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Julian Assange has been forcibly removed from political asylum and has been arrested. He is no longer in the Ecuadorian Embassy and instead is in British police custody. Julian Assange now faces the prospect of extradition to the USA to face 175 years imprisonment for publishing facts delivered to him as a journalist and those facts revealed systemic government corruption and war crimes. These were the exact issues he required protection from and why he accepted Ecuadorian political asylum.

Julian Assange is an Australian Citizen who had been “arbitrarily” detained for over 8 years and more recently had endured over 1 year of torture in the form of continuous solitary confinement. Deprived of sunlight, contact with the outside world and proper healthcare. The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on Feb. 5, 2016 determined that Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention “should be brought to an end”.

Julian Assange is an awarded and respected international journalist who has never incorrectly published any news.

We respectfully request the Prime Minister and/or the Foreign Minister of the Australian Government intervene and ensure Julian Assange’s freedom of safe passage and return to his home Australia or any other location that Julian Assange requests to travel to. We further respectfully request that the Australian Government where influence can be made with friendly nations, that the Australian Government ensure that no extradition order is effected on Julian Assange from the USA that may otherwise impinge on his ongoing freedom of passage and existence.

Please click here to sign and share this petition. Thank you.

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The Scottish independence movement has come a long way since I was a child. A few decades ago the Scottish National Party was on the fringes of politics and even when the Scottish parliament was founded, it was a Labour government at the helm. Independence was a distant dream, untouchable. It was even more intangible a prospect when my parents were young – back in the 1950s the SNP was as ostracised as the BNP currently is, with its members considered to be rather unhinged!

Gradually, over the decades, this has changed, with Alex Salmond presiding over the first ever SNP government and Nicola Sturgeon winning the largest number of seats ever for her party. Scotland’s party of independence has now been ruling the country for 12 years, and continues to dominate the political scene. On Thursday’s general election it won 47 out of 59 seats on a mandate of stopping Brexit and calling a second referendum on Scottish independence.  Nicola Sturgeon has been labelled the UK’s second most powerful politician.  Her party has never been as popular, and independence has never been so close. Now it seems the question is not if, but when.

Boris Johnson, having slaughtered Jeremy Corbyn in the election, is jubilant. He is currently coasting along on cloud nine, feeling vindicated after months of accusations hurled at himself and his ‘untrustworthy’ leadership. The man who just a short time ago, it was said, could face jail for deceiving the Queen and illegally proroguing parliament, took a gamble which paid off. He defiantly won the general election and now has a parliament behind him to pass his beloved Brexit bill.

And yet it’s not clear that he fully understands the implications of Thursday’s vote for the future of the Union. In fact it seems he is in denial. In a phone call with Nicola Sturgeon on Friday night Johnson reportedly emphasised that ‘he remained opposed to a second independence referendum’. But his words are not accepting the reality of the situation: that the majority of Scots have just voted decisively for the party which stands on an independence platform. And Sturgeon is not going to back down. In an interview on Sunday she said:  “If he thinks – and I said this to him on Friday night on the telephone – that saying no is the end of the matter, he is going to find himself completely and utterly wrong.”

Sturgeon, usually mild mannered and reserved in her rhetoric on independence, has unequivocally turned up the volume in the debate, declaring that Scotland could not be “imprisoned” in the UK against its will. She accused the Tories of ignoring the will of the Scottish people and that they will have to ‘face up to and confront reality’ about what the election result means. In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday the Scottish First Minister expressed frustration that she was being forced to explain her position: “It really is such a subversion of democracy that you’re talking to the leader of the party that overwhelmingly won the election, and I’m under pressure to say what I’m doing because the mandate that I won is not going to be honoured by the party that got roundly defeated in Scotland”.

The independence campaign of course, narrowly lost in the 2014 referendum 45% to 55%. But so much has changed since then. At that time, the campaign for remaining in the Union was even using EU membership as an argument against independence, saying that Scotland would be jeopardising its future in the EU by leaving the United Kingdom. A few years later, the sad irony of this cannot be missed. Brexit has completely altered the political landscape in Britain, stirring up nationalism both north and south of the border. England has put Brexit before the United Kingdom, and Scotland has equally decided that its future remains with Europe, but not with England.

