, but I have every reason to doubt that those who doubt (them) were completely honest.”
“Therefore, we proceed from the fact that the election took place.”
“We…I did it right away. We recognized its legitimacy.”
“And as you know, I congratulated Alexander Grigorievich Lukashenko on his victory in this election. That is all.”
In a previous article, I explained that protests since the election were made in the USA.
They’re similar to what erupted in other countries pre-and-post elections in support of pro-Western candidates — especially if or when a US favorite doesn’t defeat an incumbent Washington wants toppled.
On August 9, Lukashenko won decisively as expected.
Tsikhanouskaya lost, claims otherwise likely scripted by her US handlers.
A figure with no political experience, she’s easily manipulated by US and EU dark forces opposed to Belarus’ independence from Western control.
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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.”
August 31st, 2020 by Energie Service Zentrale Mitte
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke to hundreds of thousands in the streets of Berlin, Germany, August 29, 2020.
With Großer Stern Square and the Siegesäule Monument as a backdrop, Mr. Kennedy talked about government control by fear and spoke out against totalitarianism. He said the government and those with the greatest wealth and control have done a terrible job on public health and will shift us all to 5G and a cashless society.
He said that 5G is being pushed on us as a good thing but it will be used for surveillance and data harvesting.
Mr. Kennedy added that the COVID 19 pandemic is a crisis of convenience that is destroying the middle class, impoverishing us all, and it is making the powerful elite even more powerful.
He closed with the message that we must protect our fellow-human beings, our vulnerable children and our freedoms and democracy!
By the Children’s Health Defense Team
Senta Depuydt, Officer of the New CHD-Europe Chapter, Berlin Rally Speech
Dear friends who came from all over Europe. Today we are here to give the world a powerful message.
Humanity can not and will not longer be ruled by a model based on threat and control.
Right here, right now, we can all refuse this.
Right here, right now, we can change the ‘narrative’. We can create ‘OUR new normal’.
We keep hearing the words ‘Solidarity’, compassion and equal rights in the mouths of politicians who try to separate and divide us. People who order fines, isolation, experiment on our health and restrict all our freedoms. Those people are not philanthropists. They ask us to believe in a new religion called ‘the scientific consensus’, a fabricated dogma used by a corrupt cast called ‘experts’ who serve no other than their own interest..
Tracking and tracing are the tools of this inquisition. We know where this ultimately lead us to : Isolation, punishment and slavery.
We can choose to see things as they are, with the dangers and the opportunities they bear.
I believe history has given the German people this capacity and this responsibility.
So, I have some very good news to share, because today I am surrounded by brave people.
I am standing next to a man who is literally catching snakes with his bare hands. (Yes, watch it on instagram). Rattlesnakes hiding in the bushes of the californian valleys, and also more poisonous species who produce toxic drugs and pesticides and experiment them on humans and on nature.
This man acts with courage, passion, service and faith. That is true leadership, the capacity to inspire others by one’s actions. That is what the Kennedy’s have done, that is their legacy.
And today, today this man meets other men and women with the same values. All of you here who have come to show your true courage, your true solidarity, your true humanity. All of you who individually and collectively are peacefully manifesting your sovereignty.
I will call you all Berliners.
And as a European, as a mother, as an individual asking for the respect of my human rights I say that I am proud to ‘a Berliner’.
Children’s Health Defense Europe wants to become a Berliner alliance.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Grazie a tutti per la vostra presenza.
Hartelijk dank voor jullie aanwezigheid
Merci a tous de votre présence.
Gracias por su presencia.
Vielen Danke fur Ihren Anwesenheit
Pictures from Berlin
AUGUST 29, 2020
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Holds a Press Conference in Berlin After Launching CHD’s Europe Chapter
By Children’s Health Defense Team
On Friday August 28, 2020, Mr. Kennedy, chair of Children’s Health Defense, held a press conference and met with the leaders of the newly-formed Children’s Health Defense Europe Chapter.
In attendance were Senta Depuydt and Tina Choy (board members of CHD Europe), RA Markus Haintz (Querdenken-731 Ulm), and Heiko Schöning (MD, Ärzte für Aufkärung).
While in Berlin he will also meet with colleagues from all over Europe to discuss global challenges to health and human rights.
Saturday, August 29th, he will speak to what is anticipated to be the largest crowd in German history. (CHD will be streaming LIVE from our Facebook page.)
Over one million people from every nation in Europe will rally for freedom, peace, free expression and respect.
In photo below, RFK, Jr. is with organizers Dr Heiko Schoening, M.D. and Attorneys Markus Haintz & Rolf Karpenstein in front of Brandenburg Gate where his uncle, President John F Kennedy, gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.
According to a Daily Mail report (August 14) the British authorities have been involved in the practice of “double-counting” the official RT-PCR test results. It is presented as an unfortunate error or mistake:
“Ministers have quietly wiped 1.3million Covid-19 swabs off the official testing count, it emerged today.
Number 10 has repeatedly boasted about the number of tests it is capable of doing – with capacity now reportedly at around 340,000 per day.
But the government has now admitted a staggering one in 10 coronavirus tests were counted twice.
“And today it emerged 1.3 million counted (RT-PCR) tests have been removed from the official government total because they were counted twice.
In a statement on the website … the Department said: ‘An adjustment of -1,308,071 has been made to the historic data for the “tests made available” metric.”
‘The adjustments have been made as a result of more accurate data collection and reporting processes recently being adopted within pillar 2.’
…
The Department for Health said there had been ‘a double-counting of test kits that had been dispatched and which had not been removed from the labs processed data’.Justin Madders, the shadow health minister, told the newspaper that the data on testing had been ‘shambolic’ for months.
He said: ‘To now retrospectively adjust the testing figures by 1.3m overnight – without explanation – is the latest in a long line of chaotic failings by the government on testing. (Daily Mail, August 14, 2020)
And now Deloitte Touche, a Giant Accounting firm has been put in charge of coordinating the tests in the UK, with a view to inflating the numbers.
Meanwhile a second wave has been announced. The fear campaign has gone into high gear.
The double-counted tests were added between May 14 and August 12, but the total number of tests ‘made available’ before and after the adjustment is unclear.
The error reportedly came to light in July but was not corrected until this week, The Guardian reported.
The Government describes tests as ‘made available’ because it includes tests sent to people’s homes that are counted whether someone takes the test or not. (Daily Mail, August 14, 2020, emphasis added)
“Came to light in July” is a boldface lie. The “Double counting” procedure was known. It was reported on May 21. The manipulation of Covid data applying double counting is well in excess of three months as claimed by the British government.
According to a Daily Telegraph May 21 report: “samples taken from the same patient are being recorded as two separate tests in the Government’s official figures”.
“Tens of thousands of Covid-19 tests have been double-counted in the Government’s official tally, public health officials have admitted.”
“Diagnostic tests which involve taking saliva and nasal samples from the same patient are being counted as two tests, not one”.
The Department of Health and Social Care and Public Health England acknowledged (May 21) that they were involved in double-counting.
“This inflates the daily reported diagnostic test numbers by over 20 per cent, with that proportion being much higher earlier on in the crisis before home test kits were added to the daily totals.”
They acknowledged the fraud back in May. But nothing was done to rectify the double counting UNTIL August 14.
This is not a “mistake” or “incompetence”. It is a deliberate intent to falsify the data and inflate the number of positive cases with a view to sustaining the corona fear campaign.
Bear in mind that the “double counting” numbers were used by the Boris Johnson government to maintain the lockdown and delay the reopening of the British economy. Not surprisingly, the UK had the largest number of so-called “confirmed cases” in Europe. (See Michel Chossudovsky,Global Research, May 22, 2020)
According to the Daily Telegraph (21 May, 2020) “Almost 350,000 more tests have been reported in Government data than people tested since the start of the pandemic [on March 11].”
“Discrepancy” or Outright Fraud?
“The discrepancy is in large part explained by the practice of counting saliva and nasal samples for the same individual twice.”(Telegraph, May 21)
When did this start? And why did public health staff not speak out? Or were they instructed to shut up?
And who was in charge of instructing health staff “to double count”. Will there be an inquiry?
Test Kits
From the outset, England health officials have been promoting “home test kits” which are said to be “reliable” and “accurate”. (And these are also included in the “confirmed cases”).(See Michel Chossudovsky,Global Research, May 22, 2020)
“Doubling the figures” is but the tip of the iceberg. It is one among several procedures used to inflate the so-called “confirmed cases” of the standard RT-PCR test. The use of test kits which are sent out to patients is also an obvious form of bias.
To understand the broader process of data manipulation regarding so-called “confirmed cases”, we must address the nature of the RT-PCR test and the Covid so-called Positive estimates.
“COVID-19 is similar to SARS-1. Moreover, immunologists have confirmed that COVID-19 has similar features to a seasonal influenza coupled with pneumonia.
Bear in mind: The RT-PCR test is identical to the test used in the case of seasonal influenza. So if you test positive, Positive to What??
The standard RT-PCR used to identify Covid-19 does not “confirm” the presence of Covid-19. A positive test does not mean that you have the virus and/or that you could transmit the virus. A negative test does not mean that you do not have it.
What the governments want is to inflate the positive cases.
“Confirmed Case” are not confirmed
The RT-PCR Test Does not isolate the virus
The RT- PCR tests do not prove anything. According to Dr. Pascal Sacré, “these tests detect viral particles, genetic sequences, not the whole virus. Positive RT-PCR is not synonymous with COVID-19 disease!”
The media frighten everyone with new positive PCR tests, without any nuance or context, wrongly assimilating this information with a second wave of COVID-19.
According to renowned Swiss immunologist Dr B. Stadler
So if we do a PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome.The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Even if the infectious viri are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected].
These issues are never mentioned by the media. The results of the tests are misinterpreted with a view to increasing the so-called “confirmed cases”.
Amply documented the figures are manipulated. The death certificates are also falsified, particularly in the United States.
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Thameco Pharmaceutical has begun domestic manufacturing of azithromycin as part of Syria’s fight against the COVID pandemic. Dr. Fida Ali, the company’s General Manager, made this exciting announcement in an interview with SANA.
Dr. Ali noted that Thameco has also been authorized by the government to increase production cetamol (acetaminophen), vitamin C, and other essential medications, supplements, and hand sanitizer in quantities required to meet the needs of the population.
Long time readers of Syria News may recognize the name, Thameco Pharmaceutical. It is the largest in Syria and in 2013, the NATO supported FSA terrorists bombed its warehouses in Eastern Ghouta, “to increase the suffering level on the Syrian people.”
Azithromycin is a macrolide that has been successfully used in the treatment of COVID. While it is well known by the layperson that antibiotics cannot cure viruses, the layperson has not been taught that viral and bacterial pathogens engage in cooperation to produce respiratory disease. Obliteration of the pathogenic bacterium helps to weaken the virus.
Thameco is working closely with an advisory team from Syria’s Ministry of Health in ensuring quantity and quality in production of protocol medications in the treatment of COVID in their country.SANA also interviewed Samaya al Nin and Hussam El Din Hatahet, Head of Production, and Assistant Head of the Physical Laboratory, respectively. The two detailed how the COVID medications are made to the specifications of international standards, and how Thameco maintains quality control in all aspects of production.
As the numbers of COVID cases in Syria and the death tolls from this virus creep upward, and as the NATO hyenas at the United Nations continue to wail their crocodile tears over COVID in Syria, one might think that the Thameco Pharmaceutical being able to manufacture an important antibiotic and increase the production of other essential medications would be cause for rejoicing.
For Google’s YouTube — the US-based, social media giant with the $15.15 billion revenue in 2019, the one that has recently taken to banning US-based licensed physicians for their discussions of coronavirus — found it cause for censorship, vaporizing SANA Arabic’s short video shortly after it was published.
