Whew. Finally, at last, the United Kingdom is formally leaving the European Union on January 31.  Here in Paris, the champions of French withdrawal from the EU are celebrating. They see Brexit as the harbinger of a future “Frexit”, a French departure from undemocratic governance, and the beginning of the end of a failed project to unify Europe around the demands of neoliberal capitalism.

But the paradox is that the champions of European unification might be celebrating even more – if it weren’t too late. Because years of British membership have already helped shatter the original dreams of a united European, whether the aspirations of the federalists for political unity or the project of a European confederation of independent States advocated by Charles De Gaulle some sixty years ago.

Way back then, when De Gaulle was meeting with the aged West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to promote Franco-German reconciliation, the two old statesmen were thinking in terms of working gradually toward a partnership of core European states that would preserve their sovereignty within a confederation ensuring peace and cooperation.

From the start, the question of British membership appeared as a thorn in the side of European unity.  Initially, London was opposed to the Common Market.  In 1958, prime minister Harold MacMillan assailed it as “the Continental Blockade” (alluding to Napoleon’s 1806 European policy) and said England would not stand for it.  But as the project seemed to take shape, London sought accommodation.

De Gaulle warned from the start that Great Britain didn’t belong in a unified Europe, geographically, economically or above all psychologically.

The remark has become famous: in 1944, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, in a quarrelsome exchange, Churchill reportedly told De Gaulle that if Britain had to choose, it would always go for “the open sea” rather than the European continent.

Of course, Britain long ago lost both Churchill and its Empire. Nevertheless, the English remain psychologically wedded to their island status, the origin of their overwhelming maritime power that built the empire and has left traces of English-speaking nations and preferred trade relations all around the world.  Brits do not normally feel part of “the continent” and the traditional policy of their governments was always to keep the continent divided and weak.  This policy was passed on to London’s pupils in Washington, echoed in the description of NATO’s purpose: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” – the joke that tells the truth.

Sixty years ago, De Gaulle, who envisaged a European confederation as a way to achieve independence from the American liberators (who came to stay), saw very clearly that the UK would be America’s Trojan horse in the European community. That is called vision, the quality of a statesman – a breed that seems to have died out in the West.  He opposed British membership as long as he could, but the American influence was too great.  And curiously enough, the ardent European federalists joined in promoting British membership, seemingly unaware that such membership was totally incompatible with the political unity they desired.

British leaders, firmly attached to their parliament, their royalty, their class system, and their unique role in the world – now largely passed on to their heirs in Washington – never would consider genuine political unity with the continent.  But as a trading nation, they wanted to be part of a Europe that would favor free trade, period.

The United Kingdom first applied for membership in 1961, at a time when it comprised the central core made up of France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy. But as long as De Gaulle was President of France, this was not possible, despite U.S. support (the United States has always supported enlargement, notably Turkish membership, now considered out of the question).  The United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community only on January first, 1973, bringing with it both Ireland and Denmark, another advocate of free trade.

Bringing in Britain was the decisive step toward making unified Europe into a vast free market, a step toward globalization.  This was indeed the program of Jean Monnet, a totally Americanized French businessman who plotted the path to European unity through purely economic measures, indifferent to political issues. But it took British weight to pull Europe firmly in that direction, away from the original Common Market idea (removing trade barriers only between Member States) toward an open market, with minimum trade barriers, extending the benefits of its “free competition” doctrine to such giants as the United States and China.

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher appointed Leon Brittan to the post of European Commissioner for competition, where he stayed until 1999 in charge of trade and external affairs. In Brussels his was the most powerful influence in confirming the EU’s role as chief enforcer of neoliberal policies. At the same time, Thatcher demanded “her money back” and strengthened the UK’s own freedom from European institutional constraints.

The UK never agreed to the Schengen agreement on EU borders and declined to scrap the pound sterling for the euro – a wise move, no doubt. But also symptomatic of the essential incapacity of England to fully merge with the continent.

At the same time, the presence of London has certainly contributed to the total inability of the EU to develop a foreign policy which deviates from that of Washington. Britain supported the enlargement to the East which has made the EU more politically disunited than ever and has been the strongest supporter of the paranoid Russophobia of Poland and the Baltic States which pushes other European countries into a dangerous conflict with Russia that is contrary to their own interests.

Not that Britain is responsible for everything that is wrong with the European Union today.  A major mistake was made by French President François Mitterrand in the 1980s when he insisted on a “common European currency” under the illusion that this would help France contain Germany – when it turned out not only to do the contrary but to ruin Greece and cause ravages in Portugal, Spain and Italy.

And there are plenty of other mistakes that have been made, such as Angela Merkel’s invitation to come to Europe, ostensibly addressed to Syrian war refugees but understood by millions of unfortunates in the Middle East and Africa as meant for themselves.

And certainly, there were and are a minority of Englishmen and women who sincerely identify with Europe and want to feel part of it.  But they are a minority.  England has for too many centuries cherished and celebrated its uniqueness for that to be erased by complex impersonal institutions.

As England returns to the uncertainties of the open sea, it leaves behind a European Union that is bureaucratically governed to serve the interests of financial capital.  Member States, such as Macron’s France, are governed according to EU decrees against the will of their people.  British membership contributed to this denial of democracy, but paradoxically, the British people themselves are the first to reject it and demand a return to full national sovereignty.

Even the ardent fans of European unity increasingly insist that they want “a different Europe”, recognizing that the project has failed to produce the wonders that were promised. But changing this particular Europe would require unanimity between the 27 remaining, and increasingly quarrelsome, Member States.

That is why the idea is growing that it may be time to give up this failed European union and start all over, seeking political understanding issue by issue between sovereign democracies rather than a nonfunctional economic unity as decreed by transnational capitalist bureaucracy.

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Diana Johnstone’s latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020).

Featured image is from TruePublica

“The collapse of the Libyan state has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of people and weapons destabilizing other countries throughout North Africa.” This statement came from the Soufan Group’s recent Intelbrief, entitled “Fighting Over Access to Libya’s Energy Supplies” (24 January 2020). 

Are you listening, Barack Obama?

“There’s a bias in this town [Washington, DC] toward war,” President Obama said to me and several others assembled in the White House’s Roosevelt Room on September 10, 2015, almost seven years into his presidency. At the time, I thought he was thinking particularly of the tragic mistake he made by joining the intervention in Libya in 2011, ostensibly implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was sitting right beside the president as Obama spoke. I recall asking myself at the time if he were lecturing Kerry as well as lamenting his own decision, because Kerry had been rather outspoken at the time about heavier U.S. participation in yet another endless war then — and still — transpiring in Syria. Obama however, was apparently having none of that.

The reason is that the Libya intervention not only lead to the grisly death of Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi — and set in motion a brutal and continuing military conquest for the title of “who rules Libya,” invite outside powers from all over the Mediterranean to join the fray, and unleash a destabilizing refugee flow across that inner sea — it also put the weaponry from one of the world’s largest arms caches into the hands of such groups as ISIS, al-Qa’ida, Lashkar e-Taibi, and others. Additionally, many of those formerly Libyan weapons were being used in Syria at that very moment.

Before we offer faint praise for Obama having learned his lesson and thus not deciding to intervene in Syria in a more significant manner, we need to pose the question: Why do presidents make such disastrous decisions like Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and, tomorrow perhaps, Iran?

President Dwight Eisenhower answered this question, in large part, in 1961:

“We must never let the weight of this combination [the military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”

Simply stated, today America is not composed of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the Complex that Eisenhower so precisely described is in fact, and in ways not even Eisenhower could have imagined, endangering our liberties and democratic processes. The Complex creates the “bias” that President Obama described.  Moreover, today the U.S. Congress fuels the Complex — $738 billion this year plus an unprecedented slush fund of almost $72 billion more — to the extent that the Complex’s writ on war has become inexhaustible, ever-lasting, and, as Eisenhower also said, “is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.”

With respect to the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” an outcome not only in the long-term attributable to proper education but in the short-to-medium term principally inculcated by a responsible and capable “Fourth Estate,” there is an abysmal failure as well. 

The Complex for most of its nefarious purposes owns the media that matters, from the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, to its capital city’s modern organ, The Washington Post, to the financial community’s banner paper, The Wall Street Journal. All of these papers for the most part never met a decision for war they didn’t like. Only when the wars become “endless” do some of them find their other voices — and then it’s too late.

Not to be outdone by print journalism, the mainstream TV cable media features talking heads, some of them paid by members of the Complex or having spent their professional lives inside it, or both, to pontificate on the various wars. Again, they only find their critical voices when the wars become endless, are obviously being lost or stalemated, and are costing too much blood and treasure, and better ratings lie on the side of opposition to them.

Marine General Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient, once confessed to having been “a criminal for capitalism.” An apt description for Butler’s times in the early days of the 20th century. Today, however, any military professional worth his salt as a citizen as well — like Eisenhower — would have to admit that they too are criminals for the Complex — a card-carrying member of the capitalist state, to be sure, but one whose sole purpose, outside of maximizing shareholder profits, is facilitating the death of others at the hands of the state. 

How else to describe accurately men — and now women — wearing multiple stars ceaselessly going before the people’s representatives in the Congress and asking for more and more taxpayer dollars? And the pure charade of the slush fund, known officially as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund and supposed to be strictly for operations in theaters of war, makes a farce of the military budgeting process. Most members of Congress should hang their heads in shame at what they have allowed to happen annually with this slush fund.

And Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s words at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, ostensibly spoken to illustrate “new thinking” at the Pentagon with regard to budgeting, suggest no indication of real change in the military’s budget, just a new focus — one that promises not to diminish cash outlays but to increase them. But rightfully so, Esper does indicate where some of the blame lies as he glibly accuses the Congress of adding to already bloated budget requests from the Pentagon: “I’ve been telling the Pentagon now for two and a half years that our budgets aren’t gonna get any better — they are where they are — and so we have to be much better stewards of the taxpayer’s dollar. … And, you know, Congress is fully behind that. But then there’s that moment in time when it hits their backyard, and you have to work your way through that.”

“[T]hat moment in time when it hits their backyard” is an only slightly veiled accusation that members of Congress often plus-up Pentagon budget requests in order to provide pork for their home districts (no one is better at this than the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in his many years in the Senate has provided millions of taxpayer dollars — including to Defense — for his home state of Kentucky to ensure his long-lived hold on power there. And he’s no piker either in receiving money from the defense sector into his campaign coffers. McConnell just might be different, however, from other members of Congress in the way he returns to Kentucky and openly brags about the huge amounts of pork he brings annually to his state in order to offset his increasingly bad poll ratings). 

But Esper continued in a far more telling manner:

“We’re at this moment in time. We have a new strategy. …We have a lot of support from Congress. … We have to bridge this gap now between what was Cold War-era systems and the counter-insurgency, low-intensity fight of the last ten years, and make this leap into great power competition with Russia and China — China principally.”

If the old Cold War brought sometimes record military budgets, we can expect the new cold war with China to outstrip those amounts by orders of magnitude. And who is it that decided that we needed a new cold war anyway?

Look no further than the Complex (from which Esper comes, not coincidentally, as one of the top lobbyists for Raytheon, a stellar member of the Complex). One of the Complex’s sine qua nons is what it learned from the almost half century of the cold war with the Soviet Union: nothing on earth pays out so handsomely and consistently than a prolonged struggle with a major power. Thus, there is no stronger, more powerful advocate for a new cold war with China — and throw Russia into the mix too for extra dollars — than the Complex. 

However, at the end of the day, the very idea that the U.S. must spend annually more money on its military than the next eight nations in the world combined, most of whom are U.S. allies, should demonstrate to an even unknowledgeable and not-so-alert citizenry that something is seriously wrong. Roll out a new cold war; something is still seriously wrong.

But apparently the power of the Complex is simply too great. War and more war is the future of America. As Eisenhower said, the “weight of this combination” is in fact endangering our liberties and democratic processes.

To understand this explicitly, we need only examine the futile attempts in the past few years to wrest back the power to make war from the executive branch, the branch that when equipped with the power to make war, as James Madison warned us, is most likely to bring tyranny.

Madison, the real “pen” in the process of writing the U.S. Constitution, made certain that it put the war power in the hands of the Congress. Nonetheless, from President Truman to Trump, almost every U.S. president has usurped it in one way or another.

The recent attempts by certain members of Congress to use this constitutional power simply to remove America from the brutal war in Yemen, have fallen to the Complex’s awesome power. It matters not that the bombs and missiles of the Complex fall on school buses, hospitals, funeral processions, and other harmless civilian activities in that war-torn country. The dollars pour in to the coffers of the Complex. That is what matters. That is all that matters.

There will come a day of reckoning; there always is in the relations of nations. The names of the world’s imperial hegemons are indelibly engraved in the history books. From Rome to Britain, they are recorded there. Nowhere, however, is it recorded that any of them are still with us today. They are all gone into the dustbin of history.

So shall we someday soon, led there by the Complex and its endless wars.

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Damage caused by aerial herbicide spraying conducted by Israel on three consecutive days (January 14-16) along Gaza’s perimeter fence has become visible on crops in the Strip. Individuals working with London-based research agency Forensic Architecture collected samples from fields located east of Jabalya, in northern Gaza, at distances of 100, 200, 400 and 600 meters from the fence. The damage to the crops is clearly visible on the samples they collected. According to local farmers, dunams more of parsley, peas, wheat, barley, spinach and other produce were destroyed entirely. The effect of the spraying appears several days after the spraying is conducted.

Riad Al Nisar, a farmer from Al Bureij Refugee Camp, who cultivates more than 20 dunams (about five acres) of parsley and zucchini crops about 300 meters away from the fence, reported that the effects of the spraying in the area on Wednesday and Thursday appeared on the crops clearly on Sunday. Al Nisar has suffered from significant financial losses caused by the spraying in previous years as well. In late 2018, he assessed that losses he had sustained amounted to at least 10,000-15,000 USD.

Another local farmer, Salah Al Najjar, has farmland located 300 to 600 meters from the fence in an area stretching east of Khan Yunis. His spinach fields were completely destroyed. He said his brother’s fava bean field, about a kilometer away from the fence, is also showing signs of damage. Al Najjar’s crops have been severely impacted as a result of previous spraying.

Image on the right: A sample collected after the recent round of spraying. Photo by Forensic Architecture

A video update by Forensic Architecture confirms the farmer’s assessmentthat the spraying was timed so that westward-blowing wind would carry the chemical agents used in the spraying into the Strip. Farmers were not given any notice, leaving them unable to take precautions to protect their crops or harvest them in advance to avoid further losses.

In response to Freedom of Information requests by Gisha, Israel admittedto having conducted aerial spraying over Israeli territory near the perimeter fence almost 30 times between 2014 and 2018. The army has stated that the spraying is conducted in order to expose the terrain “to enable optimal and continuous security operations.” No incidents of spraying were recorded in 2019. It is estimated that aerial herbicide spraying by Israel has affected a total area of 7,620 dunams of arable land in the Strip. In July 2019, Forensic Architecture published a multi-media investigation into the practice, based in large part on research and legal work by human rights organizations Gisha, Adalah, and Al Mezan. The report strengthened the organizations’ findings whereby aerial herbicide spraying by Israel has damaged lands deep inside Gaza.

Last Thursday, Gisha, Adalah and Al Mezan, sent a letter to Israel’s Minister of Defense, Military Advocate General, and Attorney General, arguing that such a disproportionate measure, with detrimental impact on livelihoods and the health of the civilian population, is unlawful under both Israeli and international law, and calling on Israeli authorities to stop the practice immediately.

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Featured image: Spinach in Gaza, after the spraying was conducted. Photo by Forensic Architecture

Relying on confidential industry research, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a final interim decision today to reapprove glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto/Bayer’s Roundup and the world’s most heavily used pesticide.

The EPA’s assessment contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

“The Trump EPA’s assertion that glyphosate poses no risks to human health disregards independent science findings in favor of confidential industry research and industry profits,” said Lori Ann Burd, the Center for Biological Diversity’s director of environmental health. “This administration’s troubling allegiance to Bayer/Monsanto and the pesticide industry doesn’t change the trove of peer-reviewed research, by leading scientists, that’s found troubling links between glyphosate and cancer.”

While today’s decision is called interim, the EPA’s practice is to issue interim, rather than final, decisions in its registration-review process for pesticides, which means this is akin to a final decision.

In addition to the World Health Organization’s conclusion, multiple U.S. federal agencies have acknowledged evidence of a link between glyphosate and cancer. This includes the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Earlier this week the EPA’s Office of Inspector General announced it’s starting an audit to assess whether the EPA’s pesticide regulatory office adheres to pesticide registration risk assessment regulations, policies and procedures.

“The EPA’s pesticide office is clearly willing to bend over backwards, including disregarding its own guidelines for evaluating cancer risks, to give the industry what it wants,” said Burd. “This pesticide is heavily used on food crops, landscaping and even playgrounds, and the public deserves unbiased answers to the basic question of whether it’s safe.”

Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto/Bayer by cancer victims and their families have uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the EPA and the company on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.

In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.”

The Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years and only recently released.

Monsanto/Bayer also enjoys broad support from the Trump White House. A domestic policy advisor in the Trump administration stated, “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.”

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Featured image is from Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc

Back in November 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M near the Syria–Turkey border on the allegations that the Russian warplane had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds – an interesting casus belli considering that Turkey violates Greek airspace thousands of times a year, occupies large swathes of northern Syria in defiance of international law, and continues to rebel against United Nations resolutions by illegally occupying northern Cyprus. Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2015 promised Turkey they “will regret” being responsible for the death of Russian pilots. Although rumors circulated of a first Russo-Turkish War since World War I, the only reaction Russia made against Turkey were sanctions.

But rather than a deterioration of relations, the exact opposite has happened with an acceleration of bilateral relations, so much so that Turkey even acquired the lucrative Russian-made S-400 missile defense system, in addition to the two countries opening the Turkstream pipeline earlier this month and cooperating on Syria through the Astana and Sochi formats. It appears that the “regret” Putin would inflict on Turkey has not even remotely come to fruition and rather Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been rewarded for his insolence, especially as there has been at least 116 Russian military deaths, most of them killed by Turkish-backed terrorists groups in Syria.

Putin has caused havoc in NATO by giving Turkey the confidence to act in its own interests, despite Erdoğan’s own imperial ambitions. This sense of self-confidence in Turkey has allowed the country to pursue its Neo-Ottoman dreams that has antagonized all of its neighbors, the European Union, NATO and all regional states with the exception of Qatar, which unironically was one of the last countries to get independence from the Ottoman Empire. By instilling a self-confidence in Turkey, a confidence that pushes for an ambition it cannot meet, Putin turned Erdoğan into an ally and a friend. However, when we look at the long game that Putin has played, Russia has been using Turkey for its own interests.

Turkey’s Libya gambit has once again shown that it is isolated, finding no support from any interested party in the conflict. At a time when Turkey is becoming increasingly isolated but still confident in its relations with Russia, Moscow condemned Turkey’s decision to increase its military assistance to the Tripoli government.

Despite the increasing isolation and memories of the crippling Russian sanctions on Turkey in 2015, Erdoğan appears to be frustrated and lashed out against Moscow yesterday saying:

“Currently, Russia is not abiding by Astana or Sochi [peace formats on Syria]. If we are loyal partners with Russia on this, they have to put forth their stance… Our wish is that Russia immediately makes the necessary warnings to the [Syrian] regime which it sees as a friend. The Astana process has fallen into silence now. We need to look at what Turkey, Russia and Iran can do to revive the Astana process.”

It certainly cannot be denied that Erdoğan is frustrated and is now falsely claiming that Russia is not adhering to the deals made in Astana and Sochi. The deals allow for the Syrian government and its allies to conduct operations against terrorist organizations, such as the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front and the Turkestan Islamic Party, with the former being the most dominant and powerful militant group in the Syrian province of Idlib.

Russia’s assistance in fighting Al-Qaeda in Idlib prompted Erdogan’s outburst, where he also said “Russia tells us they fight against terrorism. Who are terrorists? The people fighting to defend their own lands?” This once again shows Turkey’s complete defense and apology for terrorist organization operating in Syria, unsurprising since it was Russia who revealed and destroyed the lucrative ISIS-Turkey oil trade in 2015 with surgical airstrikes against convoys that were ignored by the U.S. air force. So not only has Turkey revealed its frustrations against Russia for its own failures in Libya and Syria, it is now reverting to lies and contradictions that it usually reserves for using against Greece, Cyprus, Syria and Armenia, by deceitfully claiming Russia is “not abiding by Astana or Sochi.”

With increasing of anti-Turkish sentiment in Washington, Europe and the wider region Turkey has become militarily, diplomatically and economically weaker, as well as completely isolated – effectively destroying all ambitions for a Neo-Ottoman Empire.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Featured image is from RIA Novosti

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Idlib militants seem to be in disarray amid the developing advance of the Syrian Army. Since the liberation of Maarat al-Numan, government forces have achieved several important breakthroughs on the frontline in southeastern Idlib and southwestern Aleppo.

The army has liberated the villages of al-Qahira, al-Jaradah, Khan Assubul, Maarrat Dibsah and Ain Halbane‏, all located on the M5 highway north of Maartan al-Numan. Near Aleppo city, government forces have liberated Tell Maher, Tell Abiad, Tell al-Zaitoun, Tell al-Mahruqat, Jurf al-Sakhr, the Rashidin 5 neighborhood and one of the key militant strongpoints – Khan Tuman.

Most of these areas were liberated without significant resistance from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) or the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation. Despite this, according to pro-opposition sources, up to 200 militants have been killed or wounded in clashes with the Syrian Army.

The setbacks of al-Qaeda-backed militants and their pro-Turkish allies has caused discontent in Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that Russia “hasn’t abided by either the Astana or the Sochi agreements.”

“We have waited until now, but from this point, we are going to take our own actions. This is not a threat but our expectation is that Russia will give the regime the necessary warning,” the President said.

The main point of contradictions between Turkey and the Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance is the fighting of terrorism and the separation of opposition groups from terrorist  groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Ankara does not want or just cannot separate its proxies in Idlib from al-Qaeda. So, it sees anti-terrorism efforts by the Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance as a threat to its own interests and influence.

On January 29, reports appeared that Syrian government forces had shelled a Turkish military convoy west of Aleppo city. According to photos which appeared online, the shelling destroyed at least one vehicle. However, it remains unclear if it belonged to the Turkish Army. Turkish military convoys moving through Idlib often include members and equipment of Turkish-backed militant groups. So, one of these vehicles may have become a target of the Syrian strike. This would explain the lack of reaction from the Turkish Defense Ministry.

Currently, the advance of government forces seems to be focused on the M5 highway area. The army and its allies exploit the internal contradictions among Idlib militant groups who have failed to cooperate properly to set up strong defenses deep inside the region. It is no secret that mighty Idlib fighters prefer taking selfies to digging trenches.

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We now know that, before Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, the FBI had the ouster of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the President’s National Security Adviser, in its sights. By February 13^th, Flynn was out the door.  

Think about it. Why was Flynn’s removal of the utmost importance to the FBI, more vital than removal of any other cabinet officer like the Pentagon or State Department.  So crucial was it that they created a specific strategy willing to embrace prosecutorial misconduct and agency malfeasance to take Flynn down. Prosecutorial misdeeds are nothing new to the FBI as they have a well founded history of corruption over the years with its warts now publicly displayed.

It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn’s immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump’s entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan.  In retrospect, the entire fraudulent Russiagate conspiracy makes sense when viewed from the perspective of an effort to rein in Trump’s foreign policy goals of which Flynn would have been a necessary, integral part.

The question is where did the first glimmer of setting up Flynn originate?  Who had the most to gain by disrupting Trump’s foreign policy agenda?  A number of suspects come to mind including the evil Brennan/Clapper twins, a bureaucratically well placed neocon, an interested foreign entity like Israel or somewhere deep within the dark bowels of the FBI, all of which are in sync with the Democratic leadership and its corporate media minions.

At the time, the Washington Post, a favorite CIA organ, was reporting that Flynn had ‘hinted’ to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Trump might be willing to ‘relax’ sanctions against Russia.  It was then claimed that Flynn had ‘misled’ VP Pence by denying that he had had a conversation regarding sanctions with Kislyak. None of it was true.

With Flynn removed, Trump never regained his footing on foreign policy  – which no doubt was exactly as intended; thereby opening the door for the likes of Jared Kushner to assume the role of ‘trusted adviser.”

Let’s examine how the FBI eliminated Flynn:

In August, 2016, an FBI ‘strategic intelligence briefing’ was conducted for  candidate Trump with Flynn as his national security adviser in attendance.  The briefing, which was not a traditional ‘defensive’ briefing in which a presidential candidate is alerted of a foreign government’s effort to intercede in their campaign, was led by an anonymous “experienced FBI counter intelligence agent.” According to the IG Report on FISA abuses, at that time Flynn was already a “subject in the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

The IG Report confirms that, after the election, top FBI officials discussed ‘interview strategies’ regarding how to set Flynn up in an ostensibly innocent conversation.  Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe arranged the meeting with the goal to walk Flynn into a well laid trap without informing him that there was a criminal investigation underway or that he was a target.  Such a procedure is called ‘entrapment’ and considered illegal  See Clint Eastwood’s new film Richard Jewell for details on the FBI’s entrapment techniques.

Image on the right: Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

On January 24, 2017, four days after the Inaugural, Peter Strzok, former FBI Chief of counterespionage and the same unnamed SSA1 (Supervisory  Special Agent) who led the August briefing met with Flynn for a friendly chat, more popularly referred to as the Ambush Interview.  At that time, either one or both agents took handwritten notes while neither provided the usual heads-up about penalties for making a false statement – since that would have tipped their hand. Since Flynn believed this was an informal visit, he did not feel the need to have an attorney present or inquire why, if this was a friendly get-to-know chat, the need to take notes.  That conversation led to Flynn being charged with ‘lying to the FBI’ regarding his conversation with Kislyak.

After the interview, preparation of a 302 form is normal procedure.  A 302 is a summary of and a formalizing of those notes taken during the conversation.  It is those original 302 notes which are in dispute and which the FBI refuses to provide to either the Senate Judiciary Committee or to Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell.  What does that tell you?  Powell believes, based on sworn witness  testimony, that the final 302 is not an accurate reflection of the 302 notes or Flynn’s statements of January 24^th.

It is curious that an SSA1 whose identity remained cloaked in secrecy throughout the entire IG FISA Report continues to be mentioned as a significant participant in the Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane while his name remains redacted on official documents.  Disguising his identity may simply be attributed to activities worth concealing.

In an unexpected turn, it was Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee who outed the SSA 1 as agent Joe Pientka in his May 11, 2018 letter to the Bureau.  Pientka remains a central figure in the FBI scam against Flynn as well as other clandestine activities identified within the Crossfire operation – and there’s more.

According to Strzok, Pientka was “primarily responsible” as the ‘note taker’ and prepared the 302 report of the interview on which Flynn’s prosecution is based.  Powell has challenged authorship since the final 302 version contains falsified statements never made in the original interview that are now being criminalized.

In a message to his paramour Lisa Page, Strzok thanked Page for her ‘edits’ on the 302 regarding the Flynn – Kislyak conversation on sanctions that never occurred while Strzok suggested that, at some future time, they discuss a ‘media leak strategy.’  

Soon after Flynn’s resignation, a skeptical Grassley requested unredacted transcripts of the Flynn – Kislyak conversation with the FBI repeatedly refusing to comply.  Grassley’s May 11^th letter confirms that Comey was aware that Flynn had not lied regarding the Kislyak conversation and further points out the stunning revelation that that Pientka was ‘on detail’  as staff on the Judiciary Committee, presumably with the Democrats.  For all his persistence, the FBI continues to rebuff Grassley’s assertions for a transcript of the Kislyak conversation as well as demanding  Pientka’s presence “for a transcribed interview with Committee staff.”

In response to an ‘insufficient’ FBI reply, Grassley then let loose with a June 6^th zinger detailing a compilation of FBI lies, failures and hypocrisies too numerous to be articulated (but worth reading) here.

While a review of the FBI’s entire prosecution of Flynn raises considerable legal and ethical questions, the Bureau’s consistent refusal to turnover evidentiary material is indicative of a deceitful agency protecting its own criminal behavior.

• Why is the FBI embedding an SSA1 with the Senate Committee that has legislative jurisdiction over its mission? Does this strike anyone else like the tactic of a totalitarian state?
• How does Flynn’s case move forward without the FBI providing the necessary exculpatory documents legally required for every defendant?
• How does a Congressional Committee provide effective oversight and accountability if they are continually stonewalled by the very agency within their legal authority?
• How can the FBI ever be rehabilitated if Congress, fearful of a constitutional crisis, has no political will to assert its proper authority and issue  a Contempt of Congress subpoena?
• With the FBI out of control, Is this any way to run a country?

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Renee Parsons  has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter.  She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC. Renee is also a student of the Quantum Field and may be reached at @reneedove31. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

With all the media excitement focused on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, it comes as no surprise that some recent additional insights into how the United States became a torture regime have been largely ignored. It has been known for years that the George W. Bush Administration carried out what most of the world considers to be torture.

Acting as if it really cared about illegal activity, the White House back at that time found two malleable Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Busby who would be willing to come up with a defense of torture. They discovered somewhere in their law books that it was possible to do anything to a suspect as long as it did not bring about organ failure. That became the bottom line for interrogations, though in practice some prisoners died anyway, which might be considered the ultimate organ failure. The only one who was subsequently punished over the illegal torture program was former C.I.A. employee John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on it.

Last week there was a hearing at a Guantanamo Bay courtroom in which one of the psychologists who devised the Central Intelligence Agency torture regime testified under oath.

Psychologist James Mitchell was testifying in what was a preliminary hearing relating to the eventual trial of five alleged 9/11 conspirators He discussed how he and his business partner Dr. Bruce Jessup together developed the Agency’s torture program, which internal government documents described by employing the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They were paid $81 million for their work and were able to produce a training manual that included waterboarding, stress positions and mock burials to physically and mentally destroy the target’s ability to resist. Both Mitchell and Jessup have asserted that their procedures were more designed to make a suspect uncomfortable rather than in pain and they blame interrogators who went too far for the physical and mental permanent damage that resulted.

To understand the depth of depravity that was part and parcel of “enhanced interrogation,” it is useful to consider Dr. Mitchell’s own testimony relating to the torture of prisoner Abu Zubaydah, a procedure that was implemented at one of the Agency’s secret prisons. The prison was likely the one located in Thailand, where current director of Central Intelligence Gina Haspel was in charge. Mitchell, who was also involved in the 183 waterboardings of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, personally participated in the interrogation. Zubaydah reportedly cooperated with his interrogators but then ceased to do so when the torture began. He was waterboarded more than 80 times while also being subjected to other “coercive physical pressure” including being buried alive over concerns that he might be hiding something. He survived and since has been held at Guantanamo for more than 13 years. The United States government has never tried him and has never even charged him with any crime.

Waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Mitchell’s testimony states that he and the other interrogators had wanted the waterboarding to stop due to concerns that Zubaydah’s deteriorating mental processes were rendering any further interrogation unreliable. They sent a message to headquarters at Langley saying that “the intensity of the pressure applied to him thus far approaches the legal limit.” C.I.A. management ordered the interrogators to keep going as Zubaydah might be concealing details of an imminent terrorist attack along the lines of 9/11.

Americans have, of course, seen the use of “imminent” recently to explain away illegal actions that amount to war crimes. Another version exploiting a unknown imminent threat is the “ticking bomb scenario” which is based on the belief that a prisoner has knowledge of another terrorist act that is about to take place. It has frequently been employed by the Israelis to justify their wholesale torture of capture Palestinians. Israeli apologist Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others, has cited the ticking bomb scenario to justify use of torture, but the problem is that there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever worked. No impending terrorist action has ever been prevented by torturing prisoners who have already been detained.

In the case of Zubaydah, C.I.A. even sent a senior officer to the torture room to make sure that no one was holding back on getting the job done properly. During the waterboarding Zubaydah was experiencing involuntary body spasms and was crying. Even the torturers and viewers were visibly upset. Mitchell’s testimony included “I thought it was unnecessary, and I felt sorry for him.”

Mitchell claims that he was pressured by C.I.A. management to always push harder during interrogations. At one point, Mitchell claims he sought to withdraw from the program but was told that “he’d lost his spine and it would be his fault if more people in the US died in a catastrophic attack.” Mitchell added “The implication was that if we weren’t willing to carry their water, they would send someone else who would do it, and they may be harsher than we were.”

Mitchell not unreasonably explained how post-9/11 there was a “climate of fear” over another imminent attack, possibly employing nuclear or biological weapons and he was unapologetic about his role in protecting his country. He said “I’d get up today and do it again… I thought my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us. To me it just seemed like it would be dereliction of my moral responsibilities.”

Inter alia, Mitchell made clear that “C.I.A. was never interested in prosecutions. The C.I.A. was not going to let them set off another catastrophic attack in the United States. They were going to go right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it and lean forward.”

There are a number of things wrong with Mitchell and with the C.I.A. managers who first adopted his techniques and then repeatedly applied them in such a fashion as to insure both physical and mental damage. That is torture. Torture and abusive interrogation tactics are illegal under both US law and international law. Torture is prohibited under federal law, as are lesser forms of detainee abuse such as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Article 5 states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Being patriotic is not a mitigating factor when one is carrying out torture, no matter what Dr. Mitchell might think. The United States is also a party to the Convention against Torture, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1984, as well as other treaties that ban the use of torture and other ill-treatment. The Convention against Torture requires countries to criminalize the use of torture within their own jurisdictions. Washington enacted such legislation in 1994, when Congress passed the federal anti-torture statute. The treaty also requires countries to conduct credible criminal investigations and prosecutions of those responsible for torture.

And then there is the “ticking bomb,” i.e. the American government’s claimed fear that another 9/11 was about to take place as a justification for its adoption of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The problem with that thinking was that the C.I.A. had no evidence suggesting that that another major attack might be impending, but it nevertheless grabbed people off the streets in some cases to “render” them to secret prisons where they were tortured. Many of them turned out to be innocent and it could reasonably be suggested that torturing someone “just in case he or she might know something” is no defense at all.

Finally, the United States government is obligated to prosecute those responsible for torture. That plausibly includes Drs. Mitchell and Jessup, but it certainly includes those Agency officers who were in place from 2001 through 2003 and responsible for implementing the program. They would presumably include the Director of Central Intelligence, Deputy Executive Director, Deputy Director for Operations, and the two Directors of CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. All of those former officers are now enjoying comfortable retirements to include various sinecures with universities as well as national defense and security contractors and none of them has ever been punished in any way for their involvement with torture.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

The beautiful,  ancient and populous Iraqi city of Fallujah (the City of Mosques) in Iraq’s Anbar province suffered 13 years of US-enforced sanctions, and then 3 bloody sieges and 2 substantial demolitions or sackings at the hands of the genocidally racist, serial war criminal and child-killing American invaders.  This appalling atrocity cries out for justice and is documented in the must-read book “The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History” by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn.

“The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History” by Ross Caputi (a US Iraq War veteran and scholar), Dr Richard Hil (a British Australian sociologist and academic), and Donna Mulhearn (an Australian human rights activist and journalist) tells the tragic story of the successive, and substantial   demolitions  of the huge Iraqi city of Fallujah by the US Alliance, first in 2004 during the war criminal US Coalition’s Iraq War (2003-2011) and then again in 2014-2016 during the US Coalition’s ongoing War on ISIS  in Syria and Iraq (2012 onwards) [1].

A key aspect of the book is that it is written from the perspective of the ordinary people of Fallujah and thus exposes the horrendous realities behind the bland Western Mainstream media headlines over 15 years announcing the “besieging of Fallujah” and the “capture of Fallujah”. Every chapter is followed by the heart-wrenching testimony (People’s stories) of ordinary Iraqis, including children. This book is deeply upsetting and should be in every library as a cry for justice and a memo to a God-less, self-absorbed and serial war criminal  America: “Thou shalt  not kill children”.

Before reviewing “The Sacking Of Fallujah” in detail it is  useful to succinctly describe (a) the history and cultural significance of Fallujah before  the US invasions, and (b) the events associated with the successive sackings of this beautiful Iraqi  city by the war criminal US in the 21st century.

Prior  to the US invasion Fallujah had a population of 300,000-425,000 (page 1 [1]) and was known as the City of Mosques because of  about 200 mosques within the city and in surrounding villages. Fallujah is located on the Euphrates River about 70 kilometers from Baghdad in the substantially  Sunni Anbar province. Fallujah  dates back to Babylonian  times in the first millennium BCE and indeed was a major centre for Jewish scholarship dating from that period [2]. Fallujah was successively  part of the Greek Empire,  the Roman Empire and the Persian  Sassanian Empire before conversion to Islam in the 7th century CE. The region suffered periodic Bedouin attacks and was devastated by the Mongols in 1262.  In the 13th century Iraq became part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, this lasting until  the British invasion in 1914.