Syrian SAMA TV private channel aired a similar report in Arabic, we captured it before YouTube censored it:
Malicious censorship and the UN’s unwillingness to stand by its noble charter notwithstanding, Syria should be viewed by the world as a much-needed source of inspiration, particularly in the medical and engineering fields.
In April, less than one month after the first COVID case in Syria, Syrian engineers and physicians worked together and built the country’s first ventilator, in sixteen days.
Medical, engineering, & technical teams were joined by local cadres to create the first Syrian made ventilator, in 16 days.
Throughout the millennia, foreign colonizers have attempted to crush the creativity and resilience of the Syrian people, lest they spread good will throughout the world.
Syrians will overcome this COVID crisis as they have overcome other crises throughout their very long history.
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The United States has erected the legal and institutional architecture of a totalitarian police state.
Institutionally, the national security autocracy has merged with the military, law enforcement and a vast private intelligence network to create a massive physical apparatus of repression that possesses panoptic powers.
Legally, an extensive framework of legislation threatens individual freedoms in the name of providing security for the American people.
Slowly, methodically and deliberately an apparatus of legal repression has been erected that abolishes significant constitutional protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, rendering genuine civil liberties into a set of arbitrary privileges to be withdrawn at the will of the state.
A network of Orwellian surveillance has been put in place to monitor political and social dissent. The legal apparatus of repression has evolved to such an extent that only a presidential decree of martial law in a time of crisis is needed to begin implementation of absolutist rule in America.
Although it has taken over a century to construct, the legal architecture of repression is always expanded during times of war for the purpose of neutralizing opposition and suppressing protest. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War have all been attenuated by attacks on civil liberties.
To understand the magnitude of these attacks, the history of political repression in the United States should be studied with care. It is a history that mirrors foreign intervention as the repressive apparatus protects a global empire. The U.S. government has not only intervened to prevent successful challenges to the economic and social relations of capitalism abroad, it has done so repeatedly at home for the same purpose.
At the core of American’s institutional apparatus of repression is the national security autocracy led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Throughout its history, the national security autocracy has conducted innumerable covert operations to repress popular movements and governments internationally. Several of the most notorious were CIA operations Ajax in Iran (1953), Success in Guatemala (1954), Mongoose in Cuba (1961), Phoenix in Vietnam (1967) and Condor in Chile (1975).
The autocracy has unleashed a torrent of murderous repression that involves dimensions of mass tyranny too terrible to contemplate. But the contemplation of these crimes is imperative if an understanding of the autocracy’s capacity for mass violence is to be attained.
A devastating conclusion can be drawn by probing this history. In that the U.S. power elite directed the autocracy to impose fascist dictatorship in far-away countries like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, South Vietnam and Indonesia by training, arming and unleashing military and police forces to torture and murder hundreds of thousands of struggling peoples, it is apparent that it would not hesitate to inflict a similar dictatorship within the United States if the interests of capital were threatened in the “homeland,” to use a fascist term.
It is a rich and well documented critique that is kept hidden in plain sight from a majority of the American people who are diverted from political realism by a political and media establishment addicted to political theatre. Yet, reality has a way of contradicting the most deeply entrenched fabrications.
The foundation for a legal architecture of political repression in the United States was laid during the first half of the 20th century. The Espionage Act of 1917, Sedition Act of 1918, Smith Act of 1940 and the McCarren Act of 1950 are monuments to state subversion of democratic rights. The laws made it a crime to speak out in opposition to war, express disloyal opinions or advocate the desirability of overthrowing the U.S. government during World War I and II.
These statutes are not legal artifacts gathering dust on books safely stored in the country’s law libraries. Although it is over 100 years old, the Espionage Act was used by Barack Obama to indict more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined.
Among those indicted were Edward Snowden who revealed NSA illegal mass surveillance, former intelligence officer John Kiriakou who exposed CIA torture during Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and Chelsea Manning who unmasked U.S. war crimes in Iraq via Wikileaks. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sits in Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom awaiting extradition to the United States. He faces multiple charges of violating the Espionage Act.
The legal edifice of political repression in contemporary America was dramatically extended during the ‘war on terrorism’, a policy that should properly be termed a ‘war of terrorism’ as it is yet another pretext used to justify U.S. military intervention.
The ‘war on terrorism’ has replaced the ‘war on communism’ as the major paradigm used to justify foreign intervention and domestic repression. The terrorism paradigm functions both as a direct and ideological method of social control. The ideological dimensions of terrorism are used to frighten the population into willingly surrendering civil liberties for illusory security. For those who engage in dissent, more direct means of coercive social control are used.
This legislation coupled with National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 51 (2009) effectively strips the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments to the U.S. Constitution of their procedural and substantive validity, rendering them dead letters and sets the stage for martial law in America.
The Patriot Act broadened the definition of domestic terrorism by providing the government with the ability to criminalize any act of political protest or civil disobedience, crippling First amendment freedoms of speech, assembly and by extension, association.
Fourth amendment privacy rights are eroded by legislation that permits the FBI to investigate the political activity of American citizens and monitor the organizations they belong to, people they associate with, books they read, websites they visit and phone calls they make by alleging the inquiry is related to national security.
Fourth amendment privacy rights are also violated daily at the nation’s airports by the Transportation Security Administration under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security as the use of millimeter-wave body scanners and pat-downs constitute unreasonable searches, not to mention affronts to human dignity.
Fifth amendment due process rights of citizens and non-citizens and Sixth amendment rights to a public jury trial and an attorney have been restricted by anti-terror legislation that makes it a crime to provide “material support” for a terrorist organization including advice, advocacy or assistance for “non-violent purposes.” The legislation criminalizes political speech.
The U.S. government now has authority to label an accused terrorist an “enemy combatant” allowing for that person to be held indefinitely in a military prison without access to counsel. George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft performed this act in 2002. An American citizen, Jose Padilla, was arrested after being detained at Chicago’s O’hare airport when returning from the Middle East. Padilla was accused of being associated with Al Qaeda and held in a military prison for four years before eventually being transferred to a civilian court where he was convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorism. President Obama codified indefinite detention by signing the National Defense Authorization Act Section 1021 into law in 2012.
It is now a crime to support any organization labeled ‘terrorist’ by the State Department, preventing international solidarity. It should be recalled that the Irish Republican Army (IRA), African National Congress (ANC) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were once considered terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
Immigrants can be deported based upon undisclosed evidence if the government alleges they are engaged in “terrorist activity” or provide “material support” for terrorism. The definition of material support is so broad that it can include humanitarian aid.
Muslim charities that provided medical support for Palestine such as the Holy Land Foundation were shut down and their leaders imprisoned under the pretext of providing “material support” for Hamas, a resistance organization that defends the Palestinian people against Zionist aggression.
The prohibition against providing “material support” for “terrorist activity” also impacts the Sixth amendment right to legal counsel.
The late civil rights attorney Lynn Stewart was sent to federal prison for advocating on behalf of her client, the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian nationalist who fought the Mubarak dictatorship. Stewart’s ‘crime’ was to announce in a public news conference that the Sheikh did not support a cease fire between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government. For openly articulating her client’s political views, she was sentenced to federal prison for 10 years.
Eighth amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment are routinely violated by officially sanctioned torture, drone assassination, death penalty execution and police murder.
Presidential directives have given the president authority to declare martial law in the United States. Autocratic rule can be imposed during a “national emergency” or a “catastrophic event” and U.S. troops from the Northern Command (Northcom) can be deployed domestically. The president has authority to take command of the National Guard by superseding the control of state governors.
Not to be outdone by any of its predecessors, the Trump administration has worked assiduously to attack civil and human rights in a concerted effort to enhance executive power.
What we are witnessing in the United States is a bi-partisan attempt by the U.S. power elite to expand law enforcement and converge criminal with foreign intelligence law at home while waging perpetual war abroad. The reason is clear. The American plutocracy must impose systemic political repression to neutralize domestic and international opposition to its predatory global empire.
Escalation of political repression under the guise of fighting terrorism and crime is the genuine aim of the state, particularly as anti-war sentiment and social unrest increase within the population of the United States and struggles for national sovereignty and self-determination accelerate outside of its borders.
The evisceration of democratic protections and human rights by state power includes the abolition of habeas corpus and due process of law, extensive use of warrantless electronic surveillance, monitoring of political activism, imposing indefinite detention without trial, conducting secret deportations, creating secret detention facilities, practicing extraordinary rendition, torture and drone assassination, establishing military commissions, effecting preparations for mass internment, imposing mass incarceration and perpetrating systemic police violence.
Draconian measures are being taken in the service of corporate capitalism, a system that relies on perpetual exploitation and war for perpetual profit. Critical analysis of political repression illustrates its true purpose and dramatizes the need to repeal repressive legislation, restrict executive power and abolish the national security autocracy to restore the rule of law.
It should be noted that the United States has not yet adopted domestic totalitarian rule. It is, however, moving rapidly in that direction. This trajectory can be halted and reversed if a popular struggle is waged to restore, defend and extend civil and constitutional liberties and human rights.
When confronting the ideological matrix of political repression, the wise counsel of Benjamin Franklin should be remembered. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”
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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics of Terrorism, and is available at amazon.com
Wednesday’s collision between the US military occupying the northeast of Syria, and the Russian military legally present there, showcases the drama unfolding, as the occupiers are being handed a cue: “Yankee Go Home”.
Sheiks and elders of the Arab Al-Uqaydat tribe met at Deir Ez Zor, Syria on August 11 and gave the US occupation force, and the SDF, one month to “leave the Arab region to the Arabs”.
US and Russian military vehicle crash
The incident occurred around 10 am. Syrian time, on August 26 on a road near Dayrick in northeast Syria. Numerous videos appeared on social media which capture the encounter between two military vehicles.
In the video, a Russian Typhoon-K MRAPs collides with the front of a US M-ATV, after which the American driver honked his horn. Afterward, the Russian vehicles chased the American vehicles, who turned and left the area in a de-escalation maneuver. Four US troops were diagnosed with mild concussion-like symptoms, which resulted from the impact.
The Russian military explained that their convoy was on a routine patrol of the area and that they had warned the US vehicles of their position and had asked them to back-off. However, the Americans did not heed the warning, and the situation escalated.
National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot confirmed the details of the incident. “Unsafe and unprofessional actions like this represent a breach of de-confliction protocols, committed to by the United States and Russia in December 2019,” Ullyot said. “The Coalition and the United States do not seek escalation with any national military forces, but US forces always retain the inherent right and obligation to defend themselves from hostile acts.”
Joint Chiefs ChairmanGen. Mark Milley spoke with Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov, by telephone on Wednesday, according to a Pentagon statement.
Previous encounters
This flare-up is the latest in a series of events beginning in February, next in June, then in July, and now in August.
“The encounters happen a few times each month and, thus far, have been resolved without escalation,” said OIR spokesman Army Col. Myles Caggins.
“With Russia, Coalition forces work to de-conflict our movements through pre-existing communication channels, in order to prevent unnecessary and unplanned military interactions, and to de-escalate between forces when necessary,” he added.
The US in Syria
The US military illegally entered and occupied Syria under the guise of fighting ISIS. While the threat of ISIS was real, the Syrian Arab Army (SAR) and the Russian military were already fighting ISIS and were capable. However, the US foreign policy on Syria prevented the US military from partnering with the existing forces on the ground, even though they consisted of hundreds of thousands of ground troops, aircraft, tanks, helicopters, and weapons of all types. Instead, the Pentagon chose to develop an alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is a militia and is aligned with the YPG, who are part of the PKK, an internationally recognized terrorist group, has killed thousands in Turkey over four decades.
The US currently has about 600 troops illegally in northeast Syria and another 150 at the Al Tanf Garrison.
US President Trump ran on a 2016 campaign promise to bring home the troops from Syria, which he tried to fulfill in 2018, but his order met with criticism, and the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis.