Between WW1 and WW2 the British consolidated their rule of Iraq (Mesopotamia) using the nascent Royal Air Force (RAF)  for the first time to subjugate Kurds, with Winston Churchill suggesting use of poison gas [3]. In the Anglo-Iraqi War in 1941 the British  defeated an Iraqi army near Fallujah.

Post-WW2 formal  Iraqi independence under royalist regimes  saw greater  functional independence (with Iraq opposing  the Zionist-imposed  Palestinian Genocide in Palestine)  but Iraq became a member of the US-backed Baghdad Pact in 1955. In 1963 the Baathist secular socialists came to power with US-backed Saddam Hussein gaining power in 1968.

In the US-backed Iran-Iraq war the US supplied high technology weapons and poison gas – 1.5 million Iranians  and 200,000 Iraqis died [4]. In 1990 the US green-lighted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and used this as an excuse for massive intervention in Iraq through sanctions (1990-2003), US, UK and Apartheid Israeli bombing (1990 onwards), eventual invasion, occupation  and genocidal devastation (the Iraq War, 2003-2011), and then re-invasion by the US-led Coalition with substantial demolition of Fallujah and the huge city of Mosul (2014 onwards) [5].  Following the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Shia Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport in January 2020,  the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament demanded that the US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany have rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand,  with the US threatening to instantly collapse  the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if Iraq  insists on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory [20]. The active and passive killing of Iraqis by the US Alliance continues.

The human cost of this over 100 year  Western devastation of Iraq has been horrendous as set out by Iraqi and other scholars [5-16]. British interest in invading and conquering Iraq came from discovery of oil in adjacent Iran in 1908. Western violation of Iraq commenced with the British invasion a mere 6 years later, in 1914 during WW1.  The human cost since 1914 is set out below.

(a). Assuming excess mortality of Iraqis under British rule or hegemony (1914- 1948) was the same as for Indians under the British (interpolation from available data indicate Indian avoidable death rates in “deaths per 1,000 of population per year” of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950) [17], one can estimate from Iraqi population data [18] that Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation under British occupation and hegemony from 1914-1950 totalled about 4 million [5].

(b) Violent deaths and avoidable deaths from violently-imposed deprivation in the Gulf War (1990-1991) and Sanctions period (1990-2003) totalled  0.2 million and 1.7 million, respectively [5].

(c). US Just Foreign Policy organization estimates, based on the data of expert UK analysts and top US medical epidemiologists, 1.5 million violent deaths in the Iraq War (2003-2011) [6 -9] and UN data [19] indicate a further 1.2 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation in this period [2, 15].

(d) Accordingly, Iraqi deaths from violence (1.7 million) or war-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) in the period 1990-2011 totalled  4.6 million [5].

(e ). The US ostensibly withdrew from devastated Iraq in 2011 but returned to the region with a vengeance in 2012 to help Syria, Iraq and Iran deal with ISIS  in Syria (2012 onward)  and  thence in Iraq (2014 onwards) that has been associated with about 0.1 million violent Iraqi deaths, most notably in devastated Mosul [12] and  twice US-demolished Fallujah [1]. One notes that the ruthless and barbarous ISIS subverted and took over the Sunni insurgency in Iraq against the corrupt, violent, US-installed Al Maliki Government, and similarly ISIS came to dominate the US Alliance-backed Sunni insurgency against the Assad Government in Syria [1, 20].   UN data indicate about 0.3 million avoidable Iraqi  deaths from deprivation in the period 2011-2020.

(f). Ignoring Iraqi deaths associated with the US-backed Iraq-Iran War, one can estimate about 9 million Iraqi deaths from UK or US violence or imposed deprivation in the century after the 1914 invasion of Iraq by Britain, this constituting an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide [5]. One notes that  “Holocaust” means the death of a huge number of people. According to Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [21]. The ruler is responsible for the ruled.  The huge avoidable deaths of Iraqis under the British, Americans and the US Coalition is evidence of gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that state unequivocally that an Occupier must provide its conquered subjects with life-preserving food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” [22]. These key injunctions of International Law have been grossly violated by the US and its degenerate and serial war criminal allies (notably the UK, Apartheid Israel, France and US lackey Australia) in the 2-decade US War on Terror.

What has driven the UK and thence the US to inflict  this horrendous, century-long and ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide on the birthplace of civilization, the remote and ancient land of Mesopotamia?  The answer to the question is simple:  oil. Thus from the Right, Alan Greenspan (leading Republican economist,  chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, and servant of  four US presidents): “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” [23]. And on the Left, Professor Noam Chomsky (eminent linguistics expert  and anti-racist Jewish American human rights activist at 101-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute  of Technology (MIT) (2009):

“There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that if we can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world” [24].

And of course, the initial British invasion happened in 1914 a mere 6 years after the  discovery of oil in neighbouring Iran, noting the  considerable time required to reach a political decision in London and to assemble the invasion and occupation force involving British forces, Indian forces and indeed the nascent Australian Flying Corps (AFC, the precursor of the Royal Australian Air Force, the RAAF) of even more distant Australia. Indeed UK invasion of Iraq  prior to 1914 (e.g. immediately  after the discovery of oil in Iran in 1908) might well have precipitated war then with a Germany that was close to completing the Berlin to Baghdad railway and gaining land access to the Indian Ocean [27]. In relation to ruthless British speed to utter bastardry one notes that the UK Balfour Declaration (offering Palestine to the Zionists in an attempt to get Russian Zionists to keep Russia in the war with Germany) was issued on 2 November 1917, a mere 2 days after  the victorious 31 October 1917 charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba that spelled the end of Ottoman rule in  Palestine.

With this background in mind, we can now consider “The Sacking of Fallujah” in detail as part of the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide  In reviewing this important book I have followed the order of the chapter headings and subheadings of the authors in order to  ensure that the critical details of the humanitarian message get through. Each chapter is followed  by an essay or compilation giving the views of Fallujans (“People’s stories”), this being a very  powerful and compelling aspect of the book.

Introduction

The Introduction  ignores most of the pre-1914 background presented above, but states “Fallujah has more than once been the bane of foreign invaders. The city played a leading role in anti-colonial struggles against the British in the 1920s, earning itself a reputation throughout Iraq for its patriotism, bravery, and rebellious spirit. Perhaps, not surprisingly, when the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq began in 2003 the city reemerged as a key site of armed resistance, as it did a decade later when the Iraqi government vied with the Islamic State [IS, ISIS, Daesh] for control over Anbar province (pages 1-2 [1]. The Introduction usefully summarizes the coverage of the book chapters and makes a powerful point about Western propaganda hiding the truth about the last of the sackings of Fallujah, and how IS had subverted the secular Sunni resistance  against  abuses of a US-installed, Shia-dominated Iraqi Government. The Introduction concludes “The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History casts a critical light on a tragic conflict founded on questionable, self-serving motives, which despite all the lofty rhetoric about “freedom” and “liberty”, has delivered anything but. The conflict  has lingered for  fifteen years, primarily because of a  lack of accountability and a failure to pay heed to the needs and aspirations of the Iraqi people. One of the intentions of this book is to establish exactly that – accountability, and to contribute to a lasting memory of what was done to Fallujah” (pages 11-12 [1]).

A criticism of the Introduction and the book is that while laudably dealing with the appalling double demolition of Fallujah, it fails to sufficiently  address the horrendous magnitude of the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (9 million Iraqi deaths from violence or imposed deprivation since the initial British invasion for oil in 1914, 5.0 million such Iraqi deaths since 1990, and 3.1 million such Iraqi deaths since the invasion by the US, UK and Australia in 2003 [4-16]. Indeed the terms Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide  are not used in the book except for a reference to the Geneva International Centre for Justice “arguing that the assault on Fallujah, and all of Anbar province, met the legal definition of genocide” (page 147 [1]) – many eminent scholars  would agree, most notably  Dennis Halliday UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq  from September 1, 1997, until 1998 [5]. The mendacious Western Mainstream media hugely downplay Iraqi casualties e.g. the Australian taxpayer-funded ABC, the Australian equivalent of the mendacious UK BBC,   in 2011 described “a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead” [28]. In contrast, in  1996  anti-racist  Jewish American journalist Lesley Stahl  asked US UN representative  Madeleine  Albright  about Iraqi children under deadly Sanctions: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” and Albright replied “we think the price is worth it” [5] – the only US admission so far (albeit only in part) of its appalling, genocidal  crimes in Iraq.

And as for “accountability”, anti-racist Jewish British writer Harold Pinter in his 2005 Literature Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech stated (2005): “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law…  How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice” [71]. 9.0 million? 5.0 million? 3.1 million? More than enough, I would have thought.

Chapter 1. The road to Fallujah

This chapter deals with some major themes relating to genocidal American imperialism and  puts America’s  Iraq invasion atrocity in an overall historical  context: “Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, America  has invaded over seventy countries [72 by my count], financed pro-American paramilitaries, toppled democratically-elected leaders, engaged in targeted assassinations, and imprisoned, and tortured its opponents without trial” (page 15 [1]). However serial war criminal America did not act alone in Iraq  and the serial war criminal UK has invaded 193 countries, serial war criminal and  US lackey Australia 85 and serial war criminal Apartheid Israel 12 – as compared to France 82, Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Iraq 2, China 2, Korea arguable zero   and Iran zero since the Sassanian  Empire 1,300 years ago [4, 29-34].  Criticall,y the book identifies control of oil as the key imperialist imperative in Iraq: “The single most important strategic and economic factor in the region was oil” (page 15 [1]).  The book makes it clear that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a US ally until the US greenlighted Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (page 17 [1]).

No numbers are given of avoidable deaths from sanctions- or war-imposed deprivation in US war zones from Libya to Pakistan but a qualitative acknowledgment is given: “The resulting death toll, given the number of civilians who have died from avoidable war-related harm, is staggering” (pages 18-19 [1]). It was  estimated (2015) that 32 million Muslims had died from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people [35, 36]. While 9-11 is mentioned as an “excuse” for US actions in Iraq there is no disputation in the book of the blindly adopted “official US version of 9-11” that would surely have made the book unpublishable, notwithstanding the reality that numerous science, architecture, engineering, aviation, military and intelligence experts conclude that the US Government was responsible  for 9-11 with likely Apartheid Israeli and Saudi Arabian involvement [36].  Nevertheless subsections of Chapter 1 deal with American racism, theft and lying (“Civilizing the barbarians”), oil (“Operation Iraqi Liberation code named oil”), and massive US disinformation (“Information warfare”).

 “People’s stories” after the end of Chapter 1 were  collected by Dr Asmaa Khalaf Madlool of the University of Anbar, Fallujah, and bring home the shocking realities of war, noting that war is the penultimate in racism and genocide the ultimate racist atrocity. A shocking and deeply upsetting example is “Unlucky Bride”: “One day a very beautiful woman was hired by our school to teach English. Everyone was attracted to her appearance. She was a good woman, very religious, always wearing the Islamic veil…  She found great happiness in her marriage. Her new family, like mine, refused to leave Fallujah during the second battle with the Americans. Perhaps they made this decision due to the large size of their family… Thus as usual, without any warrant  the Americans shot the whole family. The teacher held her baby strongly to protect him, but the shooting was heavy. She and the child fell to the side of the road” (pages 35-36 [1]).

Chapter 2. Conflicting Narratives

Chapter 2 commences  with an event that provided a further “excuse” for mass murder by the Americans: “On March 31, 2004, four U.S. mercenaries with the Blackwater USA private military contracting company were ambushed and killed, their bodies burned, mutilated, dragged through the city, and hug from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The bodies were still hanging when news of the ambush began to spread around the world” (page 37 [1]). The mutilation incensed the Americans. A leading American journalist, Bill O’Reilly, exhorted  “Final solution… Let’s knock this place down”. Another American  figure, Jack Wheeler,   referenced  the Roman total destruction of Carthage and Cato the Elder’s “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”) in exhorting “Fallujah delenda est… Fallujah must be destroyed… Fallujah must be physically obliterated from the face of the earth” (page 38 [1]).   This hysteria indeed led to mass murder of Iraqis: “The American political leadership caved into public pressure and called for an operation to sweep and clear Fallujah of insurgents – the first siege of Fallujah, also known as Operation Vigilant Resolve or the First Battle of Fallujah. On April 5, General Kimmitt announced the initiation of operations in Fallujah” (page 39 [1]).

“People’s stories” after the end of Chapter 2 include that of a disabled man liked in the community, well known as “crazy Hazim” and  who is of course shot by the Americans; a girl who  unwisely unlocks a door for the Americans in a school in which her family is hiding,  so the Americans, hearing the noise of the key,  simply shoot her through the door; and similarly  2 old ladies hurry to open the door for the Americans who throw in a grenade that rips them apart (pages 51-52 [1]).

Chapter 3. The First Siege of Fallujah [April 2004]

Chapter 3 commences: “Four days after the killing and mutilation of the Blackwater mercenaries, Fallujah was surrounded and sealed off by Coalition checkpoints. On the evening of April 4, 2004, Operation Vigilant Resolve began” (page 53 [1]). The Americans invaded and for 6 days indulged in a war criminal  orgy of killing and destruction that provoked strong reactions  from both Sunni and Shia Iraqis and the world: “With uprisings across Iraq, allegations of war crimes from the international community, increasing criticism at home, and dissent within the Iraqi Governing Council and the Iraqi Army, the Coalition’s political project in Iraq was beginning to unravel. On April 9, the United States declared a  “unilateral suspension of offensive operations” in Fallujah… the eventual agreement was that Fallujah’s “security” would be handed over to the Fallujah Brigade, a newly formed unit composed of former Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi police, and mujahideen… On April 30, Coalition forces withdrew completely from Fallujah… human rights and solidarity groups have counted between 572 and 749 civilians killed, including at least 300 women and children”  (pages 63-64 [1] . However the cessation of American violence was only temporary: “Just as the first siege of Fallujah ended, another more determined operation was being planned to retake the city” (page 65 [1])..

“People’s stories” after the end of Chapter 3 are provided by an accounted entitled “Sami, Part I” and based on interviews by Kali Rubaii with an Iraqi boy, Sami, who was 7 years old when the First Siege of Fallujah began. The Americans ordered everyone to leave but for a variety of reasons many did not want to abandon their homes and families.  Sami describes the shooting deaths of his sister, his father and then of his  oldest brother; his second brother, Hameed,  was shot in the ankle by an American sniper. They survived the shooting and bombing  amid dead bodies and the pervasive smell of death. They heard from a mosque that the local hospital had been bombed and in the absence of medical care his brother died. He concludes; “My mother said it was time to go. We went out in the street. I felt there was always  a sight on my back, that any second I would fall like my oldest brother. I imagined the scenario a lot”.   They made their way out of the devastated city to relatives in a nearby town (pages 67-71 [1]).  What sort of evil, criminal degenerates inflict such horrors on children?

Chapter 4. The Intersiege Information Campaign

Chapter 4 describes how the Americans  had every intention of returning and destroying Fallujah but realized the prior necessity of  demonizing the enemy: “The information campaign unfolded gradually, first with a change in how it characterized the enemy from “former regime elements” to Al Qaeda militants led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zaqawi. While this rhetorical shift was barely noticeable to the American public, it created a dangerous and misleading public discourse. Military spokespersons and media commentators were now using the labels like “jihadists”, “thugs”, “terrorists”, “insurgents”, and “Al Qaeda” interchangeably, conflating and demonising all Islamic militant groups, regardless of their political goals or choice of tactic” (page 75 [1]).The name given to the Second Siege of Fallujah was Operation Phantom Fury which commenced on 8 November and concluded with destruction  of most of the city.

Lying by the Bush Administration and the US military over Iraq was simply de rigeur for the American Establishment. Famed, anti-racist Jewish American  journalist  I.F. Stone declared: “Governments lie” [37, 38]. Great American writer and historian Gore Vidal was more specific: “Unlike most Americans who lie all the time, I hate lying. And here I am surrounded with these hills [in Hollywood] full of liars — some very talented” [39]. America has invaded 72 countries but always needed an “excuse” no matter how obviously fabricated.  Thus the American Revolution in 1776 was supposedly about “freedom”, “liberty” and “no taxation without representation” but was actually about being free to expand Westwards and exterminate the Indigenous inhabitants [4]. 9-11 was the US “excuse” for the US War on Terror in which 32 million Muslims have died from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation 27 million, in 20 countries  invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people [35, 36]. However no Iraqis or Afghans were among the 19 alleged  perpetrators  who were quickly identified as the culprits but were conveniently supposedly dead and thus not around to be put on trial [36]. Indeed the US Center for Public Integrity determined that the Bush Administration told 935 lies about Iraq between 9-11 and the war criminal invasion of Iraq in March 2003 [40].  There is massive lying by omission and lying by commission by Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes, noting that lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter can at least admit public refutation and public debate [41-43]. While the Americans have enshrined free speech (and thus the right to lie) in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the British Establishment has draconian laws against free speech and opts for diffidence, obfuscation and lying by omission. Thus, for example, in 1942-1945 the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death for strategic reasons in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa but this immense WW2 Bengali Holocaust atrocity has been almost completely  whitewashed from British history by successive generations of mendacious British historians [44, 45]. Presently the US and the UK are conspiring to imprison for life  the Australian truth-telling world hero, Julian Assange, for publishing details of American mendacity and war crimes, including US Coalition war crimes in Iraq  [46].

People’s stories after the end of Chapter 4 include these shocking accounts: “Faithful father” (a surgeon son has to save his  now legless father’s life in a corridor of a crowded hospital), “A cigarette” (a father asks his young son to go to the smashed shop across the road for cigarettes but the child is killed by an American sniper), “A dead visitor”(a dying boy knocks on the door and is taken in after the firing dies down; he dies,  they bury him and all they can give the mother is his belt), and “Forbidden Bombs” (that recounts “melted” flesh and high radioactivity in Fallujah possibly indicating American use of forbidden weapons like the Apartheid Israelis in the Gaza Concentration Camp; one notes eye-witness evidence that the Americans may have used a low yield “neutron bomb-like” device to rapidly secure Baghdad Airport in the 2003 invasion, instantly massacring the defenders  while minimizing damage to strategically vital infrastructure [15, 16]).

Chapter 5. The Second Siege of Fallujah [November 2004 –December 2004]

The Second Siege of Fallujah began with cowardly American bombing and the deliberate cutting of water and power to the city which was declared a “free-fire zone” . The authors: “By November 12, Coalition forces had successfully pushed from the northern edge of the city all the way to its southern limits…Muhammad Al-Darraji at the Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy was prominent among those seeking to make plain exactly what had occurred in the wake of the second siege… Based on these figures, Al-Darraji estimates that the true number of civilian casualties during the second siege could be as high as 4,000 to 6,000” (pages 103-105 [1]). This chapter considers human rights and international law aspects of this atrocity, with the war criminal and genocidally racist Americans asserting that they followed the “rules of war”, and the world looking the other way. The chapter concludes as follows: “Living in a constant siege-like situation for years on end , Fallujah’s residents faced the daily reality of suffocating checkpoints, harassment, arrests, detention, and political discrimination. These abnormal and dehumanizing conditions led to the unraveling of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life, compounding the collective trauma of the 2004 attacks” (page 114 [1]).

People’s stories after the end of Chapter 5 include a personal  account by Iraq War veteran Ross Caputi entitled “War heroes and war criminals”. His account commences: “My unit returned home from Fallujah to a hero’s welcome.  The celebrations began as soon as our buses rolled onto base. There were crowds of family and friends waiting for us behind a banner that read, “Welcome Home 1st Battalion 8th  Marines”… For a short period we were America’s favorite heroes – veterans of the Second Battle of Fallujah” (page 115 [1]).  However slowly reality  began to kick in: “As we struggled to transition , our daily emotions volleyed from rage to despair, frustration, and joy. But one thing we never had to feel was shame… … On one random Saturday morning they gave a surprise drug test, when many of us were still under the influence from the night before. Of the roughly 120 in our company, about forty failed the drug test, and almost all of them were discharged. By a stroke of luck, I passed… After sixteen years of costly and fruitless war , we are struggling to identify moments to feel good about. The liberation of Fallujah as it was told on TV, is one of a few events in our collective memory of the Global War on Terror that is consonant with our national self-image. We want to feel proud, not ashamed. So we are resistant to facts, to the experiences of our victims, to change” (pages 116-117 [1]).

Patriotic Americans would generally be aware that 3,000 people were killed on 9-11,  and that about 8,500 US Alliance soldiers have died in the US War on Terror [47]. However hidden from them by mendacious Mainstream media are the following appalling post-9-11 realities: 31 million American preventable deaths from “lifestyle” or “political choice” reasons  [48-53],   7 million Occupied Afghan deaths from violence or deprivation [10, 54] , 4.6 million Iraqi deaths from violence or deprivation, 1990-2011 [5, 10 41, 43] ,  6.3 million World drug-related  deaths, 5.2 million World opiate drug-related deaths linked to US-protected Afghan opium production in US-occupied Afghanistan, 759,000 US drug-related deaths [54, 55], and 130,000 US veteran suicides [56, 57]. Americans  are utterly unware of  32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [35, 36] – the bigger the US-imposed atrocity the more assiduously is it white-washed away by mendacious, US Government-beholden Mainstream media. The long-term accrual cost to Americans of the War on Terror is about $6 trillion, a gross fiscal  perversion involving successive war criminal US Administrations committing $6 trillion to killing 30 million Muslims abroad rather than trying to keep 30 million Americans alive at home.

People’s stories continue after  Ross Caputi’s essay with a series of photographs and associated  text covering the period 2004-2014.Surely the world must be moved  by the words of 13-year old  Iraqi girl, Sarah, whose family were refugees to a Baghdad refugee camp from  the first US demolition of  Fallujah (2004): “What does America want from us? Why did they destroy our homes? This is not their home, this is our home. Why did they come here and force us to live like this? The bombing went all day and all night. They made us homeless, they made us wander from house to house to ask if anyone can help us. Why did they come here? I want them to go” (page 118 [1]). Like Greta Thunberg’s commentary  on the deadly and worsening Climate Emergency, Truth from the mouths of children, indeed.

Chapter 6. Aftermath

The authors make an initial critical observation: “The first siege of Fallujah helped unite various factions of the Iraqi insurgency, most notably the Mahdi Army led by the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr with the Sunni militias. In response, the Coalition took measures to fracture this unity through a number of divide-and-conquer tactics that ultimately fostered [Shia versus Sunni] sectarian animosity. The sacking of Fallujah in November-December 2004 marked a turning point in the occupation, after which the Coalition gained the upper hand and was able to achieve several of its state-building goals, including holding elections [after killing off or otherwise neutralizing the people the US didn’t like] and drafting a new [US-imposed] constitution for [Occupied] Iraq” (page 119 [1]). This American consolidation of power with the support of Indigenous political and military elements is par for the course for numerous US invasions around the world  – subvert, apply sanctions, assassinate leaders, and ultimately invade to  kill off, exile or imprison  people and populations you don’t like, and then hold “democratic” elections in which people you do like get elected [4] (also see William Blum, “Rogue State”, 2000; Philip Agee, “Inside the Company: CIA Diary”, 1975; and John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, 2004).

A key part of Chapter 6 is concerned with medical doctors reporting an increased incidence of cancer and birth defects among Fallujans that they attributed to toxic materials generated through explosion of US shells and bombs  and most notably depleted uranium (DU). However the US-installed authority, the US-installed Al Maliki Government, has an appalling record of understating horrendous medical statistics e.g.  absurdly claiming that Iraqi infant mortality declined as a consequence of sanctions, invasion and devastation (as reported to the UN [19]), and claiming that rates of spontaneous abortion, still births and congenital birth defects in devastated and toxin contaminated areas of post-invasion Iraq were normal, contrary to the shocking findings of expert researchers on the spot and outside the US-installed Iraqi Health Ministry [58]. The mendacious, child-killing and genocidally war criminal Americans appear to have inflicted a post-war child health disaster on Iraq (via toxic compounds from exploded shells, mortars and bombs) just as they did on Vietnam (via teratogenic dioxins in auxin herbicides  applied to destroy jungle vegetation). Dr Samira Alaani of the Fallujah Hospital: “As a consequence of the use of inhumane, indiscriminate, and toxic weapons, many people have been killed, and many are still suffering physical harm without any reparations” (page 128 [1]).

People’s stories after Chapter 6 are related in an essay by Donna Mulhearn entitled “The children of Fallujah”. She details the case of Azraq, the son of Hamid and Marwa al-Bakr, born with a serious heart defect. Marwa al-Bakr: “Fallujah has no future because of these things” (page 141 [1]).

Chapter 7. The Third Siege of Fallujah [January 2014- June 2016]

Frustration  with the American legacy of a corrupt, sectarian and US-installed al-Maliki Government led to a non-violent Arab Spring protest movement in 2013 that involved Sunnis and some Shias. The fundamentalist group ISIS became involved and grew to dominate Sunni resistance in Fallujah: “On January 2 [2014], the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior reported to the press that half of Fallujah had “fallen” to ISIS… In response to this, the United States increased its level of military support to Iraq” (page 145 [1]). US-backed Iraqi forces sealed off Fallujah and commenced the Third Siege of Fallujah with indiscriminate bombing and shelling of homes and hospitals: “Civilian structures in Fallujah and elsewhere were repeatedly shelled and bombed, including hospitals, with civilians wounded and killed on a daily basis. Over the following two years, more than 3,521 civilians would be killed in Fallujah (including 840 women and 1,013 children)… In February 2014, the UN estimated that 62,679 families had been displaced , or roughly 370,000 people from Anbar province” with European human rights groups  describing the assault as “genocidal”    (pages 147-149 [1]). In September  2014 serial war criminal US President Barack Obama launched  Operation Inherent Resolve “a joint operation conducted by an Iraqi-led coalition of nations against IS and the Sunni uprising (the latter being conflated with the former). History was being actively rewritten… [it] went on to “liberate” villages and major cities, including Tikrit and Ramadi, and to slowly roll back IS’s territorial gains over the next two years. However, every victory against IS was mired in accusations against the PMU’s [the Iranian-backed, mostly Shia Popular Mobilization Units] of war crimes and ethnic cleansing”  (page 152 [1]).

The UN estimated in mid-2016 that 87,000 people had fled the city. Chapter 7 concluded : “While the conditions in the refugee camps were appalling, Fallujah itself was destroyed yet again and left completely  uninhabitable. When the operation officially concluded on June 6 [2016], Iraqi officials stated that the city had been “laid to waste”. Preliminary reports claimed that Fallujah’s basic infrastructure was “almost completely destroyed” and that 400 educational facilities, 238 health centres, 44 residential compounds, 7,000 homes, and 6,000 shops were heavily damaged, many beyond repair” (page 158 [1]).

People’s stories after Chapter 7 are set out in “Sami, Part II” by Kali Rubaii. Sami fled the First  Siege of Fallujah with his surviving family to Saqlawiya in 2004. Sami: “What can I tell you? That I dropped out of school when I was only twelve? That I can’t read because the Americans took my education? That I will never marry because I cannot afford to feed even my own family? That I am responsible for my entire [surviving] kin, for feeding and clothing my siblings, my mother? That I am making man decisions at the age of a child? That I watched all the men die? That the only way out of this is to become like them? That I fear for my life every time I move? That I have no future?” (pages 159-160 [1]).

Conclusion

The authors state “The official story of Fallujah, as told by the mainstream media, recounts the heroic efforts of U.S. soldiers to vanquish an evil enemy and liberate helpless civilians. But as we have argued, this narrative was constructed as propaganda, largely to pacify Western – and particularly  U.S. – audiences so that Coalition forces could crush the resistance movement in Fallujah, unencumbered by the constraints of the Geneva Convention” (page 163 [1]). Indeed the authors further state: “According to British commentator Jonathan Holmes, the 2004 sieges of Fallujah contravened seventy individual articles of the Geneva Conventions and were in breach of nearly every major area of concern  identified by them” (page 170 [1]). The authors conclude “Central to the Coalition’s attempt to subdue the Iraqi people was a campaign to present a certain version of history that excluded ordinary people from the dominant narrative. This is a time-honored strategy used by Western powers, indeed of all those who seek to assert dominance over other nations” (page 172 [1]).

The authors commented on Coalition’s “liberation” of the city of Mosul (population 2 million): “The operation began on October 17 [2016], and on July 9, 2017, culminated in the Islamic State being forced out of its last stronghold in Iraq. Predictably, the victory came at a heavy price. Amnesty International estimated that 600,000 residents were displaced from Mosul. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, the total civilian death toll from the operation is estimated to be 9,000 and 11,000. The numbers are potentially much higher” (page 166 [1]). However leading UK Middle East journalist, Patrick Cockburn, reporting on the latest awful episode of the Iraqi Genocide in Mosul, stated (2017):“More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from Isis [IS], according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent – a death toll far higher than previous estimates” [12, 59].

For all that ISIS was evidently barbarous and fanatical with an extremist Islamic ideology, a peaceful alternative to more US Alliance-imposed Iraqi Genocide through the near-total destruction of the Iraqi cities of  Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah on the basis of  IS occupation was always possible.  Thus, for example,  the fundamentalist  Muslim, Sharia Law-committed   Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) fought against Indonesian government forces in the Aceh insurgency in Sumatra from 1976 to 2005, during which over 15,000 people were killed. After the calamitous 2004 tsunami (170,000 Indonesians killed, mostly in Sumatra) there was a  peace agreement between Aceh and the Indonesian Government in 2005 involving cessation of violence and considerable Acinese autonomy. The killing stopped at the price of imposition of Sharia Law in Aceh – thus, for example, unmarried lovers, women with a penchant for “immodest dress”, homosexuals and apostates would have their human rights and civil rights grossly violated and they would  have to move from Aceh to elsewhere in Indonesia to avoid extreme  mediaeval punishment ranging from caning to execution, but at least the  war and killing stopped. Churchill’s “jaw, jaw instead of war, war” is always possible but faltered in Iraq in the face of American greed, mendacity, racism and exceptionalist violence  that exceeded in barbarity that of  repugnant ISIS. One notes that the US with Australian complicity backed Islamist rebels in the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Sulawesi in the 1950s and 1960s  (page 132, Brian Toohey “Secret”). Indeed the US has a long history of backing jihadi and other terrorist groups (from backing church-bombing gangs in Ecuador, Latin American deaths squads  and Gladio  terrorists in Europe to backing jihadis in  Afghanistan, Kosovo, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Jihadis in  Syria (eventually dominated by IS) were variously backed  by countries of the  US Alliance (the UK, US, France, Turkey, Apartheid Israel, and Saudi Arabia). Indeed jihadi non-state terrorists have been the greatest asset of resources-driven US imperialism, with any  jihadi atrocity providing an “excuse” for horrendously disproportionate  US violence.

Fallujans did not just die from violence during the 30 year, US-imposed Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide – they also died in their tens of thousands  from sanctions- and war-imposed deprivation [4, 19]. Assuming the upper estimate  of the  pre-war Fallujah population of 425,000 (page 1 [1])  one can attempt to determine the number of avoidable deaths from deprivation in sanctions- and war-devastated Fallujah over the last 30 years. The US-installed al-Maliki Iraqi Government has egregiously lied about the health circumstances of Iraqis (e.g. claiming that the death rate decreased after the US invasion) so we need to look elsewhere for estimates of “annual avoidable deaths from deprivation per thousand of population”. In similarly war-ravaged and US Coalition-occupied Somalia the figure is 6.6 and applying this to Fallujah  yields 6.6 deaths per thousand of population per year x 425 thousand of population x 30 years = 84,000 Fallujan avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation over the last 30 years of  sanctions and thence invasion and occupation (applying the lying Iraqi Government’s figure of 1.7  the estimate is 22,000).

Afterward. Fallujah. My Lost Country

People’s stories: in an Afterward entitled “Fallujah. My Lost Country”, expatriate Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani (originally from Fallujah) writes about the tragedy imposed on his country by the rich, oil-hungry and serial war criminal America and its allies the degenerate UK and US lackey Australia.  He writes about the deadly sanctions imposed on Iraq: “Everyone was hungry. Everyone was angry. I was fifteen when I saw my cousins go to work at the market instead of attending school. Fifteen years old when I learned that Iraq didn’t have the right to import pencils. The country that had invented writing deprived of pencils – how ironic. I saw hospitals  without beds. Sick people without medicine. The Iraq I knew in 1989 [prior to the 1990-2003 Sanctions]  slipped further and further away from me” (page 174 [1]. From pre-al-Maliki regime UN Population Division data it is estimated that 1.7 million Iraqi died avoidably from imposed deprivation under Sanction [5]. Indeed Dennis Halliday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq  from September 1, 1997 until 1998,  resigned after 34 years with the UN, including being UN assistant secretary-general, over the deadly Sanctions  imposed on Iraq, characterizing them as “genocide”[5].

Feurat Alani presents a shocking statistic “To this day, one child out of five in Fallujah is born with a deformity” and concludes  “This is a question of justice, of the oppressor and the oppressed, of the strong and the weak. Every honest and upstanding human being should be engaged in this fight. Whether in the case of, Palestine, or any other country where human rights are scorned and injustice reigns” (page 176 [1]). Careful analysis reveals that the sorely oppressed Occupied Palestinians are excluded by Apartheid Israel from all 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [60].

Following the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Shia Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport,  the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament Speaker and the Iraqi Parliament have demanded that US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany have rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand,  with fervently pro-Zionist, pro-Apartheid Israel, pro-Apartheid, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and Islamophobic Trump America threatening to instantly collapse  the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if mostly Arab and Muslim but unfortunately oil-rich Iraq  insists on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory [20]. The egregiously racist, serial war criminal and nuclear terrorist states of Apartheid Israel and Zionist-subverted America continue to bomb targets in Iraq with threats to destroy neighbouring, oil- and gas-rich   Iran in which some 70,000 people presently die avoidably from deprivation each year under deadly US sanctions [4, 19]. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that removed the US-installed Shah,  the US has conducted a War on Iran through outright violence (as in the US-backed Iran- Iraq War), through application of deadly sanctions, and through the deadly impact of opiate drugs from US-occupied Afghanistan.  Iranian deaths in the 4-decade US War on Iran have totalled 4 million, including 1 million from violence and 3 million avoidable deaths from war- and sanctions-imposed deprivation. Now the war criminal and nuclear terrorist UK, US and Apartheid Israel are itching for Trump’s adumbrated “obliteration” of Iran. [61] . The killing continues.

Final comments

The 3 sieges of Fallujah, the 2 demolitions of Fallujah, the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide, and the ongoing Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide cry out for justice.  However, it is highly unlikely that America’s George Bush, the UK’s Tony Blair, and US lackey Australia’s John Howard, their associates and successors – notably serial war criminal Barack Obama and serial war criminal Donald Trump – will ever be arraigned before the racist, Iraqi  Genocide-ignoring and Iraqi Holocaust-ignoring International Criminal Court (ICC). What can decent people do? Decent, humane people around the world must (a) penetrate the Mainstream Media Wall of Silence and tell everyone they can about the ongoing, blood-for-oil  Iraqi Genocide, and (b)  urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment   and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, politicians, parties, companies, corporations and countries complicit in the ongoing Iraqi Genocide and the ongoing Muslim Genocide and Muslim Holocaust. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.

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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003).

Notes

[1]. Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn, “The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History”, University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.

[2]. “Fallujah”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah .

[3]. “Alleged British use of chemical weapons in Mesopotamia in 1920”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemical_weapons_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920 .

[4]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes a succinct history  of every country and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ .

[5]. “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[6]. “Just Foreign Policy”: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq .

[7]. ORB (Opinion Research Business), “January 2008 – Update on Iraqi Casualty Data”, January 2008: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88 .

[8]. Les Roberts, “Les Roberts: Iraq’s death toll far worse than our leaders admit”, Uruqnet: 14 February 2007: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=30670&s2=16 

[9]. G. Burnham, R. Lafta, S. Doocy and L. Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey”, The  Lancet 2006 Oct 21;368(9545):1421-8: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17055943 .

[10]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .

[11]. Gideon Polya, “12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion – 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation”, Countercurrents,  23 March, 2015: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya230315.htm

[12]. Gideon Polya, “Mosul Massacre latest in Iraqi Genocide”, Countercurrents, 24 July 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/07/mosul-massacre-latest-in-iraqi-genocide-us-alliance-war-crimes-demand-icc-bds

[13]. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and  Tarik Al-Ani (foreword by Professor Joshua Castellino),  “Genocide in Iraq Volume I . The case against the UN Security Council and member states”,  Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2013.

[14]. Gideon Polya ““Genocide in Iraq, The Case Against UN Security Council And Member States”. Book review”,  Countercurrents, 8 February, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080213.htm .

[15]. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani, “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State”, Clarity Press, 2015.

[16]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The obliteration of a modern state” By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani”, Countercurrents, 15 March 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna wins Cambridge Prize”, MWC News, 20 November 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/14978-economist-mahima-khanna.html .

[18]. “Iraq Population”: http://www.populstat.info/Asia/iraqc.htm  .

[19].  “UN Population Division. World Population Prospects 2019”: https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/ .

[20]. Gideon Polya, “US, UK,  Australia, Canada & Germany Reject Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq Demand”, Countercurrents, 16 January 2020: https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/us-uk-australia-canada-germany-reject-iraqi-parliaments-quit-iraq-demand ).

[21]. UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[22]. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/380 .

[23]. Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters, “Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m”, The Observer, 16 September 2007: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline .

[24]. Noam Chomsky quoted in Sherwood Ross, “Chomsky: Iraq invasion “major crime” designed to control Middle East oil”, The Public Record, 3 November 2009:  http://pubrecord.org/nation/5953/chomsky-invasion-major-crime/ .

[25]. “The discovery of oil in the Middle East”, The history of Western civilization II: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/the-discovery-of-oil-in-the-middle-east/ .

[26]. “Petroleum industry in Iran”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iran .

[27]. “History of the Royal Australian Air Force“, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Royal_Australian_Air_Force .

[28]. Ann Barker, “US military marks end of its Iraq war”, ABC News, 16 Decemebr 2011: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-15/us-military-marks-end-of-its-war-in-iraq/3733982 .

[29]. Gideon Polya, “The US Has Invaded 70 Nations Since 1776 – Make 4 July Independence From America Day”, Countercurrents, 5 July, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm .

[30]. Gideon Polya, “British Have Invaded 193 Countries:  Make  26 January ( Australia Day, Invasion Day) British Invasion Day”, Countercurrents, 23 January, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230115.htm .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm .

[32].  Gideon Polya, “President Hollande And French Invasion Of Privacy Versus French Invasion Of 80 Countries Since 800 AD”, Countercurrents, 15 January, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150114.htm  .

[33]. “Stop state terrorism” : https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/  .

[34]. “State crime and non-state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/statecrimeandnonstateterrorism/  .

[35]. Gideon Polya, “Paris atrocity context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm .

[36]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[37]. I.F. Stone, quoted in “Two words – governments lie. Iraqi oil, climate change and Tony Blair”, Media Lens, 22 January 2003: http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=239:two-words-governments-lie-iraq-oil-climate-change-and-tony-blair&catid=17:alerts-2003&Itemid=42 .

[38]. I.F. Stone, quoted in Gideon Polya, “Iraqi Holocaust”, ConScience, Australasian Science, 2 June 2004: http://www.shiachat.com/forum/index.php?/topic/33427-iraqi-holocaust/ .

[39]. Gore Vidal interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show”, 2008: http://warincontext.org/2012/08/01/remembering-gore-vidal-change-is-the-nature-of-life-and-its-hope/ .

[40]. “Study: Bush, aides made 935 false statements in run-up to war”, CNN, 2004: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/23/bush.iraq/ .

[41].” Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/home .

[42]. Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/home  .

[43]. Gideon Polya, “Mainstream media fake news through lying by omission”, MWC News, 1 April 2017: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/2017-04-01 .

[44].  Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: https://countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

[45]. “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine) writings of Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust .

[46]. Gideon Polya, “Craven US lackey Australia betrays Australian & World hero Julian Assange & free journalism”,   Countercurrents, 13 April 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/04/craven-us-lackey-australia-betrays-australian-world-hero-julian-assange-free-journalism .

[47]. “i-casualties”:  http://icasualties.org/ .

[48]. Gideon Polya, “14 million Americans will die preventably under a 2-term Trump Administration”, Countercurrents, 22 March 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/03/over-14-million-americans-will-die-preventably-under-a-2-term-trump-administration .

[49]. Gideon Polya, “Movie review: “Who to Invade Next” by Michael Moore – Hammer, chisel down for social humanism”, Countercurrents, 23 April 2016: https://countercurrents.org/polya230416.htm .

[50].  Gideon Polya, “One million Americans die  preventably  annually in USA ”, Countercurrents,  18 February 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya180212.htm .

[51]. Gideon Polya, “American Holocaust, Millions Of Untimely American Deaths And $40 Trillion Cost Of Israel To Americans”, Countercurrents,  27 August, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270813.htm .

[52]. Gideon Polya, “One Percenter Greed & War Means Over 1.5 Million Americans Die Preventably Each Year”,  Countercurrents, 19 September, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190914.htm.

[53]. Gideon Polya, “West Ignores 11 Million Muslim War Deaths & 23 Million Preventable American Deaths Since US Government’s False-flag 9-11 Atrocity”, Countercurrents, 9 September, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090915.htm .

[54]. “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .

[55]. Gideon Polya, “US-imposed Opiate Holocaust – US protection of Afghan opiates has killed 5.2 million people since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 10 August 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/08/us-imposed-opiate-holocaust-us-protection-of-afghan-opiates-has-killed-5-2-million-people-since-9-11 .

[56]. Gideon Polya, “ Australian state terrorism (4). Jingoistic, US Lackey Australia’s Deadly Betrayal Of Its Traumatized Veterans”, Stop state terrorism, 2018: https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/australian-state-terrorism-4 .

[57]. Dr Janet Kemp and Dr Robert Bossarte, “Suicide data report, 2012”, Department of Veterans Affairs, Mental Health Services, Suicide Prevention Program, especially Figure 3: http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf  .

[58]. Neel Mani (Director of the World Health Organisation’s Iraq programme between 2001-2003,  “Iraq: politics and science  in post-conflict health research”, Huffington Post, 15 October 2014: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/neel-mani/iraq-politics-and-science_b_4098231.html.

[59]. Patrick Cockburn, “The massacre of Mosul: 40,000 feared dead in battle to take back city from Isis as scale of civilian casualties revealed ”, Independent, July, 2017: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html .

[60]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel Excludes Occupied Palestinians From All Provisions Of  The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights”,  Countercurrents, 20 May, 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya200512.htm .

[61]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel bombing Syria & Iraq – hotting deadly 4-decade US War on Iran”, Countercurrents, 14 August 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/08/apartheid-israel-bombing-syria-iraq-hotting-up-deadly-4-decade-us-war-on-iran 

WHO Impressed by Chinese Response to Coronavirus Outbreak

By Padraig McGrath, January 30, 2020

The Chinese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak might not quite match those Herculean feats of crisis-management, but the news of the past few days is nonetheless somewhat reminiscent of Kosygin’s achievements. In Geneva on January 29th, the World Health Organization team assembled to address the coronavirus outbreak gave a glowing assessment of the Chinese government’s response to the crisis.

Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ Won’t Bring Peace – That Was the Plan

By Jonathan Cook, January 30, 2020

On January 28, units of the Syrian Army, led by the 25th Special Mission Forces Division, liberated the town of Maarat al-Numan, the Wadi Al-Deif military base and nearby villages from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda-linked groups.

Earlier on the same day, a Turkish military convoy consisting of at least 30 vehicles entered Syria through the Kafr Lusein crossing and moved to the south. This was mostly a tactical manoeuver designed to demonstrate to pro-Turkish militant groups that Ankara was not going to surrender its positions in Idlib. Nonetheless, the only thing that these Turkish forces are able to do is to establish another observation point in the region. Local sources say that this point will be set up south of Saraqib.

Another area where Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forces suffered setbacks is southwestern Aleppo, where government troops pushed militants away from the Khan Tuman farms and delivered a blow to militant formations deployed in the Rashidin 5 area.

On January 29, government forces continued their operations on both frontlines. The current priority of the Syrian Army in southeastern Idlib is to secure the chunk of the M5 highway between Khan Shaikhun and Maarat al-Numan. After this, the militant strong points in Kafr Nubl and Kafr Sajnah will likely become the next target of the army offensive. Their liberation is crucial if government troops want to create a proper defense against possible militant attacks from the Zawiyah Mountain area.

Saraqib, located on the crossroad of the M4 and M5 highways, is also a high priority target. Nonetheless, an advance in this direction is unlikely in the immediate future.

In Western Aleppo the Syrian Army seeks to liberate Khan Tuman, Rashidin 4 and Rashidin 5 in order to limit the number of mortar and rocket attacks on Aleppo city by militants.

The Syrian military, supported by the Russian air power and special forces, launched an offensive in Greater Idlib on December 19, 2019. Since then, pro-government forces have liberated over 50 settlements in the south and the east of the Idlib de-escalation zone. As long as al-Qaeda-linked factions remain the core of the so-called Idlib opposition and Turkish-backed groups cooperate with them, such military operations in the area will continue.

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Donald Trump‘s “Deal of the Century”, his “vision” of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, is, as expected, a boon for Israel and a trap for the Palestinians. Everyone knew this would be the case. His deal could never have been otherwise. It was concocted by a team of hyper-Zionists under the management of his son-in-law Jared Kushner in whose bed his family friend Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu often slept.

During Tuesday’s launch, standing next to a smirking Netanyahu, Trump announced that, under his “plan”, Palestinians would, at long last, achieve their “state”. But, not for four years and on condition Palestinians give up “terrorism”, legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation, cease incitement against Israel, “negotiate”, and, according to Netanyahu, accept Israel as “the Jewish State” despite the fact that 20 per cent of its citizens are Muslim and Christian Palestinians.

Negotiate what? Trump’s “vision” gives Israel everything it wants on the issues meant to be negotiated with the Palestinians: Borders, Israeli colonies, Jerusalem and refugees. Under the 1993 Oslo accord, these issues were supposed to be negotiated by Palestinians and Israelis. Trump has unilaterally cancelled the land-for-peace formula, the 1993 Oslo Accord and the subsequent peace process. Trump is determined to dictate the outcome on these issues and to “legitimise” Israeli “acquisition of territory by force”, which is inadmissible under the UN Charter and international law, and illegal colonisation of occupied Palestinian land.

What sort of “state” will the Palestinian entity be? If Trump’s plan is implemented, this entity will be under Israeli security control, will host more than 600,000 Israeli colonists and will be totally surrounded by territory annexed by Israel, 30 per cent of the West Bank. This entity will be controlled by Israel from land, air and sea while Israel will have a recognised border with Jordan on the Jordan River.

Trump’s “vision” would compensate Palestinians with isolated enclaves in the Negev connected to Gaza. East Jerusalem, the Old City of Jerusalem and its suburbs occupied by Israel in 1967, will not be the Palestinian capital but will be recognised as part of Israel’s “undivided” capital. Palestinians will be able to establish their capital in the West Bank town of Abu Dis or overcrowded, impoverished Shuafat, on the edge of Jerusalem. Most Palestinian refugees will stay where they are, their right of repatriation revoked while some will receive compensation for losses inflicted when Israel was established. Israel’s only concession will be to freeze expansion of colonies beyond their security borders.

Trump’s “deal” was intentionally designed to be dismissed by the Palestinians who stand accused of repeatedly rejecting “peace plans” which were unacceptable. The Palestinians, however, accepted and planned to build upon the Oslo accords. Their aim was to achieve an independent state in only 22 per cent of Palestine. But Israel did not negotiate fruitfully on the basic issues or abide by Oslo’s terms and redoubled colonisation of the land Palestinians expected for their state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Under Trump’s plan, Palestinians lose control of security in the 18 per cent ruled by the Palestinian Authority according to Oslo, although Israeli forces constantly enter this area in violation of Oslo.

The Trump “vision” has been ready for roll-out for more than a year. Why did this happen now? Determined to win a second term in office in November, Trump has been in campaign mode ever since he moved into the White House. However, he has been impeached by the US House of Representatives for using his position for political gain and is under trial in the Senate. Trump would like to divert attention from his trial and proclaim a win-win foreign policy that is certain to win him votes from white Evangelical Christians.

Under indictment for accepting bribes and breach of trust, Trump’s chum Netanyahu is fighting an election in early March. If his Likud loses, he could go to jail. Although he heads a caretaker government which should not take any major political initiatives, Netanyahu is expected to declare Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and of all or some of the West Bank colonies.

The launch of his deal also took place on the day after ceremonies for the liberation by Soviet forces of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland where the Nazis executed more than a million Jews, Gypsies and others. The timing was meant to remind the world that Israel’s security must be guaranteed whatever the cost to the Palestinians. This is, of course, a false claim as nuclear-bomb-armed Israel has become by far the strongest military power in the region. Criticism of Tump’s deal will also be met by accusations of anti-Semitism, i.e. the anti-Jewish feeling that caused the Holocaust.

Trump’s vision was also revealed at a time the Palestinians, who have rejected it, are in their weakest ever position. The Arabs have become weary of the “Palestine Cause”. Palestinians remain divided between the West Bank enclaves administered by the Fateh-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas ruled Gaza. Although President Mahmoud Abbas responded to Trump by calling for unity, it is unlikely that he can bring this about. He has refused unity since Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary election and in 2007 took over Gaza. Furthermore, elected in 2005 as a peacemaker, Abbas’ term in office has long since expired and his efforts at conducting meaningful negotiations have been rebuffed by Israel, which has blamed him for refusing to carry on. The Trump administration and Netanyahu may be waiting for Abbas, now 85, to die or leave office so they can press for him to be replaced by a leader who will agree to capitulate to Trump’s skewed vision.

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On July 1st 1941, the Soviet Politburo created the Council for Evacuations, an emergency governing body tasked with organizing the evacuation of people, food, farm-livestock, other goods and entire factory complexes to the Urals region before they could be captured or requisitioned by the advancing Wehrmacht. The deputy-chairman of this committee, a 37 year-old bureaucrat named Alexei Kosygin, was given special responsibility for the evacuation of factories, with a priority placed on industries connected to the Soviet military-industrial complex.

Between July and November 1941, he succeeded in expediting the evacuation of no fewer than 1,300 entire factory complexes, and their rapid reassembly and re-commencement of production. One such factory was #183 in Kramatorsk, which employed 60,000 workers for 24-hour tank-production. The factory was still operational in Kramatorsk in October 1941, was evacuated in November, and resumed full production in Chelyabinsk in December. Kosygin went on to have a long and illustrious Politburo career – minister for light industry, minister for finance, architect of the 1965 economic reforms package, chairman of GOSPLAN, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (official Soviet head of state) for 15 years before his death in 1980.

The Chinese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak might not quite match those Herculean feats of crisis-management, but the news of the past few days is nonetheless somewhat reminiscent of Kosygin’s achievements. In Geneva on January 29th, the World Health Organization team assembled to address the coronavirus outbreak gave a glowing assessment of the Chinese government’s response to the crisis.

Dr. Maria Van Der Kerkhove of the WHO stated that one of the reasons why the growth in coronavirus diagnoses has been so rapid is because the Chinese government had published a full genome-mapping of the new variant within days of the initial outbreak, making diagnosis easier. This is possible partially because China has been producing an academic golden generation of doctoral candidates in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years. China has got an absolutely massive academic talent-pool in the life-sciences, especially in molecular biology, microbiology and biochemistry.

In other words, Dr. Van Der Kerkhove argued, the rapid increase in newly diagnosed cases should be interpreted as a positive rather than as a negative, insofar as it was an indicator of the proficiency of the Chinese response.

It is historically unprecedented that the entire genome-sequence of a new virus is published within days of the virus’ first appearance.

Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, stated that

“China and Chinese scientists have performed probably the most rapid characterization of a novel pathogen in history, and that was shared immediately. Multiple sequences were shared immediately on global platforms.”

Previously Dr. Ryan had commented on his visit to China in the previous days, stating that

“China is doing the right things, and China is responding in a massive way….What I took away from that mission was the absolute, relentless and focused determination of the government of China to put the health of people in China ahead of anything else at this point, and to take what are significant economic and other hits in order to put the health of people first. The levels of meetings, the numbers of meetings and the attendance at those meetings was unprecedented in my memory in terms of a government’s commitment to do that….”

Answering concerns raised by a Bloomberg correspondent regarding the transparency of the Chinese government’s response, Dr. Ryan described the Wuhan regional government’s response and dissemination of information as “state of the art,” saying that the Wuhan government’s public website had declared a red alert extremely early, and that an extremely impressive quantity of new information contained in their daily updates had been published since December 31st/January 1st. Dr. Ryan said

“I was involved in 2002/2003 in SARS, and I can tell you from direct operational experience that there is no comparison between the behaviour of China then and the behaviour of China now.”

He described the responses of all countries which had been affected thus far, including China, as “remarkably transparent.”

So, a glib western journalist asks a cheap propagandist’s question, and promptly gets his head handed to him.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom said that he had been in almost daily contact with Chinese health minister Ma Xiaowei, and that during his meetings with Minister Ma, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, he had been “very encouraged and impressed by the president’s detailed knowledge of the outbreak and his personal involvement in the response. This was for me a very rare leadership.”

While reports of the Chinese government building 2 specialized hospitals for the treatment of coronavirus in only 48 hours have been somewhat exaggerated, the scale and rapidity of the Chinese government’s infrastructural response to the crisis is still staggering. We already know that in most reasonably well-governed countries, the defence ministry has a ready-made contingency-plan for almost every imaginable hypothetical national emergency situation. This makes rapid response and implementation of emergency-measures possible. Just take the plan off the shelf, and do it! If we are to take the last few days as evidence, it turns out that in China, the Health Ministry also has ready-made and well devised contingency-plans for almost every imaginable public health emergency.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Padraig McGrath is a political analyst.

Featured image is from EPA/STRINGER CHINA OUT

In spite of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s best efforts, the JCPOA may very well be in the process of collapsing. On January 14th, British, French and German officials decided to trigger the agreement’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism in relation to alleged Iranian non-compliance with its obligations under the deal, a move which the Russian and Chinese governments’ view as unhelpful. For its own part, Iran has also criticized European signatories’ non-compliance with their own economic obligations under the JCPOA, regarding the un-freezing of Iranian assets, etc.

A Russian Foreign Ministry statement released on January 24th stated

“For our part, we would like to confirm the existence of substantial difficulties created by the E3’s decision. Their step creates additional problems and challenges in the implementation of the JCPOA. Besides, the above-mentioned mechanism cannot be put into effect due to the absence of the necessary procedures and the Joint Commission’s decisions.”

On January 28th, a Russian Foreign Ministry official stated that Russia was strongly opposed to any re-imposition of sanctions on Iran, and that Iran could count on Russia’s support in the matter. Since January 14th, British, French and German officials have urged the Russian and Chinese governments to participate in the Dispute Resolution Mechanism.

In alleging Iranian non-compliance, the JCPOA’s European signatories overlook the point that the Iranian government has clearly and repeatedly stated that it would implement a phased suspension of its commitments under the JCPOA until such a time as the deal’s other signatories came into full compliance. For example, on September 29th last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran has been enriching uranium to a purity of 4.35%, which marginally exceeds the limit of 3.67% stipulated under the terms of the JCPOA, and Iran has exceeded the limit of 300 kilograms of stockpiled nuclear fuel which is permitted under the terms of the deal. The Iranian explanation of its step back from these commitments has been clear and consistent – Iran cannot meet all of its obligations under the deal while the other signatories refuse to do so.

Admittedly, the decision by the United States to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA and re-impose sanctions on Iran in May 2018 has made it difficult for European signatories to come into full compliance, as the un-freezing of Iranian assets in European countries and the full enabling of trade with Iran would make European financial institutions themselves secondary targets for US sanctions. The crucial point is that all dollar-denominated transactions worldwide technically come under US legal jurisdiction. However, the Iranian government can hardly be held responsible for this lack of resolve and geo-political weakness on the part of the deal’s European signatories.

The tactical oscillation of the German government, in particular, has a destabilizing effect. During Chancellor Merkel’s meeting with President Putin in Moscow on January 11th, both leaders re-stated their commitment to saving the JCPOA at all costs. They also jointly confirmed that the Nord Stream 2 project would go ahead in spite of US sanctions.

3 days later, German, French and British diplomats trigger the Dispute Resolution Mechanism, throwing the entire future of the JCPOA into serious doubt.

Only 12 days after Merkel’s highly productive meeting with Putin, the largest NATO military exercises held in Europe for 25 years take place, highly concentrated on German territory but focusing on the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

What exactly is Merkel trying to achieve here?

One usually associates these kinds of cheap moves and this kind of obsessionally short-termist tactical oscillation with Erdogan.

What kind of advantage can Merkel hope might accrue to Germany through such a demonstration of bad faith? Maybe she just wanted to put Nord Stream 2 in her pocket before she left Moscow.

This kind of non-stop geo-political flip-flopping serves as a partial explanation as to why no western European nation-state, not even the EU hegemon, has any meaningful level of geo-political reach. Due to the infantilization of Europe’s political class, they are simply incapable of formulating or maintaining a consistent policy on external relations. Playing your suitors off against each other and sending new mixed signals every 5 minutes is not a policy. It’s a symptom of incoherence and strategic impotence.

For the first time on January 22nd, the Iranian side began to openly discuss outright withdrawal from the JCPOA rather than mere suspension of some of its commitments under the agreement. The Iranian Presidential Chief of Staff Mahmoud Vaezi raised this possibility as a for-instance. His preparedness to do so explicitly was a strong signal that Tehran has finally begun to lose patience with her western partners, and that the JCPOA may very well be in its death-spiral. This breakdown in trust simply may not be redeemable.

We should bear in mind that the central issue with regard to Iran’s nuclear program has never been the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons capability. The thing which has worried both the United States and the western European powers most is simply that Iran might build a more technologically modern and efficient economy. The Iranian government has consistently stated that its only motivation for pursuing its nuclear program is that gasoline is too valuable to be used for domestic electricity-production.

The western alliance fears Iran’s endeavours toward economic and technological self-strengthening. They see it as more desirable to keep Iran in a state of economic dependency, as an under-developed natural resource colony. Sanctions today serve precisely the same strategic purpose which the combination of tariffs-regimes and gunboat-diplomacy did during the 19th century, to maintain one-sided economic relationships. With that in mind, we have to ponder the question as to whether the JCPOA’s European signatories are simply demonstrating extreme weakness and lack of resolve in the face of American economic coercion, or if they simply never entered into the JCPOA in good faith in the first place.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Padraig McGrath is a political analyst.

A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Before I analyse these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?

To look at the documents themselves, they have to be read from the bottom up, and they consist of a series of emails between members of the Washington Field Office of the FBI (WF in the telegrams) into which Strzok was copied in, and which he ultimately forwarded on to the lawyer Lisa Page.

The opening email, at the bottom, dated 10 August 2016 at 10.32am, precisely just one month after the murder of Seth Rich, is from the media handling department of the Washington Field Office. It references Wikileaks’ offer of a reward for information on the murder of Seth Rich, and that Assange seemed to imply Rich was the source of the DNC leaks. The media handlers are asking the operations side of the FBI field office for any information on the case. The unredacted part of the reply fits with the official narrative. The redacted individual officer is “not aware of any specific involvement” by the FBI in the Seth Rich case. But his next sentence is completely redacted. Why?

It appears that “adding” references a new person added in to the list. This appears to have not worked, and probably the same person (precisely same length of deleted name) then tries again, with “adding … for real” and blames the technology – “stupid Samsung”. The interesting point here is that the person added appears not to be in the FBI – a new redacted addressee does indeed appear, and unlike all the others does not have an FBI suffix after their deleted email address. So who are they?

(This section on “adding” was updated after commenters offered a better explanation than my original one. See first comments below).

The fourth email, at 1pm on Wednesday August 10, 2016, is much the most interesting. It is ostensibly also from the Washington Field Office, but it is from somebody using a different classified email system with a very different time and date format than the others. It is apparently from somebody more senior, as the reply to it is “will do”. And every single word of this instruction has been blanked. The final email, saying that “I squashed this with …..”, is from a new person again, with the shortest name. That phrase may only have meant I denied this to a journalist, or it may have been reporting an operational command given.

As the final act in this drama, Strzok then sent the whole thread on to the lawyer, which is why we now have it. Why?

It is perfectly possible to fill in the blanks with a conversation that completely fits the official narrative. The deletions could say this was a waste of time and the FBI was not looking at the Rich case. But in that case, the FBI would have been delighted to publish it unredacted. (The small numbers in the right hand margins supposedly detail the exception to the FOIA under which deletion was made. In almost every case they are one or other category of invasion of privacy).

And if it just all said “Assange is talking nonsense. Seth Rich is nothing to do with the FBI” then why would that have to be sent on by Strzok to the FBI lawyer?

It is of course fortunate that Strzok did forward this one email thread on to the lawyer, because that is the only reason we have seen it, as a result of an FOI(A) request for the correspondence between those two.

Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, the FBI was at this time supposed to be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. The FBI here believed Wikileaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich who had then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a media issue?

We are asked to believe that not one of these emails says “well if the publisher of the emails says Seth Rich was the source, we had better check that out, especially as he was murdered with no sign of a suspect”. If the FBI really did not look at that, why on earth not? If the FBI genuinely, as they claim, did not even look at the murder of Seth Rich, that would surely be the most damning fact of all and reveal their “investigation” was entirely agenda driven from the start.

In June 2016 a vast cache of the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. On 10 July 2016 an employee from the location of the leak was murdered without obvious motive, in an alleged street robbery in which nothing at all was stolen. Not to investigate the possibility of a link between the two incidents would be grossly negligent. It is worth adding that, contrary to a propaganda barrage, Bloomingdale where Rich was murdered is a very pleasant area of Washington DC and by no means a murder hotspot. It is also worth noting that not only is there no suspect in Seth Rich’s murder, there has never been any semblance of a serious effort to find the killer. Washington police appear perfectly happy simply to write this case off.

I anticipate two responses to this article in terms of irrelevant and illogical whataboutery:

Firstly, it is very often the case that family members are extremely resistant to the notion that the murder of a relative may have wider political implications. This is perfectly natural. The appalling grief of losing a loved one to murder is extraordinary; to reject the cognitive dissonance of having your political worldview shattered at the same time is very natural. In the case of David Kelly, of Seth Rich, and of Wille Macrae, we see families reacting with emotional hostility to the notion that the death raises wider questions. Occasionally the motive may be still more mixed, with the prior relationship between the family and the deceased subject to other strains (I am not referencing the Rich case here).

You do occasionally get particularly stout hearted family who take the opposite tack and are prepared to take on the authorities in the search for justice, of which Commander Robert Green, son of Hilda Murrell, is a worthy example.

(As an interesting aside, I just checked his name in the Wikipedia article on Hilda, which I discovered describes Tam Dalyell “hounding” Margaret Thatcher over the Belgrano and the fact that ship was steaming away from the Falklands when destroyed with massive loss of life as a “second conspiracy theory”, the first of course being the murder of Hilda Murrell. Wikipedia really has become a cesspool.)

We have powerful cultural taboos that reinforce the notion that if the family do not want the question of the death of their loved one disturbed, nobody else should bring it up. Seth Rich’s parents, David Kelly’s wife, Willie Macrae’s brother have all been deployed by the media and the powers behind them to this effect, among many other examples. This is an emotionally powerful but logically weak method of restricting enquiry.

Secondly, I do not know and I deliberately have not inquired what are the views on other subjects of either Mr Ty Clevenger, who brought his evidence and blog to my attention, or Judicial Watch, who made the FOIA request that revealed these documents. I am interested in the evidence presented both that the FBI lied, and in the documents themselves. Those who obtained the documents may, for all I know, be dedicated otter baiters or believe in stealing ice cream from children. I am referencing the evidence they have obtained in this particular case, not endorsing – or condemning – anything else in their lives or work. I really have had enough of illogical detraction by association as a way of avoiding logical argument by an absurd extension of ad hominem argument to third parties.

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Executive Summary

If there ever was a “kitchen sink” quarter, Boeing just had it.

Moments ago, the ailing US aerospace giant reported Q4 earnings which prompted traders to do a double take after revenues cratered by 37% Y/Y, down from $28.3BN a year ago, and nearly $4 billion below the Wall Street consensus of $21.7BN; Q4 EPS was a whopping loss of $2.33/share, compared to expectations of a $1.47 profit, and down from $5.48 a year ago, resulting in the worst quarter in over two decades.

As a result of the abysmal quarter, Boeing posted an annual loss for the first time since 1997, the last time the plane maker had to shut down production of its cash-cow 737 jetliner. Core loss per share was $3.47 in 2019, down from $16.01 a year ago, with operating cash flow tumbling to a $2.4BN cash burn.

Predictably, the biggest item here was the continued grounding of the 737 MAX or rather attempts to get it back in the air, and in Q4 the company laid out its latest estimated costs for the 737 Max grounding, which as Bloomberg put it, “is a doozy” at $18.6 billion:

• included $2.6B additional costs to produce aircraft in the 737 program accounting quantity in 4Q19; bringing the total for the full year to $6.3BN
• Booked an additional $2.6B pre-tax charge related to estimated potential concessions and other considerations to
  customers in 4Q19; bringing the total for the full year to $8.3BN
• Estimated an additional $4BN in “abnormal production costs” that it expects to book this year to cover extra expenses as it halts and then gradually resumes work in its 737 factory.

The full details of the 737MAX kitchen sinking can be found here:

The continued grounding of the 737 MAX means that Boeing’s commercial airplane inventory is now a record high, rising 26% from a year earlier as the company continues to produce planes that nobody wants to buy (as they can’t fly them).

But wait there’s more, because it’s not just 737MAX anymore: as had been leaked previously, Boeing also confirmed that it is cutting 787 Dreamliner output to 10/month in early 2021, a number which it expects to return back ti 12 planes/month in 2023 (but may not). One hopes this is not on the same ground as the, pardon the pun, 737 MAX grounding. Boeing also reported that the 787 deferred production cost in 4Q was $18.7 billion, that’s down from $19.8 billion in 3Q and $23.0 billion a year ago.

And so, with earnings in freefall, it is hardly a surprise that operating cash flow plunged from $15.3BN to cash burn of $2.4BN in Q4 which however was modestly better than the $3.9BN expected…

… and with the company keeping cash at roughly $10BN, this meant that total debt rose to a new record high of $27.3BN in total debt.

Don’t worry though, the company’s dividend is safe and sound: Boeing paid $1.2 billion of dividends in the quarter.

Commenting on the result, the company’s new CEO Calhoun regurgitated the same old trite pablum we have come to expect from the company:

“We are focused on returning the 737 MAX to service safely and restoring the long-standing trust that the Boeing brand represents with the flying public. We are committed to transparency and excellence in everything we do. Safety will underwrite every decision, every action and every step we take as we move forward. Fortunately, the strength of our overall Boeing portfolio of businesses provides the financial liquidity to follow a thorough and disciplined recovery process.”

And while the stock initially tumbled on the abysmal results, it then promptly rebounded…

… as the sellside quickly decided that it can’t possibly get any worse, or as Bloomberg put it, Calhoun has “really brought forth everything,” trying to put a “bottom” on the bad news at Boeing so the jet maker can start trying to “take the news flow positive from here.”

As a reminder, this is what the market thought about last quarter too, and everyone knows what happened next.

Incidentally, for Boeing the only question that matters is a simple one: if and when the 737 MAX is allowed to return to the sky again, will anyone ever want to fly on that airplane again?

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Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, mentioned to the authors of the “Deal of the Century” that the occupied Golan Heights is Syrian territory.

“Yesterday, Washington’s vision of a settlement in the Middle East was published and we noticed the maps included in the plan that the Golan Heights were defined as Israeli territory, and in this regard, we would like to remind the authors of the geographical maps that we [Russia] and UN Security Council Resolution 497 do not recognize the sovereignty of Israel,” Nebenzia said.

The Permanent Representative of Russia told the U.N. that the “Golan Heights is Syrian land illegally occupied.”

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his peace plan to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, known medially as the “Deal of the Century”, in the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ambassadors of Oman, Bahrain and the UAE.

Trump’s peace plan has already been rejected by most of the countries in the Arab League, along with the Palestinian Authority.

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Featured image is from AMN

Due to the U.S. sanctions on Iran, Tehran is unable to use or transfer US$5 billion in revenues it has received from Iraq for supplying natural gas and electricity to its neighbor, an Iranian official told local media on Wednesday.

Even after the U.S. slapped sanctions on Iran’s energy exports, Iraq continues to import natural gas and electricity from Iran under a special waiver that the United States has regularly extended to Iraq.

Major Iraqi power plants are dependent on Iranian natural gas supply, and Iraq also imports electricity from Iran, as Baghdad’s power generation is not enough to ensure domestic supply.

Despite the U.S. waiver for energy trade between Iran and Iraq, Iran is unable to use the money Iraq has paid in Iraqi dinars for the energy it imports from Iran.

Up to $5 billion sits in an escrow account at the central bank of Iraq, but Iran cannot touch it because of the U.S. sanctions, Hamid Hosseini, a spokesman for Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Association (OPEX) told Iranian news outlet Press-TV on Wednesday. Iran has been cut off from the global SWIFT payment system, and because of this, it hasn’t found a way yet to have the money transferred, according to Press-TV.

The situation highlights how the U.S. sanctions are crippling Iranian revenues and how Iran cannot access money from its energy exports even if those exports are allowed under the U.S. sanctions.

Iraq, for its part, may have serious problems in securing its energy needs if the United States doesn’t extend a waiver for an Iraqi bank to process payments for Iraq’s imports of electricity and natural gas from Iran, the head of the Iraqi bank told AFP last week.

The waiver for the Iraqi bank handling the payments to Iran in Iraqi dinars expires next month. If the U.S. doesn’t extend the waiver, the bank—Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI)—will stop processing payments, the head of the bank Faisal al-Haimus told AFP last week.

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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. 

Hard evidence collected by Israeli AG Mendleblit proves Netanyahu guilt of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, serious civil offenses — his high crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide against long-suffering Palestinians ignored.

His day in the dock appears just a matter of time, likely after a new government is formed once elections settle the matter – in March or months later.

Ahead of a scheduled Knesset session he requested on whether to grant him immunity from prosecution, he cancelled it at the 11th hour, knowing a parliamentary majority opposed it.

He can no longer seek immunity from prosecution after AG Mendelblit indicted him on Tuesday in Jerusalem District Court.

He responded as expected, saying: What’s happening “is in line with the persecution campaign that the ‘Anything but Bibi’ camp has waged (sic),” adding:

“Instead of grasping the gravity of the hour, and rise above political considerations, they continue to engage in cheap politicking, harming a decisive moment in the history of the country” — referring to release of Trump’s no-peace/peace plan.

“We will take the time later to shatter all the disproportionate claims made by my detractors. But right now, I will not allow my political opponents to use this matter to interfere with the historic move I am leading (sic).”

Back in Israel after meeting with Trump on Monday, Gantz said

“Netanyahu will go to trial now, and we must move forward. Israelis have a clear choice…No one can run a state and at the same time manage three serious criminal cases for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.”

Whether Netanyahu or Gantz is prime minister, Palestinian rights will be denied like always.

What began with Arthur Balfour’s duplicitous 1917 declaration, continued during and after the Nakba — over a century of endless conflict, occupation, dispossession, repression, and Palestinian suffering, along with social and cultural fragmentation.

Historic Palestine was erased. Apartheid Israel replaced it. Run by fascist regimes, they’re supported by the US and West — sustained resistance the only hope for change.

The Trump/Netanyahu no-peace plan wants the Occupied Territories demilitarized for easier control.

It wants Palestinians consigned to isolated cantons on worthless scrubland, surrounded by hostile settlers and Israeli security forces.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak believes Netanyahu wants Trump’s scheme to fail, a way to blame others and begin the process of annexing settlements and the Jordan valley — with Trump’s support, he said, adding:

“Jordan should be the security border in the east. Netanyahu’s proposals to immediately annex the Jordan Valley reflect personal hysteria, like the behavior of an escaped convict, and a loss of judgment, not to say an irresponsible attitude toward security.”

Since the Nabka and 1967 Six Day War, Israel systematically stole Palestinian land dunam by dunam, a process continuing until accomplishing its aims entirely.

Whether or not settlements and the Jordan Valley are formally annexed, Israel exerts full control, Palestinians displaced from their land, once dispossessed not allowed back, what’s been going on since Balfour decreed the end of historic Palestine over 100 years ago.

Annexing the Jordan Valley straightaway after release of Trump’s scheme would destroy any chance of implementing it, Barak believes.

Jordanian king Abdullah’s son called annexation of valley land catastrophic for peace. None existed since Israel’s establishment.

Longstanding US/Israeli policy calls for continued regional conflict and instability.

Trump’s scheme has nothing to do with peace and respect for Palestinian rights, everything to do with one-sidedly serving US/Israeli interests.