After a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in October 2019, Trump ordered the withdrawal of US troops from the Turkish border.
The SDF
Democrat and Republican lawmakers condemned Trump for abandoning the SDF, a Kurdish militia that had been the US ally in the fight against ISIS in Syria. The group received weapons, air, and ground support in the fight to defeat the ISIS. The US pulled back from the Turkish border in October 2019 which allowed the Turkish invasion, utilizing mainly Radical Islamic mercenaries who were a mixed-bag between Al Qaeda and former ISIS terrorists.
James Jeffrey, US special envoy said in 2018 that the Syrian Kurds’ future would be with Damascus. The State Department described the relationship with the SDF as “tactical, transactional and temporary.”
The Turkish occupation of Syria
The US State Department has criticized Turkey for hosting Hamas members, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the US of alliance with terrorists in Syria, such as the SDF.
Some in the Trump administration is very close to Ankara, and the US State Department under Pompeo has always preferred Syrian terrorist groups in Syria, who are fighting to topple the Syrian government alongside extreme Islamist groups, such as Jibhat al Nusra and ISIS, which Turkey favors. To the US and Turkey, these blood-thirsty savages are just tools to be used for political gains.
Turkey seeks to take over Kurdish areas in northeast Syria and implant non-Kurds and militias following Radical Islam. The militias Turkey employs routinely kidnap women and assassinate women activists.
Turkey regularly turns off water to northeastern Syria, causing hundreds of thousands to be without water, even though Covid-19 precautions require hand-washing.
On August 18, near Deir Ez Zor, Syria, a Russian Major General, and three Russian soldiers were killed when their convoy drove over an IED, on its way back from a humanitarian mission. Many have theorized it was the SDF who planted the IED.
If you can’t stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen
On August 20, Pres. Trump met with Iraq’s PM, and said the US is leaving Iraq “fairly rapidly” and making decisions on Syria “fairly soon.” The Iraqi Parliament called for the total withdrawal of US troops.
A meeting of 5,000 Syrian tribal members in northeast Syria on August 11 demanded the US forces, and their SDF militia partners withdraw from occupation of the area after the SDF assassinated Sheikh Mutashar al-Hafil and his relative Dar Mihlef al-Khalaf, which provoked a wave of protests, and the call of “Yankee Go Home”.
“We are calling on the international coalition to transfer control over the province directly to its Arab population, respecting Syria’s territorial integrity, as well as the rights of Syrian citizens“, the tribal elder’s statement said.
The Syrian tribe demanded that the SDF release all prisoners and hostages, and especially women and children.
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The Greek Private Asset Utilization Fund (HRADF) will sell a 67% stake of Alexandroupolis Port in northern Greece near the border with Turkey and Bulgaria. Two American companies are believed to be interested in the deal. Selling a port of strategic importance to U.S. companies, coupled with the availability of the facility for U.S. and NATO troops, is raising many questions in Greece. The Mediterranean country remains only one in two countries surveyed in NATO where the civilian population is not in favor of the alliance and only 36% of Greeks view the U.S. favourably. An announcement issued by HRADF emphasized that the bid consisted of two phases – “in the first phase, interested parties are invited to express their intention to participate before 5:00 pm on October 2, 2020.”
It is worth noting that the signing of a new defense agreement between Athens and Washington in October 2019 gave the Americans freedom to use the country’s seaport infrastructure. In fact, the U.S. announced its interests in the Alexandroupolis Port as far back as September 2019.
Selling ports is extremely risky for reasons related to national security and sovereignty. Privatizing ports means the deregulation of state-owned property and the transfer of all functions and transactions for the private sector instead of state security. What will happen if a foreign investor, such as the U.S., was involved in the management of ports located in the Aegean Sea, which plays an irreplaceable role in the border and national defense of Greece, especially at a time when Turkey is increasing its war rhetoric against Greece?
The establishment of a U.S.-NATO base at Alexandroupolis Port aims to secure an energy hub and serve as a point to pressurize Russia. In addition to the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria pipeline and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline being in the region of the port, a third pipeline is also being prepared. This would turn Thrace, the region of Alexandroupolis Port, into a true energy hub.
Of course, we must not forget the fact that in addition to the privatization of Alexandroupolis Port, there is a bigger problem with the military bases. The port can serve as a vehicle for imposing U.S.-NATO interests in the region. The creation of such a base, along with the sale of the port to an American company, creates a head-to-head situation with other competitors, such as Russia. The port is strategically located close to the Turkish-controlled Dardanelles that connects the Aegean/Mediterranean Seas with the Black Sea, and therefore Russia.
With the acquisition of this port, U.S.-NATO forces may be in many areas of the Balkans in only a few hours and can significantly hinder Russian trade with the world via the Black Sea by blockading the Dardanelles. Currently, Greece and Turkey are the closest they have been to war since 1974 when the latter invaded northern Cyprus. The Greek government is likely to use the hostilities as a justification for opening a U.S. naval base in Alexandroupolis to supposedly ensure Greece’s security despite opposition from the majority of Greeks.
As security against Turkey’s continued aggression is the biggest priority for Greece at the moment, Washington is trying to capitalize on Turkish aggression against Greece by attempting to pivot Athens towards them. Although the Greek establishment is desperate for a U.S. naval base in Alexandroupolis, there is strong public resentment towards this, especially as U.S. President Donald Trump serves his own private business interests in Turkey rather than those of his country and America’s allies. For close observers of Turkish-American relations, Trump’s appeasement for Turkish aggression is glaringly obvious.
Trump said last Monday that Erdoğan listens to him, which led many to question why the American president has not told Turkey to deescalate its hostilities with Greece and Cyprus. John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor for Trump, described in his book ‘The Room Where It Happened’ that the relationship between the American president and Erdoğan was a “bromance,” especially as Trump agreed to help hide the charge that Turkey breached U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran. In addition, Erdoğan was again praised by Trump to Pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in October 2016 in Turkey and held for two years on charges of complicity with the Fethullah Gülen movement and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Brunson was told by Trump three days ago that “I have to say, to me, President Erdoğan was very good.”
Although the Greek leadership knows that Washington has traditionally appeased Turkey at the expense of Greek security and interests, they are still willing to sacrifice one of their most strategic assets with the hope that it will stem Turkish aggression on Greece. Earlier this week, Turkish Member of Paliament Metin Külünk, who belongs to the ruling Justice and Development Party and went to the same youth movement as Erdoğan, went to Twitter to announce Turkey’s future conquest of Greece’s eastern Aegean islands and the mainland region where Alexandroupolis Port is located, accompanied with a map of “Greater Turkey.” Under such sustained pressure and hostility from Turkey, Greece believes the U.S. can secure its sovereignty. However, Greeks remember that Washington has for decades appeased Turkey, and even greenlighted the invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. Greeks believe an American naval base will not protect Greece’s sovereignty from Turkish aggression, and rather it will be used as an American forward base to pressurize Moscow as they will have the option to blockade Russia in the Black Sea if Turkey goes rogue in its NATO responsibilities in any potential war against Russia.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates are going to create a military intelligence-gathering infrastructure on Yemen’s Socotra Island, according to Arab and French sources.
The 3,650km2 island, located south of the Yemeni mainland in the Indian Ocean, overlooks the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The straight is a sea route chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea. Most exports of oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal or the SUMED Pipeline pass through both the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz.
Since the start of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the UAE, formally a Saudi ally, and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, a Yemeni separatist movement that is formally allied with the Saudi-backed government in Aden, have established control over most of Socotra Island. For years, the UAE has been seeking to annex the island due to its strategic location. The collapse of the Yemeni statehood due to the years-long instability and the foreign intervention paved a way for more direct actions. The creation of a military infrastructure there is a logical step in this strategy.
According to reports, a delegation of Israeli and UAE officers recently visited the island and examined several locations for establishing the planned intelligence facilities. Earlier in August, the UAE and Israel with assistance from the United States reached a historical peace agreement relaunching diplomatic, economic and even military cooperation between the states on the highest level. The security and military cooperation in the Bab al-Mandab Strait was among the expected goals.
Arab and Iranian media allege that in 2016 Israel started building an intelligence-gathering base at the top of Mount Ambassaira, south of the Eritrean capital of Asmara. The base, according to reports, is designed to monitor the conflict in Yemen, as well as the naval situation in the region, including movements of Iranian naval forces.
The UAE, thanks to its support to the Southern Transitional Council, has already changed the balance of power in southern Yemen to its favor. If, additionally to this, Abu Dhabi succeeds in turning the Socotra Island into its outpost, the UAE will have all chances to shift the balance of power to its own favor even further.
The Emirati leadership has been slowly but steadily taking an upper hand in the diplomatic, military and economic competition with the Saudi Kingdom, which has so far suffered most of negative consequences, including direct strikes on its territory, from the conflict with Yemen’s Houthis. The peace agreement and security, military cooperation with Israel will also contribute to this scenario.
The tactical UAE-Israeli-US alliance has all chances to compete with the expanding Iranian influence in the region. Saudi Arabia, which for years was the key US ally against Iran, has been left outside of this plan. And this is very bad news for the Kingdom, which is passing through a deep economic and political crisis complicated by the barely successful invasion of Yemen.
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The hybrid war against Venezuela is intensifying as the U.S. presidential campaign is heating up. The Trump administration and its Venezuelan and international allies have set the stage for an October surprise, a possible attack by the United States or one of its proxies designed to boost President Trump’s reelection. The attacks on Venezuela are coming from multiple dimensions, including overt military pressure, economic pressure, covert operations, and disinformation campaigns. All of these are elements of a hybrid war that has sought to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro over the past years, and each element has seen new developments over the past few weeks, just as Venezuela is battling a surge in COVID-19 cases.
Overt military pressure
The US naval deployment to Venezuela’s maritime border is about to begin its fifth month of operations in the area. Even the few Democrats in Congress willing to criticize Trump’s Venezuela policy have said nothing about this deployment, perhaps because it is entirely normal for the United States to threaten war on a country and then dock its Navy right outside. The silence from Democrats is unfortunate, as this could easily have been used as an example of the Pentagon’s wastefulness. Deploying a massive “counter-narcotics” operation to the Caribbean, when 84% of the cocaine in the US transits through the Pacific, could be low-hanging fruit in the debate to cut military spending.
In Colombia, President Iván Duque met with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and Head of U.S. Southern Command Craig Faller on August 18, where they announced the Colombia Growth Initiative, a multi-billion dollar plan that O’Brien says is “focused on rural development, infrastructure expansion, security, and the rule of law,” though the announcement was short on details. Two days after the visit with US officials, Duque baselessly accused Venezuela of trying to acquire medium and long-range missiles from Iran. Both Iran and Venezuela denied the allegations.
On August 27, a Colombian court authorized a US military unit to restart its “advising mission” after previously suspending such cooperation in light of a constitutional challenge with regards to the deployment of foreign troops on Colombian soil. This unit, a Special Forces Assistance Brigade, is designed to “build a professional military force.” It’s worth noting that in his tell-all book, former National Security Advisor John Bolton claims to have learned in February 2019 that Colombia’s “troops simply weren’t ready for conventional conflict with Maduro’s armed forces.”
Venezuela’s southern neighbor, Brazil, is also involved in the escalation. The Brazilian Air Force is holding military exercises between August 17 and September 4. The exercises, which were reported as training for non-conventional combat against insurgent or paramilitary forces, include Black Hawk helicopters and fighter jets.
Brazil and Colombia cooperate closely on military matters with the United States. In a July event in Miami, President Trump was introduced to Brigadier General Juan Carlos Correa of Colombia and Major General David of Brazil by Admiral Faller, who said the men “work for [him].” Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva expressed alarm that his country’s military “may be used for actions incompatible with constitutional principles of non-intervention and self-determination of peoples.”
Economic pressure
On the economic front, the United States seized two tankers of fuel purchased by Venezuela on August 14. This brazen act of piracy didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media, but is part of the strategy to suffocate Venezuela’s economy, which is facing gasoline shortages due to the difficulty in importing necessary chemical additives and spare parts for refineries. Now, the Trump administration is considering ending a sanctions exemption of diesel-for-crude swaps that oil companies Reliance, Repsoil and Eni have been carrying out with Venezuela. Sanctions on diesel would have widespread impacts on Venezuela agriculture, transportation, health and energy industries. Trucks used for shipping food and buses that transport people both depend on diesel fuel. Hospitals throughout the country rely on backup diesel generators to weather erratic electricity supplies. In western Venezuela, diesel is commonly used in power plants for local electricity generation.
The diesel exemption is set to end in early November, and the Trump administration has told the companies to wind down such swaps, prompting criticism from prominent members of Venezuela’s opposition, including economist Francisco Rodríguez, who characterized it as a “clearly electoral measure” that “will cost lives.” Sanctions are becoming one of the main drivers of division within the opposition, as more and more opposition figures have begun to criticize them for not leading to regime change and for punishing ordinary Venezuelans.
Covert operations and criminal disorder
Although we may never know the extent of U.S. involvement in the August 2018 assassination attempt on President Maduro, the March 2019 cyberattack on Venezuela’s power grid, or the May 2020 attempted incursion by two ex-Green Berets and other mercenaries, it would be disingenuous to think that U.S. intelligence agencies and special forces are sitting idle. In Venezuela, there’s growing concern that several crimes over the past weeks are part of a plot to sow chaos.
There is no way to confirm that theory, but it is not far-fetched. Military analyst Frank G. Hoffman states that hybrid war can “incorporate a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder [emphasis added].” An example of this occurred during the weekend of the May incursion, when there was an outbreak of gang violence in Petare, Venezuela’s largest slum. One of the captured mercenaries later alleged that the Drug Enforcement Agency had “paid for gunfire” to act as a smokescreen for the incursion.
The current concern is a series of crimes that began on August 8th with the disappearance of an iconic revolutionary leader. This was followed by the August 20th death of well-known leftist artist under mysterious circumstances and the August 21st murder by police of two leftist communciations workers. Authorities continue to investigate all three cases; in the latter, eight police officers and a district attorney have been charged for the murder and attempted coverup. Attorney General Tarek Saab called the nine people charged “infiltrators” who had entered the police force to engage in crime. Regardless of whether these events are connected to a plot to generate criminal disorder, they are certainly causing psychological harm to the Venezuelan people.
Pictures of gang members holding bazookas released on social media after police confrontations.
In addition to these crimes, there have been recurrent violent confrontations between the police and well-armed criminal groups. On August 25, a gang equipped with AR-15s, AK-103s and FN-MAG machine guns ambushed a police arms depot. Above, the picture on the left is allegedly of one of the gang’s founders holding a bazooka during the confrontation. Attacks on barracks or arms depots linked to coup plots have occurred several times since 2017, resulting in the theft of assault rifles, heavy weapons, grenades and other explosives that end up in the hands of criminals.
Social media shutdowns
Tech giants appear to be joining in on the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign. In March, just as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning in Venezuela, Twitter suspended 40 accounts belonging to officials, state institutions, journalists and influencers, including those of the Health Ministry and Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who was in charge of the Covid-19 response. Most, but not all, of those accounts were recovered, but Twitter gave no explanation for its actions.
On August 19, Twitter restricted the account of Venezuela Analysis, one of the most important websites for English-language news about the country. As The Grayzone’s Ben Norton notes, these are accounts that “conflict with Washington’s pro-war narrative.” Their suspensions represent an escalation in the media dimension of the hybrid war. On August 21, Google blocked or erased three YouTube and Gmail accounts belonging to Venezuelan state television outlet VTV, preventing Venezuelans from accessing live news and 68,000 videos VTV had uploaded since 2011.
Disinformation campaigns and Covid-19
The timing of these shutdowns is curious, occurring just as a major disinformation campaign about Venezuela’s Covid-19 response is underway. The New York Times and other media outlets have published stories about the plight of returning Venezuelan migrants and the allegedly extreme measures taken by the Venezuelan government to fight the pandemic.
Missing from these articles is the fact that Venezuela has received 130,000 returning migrants since the pandemic began. Venezuela may be the only country in the world that is receiving such vast numbers of people during the pandemic, as most countries have closed their borders and returning home has been difficult for people all over the world. Of those returning Venezuelans, 90,000 have entered through official channels, where they are immediately tested for Covid-19. Most are then sent to a Comprehensive Social Care Point (PASI) to comply with quarantine protocols. At the PASIs, migrants receive food, medical care and personal hygiene products as they wait 2-3 weeks to ensure they are not infected with the coronavirus (positive tests can extend their stays).
The other 40,000 migrants returned to the country through unofficial routes, skipping health and immigration controls. In late May, Venezuela began experiencing rapid growth in Covid-19 cases after controlling the pandemic for two months. Much of this growth was attributed to migrants who did not heed the health warnings; at one point, 80% of Venezuela’s new cases were imported from abroad. In mid-June, the numbers flipped and community transmissions surged rapidly.
There are good reasons for migrants to avoid official entry points, including dismal conditions on the Colombian side of the border and long waits to enter given the limit on the number of people who can cross the border daily. However, many of the migrants have been victims of fake news. Telesur’s Madelein García interviewed a returning Venezuelan who was told in Colombia that Venezuelans were injecting migrants with Covid-19 because doctors were being paid by case numbers, as well as lies about migrants not being fed and being locked in cages in PASIs.
Although there are reports in social media of poor conditions in certain PASIs, they appear to be the exception, rather than the rule. A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report noted the differences between the over 200 PASIs, with those in universities and hotels having better infrastructure than those in grade schools and gymnasiums, some of which require “greater support to strengthen their capacity to offer services.” The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have visited PASIs and are contributing aid to the migrants temporarily quarantined in them. Government and local officials routinely inspect PASIs, and Venezuelan media have reported from them. The PASIs have been much maligned in the media without any context of the vastness of the program or the challenge of fighting off a pandemic for a country economically suffocated by sanctions.
The mainstream media narrative around Covid-19 and Venezuela’s migrants is being used to present the country as being in need of humanitarian intervention. Indeed, the Trump administration and think tanks like the Center for Strategic & International Studies, which put out a report titled “Venezuela: Pandemic and Foreign Intervention in a Collapsing Narcostate,” have been attempting to turn Venezuela’s Covid-19 response into an issue of regional security. The Atlantic Council, considered to be NATO’s think tank in Washington, held an event on August 13 with Admiral Faller in which he declared that the Maduro government is an urgent threat to democracy, economic stability and the Covid-19 response.
Yet as seen in the graph above, it’s ludicrous to claim that Venezuela is a Covid-19 threat. The country is doing significantly better than its neighbors in controlling both the spread of the disease and the number of casualties. Venezuela has experienced 358 total Covid-19 deaths, a rate of 13 deaths per million population (Argentina is the next lowest in South America, with 180 deaths per million). After a surge in cases from July through mid-August, the curve of new cases looks like it is flattening, although it is still too soon to tell. Venezuela has been able to weather the storm thanks to its policy choices and timely aid from Cuba, China, Russia, the European Union, the ICRC and UN agencies.
Conclusion
Of course, military action against Venezuela would impede, if not destroy, its capacity to deal with the pandemic, which would lead to increased infections in Brazil, Colombia and other nations if there’s a wave of war refugees. Yet these concerns seem secondary to Venezuela hawks, who view a second Trump administration or a Biden administration as less likely to deliver regime change than a pre-electoral attack.
According to sources that spoke to La Política Online, Senator Marco Rubio has been advising the Trump administration that military action against Venezuela would “ensure Florida’s Electoral College votes in November.” It should be noted that these allegations have not been independently verified and Senator Rubio has not commented on them. However, President Trump’s hawkish Venezuela policy is based around winning Florida and many of the events detailed above have been put into motion to give the president the military option he’s been threatening since August 2017. The stage is set for a disastrous October surprise, especially if Trump’s chances for re-election look dim.
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Leonardo Flores is a Latin American policy analyst and campaigner with CODEPINK.
All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated; featured image: President Trump at a July briefing at Southern Command Headquarters in Miami.
Next week, at the height of the Covid crisis, we will be commemorating 9/11. It was 19 years ago. It was a criminal undertaking and a Big Lie. It was a pretext and justification to initiate the “Global War on Terrorism”.
This article was initially posted 2 years ago, largely based on my earlier writings including texts published in the immediate wake of the tragic events of 9/11. These texts were later published in my book entitled “America’s War on Terrorism, In the Wake of 9/11” (Global Research, Montreal, 2003)
“Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.”
This text provides an overview as well as historical overview focussing on the geopolitical implications.
Michel Chossudovsky, August 30, 2001.
***
1. September 11, 2001:
Onset of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11. .
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
The 9/11 Commission Report has largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks.
The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a house of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
Video: Michel Chossudovsky with James Corbett
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last 18 years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “Its like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
October 7, 2001: Waging America’s 9/11 War of Retribution against Afghanistan
The immediate response of the US and its allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden. By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Taliban were complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
Image: Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan, invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) is an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security. Under any stretch of the imagination, the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon cannot be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September-early October 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin Laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away. Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. The war on Afghanistan was already in the advanced planning stages prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, almost immediately following 9/11 with the adoption of the PATRIOT legislation and the setting up of a Homeland Security apparatus, under the pretext of protecting Americans. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Controlled Demolition. The Collapse of the World Trade Center Buildings
Based on the findings of Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was not caused by fire resulting from the crash of the planes:
In more than 100 steel-framed, high-rise fires (most of them very hot, very large and very long-lasting), not one has collapsed, ever. So it behooves all of us, as your own former chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division, Dr. James Quintiere, said, “to look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of these collapses.”
Fire cannot produce these effects. Fire produces large, gradual deformations and asymmetrical collapses. Thermate can produce all of these effects used in conjunction with linear shaped charges. If the thermate is formed into ultra-fine particles, as has been accomplished at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is called super-thermate, and is very explosive.(Richard Gage, January 2008)
The following AE911Truth Video provides evidence that the WTC center towers were brought down through controlled demolition.
According to David Ray Griffin:
“The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse—never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York City—never.” See David Ray Griffin).
According to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, based on solid scientific analysis and evidence, the collapse of the WTC towers was engineered through controlled demolition. While AE11Truth does not speculate on who might be behind the conspiracy to bring down the WTC buildings, they nonetheless suggest that the carrying out such an operation would require a carefully planned course of action with prior access to the buildings as well as an advanced level of expertise in the use of explosives, etc.
The Collapse of WTC Building Seven
The most grotesque lie pertains to the BBC and CNN announcement in the afternoon of September 11, that WTC Building Seven (The Solomon Building) had collapsed. The BBC report went live at 5.00pm, 21 minutes before the actual occurrence of the collapse, indelibly pointing to foreknowledge of the collapse of WTC 7. CNN anchor Aaron Brown announced that the building “has either collapsed or is collapsing” about an hour before the event.
CNN anchor Aaron Brown seems to struggle to make sense of what he is seeing one minute after announcing that WTC Building 7, whose erect facade is clearly visible in his view towards the Trade Center, has or is collapsing.
BBC journalist, september 11, 2001
Coverup and Complicity: War Propaganda
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well as smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of media disinformation and war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion. It prevents people from thinking.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained –by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
2. Flashback to the Soviet Afghan War
The 9/11 events constitute the culmination of a long history going back to the Soviet Afghan war (1979-1989) and NATO wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001)
“The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
“Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, … Since September 11, [2001] CIA officials have been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden.” (Phil Gasper, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001)
History of Al Qaeda
-Osama bin Laden, America’s bogyman, was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihad. He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerilla training camp.