Barak is right about one thing. Trump’s scheme is “the most favorable approach to Israel ever adopted by an American president regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Palestinian rights and welfare don’t matter. They never did before, less than ever by Trump and Netanyahu, a sinister duo exceeding the worst of earlier regimes running both countries.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

La lancetta dell’«Orologio dell’apocalisse» – il segnatempo simbolico che sul Bollettino degli Scienziati atomici statunitensi indica a quanti minuti siamo dalla mezzanotte della guerra nucleare – è stata spostata in avanti a 100 secondi a mezzanotte.

E’ il livello più alto di allarme da quando l’«Orologio» fu creato nel 1947 (come termine di paragone, il massimo livello durante la guerra fredda fu di 2 minuti a mezzanotte).

La notizia è però passata in Italia quasi inosservata o segnalata come una sorta di curiosità, quasi fosse un videogioco. Si ignora il fatto che l’allarme è stato lanciato da un comitato scientifico di cui fanno parte 13 Premi Nobel.

Essi avvertono: «Siamo di fronte a una vera e propria emergenza, uno stato della situazione mondiale assolutamente inaccettabile che non permette alcun margine di errore né ulteriore ritardo».

La crisi mondiale, aggravata dal cambiamento climatico, rende «realmente possibile una guerra nucleare, iniziata in base a un piano oppure per errore o semplice fraintendimento, che metterebbe fine alla civiltà».

La possibilità di guerra nucleare – sottolineano – è stata accresciuta dal fatto che, l’anno scorso, sono stati cancellati o minati diversi importanti trattati e negoziati, creando un ambiente favorevole a una rinnovata corsa agli armamenti nucleari, alla loro proliferazione e all’abbassamento della soglia nucleare.

La situazione – aggiungono gli scienziati – è aggravata dalla «cyber-disinformazione», ossia dalla continua alterazione della sfera dell’informazione, da cui dipendono la democrazia e il processo decisionale, condotta attraverso campagne di disinformazione per seminare sfiducia tra le nazioni e minare gli sforzi interni e internazionali per favorire la pace e proteggere il pianeta.

Che cosa fa la politica italiana in tale situazione estremamente critica? La risposta è semplice: tace.

Domina il silenzio imposto dal vasto arco politico bipartisan responsabile del fatto che l’Italia, paese non-nucleare, ospiti e sia preparata a usare armi nucleari, violando il Trattato di non-proliferazione che ha ratificato.

Responsabilità resa ancora più grave dal fatto che l’Italia si rifiuta di aderire al Trattato sulla proibizione delle armi nucleari votato a grande maggioranza dall’Assemblea delle Nazioni Unite.

All’Articolo 4 il Trattato stabilisce: «Ciascuno Stato parte che abbia sul proprio territorio armi nucleari, possedute o controllate da un altro Stato, deve assicurare la rapida rimozione di tali armi». Per aderire al Trattato Onu, l’Italia dovrebbe quindi richiedere agli Stati uniti di rimuovere dal suo territorio le bombe nucleari B-61 (che già violano il Trattato di non-proliferazione) e di non installarvi le nuove B61-12 né altre armi nucleari.

Inoltre, poiché l’Italia fa parte dei paesi che (come dichiara la stessa Nato) «forniscono all’Alleanza aerei equipaggiati per trasportare bombe nucleari, su cui gli Stati uniti mantengono l’assoluto controllo, e personale addestrato a tale scopo», per aderire al Trattato Onu l’Italia dovrebbe chiedere di essere esentata da tale funzione.

Lo stesso avviene con il Trattato sulle forze nucleari intermedie affossato da Washington. Sia in sede Nato, Ue e Onu, l’Italia si è accodata alla decisione statunitense, dando in sostanza luce verde alla installazione di nuovi missili nucleari Usa sul proprio territorio.

Ciò conferma che l’Italia non ha – per responsabilità del vasto arco politico bipartisan – una politica estera sovrana, rispondente ai principi della propria Costituzione e ai reali interessi nazionali. Al timone che determina gli orientamenti fondamentali della nostra politica estera c’è la mano di Washington, o direttamente o tramite la Nato.

L’Italia, che nella propria Costituzione ripudia la guerra, fa così parte dell’ingranaggio che ci ha portato a 100 secondi dalla mezzanotte della guerra nucleare.

Nothing about the scheme surprised, an affront to millions of long-suffering Palestinians and international law — a document with no legitimacy.

One observer compared Trump’s unveiling to a wedding attended by the bride, not the groom.

Palestinians were excluded from drafting the scheme put together by the Trump and Netanyahu regimes — serving US/Israeli interests exclusively, ignoring fundamental Palestinian rights and the rule of law.

Their representatives were absent from Tuesday’s unveiling. No self-respecting Palestinians would touch a scheme that legitimizes permanent bondage of their people under Israel’s repressive boot.

The Trump/Netanyahu scheme recognizes illegal Israeli control over most of the Occupied Territories — including settlements, most Jordan Valley land, military bases, free-fire zones, commercial locations, tourist sites, nature reserves, no-go areas, Jews-only roads, checkpoints, the separation wall, and other exclusive Jewish areas — along with water, hydrocarbon reserves, and other resources rightfully belonging to Palestinians.

The scheme of the century recognizes Israeli land theft, dispossession of its indigenous occupants, loss of their possessions, and Jewish state control over historic Palestine’s borders and airspace.

It illegally legitimizes Israeli control over all valued parts of Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem as an undivided Jewish state capital.

Palestine’s “capital” is to be located “east and north of the existing security barrier, including Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis, and could be named” whatever its officials wish — a capital in name only.

Democratically elected Hamas, Palestine’s legitimate government, is called “repressive.”

Illegal Israeli blockade of the Strip was unmentioned in the Trump/Netanyahu scheme, demanding it be demilitarized, defenseless against Israeli rapaciousness, and controlled by a Palestinian entity recognized by Israel.

Diaspora Palestinians are prohibited from returning to their homeland. No settlements will be uprooted. They’ll be mostly “incorporate(d) into contiguous Israeli territory (to) become part of the state of Israel” — in violation of international law, what the US and Israel disrespect and breach at their discretion.

A dubious Palestinian state in name only is conditional on its leadership’s subservience to Israeli demands.

They include renouncing the right of self-defense the US and Israel call terrorism, Jewish state aggression considered self-defense.

The scheme prevents regional peace and stability, making it more unattainable by adoption of what it stipulates — an unacceptable master/vassal arrangement, legitimizing Palestinian subjugation, offering the illusion of self-determination.

Israel is to retain control over everything related to security, assuring no change in the unacceptable status quo.

The Trump/Netanyahu scheme is a flagrant violation of international law, demanding world community rejection and condemnation.

Palestinian officials rejected it long before release. It has nothing to do with “peace to prosperity,” nothing “improv(ing) the lives of the Palestinian people,” just the opposite.

Palestinian authorities and activists vowed to fight against the scheme, one activist calling it a “new Balfour Declaration, (Trump) giving away what he does not own to people who have no right to it.”

Tuesday’s unveiling was a “historic” sellout day, exclusively serving US/Israeli interests at the expense of Palestinian rights.

The economic part of the scheme unveiled last June has nothing to do with aiding millions of long-suffering Palestinians.

It includes a global investment fund of $50 billion for 179 infrastructure and business projects — benefitting corporate interests exclusively in the West and Israel, neoliberal harshness for ordinary Palestinians.

The Trump regime wants wealthy Arab Gulf states to provide the money.

Around $28 billion is earmarked for the occupied West Bank and Gaza — intending greater exploitation of the Palestinian people, the way the US and other Western states exploit their own people, only worse in mind for Palestinians.

Jordan will receive a $7.5 billion bribe, Egypt $9 billion, and Lebanon $6 billion.

Around $15 billion is to come from grants, $25 billion from subsidized loans, and $11 billion from private capital.

Another $5 billion is for a transportation corridor to connect the West Bank and Gaza by a tunnel and/or high-speed rail link.

The economic part of the scheme has nothing to do with lifting Palestinians out of poverty, everything to do with continued exploitation under militarized control.

Trump’s scheme of the century is a categorical rejection of fundamental Palestinian rights while pretending to respect them — benefitting US/Israeli interests exclusively at their expense.

On Sunday, Israel’s Knesset will vote on annexing settlements, approval virtually certain.

According to Netanyahu, Knesset approval isn’t needed, just cabinet members signing off on it, a rubber-stamp procedure.

A Final Comment

Security Council resolutions are automatically international and US constitutional law under its Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2).

By illegally giving Israel control of Jerusalem, the scheme breaches unanimously adopted Security Council Res. 476.

It declared “all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant (Fourth Geneva) violation.”

The scheme ignored Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 stating:

“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Settlements are flagrantly illegal under international law.

The Trump/Netanyahu scheme breached Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 2016), stating the following:

Settlements have “no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation under international law.”

The resolution demands “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

It recognizes no territorial changes “to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.”

It “(c)alls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”

It “(c)alls for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction, calls for accountability in this regard…”

In nearly half a century of no-peace/peace plans, one-sidedly serving Israeli interests at the expense of Palestinian rights, Trump’s scheme exceeds the worst of earlier ones.

With no Palestinian or world community say about what’s in it, the Trump and Netanyahu regimes want the scheme’s demands force-fed on a long-suffering people — an act of war by other means.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from NDTV

Singapore, a small but well-armed island nation in Southeast Asia, with 72,000 troops in the army, was approved by the United States in early January 2020 to acquire 12 F-35Bs, along with necessary equipment such as spare engines, parts, electronics, equipment, and simulators, at a contract price of $2.75 billion. The Singaporean Air Force has 316 aircraft, 16 squadrons and 14,800 troops at four Air Force bases, with most of the offensive power being 40 F-15s and 60 F-16s. The Air Force is impressive but not so much compared to other regional and great powers. Singapore’s Defense Minister, Ng Eng Hen, emphasized that the American made war planes is intended to gradually replace the F-16 fighter that is now mostly used by the Singaporean Air Force – and this could be a gamechanger against Chinese interests in the region. 

With Singapore’s acquisition of these aircraft, it could drastically change the arms balance in the South China Sea region where China and the U.S. are competing, and even beyond. This small island nation has a close alliance with the United States and has also joined the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia – all Commonwealth countries – in a military agreement known as the Five Powers Defence Arrangements. Singapore is also providing full support to the U.S. by allowing them use of the Paya Lebar Air Force Base, and U.S. warships can call at Sembawang Naval Base. The visits by U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the Paya Lebar base during their visit to the region also demonstrates Washington’s trust in Singapore and recognizes the critical geostrategic location of Singapore on international trades.

The Paya Lebar Air Base is home to 40 F-15s, and is also home to five aerial refuelling aircraft, the KC-130B. Changi East Air Base is equipped with 20 F-16s and four A330 MRTT aerial refuelling aircraft. The A330 MRTT’s are essentially a refuelling machine tied to a fighter. This greatly increases the radius of action. Not only can the F-35 be refuelled in the air, but it can also land on allied, especially American, aircraft carriers. For example, an American Wasp-class assault ship can support the F-35’s offensive actions.

Singapore is located on a junction of the Malacca Straits, a crucial sea lane in Southeast Asia that has about 50,000 mercantile ships pass through every year. The Malacca Straits, strategically and economically, is one of the most important sea lanes in the entire world, in equal importance to the Suez and Panama Canals. This is because the Malacca Straits is the main sea route connecting the Indian Ocean with the Pacific Ocean. The route runs along the southern shore of the island and Singapore controls the airspace above it, making it one of the most important sea lanes in the world, especially for international Chinese trade and the Belt and Road Initiative. It is for this reason that Singapore has become another flashpoint in the China-U.S. rivalry in the region as any blockage of this sea lane from Chinese ships will significantly impact China’s economy.

Although Singapore is more aligned with the U.S., its air force does not match its ambitions. However, the acquisition of the U.S.-made F-35’s aims to create the island country into a powerful Small Power in one of the most important geostrategic locations in the world. The F-35 creates many advantages in the Malacca Straits for the U.S. and Singapore. In the event of a war in the region the Straits could be closed to China, creating significant economic and logistical problems for China’s engagement with the rest of the world.

In this way, Singapore’s acquisition of modern aircraft means not only increased control of the Straits, which is critical for military and commercial navigation, but also the possibility for the U.S. and Singapore to quickly dispatching reinforcements to areas where potential combat in the South China Sea, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula, could occur. With Singapore’s F-35B, the small island country can also appear in unexpected places all across the region to assist their American allies in anti-China operations.

It is likely that Washington is turning Singapore into an important U.S. hub in the region to enact and serve its interests and prevent the ever-increasing influence of China in Southeast Asia. With Singapore becoming a regional hub for the U.S. military, there is the possibility that the U.S. Air Force can reduce its reliance on air refuelling and facilitates in possible combat operations.  Therefore, there is little doubt that Singapore’s latest acquisition of these powerful warplanes is to further consolidate Singapore’s alliance with the U.S. and Commonwealth states who overwhelmingly represent the Old Order of the world system and are yet to accept the realities of the Multipolar System.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

The US Air Force reported Monday that it carried out more airstrikes in Afghanistan in 2019 than any year in the last decade. Manned and unmanned aircraft dropped 7,423 bombs, topping the previous decade high of 7,362 in 2018.

Nearly two decades into its criminal neocolonial occupation, the United States government is dropping an average of 20 bombs on the country per day. The rise in airstrikes has resulted in an increase of civilian casualties at the hands of the US military, with a UN report from December finding that American attacks from January to October had claimed the lives of 579 civilians and wounded 306, a third higher than in 2018.

Among the US massacres that made headlines last year was a drone strike at the end of November that killed an entire family, including three women, in Khost province. The attack came just one day after President Donald Trump made a Thanksgiving Day photo-op appearance at Bagram Air Base, flying in and out in the dark of night. In September, a drone strike in Nangarhar province, along the border with Pakistan, killed 30 farm workers and injured 40 others as they were sleeping after a day’s work picking and shelling pine nuts.

Highlighting the scope of ongoing US operations, one of the US Air Force’s electronic surveillance jets used for coordinating airstrikes and ground attacks crashed in central Afghanistan on Monday, killing the two-man crew. While the Taliban took credit for shooting down the aircraft, the Pentagon told CBS News that the cause was under investigation, but that there were “no indications the crash was caused by enemy fire.”

By conservative estimates, the 18-year-old US-led war and occupation of the country has directly resulted in the deaths of more than 157,000 people, including 43,000 Afghan civilians, with hundreds of thousands of others dying from the effects of the fighting. More than 3,500 US and other NATO soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded over the years. Seventeen American soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2019, the highest number since 2015.

Even as the number of US troops in the country has fallen to 12,000—down from a peak of 100,000 during Barack Obama’s surge in 2009—and 4,000 more are expected to leave the country soon, the Pentagon has pursued a dramatic increase in the pace of airstrikes as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure the Taliban into agreeing to a settlement in the longest war in American history.

Trump threatened last year that he could quickly kill “10 million” Afghans and wipe the country of 35 million “off the face of the Earth,” while insisting that he hoped for a negotiated agreement. The Afghan-Pakistan border was the chosen site for the dropping of the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, in April 2017, demonstrating that there were no restraints on what the US military would do in pursuit of American imperialist interests.

Talks that were abruptly called off by Trump via Twitter in September 2019, on the eve of a purported peace conference at Camp David, resumed in December, with the Taliban offering to scale back attacks on US and Afghan-puppet forces for a limited period of time. The Taliban now holds more territory than at any time since the US invasion began in 2001, with 67 percent of districts and 51 percent of the population under its control or actively contested, according to an estimate published by the FDD’s Long War Journal.

An online poll recently conducted by Pajhwok Afghan News found that 90 percent of Afghans want a peace deal with the Taliban and 68 percent desire a ceasefire ahead of possible intra-Afghan talks.

Trump met with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, telling the Afghan leader that only a “significant and lasting reduction” in attacks by the Taliban would facilitate negotiations. So far, the Taliban has refused to negotiate with the US-backed government, instead focusing on direct negotiations with US representatives in Doha. The Sunni fundamentalist movement, which controlled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, continues to insist that it will not share power with the Ghani regime, which is propped by US military support and funding.

Despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars and millions of lives, two decades of imperialist war in Afghanistan, across the Middle East and throughout Africa have done nothing to achieve the aim of securing control over strategic oil- and mineral-rich regions and geostrategic energy transit routes.

However, American imperialism is not backing down. A cease fire or peace deal and withdrawal of combat troops would not bring an end to US intervention in Afghanistan. As seen in Iraq and Syria, American imperialism will seek to maintain its military foothold with the use of special forces and drone assassinations, and the deployment of ground troops in violation of territorial sovereignty.

This was made clear in testimony Tuesday by John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who told members of the House Oversight Committee that efforts would be necessary to safeguard “US taxpayers’ investments” in the country from risks that will follow the “day after” a peace deal is signed.

The Trump administration’s effort to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban has nothing to do with bringing an “end to endless wars,” as Trump has claimed. It is instead aimed at preparing the stage for even bigger conflicts. Two decades after the launching of the so-called “war on terror,” the stage has been set for open conflict against “great powers,” foremost China and Russia. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters in December that the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan would facilitate their redeployment throughout the Asia-Pacific to confront China.

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Donald J. Trump is the third president in American history to face an impeachment trial in the United States Senate. He stands accused by Democratic members in the House of Representatives of abusing power and obstructing Congress.

In reality, Trump is being impeached because he crossed an unspoken red line in American politics by deliberately sticking his thumb in the eye of the Washington establishment.  He did so by winning an election he was not supposed to win defeating two political dynasties along the way, the Bush’s and the Clinton’s.  He threatened to ‘drain the swamp’ and fight political corruption when he took up residence in the White House.  He promised to end unnecessary and costly wars in the Middle East.  Most egregiously, he pledged to seek peaceful relations with Russia once elected.  Finally, he said some nasty things about Mexicans, Muslims, the media and the ruling class that exposed several fault lines in American society that those in power would prefer remain hidden from view.  In short, Trump polarized the United States in ways that threaten the stability of the political order while simultaneously perpetuating the economic and social inequalities protected by the political establishment he attacked.

It is therefore necessary to examine the historical events that brought Trump to this ignominious moment in his presidency and to expose the real reasons for his impeachment.  It is also wise to assess the part played by Trump, his accusers and defenders in perpetuating a pattern of lawless behavior that contributes to a ubiquitous chronicle of American state criminality.

The 2016 political season was to be a time of harvesting for Hillary Clinton, a dogged politician who labored as First Lady in the shadow of her husband Bill Clinton during his two terms as president and who subsequently launched an independent political career, first as a junior Senator from New York and second as Secretary of State, a position she dutifully accepted as a consolation prize after having been defeated in her first bid to become the Democratic party nominee for president in 2008 by the charismatic upstart from Illinois, Barak Obama.  Secretary Clinton was widely favored to win the presidency in 2016 over the presumptive Republican party nominee, Jeb Bush.

Enter Donald Trump who, in the pursuit of ever growing fame and fortune, launched a presidential campaign designed primarily to advertise ‘Brand Trump’.  To his own surprise and that of his advisors, Trump gained enormous traction at political rallies by exploiting people’s hatreds, fears and prejudices, a skill once practiced to great effect by one of his mentors, Roy Cohen, who served as chief counsel for the infamous Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Trump realized very early on that significant sectors of the American population felt as though they were thrown overboard 35 years ago by the leaders of both political parties who continually promised to provide phantom jobs and trickle down prosperity.  What actually trickled down during the neo-liberal economic era ushered in by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and continued to a greater or lesser degree by his successors was unemployment, poverty and despair.

Large sectors of the working and middle classes watched helplessly as corporate America outsourced their jobs to China, Mexico, Indonesia and beyond, destroyed their unions and turned the American dream into an unending American nightmare, all the while proceeding to create social conditions south of the border that flooded the country with undocumented immigrants who were desperate to find jobs.  For their part, the migrants were fleeing the consequences of globalized free trade agreements, drug wars, coup’s and insidious reincarnations of political repression that turned their countries into living hells.  These foreign infernos were primarily ignited by the same American corporatocracy that was responsible for creating the economic and social devastation that ravaged the United States, all in the service of transnational capital accumulation.

Trump proceeded to manipulate the deep seated discontent of American workers by promising to “Make America Great Again.” He said he would return jobs to this country, rebuild its infrastructure and rid the homeland of illegal immigrants, gangs and drugs.  Trump’s right wing populist rhetoric was carefully scripted by the ultranationalist Steve Bannon.  Bannon’s demagogy worked to perfection against the hapless Clinton who, mired in scandal, attached those same American workers as “deplorables.”

Being an accomplished huckster, Trump never intended to make good on all of his rhetorical promises, but in his zeal to win, he violated the unspoken rules of political etiquette by airing America’s dirty laundry.  Psychologically, Trump functioned as the American id.

During a lengthy campaign and much to the horror of the political establishment, Trump had the temerity to tell Jeb Bush during a Republican presidential debate that his brother led the country into the Iraq war based upon lies.  He told Hillary Clinton during a nationally televised debate that if he were president she would be in prison for destroying 33,000 emails under subpoena by Congress.  He called the mainstream media an enemy of the people.  He stated openly that NATO was obsolete and America should get along with Russia.  And he told the American people that if elected, he would wrist their government back from the clutches a corrupt ruling class.  Trump had the audacity to say these things because he is independently wealthy, could finance his own campaign for the Republican nomination, and being a bona fide member of the owning class, had apparently become discontented with the politicians that serve as the hired help of his class and had decided, being a supreme narcissist, that if elected, he could do a better job of running the country himself.

The results of the election shocked the political establishment.  On November 8, 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected as the 45^th President of the United States.  Trump pulled off one of the most remarkable upsets in modern American political history because he tapped into an enormous sea of anger and hatred that exists within vast swaths of the American wasteland.

From the moment he became a serious candidate for president, a covert operation was set in motion by Clintonite loyalists within the national security autocracy, the democratic party and the corporate media to prevent him from winning the election.  Once that project failed, a second phase of the operation was launched.  Here, the operatives had two objectives.  Firstly, to depict Trump as an illegitimate president thereby securing his removal as the chief executive of the ruling class.  Secondly, to effectively block his peace initiative with Russia.  The first phase of the covert operation produced FISA-gate and the second phase produced Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate and impeachment.

The covert operation was reportedly organized by John Brennan at the CIA, James Comey at the FBI, James Clapper at the NSA and Hillary Clinton and her cronies in the Democratic Party.  Their fabrications were printed as truth by the New York Times and the Washington Post and broadcast uncritically by CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS.  It is crucial to remember the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird in this context.  A special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed to investigate ‘Russian interference’ in the 2016 election and possible ‘collusion’ with the Trump campaign.  When the investigation failed to prove collusion, a CIA ‘whistleblower’ was produced to level additional accusations of official misconduct involving Ukraine.  Chairmen Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took up their posts in Congress to investigate Trump’s interaction with Ukrainian President Zelensky and quickly moved to orchestrate impeachment proceedings that have resulted in a Senate trial.

The litany of sensational revelations seemed unending.  Leaked conversations of Trump bragging to Billy Bush about grabbing the private parts of women; salacious stories emanating from the infamous Steele dossier about Trump having sex with urinating prostitutes in a Moscow hotel; illegally obtained FISA warrants used by the FBI to surveil the Trump campaign; charges that  Russia hacked computer servers in the DNC to obtain the Clinton emails, subsequently giving them to Wikileaks for publication; accusations that Trump collaborated with Julian Assange and Wikileaks in leaking the Clinton emails to discredit his opponent; the firing of FBI director Comey by Trump to obstruct justice; the withholding of foreign aid to pressure the president of Ukraine to investigate Joseph Biden, a political rival, thereby jeopardizing the integrity of American elections and national security.

The most serious allegations leveled against Trump are not supported by facts.  No empirical evidence has ever been presented to prove any of the numerous allegations involving Russian state interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Julian Assange maintains that the Clinton’s emails were leaked by a non-state actor, not hacked.  The emails revealed, among other things, that Clinton voiced a public policy for voters while advocating a private policy for Wall Street donors and that Clinton’s campaign staff frantically sought ways to discredit rival Bernie Sanders.  Clinton subsequently colluded with the DNC to subvert the candidacy of Sanders during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.  The emails also revealed that her campaign staff worked vigorously to respond to criticisms that while Secretary of State, Hillary participated with husband Bill in a ‘pay for play’ influence peddling operation, more commonly known in legal circles as racketeering, that was set up through the Clinton Foundation.

Furthermore, the Steele dossier was exposed as a fraud and credible legal scholars have demonstrated  that Trump’s activities with Ukraine do not rise to the level of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ as required for impeachment by the U.S. Constitution.

What the American people are witnessing is an ongoing attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by removing Trump from office through impeachment.  The probable results of this strategy do not bode well for the Democrats.  In all certainty, Trump will be acquitted in the Senate trial, thereby strengthened, not weakened in his bid for re-election.  The Democrats chose the path of impeachment because they have no genuine oppositional politics with which to defeat Trump.

Consequently, what is on display in Washington is the spectacle of one faction of the American political establishment using the constitution as a legal weapon against the other faction in a very public struggle for control of U.S. empire.

What remains largely unexamined during the impeachment saga are the real crimes, as opposed to the alleged crimes, that have been committed by Donald Trump in the service of that empire.  A central part of this drama is the complicity of both his accusers and defenders in the commission of those crimes.

Firstly, Donald Trump would never have had the opportunity to seek a criminal investigation of his presidential rival if not for the fact that former Vice President Joseph Biden had been involved in corrupt activities while serving as Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine.  Biden’s activity entailed actually threatening Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko  with cancellation of $1 billion in U. S. loan guarantees if Poroshenko did not fire Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin who was investigating corrupt practices of the natural gas firm Barisma Holdings, a company on whose board of directors sat Biden’s son, Hunter, at a cost to the company of $166,000 a month.

Secondly, Joseph Biden would not have been involved in these activities had not the Obama administration engineered a coup d’état in the Ukraine in 2014 to oust the pro-Russian government of Victor Yanukovych who had refused to come under the domination of the EU and IMF.  U.S. involvement in the coup was revealed, in part, by leaked conversations of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland who, along with U.S. Ambassador Jeoffrey Pyatt, helped legitimate the post-coup government by selecting its Prime Minister. Nuland’s ‘guy’ was  Arseniy Yatsenyuk who imposed IMF austerity on Ukraine once Yanukovych was removed. Nuland also revealed that the United States had invested $5 billion in anti-government activities in Ukraine.

Nuland’s husband is Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative who was instrumental in creating the Project for the New American Century, a think tank whose members advocated preemptive and unilateral ‘war on terror’ as a pretext for global interventionism.  Kagan, along with several other neoconservatives, is also the author of a policy document that directly challenges Trump’s ‘America First’ military strategy with one of aggressive interventionism.  Kagan’s brother Fredrick, worked as a fellow in the American Enterprise Institute in 2007  where he wrote a policy paper that was instrumental bringing about a massive troop surge during the war in Iraq.  The neocons are consistent advocates of military interventionism and they dominate thinking in the foreign policy establishment of the United States.  It is in this context that the firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton can be understood. Bolton is a virulent neoconservative who consistently advocated war as the policy of first choice in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela to annoyance of Trump who does not want to risk re-election by starting new wars of choice.  Bolton’s testimony is now sought by Senate Democrats in the impeachment trial as they attempt to discredit Trump on Ukraine.

The coup in Ukraine touched off a civil war in that country that the United States converted into a proxy war with Russia.  The Obama administration initially withheld lethal military aid to the Kiev government in 2014 but quickly reversed course in 2015 and signed off on a congressional aid package that approved $50 million in lethal military aid in 2015.  Between 2016 and 2019 that aid increased to $850 million.  To date, the United States has sent $1.5 billion to Ukraine in security assistance.  The Obama administration also falsely accused Russia of invading Ukraine when the latter annexed the Crimea and began arming separatist forces in the Donbass region in response to U.S. actions. Therein lies the centrality of sending military aid to Ukraine for the U.S. foreign policy establishment.  Trump stands accused by Congressional Democrats of endangering U.S. national security by temporarily withholding that aid. Trump eventually released $400 million of military aid to Ukraine yet the accusation underscores the need for impeachment in the eyes of Democrats.

Thirdly, Trump advocated détente with Russia.  For the neoconservatives and liberal interventions in the American foreign policy establishment, strategy in the Ukraine is part of a larger project that has been undertaken to subjugate Russia.  Part of the EU deal rejected by Yanukovych stipulated Ukrainian military coordination with NATO, a pact that would have further extended the military arm of the EU to the doorstep of the Russian Federation.  Militarily confronting Russia began with the expansion of NATO eastward under Bill Clinton in 1999; the withdrawal from the ABM treaty by Bush Jr. in 2001; the placement of anti-ballistic missile defense systems in Romania in 2016 and Poland in 2018 by Obama; and the imposition of economic sanctions, expulsion of diplomats and seizure of Russian diplomatic properties in the United States by Obama in 2018.  Collectively, these policies have contributed to a calculated new cold war.   Hence, the targeting of Trump who wanted peaceful relations with Russia.  Hence, Russia-gate and its spin off Ukraine-gate.  Hence, impeachment.

U.S. foreign policy has been structured to prevent the emergence of a global rival from the Eurasian land mass after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The architect of that policy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor.  Brzezinski was also the mastermind of the Russian ‘bear trap’ that induced Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in 1980 by arming, training and deploying the ‘Islamic Mujahideen’, out of which sprang Al Qaeda.  Trump will not be allowed to deviate from aggressive anti-Russian policy.  This is particularly true in the Middle East.

In assessing policy in the Middle East, it is important to note that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is an offshoot of Al Qaeda that is presently being used as a justification for U.S. troop deployment in Iraq and Syria. Ostensibly the troops are deployed to fight ISIS, but in reality they are there to secure the region’s oil resources and protect the apartheid state of Israel.  As such, Trump’s regional policy directly conflicts with that of the Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Iraqi governments that actually fight ISIS.  Trump’s order to assassinate Iranian General Suleimani, who coordinated the fight against ISIS puts a lie to U.S. claims that it is fighting a ‘war on terror’ against the Islamic State.

Although Trump has indicated that he is against wars of regime change in this region, his policies are likely to provoke the very wars he claims to oppose, especially if he follows the advice of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, yet another neoconservative warmonger.

Trump’s missile strikes in Syria and the illegal military occupation of Syrian oil fields; Trump’s green light for the Turkish invasion of Syria; Trump’s withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear agreement (JAPOC); Trump’s imposition of economic sanctions on Iran; Trump’s extrajudicial assassination of General Suleimani; Trump’s massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia; Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognize Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights; Trump’s support for the dictatorship in Egypt; and Trump’s drone war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, constitute genuine war crimes and crimes against humanity for which he should be removed from office. But Trump is not being impeached for any of these crimes because they are crimes committed in furtherance of empire.

Furthermore, Trump has committed these crimes with the full support of Congress, the largely symbolic and non-binding War Powers Act Resolution of 2020 notwithstanding.

It was Congress, in a vote that included 188 Democrats, that approved Trump’s $738 billion military budget in 2020.

It was the Senate that ratified Trump’s $500 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia in 2017.  The majority of those billions are used by the Saudi’s to buy weapons from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Boeing so as to wage war in Yemen.  It should be noted that members of the House and Senate own an estimated $5.3 million worth of stock in the defense industry raising a visible conflict of interest.  Consequently, it is no surprise that the Senate confirmed former lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, Mark Esper as Trump’s Secretary of Defense in 2019 without a hitch.

Additionally, the den of Congressional thieves continues funding for the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $45 billion per year, approved a $38 billion military aid package over 10 years for Israel in 2018 and overwhelmingly extended key provisions of the Patriot Act in 2019, with significant support coming from the Democratic party of lesser evilists, thus illustrating their support for the rampant militarism underlying American state criminality.

Unrestrained militarism is a crime against peace.  Aggressive preparation for war leads to actual war.  America’s Imperial President and its venal Congress are guilty of waging war on humanity, a monstrous reality that is hidden behind the charade of impeachment.

The battle over Trump’s impeachment is a power struggle that will decide who will lead the American empire.  It is not a fight involving the abuse of power as much as it is a fight involving the exercise of power.  The outcome of that fight will determine which faction of the American political establishment will employ Imperial state power to advance a vicious global empire that relentlessly elevates the rights of property over the rights of people to the detriment of all humanity.

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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 ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com

US President Donald Trump finally unveiled his ‘Middle East Peace Plan’ on Tuesday, 28 January 2020, during a media conference in Washington, as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stood by his side.

The entire document, called ‘Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People’ consists of 181 pages, including a political plan, ‘The Trump Economic Plan’ (that Washington had already introduced last July, during a conference in Bahrain) and sections on security, border crossings, water, refugees, and Gaza. The economic plan vowed to set up a $50 billion fund to help revive the Palestinian economy, with Jordan, Egypt, and Israel also receiving shares of the proposed financial aid. Trump hopes to raise this money from Arab states, but little funding has thus far been pledged to turn the Bahrain plan into action.

Trump’s Washington announcement is considered the political component of what he and his advisers had termed the ‘Deal of the Century’. The plan creates a fictitious Palestinian state, which should be demilitarised and have no control over its own security, borders, waters, and foreign policy, ceding most of these to Israel. Such a ‘state’ would, in effect, have less power and control than the bantustans created by apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Certainly, Lucas Mangope or General Oupa Gqozo, leaders of the Bophutatswana and Ciskei bantustans respectively, had more power over the territories they ostensibly controlled than the ‘government’ of Trump’s envisaged Palestinian ‘state’ would have.

Yes to settlements

According to the long-delayed plan, the USA will officially recognise Israel’s Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. All the settlements, housing around 600 000 settlers, are illegal under international law. The document is also an encouragement to Israel to seize as much Palestinian land as it wants before the plan is operationalised.

According to the document, ‘[Israel] will not have to uproot any settlements, and will incorporate the vast majority of Israeli settlements into contiguous Israeli territory. Israeli enclaves located inside contiguous Palestinian territory will become part of the State of Israel and be connected to it through an effective transportation system.’

No to Palestinian State

Although Trump’s plan refers to a ‘Realistic Two-State Solution’ and the creation of a Palestinian state, it delineates that entity as a series of individual enclaves connected by tunnels and bridges, and comprising only around nine per cent of what was British Mandate Palestine in 1947. It also imposes ‘limitations of certain sovereign powers in the Palestinian areas’ which strips the new entity of the powers, rights and duties of a normal state. The ill-defined Palestinian ‘state’ is also conditioned on the Palestinian leadership meeting a number of conditions, including the rejection of ‘terror’.

‘The State of Israel, the State of Palestine and the Arab countries will work together to counter Hezbollah, ISIS, Hamas… and all other terrorist groups and organizations, as well as other extremist groups,’ the document says. Clearly, ‘other extremist groups’ does not refer to Netanyahu’s Likud party or the myriad armed, violent racist Jewish settler groups that daily attack Palestinians, their livestock, farms and other possessions.

The ‘state’ will not be allowed to have any military or paramilitary capabilities, and will ‘not have the right to forge military, intelligence or security arrangements with any state or organization that adversely affect the State of Israel’s security, as determined by the State of Israel.’ The document contains a list of security capabilities that the Palestinian ‘state’ will not be allowed to have, including mines, heavy machine guns, and military intelligence. And, in the event that the Palestinians violate any of these prohibitions, Israel ‘will maintain the right to dismantle and destroy any facility’. Israel will also have the right to undertake any measures to ‘ensure that the State of Palestine remains demilitarized and non-threatening’ to Israel.

Yes to Jerusalem as capital – for Israel

The plan refers to Israel as a ‘good custodian of Jerusalem’, ‘unlike many previous powers that had ruled Jerusalem, and had destroyed the holy sites of other faiths.’ It also commends Israel ‘for safeguarding the religious sites of all and maintaining a religious status quo’, completely ignoring the reality of Israel’s destruction of and ongoing attacks on Christian and Muslim religious sites for the past seven decades.

Jerusalem, according to the plan, is envisioned as the ‘undivided’ capital of Israel, as already declared by the Trump administration on 6 December 2017. The plan does, however, propose to give Palestinians limited sovereignty over a few neighbourhoods that are adjacent to the Israeli apartheid wall that is built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. ‘The sovereign capital of the State of Palestine should be in the section of East Jerusalem located in all areas east and north of the existing security barrier, including Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis,’ the document says, making clear that the Palestinian ‘state’ will not have control over any part of Jerusalem itself, especially not the old city of Jerusalem or the important religious sites such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In a seemingly-generous concession, it suggests that the neighbourhoods identified ‘could be named Al Quds or another name as determined by the State of Palestine’. Essentially, Palestinians can have their capital in Jerusalem, as long as their Jerusalem is not in Jerusalem.

Yes to Gaza as part of Palestinian state, if…

With not a single reference in its 181 pages to the fourteen-year-long brutal Israeli siege on Gaza, and the various Israeli military onslaughts on the territory in that period, the document asserts that the people of Gaza ‘have suffered for too long under the repressive rule of Hamas’. It is irrelevant that Hamas was democratically elected by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006, but has been subjected, along with two million Palestinians, to the hermetic Israeli siege in the impoverished Gaza Strip.