-The architects of the covert operation in support of “Islamic fundamentalism” launched during the Reagan presidency played a key role in launching the “Global War on Terrorism” in the wake of 9/11.
– President Ronald Reagan met the leaders of the Islamic Jihad at the White House in 1985
-Under the Reagan adminstration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. In today’s World, the “freedom fighters” are labelled “Islamic terrorists”.
-In the Pashtun language, the word “Taliban” means “Students”, or graduates of the madrasahs (places of learning or coranic schools) set up by the Wahhabi missions from Saudi Arabia, with the support of the CIA.
-Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. The US covert education destroyed secular education. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
The Soviet-Afghan war was part of a CIA covert agenda initiated during the Carter administration, which consisted in actively supporting and financing the Islamic brigades, later known as Al Qaeda.
The Pakistani military regime played from the outset in the late 1970s, a key role in the US sponsored military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan. In the post-Cold war era, this central role of Pakistan in US intelligence operations was extended to the broader Central Asia- Middle East region. From the outset of the Soviet Afghan war in 1979, Pakistan under military rule actively supported the Islamic brigades. In close liaison with the CIA, Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), became a powerful organization, a parallel government, wielding tremendous power and influence.
America’s covert war in Afghanistan, using Pakistan as a launch pad, was initiated during the Carter administration prior to the Soviet “invasion”:
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” (Former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, 15-21 January 1998)
In the published memoirs of Defense Secretary Robert Gates , who held the position of deputy CIA Director at the height of the Soviet Afghan war, US intelligence was directly involved from the outset, prior to the Soviet invasion, in channeling aid to the Islamic brigades.
With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a “parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government”. (Dipankar Banerjee, “Possible Connection of ISI With Drug Industry”, India Abroad, 2 December 1994). The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. (Ibid)
Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:
“Relations between the CIA and the ISI had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia’s ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime. … During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984.” (Ibid)
The ISI operating virtually as an affiliate of the CIA, played a central role in channeling support to Islamic paramilitary groups in Afghanistan and subsequently in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.
Acting on behalf of the CIA, the ISI was also involved in the recruitment and training of the Mujahideen. In the ten year period from 1982 to 1992, some 35,000 Muslims from 43 Islamic countries were recruited to fight in the Afghan jihad. The madrassas in Pakistan, financed by Saudi charities, were also set up with US support with a view to “inculcating Islamic values”. “The camps became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism,” (Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban). Guerilla training under CIA-ISI auspices included targeted assassinations and car bomb attacks.
“Weapons’ shipments “were sent by the Pakistani army and the ISI to rebel camps in the North West Frontier Province near the Afghanistan border. The governor of the province is Lieutenant General Fazle Haq, who [according to Alfred McCoy] . allowed “hundreds of heroin refineries to set up in his province.” Beginning around 1982, Pakistani army trucks carrying CIA weapons from Karachi often pick up heroin in Haq’s province and return loaded with heroin. They are protected from police search by ISI papers.”(1982-1989: US Turns Blind Eye to BCCI and Pakistani Government Involvement in Heroin Trade See also McCoy, 2003, p. 477) .
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a mujahedeen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
Osama Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, America’s bogyman, was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihad. He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerilla training camp.
During the Reagan administration, Osama, who belonged to the wealthy Saudi Bin Laden family was put in charge of raising money for the Islamic brigades. Numerous charities and foundations were created. The operation was coordinated by Saudi intelligence, headed by Prince Turki al-Faisal, in close liaison with the CIA. The money derived from the various charities were used to finance the recruitment of Mujahieen volunteers. Al Qaeda, the base in Arabic was a data bank of volunteers who had enlisted to fight in the Afghan jihad. That data base was initially held by Osama bin Laden.
The Reagan Administration supports “Islamic Fundamentalism”
Pakistan’s ISI was used as a “go-between”. CIA covert support to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, –i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be “successful”, Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the “jihad”, which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.
In December 1984, the Sharia Law (Islamic jurisprudence) was established in Pakistan following a rigged referendum launched by President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Barely a few months later, in March 1985, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which authorized “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well a support to religious indoctrination.
The imposition of The Sharia in Pakistan and the promotion of “radical Islam” was a deliberate US policy serving American geopolitical interests in South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Many present-day “Islamic fundamentalist organizations” in the Middle East and Central Asia, were directly or indirectly the product of US covert support and financing, often channeled through foundations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Missions from the Wahhabi sect of conservative Islam in Saudi Arabia were put in charge of running the CIA sponsored madrassas in Northern Pakistan.
Under NSDD 166, a series of covert CIA-ISI operations was launched.
The US supplied weapons to the Islamic brigades through the ISI. CIA and ISI officials would meet at ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi to coordinate US support to the Mujahideen. Under NSDD 166, the procurement of US weapons to the Islamic insurgents increased from 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983 to 65,000 tons annually by 1987. “In addition to arms, training, extensive military equipment including military satellite maps and state-of-the-art communications equipment” (University Wire, 7 May 2002).
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
VIDEO (30 Sec.)
With William Casey as director of the CIA, NSDD 166 was described as the largest covert operation in US history:
The U.S. supplied support package had three essential components-organization and logistics, military technology, and ideological support for sustaining and encouraging the Afghan resistance….
U.S. counterinsurgency experts worked closely with the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in organizing Mujahideen groups and in planning operations inside Afghanistan.
… But the most important contribution of the U.S. was to … bring in men and material from around the Arab world and beyond. The most hardened and ideologically dedicated men were sought on the logic that they would be the best fighters. Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad. (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Afghanistan and the Genesis of the Global Jihad, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
Religious Indoctrination
Under NSDD 166, US assistance to the Islamic brigades channeled through Pakistan was not limited to bona fide military aid. Washington also supported and financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the process of religious indoctrination, largely to secure the demise of secular institutions:
… the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..
The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books “are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy.” Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.
… AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.
“It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,” Stratos said. “But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.”
… Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtun, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska -Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $ 51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
In the 1970s and 1980s, Afghanistan was an advanced secular society
Kabul University 1980s
In the 1980s, Kabul was:
“a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs.”
There were female members of parliament, and women drove cars, and travelled and went on dates, without needing to ask a male guardian for permission.
Visibly, the US led War’s objective was to Destroy and entire country.
The Role of the NeoCons
There is continuity. The architects of the covert operation in support of “Islamic fundamentalism” launched during the Reagan presidency played a key role in launching the “Global War on Terrorism” in the wake of 9/11.
Several of the NeoCons of the Bush Junior Administration were high ranking officials during the Reagan presidency.
Richard Armitage, was Deputy Secretary of State during George W. Bush’s first term (2001-2004). He played a central key role in post 9/11 negotiations with Pakistan leading up to the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. During the Reagan era, he held the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. In this capacity, he played a key role in the implementation of NSDD 163 while also ensuring liaison with the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus.
Richard Armitage
Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz was at the State Department in charge of a foreign policy team composed, among others, of Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama and Zalmay Khalilzad.
Wolfowitz’s group was also involved in laying the conceptual groundwork of US covert support to Islamic parties and organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Paul Wolfowitz
Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, who now serves the Obama administration, was also involved in setting the groundwork for CIA covert operations. He was appointed Deputy Director for Intelligence by Ronald Reagan in 1982, and Deputy Director of the CIA in 1986, a position which he held until 1989. Gates played a key role in the formulation of NSDD 163, which established a consistent framework for promoting Islamic fundamentalism and channeling covert support to the Islamic brigades. He was also involved in the Iran Contra scandal. .
The Iran Contra Operation
Richard Gates, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, among others, were also involved in the Iran-Contra operation.
Armitage was in close liaison with Colonel Oliver North. His deputy and chief anti-terrorist official Noel Koch was part of the team set up by Oliver North.
Of significance, the Iran-Contra operation was also tied into the process of channeling covert support to the Islamic brigades in Afghanistan. The Iran Contra scheme served several related foreign policy:
1) Procurement of weapons to Iran thereby feeding the Iraq-Iran war,
2) Support to the Nicaraguan Contras,
3) Support to the Islamic brigades in Afghanistan, channeled via Pakistan’s ISI.
Following the delivery of the TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran, the proceeds of these sales were deposited in numbered bank accounts and the money was used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras. and the Mujahideen:
“The Washington Post reported that profits from the Iran arms sales were deposited in one CIA-managed account into which the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had placed $250 million apiece. That money was disbursed not only to the contras in Central America but to the rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan.” (US News & World Report, 15 December 1986).
Although Lieutenant General Colin Powell, was not directly involved in the arms’ transfer negotiations, which had been entrusted to Oliver North, he was among “at least five men within the Pentagon who knew arms were being transferred to the CIA.” (The Record, 29 December 1986). In this regard, Powell was directly instrumental in giving the “green light” to lower-level officials in blatant violation of Congressional procedures. According to the New York Times, Colin Powell took the decision (at the level of military procurement), to allow the delivery of weapons to Iran:
“Hurriedly, one of the men closest to Secretary of Defense Weinberger, Maj. Gen. Colin Powell, bypassed the written ”focal point system” procedures and ordered the Defense Logistics Agency [responsible for procurement] to turn over the first of 2,008 TOW missiles to the CIA., which acted as cutout for delivery to Iran” (New York Times, 16 February 1987)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was also implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair.
The Golden Crescent Drug Trade
The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA’s covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. (Alfred McCoy, Drug Fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive, 1 August 1997).
Alfred McCoy’s study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.” (Ibid) Various Islamic paramilitary groups and organizations were created. The proceeds of the Afghan drug trade, which was protected by the CIA, were used to finance the various insurgencies:
“Under CIA and Pakistani protection, Pakistan military and Afghan resistance opened heroin labs on the Afghan and Pakistani border. According to The Washington Post of May 1990, among the leading heroin manufacturers were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan leader who received about half of the covert arms that the U.S. shipped to Pakistan. Although there were complaints about Hekmatyar’s brutality and drug trafficking within the ranks of the Afghan resistance of the day, the CIA maintained an uncritical alliance and supported him without reservation or restraint.
Once the heroin left these labs in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, the Sicilian Mafia imported the drugs into the U.S., where they soon captured sixty percent of the U.S. heroin market. That is to say, sixty percent of the U.S. heroin supply came indirectly from a CIA operation. During the decade of this operation, the 1980s, the substantial DEA contingent in Islamabad made no arrests and participated in no seizures, allowing the syndicates a de facto free hand to export heroin. By contrast, a lone Norwegian detective, following a heroin deal from Oslo to Karachi, mounted an investigation that put a powerful Pakistani banker known as President Zia’s surrogate son behind bars. The DEA in Islamabad got nobody, did nothing, stayed away.
Lucrative Narcotics Trade in the Post Cold War Era
The drug trade has continued unabated during the post Cold war years. Afghanistan became the major supplier of heroin to Western markets, in fact almost the sole supplier: more than 90 percent of the heroin sold Worldwide originates in Afghanistan. This lucrative contraband is tied into Pakistani politics and the militarization of the Pakistani State. It also has a direct bearing on the structure of the Pakistani economy and its banking and financial institutions, which from the outset of the Golden Crescent drug trade have been involved in extensive money laundering operations, which are protected by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus:
According to the US State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (2006) (quoted in Daily Times, 2 March 2006),
“Pakistani criminal networks play a central role in the transshipment of narcotics and smuggled goods from Afghanistan to international markets. Pakistan is a major drug-transit country. The proceeds of narcotics trafficking and funding for terrorist activities are often laundered by means of the alternative system called hawala. … .
“Repeatedly, a network of private unregulated charities has also emerged as a significant source of illicit funds for international terrorist networks,” the report pointed out. … “
The hawala system and the charities are but the tip of the iceberg. According to the State Department report, “the State Bank of Pakistan has frozen more twenty years] a meager $10.5 million “belonging to 12 entities and individuals linked to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda or the Taliban”. What the report fails to mention is that the bulk of the proceeds of the Afghan drug trade are laundered in bona fide Western banking institutions.
The Taliban Repress the Drug Trade
A major and unexpected turnaround in the CIA sponsored drug trade occurred in 2000.
The Taliban government which came to power in 1996 with Washington’s support, implemented in 2000-2001 a far-reaching opium eradication program with the support of the United Nations which served to undermine a multibillion dollar trade. (For further details see, Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, Global Research, 2005).
In 2001 prior to the US-led invasion, opium production under the Taliban eradication program declined by more than 90 percent. (see graph above)
In the immediate wake of the US led invasion, the Bush administration ordered that the opium harvest not be destroyed on the fabricated pretext that this would undermine the military government of Pervez Musharraf.
“Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. According to these sources, Pakistani intelligence had threatened to overthrow President Musharraf if the crops were destroyed. …
‘If they [the CIA] are in fact opposing the destruction of the Afghan opium trade, it’ll only serve to perpetuate the belief that the CIA is an agency devoid of morals; off on their own program rather than that of our constitutionally elected government’” .(NewsMax.com, 28 March 2002)
Since the US led invasion, opium production has increased from 185 tons in 2001 under the Taliban to 9000 tons in 2017. Cultivated areas have increased more than 20 fold since the 2001 US-led invasion. (Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 6 January 2006)
In 2007, Afghanistan supplied approximately 93% of the global supply of heroin. The proceeds (in terms of retail value) of the Afghanistan drug trade are estimated (2017) to be in excess of 700 billion dollars a year, representing a significant fraction of the global trade in narcotics.
The proceeds of this lucrative multibillion dollar contraband are deposited in Western banks. Almost the totality of the revenues accrue to corporate interests and criminal syndicates outside Afghanistan.
The laundering of drug money constitutes a multibillion dollar activity, which continues to be protected by the CIA and the ISI. In the wake of the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.
In retrospect, one of the major objectives of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was to restore the drug trade.
The militarization of Pakistan serves powerful political, financial and criminal interests underlying the drug trade. US foreign policy tends to support these powerful interests. The CIA continues to protect the Golden Crescent narcotics trade. Despite his commitment to eradicating the drug trade, opium production under the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has skyrocketed.
3. Bosnia-Gate
The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Known and documented, since the Soviet-Afghan war, recruiting Mujahideen (“holy warriors”) to fight covert wars on Washington’s behest has become an integral part of US foreign policy.
A 1997 Congressional document by the Republican Party Committee (RPC), while intent upon smearing President Bill Clinton, nonetheless sheds light on the Clinton administration’s insidious role in recruiting and training jihadist mercenaries with a view to transforming Bosnia into a “Militant Islamic Base”.
In many regards, Bosnia and Kosovo (1998-1999) were “dress rehearsals” for the destabilization of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen).
With regard to Syria, the recruitment of jihadists (according to Israeli intelligence sources) was launched prior to 2011 under the auspices of NATO and the Turkish High command in liaison with the Pentagon.
The RCP report reveals how the US administration – under advice from Clinton’s National Security Council headed by Anthony Lake – “helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base” leading to the recruitment through the so-called “Militant Islamic Network,” of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world:
Perhaps most threatening to the SFOR mission – and more importantly, to the safety of the American personnel serving in Bosnia – is the unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to come clean with the Congress and with the American people about its complicity in the delivery of weapons from Iran to the Muslim government in Sarajevo. That policy, personally approved by Bill Clinton in April 1994 at the urging of CIA Director-designate (and then-NSC chief) Anthony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, has, according to the Los Angeles Times (citing classified intelligence community sources), “played a central role in the dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Bosnia.
(…)
Along with the weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and VEVAK intelligence operatives entered Bosnia in large numbers, along with thousands of mujahedin (“holy warriors”) from across the Muslim world. Also engaged in the effort were several other Muslim countries (including Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey) and a number of radical Muslim organizations.
For example, the role of one Sudan-based “humanitarian organization,” called the Third World Relief Agency, has been well documented. The Clinton Administration’s “hands-on” involvement with the Islamic network’s arms pipeline included inspections of missiles from Iran by U.S. government officials… the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization … has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. … TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups. [Washington Post, 9/22/96] emphasis added
The Republican Party Committee report quoting official documents as well as US media sources confirmed unequivocally the complicity of the Clinton Administration with several Islamic fundamentalist organisations including Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.
What was the ultimate purpose of this report?
The Republicans wanted at the time to undermine the Clinton Administration. However, at a time when the entire country had its eyes riveted on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans no doubt chose not to trigger an untimely “Iran-Bosniagate” affair, which might have unduly diverted public attention away from the Lewinsky scandal.
The Republicans wanted to impeach Bill Clinton “for having lied to the American People” regarding his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. On the more substantive “foreign policy lies” regarding covert operations involving the recruitment of “Jihadists” in the Balkans, Democrats and Republicans agreed in unison, no doubt pressured by the Pentagon and the CIA not to “spill the beans”. Clinton’s support of “jihadist” terrorist organizations in Bosnia and Kosovo was a continuation of the CIA sponsored recruitment of Mujahideen implemented throughout the 1980s in Afghanistan, under the helm of the CIA.
From Bosnia to Kosovo 1999
The “Bosnian pattern” described in the 1997 Congressional RPC report was then replicated in Kosovo. Among the foreign mercenaries fighting in Kosovo (and Macedonia in 2001) were Mujahideen from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union as well as “soldiers of fortune” from several NATO countries including Britain, Holland and Germany.
Confirmed by British military sources, the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6, together with “former and serving members of 22 SAS [Britain’s 22nd Special Air Services Regiment], as well as three British and American private security companies”. (The Scotsman, Glasgow, 29 August 1999)
The US DIA approached MI6 to arrange a training programme for the KLA, said a senior British military source. `MI6 then sub-contracted the operation to two British security companies, who in turn approached a number of former members of the (22 SAS) regiment. Lists were then drawn up of weapons and equipment needed by the KLA.’ While these covert operations were continuing, serving members of 22 SAS Regiment, mostly from the unit’s D Squadron, were first deployed in Kosovo before the beginning of the bombing campaign in March. (ibid)
While British SAS Special Forces in bases in Northern Albania were training the KLA, military instructors from Turkey and Afghanistan financed by the “Islamic jihad” were collaborating in training the KLA in guerilla and diversion tactics. (Truth in Media, April 2, 1999)
Bin Laden had visited Albania himself. He was one of several fundamentalist groups that had sent units to fight in Kosovo, … Bin Laden is believed to have established an operation in Albania in 1994 … Albanian sources say Sali Berisha, who was then president, had links with some groups that later proved to be extreme fundamentalists. (Sunday Times, London, 29 November 1998, emphasis added).
Congressional Testimonies on KLA-Osama links
According to Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organised Crime Program, in a testimony presented to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee:
What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the “Balkan Route” that links the “Golden Crescent” of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe. 11
According to Ralf Mutschke of Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence division also in a testimony to the House Judicial Committee:
The U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden” . Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. 12
Madeleine Albright Covets the KLA
These KLA links to international terrorism and organised crime documented by the US Congress were totally ignored by the Clinton Administration. In fact, in the months preceding the bombing of Yugoslavia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was busy building a “political legitimacy” for the KLA. The paramilitary army had –from one day to the next– been elevated to the status of a bona fide “democratic” force in Kosovo. In turn, Madeleine Albright has forced the pace of international diplomacy: the KLA had been spearheaded into playing a central role in the failed “peace negotiations” at Rambouiillet in early 1999.
Albright and KLA leader Hashim Thaci
The Senate and the House tacitly endorse State Terrorism
While the various Congressional reports confirmed that the US government had been working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, this did not prevent the Clinton and later the Bush Administration from arming and equipping the KLA. The Congressional documents also confirm that members of the Senate and the House knew the relationship of the Administration to international terrorism. To quote the statement of Rep. John Kasich of the House Armed Services Committee: “We connected ourselves [in 1998-99] with the KLA, which was the staging point for bin Laden…”
In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, Republicans and Democrats in unison have given their full support to the President to “wage war on Osama”.
In 1999, Senator Jo Lieberman had stated authoritatively that “Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” In the hours following the October 7 missile attacks on Afghanistan, the same Jo Lieberman called for punitive air strikes against Iraq: “We’re in a war against terrorism… We can’t stop with bin Laden and the Taliban.” Yet Senator Jo Lieberman, as member of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate had access to all the Congressional documents pertaining to “KLA-Osama” links. In making this statement, he was fully aware that that agencies of the US government as well as NATO were supporting international terrorism.
The War in Macedonia
In the wake of the 1999 war in Yugoslavia, the terrorist activities of the KLA were extended into Southern Serbia and Macedonia. Meanwhile, the KLA –renamed the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC)– was elevated to United Nations status, implying the granting of “legitimate” sources of funding through United Nations as well as through bilateral channels, including direct US military aid.
And barely two months after the official inauguration of the KPC under UN auspices (September 1999), KPC-KLA commanders – using UN resources and equipment – were already preparing the assaults into Macedonia, as a logical follow-up to their terrorist activities in Kosovo. According to the Skopje daily Dnevnik, the KPC had established a “sixth operation zone” in Southern Serbia and Macedonia:
Sources, who insist on anonymity, claim that the headquarters of the Kosovo protection brigades [i.e. linked to the UN sponsored KPC] have [March 2000] already been formed in Tetovo, Gostivar and Skopje. They are being prepared in Debar and Struga [on the border with Albania] as well, and their members have defined codes. 14
According to the BBC, “Western special forces were still training the guerrillas” meaning that they were assisting the KLA in opening up “a sixth operation zone” in Southern Serbia and Macedonia. 15
“The Islamic Militant Network” and NATO join hands in Macedonia
Among the foreign mercenaries now fighting in Macedonia (October 2001) in the ranks of self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA), are Mujahideen from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Also within the KLA’s proxy force in Macedonia are senior US military advisers from a private mercenary outfit on contract to the Pentagon as well as “soldiers of fortune” from Britain, Holland and Germany. Some of these Western mercenaries had previously fought with the KLA and the Bosnian Muslim Army.
Extensively documented by the Macedonian press and statements of the Macedonian authorities, the US government and the “Islamic Militant Network” are working hand in glove in supporting and financing the self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA), involved in the terrorist attacks in Macedonia. The NLA is a proxy of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In turn the KLA and the UN sponsored Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) are identical institutions with the same commanders and military personnel. KPC Commanders on UN salaries are fighting in the NLA together with the Mujahideen.
In a bitter twist, while supported and financed by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, the KLA-NLA is also supported by NATO and the United Nations mission to Kosovo (UNMIK). In fact, the “Islamic Militant Network” –also using Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) as the CIA’s go-between– still constitutes an integral part of Washington’s covert military-intelligence operations in Macedonia and Southern Serbia.
The KLA-NLA terrorists are funded from US military aid, the United Nations peace-keeping budget as well as by several Islamic organisations including Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Drug money is also being used to finance the terrorists with the complicity of the US government. The recruitment of Mujahideen to fight in the ranks of the NLA in Macedonia is implemented through various Islamic groups.
US military advisers mingle with Mujahideen within the same paramilitary force, Western mercenaries from NATO countries fight alongside Mujahideen recruited in the Middle East and Central Asia. And the US media calls this a “blowback” where so-called “intelligence assets” have gone against their sponsors!
But this did not happen during the Cold war! It is happening right now in Macedonia. And it is confirmed by numerous press reports, eyewitness accounts, photographic evidence as well as official statements by the Macedonian Prime Minister, who has accused the Western military alliance of supporting the terrorists. Moreover, the official Macedonian New Agency (MIA) has pointed to the complicity between Washington’s envoy Ambassador James Pardew and the NLA terrorists. 17 In other words, the so-called “intelligence assets” are still serving the interests of their US sponsors.