Despite Palestinians in Gaza having ‘suffered for too long’, for Gaza to be included in any future ‘peace agreement’, it would have to be demilitarised and to fall under the control of the Palestinian Authority or any other party that Israel chooses to recognise.

No to refugees

As expected, the plan repeats Israel’s rejection of Palestinian refugees’ right, under international law, to return to their homes and their country. ‘There shall be no right of return by, or absorption of, any Palestinian refugee into the State of Israel,’ it stipulates. What is described as the ‘refugee problem’ should be solved by Palestine’s ‘Arab brothers’, who ‘have the moral responsibility to integrate them into their countries as the Jews were integrated into the State of Israel’. Even the possible ‘absorption’ of Palestinian refugees into ‘the State of Palestine’ is subject to limitations. The plan envisages a committee ‘of Israelis and Palestinians’ being formed to ensure that the ‘rights of Palestinian refugees to immigrate to the State of Palestine shall be limited in accordance with agreed security arrangements’.

The document calls for a ‘just, fair and realistic solution to the Palestinian refugee issue’, but then equates it with ‘the Jewish refugee issue’, referring to Jews who left Muslim countries to settle in Israel, calling also for a ‘just, fair and realistic solution for the issues relating to Jewish refugees’.

Yes to security – for Israel

Israel’s security is a key thread running through the document, with one subheading clearly stating ‘The Primacy of Security’. Israel will, in fact, have ‘overriding security responsibility over the State of Palestine’, and will be responsible for ‘security at all international crossings into the State of Palestine’, meaning the new state will have no control over any of its borders. Israel will also ‘continue to maintain control over the airspace and electromagnetic spectrum west of the Jordan river’.

Even aspects of foreign relations of the Palestinian ‘state’, according to the document, will be the responsibility of Israel. ‘The State of Palestine will not have the right to forge military, intelligence or security arrangements with any state or organization that adversely affect the State of Israel’s security, as determined by the State of Israel,’ it asserts.

Yes to more ethnic cleansing

Another worrying section of the plan concerns Palestinian communities within Israel who live in an area referred to as the ‘Triangle’. Regarding these communities – in Kafr Qara, Ar’ara, Baha al-Gharbiyye, Umm al-Fahm, Qalansawe, Tayibe, Kafr Qasim, Tira, Kafr Bara and Jaljulia, the document ‘contemplates the possibility… that the borders of Israel will be redrawn such that the Triangle Communities become part of the State of Palestine’. The goal, then, is to politically relocate these communities of around 350 000 people, stripping the individuals of their Israeli citizenship and dumping them into the Palestinian bantustan. The plan is effectively proposing yet another way of helping to ethnically cleanse Israel of its Palestinian population.

Conclusion

Palestinians, seemingly without exception, have rejected the Trump plan. A number of Palestinian political formations the day before the plan’s unveiling to express their united opposition to it. This is not surprising, considering the provisions of the document. The reality, however, is that, in many respects, Trump’s plan only attempts to legitimate the status quo. Much of what the document talks about as a future ‘Vision’ is already the Palestinian reality.

The question now is how Palestinian groups will actualise their opposition as a resistance project that confronts not only the Trump Plan, but also the Israeli occupation and annexation project as a whole.

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The following report by Middle East Monitor remains to be fully corroborated.

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Russian intelligence sources have claimed that Michael D’Andrea, head of CIA operations in Iran and who orchestrated the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US spy plane downed yesterday in Ghazni, Afghanistan.

The plane with US Air Force markings reportedly served as the CIA’s mobile command for D’Andrea, who earnt several nicknames including: Ayatollah Mike, the Dark Prince, and the Undertaker. He is one of the most prominent CIA figures in the region, appointed head of the agency’s Iran Mission Centre in 2017. Under his leadership, the agency was perceived to take a more “aggressive stance toward Iran”.

The Taliban claimed to have shot down the plane but have yet to provide evidence, whilst the US has denied the claim but has acknowledged the loss of a Bombardier E-11A plane in central Afghanistan. Graphic images online have already circulated purportedly showing some of the charred remains of those on board.

#AlFath
Enemy intelligence aircraft crashed in Sado Khelo area of Deh Yak district #Ghazni noon hours today resulting in all crew & high-ranking CIA members killed.
Wreckage & dead bodies laying at crash site. https://t.co/DL7qwHpcRe

— Zabihullah (..ذبـــــیح الله م ) (@Zabehulah_M33) January 27, 2020

Unconfirmed reports that the CIA head of anti-Iran operations, Michael D’Andrea aka Ayatollah Mike, was on board the plane that crashed near Ghazni, Afghanistan this morning.

D’Andrea also masterminded the murder of Imad Mughniyeh, former Hezbollah Chief of Staff, back in 2008.

— Brasco_Aad (@Brasco_Aad) January 27, 2020

Afghan authorities initially claimed the plane was a state-owned airline, but this was denied by the company, Ariana. Helicopters have been brought down before by the Taliban, but they are not believed to have the capabilities required to bring down a high-flying aircraft.

It has been speculated that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) may also have a hand in the incident, especially as anti-aircraft support has previously been given to the Taliban. Additionally, the Afghan Shia Fatimyoun Brigades, who are trained by the IRGC, also have a presence in the country.

CIA Middle East chief, Soleimani Killer and Bin Laden Hunter, dead on Jet in Afghanistan. Tasnim and Mirror told after VT
by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio for VT iTaly

VERSIONE ORIGINALE IN ITALIANO
The news is so big that we have to write it running the risk of a denial, … pic.twitter.com/7Da2jmkHug

— VeteransToday (@veteranstoday) January 28, 2020

An exiled Iranian journalist who has written previously for the hard-line Javan daily newspaper suggested the IRGC was involved, tweeting: “The American Gulfstream plane was downed in Afghanistan by the Taliban. They say that intelligence officers were on board. This report has not yet been confirmed, but if it is, it is possible that the issue of Iran will also emerge in this case.”

Another Iranian journalist who writes for Mashregh newspaper, described as having close links to IRGC, tweeted not long after the news broke out: “We will attack them on the same level as they are attacking us.”

Soleimani’s successor as head of the IRGC’s Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, has established ties in Afghanistan going back to the 1980s. Additionally, the chief commander of the IRGC, General Hossein Salami, warned that no American military commanders will be safe if the US administration continues to threaten Iranian commanders.

D’Andrea, who is reportedly a convert to Islam, doing so in order to marry his Muslim wife, who is from a wealthy family from the Mauritius of Gujarati origins, having met on his first overseas assignment in East Africa, one of the senior directors of her family’s company Curumjee Group, has been speculated to provide cover for CIA operations.

He also oversaw hundreds of drone strikes, which according to The New York Times “killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians”. D’andrea is credited with being the mastermind behind the CIA’s notorious “signature strike” used to kill people based on their behaviour, not identity, subsequently used to determine someone’s guilt or likelihood of being a terrorist.

He was central to the post-9/11 interrogation programme and ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach. He also oversaw the hunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and was involved in the assassination of Hezbollah member Imad Mughniyah in Damascus, Syria.

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Featured image: US vs Iran, who’s going to win the war of influence – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

One day, long, long ago, a man was fishing on the reef, and he saw something out to sea. It appeared to be an island, but it moved. He ran to the beach shouting ‘’An island is coming here’’, and quickly the people gathered on the beach to watch a sailing ship approach and anchor off the reef. The inhabitants of this island came ashore, and our island-world ceased to be. The world exploded, and our island became a remote outpost …the last place in a country which has few centres and much remoteness – (Luana, 1969 : 15)

In the mid-1960s I spent 14 months in the Central Highlands of New Guinea studying the agricultural system of the Enga people, this in the context of my doctoral research in the Research School of Pacific Studies, as it was then called. For much of this time I lived among the Raiapu Enga, on the southern slopes of the Lai Valley, overlooking the patrol post, mission station and airstrip at Wapenamanda. The Aruni – their clan name – at Sabakamádá built a house for me on the edge of their ceremonial ground, welcomed me into their homes and gardens, and responded with surprising patience, and occasionally with real interest, to my interminable questioning. Their willingness to share their lives with me, their generosity and above all their pride and dignity left an indelible mark on me. Even today, over 50 years on, scarcely a week goes by without my thinking about the time I spent in what we call today Enga Province. In this respect I share without a shadow of a doubt the sentiments of Joël Bonnemaison, a fellow ethno-geographer and above all friend, who I first met in Canberra back in 1968 :

Local studies commenced in the 1960s and continue to be practised, differently. For those researchers who undertook them it is an extended immersion (…) in another society, a first confrontation between ideas and the reality of ‘fieldwork,’ and often a kind of initiation. We all return from it changed, respectful of those whom we have met. (Bonnemaison, 1993. My   translation and emphasis.)

The Golden Age

With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that I had experienced what another of my contemporaries, Bill Clarke, called theGolden Age in Papua New Guinea, that brief but magical period for both the observers and the observedthat was suspended between the end of tribal fighting and the onset of global capitalism. It was a time of discovery of other ways of inhabiting the earth. It was also a time without fear which nourished expectations of a more generous and caring world to come. The Highlanders welcomed us inquisitive strangers into their land. Our mutual concern was to get to know each other and, quite naturally, to collectively benefit from the ties we were in the process of establishing. In my particular case I was deeply impressed by the sophistication of the Enga agricultural system, in other words it’s absolute intelligence, this in a context of climatic marginality and demographic pressure. By the extraordinary order and beauty of the humanised landscape too. Indeed Joël created a vocabulary to describe a similar world in Tanna (Vanuatu) : magical gardens, enchanted territories, cultural plenitude…

In the 1960s the land belonged unequivocally to those who inhabited it. The colonial State ensured relative peace and freedom of movement, its primary concern being to establish a pax australiana,while the Corporation, with its insatiable thirst for resources to nourish the global economy, was yet to rear its head. Living temporarily on the edge of the sing-singground at Sabakamádá I was able to appreciate something of the quality of Raiapu Enga life; the easy mix of work and leisure and, with regard to the latter, the wealth of casual conversations, of social relations and of ceremonial activities. I felt inspired, both intellectually and emotionally. Certainly it wasn’t ‘paradise’ – but then does such a place exist?! There were inequalities in material wealth and hence in the exercise of power. So there was a big man and one or two rubbish men among the Aruni, but there was no abject poverty, no exclusion. Rather the big man took the rubbish maninto his household such that, in return for his labour, he was cared for. The big man, for his part, was called upon to defend the interests of the clan (community) as a whole. Further, with the exception of high infant mortality and some protein deficiency in the diet, the general health status and life expectancy of the population as a whole was surprisingly good.

There were inevitably moments of questioning on my part. I think particularly of the time when the young bachelors, following their return from the clan’s sadárú (initiation) ceremony in the hills, ran amok for 24 hours or so. It was a ritualised moment of individual frustration, largely symbolic violence and anger prior to settling into adult life as a formally delineated, and hence constrained, member of the group. The deceased Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou about whom I wrote several decades later (Waddell, 2008), offers a vivid description of the New Caledonian equivalent of this adult world the young Enga men were on the point of entering:

Landscape, village layout, society, the deceased and mythical beings constitue a whole that is not only indivisible but still practicially undifferentiated…. The space of the tribe appears in this way like the immense stage of a perpetual theatre where each person plays his role at an assigned place.(Tjibaou, 1976 : 284-285. My translation and emphasis.)

There was indeed little place for individual expression or non-conformity among the Enga such as were a feature of my own world, and I certainly reflected on this profound difference that characterised our respective lives. Yet it was never a source of concern or judgement on my part.

If my experience and my memories are of a place and a people of great beauty, I have nevertheless carried with me for over 50 years now the questioning of an old man who would often visit me in my house and who otherwise spent much of his time chatting with kin on the ceremonial ground just behind. His name was Komeyá and I cherish a photo of him. It is there, above my desk, and it nourishes my thoughts about the interconnected world in which we all now live, this even though my home on the shores of the Saint Lawrence River (Canada) is some 15 000 kilometres away from the Lai Valley. He was a lapun man who had known tribal warfare and the time before the irruption of Australian colonial administrators and foreign missionaries in his land. He was troubled by the totally unsolicited arrival of strangers in his land, strangers who showed no signs of leaving and who clearly sought to impose their will on his people. It was this concern which led him to ask me, time and again, the same question : « Why have you kone [red people] come here? What precisely do you want? » I was young and I could offer no satisfactory (to either of us) answer to his querying. I no doubt talked about learning and sharing, about ‘the family of man’, about a desire on the part of the world from which I came to ‘help’. And I probably expressed the wish to build a better future for us all. But it was all pretty vague and incoherent. Certainly I had a good idea why I personally was there but I don’t think I had much of a clue in a broader, civilisational sense. Also, I was fully conscious of the fact that I was only passing through his land.

Image 1: Komeyá, the lapun man from Sabakamádá

One extraneous event is inscribed in my memory of the late 1960s in Melanesia. It was the news of what I believe was a UNDP fact-finding mission to the Solomon Islands2, the objective of which was to identify needs and development priorities for the soon-to-be-independent colony. The UN body had been established in 1966 with the aim of engaging in a global ‘war on poverty.’ In the case of the SI mission, the team rapidly came to the conclusion that the quality of life there was satisfactory and that, apart from investing in improved health services, the country should basically be left alone! Needless to say their report was rapidly condemned to oblivion since their recommendations did not fit with interests and vision of the emerging new world order.

I only returned to Enga country briefly since my doctoral field research. It was in 1972-1973 and it involved two visits with a single purpose, to look at the impact of the 1972 frosts on the population and, more specifically, to identify their strategies for coping with such an extreme event. The nature of the crisis meant that I spent most of my time on the edge of the Marient Basin (near Kandep), where people were living at an altitude of around 2,400-2,500m and crop loss due to the succession of frosts was substantial. The Aruni, living at a significantly lower altitude – c.1,700-1,800m – and on the lower slopes of a relatively incised river valley, had for their part experienced no significant ground frosts and attendant damage to their crops. I nevertheless profited from the occasion to visit Sabakamádá. What a welcome I received! I recall walking in through the mounded sweet potato gardens, the joy of seeing old friends and neighbours, our spontaneously embracing each other, and asking for news, talking of births, deaths and other personal events that were of primary concern to us all as fellow human beings whose lives had been interwoven for a time and had been nourished by memory since my departure back in 1967. It was a moving experience and I thought once again about the family of man and of the bonds that unite us all.

Then I left, never to return to Sabakamádá.

Change

By virtue of my new research mandate I travelled reasonably widely among the high-altitude Enga and I became conscious of the groundswell of change that would inevitably transform the Highlands in the years to come: the development of the cash economy with, notably,  an increasing number of trade stores stocked with alcohol; the sense that old tribal grievances were re-surfacing; the emergence of ‘pay week’ and ‘rubbish week’ in adminstrative centres, with the attendant domestic violence; Toyota Landcruisers and pick-ups abandoned by the roadside. I sensed being witness to the slow emergence of a new kind of disorder and new forms of instability characterised by a situation where there would be few ‘winners’ and many ‘losers’, where the Enga as a whole would lose control of their destiny, and where, in other words, a new kind of chaos was emerging. The Golden Age appeared to be coming to an end and I too was experiencing a growing sentiment of loss. I was uneasy.

Largely unconsciously I think, PNG slipped slowly over the horizon as I moved on in life. I was partly drawn by my newly developed roots and dreams in French-speaking North America. However another part of me remained firmly grounded in the Pacific, a Pacific that had nourished me as a young man and had helped mould my values and world-view : the celebration of difference, learning from other peoples, recognising the crucial presence of the past in our lives – Epeli Hau’ofa would later describe this state of mind as ‘Pasts to remember’ – and the vital role of culture, hence of collective identity and the collective good as being the essential foundations for political action. I had, largely by a process of osmosis no doubt, learned a great deal about life in the course of my PhD research in the New Guinea Highlands and I was determined to re-enter Oceania in a different capacity.

In the 1980s and 1990s I spent extended periods teaching at the University of Hawai’i (Manoa), the University of the South Pacific (Fiji) and the Université de Nouvelle-Calédonie. This meant I now had Oceanians as colleagues and students, notably at USP. Both offered me a different perspective on the world of Pacific Studies and indeed the business of scholarly research in general. Islands and island peoples were no longer the object of my interest, to be viewed through the prism of scholarly debate and preoccupations in metropolitan countries. Rather they were fellow teachers, friends and students who invited me to read the world from their perspective and according to their firmly grounded and pressing preoccupations. I started listening to voices that were consciously positioning themselves outside the scholarly – particularly disciplinary – mainstream. In the case of USP I think particularly of Epeli Hau’ofa, a PNG-born Tongan who had studied and engaged in field research in anthropology, Epeli quickly realised that he had been formatted to deliver a clinical, disembodied and ultimately desperate view of his own people, be they in PNG, Tonga, Fiji or elsewhere in the Pacific Islands:

[A]fter decades of anthropological field research in Melanesia we have come up only with picture of people who fight, compete, trade, pay bride-prices, engage in rituals, invent cargo cults, copulate and sorcerise each other. There is hardly anything in our literature to indicate whether these people have any such sentiments as love, kindness, consideration, altruism and so on. We cannot tell from our ethnographic writings whether they have a sense of humour. We know little about their systems of morality, specifically about their ideas of the good and the bad, and their philosophies… (Hau’ofa, 1975 : 61)

They [anthropologists] do not know how we feel (ibid : 58)

Furthermore, in teaching anthropology at USP in the 1980s and early 1990s, he quickly came to appreciate that this perspective, dictated by foreign knowledge and transmitted according to the dictates of foreign scholarship, only served to belittle his students and render them powerless :

I began noticing the reactions of my students when I described and explained our situation of dependence. Their faces crumbled visibly, they asked for solutions. I could offer none. […] I was actively participating in our own belittlement, in propogating a view of hopelessness. I decided to do something about it. (Hau’ofa, 1993 : 5)

That ‘something’ was to abandon the cold, disciplinary confined intellectualism of the international academic community in favour of an approach to knowledge and understanding as embodied by the Pacific Island peoples of which ‘I [Epeli] am emotionally a part.’ By the mid-1990s he had come to the conclusion that approach would be centred on arts and culture, ‘a distinctly Oceanian way of transmitting knowledge’,3a way that was firmly grounded in the past. Such an approach would ensure that the architects of this creative world set their own rules rather than be subject to dictates imposed from outside.

Insofar as the political arena was concerned, it was the Kanak (New Caledonia) independance leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou who attracted my attention. It too was in the early 1990s, that is at the same time that I re-established close contact with Epeli. Jean-Marie, like Epeli, had spent the first decade of his life in the village, close to the land, immersed in the closely-woven fabric of social life and experiencing a Melanesian universe that was defined at least in part by the constant presence of the past. Like Epeli he also studied anthropology, in his case in France, although he didn’t complete his PhD. The path he chose in early adult life was the Church rather than the University, and as a priest in Nouméa he experienced the same shock as Epeli did as a professor in Suva:

During the year I was curate in Nouméa… what a lot of drunks I gathered up in the evening… to take home… And I often experienced that discourse, cries from the bottom of the dungeon… the tears that recall the lost land… and who proclaim… who get angry, who fight, who struggle… but who find comfort in alcohol. (Tjibaou, 1989 : 19)

Like Epeli, he chose to pursue studies overseas, first in the broad field of development studies and then in anthropology, with the intention of ‘looking for the analytical tools that would help better understand the situation here [in New Caledonia] (ibid : 17)’. The time he spent in France and his experience in social action once back home led him, as with Epeli, to become a severe critic of Western development models, centred on industrialisation, accumulation, uniformisation, individual gain, and on erasing the past. Hence his conviction, even as a politician in the 1980s, that it was necessary to return to one’s roots, one’s cultural identity in order to lay the foundations today of an authentically Melanesian destiny :

[T]he search for identity, the model, lies before us, never behind. It is being constantly   reformulated. And I will say that the challenge right now is to include the maximum number of elements belonging to our past, to our culture, in the model of mankind and society that we aspire to for the creation of the city. (Tjibaou, 1985 : 1601)

Not surprisingly perhaps, Jean-Marie would typically commence gatherings of the Kanak independence movement by thanking the ancestors for being present. It was yet another illustration of the fact that he, like Epeli, was deeply concerned with the future of the Pacific past. Both recognised the promotion of a dynamic and firmly grounded Oceanian culture and identity to be the only possible way forward.

It was about this time – the early to mid-1990s -, by virtue of the changes I had been witness to here in Canada and because of my increasing familiarisation with the writings and actions of the likes of Epeli and Jean-Marie back in Melanesia that I was finally able to formulate in my own mind the answer to the Enga lapunman’s question; ‘’Why have we Konecome to the land of the Enga? What precisely do we want?’’ That answer was simple, direct and troubling;

We want your primary resources – forest products, copper ore, gold, nickel, oil, natural gas, fish… – to help meet the demand of the rapidly expanding global economy. We want your labour, to produce coffee and palm oil in response to global consumer demand. And we demand your integration as consumers into that same economy. In other words, we are seeking new markets too. We want everything of value to us, at minimum cost and with maximum benefits to the investors.

All this means of course on terms where the vast majority of Enga/PNGns/Melanesians are condemned to the role of simple onlookers in an arena where our avowed aim is to transform their lives. I was mortified at the thought, and I still am today. Why wasn’t I aware of this back in 1966? What had happened? Was I in fact some kind of passive and unconscious agent in the process of mass and totally uncompromising externally directed change? The question is not an easy one and, in seeking to answer it, I can only really speak for myself, although I believe the likes of Joël Bonnemaison, Bill Clarke and Epeli Hau’ofa shared most of my sentiments. Unfortunately they are no longer with us to tell their version of the story.

The rise of corporate power

This is neither the time or place to provide a summary of post-war economic history. It is nevertheless vital to highlight the fact that a major change in direction in terms of North-South relations occurred around the 1980s. In the aftermath of the Second World War our principal preoccupation in what came to be termed the ‘developed world’ was one of human justice, poverty elimination, the end to war, rebuilding entire countries and continents, all this in the spirit of sharing in as generous a manner as possible. These were the values I certainly learned and then practised as an adolescent. I volunteered with the Service Civil International (SCI), going to work camps in France and Switzerland. We were Catholics and communists, pacificists, vegetarians, hippies before their time, school teachers… I recall a Swedish Jew and a German war-time Messerschmitt pilot in one of our camps. I worked a while for the abbé Pierre in Paris. We were all striving to build a better world for all. We endeavoured to speak each others language, we sang each others songs and we called each other camarade. We were fascinated by the diversity of the human experience and we believed ourselves to be citizens of the world, hence enthusiastic members of the family of man.

This is not the first time I use the expression. It refers specifically to an exhibition of 503 photographs of people from around the world that was first presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. Over the following decade it travelled around the world and was seen by over nine million visitors. It offered a fascinating portrait of mankind, highlighting both the diversity of the human experience and the sense of being part of a single community of global dimensions. My generation was deeply marked by this humanist vision of the world and it was, implicitly at least, this which in the early 1960s took me to PNG and on to the Enga, in search of my fellow men. I think it fair to say that the exhibition mirrored a post-War era where governments, and the international alliances and agencies they created, were concerned with human justice and dignity – to include self-government -the reduction of poverty, and the improvement of the health and nutritional status of entire populations. Wealth generation and profit were not yet primary preoccupations. There were obviously profound ideological divisions with regard to the way to proceed; the communist and capitalist blocs, the non-aligned movement. However, ideology apart, they could all be considered societal projects. This was the case with PNG in the mid/late 1960s. Australia was preparing the country for political independence. I felt it to be a reasonably generous and caring time and I had no sense of myself, the colonial administration or the Christian missions being agents of subversion of Melanesian society. Certainly we didn’t really doubt that they would quite spontaneously want to share some of the ‘benefits’ of Western civilisation. We perceived our actions to be an appropriate path to ‘improving’ the daily lives of the Enga but not one of radically transforming or destabilising them.

What we now term economic development, measured in terms of such quantitative parameters as growth, profitability, competitivity, gross domestic product, etc., has it roots in the USA and no doubt started to take form as a global initiative in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its first major manifestation was the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction. While the plan set the foundations for the creation of multinational corporations, it was the state that was the major actor in development, both national and international, and interests were directed primarily to social and economic justice and the building of solid national institutions. As first an adolescent and then a young man, I was witness to and, as a SCI volunteer, a tiny actor in an initiative of global dimensions that I and those around me believed to be a noble and generous endeavour.  It was those concerns and those interests which drew me to PNG in the 1960s.

It was in the following decades, notably in the 1980s, that a shift occurred, with the progressive transfer of economic initiative from the state to the private sector. This shift was accompanied by a fundamental change in intentions. The corporate world expressed little interest in social welfare, or any form of integrated regional development. Its over-riding concern was with profit, ideally short-term, to be acquired through unlimited economic growth across a world increasingly free of barriers to the movement of goods, services and capital. Where states proposed a shared vision of the future and were accountable to their citizens, corporations have much narrower interests and are only accountable to their shareholders. The state is now largely at the service of these enterprises. Society has little meaning in the eyes of the corporation. Indeed wasn’t it Margaret Thatcher, that architect – along with Ronald Reagan – of the brave new world, who asserted ‘There’s no such thing as society!’? It was more of a premonition or, perhaps, a programmatic statement than a fact at the time. Certainly today however, with the withering of the state and the unleashing of the corporation and financial oligarchies, society has been transformed into a largely unstructured mass of consumers, an infinite number of individuals, throughout the world, Enga Province included.

I had no idea back in the 1960s that this would be the shape of the world to come. However I do now know that Komeyá, the old Enga man at Sabakamádá, had every reason to ask me a question for which I had no satisfactory answer at the time.  I also know that I do not believe in economic development and unlimited growth as practised today. It is a cruel and indeed absurd agenda in terms of the rapidly growing inequalities within communities and between peoples, and the accumulation of largely useless commodities it generates. And it is an absolute disaster for the biosphere. Confronted as we are with the pollution of soils, water and air, the decline in biodiversity, starvation and the massive dislocation of human populations, time is fast running out for us all. Another mass extinction may well occur, and this time it could conceivably be homo sapiens.

I think it is fair to say that all those who I have named in the preceding pages – Joël Bonnemaison, Bill Clarke, Epeli Hau’ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou – ceased to believe in development strategies as formulated in the metropolitan countries. Perhaps they ceased to believe in economic development at all. Certainly there came a time in their lives when they no longer espoused the litany of industrialisation, accumulation, growth and individualism. Jean-Marie Tjibaou dreamed that one day, in the not too distant future, the Kanak people would be invited to sit at the ‘banquet of civilisations’ in order to contribute to a shared discussion on the future of the world. Epeli Hau’ofa strove for cultural and intellectual independence for his Oceanian brothers and sisters, this through the independent development of arts and culture firmly grounded in their own past. This alone would allow them to design their own future. As for us visiting researchers from the West who, in the 1960s and 1970s, had the good fortune to be immersed in rural Melanesian society but who only came to appreciate the significance of the experience several decades later, allow me to share some of Joël’s thoughts, summarised in a paper I wrote in his memory :

On the island of Tanna he was witness to the encounter of two truths, one with and the other    without real roots. More important, he observed through their confrontation, ‘a conflict of ideas that was of global significance’ (Bonnemaison, 1997 : 521) and he came to the unavoidable conclusion that it is more important to live culturally than it is to survive materially. Otherwise       our very existence is without meaning. Finally, in order to realise this dream, which had unexpectedly become universal, he had the sentiment that it was necessary to ‘refer at one and the same time to the past and to the challenges of the present,’ both to ensure that all peoples can live decently and honour their ancestors, and to ‘recreate the unity of the world’ (idem: 514) (Waddell, 1999 : 182).

And for this new world to materialise he recognised that the West had to cease being the giver of lessons.

Looking back to the 1960s all this was perhaps unconsciously revealed to us at the time but there certainly wasn’t the sentiment of urgency to pass the message on to the world from which we came. So we only returned home transformed individually by the experience because, in reality, we had only left to observe, rarely to listen and discuss. What a conversation I might have had with my lapun man if he had been able to share his preoccupations with me for, in the final analysis, he was not perhaps asking me a question. Rather he was inviting me to engage in a conversation, a conversation between equals.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Prof. Eric Waddell is a renowned author and ethno-geographer concerned with issues of culture and identity within the New World Order. He is Honorary Professor at  the School of Geosciences, Sydney University, Australia. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

This article was first published in the 80th issue of The Development Bulletin, Australia National University (ANU) Since 1988 it has been the journal of the Development Studies Network, currently based at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

This special publication celebrates the journal’s 80th issue. Its focus is the Pacific Islands and their specific trajectory from colonial states through independence to the present day. The editor commissioned these papers from Pacific Island, Australian, New Zealand and British academics, journalists, NGOs, government personnel and consultants who have lived and/or worked extensively in the Pacific over a number of years. The papers here are their reflections and perceptions of development, aid and change and their thoughts for the future.

Sources

Bonnemaison, Jöel 1993, ‘Gens de pirogue,’ Chroniques du Sud, 11 : 93-94.

Bonnemaison, Joël 1997, Les fondements géographiques d’une identité. L’archipel du Vanuatu. Essai de géographie culturelle. Book 2 : Les gens des lieux : Histoire et géosymboles d’une société enracinée : Tanna, Orstom, Paris.

Hau’ofa, Epeli1975,‘Anthropology and Pacific Islanders,’ Man in India, 55 (1) : 57-66.

Hau’ofa, Epeli1993,‘Our Sea of Islands,’ pp. 2-16 in Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu & Epeli Hau’ofa (eds), A New Oceania. Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

Hereniko, Vilsoni and Karen Stevenson (eds) 2012, Hidden Treasures, Contemporary Pacific Art from the Oceania Centre Collection, USP Press, Suva, Fiji.

Luana, Caspar 1969, ‘Buka! A retrospect’, New Guinea and Australia, the Pacific and South-East Asia, 1, 4, 15-20.

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 1976, ‘Recherche d’identité mélanésienne et société traditionnelle’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 53, 32): 281-292.

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 1985, ‘Entretien avec Jean-Marie Tjibaou,’ Les Temps Modernes, 464 : 1587-1601.

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 1989, ‘Le message de Jean-Marie Tjibaou.’ Interview by Jacques Violette, Bwenando, 121-124.

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie  1985 ‘Entretien avec Jean-Marie Tjibaou,’ Les Temps Modernes, 464 : 1587-1601

Waddell, Eric1999, ‘Rootedness and travels : The Intellectual Journey of Joël Bonnemaison’, The Contemporary Pacific, 11 (1) : 176-185.

Waddell, Eric 2008, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanak Witness to the World. An Intellectual Biography. Pacific Islands Monograph Series 23, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.

Notes

1 Honorary Professor, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney.

2 Not having kept any record of the event in my files, I am not 100% sure it was a UNDP mission so I shall attribute the lack of recall to a time when, to borrow a poetic image of Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘the moon and red wine play tricks on my aging mind’!

3 Cited in Hereniko and Stevenson 2012 : 10. 

A funny thing happened on the way to the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX)…or rather, several funny things. And they all have to do with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s fear of “foreign meddling” in Canada’s pipeline politics.

You may recall that at a stop in Vancouver on March 6, 2018, Kenney told CBC News,

“I think we have legitimate questions to ask about the ultimate source of some of the funds that are being spent in Canadian politics to bottleneck our resources,” he said. “In whose interest is it that Canadian oil and gas does not get to global markets? Well, obviously, it’s in the interest of Russia, with the fourth-largest reserves on earth.”

There has long been fierce opposition to the TMX project (owned at the time by Texas-based Kinder Morgan), which will nearly triple the pipeline’s capacity to bring Alberta diluted bitumen (dilbit) to the West Coast.  Kenney further stated,

“If the Russian government decided to deploy an organized social media campaign to attack U.S. energy, so there’s less American energy exports, it’s entirely reasonable to assume they might have tried to do the same thing in Canada. I have no evidence of that, but it’s a reasonable question.” [1]

Kenney’s Russian musings may have been prompted by a lengthy, March 2, 2018 article in the Financial Post by Claudia Cattaneo entitled “Russian meddling another worry for Canadian energy exports.” [2]

Russian Bots?

All of this prompted the B.C. NGO Dogwood Initiative to launch an impromptu selfie campaign, urging supporters to send photos to Kenney to reassure him that they aren’t Russian bots. “It’s time to fess up,” Dogwood’s Kai Nagata wrote. “Are you being paid by Vladimir Putin? Post a picture of yourself with the hashtag #NotARussianBot to show that you’re a real Canadian, expressing your opinions in a democracy.” [3]

Throughout March 2018, the Russia meddling theory got widespread coverage in Canadian media, and then suddenly the coverage stopped.

I suspect that an aide to Jason Kenney quietly took him aside and told him something like this: “Mr. Kenney, sir, do you realize that the pipe being provided for Kinder Morgan’s TMX is actually being manufactured by a Russian-owned company?”

In other words: Oops.

On May 2, 2017 (almost a year before Kenney’s Russia musings), Kinder Morgan had announced an agreement to purchase more than 75 per cent (nearly 300,000 tonnes) of the pipe needed for the TMX from a steelmaking factory in Regina owned by Evraz North America, subsidiary of Evraz Plc, Russia’s No.2 steelmaker. [4]

As Dogwood put it in a posting on March 22, 2018 while “everyday British Columbians have no ties to Vladimir Putin, Kinder Morgan does. If Kenney is fond of conspiracy theories, he should look at the Russian businessmen who have every interest in seeing this pipeline built.” [5]

Meanwhile, a more serious problem concerning those pipes was starting to get some attention, at least from pipeline opponents.

Condition 9

The National Energy Board (NEB) had determined 157 conditions to be met by Kinder Morgan for its TMX project. Condition 9 required the company to file, and get approval for, a Quality Management Plan (QMP) 4 months prior to the manufacturing of any pipe and major components for the project.

But in November 2017, DeSmog Canada (now The Narwhal) published an article revealing that Kinder Morgan had awarded pipeline manufacturing contracts (to Evraz North America) between May and July of 2017, and manufacturing of the pipe had begun in October, but without an approved QMP in place. [6]

As author Carol Linnit explained,

“The quality management plan requires Trans Mountain to supply documentation regarding the qualifications of pipeline contractors, vendors and suppliers, quality auditing of manufactured pipe and the preservation of pipe during shipping and storage.”

Given that Kinder Morgan had no such approved QMP before contracting the pipe manufacturing, Linnit noted that “Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain may be in violation of a condition [Condition 9] laid out by the National Energy Board, Canada’s federal pipeline regulator.” [7]

As Dogwood’s writer put it, this “corporate rule-breaking” is a “more concerning component of Kinder Morgan’s Russian pipe deal…It’s the kind of thing you might expect in a corrupt petrostate – like Russia.” [8]

New Angles

Jason Kenney then appeared to have moved on from his Russian meddling theory, to a surprising new angle. In a speech to oil executives at the Oil Sands Trade Show in Fort McMurray in September 2019, Kenney said that Alberta needs to take a hardline approach against environmentalists like autocratic regimes do against critics. He said,

“They know they couldn’t get away with this in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In fact, Greenpeace did do a protest on an offshore rig in Russia and their crew was arrested and thrown in a Siberian jail for six months and funnily enough they’ve never been back – I’m not recommending that for Canada, but it’s instructive. It’s instructive.” [9]

(In reality, the Greenpeace crew was jailed in Saint Petersburg, released after a few months, and then won a lawsuit in which the Russian government had to pay them millions of dollars in compensation for the illegal seizure in international waters.) [10]

Not surprisingly, Canadian civil liberties groups reacted strongly to Kenney’s hardline approach. Amnesty International Canada warned Kenney that his anti-environmentalist initiatives undermine constitutional rights, and free speech. Kenney then accused Amnesty International of aligning with foes of Alberta’s oil patch and of protecting “foreign-funded billionaires”. [11]

But Kenney soon dropped that angle too. I suspect a dutiful aide again approached him and said something like this: “Mr. Kenney, sir, do you realize that Evraz North America, the company whose Canadian subsidiary manufactured the pipes for TMX, is actually owned in part by Roman Abramovich, a Russian citizen who also holds an Israeli passport and whose net worth is about $15 billion?”

Oops again.

“Pipe in the Ground”

By December 2019, the National Post was announcing that TMX construction was set to begin at a site near Edmonton, with “pipe in the ground before Christmas” and large stockpiles of pipe “massed at yards in the B.C. towns of Vavenby, Hope and Kamloops” and preparatory work ongoing in Valemount. [12]

That prompted me to try to determine what had happened with regard to that Kinder Morgan QMP and the lack of regulatory approval under Condition 9, which governs the actual pipes.