Pardew’s background is revealing in this regard. He started his Balkans career in 1993 as a senior intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff responsible for channeling US aid to the Bosnian Muslim Army. Coronel Pardew had been put in charge of arranging the “air-drops” of supplies to Bosnian forces. At the time, these “air drops” were tagged as “civilian aid”. It later transpired –confirmed by the RPC Congressional report– that the US had violated the arms embargo. And James Pardew played an important role as part of the team of intelligence officials working closely with the Chairman of the National Security Council Anthony Lake.
Pardew was later involved in the Dayton negotiations (1995) on behalf of the US Defence Department. In 1999, prior to the bombing of Yugoslavia, he was appointed “Special Representative for Military Stabilisation and Kosovo Implementation” by President Clinton. One of his tasks was to channel support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which at the time was also being supported by Osama bin Laden. Pardew was in this regard instrumental in replicating the “Bosnian pattern” in Kosovo and subsequently in Macedonia…
4. ISIS-Daesh:
America’s Fake Counter-terrorism Operation
against Syria and Iraq (2011-
Washington is behind the Islamic State (ISIS-ISIL-Daesh) and at the same time it is behind the moderate Al Qaeda terrorists, which the Trump administration is supporting as part of America’s alleged campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). And they expect us to believe that they are committed to waging a campaign against terrorists.
The US has been protecting both Al Qaeda and ISIS-ISIL-Daesh.
The US Airforce has consistently acted on behalf of the terrorists, bombing Syrian government forces
The Islamic State (ISIS) was until 2014 called Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Al Nusra is an al Qaeda affiliate which has committed countless atrocities in Syria. It is considered by the US administration as the “Moderate Opposition”, fighting against Syrian government forces.
America’s “anti-terrorist campaign’ consisted in supporting a so-called “moderate” Al Qaeda entity (Al Nusra, now renamed) with a view to going after another al Qaeda entity entitled , formerly designated as Al Qaeda in Iraq.
“Al Qaeda is going after Al Qaeda”, and both wings of al Qaeda are supported covertly by US intelligence.
The terrorists are described as the victims of Syrian government aggression. From the very outset, the atrocities committed by the terrorists are casually blamed on Syrian government forces.
Moreover, the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels responsible for countless atrocities are trained and financed by US-NATO and its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel.
Those who recruited, trained and financed the terrorists are upheld by the “international community” as the guardians of World Peace. The latter include the heads of state and heads of government of the US, Britain, France and Turkey among others. It’s called “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).
Turkey provided a corridor for the terrorists into Northern Syria, they recruited and trained them in liaison with NATO.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar provided money, training and weapons to Al Qaeda.
The Obama administration ordered an air campaign directed against the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh).
What the US-led coalition was doing was PROTECTING ISIS-DAESH, while bombing the civilian infrastructure of Syria and Iraq as part of a so-called “counterterrorism operation”.
The Terrorists R Us….
The mainstream media applauds, The Lie becomes the Truth.
It’s official: Obama’s counterterrorism campaign requires upholding Al Qaeda as a “moderate opposition.”
It was all for a good cause: install a puppet Islamic State in Damascus (modelled on Afghanistan), spread “Democracy Made in America” throughout the Middle East, confiscate the regions extensive oil and gas reserves, transform countries into open territories…
The diabolical plan of sending terrorists into Syria as the foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance has failed.
And now Trump has decided to repatriate all remaining US troops.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” said Trump in his tweet.
The US-led counter-terrorism campaign against ISIS is “fake”, i.e. it provided a pretext to bomb and invade Syria. The U.S. did not defeat ISIS-Daesh. It was the Syrian Arab Army, aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah which waged the campaign against ISIS-Daesh
.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a creation of US intelligence. Washington’s “Counter-terrorism Agenda” in Iraq and Syria consists in Supporting the Terrorists.
The incursion of the Islamic State (IS) brigades into Iraq starting in June 2014 was part of a carefully planned military-intelligence operation supported covertly by the US, NATO and Israel.
The counter-terrorism mandate is a fiction. America is the Number One “State Sponsor of Terrorism”
The Islamic State is protected by the US and its allies.
If they had wanted to eliminate the Islamic State brigades, they could have “carpet” bombed their convoys of Toyota pickup trucks when they crossed the desert from Syria into Iraq in June.
\
The Syro-Arabian Desert is open territory (see map below). With state of the art jet fighter aircraft (F15, F22 Raptor, CF-18) it would have been -from a military standpoint- a rapid and expedient surgical operation
It could not have been undertaken without the unbending support of the Western media which has upheld Obama’s initiative as a counter-terrorism operation.
The Islamic State (ISIL) was originally an Al Qaeda affiliated entity created by US intelligence with the support of Britain’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), Ri’āsat Al-Istikhbārāt Al-’Āmah ( رئاسة الاستخبارات العامة). The ISIL brigades were involved in the US-NATO supported insurgency in Syria directed against the government of Bashar al Assad.
NATO and the Turkish High Command were responsible for the recruitment of ISIL and Al Nusrah mercenaries from the outset of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011. According to Israeli intelligence sources, this initiative consisted in:
“a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011.)
There are Western Special Forces and Western intelligence operatives within the ranks of the ISIL. British Special Forces and MI6 have been involved in training jihadist rebels in Syria.
Western military specialists on contract to the Pentagon have trained the terrorists in the use of chemical weapons.
“The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday. ( CNN Report, December 9, 2012)
The ISIL’s practice of beheadings is part of the US sponsored terrorist training programs implemented in Saudi Arabia.
Jihadist fighters have met Israeli IDF officers as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu. The IDF top brass tacitly acknowledges that “global jihad elements inside Syria” [ISIL and Al Nusrah] are supported by Israel. See image below:
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon next to a wounded mercenary, Israeli military field hospital at the occupied Golan Heights’ border with Syria, 18 February 2014″
The ISIL are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance.
Their unspoken mandate is to wreck havoc and destruction in Syria and Iraq, acting on behalf of their US sponsors.
The late US Senator John McCain met up with jihadist terrorist leaders in Syria. (see picture right)
The Islamic State (IS) militia, which was the alleged target of a US-NATO bombing campaign under a “counter-terrorism” mandate, continues to be supported covertly by the US. Washington and its allies continue to provide military aid to the Islamic State.
US and allied bombings are not targeting the ISIL, they are bombing the economic infrastructure of Iraq and Syria including factories and oil refineries.
The IS caliphate project is part of a longstanding US foreign policy agenda to carve up Iraq and Syria into separate territories: A Sunni Islamist Caliphate, an Arab Shia Republic, a Republic of Kurdistan.
5. Escalation: The Globalization of the “War on Terrorism”
U.S. sponsored Al Qaeda terror brigades (covertly supported by Western intelligence) have been deployed in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia and Yemen, extending into South East Asia and China.
These various affiliated Al Qaeda entities in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are CIA sponsored “intelligence assets”. They are used by Washington to wreck havoc, create internal conflicts and destabilize sovereign countries.
The US is also supporting Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region of China. The underlying objective is to trigger political instability in Western China.
The homegrown terrorist threat is a fabrication. It is promoted by Western governments and the media with a view to repealing civil liberties and installing a police state.
The terror attacks by alleged jihadists and terror warnings are invariably staged events. They are used to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
In turn, the arrests, trials and sentences of “Islamic terrorists” sustain the legitimacy of America’s Homeland Security State and law enforcement apparatus, which has become increasingly militarized.
The ultimate objective is to instill in the minds of millions of Americans that the enemy is real and the U.S. Administration will protect the lives of its citizens.
The “counter-terrorism” campaign against the Islamic State has contributed to the demonization of Muslims, who in the eyes of Western public opinion are increasingly associated with the “jihadists”.
Anybody who dares to question the validity of the “Global War on Terrorism” is branded a terrorist and subjected to the anti-terrorist laws.
The ultimate objective of the “Global War on Terrorism” is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the inquisitorial social order which rules America.
The US Administration has imposed a diabolical consensus with the support of its allies, not to mention the complicit role of the United Nations Security Council. The Western media has embraced the consensus; it has described the Islamic State as an independent entity, an outside enemy which threatens the Western World.
The Big Lie has become the Truth. Say no to the “Big Lie”. Spread the message. The truth is ultimately a powerful weapon.
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
In the first video, Pastor Henry Hildebrandt of the Church of God, in Aylmer, ON., decries the government’s infringement of Canadians’ Constitutionally-enshrined freedoms to assemble and to worship.
He sees the government-imposed COVID measures as a form of social conditioning.
In the second video, Christy from Bobcaygeon reminds us that Canada’s preeminent Sick Kids Hospital advises against masking and social distancing. She says that her kids will have to wear a mask all day at school, and that it will negatively impact their health. The COVID measures will traumatize her kids, she says, and it will be like they are “in prison”.
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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.
Featured image is from the author
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
On 30 August 1945, Major General Lauris Norstad dispatched a document to his superior, General Leslie Groves, outlining a total of 15 “key Soviet cities” to be struck with US atomic weapons, headed by the capital Moscow. This was followed by another 25 “leading Soviet cities” listed for annihilation, topping this latter group was Leningrad, almost destroyed during the Nazi siege finally lifted in late January 1944.
The above nuclear plans were being composed three days before the Second World War had even officially concluded (on 2 September 1945), and a mere two weeks following Japan’s surrender.
These initiatives, targeting the USSR for destruction, were actually developing at least as early as March 1944, at a time when Moscow was a vital wartime ally. Due to ongoing Soviet intelligence reports, Stalin was privy to America’s nuclear project most certainly by April 1942, but quite likely earlier.
Meanwhile, Japan’s political leaders were compelled to surrender on 15 August 1945, after the US military threatened to drop more atomic weapons over the country. This would have just been feasible, with the Pentagon holding a further two atomic bombs in its stockpile during the latter part of 1945.
In the days stretching beyond late August 1945, Groves’ and Norstad’s schemes of ruin were enlarging. On 15 September 1945, a highly classified document relating to their plan expounded in stark tones that,
“The immediate destruction of the enemy’s will [USSR] and capacity to resist is the primary objective of the United States Army Strategic Air Forces”, to be focused upon “the enemy centers of industry, transportation and population”.
That same day, 15 September 1945, Groves and Norstad estimated that over five dozen Soviet metropolises, 66 altogether, should be obliterated with 204 atomic bombs – a “revolutionary” weapon which was “spectacularly successful” in desolating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was calculated that these 66 cities held 100% of the Soviet Union’s aluminium production, 97% of its tanks, 95% of its aircraft, 95% of its oil refining capacity, etc.
This declassified material – virtually ignored by commercial media and largely avoided by alternative news – is of particularly high importance, as it blows apart the long-purported myths that the so-called Cold War began in 1947. It further debunks claims that resumption of hostilities was due to Soviet antagonism.
A top secret Pentagon document, once more dated 15 September 1945, outlined explicitly that,
“the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war has therefore been used as a basis upon which to predicate the United States’ atomic bomb requirements”.
Ever eastwards, more than 20 cities in Soviet-occupied Manchuria were also “investigated” for atomic attacks, but it was eventually decided this resource-rich region “is not an integral part of the USSR”.
America’s atomic arsenal unleashed over the Soviet Union would, preferably, be delivered by the upcoming B-36 “Peacemaker” six-engine bomber, with its remarkable 230 foot wingspan – and not, as thought, with the smaller B-29 “Superfortress” aircraft, fresh from discharging two bombs over Japan.
The B-29’s roaming capacity was that of more than 5,000 miles without refuelling, but even this impressive distance had its limitations for what was now envisaged. By comparison, the B-36 boasted a flying range of 10,000 miles.