After all, a lot had happened since that November 2017 De Smog/ The Narwhal article had been published. A shortlist would include: the replacement of the National Energy Board by the Canada Energy Regulator (CER); the $4.5 billion purchase of TMX by the Canadian federal government; Jason Kenney’s launch of a “war room” (the Canadian Energy Centre, with Claudia Cattaneo on board) and a $2.5 million public inquiry into “anti-Alberta energy campaigns;” a Federal Court’s quashing of TMX approval due to lack of meaningful consultation with Indigenous groups; and a federal election.

As well, The Tyee writer Geoff Dembicki had thoroughly debunked Kenney’s Russian conspiracy theory, tracing its origins to a notorious U.S. PR firm. [13] (Equally interesting, in the U.S. The Nation magazine had thoroughly debunked widespread Russian meddling in the 2016 election.) [14]

But what about Condition 9 and those pipes, manufactured before any approved QMP and now stored at various locations across the pipeline route?

So in December 2019 I read through all the entries under Condition 9 on the NEB/CER website and could not find any mention at all of the actual pipes in these filings, which were made over many months and which ended as of mid-June 2018. In mid-December, I contacted the CER and asked: “Does this mean that full approval for Condition 9 compliance in the Quality Management Plan is still pending?”

In response to my question, the CER provided a letter sent by the NEB to Kinder Morgan, dated 22 June 2018. The letter stated that the NEB

“requires Trans Mountain to submit a letter signed by the Trans Mountain Accountable Officer confirming that the procurement, manufacture, transportation, and storage of all pipe and major components prior to 21 March 2018 was undertaken in conformance with Trans Mountain’s internal processes and procedures. The letter must also confirm that pipe and major components comply with all relevant internal specifications. The letter must be submitted to the Board no later than 29 June 2018.”

Kinder Morgan had duly responded with a letter (also provided to me by CER), dated 28 June 2018 and signed by Ian Anderson (President, Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC, Kinder Morgan Canada Inc.). It stated:

“As the accountable officer of Trans Mountain, I, to the best of my knowledge, as of the date of this confirmation and after due inquiry, confirm that the procurement, manufacture, transportation and storage of all pipe and major components prior to 21 March 2018 was undertaken in conformance with Trans Mountain’s internal processes and procedures. I also confirm that pipe and major components comply with all relevant internal technical specifications.”

Federal Regulation?  

I may be wrong, but it seems obvious to me that the NEB told Kinder Morgan exactly what to write in order to meet Condition 9 at that late date, and then Kinder Morgan wrote exactly that.

I then contacted Lynn Perrin, who has been following the pipeline regulatory approval process for years as a Director of Pro Information Pro Environment United People Network, otherwise known as Pipe Up.  I asked her: is it normal for the NEB/CER to accept a company letter confirming that all QMP guidelines and conditions for the pipes have been met, six months after the manufacturing had already begun?

Perrin’s answer by email was short and to the point: “Two Auditor General reports note that the NEB does not enforce Conditions the majority of the time!” The reports cover years of such lack of enforcement by the federal regulatory body. [15]

I guess this is how the politburo functions in a petro-state.

Nonetheless, opposition to TMX continues, regardless of “pipe in the ground” near Edmonton. Stay tuned for TMX Part 2: The Pipeline and The Supremes.

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Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Notes

[1] Quoted in Justin McElroy, “Why Kinder Morgan and Russian interference in elections are more closely related than you think,” CBC News, March 6, 2018.

[2] Claudia Cattaneo, “Russian meddling another worry for Canadian energy exports,” Financial Post, March 2, 2018.

[3] Alexandra Bly, “Dogwood Snarks Back After Kenney Claims Pipeline Opponents Are Russian Agents,” The Energy Mix, March 9, 2018.

[4] Reuters Staff, “Russia’s Evraz to supply pips for Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion,” Reuters, May 2, 107.

[5] Sophie Harrison, “One Small problem with Jason Kenney’s ‘Russian bots’ theory,” Dogwood posting, March 22, 2018.

[6] Carol Linnit, “Kinder Morgan At Risk of Violating NEB Condition With Premature 300,000-Tonne Pipeline Order,” DeSmog/The Narwhal, November 3, 2017.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Harrison, op. cit.

[9] Quoted in “Jason Kenney: Vladimir Putin’s Jailing of Dissidents is ‘Instructive’ on How to Deal With Environmentalists,” Press Progress, September 11, 2019.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Geoffrey Morgan, “Trans Mountain construction set to begin, with ‘pipe in the ground before Christmas’,” National Post, December 2, 2019.

[13] Geoff Dembicki, “Enviros Tools of Russians? The Weird Conspiracy Theory Firing up Kenney’s Inquiry,” The Tyee, November 22, 2019.

[14] Aaron Mate, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics,” The Nation, December 28, 2018.

[15] The 2 Auditor General Reports can be found at: [https://foroilfreeshores.fils.wordpress.com/2016/05/auditor-general-2010-report-on-transportation-of-dangerous-goods.pdf] and [http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_cesd_201601_02_e_41021.html#hd3a]

Featured image: Premier Jason Kenney and Cabinet at Government House, in Edmonton on Tuesday, April 30, 2019.  (Photo by Chris Schwarz/Alberta Government)

‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?.. when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, …you begin to question the capitalistic economy.“ – Martin Luther King

Introduction

Over the last ten years Greece has been a prime example of how a country and a people can be deprived of their liberty through clearly illegitimate debt. Since the 19^th century, from Latin America to China, Haiti, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire public debt has been used as a coercive force to impose domination and pillage (Toussaint, 2017). Visibly, it is the combination of debt and free trade that constitute the fundamental factors subordinating whole economies as from the 19^th century. Local elites allied themselves with big financial powers in order to subject their own countries and peoples permanently to methods of power that transfer wealth towards local and foreign creditors.

Contrary to commonplace ideas, it is generally not the indebted weaker countries that are the cause of sovereign debt crises. These crises break out first in the biggest capitalist countries or are the result of their unilateral decisions that produce effects of great magnitude in the indebted countries. It is not so-called “excessive” public spending that builds up unsustainable debt levels, but rather the conditions imposed by local and foreign creditors. Real interest rates are abusively high and so are bankers’ commissions. The indebted countries unable to keep up with repayments have to continually find new loans to repay old loans. In the past, when that became impossible, the great powers had licence to resort to military action to ensure they were repaid.

Debt crises and their outcomes are always directed by the big banks and the governments that support them.

Over the last two centuries, several countries have successfully repudiated debts by arguing that they were either illegitimate or odious. Mexico, the USA, Cuba, Russia, China and Costa Rica have all done this. Conflict involving debt non-payment has given birth to a judicial doctrine known as Odious Debt which is to this day pertinent.

Historical examples

Creditors, whether powerful states, multilateral organisations that serve them or banks, have become very adroit at imposing their will on debtors. From early in the 19^th century Haiti, the first independent black republic, was an early testing ground. The island gained freedom from the yoke of the French empire in 1804, but Paris did not abandon its claims on the country and obtained from Haiti payment of a royal indemnity granted to the former colonial slave owners. The 1825 agreements signed by the new Haitian leaders created a monumental debt of independence untenable from 1828 and which took a full century to pay off, thus preventing any real development.

Debt was also used to subjugate Tunisia under France in 1881 [1] and Egypt to the British in 1882. [2] The lending powers used unpaid debt to impose their will on countries that had so far been independent. Greece too, was born in the 1830s with a burden of debt that held it in the sway of Russia, France and the British, [3] Newfoundland, which had become the first autonomous dominion of the British Empire in 1855, well before Canada and Australia, had to renounce its independence in 1933 because of the grave economic crisis in order to face up to its debts and was finally incorporated into Canada in 1949. Canada agreed to take charge of 90% of Newfoundland’s debt (REINHARDT and ROGOFF, 2010).

Debt during the 1960s and 70s

The process was repeated after the Second World War, when the Latin American countries had need of capital to fund their development and first Asian, then African, colonies gained independence. The debt was the principal instrument used to impose neocolonialist relations. It became frowned upon to use force against a debtor country, and new means of coercion had to be found.

The massive loans granted as from the 1960s, to an increasing number of peripheral countries (not least those in which the Western powers had a strategic interest such as Mobutu’s Congo, Suharto’s Indonesia, the military regimes in Brazil, Yugoslavia and Mexico) oiled a powerful mechanism that took back the control of countries that had begun to adopt policies that were truly independent of their former colonial powers and Washington.

Three big players have incited these countries into debt by promising relatively low interest rates:

1. the big Western banks seeking to put massive amounts of liquidities to work;
2. the developed countries seeking to stimulate their economies after the1973 oil crisis;
3. the World Bank seeking to increase US influence and to fend off the increasing expansion of the private banks.

Local elites also encouraged higher debt and made gains, contrary to the populations, who derived no benefit.

The debt crisis of the 1980s

At the end of 1979 the US decided to increase its interest rates. This had an effect on the rates applied to indebted Southern countries whose borrowing rates were variable and had already been subject to sharp rises. Coupled with low export commodities prices (coffee, cacao, cotton, sugar, ores, etc.,) which caused reduced revenues for the countries, the trap was sprung.

In august 1982, Mexico, among other countries announced that they were unable to assure debt repayments. So, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was asked, by the creditor banks, to lend the countries the necessary funds at high interest rates, on the double condition that they continue debt repayments and apply the policies decided by the IMF “experts”: abandon subventions on goods and services of primary necessity; reduce public spending; devalue the currency; introduce high interest rates in order to attract foreign capital; direct agricultural production towards exportable products; free access to interior markets for foreign investors; liberalise the economies, including the suppression of capital controls; introduce a taxation system that aggravates inequalities, including VAT increases; preserve capital gains and privatize profitable publicly owned industries; this list is not exhaustive.

These structural adjustment loans were aimed at the suppression of independent economic and financial policies in the peripheral countries and tying their independence to the World markets. Also, to ensure access by the industrialized economies to the raw materials and they needed. By gradually putting the developing countries into competition with each other the economic model based on exports and the extraction of raw materials for foreign markets is reinforced, which in turn reduces production costs and increases profits, favouring the developed economies.

So, a new form of colonialism sprang up. It was no longer necessary to maintain an administration and an army to put the local population to heel; the debt did the job of creaming off the wealth produced and directing it to the creditors. Of course the colonialists continued to interfere in local politics and economic policies whenever they considered that it suited them.

 Developments in the 2000s

As from 2003-04, in a context of strong world demand, commodity prices started to increase. Exporting countries improved their foreign exchange incomes. Some developing countries increased their social spending but most preferred to buy US treasury bonds and so put their increased means at the disposal of the principal economic powers. This increase in developing countries’ incomes whittled down the weight of the World Bank and the IMF.

Another factor was the Chinese economic expansion. China had become the world’s principal sweatshop and was accumulating important financial reserves and using them to significantly increase funding to developing countries in competition with the offers of funding from the industrialised countries and the multilateral institutions.

During the 2000s, the reduction of interest rates by the Central Banks in the industrialized countries in the North decreased the costs of the debt in the South. Because of the 2007-8 financial crisis in North America and Western Europe massive amounts of liquidities were injected into the financial system to save the big banks and corporations that were too heavily indebted themselves. A decrease in the costs of financing the debts of the developing countries followed naturally and the governments of developing countries gained a false sense of security.

The situation began to degrade in 2016-17 when the Fed started to raise its interest rates, from 0.25% in 2015 to 1.5% in October 2019 and tax breaks were granted by the Trump administration to big business to attract US foreign investment back to the US. What’s more, commodities prices slipped and exporter countries’ revenues slipped with them making debt repayments in strong.

General view of the debt in the South

These last years have have seen a significant increase in constant values of foreign debt; between 2000 and 2017 it has tripled. The greater part is in the private sector.

Table 1. foreign debt by regions ($ billions)

Source: http://datatopics.worldbank.org/debt/ids/region/lmy

Foreign public debt has also increased although less abruptly than in the private sector.

Table 2. foreign public debt by regions ($ billions)

Source: http://datatopics.worldbank.org/debt/ids/region/lmy

Debt in the Global South

Whatever the World Bank and the IMF may cheerfully repeat, the debt of developing countries is still a major obstacle to meeting their inhabitants’ basic needs and safeguarding human rights. Inequalities have sharply increased and progress in terms of human development has been very limited.

Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, outgoing flow of capital via debt service and corporations garnering their profits are significant. In 2012, the profits repatriated from the poorest area on earth amounted to 5% of its GDP vs 1% in public aid to development. In this context, it is legitimate to raise the question: who is helping who?

If we take into account the plundering of Africa’s natural resources by private corporations, the brain drain of African intellectuals, embezzlement of goods by the African ruling class, manipulations of transfer prices by private corporations and other misappropriations, we cannot but be aware that Africa has been drained dry.

EU relations with Africa illustrate the continuation of neocolonial policies. These have developed beyond the framework of the ACP Cotonou Agreements. [5] Nowadays, the EU has enforced other frameworks that are more significant in its relation with Africa such as an EU partnership framework for migration (the Valletta Action Plan with the Khartoum and Rabat processes), to which we should add the bilateral frameworks and agreements that European countries have with African countries or regions. Not forgetting the CFA currency for 15 African countries, soon to become the Eco for eight of them, without significant change of policy.

Many European citizens have no idea of the extent to which conditions and clauses imposed under such agreements are setting the ground for a new debt crisis in the developing countries. Some basic facts that are not known by most people are that whereas the total volume of aid received annually by Africa from Europe stands at around $21 billion, African migrants in Europe remit around $30 billion to their families in their home countries, almost 50% more than the amount of the European aid; or funds currently available from the European Investment Fund for the whole African continent that stand at $3.3 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of one mid-sized infrastructure project like a port. Furthermore, the new EU proposed budget for 2021-2027 plans to allocate more than $34.9 billion to various mechanisms of migration control. [6] It will end up costing Europe more to patrol its borders than what is allocated to Africa as development aid or what Africa is suffering from trade losses with Europe. The impact of these agreements on trade results is also remarkable. From 2003 to 2014, Africa always had a trade surplus with Europe, whereas since 2015, the trend has reversed amounting to close to a $30 billion deficit.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Table 3. Debt and resources devoted to repayment (in billions USD): Latin America and the Caribbean  [7]

Sources:
Total external debt: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.TDS.DECT.CD
Public external debt and guarantee: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.TDS.DPPG.CD

Latin America has one of the highest negative external debt balances among developing continents for 1985-2017.

Table 4. Net transfers on external debt 1985 – 2017 (in billions of USD): Latin America and the Caribbean

Sources:
Public external debt and guarantee: https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicateur/DT.NTR.DPPG.CD [data no longer available]
External debt: https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicateur/DT.NTR.DECT.CD?end=2017&start=2000 [data no longer available]

Impact of debt payment on the way public resources are used

Table 5. Distribution of expenditure in national budgets (as % of GDP and as % of the budget) in Latin America in 2013  [8]

If we take into account the evolution of public expenditure of some fifty low-income countries from 2015 to 2017, we notice an increase of expenditure related to debt repayment, a decrease of health-related expenditure and a stagnation in terms of education (see chart 1).

Chart 1 – Public expenditure in low-income countries for public debt servicing, education and health care [9] (as % of the GDP)

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on World Bank World Development Indicators data and International Monetary Fund DSA LIC country reports published between 2015 and 2018.

From 2015 to 2017 we also notice an increase in public expenditure related to debt repayment in Africa, South Asia and in general for Least developed countries (LDCs) (see chart 2).

Chart 2 – Expenditure of public debt servicing in Least developed countries countries in large regions (as % of the GDP)

Source: UNCTAD secretariat calculations based on International Monetary Fund DSA LIC country reports published between 2015 and 2018.

According to Milan Rivié https://www.cadtm.org/New-debt-crisis-in-the-South, who uses IMF information, in July 2019, among low income countries, nine were over indebted and 24 were on the brink of being over indebted, i.e. 39% of them. [10] As evidence of the inability (and the lack of determination) of international financial institutions (IFIs) to find an adequate and sustainable response to over indebtedness, half of those countries had strictly applied the adjustment policies of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative launched by the G7, the World Bank and the IMF in 1996. And according to a German NGO, 122 are actually in a critical debt situation. [11]

It is possible not to repay an illegitimate debt

It is quite possible to resist creditors, as evidenced by Mexico under Benito Juárez, who in 1867 refused to repay loans contracted by emperor Maximilian from the Société Générale de Paris two years earlier in order to finance the occupation of Mexico by the French army. [12] In 1914, at the height of the revolution, when Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were victorious, Mexico completely suspended payment of its external debt, which was considered to be illegitimate; the Mexican government only repaid symbolic amounts from 1914 to 1942, just in order to pacify creditors. From 1934 to 1940, President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the railway and the oil industry without any compensation; he also expropriated over 18 million hectares of landed estates to give them over to indigenous communities. His tenacity paid: in 1942, creditors renounced about 90% of the debt value and said they were satisfied with limited compensations for the companies they had been evicted from. Mexico was able to undergo major social and economic development from the 1930s to the 1960s. Other countries such as Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador successfully suspended debt repayment from 1931. In the case of Brazil, selective suspension of repayment lasted until 1943, when an agreement made it possible to reduce debt by 30%.

More recently, in July 2007, in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa set up a committee to audit public debt. After fourteen months of work, its findings gave evidence that a large part of the country’s public debt was illegitimate and illegal. In November 2008, the government decided to unilaterally suspend repayment of debt securities sold on international financial markets and maturing in 2012 and 2030. Finally, the government of this small country won its case opposing North-American bankers who held those securities. It bought for USD 900 million securities that had been worth USD 3.2 billion. Through this operation Ecuador’s public Treasury saved about USD 7 bn on the borrowed capital and the remaining interests. It could then free resources to finance new social spending (as shown in table 5). Ecuador has not been targeted by international reprisals. [13]

It is obvious that refusing to repay illegitimate debt is a necessary measure, but it is not enough to generate development. A consistent development programme must be implemented. Financial resources have to be generated through increasing the State’s resources through taxes that respect social and environmental justice (Millet and Toussaint, 2018).

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This article was originally published on CADTM.

Translated by Snake Arbusto, Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.

Sources

• Howse, R. (2007). The Concept of Odious Debt in Public International Law. UNCTADDiscussion Papers No. 185. New York, USA: United Nations
• King, J. (2006). Odious Debt: The Terms of Debate, North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, vol. 32 no. 4.
• King, J. (2016). The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law. A Restatement, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Lamarque, C., and Vivien, R. (2011). “Suspending public debt repayments by legal means” https://www.cadtm.org/Suspending-public-debt-repayments
• Lienau, O. (2014). Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics Reputation and Legitimacy in Modern Finance, Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press.
• Ludington, S., Gulati, M., & Brophy, A. (2009). Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debt, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11 (1)
• Michalowski, S. (2009). The Doctrine of Odious Debts in International Law in Mader, M., and Rothenbühler,A., (eds) How to Challenge Illegitimate Debt Theory and Legal Case Studies, Basel, Switzerland: Aktion Finanzplatz Schweiz.
• Millet Damien and Toussaint Eric, “Once upon a time there was a popular government that wanted to do away with the export-oriented extractivist model”, https://www.cadtm.org/once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-popular-government-that-wanted-to-do-away-with-the
• MILLIKAN, Max and ROSTOW, Walt Whitman. 1957. A Proposal: Keys to An Effective Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, p. 158.
• REINHARDT Carmen et ROGOFF Kenneth, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton, 2009.
• RIVIÉ, Milan, “New Debt Crisis in the South” https://www.cadtm.org/New-debt-crisis-in-the-South
• ROSENSTEIN-RODAN, Paul. (1961). ‘International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.43, p.107.
• Roos, J. (2016). Why Not Default? The Structural Power of Finance in Sovereign Debt Crises, Thesis Introduction, European University Institute, Florence
• SACK, A., N. (1927). Les Effets des Transformations des États sur leurs Dettes Publiques et Autres Obligations financières, Paris, France: Sirey.
• SAMUELSON, Paul. 1980. Economics, 11^th edition, McGraw Hill, New York, p. 617-618.
• TOUSSAINT, Éric (2017), The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation, Haymarket, 2019

Notes

This was posted on Youtube in 2011.

This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer’s 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people.

The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The thrust of the exposé is the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running operations which flooded the streets of our nation with crack cocaine. The significance of the documentary is probably greater today in 2007 than it was when it was made.

We now have a situation in which these same forces have committed the most egregious terrorist attack on US soil and have declared a fraudulent so-called “War on Terror”. The ruling regime in the US who have conducted the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are now banging the war drum against Iran.

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Taliano told Press TV in an interview on Saturday that if enriching the US billionaire class “entails stealing another country’s oil, then the billionaire class is fine with that.”

He said that the US did not need the oil from the Middle East; however, “preferential contracts” gave profits to the Americans.

Taliano said billionaire compound their profits by selling guns to perpetuated conflict zone of the Middle East.

“The billionaire class profits when the military builds more weapons and sells more weapons,” he said, adding, “The billionaire class profits when it occupies a country and forces regime change.”

Taliano insisted that Iraq, Syria and Iran were the only countries resisting the Americans sister plots.

He said these countries in the Middle East were “safeguarding their sovereignty and their territorial integrity as per international law.”

Taliano said the US billionaires, who seek to make money at the expense of others and have no respect for either human rights or international law, were running the United States.

“Those who claim to represent Washington have no regards for international law, for nation and state sovereignty, the right for countries to be democratic and self-governing,” he said.

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As the jumped-up, self-proclaimed, blonde new ruler of the world gives away half the Palestinian West Bank to the current Israeli military occupier, the world watches in amazement at the idea that this unbalanced popinjay – currently facing impeachment – could possibly be elected for a second term.

What on Earth happened to integrity and the rule of law?  What happened to the Geneva Conventions? What happened to the NPT? What has happened to America? How is it possible that the world has to succumb to the unlawful activities of the Gang of Three: Trump, Pence and Pompeo?

The idea that this dangerously out-of-control  triumvirate is allowed to continue to trample on international law by overturning hundreds of years of legal consensus around the world, is a frightening indication of corrupt government and leadership.

The activities of the Gang of Three becomes more bizarre every day as they configure both America and the world to their own personal advantage. It is reminiscent of the recent rape of South Africa by the Gupta family.

Who would have believed that after Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan and Obama, the American people would then make the gigantic error of electing a hotel developer with no political experience to run the most powerful state in the world? A man who cannot read and write but is adept at tweeting and philandering.

This political aberration must be dealt with once and for all by the electorate.

Time is now of the essence as the nuclear clock is already now at two minutes to midnight.    These are very dangerous times. The clowns must go otherwise the United States will eventually mirror lame-duck South Africa – a country hugely rich in natural resources but now near to collapse, and that, for America, would be a complete tragedy for the entire world.

Annexation of the Palestinian West Bank is unlawful and a criminal act of the Israeli state in collusion with the Gang of Three in the White House. The international community must condemn and reject such acts of forced colonisation. This is 2020 not 1936.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

United Nations has rejected US President Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ and reiterated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved based on UN resolutions and international law.

In a statement, a copy of which sent to MEMO, Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said:

“The position of the United Nations on the two-State solution has been defined, throughout the years, by relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions by which the Secretariat is bound.”

He added:

“The United Nations remains committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis in resolving the conflict on the basis of United Nations resolutions, international law, and bilateral agreements and realizing the vision of two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.”

It is worth noting that Trump has ignored the two-state solution adopted by the UN and the international community and proposed his own view of the two-state solution, which ignores the 1967 borders and has all of Jerusalem under full Israeli sovereignty.

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Featured image: Trump and Netanyahu’s love affair around Jerusalem and Palestine’s fate – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Russia’s relations with “Israel” in recent years are much deeper and more strategic than its historic ones with Palestine so it’s unthinkable that Moscow won’t tacitly support the so-called “deal of the century” despite expectedly voicing mild reservations about it in public for the sake of retaining its regional soft power.

Done Deal: How the “Peace Process” Sold Out the Palestinians

By David Hearst, January 29, 2020

In November 2016, fresh off his electoral win, US President-elect Donald Trump boasted of his intention to end the Israel-Palestine conflict by striking what he called the “ultimate deal”.

Calling it “the war that never ends,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal: “As a deal maker, I’d like to do … the deal that can’t be made. And do it for humanity’s sake.”

The ‘Deal of the Century’ Is Apartheid

By Sheena Anne Arackal, January 29, 2020

Under President Trump’s newly unveiled peace plan, the Palestinians will be granted limited autonomy within a Palestinian homeland that consists of multiple non-contiguous enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The government of Israel will retain security control over the Palestinian enclaves and will continue to control Palestinian borders, airspace, aquifers, maritime waters, and electromagnetic spectrum. Israel will be allowed to annex the Jordan Valley and Jewish communities in the West Bank. The Palestinians will be allowed to select the leaders of their new homeland but will have no political rights in Israel, the state that actually rules over them.

Macron’s Macro-hypocrisy on Palestine

By Dr. Vacy Vlazna, January 29, 2020

As a Frenchman, Macron is an expert on antisemitism, white feathers and collaboration. Under German occupation, the French government capitulated. Rather than fight the Nazis, it signed an armistice on 22 June 1940 with Germany that divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones- the latter referred to as Vichy France though the Vichy regime administered both.

Trump’s Farcical Mideast “Peace Deal” Ignores International Law. Green Light to Israeli Annexation of Palestine?

By CJPME, January 29, 2020

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is highly critical of the Mideast Peace Plan announced by US President Donald Trump today – one that CJPME considers preposterous. The plan was done without the participation of the Palestinians, and ignores both international law and international precedent on the conflict. The Plan further entrenches pro-Israel decrees that Trump has made in recent years, including that Jerusalem will be Israel’s “undivided” capital and that Israel will be able to annex major illegal Israeli colonies in the occupied West Bank. Given that the Plan virtually ignores Palestinian interests, CJPME considers it useless in terms of resolving decades of violent conflict.

Trump Regime’s Criminal “Deal of the Century”: Breaking Palestine, Endorsing “Greater Israel”?

By Stephen Lendman, January 29, 2020

Edward Said minced no words denouncing what he called “the fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance, (and) the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.”

Palestinian Rejection: End of Oslo Peace Process and the Trump-Netanyahu Apartheid “Steal of the Century”

By Juan Cole, January 28, 2020

The Palestinian leadership has entirely rejected what is known of the Trump plan for Israel and Palestine, and warned that they see it as destroying the Oslo Peace accords. The Trump administration did not consult the Palestinians in drawing up the plan, which gives away East Jerusalem and 30% of the Palestinian West Bank to Israel. The Palestinians may as well, Palestine foreign minister Saeb Erekat said, just withdraw from the 1995 Interim Agreement on Oslo.

European Jewish Congress (EJC) Launches Campaign Against ‘Antisemitism’ (Aka Support for Palestinian Rights)

By Alison Weir, January 24, 2020

The European Jewish Congress (EJC) has announced the launch of a worldwide, star studded social media campaign against what it calls “antisemitism,” but which is often advocacy for Palestinian human rights and opposition to Israeli apartheid. EJC is the regional affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, one of whose main missions is to advocate for Israel.

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Die von Präsident Donald Trump autorisierte Ermordung des iranischen Generals Qassem Soleimani hat eine Kettenreaktion in Gang gesetzt, die sich über die Region des Nahen Ostens hinaus ausbreitet. Dies lag in der Absicht desjenigen, der die Entscheidung getroffen hat. Soleimani stand lange Zeit im Fadenkreuz der USA, aber die Präsidenten Bush und Obama haben seine Ermordung nie autorisiert. Warum traf Präsident Trump diese Entscheidung? Aus mehreren Gründen, unter anderem aus dem persönlichen Interesse des Präsidenten, seiner Not zu entgehen, indem er sich als glühender Verteidiger „Amerikas“ gegenüber einem gefährlichen Feind präsentiert. Der Hauptgrund für die Entscheidung zur Ermordung Soleimanis, die vom Deep State getroffen wurde, bevor sie vom Weißen Haus getroffen wurde, muss in einem Umstand gesucht werden, der erst in den letzten Jahren für die Interessen der USA kritisch geworden ist – die wachsende wirtschaftliche Präsenz Chinas im Iran.

Der Iran spielt eine wesentliche Rolle in der Neuen Seidenstraße, die Peking 2013 ins Leben gerufen hat und die derzeit in vollem Gange ist – sie besteht aus einem Straßen- und Schienennetz zwischen China und Europa durch Zentralasien, den Nahen Osten und Russland, kombiniert mit einem Seeweg über den Indischen Ozean, das Rote Meer und das Mittelmeer. Investitionen von mehr als 1.000 Milliarden Dollar sind für die gesamte Straßen-, Schienen- und Seeverkehrsinfrastruktur in mehr als 60 Ländern geplant. In diesem Rahmen investiert China etwa 400 Milliarden Dollar – 280 in die Öl-, Gas- und petrochemische Industrie und 120 in die Verkehrsinfrastruktur, einschließlich Öl- und Gaspipelines. Es ist geplant, dass diese Investitionen, die über einen Zeitraum von fünf Jahren genutzt werden sollen, später erneuert werden.

Im Energiesektor erhielt die China National Petroleum Corporation, ein staatliches Unternehmen, von der iranischen Regierung einen Auftrag für die Entwicklung von Offshore-Bohrungen im South Pars/North Dome Feld im Persischen Golf, der größten Erdgasreserve der Welt. Darüber hinaus ist der Iran mit einem anderen chinesischen Unternehmen, Sinopec (75% Staatseigentum), an der Entwicklung der Förderung der Ölfelder von West-Karoun beteiligt. Unter Missachtung des US-Embargos erhöht China die Einfuhr von iranischem Öl. Noch gravierender für die Vereinigten Staaten ist die Tatsache, dass in diesen – und anderen – Handelsabkommen zwischen China und dem Iran zunehmend chinesische Renminbi (Yuan) und andere Währungen verwendet werden sollen, wobei der Dollar zunehmend ausgeschlossen wird.

Im Verkehrssektor hat China einen Vertrag über die Elektrifizierung von 900 Kilometern iranischer Eisenbahnen im Rahmen eines Projekts unterzeichnet, das die Elektrifizierung des gesamten Eisenbahnnetzes bis 2025 vorsieht, und wird wahrscheinlich auch einen Vertrag über eine Hochgeschwindigkeitsstrecke von mehr als 400 Kilometern unterzeichnen. Die iranische Eisenbahn ist an die 2.300 Kilometer lange Strecke angebunden, die bereits China und den Iran verbindet, wodurch sich die Transportzeit für Waren auf 15 Tage statt 45 Tage im Seeverkehr verkürzt. Über Täbris, eine große Industriestadt im Nordwesten des Iran – dem Ausgangspunkt einer 2.500 Kilometer langen Gaspipeline, die im türkischen Ankara ankommt – könnten so die Transportinfrastrukturen der neuen Seidenstraße mit Europa verbunden werden.

Die Abkommen zwischen China und dem Iran sehen keine militärischen Komponenten vor, aber laut einer iranischen Quelle sind zur Bewachung der Standorte etwa 5.000 chinesische Wachen vorgesehen, die von den Baufirmen für den Sicherheitsdienst beschäftigt werden. Bezeichnend ist auch, dass Ende Dezember die erste Marineübung zwischen dem Iran, China und Russland im Golf von Oman und im Indischen Ozean stattgefunden haben wird.

Unter Berücksichtigung dieser Tatsachen ist es nicht schwer zu verstehen, warum die Ermordung Soleimanis in Washington beschlossen wurde – sie war geplant, um eine militärische Gegenreaktion Teherans zu provozieren, um den Würgegriff auf den Iran zu verstärken und einen Angriff zu rechtfertigen, und auch, um das chinesische Projekt der Neuen Seidenstraße zu treffen, bei dem die USA nicht die Mittel haben, diesem im wirtschaftlichen Bereich etwas entgegenzusetzen. Die durch die Ermordung von Soleimani ausgelöste Kettenreaktion wird auch China und Russland mit einbeziehen und eine immer gefährlicher werdende Situation schaffen.

Manlio Dinucci

La Cina, non solo l’Iran, sotto tiro Usa in Medioriente

il manifesto, 10.Januar 2020

Übersetzung: K.R.

In November 2016, fresh off his electoral win, US President-elect Donald Trump boasted of his intention to end the Israel-Palestine conflict by striking what he called the “ultimate deal”.

Calling it “the war that never ends,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal: “As a deal maker, I’d like to do … the deal that can’t be made. And do it for humanity’s sake.”

A billionaire property tycoon and reality TV star known for his wheeling and dealing in the New York City real estate market, this was not the first time that Trump had framed the cause of peacemaking and diplomacy in terms of a business transaction.

Asked in March 2016 during his election campaign what the best deal of his life had been, he said it had been the creation of 6,000 housing units on the West Side of Manhattan.

His interviewer then asked him what would be the best deal he could make as president.

“Peace all over the world would be the best deal. And I think I would know how to do it better than anybody else, but peace all over the world,” came the modest reply.

Once in office, Trump tasked another property speculator, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, with delivering that deal, by now widely dubbed the “deal of the century”.

‘Slap of the century’

It has since turned into the most controversial and scandal-plagued peace initiative in the long and sad history of Middle East peace initiatives.

In the process of attempts to get it off the ground, the Palestinian leadership has refused to even open the file, let alone get involved in negotiations, with PA President Mahmoud Abbas calling it the “slap of the century“.

Trump has meanwhile closed the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s mission in Washington; he has recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

In addition, he has cut funds to the United Nations relief agency UNRWA, which runs schools and medical facilities for millions of Palestinian refugees across the region, as well as providing their main source of employment.

And he has unilaterally called for a change in the definition of a refugee, deciding that all but 500,000 of an estimated 5.5 million Palestinian refugees should be stripped of their status.

All this in an attempt to “break and remake” the Middle East.

The deal has divided analysts. Some believe it is designed to fail. Others believe it does not matter whether it is published or not – it is already being enacted on the ground, with the process of “peace-making” itself now only providing cover for the US administration’s one-sided support for Israel.

Middle East Eye examines this thesis in a series of articles originally published in June 2019 which we have grouped together under the heading “Done Deal” – recognition that whatever is proposed, the reality on the ground has already changed in fundamental ways and continues to do so regardless of what is said in the halls of power in Washington or elsewhere.

In the first of these, we look at how reality is changing to prepare for Israel’s permanent annexation of large parts of the West Bank.

In other articles, we consider how the status of refugees is changing; how access to the Old City in Jerusalem has been restricted; how the stranglehold over Gaza has been progressively tightened; and, finally, how financial incentives and threats, with large sums of money dangled to entice Palestinians into agreeing to an inequitable deal or the withdrawal of funds to compel them to do so, are nothing new.

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Featured image is from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Flickr

With great fanfare, President Trump finally unveiled his long-anticipated Middle East peace proposal. The proposal was labeled ‘The Deal of the Century’ because it was supposed to offer an even-handed and just solution to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Instead it does something very different. The ‘Deal of the Century’ resurrects and restores grand apartheid, a racist political system that should have been left in the dustbins of history.

Under President Trump’s newly unveiled peace plan, the Palestinians will be granted limited autonomy within a Palestinian homeland that consists of multiple non-contiguous enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The government of Israel will retain security control over the Palestinian enclaves and will continue to control Palestinian borders, airspace, aquifers, maritime waters, and electromagnetic spectrum. Israel will be allowed to annex the Jordan Valley and Jewish communities in the West Bank. The Palestinians will be allowed to select the leaders of their new homeland but will have no political rights in Israel, the state that actually rules over them.

President Trump’s plan for racial control and segregation should sound disturbingly familiar. Indeed it should immediately bring to mind the Bantu homelands which were the cornerstone of South Africa’s ‘grand apartheid’. While ‘petty apartheid’ was the term used to describe racial segregation on buses and public facilities, ‘grand apartheid’ referred to the many laws which enforced territorial and political separation between black and white South Africans.

Map of the future Israeli state in the Trump administration plan. (Source: Mondoweiss)

The Bantu homelands, which were key to the territorial and political separation of racial groups, had their origin in the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936 which created reserves for the native black population. Then in 1970 the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act made the native population legal citizens of their Bantustans, denying black South Africans political rights in white South Africa. The South African government created Bantu homelands in order to claim that South Africa, a state with a majority black population, was actually a state with a majority white population. The Bantu homelands were political sleight of hand; a poorly veiled attempt to give racist ethnic rule the veneer of democratic respectability.

Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan physically and politically separates Palestinians by placing them within a non-contiguous homeland (Areas A and B and Gaza), and declaring them citizens of that homeland. Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan grants the Palestinian homeland autonomy over civil matters like education and healthcare, while critical areas such as trade, immigration, and security will remain under Israeli control. Like South Africa’s grand apartheid, the Trump plan is political sleight of hand: a thinly veiled attempt to claim that Israel, a state that rules over roughly the same number of Jews and Palestinians, is actually a Jewish-majority state. Also like apartheid South Africa, the Trump administration claims the homelands are a temporary solution. Once the indigenous population proves itself ready for self-governance they will one day be granted something that resembles a state.

Using a combination of financial sticks and carrots, some of which were unveiled last June at the economic summit in Bahrain, the Trump administration will try to force Palestinians to accept the ‘peace plan’ and declare independence within their homeland, just as the apartheid South African government once tried to force the native black population to declare independence within their Bantustans. While the crony leadership of some Bantustans did indeed declare independence, South Africa’s grand apartheid ultimately failed because local leaders, including the African National Congress and the legendary Nelson Mandela, waged a determined and powerful international campaign against apartheid.

President Trump’s peace plan was labeled the ‘Deal of the Century’ because it was supposed to bring peace and dignity to the people of the Middle East. Instead the ‘peace plan’ does the exact opposite and resurrects apartheid, a racist political system that should have been left in the dustbins of history.

The Trump peace plan cannot, and should not be implemented because it gives Israelis the illusion of security while in reality trapping them within an unstable regime based on racial oppression. The Trump peace plan cannot, and should not be implemented because it gravely violates the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people and very likely constitutes a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute (1998). The Trump peace plan cannot, and should not be implemented because once we look past all the streamers and confetti, it turns out ‘The Deal of the Century’ is nothing less than Apartheid.

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Sheena Anne Arackal holds a master’s degree from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Now based in Houston, Texas, she specializes in the field of ethnic conflict.

Featured image: Map of a future Palestinian state in the Trump administration plan. (Source: Mondoweiss)

Expats living in Wuhan are enraged by foreign media coverage of the 19-nCoV outbreak. Better placed and likely more informed than any journalist in a faraway land, most are full of praise for the authorities’ handling of the situation.

Media the world over are publishing stories about the virus’ outbreak in Wuhan, much of them blaming the authorities in any way they can. They report containment of the virus to be the toughest challenge ever faced by the Chinese government.

Last week, they would not have been able to tell you that Wuhan is a city, let alone in which country it is.

The expats in Wuhan are taking an altogether different view. In a word, they are more pragmatic.

In the Facebook group, Wuhan Expats, Chris Carr said:

“Wuhan has 11 million people, which is around three times my country’s population. Odds of being involved in a road accident in Asia have always been much higher”.

Many of the group’s members believe the authorities have been doing all they can. Afzaal Ahmed said,

“One of my friend had fever he was afraid of getting virus; the blood tests were done without any cost and he was free to go because the reports were negative.

“Even free masks were available in hospital. They were checking temperature in subway and in some streets to make sure that this should be controlled and in my university we were provided free food like bread, milk packs and water.”

Western Media Seek Out Foreigners in Wuhan

Many journalists have been posting in the group looking for people to comment. One from the UK’s Evening Standard got just that. It read, “How about doing articles on road accidents in Asia and ensuring the entire Asian media see them?”

Daniel Pekárek sized up the opinion of many a Wuhan expat today.

“Seeing the reactions from outside world, especially in western media, racist, political comments and so on is so disgusting, people should stop this.”

Other requests from journalists have come from Australia, Italy, France, Canada, Ireland and the Philippines. Carr also asked whether there is any way to ban journalists from the group.

In further efforts to attract readers, much foreign media has been drawing comparisons between this outbreak and that of SARS.

Back in 2002 when the SARS virus hit, there was virtually no Internet in China. People replied on traditional media for their news, which was often slow, cumbersome and inaccurate.

Today, all media is online and there is also WeChat, Weibo and Douyin. Plus lots more. While censorship by the authorities is a reality, these platforms mostly comprise User Generated Content, meaning Chinese people are more informed and able to make up their own minds.

As to the Chinese media itself, with the government as owner, so there is less competition between publications for readers. It all ads up to more responsible reporting all round. At times like this, that’s something of which we would all like to see a little more. One thing is for sure; sensationalism doesn’t help.

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Featured image: A sanitation worker disinfects a rubbish bin in quarantined Wuhan. (Source: via Facebook courtesy of Afzaal Ahmed)

Israel’s Tag Meir organisation revealed on Monday that extremist Jewish settlers have carried out arson attacks on 46 mosques and 12 churches in the occupied West Bank and Israel over the past decade, Al Sabeel has reported.

Tag Meir, which was established 15 years ago to counter settlers’ hate crimes and racism in Israel and the West Bank, said that the perpetrators of these crimes generally went unpunished. It pointed out that most of these arson attacks were committed by an extremist settler group called Price Tag, and that the criminals spray graffiti such as “Death to Arabs” and other hate messages on the walls of the buildings they burn down.

The last of these attacks was the on a mosque in the Beir Safafa neighbourhood of occupied Jerusalem. The fire started by the illegal settlers caused severe damage to the building.

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Featured image: Settlers set fire to the Sharafat village mosque, south of occupied Jerusalem [Twitter]

“President Emmanuel Macron made a scene in occupied East Jerusalem on Wednesday when he angrily told Israeli security officers to get out of the Church of Saint Anne, which is traditionally under France’s control:

“Everybody knows the rules. I don’t like what you did in front of me,” Macron ordered. “Go out – outside!”  Abunimah

Ah the Hypocrisy! Macron telling Israeli authorities to leave property under French control while supporting Israeli occupation of the land of Palestine which, according to the British Mandate, should have been under Palestinian control since 1947..

“The mandate document was based on Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations of 28 June 1919 and the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers’ San Remo Resolution of 25 April 1920. The objective of the mandates over former territories of Ottoman Empire was to provide “administrative advice and assistance… until such time as they are able to stand alone”. 

Neither the United Nations nor Lord Balfour had a legal mandate to hand over a foreign land to European immigrants.

Moreover, identical to Australian First Nations, Palestinians never ceded their sovereignty over historic Palestine.

Macron’s hypocrisy lies in the certitude that everybody does know the rules – under international law: 

that Israel’s occupation is against the rules, that the Israeli settlements are against the rules, that Israeli apartheid is against the rules, that Israel’s extrajudicial executions, massacres, incarcerations of Palestinian political prisoners are against the rules, that the Israeli blockade of Gaza has been against the rules for 13 years.

On the other hand there is no hypocrisy on Manu Macron’s part if one considers that he is referring to the brutal rules of colonial expansionism which France followed repressively to the letter in West, East, Equatorial, North Africa, Indo-China, in Oceania. Take Algeria for instance.

The barbaric rules that the French regime perpetrated against Algerians are –

whole scale massacres and napalm bombing  in Setif, Kherrata, North Constantinos, the massacre of thousands of men in the Skikda stadium, collective punishment, humiliations, lynchings, impalings, collective rape, annihilation of villages and their occupants, mass arrests, disappearances, concentration camps, tens of thousands of summary executions, bombings of trade unions, terrible tortures in prisons and in homes in front of the family, curfews, checkpoints, rampant raids, looting, psychological warfare, blowing up homes, the relentless incitement fear and terror, military courts replaced civil courts, decapitation by guillotine, the Paris massacre of 300 Algerian protestors  

All were executed with merciless French arrogance and indifference to the  humanity of the ‘natives’. An arrogance that masks the moral inferiority of the colonist.

French colonial sadism exists to this day thus explaining why since 1947, Presidents from Auriol to Macron (with the exception of  Pompidou and d’Estaing) have enthusiastically supported the savage colonialism of their Israeli frères d’armes:

Auriol: approved Partition Plan, voted for the Israel’s membership to the UN.

Coty:  France and Israel cooperated  “in research and production of nuclear weapons,” and build Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.

de Gaulle: “I raise my glass to Israel, our friend and our ally.”

(Pompidou and  d’Estaing)

Mitterrand: “Indeed, the French nation is a friend to the nation of Israel.”

Chirac: “France is determined to strengthen Israel and I say that it is important that the process move forward towards full development and assure full security for the people of Israel.”

Sarkozy: “On behalf of France, we would like to declare our love for Israel – we love you!”

Hollande:  “I will always remain a friend of Israel”

Macron – “French law prohibits … boycotting [Israel]. There is no question of changing that law and no question of acting indulgently on this. For me, these [BDS protests] are anti-Zionist moves, thus profoundly anti-Semitic … I condemn this approach both legally and politically.” and  recently Macron says anti-Zionism and denying ‘Israel’s right to exist’ are antisemitic

As a Frenchman, Macron is an expert on antisemitism, white feathers and collaboration. Under German occupation, the French government capitulated. Rather than fight the Nazis, it signed an armistice on 22 June 1940 with Germany that divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones- the latter referred to as Vichy France though the Vichy regime administered both. 

In 2017, despite denouncing France’s participation in the holocaust, Macron with Neo-Vichy fervour collaborates with Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians by trading arms with Israel in breach of the rules of the Arms Trade Treaty, by granting impunity for Israel’s war crimes by, on 3rd December 2019, signing onto the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism which includes anti-zionism and criticism of Israel.

And now Macron, on a hypocrisy roll, pledged to Netanyahu that “France was determined Iran would never gain a nuclear weapon” despite France’s primary role during the 1950s in setting up Israel’s  not-so-secret nuclear program and maintains the farce that it doesn’t exist; no formal IAEA inspection of Israel’s arsenal of nuclear warheads has been carried out. 

Ironically, hypocritically, consistently, Macron made the pledge while attending, in Jerusalem, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz where he stated “no one has the right to invoke (those killed by the Nazis) to justify division or contemporary hatred’ while dependably overlooking Netanyahu’s opportunistic turning of the Holocaust anniversary into an anti-Iran-hate-fest.

40 other heads of state also obsequiously stood by as Netanyahu ran roughshod with his Iran bandwagon over the memory of the holocaust Dead and the daily brutal violations under his watch of ‘Never Again’ against Palestinian families.

Protest to French UN Embassy https://onu.delegfrance.org/Contact-us.

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Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name.  She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of  Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Americans understand that it was an illegal war based on lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” But our government is now threatening to drag us into a war on Iran with a nearly identical “big lie” about a non-existent nuclear weapons program, based on politicized intelligence from the same CIA teams that wove a web of lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 2002-3, U.S. officials and corporate media pundits repeated again and again that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that posed a dire threat to the world. The CIA produced reams of false intelligence to support the march to war, and cherry-picked the most deceptively persuasive narratives for Secretary of State Colin Powell to present to the UN Security Council on February 5th 2003. In December 2002, Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), told his staff,

“If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”

Paul Pillar, a CIA officer who was the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, helped to prepare a 25-page document that was passed off to Members of Congress as a “summary” of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. But the document was written months before the NIE it claimed to summarize and contained fantastic claims that were nowhere to be found in the NIE, such as that the CIA knew of 550 specific sites in Iraq where chemical and biological weapons were stored. Most Members read only this fake summary, not the real NIE, and blindly voted for war. As Pillar later confessed to PBS’s Frontline,

“The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers for that purpose? I don’t think so, and I regret having had a role in it.”

WINPAC was set up in 2001 to replace the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center or NPC (1991-2001), where a staff of 100 CIA analysts collected possible evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons development to support U.S. information warfare, sanctions and ultimately regime change policies against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and other U.S. enemies.

WINPAC uses the U.S.’s satellite, electronic surveillance and international spy networks to generate material to feed to UN agencies like UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who are charged with overseeing the non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The CIA’s material has kept these agencies’ inspectors and analysts busy with an endless stream of documents, satellite imagery and claims by exiles for almost 30 years. But since Iraq destroyed all its banned weapons in 1991, they have found no confirming evidence that either Iraq or Iran has taken steps to acquire nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

UNMOVIC and the IAEA told the UN Security Council in 2002-3 they could find no evidence to support U.S. allegations of illegal weapons development in Iraq. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei exposed the CIA’s Niger yellowcake document as a forgery in a matter of hours. ElBaradei’s commitment to the independence and impartiality of his agency won the respect of the world, and he and his agency were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Apart from outright forgeries and deliberately fabricated evidence from exile groups like Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), most of the material the CIA and its allies have provided to UN agencies has involved dual-use technology, which could be used in banned weapons programs but also has alternative legitimate uses. A great deal of the IAEA’s work in Iran has been to verify that each of these items has in fact been used for peaceful purposes or conventional weapons development rather than in a nuclear weapons program. But as in Iraq, the accumulation of inconclusive, unsubstantiated evidence of a possible nuclear weapons program has served as a valuable political weapon to convince the media and the public that there must be something solid behind all the smoke and mirrors.

For instance, in 1990, the CIA began intercepting Telex messages from Sharif University in Tehran and Iran’s Physics Research Centre about orders for ring magnets, fluoride and fluoride-handling equipment, a balancing machine, a mass spectrometer and vacuum equipment, all of which can be used in uranium enrichment. For the next 17 years, the CIA’s NPC and WINPAC regarded these Telexes as some of their strongest evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran, and they were cited as such by senior U.S. officials. It was not until 2007-8 that the Iranian government finally tracked down all these items at Sharif University, and the IAEA inspectors were able to visit the university and confirm that they were being used for academic research and teaching, as Iran had told them.

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the IAEA’s work in Iran continued, but every lead provided by the CIA and its allies proved to be either fabricated, innocent or inconclusive. In 2007, U.S. intelligence agencies published a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran in which they acknowledged that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program. The publication of the 2007 NIE was an importantstep in averting a U.S. war on Iran. As George W Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

But despite the lack of confirming evidence, the CIA refused to alter the “assessment” from its 2001 and 2005 NIEs that Iran probably did have a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003. This left the door open for the continued use of WMD allegations, inspections and sanctions as potent political weapons in the U.S.’s regime change policy toward Iran.

In 2007, UNMOVIC published a Compendium or final report on the lessons learned from the debacle in Iraq. One key lesson was that, “Complete independence is a prerequisite for a UN inspection agency,” so that the inspection process would not be used, “either to support other agendas or to keep the inspected party in a permanent state of weakness.” Another key lesson was that, “Proving the negative is a recipe for enduring difficulties and unending inspections.”

The 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on the U.S. intelligence failure in Iraq reached very similar conclusions, such as that, “…analysts effectively shifted the burden of proof, requiring proof that Iraq did not have active WMD programs rather than requiring affirmative proof of their existence. While the U.S. policy position was that Iraq bore the responsibility to prove that it did not have banned weapons programs, the Intelligence Community’s burden of proof should have been more objective… By raising the evidentiary burden so high, analysts artificially skewed the analytical process toward confirmation of their original hypothesis – that Iraq had active WMD programs.”

In its work on Iran, the CIA has carried on the flawed analysis and processes identified by the UNMOVIC Compendium and the Robb-Silberman report on Iraq. The pressure to produce politicized intelligence that supports U.S. policy positions persists because that is the corrupt role that U.S. intelligence agencies play in U.S. policy, spying on other governments, staging coups, destabilizing countries and producing politicized and fabricated intelligence to create pretexts for war.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is highly critical of the Mideast Peace Plan announced by US President Donald Trump today – one that CJPME considers preposterous. The plan was done without the participation of the Palestinians, and ignores both international law and international precedent on the conflict. The Plan further entrenches pro-Israel decrees that Trump has made in recent years, including that Jerusalem will be Israel’s “undivided” capital and that Israel will be able to annex major illegal Israeli colonies in the occupied West Bank. Given that the Plan virtually ignores Palestinian interests, CJPME considers it useless in terms of resolving decades of violent conflict.

“The Plan announced today has nothing to do with the Palestinians,” announced Thomas Woodley, president of CJPME. “The Plan is a bogus ‘deal’ between the US and Israel, and makes no serious effort to accommodate any of the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians.”

CJPME points out, for example, that Israel’s colonies (a.k.a. “settlements”) have been repeatedly denounced by the international community as being illegal. The 2004 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on the conflict concluded that Israel’s colonies violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. By allowing Israel to annex these colonies with no penalty or swap simply rewards Israel for its decades violating international law. With this new Plan, Israel has no incentive to discontinue its practice colonizing the Palestinian land that it occupies militarily.

This latest Plan cements CJPME’s belief that the US can no longer masquerade as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. CJPME points out that the Trump administration has sought to undermine the Palestinian negotiating position for years. In September, 2018, Trump closed the Palestinian embassy in Washington. That same month, the Trump administration announced it would end all humanitarian funding the Palestinian refugees. In November, Trump’s Secretary of State Pompeo announced that Washington no longer regarded Israeli settlements on occupied West Bank land as inconsistent with international law. That Trump and Netanyahu would dare to announce a “Peace Plan” absent negotiations with the Palestinians is a farce.

CJPME calls other bodies or players to assert a role for themselves in the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. “If we allow Trump to continue with this sham, it sends a message to other rogue leaders and countries that international law is meaningless, and that ‘friendship’ with the US is the only bargaining chip of value,” concluded Woodley. CJPME does not consider Canada eligible to be a broker between Israel and the Palestinians, as Canada has largely aped the US’ pro-Israel Mideast policy in recent years. CJPME could envision the UN, the European Union, or other groups of countries (including perhaps China and/or Russia) asserting themselves into the negotiations process.

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On January 24, the Syrian military resumed its offensive against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its Turkish-backed allies.

Warplanes of the Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out over 3 dozens of airstrikes on militants’ positions across Greater Idlib. Pro-government forces, led by the 25th Special Mission Forces Division (also known as the Tiger Forces) started a ground operation in southeastern Idlib. They liberated Deir Gharbi, Ma’ar Shimmareen, Abu Jurif, Kursiyan and a few other villages. According to reports, over 30 militants were killed or injured. Four vehicles belonging to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were destroyed.

On January 25, government forces liberated Ma’ar Shamshah, Talmenes and deployed in the vicinity of Maarat al-Numan. The town, located on the M5 highway, is the key militant stronghold and the largest urban enter in Idlib province.

On the same day, army units, led by the 4^th Armoured Division, attacked positions of militants near Aleppo city. They liberated the al-Sahafyeen residential complex and the Ghabat al-Assad hilltop, and destroyed a large weapon depot of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. An OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missile reportedly hit a militant HQ near Bawabiya. Nonetheless, government troops appeared to be unable to achieve more gains there.

On January 26, southeastern Idlib remained the main area of clashes, while the army offensive near Aleppo city fizzled. Syrian soldiers took control of Ghadqah, and repelled a counter-attack by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham southeast of Maarat al-Numan.

Currently, the army is working to cut off the M5 highway south and north of Maarat al-Numan. When the city is fully isolated, government forces will storm it. The fall of Maarat al-Numan will sign the total collapse of Idlib militants’ defense and open a road to liberate al-Barah, Kafranbel and the entire area along the M5 highway south of them.

The Russian military deployed an advanced Tu-214R reconnaissance aircraft amid the Syrian Army advance on Maarat al-Numan. Pro-government sources speculate that this move is linked with the military escalation in Idlib.

US forces are working to limit the freedom of movement of the Russian Military Police in northeastern Syria. According to reports, US troops blocked at least three Russian patrols in the province of al-Hasakah. Local sources link the soft Russian reaction to these actions with the ongoing diplomatic effort of Moscow to normalize relations with Washington.

Late on January 25, a car bomb exploded in the Turkish-occupied city of Azaz in northern Aleppo. At least 8 civilians were killed and at least 20 others were injured in the attack. Turkish sources as always accused Kurdish rebels of the attack. However, no evidence was provided. During the last few months, a series of IED and car bomb attack hit villages and towns controlled by Turkish proxies. The main reason of the Turkish inability provide a popper security in these areas is that its proxy groups, with their criminal and radical behavior, are among the key sources of instability.

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US/Israeli policy is hardwired against regional peace and stability.

From what’s known about Trump’s deal of the century ahead of its reported Tuesday unveiling at the White House, it fulfills an Israeli wish list at the expense of fundamental Palestinian rights and peace.

Israeli media reported that the scheme includes Israeli annexation of (illegal) settlements and the Jordan Valley, a map to reveal details visually.

Palestinian self-determination, independence, autonomy, and/or other terminology used will be long on illusion, way short of reality.

When the Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles were unveiled on September 13, 1993 at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were together with Bill Clinton for the dubious signing ceremony.

Edward Said minced no words denouncing what he called “the fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance, (and) the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.”

Oslo was unilateral surrender, a Palestinian Versailles, affirming a vaguely defined negotiating process to come with no fixed timeline or outcome.

Israel refused to make concessions, delaying and obstructing the process to continue stealing Palestinian land.

Palestinian leadership got nothing for renouncing armed struggle, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and agreeing to leave major unresolved issues for later final status talks.

Over a generation later, they’re still waiting for self-determination free from occupation, and the right of diaspora Palestinians to return to their homeland as affirmed under international law.

There’s been no resolution on illegal settlements, borders, water and other resource rights, East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital, and an end to longstanding conflict.

The Trump regime’s January 28 White House deal of the century ceremony excludes a Palestinian presence.

The “fashion show vulgarities” and “degrading spectacle” has nothing to do with peace, nothing to do with respect for Palestinian rights and welfare, everything to do with serving US/Israeli interests exclusively at the expense of regional peace and stability ruling regimes of both countries reject.

Trump mocked reality claiming his no-peace/peace plan is “very good for them…(T)hey’re going to want it (sic).”

According to former Palestinian negotiator Ghaith al-Omari, Palestinians intend to show Trump’s deal is “a US/Israeli position” excluding their rights under international law.

They aim to prevent the world community from endorsing it, rendering it illegitimate and dead.

It remains to be seen how the Arab world responds. Jordan’s King Abdullah II opposes the scheme, on Sunday stressing:

“Our position is very well known…This is clear to everyone…We are opposed to it.”

Israeli Channel 13 reported that the Trump regime invited Arab envoys in Washington to take part in Tuesday’s ceremony, getting no response, adding:

The only regional response is from outraged Palestinians, on Sunday PA spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, saying:

“The leadership will hold a series of meetings on all levels — including the factions and organizations — to announce its total rejection of conceding Al Quds (Jerusalem)” and other unacceptable parts of the Trump regime’s scheme of the century.

PA official Saeb Erekat said the scheme will turn “temporary occupation into a permanent occupation.”

PA prime minister Riyad al-Malki said Palestinians are discussing “practical steps with the Arab brothers” on how to respond to the Trump regime’s scheme.

A Palestinian foreign ministry statement said “Trump’s plan is the plot of the century to liquidate the Palestinian cause.”

On Monday, Trump met separately with Netanyahu and his main political opponent at the White House, Israeli media saying it gave Benny Gantz an opportunity to look prime ministerial.

He praised the no-peace/peace plan, while indicating it’s going nowhere until after Israeli elections and at least part of the Arab world is on board.

At the same time, he slammed Netanyahu, saying:

“A prime minister under indictment cannot run a peace negotiation. “Netanyahu cannot lead a country and a trial.”

Republicans support the scheme, Dems expressing opposition for political reasons, notably while Trump’s Senate impeachment trial remains ongoing.

With rare exceptions, Congress one-sidedly supports Israel, its members dismissive of Palestinian rights — pre-and-post Oslo to the present day.

Trump’s no-peace/deal of the century peace plan was dead before arrival.

His regime is more one-sided for Israel than anything his predecessors proposed.

He cut off vitally needed humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees, suspended other US aid to the PA other than for security to serve as Israel’s enforcer, and closed the PLO mission in Washington.

He illegally recognized Jerusalem (a UN-established international city) as Israel’s exclusive capital, moved the US embassy there, abandoned a legitimate two-state solution, recognized Israel’s unlawful Golan annexation, and no longer considers illegal settlements occupied territory.

His so-called $50 billion investment fund for Palestinians and neighboring Arab states that’s part of his no-peace/peace plan is all about enriching Western and Israeli monied interests, unrelated to aiding long-suffering Palestinians.

He, hardliners surrounding him, and most congressional members are indifferent to the rights and welfare of ordinary people at home and abroad — including the most disadvantaged and long-suffering Palestinians.

Trump’s deal of the century is all about supporting Israeli control of historic Palestine, its people consigned to isolated cantons on worthless scrubland — statehood in name only without rights, resources or security.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

It is often thought that the Third Reich’s final major offensive of World War II comprised the Battle of the Bulge, which was launched in mid-December 1944 against the western Allies through Belgium, France and Luxembourg, with much of the fighting occurring along the Ardennes Forest.

This attack, known on the German side as the Ardennes Offensive, was formulated entirely within the mind of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler; it began with swift and decisive German advances, news that was forwarded immediately to Hitler at his Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Eyrie) mountain headquarters located not far from the city of Frankfurt, in western Germany. Yet with the fog lifting after a few days and skies clearing, the superiority in numbers of Allied aircraft and tanks beat the Germans back by the Christmas of 1944.

However, Hitler countered with another sizable attack from 31 December 1944, called Operation Nordwind (Unternehmen Nordwind). This was in fact the final major German offensive of the war on the Western front, and not the Battle of the Bulge.

Addressing his commanders at the Adlerhorst compound on 28 December 1944, Hitler issued an order of annihilation to be directed against American and Free French soldiers during Operation Nordwind, when he said that it “has a very clear objective, namely the destruction of the enemy forces. There is not a matter of prestige involved here. The point is to gain space. It is a matter of destroying and exterminating the enemy forces wherever we find them”. (1)

Among those very likely present to hear the above was SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who would command Army Group Upper Rhine in Operation Nordwind, after his appointment to a military leadership role by Hitler on 10 December 1944.

The ensuing failure of these latest offensives constituted further setbacks for the Wehrmacht, but Hitler was not primarily concerned with enemy positions in the West, mainly due to his utter contempt for the fighting abilities of British and American troops. Winston Churchill also noted in his memoirs that German soldiers were indeed of appreciably superior quality to Allied troops. (2)

Schematic of Germany’s planned offensiv operation in Hungary in March 1945, based on descriptions by Christían Hungváry (Publisher: Karl-Heinz Frieser) in “Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Wk., Bnd. 8” and Josef Puntigam in “Vom Plattensee bis zur Mur” (CC BY-SA 3.0)

As 1945 approached over the horizon – perhaps the most fateful year in history that heralded too the development of nuclear weapons – the Nazi hierarchy looked out upon a world that was literally closing in on them.

Hitler nevertheless prepared yet another large-scale offensive, switching focus to the east against his prime nemesis the USSR, with a planned assault through Hungary, the Balkans, and it was hoped beyond that further eastwards. It was the fifth year in succession that German and Soviet troops would be fighting brutally against each other. Plans for a fresh attack were hastened by news, on 12 January 1945, that the Soviets had commenced their winter offensive more than a week earlier than expected, firstly targeting the German front in southern Poland.

Hitler departed his Adlerhorst complex for the final time on 15 January 1945 and, the following day, he relocated to the Führerbunker amid the ruins of Berlin. The Führerbunker, positioned beside the Reich Chancellery, was initially intended as a safe house for Hitler from early British air raids; it was to prove the final calling card of Nazi Germany.

Now in the late winter of 1945, preparations for a new military engagement on the Eastern front had been titled, Operation Spring Awakening (Unternehmen Frühlingserwachen).

Albert Speer, German war minister from February 1942, and one of the most powerful figures in the Reich, was repeatedly present at discussions with Hitler at the Führerbunker from mid-January 1945 onwards.

Clear in Speer’s memory was Hitler’s thinking behind Operation Spring Awakening. From a bleak cell in Spandau Prison, Speer wrote in his secret diary, on 8 November 1946, recalling vividly the offensive’s planning and how “Hitler boldly traced its course at his big map table, to advance through Hungary to the south-east”.

Speer’s recollections of the remarks made by Hitler on this last attack have, over the elapsing near 75 years, hardly ever been relayed in print before. Historians have almost universally shied away from quoting Hitler at length, presumably due to his particularly notorious legacy. Infamous as his reputation no doubt remains, Hitler was one of the major figures in 20th century history, and his views should be recounted, especially relating to offensives he had himself devised.

With a semi-circle gathering of German officers present in the Führerbunker conference room, Speer recalls that Hitler said of Operation Spring Awakening,

“There is every likelihood that the population of these areas will rise as one man, and with their help we will go roaring through the entire Balkans in a life-and-death battle. For I am still determined, gentlemen, to wage the fight in the East offensively. The defensive strategy of our generals helps only the Bolshevists! But I have never in my life been a man for the defensive. Now we shall go over from the defence to the attack once more”. (3)

Hitler’s ambition to forge ahead with the offensive went firmly against the wishes of nearly all of his remaining generals, who preferred a strategy based upon defence, embedding oneself in the earth and in bombed out buildings. This plan of containment was simply a case of delaying the inevitable, and Hitler was most likely correct to gamble. It is surely better to engineer a forward-thinking manoeuvre with victory in mind, no matter how unlikely, rather than a stay-put policy of restraint which can only result in certain defeat in the end.

Soviet counterattack (Source: Greenx aka Gerald Kainberger / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Furthermore, an attack-minded plan imbued Hitler and his few remaining loyalists with some semblance of hope that the war could yet be turned around. As late as the 21st of April 1945, Hitler attempted to organise a pincer movement to wipe out Soviet forces that had encircled Berlin two days before, placing his hopes mainly on units commanded by Waffen-SS General Felix Steiner. When Hitler was told that Steiner could not implement the attack, he fell into a bitter and tearful rage, realising that the war was undoubtedly lost.

Speer affirmed of Hitler that,

“It was as if he had always known that he had only the choice between the offensive and defeat, as if the loss of the initiative in itself was virtually equivalent to his downfall”.

Speer, who had become particularly close to Hitler as his prized architect, attests that the dictator’s actions dating to the time of his “struggle” from the early 1920s, consisted of one aggressive move after another. These provocative, sometimes criminal policies, continued following his rise to power in January 1933, as he eradicated potential rivals, reclaimed former territories, stepped up his persecution of Germany’s Jewish population, and ran roughshod over appeasement-seeking French or British politicians.

Speer writes that,

“The unleashing of war itself had been an example of offensive policy, and he [Hitler] had waged the military conflict in an offensive spirit as long as he was able. Even after the turning point of the war, the capitulation of Stalingrad, he had organised the offensive operation at Kursk, code-named Citadel”. (4)

The Battle of Kursk has also sometimes erroneously been dubbed “the last major German offensive on the Eastern front”, when it was not the case at all. (5)

Further German assaults were launched in the east during the summer of 1944, ending in disaster as the Soviets made huge advances westward with Operation Bagration. Spring Awakening itself, the following year, would consist of 10 Panzer divisions and five infantry divisions, altogether 400,000 men, considerably larger in manpower than the US-led invasion force which descended on Iraq in 2003. (6)

Meanwhile, Hitler’s argument to push ahead with Spring Awakening was bolstered when the Germans enjoyed an unlikely victory against Soviet forces in late February 1945, called Operation Southwind (Unternehmen Südwind).

It was an attack directed through the heart of Europe, into northern Hungary, and that went fully according to plan (7). By 24 February 1945 the Soviet bridgehead over the River Garam, 150 miles east of Vienna, was decimated by General Hans Kreysing’s 8th army, and in doing so they had removed the Soviet threat in this area, for now.

Hitler was reassured and said,

“Those who are down today can be on top tomorrow. In any case, we shall go on fighting. It is wonderful to see the fanaticism with which the youngest age groups throw themselves into the fighting. They know that there are only two possibilities left: Either we will solve this problem, or we will all be destroyed”. (8)

Often claimed is that the aim of Spring Awakening, led by Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army, was to ensure control over the oil wells near Lake Balaton, in western Hungary, pivotal to Nazi Germany’s lasting war effort; and to drive on north-eastwards so as to retake the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Hitler had actually envisaged this 1945 attack as a turning point in the war, a Stalingrad-type victory but this time in the Germans’ favour – that would eventually drive the Red Army divisions back towards their own frontiers.

An animated Hitler, hammering away at his military entourage, continued that,

“The Russians have almost been bled to death by now. After the retreats of the past few months, we have the priceless advantage of no longer having to defend those enormous spaces. And we know from our own experience how exhausted the Russians must be after their headlong advance. Remember the Caucasus! This means a turning point is now possible for us, as it was for the Russians. In fact, it is absolutely probable. Consider! The Russians have had tremendous losses in materiel and men.

Their stocks of equipment are exhausted. By our estimates they have lost 15 million men. That is enormous! They cannot survive the next blow. They will not survive it”. (9)

Such was Hitler’s powers of persuasion that Speer remembers how his diatribes “distorted so many men’s grasp of reality”. Dispirited officers once convinced that defeat was a matter of time, following discussions with Hitler went away thinking that victory was achievable after all.

Nazi intelligence calculations regarding the Red Army death toll were not far off. By early 1945 comfortably more than 10 million Soviet troops were dead, and around the same number of Soviet civilians had also been liquidated by the invaders (10). This horrendous loss of life outweighs the Holocaust, but the latter genocide is unprecedented in that it was pre-planned by the Nazi regime, organised and systematic.

Around the time that Hitler was laying out his designs for Spring Awakening, the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated at 3pm on 27 January 1945, firstly by soldiers from the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division. These troops, long used to fighting against fanatical German soldiers, were shocked at the horrors that lay within.

Over a million people had been killed at Auschwitz alone. For the vast majority the victims consisted of Jewish populaces from central and eastern Europe, 960,000 in total; among the dead too were minority groups like Sinti, Roma and others. (11)

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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.

Notes

1 US Lieutenant-Colonel J.C. Lambert, Armored Cavalry Journal, Roster of Armored Cavalry Officers on Active Duty, Armored Rescue, p. 37

2 Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, 1948, (RosettaBooks, June 30, 2010), p. 582

3 Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, (Fontana, London, 1977) p. 28

4 Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, p. 28

5 Ruslan Budnik, “Last Gasp of the Wehrmacht – Battle of Kursk”, War History Online, 21 August 2018, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/last-gasp-of-wehrmacht.html

6 Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron, Panzerkrieg: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Tank Divisions, (Robinson; New Ed edition, 2003-09-12)

7 Major Christopher W. Wilbeck, Swinging the Sledgehammer: The Combat Effectiveness of German Heavy Tank Battalions in World War II, (Lucknow Books, August 15, 2014)

8 Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, p. 29

9 Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, p. 29

10 Oleg Yegorov, “How many Soviet citizens died in World War II”, Russian Beyond, 8 July 2019, https://www.rbth.com/history/330625-soviet-citizens-died-world-war-statistics

11 John Daniszewski, “Plaques changed at Auschwitz-Birchenau”, Associated Press, 18 July 1990, https://apnews.com/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341

Featured image: Germans during the Operation Spring Awakening (Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1989-105-13A / Woscidlo, Wilfried / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

We are posting  the Open Letter to the Green Party for 2020, followed by a response by Jack Rasmus.

The purpose is to encourage a useful and constructive debate as well as dialogue.

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An Open Letter to the Green Party for 2020

by

Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert

.

Truthdig, January 24, 2019

As the 2020 presidential election approaches the Green Party faces the challenge of settling on a platform, choosing a candidate for president, and deciding its campaign strategy. In that context, Howie Hawkins, a contender for Green Party presidential candidate, recently published a clear and cogent essay titled “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem.” It represents a precedent Green Party stance which may guide Green campaign policy. We agree with much, but find some ideas very troubling.

The stance offered in Hawkins’ article says “the assertion that the Green Party spoiled the 2000 and 2016 elections is a shallow explanation for the Democrats’ losses;” that in 2000, “the Supreme Court…stopped the Florida recount;” that many factors “elected Trump in 2016…including black voter suppression, Comey publicly reopening the Clinton email case a week before the election, $6 billion of free publicity for Trump from the commercial media, and a Clinton campaign that failed to get enough of its Democratic base out;” that the Electoral College “gave the presidency to the loser of the popular vote;” that most Greens are “furious” at a Democratic party “that joins with Republicans to support domestic austerity and a bloated military budget and endless wars;” “that the Green Party’s Green New Deal science-based timeline, would put the country on a World War II scale emergency footing to transform the economy to zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030;” and that “the Green Party want(s) to eliminate poverty and radically reduce inequality“ including a job guarantee, a guaranteed income above poverty, affordable housing, improved Medicare for all, lifelong public education from pre-K through college, and a secure retirement;” and finally that the Green Party strategy “is to build the party from the bottom up by electing thousands to municipal and county offices, state legislatures, and soon the House as we go into the 2020s.”

We agree that many factors led to Democratic Party losses and that the Supreme Court was a big one as was the Electoral College, and we too are furious at Democrats joining Republicans in so many violations of justice and peace. Likewise, we admire the Greens’ Green New Deal and economic justice commitments, and also support a grassroots, local office approach to winning electoral gains.

So with all that agreement, why are we sending a critical open letter?

The stance the article presents, which may guide the Green campaign for president, says, “To hold all other factors (contributing to recent Presidential victories) constant and focus on the Green Party as the deciding factor is a hypothetical that is a logical fallacy because it assumes away a factual reality: the Green Party is here to stay.” However, our finding Green policy a factor in Republican victories in no way suggests that the Green Party should disappear. And our focus on factors within our reach to easily correct (for example, the Green Party role in contested states) is in fact sensible.