The B-36 could in fact fly from Washington to Moscow, drop its terrible load, and subsequently return to the American capital without having stopped once there or back (combined distance 9,700 miles). This feat would also have been achievable for the B-36 regarding other Soviet cities such as Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, and so on. Yet the B-36 would not be available for such operations until finally entering service during mid-1948, and even after that the aircraft necessitated further adjustment.
Failing the proposed deployment of 204 atomic bombs, a “minimum requirement” of 123 atomic weapons was contemplated, while at the opposite end of the spectrum an “optimum requirement” constituted an eye-watering 466 bombs.
In September 1945 the “minimum requirement” of 123 bombs was not realistic, let alone the 466 figure, and indeed the latter number was then not seriously considered. By June 1948, America’s nuclear cache still consisted of a modest 50 atomic weapons. Moscow was now to be struck with eight bombs, Leningrad with seven.
From mid-1948, America’s atomic numbers ballooned as the age of “nuclear plenty” was born. By the summer of 1949, Washington had the required 200-plus atomic bombs so as to deliver their Soviet apocalypse.
Yet Russia, recognizing the threat facing their state, had feverishly been constructing their own nuclear weapons. Just as the US arsenal was approaching requisite size, in August 1949 the Soviets detonated an atomic device over Semipalatinsk, in north-eastern Kazakhstan.
The USSR’s nuclear explosion, near identical to that of America’s Nagasaki bomb, was detected within days by the US Air Force. After they crosschecked the Soviets’ atomic debris, president Harry Truman, informed of the news, was appalled.
American intelligence had deduced that the Soviets would likely be unable to acquire atomic bombs until 1953, at the earliest. A CIA memorandum from 15 December 1947 insisted,
“it is doubtful that the Russians can produce a bomb before 1953, and almost certain they cannot produce one before 1951”.
In October 1948 General Curtis LeMay, a ruthless war leader, assumed control of Strategic Air Command, with Groves cast into obscurity early that year. LeMay promptly hammered out an Emergency War Plan, which called upon the USSR’s evisceration with “the entire stockpile of atomic bombs, if made available, in a single massive attack”.
The following year, October 1949, LeMay expanded strategies so as to include the destruction of over 100 Soviet urban regions with 292 atomic bombs. This significant total would not be available until 30 June 1950, by which time the success of Russia’s nuclear project had been confirmed.
Yet by 1950, the Pentagon was churning out Nagasaki-type bombs on a production line. The Nagasaki weapon, “Fat Man”, had a yield of 21 kilotons, making it considerably more powerful than the Hiroshima device, “Little Boy”, which held 15 kilotons of explosive force.
America’s military would not hold possession of the “optimum” 466 weapons until June 1951. This was scaled down to 400 bombs required for “killing a nation”, and the Pentagon’s nuclear stash was brimming with precisely 400 such devices on New Year’s Day 1951.
From 1950, the program would undergo major enlargement in order to encompass the new communist China in its cross hairs, a country then home to over half a billion people. China, it may be noted, did not develop nuclear weapons until 1964.
At maps in US military headquarters throughout the great Pacific region, the USSR and Chinese land areas were laid out as a combined whole: One giant red mass with no defining borders to distinguish between either state. Both were to be decimated together, while suggestions in a bid to change the stratagem were met with firm opposition and “sent shudders down planners’ spines”.
These maps, obscured by a curtain or screen from unassuming visitors, were marked with pins and arrows highlighting which areas to be flattened with nuclear bombs; but it was indeed not possible, in certain regions, to safely discern Chinese territory from that of the southern Soviet Union, or parts of Russia itself.
By 1960, it was decided upon that every city in the USSR and China would be attacked with nuclear weapons; a total consisting of hundreds of urban centres. For example, each populated space in the Soviet Union – containing 25,000 people or more – was earmarked to be struck with a nuclear bomb. These programs would largely be implemented with the new long range, jet-powered bombers, the B-52 and B-58, with the obsolete B-36 sent into retirement in 1959.
In the early 1960s, this greatly increased level of destruction was possible, as the Pentagon’s nuclear cargo reached about 18,000 bombs. The majority now consisted of the infinitely more powerful hydrogen weapons. Moscow was to be hit with a yield of 40 megatons, about 4,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
Moreover, the USSR’s Warsaw Pact allies in central and southern Europe were also designated for annihilation: such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. These nations are today all members of the US-led NATO organization, with Czechoslovakia since dissolving into two separate countries belonging to NATO.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, a prestigious military body advising the president, calculated in 1961 that nuclear attacks against the USSR, China and Warsaw Pact states would kill around 600 million people. Even this mind-numbing figure was a conservative estimate, which did not fully take into account the aftermath of such intended actions.
The Soviet Union – with its nuclear cache pointed at America’s NATO allies – would, in response to a US first strike, fire its warheads at NATO states in western Europe, wiping them from the face of the earth.
If there was lingering doubt, the resulting radioactive fallout from US nuclear assaults on European Russia and Warsaw Pact members, was expected to be blown on the wind towards the Atlantic. This would doubly eradicate much of western Europe, such as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. To the north, Finland was thought to be one of the first to face immediate destruction, following close-range fallout from planned nuclear explosions over Leningrad’s submarine pens.
Nor would the devastation from fallout be restricted to Europe, far from it. Further nuclear attacks on southern and eastern USSR, along with large-scale assaults across China, would thereafter affect many other states in Asia.
Radioactive poisoning was anticipated to spread southwards over India, whose population in 1960 comprised 450 million people.
Afghanistan, bordering both the USSR and China, faced extensive ruin from fallout – as too did Japan, whose southern reaches are located just a few hundred miles from eastern China. Mongolia, a large Asian country squeezed between Russia and China, could expect its fair share of radiation; though the Mongol state, centuries before one of the biggest empires in history, has been sparsely populated in modern times.
The combined death toll from all of the above would surely have been closer to one billion. However, unbeknownst to everyone concerned in the early 1960s, due to the extinction phenomenon of nuclear winter America would also have faced its end – even without retaliatory strikes reaching US soil. This doomsday scenario remains entirely relevant today, in an age of nuclear proliferation and environmental decline.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
“To put it simply, our fate as a species is sealed. We’re headed for extinction in the very near term despite warnings dating more than 150 years. It’s a tragic tale. And, as foretold by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams, our species hardly made a squeak as the hammer dropped.” – Guy McPherson [1]
For nearly forty years there have been warnings raised by prominent experts that the rising temperatures due to greenhouse gas warming threatens our future. [2]
Despite the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, the assembly of nations at the earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, all the way up to the Paris Accord in 2015, the world continues to pollute and the temperature continues to rise.[3]
Recently in the fall of 2018, ‘The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C’ got tons of exposure in the mainstream news and prognosticated that allowing a rise of more than 1.5°C would result in an elevated risk of “long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems.” It said , “Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.” [4][5]
But the worst of these “alarming” statistics see the human species condemned to life on a degraded planet by the year 2100, or even 2050. What you rarely hear is the warning that the changes of abrupt climate change could deny organisms of a habitat in as soon as five years, which could mean the end of the human species, and shortly thereafter, possibly every other organism on this great blue globe. What’s more, it is now simply too late for the human species to reverse the two and a half century course industry fueled by carbon energy. [6][7]
In other words, ‘Time’s up!’
One of the few scientists who came to this conclusion discovered it almost twenty years ago. He has been quoting the refereed journal literature and consequently seems to have been shut out by his peers. Yet, he is learning to see in the daunting time-frame that life, while it lasts, is glorious and free, with heroes stepping to the challenge of life as this play comes to a close.
Guy McPherson speaks with us for the entire program of the Global Research News Hour. Our topics this week include the threat to the poles of a ‘blue ice’ moment, the aerosol masking effect, the collapse of modern economy contributing to a swift rise in temperature, the refusal of contemporary society to address the threat and much, much more!
Guy McPherson was 49 when he became professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Guy taught and conducted research for more than twenty award-winning years at Texas A&M University, University of Arizona, University of California (Berkeley), Southern Utah University, and Grinnell College. He has produced a dozen books and hundreds of articles. He currently produces and hosts the radio program ‘Nature Bats Last’ and currently resides in Maitland, a suburb of Orlando, Florida.
There exists a huge disconnect between publicly available real scientific evidence and government policy surrounding the Covid crisis. Consider the following scientific “admissions” and how they contradict government “lockdown” policies:
In the first video, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Chris Whitty, states unequivocally that on an individual level the chances of dying of coronavirus are low. Even without a vaccine, he says, a high proportion of people will not get it.
Significantly, he refers to the virus as an “epidemic” and not a “pandemic”. Further, he says a significant number of people will have no symptoms, and of those WITH symptoms, for the great majority (around 80%), the symptoms will be mild to moderate. A minority will go to the hospital, he says, of which a great majority will survive.
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In the next video, Sir Patrick Ballantz, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, explains that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) rates “are people who got Covid on their Death Certificate … it doesn’t necessarily mean they were infected because many of them have not been tested … “
So, again, top authorities are admitting that the statistics are unreliable. Government policies such as the global lockdowns, are being wrapped around unreliable evidence.
The Covid operation is what Prof. Ioannidis feared it might become: an “Evidence Fiasco”. (1)
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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.
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
Four US service members were slightly injured during a standoff with the Russian Military Police near the border-town of Al-Malikiyah in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah. According to reports, the US troops received “mild injures” after their MaxxPro MRAP vehicle collided with a Russian vehicle. US officials quoted by media said there was no exchange of fire during the standoff, which took place earlier this week. According to their version of the events, a Russian vehicle intentionally rammed a US one.
Videos from the scene appeared online on August 26. They show Russian and U.S. armored vehicles chasing each other in the al-Hasakah countryside. A Russian helicopter was also filmed harassing U.S. troops that were trying to block a Russian patrol. Syrian sources say that Russian forces were reacting to attempts of the US military to block a Russian patrol in the area.
A few hours later, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley made a phone call to Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, the Pentagon said. The US military did not provide details regarding the agenda of the phone call, but it is likely that the sides discussed the current situation.
Forces of the United States and Russia regularly find themselves engaged in various small-scale incidents in the area as both sides seek to block movements of each other in the region. After the first deployment of the Russian Military Police in Syria’s northeast, forces of the US-led coalition immediately started trying to block the movement of Russian patrols near al-Hasakah. Later, the Russian Military Police and the Syrian Army, with support of pro-government locals, joined this standoff by regularly blocking US military convoys and forcing them to return to their bases. The recent developments demonstrate that these actions may easily lead to a further escalation at any moment.
A group of pro-government fighters went missing near the town of al-Mayadin in the province of Deir Ezzor during the recent security operation there, according to reports by pro-militant sources. The missing fighters are reportedly members of the local National Defense Forces (NDF) and the Palestinian militia Liwa al-Quds. The NDF and Liwa al-Quds dispatched a large force with dozens of vehicles to the western Deir Ezzor countryside to search for the missing group, whose fate is yet to be revealed. Most likely, it was ambushed and eliminated by ISIS terrorists. A wide network of ISIS cells still operates in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Russia says that these cells use the US-controlled areas in al-Tanf and on the eastern bank of the Euphrates to resupply its forces. The US rejects these claims as false.
The situation in southern Idlib remains relatively calm after the recent attack on the Russian-Turkish patrol. Nonetheless, the sides are apparently preparing for a new confrontation. On August 26, two service members of Syria’s 45th Special Forces Regiment were spotted with 9K32 Strela-2M and 9K310 Igla-1 MANPADs near the al-Zawiya Mount, close to positions of Turkish-backed militants. Apparently, these MANPADs will be employed against Turkish forces if Anakra once again opts to go offensive against the Syrian Army to protect al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in Greater Idlib.
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![Massive blast rocks Beirut, Lebanon - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_1176.jpg?resize=933%2C583&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
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