The stance also says “the Green Party is not why the Democrats lost to Bush and Trump,” but even if true, that wouldn’t demonstrate it won’t be why this time. In any case, let’s take Trump and Clinton, and see how Green Party policy mattered.

If Clinton got Jill Stein’s Green votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Clinton would have won the election. Thus, the Green Party’s decision to run in those states, saying even that there was little or no difference between Trump and Clinton, seems to us to be a factor worthy of being removed from contested state dynamics, just like the Electoral College is a factor worthy of being removed across all states.

We realize many and perhaps most Greens will respond that if those who voted for Stein in contested states in 2016 hadn’t done so, they would have abstained. We don’t know how anyone could know that, but for the sake of argument we will suppose it is correct.

Still, if these voters who preferred Stein did indeed erroneously believe that there was no difference between Trump and Clinton, surely to some degree that was a result of Stein refusing to acknowledge the special danger of Trump, and insisting that while it would be bad if Trump won it would also be bad if Clinton won, and refusing to state any preference.

Similarly, if these Stein voters did indeed erroneously believe that no harm could come from casting a vote for Stein in a close state in a close election, that also to some degree was surely a result of Green campaigning insisting that Green voters bore no responsibility for the 2000 election result.

And finally, if these voters did indeed erroneously believe that it was immoral to contaminate themselves by voting for Clinton or for a Democrat, surely in part that too was encouraged by Green campaigning that treated voting as a feel-good activity (“vote your hopes, not your fears”) as if fear of climate disaster, for example, shouldn’t be a motivator for political action.

The stance says, “The Green Party is not going back to the ‘safe states strategy’ that a faction of it attempted in 2004.” This means they will not forgo running in contested states where Green votes could swing the outcome as happened in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in 2016, and they will not run in only 40 safe states where the outcome will be a foregone conclusion.

But why reject a safe states strategy?

Like Stein in 2016, some might claim doing so can’t help Trump win again or, in any case, that Trump’s re-election would not matter all that much. “He isn’t that much worse.”

We write in hopes that no one in 2020 will rationalize campaign actions by making such irresponsible and patently false claims.

And, indeed, in his recent essay, Hawkins instead claimed a safe states strategy “couldn’t even be carried out. It alienated Greens in swing states who were working so hard to overcome onerous petitioning requirements to get the party on the ballot. Keeping the party on the ballot for the next election cycle for their local candidates depended on the Green presidential vote in many states. It became clear that safe states was dispiriting and demoralizing because the party didn’t take itself seriously enough to justify its existence independent of the Democrats. Few people, even in the safe states, wanted to waste their vote for a Green ticket that was more concerned with electing the Democratic ticket than advancing its own demands.”

This claims there is a price the Green Party has to pay for a safe states strategy. Okay, let’s take that as gospel. Where is an argument that this price is so great that avoiding it outweighs the price everyone, including Greens, will pay for re-electing Trump?

We have no way to assess the claim that Greens would find it dispiriting to remove themselves as a factor that might abet global catastrophe via a Trump re-election. But wouldn’t Trump out of office much less Sanders or Warren in office not only benefit all humanity and a good part of the biosphere to boot, but also the Green Party? For that matter, weren’t more potential Green Party members and voters driven off by the party’s dismissal of the dangers of Trump than were inspired by it? Which grew more in the last four years, DSA or the Greens?

And weren’t the Greens in the late ’80s and early ’90s winning elections to city councils and other local offices across the country, consistent with a grass roots strategy, though for much of the past 20 years, they’ve largely abandoned local and state contests, devoting nearly all their attention to increasingly harmful races for president? Hawkins’ own exemplary races for Senate and Governor in New York state, and especially the Greens’ successful mayoral races in politically important places like Richmond, CA, as well as less visible ones like New Paltz, NY, were exceptions, but how many Greens have used their hard-won ballot access to run for Congress or state legislature? Might the massive focus on presidential elections mark a decline in prospects for the localist strategy, not an advance for it?

We are told, “Greens want to get Trump out as much as anybody” but how can that be if Greens would vote for a Green candidate, and not for Sanders, Warren, or any Democrat in a contested state knowing that doing so could mean Trump’s victory?

If during the 2020 election campaign, the Green candidate campaigns in contested states knowing that he or she might be winning votes that would otherwise have gone to Sanders or to Warren or whoever, causing Trump to win the state and win the electoral college, how could that possibly evidence wanting Trump to lose as much as anyone?

Indeed, if a Green candidate weren’t telling everyone who was a potential Green voter to vote for Trump’s opponent in contested states, how could that evidence that Greens want Trump to lose as much as anyone?

Let us put our question another way. It is election night 2020. The vote tallies are in. Which way would the 2020 Green candidate feel better? Trump wins and the Green candidate gets 250,000 votes across the contested states, more than enough for Sanders, Warren, or whoever to have won? Or, Trump loses and the Green candidate gets no votes in the contested states, but a bunch extra in other states as a result of having more time for campaigning there?

Greens tell Democrats “to stop worrying about the Green Party and focus on getting your own base out.” We agree on the importance of Democrats getting their base out, starting with nominating Sanders, or, at worst, Warren. But how does that warrant the Green Party risking contributing to Trump winning?

The stance asks, “So why are we running a presidential ticket in 2020 if our strategy is to build the party from the bottom up?” The stance answers, “Because Greens need ballot lines to run local candidates. Securing ballot lines for the next election cycle is affected by the petition signatures and/or votes for our presidential ticket in 40 of the states.”

Greens will pay a price for not running in contested states. Our advice to Greens would be to notice the infinitely bigger price that millions and even billions of people will pay for Trump winning.

The stance says “Greens don’t spoil elections. We improve them. We advance solutions that otherwise won’t get raised. We are running out of time on the climate crisis, inequality, and nuclear weapons. Greens will be damned if we wait for the Democrats. Real solutions can’t wait.”

But real solutions require Trump out of office. Real solutions will become far more probable with Sanders or Warren in office. Real solutions will become somewhat more probable even with the likes of Biden in office.

To conclude, is a Green candidate running for President after the summer really going to argue we shouldn’t vote for Sanders in contested states not just to end Trumpism but also to enact all kinds of important changes including urging and facilitating grass roots activism and thereby advancing Green program?

We offer this open letter in hopes of prodding discussion of the issues raised.

Response by Jack Rasmus

You Can Trust ‘Left Liberals’ to be Liberals First (and Left Last): A Reply to Chomsky & Friends’ Open Letter

by  

Jack Rasmus

January 28, 2020

This past weekend a group best identified as ‘left liberal’ intellectuals posted an ‘Open Letter’ to the Green Party charging that party with being responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. They then declared that the Green Party’s 2020 presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, should not run in 2020, lest the Greens become responsible for getting Trump re-elected again. Everything should be done to ensure that a Democrat Party candidate, whomever that might be, should win in 2020. That includes even Joe Biden, they say. Left liberals like themselves should simply ‘hold their noses’ and vote for Biden, if necessary, if he gets the nomination.

For someone like yours truly who has been around and seen the same strategy of ‘lesser evilism’ repeated for a half century now–with devastating consequences even when the lesser evil (aka Democrats) won the presidency–it is not surprising to read and hear the ‘left liberals’ lament once again!

The coterie signatories of the ‘open letter’ include: Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert.

Their main argument, calling for Hawkins and the Greens to retreat from the 2020 electoral field (and for the record I am not a Green party member or a member of any other party), is that Hillary lost the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, etc. to Trump in 2016 but would have won them–and thus the electoral college vote–if only those who voted for the Greens presidential candidate, Jill Stein, in the swing states had not done so but voted instead for Hillary.

It’s really a logically weak argument that one would think such ‘power intellectuals on the left’ would be hesitant to pen their name to it out of concern they would have insulted themselves to their audience. But they have.

The argument fails not only on the facts but on the amateur assumptions on which it also rests.

First, logically it is juvenile in that it assumes that those who voted for the Greens in 2016 in these swing states would have voted for Hillary, had there not been a Green candidate on the ballot. Its hidden assumption is that all of those Green votes would have voted Hillary had Jill Stein not run. That these assumptions are nonsense is self evident.

Clearly those who voted Green did so because they couldn’t stand Hillary, or knew of her record, or understood that a vote for Hillary would have meant a vote for war as well as more of the same failed economic policies of the Bill Clinton-Obama era that created the real conditions that gave rise to Trump.

The Green vote in the swing states would not have gone to Hillary. Those who voted Green would have instead stayed home and not voted or would have written in some other candidate. Most Greens are Green because they’ve come to understand what the Democrats in the era of Neoliberalism really stand for, both in domestic and foreign policy: escalating income inequality, precarious jobs, stagnant wages, unaffordable healthcare, poverty in retirement, rising rents, continuous wars, incessant tax cuts for the rich and their corporations, indenture to student debt, etc. That’s the legacy of both Republican and Democrat regimes since the 1970s–i.e. the past 50 years now.

Apart from weak logic and absurd (not so hidden) assumptions of the Open Letter, there’s the voting evidence as well as Hillary’s own self-destructive arrogance that explain the Democrats loss of the swing states in 2016 and thus the rise of Trump.

First, the Left Liberal authors of the Open Letter in question fail to explain that in the swing states Libertarian and other independent voters cast three and four times the votes for Trump than the Green party cast for its candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, in 2016. SO was it the Greens’ fault? The Libertarians? Other third parties?

No, none of the above. Hillary herself lost the swing states and handed Trump the presidency when she refused to even bother to campaign in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and barely showed up until the very end when it was already too late. Hillary thought she had the ‘blue collar’ vote in those states wrapped up and arrogantly ignored campaigning there. She ignored them. Took them for granted. And no one votes for someone who arrogantly ignores them and takes them for granted. Even if no Greens voted at all, Hillary would have lost the swing states. But the Open Letter would have us believe it was someone else’s fault, not Hillary’s.

If the Democrat leadership wants to win back swing state votes, it needs someone ‘not Hillary’. But Joe Biden is just another corporate moneybag wing Hillary clone. Not for nothing is he known as ‘bankers friend Joe’ from Delaware (where many big banks have their headquarters and politically own the state). Ditto for the corporate Dems backup candidate, Mike Bloomberg, a lifelong Republican billionaire only recently joined the corporate wing of the Dems.

The fundamental argument of the Left Liberals’ in their Open Letter is not just stop Trump by any means but, their argument behind the argument that there’s a fundamental difference in voting for a Democrat. (Or at least the corollary argument that the Democrat won’t screw us as badly as will the Republican).

But what does the historical evidence show? Have the Corporate Democrats been really any better over the past half century?

American voters, especially today’s Millenials, and now the GenZers, in polls are saying ‘a plague on both houses’ of Democrats and Republicans. They have lost hope of either party making a difference in their lives. They see both as contributing to their deteriorating conditions and near hopeless future, consisting of a lifetime of precarious, part time/temp jobs, with no benefits, working two and sometimes even three jobs to make ends meet, without affordable rents, and no chance of owning a home, living a life of indentured labor paying $1.6 trillion in student loans to the US government (at 6.8% interest, by the way, while bankers pay 1.6%), without affordable health insurance (including the soaring deductibles under Obamacare), unable to afford to even start a family. It’s a bleak prospect, created by both parties over recent decades.

It’s not coincidental that polls show, by well more than 50%, even as high as 70%, that the more than 50 million Millenials and GenZers prefer something called ‘socialism’ (although they’re probably not sure what that means except ‘none of the present’).

If the DLC-Corporate-moneybag wing of the Democrat leadership puts up a Biden or a Bloomberg–(i.e. latter their fallback at the Democrat party convention after no one gets the nomination on the first vote)–even more youth will not vote Democrat. And not just in the swing states. And if the Democrat leaders continue to scuttle the Sanders nomination–which they did in 2016 and show signs now of doing again in 2020–the Dems themselves, not a Green party candidacy, will once again have put Trump in office. It won’t be the Greens.

Of course Republican ‘red state’ control of electoral college votes is being ensured by voter suppression and gerrymandering. That will play a role as well. But here the Democrats’ loss of state legislatures and governorships under Obama, due to his ineffective economic policies in 2010 and after, have enabled that suppression and gerrymandering largely to happen as well. It made possible the Republican capture of two thirds of state legislatures, many of which have been pushing the voter suppression and gerrymandering.

It’s not for nothing that Obama is sometimes referred to by youth as ‘president Jello’–meaning he appears to move left and right but really is stuck in one place.

The Left Liberals’ Open Letter buys the Democrat moneybag wing’s argument that a Joe Biden (or Mike Bloomberg) argument that Corporate Democrat programs and policies are fundamentally better for average voters than would be Trump’s.

They think that the typical working class voter in the swing states, that abandoned Hillary in 2016 (or actually vice-versa), can’t figure out the game. Or that youth voters today can’t either. But they’re wrong.

Voters remember it was Bill Clinton had enabled NAFTA and sent millions of heartland American jobs offshore. It was Clinton that allowed hundreds of thousands of skilled tech workers into the US every year under H1-B/L-1 visas. It was Clinton that gave China preferred trading rights and allowed the shift of US manufacturing supply chains (and millions more good paying jobs) to China. It was Clinton that allowed corporations to ‘check the box’ on their tax forms and thereby not pay taxes on foreign profits. It was Clinton that permitted companies to divert funds from pension plans to pay for their corporations’ share of escalating health care costs. It was Clinton that allowed the deregulation of financial institutions that paved the way for subprime mortgages and the crash of 2008-09. The list is longer still.

And what about the corporate Democrats’ last minute hand picked candidate in 2008, Barack Obama? It was Obama that gave corporations $6 trillion in tax cuts from 2009-16, almost twice that even George W. Bush gave them. It was Obama who agreed to $1.5 trillion in social program spending cuts in 2011-13, thus taking back more than twice his 2009 recovery package of $878 billion. It was Obama who extended Bush’s tax cuts two years, 2010-12, and then made them permanent after 2013, amounting to another $5 trillion tax cuts for business and investors. It was Obama who continued Free Trade deals despite their obvious effects on jobs and wages, and then tried to push through the TPP trade deal. It was Obama who had the Federal Reserve bail out the banks and investors with the tune of at least $4.5 trillion, while he gave a mere $25 billion to bail out just a few of the 14 million who lost their homes. It was Obama who let Hillary start wars in Honduras to save the big landowners there, and then gave Hillary the green light in Libya to start another, creating that failed state there (as her hubby Bill did in Somalia). It was Obama that authorized and set the precedent for assassinations by drones (over 500 times on his watch). It was Obama who supported the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, to continue loaning banks free money, at an interest rate of 0.15% for seven years, long after the banks were bailed out, while charging millions of US students interest of 6.8% on their student loans to the government.

This is the decades long record that the Left Liberals want the US working class, students, and others to vote for again. Their argument is ‘anything but Trump’ will be better. But was it? Will it? Trump might give us war with Iran. But Democrats might with Russia. Both would give us invading Venezuela and continuing to rape South America.

I’m not talking here about Sanders, who the corporate wing will never allow as the Democrat party candidate in 2020. In fact, now that Sanders is rising in the polls and primaries, the corporate wing of the Democrats attack on him has intensified. Not just from Hillary, but from Warren, from the New York Times, and, as we’ll soon see, from all quarters of the Liberal Elite and their media and their grass roots operatives. Observing how Trump captured the Republican party, two years ago the Democrats’ leaders changed the rules of the game on how the party will run its convention this summer. They are prepared to scuttle Sanders by any means necessary.

But our Left Liberal intellectuals say we should vote for their candidate, Joe, if it comes down to that, just to beat Trump. But Trump will eat ‘ole Joe’ alive in a one on one competition, sad to say. They keep saying they want a candidate that can beat Trump. Then push one who cannot. And the Left Liberals want us to vote for Joe and not for a Green or anyone else. That’s the only way to win! It may be the sure way to lose!

Vote for Joe and hold your nose, they say. The Left Liberal intellectuals, who are mostly well ensconced in secure and decent paying academic jobs, won’t be impacted much by Joe’s or Mike’s or Pelosi’s or Shumer’s policies. But the rest who need a change will be.

The Open Letter represents just another form of ‘Liberal’ telling us to vote for another Liberal. Where has that gotten us?

It’s the old ‘shell game’: Republicans make their capitalists filthy rich and ruin the economy in the process. Corporate Democrats come in and make the same even richer while failing to solve the crisis. Their failure allows the Republicans to point to their failed recovery, again to lie to us, and get back in. The process starts all over. It’s been that way for at least 50 years.

And the Left Liberal intellectuals want us to buy into it for another 50?

I’d support Sanders, but he’ll never get the Democrat nomination. Even if he wins the primaries. For this isn’t the Democrat party of FDR any more, as much as Bernie would like it to be. It’s a corporate wing run party since Bill Clinton. And the Left Liberal intellectuals have bought into the corporate wing’s lie yet again, as they always have in a crisis.

One wonders if they’ll vote for Sanders, should he run as an independent after the Democrat leadership denies him the nomination at their convention this summer. But I bet they’d still vote for Joe. (Correct that: Mike).

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It is strikingly bullying and bullish.  US officials have been less than reserved in their threats about what Britain’s proposed dealings with Huawei over admitting it to its 5G network might entail.  Three Republican Senators – Tom Cotton of Arkansas, John Cornyn of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida – have taken it upon themselves in the circus of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump to send a letter to the UK’s National Security Council, not to mention cool notes to a whole swathe of UK ministers, including the Attorney General, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Defence. 

The language is terse and unequivocal.  “The company’s actions show a clear record of predatory and problematic behaviour.”  For the sake of the “US-UK special relationship and the health and wellbeing of a well-functioning market”, it was “in the best interest of the United Kingdom” to exclude Huawei. 

The letter is also noteworthy for doing the opposite of what it claims to.  “We do not want to feed post-Brexit anxieties by threatening a potential US-UK free trade agreement when it comes to Congress for approval.  Nor do we want to have to review US-UK intelligence sharing.”  Except that they do. 

Within the Trump administration, officials are also keen to sound the note of warning, flavoured with threat, though the voice is a touch discordant.  US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is a regular on the critical circuit warning that admitting Huawei to the fold is much like admitting thieves to the party.  But were Huawei to be scrubbed from contention of applying its 5G technology to Britain, the US would “dedicate a lot of resources” of getting a trade deal done and dusted with it.

Those in London know that a hypocrisy is in the making.  Despite the righteous stand being maintained in Congress and some in the Trump administration, opponents against a full freezing out of Huawei can be found.  They have sanctuary in the Departments of Defense and Treasury.  The concern here, as the Wall Street Journal notes, is that not allowing US firms to ship to Huawei will squeeze revenue in a competitive market.  For one thing, it will chill progress in research in the field that might enable money and research to be spent on developing better alternatives.  According to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “We have to be conscious of sustaining those [technology] companies’ supply chains and those innovators.  That’s the balance we have to strike.”   

Keeping up their letter writing obsession on Huawei, Rubio and Cotton, this time with Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska to keep them company, badgered Esper for an explanation.  “Huawei is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party and should be treated as such.”   

The British have been rather surly on this; the suggestion that the US have priority in being listened to over a balanced deal that might be struck with a dominant Chinese company, albeit heavily subsided by an authoritarian regime, is grating.  Besides, no UK official would willingly compromise the digital channels of communications with Washington by letting in a potential digital burglar.  The approach of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as with much else, is to puzzle and dare. 

On Tuesday, Johnson approved the limited use of Huawei equipment in the country’s fifth-generation mobile phone networks, albeit designating it a “high risk vendor”.  (The designation suggests that Britain’s ministers are concerned enough to regard the company as subject to Beijing’s direction.)  The UK National Security Council signed off on the arrangement, but only to a market share of 35 percent within the 5G infrastructure. 

Sensitive core functions will also remain out of reach for the Chinese giant, including networks in the Critical National Infrastructure and “sensitive geographic locations, such as nuclear sites and military bases”.  According to a government press release, UK ministers “determined that UK operators should put in place additional safeguards to exclude high risk vendors from parts of the telecoms network that are critical to security.”  Guidance on the matter will be sought from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Some concession has been made by means of a promise on the part of the UK that its ministers liaise with fellow “five eyes” alliance members – US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – on developing alternatives in future.

The true victor here is Huawei, even if the victory seems clipped.  It is being treated as the innovator-in-chief in a technology market that has become addictive and hyper-competitive. To ban Huawei is to spit in the face of speedy progress.  To ban Huawei, goes this line of reasoning, is to prevent the development of 5G and cognate broadband technologies by anywhere up to two or three years.

We are also left with some speculation as to how the technology developments will unfold.  As ITV’s political editor Robert Peston maintains with relevant acuity, “The problem is that for 5G, important data processing – such as for a new generation of driverless cars – may well migrate outside of the core network to the periphery.” 

The gamble being made here, as Peston reiterates, is that Huawei’s market share falls over time, something that can only happen if the UK brings in other providers (Samsung and NEC) and make all equipment interoperable.  Given Britain’s fabulously bad record in dealing with such infrastructure decisions, marked by bungles and poor choices, this is anybody’s bet.

The sense of British pride, mighty as it is, is evident.  While they remain dupes of international relations politics when it comes to backing Washington on various fronts, the Huawei threat was one step too far.  Perhaps it said as much about Washington’s fears than it does about Britain’s own confidence: that it can strike a balance with Huawei better than others can.  As the Johnson government boasts, the NCSC had “carried a technical and security analysis” that offered “the most detailed assessment in the world of what is needed to protect the UK’s digital infrastructure.”  Huawei may well burst that bubbly presumption in time.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from CGTN

 

Two of the most persistent offensives of the Reagan presidency have been the war against communism in Central America and the war on drugs here at home.

But investigations of America’s secret war in Nicaragua have revealed mounting evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency has been fighting the Contra war with the help of international drug traffickers. It is not a new story.

From the 1980s Archive, we bring the attention of our reader the FRONTLINE investigation traces the CIA’s involvement with drug lords back to the agency’s birth following World War II.

It is a long history that asks this question: “In the war on drugs, which side is the CIA on?”

Our program was produced by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn.

It is called Guns, Drugs, and the CIA and is reported by Leslie Cockburn.

Watch the video below.

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Featured image is from TruePublica

A French publisher has apologised after a history textbook that appeared in bookshops in recent weeks suggested the 11 September 2001 attacks were probably “orchestrated by the CIA”.

The debunked conspiracy theory was apparently highlighted on social media initially by a group of schoolteachers.

The book History of the 20th Century in Flash Cards is aimed at undergraduate students.

On its website, the publisher said the phrase should never have appeared.

“This phrase which echoes conspiracy theories devoid of any factual basis should never have been used in this work. It doesn’t reflect the editorial position either of Ellipses publications or the author,” it said (in French).

The textbook is described as a complete course on the last century in French, European and world history. It was written by Jean-Pierre Rocher, a teacher of history and geography and a graduate of the Sciences Po university in Paris, and aimed at Sciences Po undergraduates as well as students preparing for France’s elite “grandes écoles”.

Although the book came out in November, it was not until the daughter of one of the secondary school teachers bought a copy that one of them spotted the reference to the CIA.

 

Click here to read full article.

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The Palestinian leadership has entirely rejected what is known of the Trump plan for Israel and Palestine, and warned that they see it as destroying the Oslo Peace accords. The Trump administration did not consult the Palestinians in drawing up the plan, which gives away East Jerusalem and 30% of the Palestinian West Bank to Israel. The Palestinians may as well, Palestine foreign minister Saeb Erekat said, just withdraw from the 1995 Interim Agreement on Oslo.

Trump appears to have decided to unveil the Israel-Palestine plan on Tuesday to take the pressure off from his Senate impeachment trial and to shore up his support from the Jewish and evangelical communities. A majority of Americans in polls say they want Trump impeached and removed from office.

Trump’s plan may also bolster beleaguered Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted for corruption and is fighting for his political life as Israel’s third election in a year approaches. Rushing the details of an important policy like Israel and Palestine for the sake of politics, however, could backfire big time.

Erekat also warned that the plan virtually assures that Israel will ultimately have to absorb the Palestinians, and give them the vote inside Israel. Mr. Erekat may, however, be overly optimistic, since it is much more likely that the Palestinians will be kept in a Warsaw Ghetto type of situation and simply denied a meaningful vote entirely.

Al-Quds al-`Arabi reports that Donald Trump attempted to call Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas during the past few days and that Mr. Abbas refused to take the call.

The plan, according to details leaked to the Israeli press, will propose a Palestinian statelet on 70% of the West Bank, to be established in four years. The hope is apparently that Mahmoud Abbas will no longer be president of Palestine in four years, and his successor will be more pliable.

This so-called state, however, will be demilitarized and will lack control over borders and airspace, and will be denied the authority to make treaties with other states. In other words, it will be a Bantustan of the sort the racist, Apartheid South African government created to denaturalize its Black African citizens.

Netanyahu has pledged that there will be no Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.

Palestinians are under Israeli military rule and are being deprived of basic human rights, including the right to have citizenship in a state. They do not have passports but only laissez-passer certificates that are rejected for travel purposes by most states. Israeli squatters continually steal their land and property and water, and Palestinians have no recourse, being without a state to protect them.

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Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an adjunct professor, Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University. He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Russian-Pakistani relations have remarkably improved in recent years as a result of their diplomatic coordination in Afghanistan and the launch of annual joint anti-terrorist drills in 2016, with both of these trust-based developments setting the stage for finally strengthening their trade ties over the past few months, which could be greatly advanced through a simple five-phase strategy that’s realistically attainable in full by the middle of this decade.

On January 27 evening, units of the Syrian Army continued their operation in southeastern Idlib. Government troops liberated Hamidiya, Bseida, Maasaran, Tal Al-Shih, Maziyan and several other villages. By this advance, the army fully besieged Maarat al-Numan from the northern, southern and eastern directions.

According to pro-government sources, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants are not planning to defend the encircled city for a long time. They are actively planting mines and IEDs in the area. Therefore, even if militants withdraw from Maarat al-Numan via the remaining corridor, government troops will not be able to secure the city immediately.

On January 28, government sources claimed that the Syrian Army had already entered Maarat al-Numan. However, government forces still have to remove IEDs and fortify their new positions.

The Syrian Army offensive in southeastern Idlib is ongoing under the nose of the Turkish observation post near Maarat al-Hat. In the event of further advances by the army, the observation post will likely be encircled by Syrian forces. This will be the third Turkish observation post that faced this fate. The previous two are located near Surman and Morek.

Pro-opposition sources blame Turkey for the recent setbacks of al-Qaeda-linked groups. According to them, Ankara conspired with Moscow in order to undermine the so-called Syrian revolution. They also claim that the redeployment of members of Turkish-backed militant groups from Syria to Libya undermined the defense of Idlib. On January 26, the Libyan National Army, a rival of the pro-Turkish Libyan Government of National Accord, claims the number of Turkish-backed fighters that were prepared to be deployed to Libya was over 8,000. Earlier, reports appeared that at least 2,400 Turkish proxy fighters had been already sent to Libya.

Another hot point of the battle for Greater Idlib is western Aleppo, where the 4^th Armoured Division is engaged in an intense fighting with militants. Local sources say that the Aleppo advance is a diversionary strike designed to drew attention of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leadership from Maarat al-Numan and contain reinforcements that it can send to southeastern Idlib.

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Enquanto a atenção político-mediática estava concentrada na campanha eleitoral, em Itália, o ponteiro do “Relógio do Apocalipse” – o relógio simbólico que no Boletim de Cientistas Atómicos dos EUA indica a quantos minutos estamos da meia-noite da guerra nuclear – foi movido para a frente, para 100 segundos para a meia-noite. É o nível de alarme mais alto desde que o “Relógio” foi criado, em 1947 (como comparação, o nível máximo durante a Guerra Fria foi de 2 minutos para a meia-noite).

No entanto, em Itália, a notícia passou quase ignorada ou assinalada como uma espécie de curiosidade, quase como se fosse um jogo de vídeo (videogame).

Ignora-se o facto de que o alarme foi lançado por uma comissão científica da qual fazem parte 13 Prémios Nobel.

Eles advertem: “Estamos perante uma emergência real, um estado absolutamente inaceitável da situação mundial que não permite nenhuma margem de erro nem atraso imediato”. A crise mundial, agravada pela mudança climática, “torna realmente possível uma guerra nuclear, iniciada com base num plano ou por engano ou por simples mal entendido, a qual poria fim à civilização”.

A possibilidade de guerra nuclear – sublinham – foi acrescida pelo facto de, no ano passado, vários tratados e negociações importantes terem sido cancelados ou destruídos, criando um ambiente propício a uma corrida renovada aos armamentos nucleares, à proliferação e à redução do limiar nuclear.

A situação – acrescentam os cientistas – é agravada pela “ciber-desinformação”, ou seja, pela contínua alteração da esfera de informação, da qual dependem a democracia e a tomada de decisões, conduzida através de campanhas de desinformação para semear a desconfiança entre as nações e destruir os esforços internos e internacionais para promover a paz e proteger o planeta.

O que é que faz a política italiana nessa situação extremamente crítica?

A resposta é simples: cala-se. Domina o silêncio imposto pelo vasto arco político bipartidário, responsável pelo facto de que a Itália, país não nuclear, albergar e estar preparada para usar armas nucleares, violando o Tratado de Não Proliferação, que ratificou. Responsabilidade que se torna ainda mais grave pelo facto da Itália se recusar a aderir ao Tratado sobre a Proibição de Armas Nucleares (Tratado ONU),votado pela grande maioria da Assembleia das Nações Unidas.

No Artigo 4, o Tratado estabelece:

“Qualquer Estado parte que possua armas nucleares no seu território, possuídas ou controladas por outro Estado, deve assegurar a remoção rápida dessas mesmas armas”.

Portanto, para aderir ao Tratado ONU, a Itália deve solicitar aos Estados Unidos para removerem do seu território, as bombas nucleares B-61 (que já violam o Tratado de Não Proliferação) e de não instalar as novas bombas B61-12, nem outras armas nucleares.

Além do mais, como a Itália faz parte dos países (como declara a própria NATO) que “fornecem à Aliança, aviões equipados para transportar bombas nucleares – sobre os quais os Estados Unidos mantêm controlo absoluto – e pessoal treinado para esse fim”, para aderir ao Tratado da ONU, a Itália deveria pedir para ser isenta dessa função. O mesmo aplica-se ao Tratado sobre Forças Nucleares Intermédias (Tratado INF), destruído por Washington.

Tanto na sede da NATO, da União Europeia e da ONU, a Itália seguiu a decisão dos EUA, dando, essencialmente, luz verde à instalação de novos mísseis nucleares dos EUA no seu território. Isso confirma que a Itália não tem – por responsabilidade do vasto arco político bipartidário – tem uma política externa soberana, que responde aos princípios da sua Constituição e aos reais interesses nacionais. No comando que determina as orientações fundamentais da nossa política externa, está a mão de Washington, directamente ou através da NATO.

A Itália que, de acordo com o texto da sua própria Constituição repudia a guerra, faz parte da engrenagem que nos levou a 100 segundos para a meia-noite, da guerra nuclear.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original en italien :

La politica 100 secondi a Mezzanotte

ilmanifesto.it

Tradutora : Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

No group in the United States has labored so hard as the friends of Israel to destroy the First Amendment to the Constitution, which commits the government to prohibit any “abridging the freedom of speech…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Ironically, of course, Congressmen and government officials who have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign have themselves been cheerleaders as the Israel Lobby carries out its devastation of the fundamental rights of every American. Many in government at all levels repeatedly boast about their undying love for the Jewish state, which is a foreign nation and no ally, even as they enthusiastically sign on to legislation that criminalizes criticism of Israel or requires recipients of government funding to sign a no-boycott pledge.

Hubristic due to their great political power, wealth and arrogance, what the Israel firsters tend to forget is the old homespun warning that “what is good for the goose is good for the gander.” Change the rules for what people can say or do and it will sooner or later come back to haunt you when you want to speak or associate freely.

In the past, Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) traditionally fought for free speech and association to advance their own tribal interest as they frequently promoted unpopular left-wing causes that most of the population opposed. Most American communists were Jews, for example. Now that that particular battle has been won they have switched gears in their war against what they perceive as anti-Semitism and have become leaders in the promotion of hate crime legislation, censorship of criticism of Jews and Israel on the internet, and legislation that would criminalize or otherwise punish supporters of an anti-Israel boycott.

Twenty-eight states currently have legislation penalizing those who support the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and there are several bills pending in Congress that would do the same on the federal level, including one piece of legislation, The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, that includes criminal financial penalties and prison time for those convicted. The original version of the bill included draconian punishment: “Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.”

And the White House is equally engaged in the hot war against any and all aspects of anti-Semitism. President Donald Trump has recently signed an executive order that defines being Jewish as both a nationality and religion under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, making it easier for the Department of Education to cut the funding for institutions that allow speakers, organizations and events that the White House regards as “anti-Semitic.” BDS is one such organization and has been particularly targeted.

There have recently been two stories that illustrate what might happen when one wants to limit what people can say. The first involves highly respected international journalist Abby Martin.

Martin is a former teleSUR presenter and is best known as the creator of The Empire Files. She earlier in her career worked at Russia Today as an interviewer and investigative journalist. She is politically progressive and a critic of Israel’s apartheid government. Abby Martin was recently barred from speaking at a planned late February International Critical Media Literacy Conference that was going to be held at Georgia Southern University. Her crime consisted of refusing to “sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel,” which had nothing to do with the conference itself. In Georgia, as well as in a number of other states, anyone receiving money, or using state facilities has to confirm in writing that he or she will be in compliance with the state’s anti-BDS law.

Martin, who has also been subjected to censorship on YouTube, tweeted subsequently,

“After I was scheduled to give a keynote speech at an upcoming Georgia Southern conference, organizers said I must comply with Georgia’s anti-BDS law. I refused and my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me.”

In a separate message she added

“This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure. We must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech.”

The second story, which appeared in the Miami Herald and the Jerusalem Post, describes how a veteran police officer with thirty-eight years on the force in the southern Florida town of Bay Harbor Islands was suspended because his wife posted comments describing Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib as a “Hamas-loving anti-Semite.” He “Liked” her comments, which resulted in the action taken against him.

The officer, identified as one Corporal Pablo Lima, is currently on administrative leave and will have to submit to an internal affairs investigation. The town’s manager J.C. Jimenez issued a statement that “The content of the social media posts that were brought to our attention are not consistent with our Town’s values and policies.” The town’s police department explicitly prohibits any expressions by employees that “ridicules, maligns, disparages, or otherwise expresses bias against any gender, race, religion, or any protected class of individuals.”

Corporal Lima’s wife, Haifa-born Israeli Anabelle Lima-Taub, is no stranger to controversy involving her country of birth. She is the city commissioner for nearby Hallandale Beach, where she was censured at a January 23^rd special meeting over Facebook posts that also related to Tlaib, repeating the claim that the Congresswoman was a “Hamas-loving anti-Semite,” and also adding that Tlaib might be considering making herself and others “martyr[s] and blow up Capitol Hill.” The Hallandale Beach board vote against Lima-Taub passed by 3 to 2, but it was also reported that dozens of Jewish supporters had attended the meeting at city hall, waving Israeli flags and holding signs supporting her statements.

Lima-Taub responded to the rebuke by repeating her claims in later social network posts. She complained in one post that “I am offended by anyone who is NOT OFFENDED by Rashida Tlaib’s hateful rhetoric and pro BDS and other radical dangerous views calling for the obliteration of Israel, literally off the face of the map. I remain unapologetic for my views that she is a danger to the peace process and demand an apology of her for relabeling Israel as Palestine on a map hanging on her wall in her congressional office.”

And it did not end there Lima-Taub gave an interview to the Miami Herald in which she explained that she opposes the congresswoman’s support of the “anti-Israeli” BDS movement, which she considers to be equivalent to supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. Lima-Taub’s posts on the subject attracted some vitriol directed at Tlaib from her supporters, including that Tlaib “took her [congressional] oath on the Koran,” “openly hates Jews” and “supports the people who flew planes into our [New York] twin towers and killed over 5,000 people.”

Anabelle Lima-Taub has blamed her husband’s troubles on “corruption” and an unnamed lobbyist, but she might well exercise a bit of introspection and realize that her inability to criticize Muslims without consequences to her and her husband is part and parcel of the same mentality that seeks to criminalize whatever one chooses to call “hate speech,” which includes expressions of “anti-Semitism.” Free speech is free speech, no matter how loathsome or misguided. Government officials should be allowed to express private opinions outside the parameters of their public responsibilities, just as students at a university should be able to invite speakers to controversial conferences or seminars without requiring those invited to sign a paper pledging that they will not criticize a certain country. Once you let the genie out of the bottle and allow rules-makers to take away fundamental rights it is very hard to induce that genie to go back in.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review