The Johnson government has a policy on Brexit, but its strategy on Scotland is less certain. Since the Prime Minister took office, his presence north of the border has been lacking, as has his interaction with Scottish politicians. Even his relationship with Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, was poor, as they had opposite views on Brexit. Johnson has deepened the hatred for the Conservative party in Scotland, estranging apathetic voters even further. By denying a second referendum he will only foster more bad feeling towards him and the Westminster government and boost the Nationalists’ campaign. If he doesn’t turn his attention to Scotland soon, he’ll have a Catalonia situation on his doorstep before he knows it…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from Jane Barlow/PA Wire

Despite disinformation in the White House letter written for him he signed, it correctly slams the ongoing politicized “crusade,” calling it “an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by” Dems.

The letter was published on the eve of the expected House impeachment vote, largely to be along party lines.

Instead of wanting Trump held accountable for legitimate reasons, targeting him is all about winning an election he was supposed to lose, wanting improved relations with Russia, perhaps as well for being the first sitting US president to meet with a North Korean leader — even though summit talks accomplished nothing.

His high crimes of war and against humanity are ignored. The same goes for betraying the public trust by serving monied interests exclusively at the expense of ordinary people — the vast majority of congressional members supporting these policies.

There’s no just cause for charging Trump with abuse of power over his dealings with Ukraine, its president refuting false claims made by Dems.

Nor did DJT’s actions obstruct Congress for refusing to participate in the sham impeachment process that’s one of the most shameful political spectacles in US history.

Trump’s letter correctly said that articles of impeachment against him include “no (real) crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever.”

He was over-the-top claiming Dems “declar(ed) open war on American democracy” — US one-party rule with two right wings a fantasy version, the real thing nonexistent from inception.

The Constitution’s Article II on executive powers states:

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States…”

The Executive “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties (and) appoint ambassadors…”

The Constitution includes nothing about conducting foreign affairs, though traditionally presidents conduct the nation’s foreign policy, including relations with their counterparts abroad.

Often it’s done without congressional involvement or approval. Usually Congress doesn’t object.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (1941 – 1954) once said “presidential powers are not fixed but fluctuate depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress,” adding:

In the absence of congressional involvement, the executive “can only rely upon his own independent powers,” calling these times a “zone of twilight” — neither authorized or prohibited by the Constitution.

Ideally, the president and Congress should work cooperatively in conducting the nation’s domestic and foreign affairs — clearly not what’s going on now with Dems hellbent to weaken and delegitimize Trump for the wrong reasons, ignoring the right ones.

In the letter written for him that he clearly approved, Trump said Dems “turn(ed) a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense.”

“(I)t is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.”

He highlighted the fact that Biden as vice president “used his office and $1 billion dollars of US aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars.”

At the Council on Foreign Relations, he bragged about it, saying:

“I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars…I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

Trump correctly said Ukrainian President Zelensky “declared (he) did nothing wrong…”

In congressional testimony, Law Professor Jonathan Turley accused Dems of “doing precisely what (they’re) criticizing (Trump) for doing” — their articles of impeachment an “abuse of power.”

Straightaway after Trump was sworn in as president, the Washington Post headlined: “The Campaign to Impeach President Has Begun.”

Last week, Pelosi said the impeachment process has been ongoing for “two and a half years” — beginning long before Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone.

Trump’s letter stressed the above, adding:

Rep. Adam Schiff “cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress…”

Robert Mueller’s Russiagate witch-hunt laid an egg, discovering nothing connected to the mandate of what was probed, the Ukrainegate spinoff faring no better.

There’s plenty to hold Trump accountable for, major wrongdoing left unaddressed in the articles of impeachment against him.

No US president was ever impeached for foreign policies congressional members disapproved of.

Targeting Trump for the wrong reasons persists — the cross he’ll likely bare for the rest of his time in office, including if reelected next year.

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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: President-elect Donald J. Trump and U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi smile for a photo during the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. More than 5,000 military members from across all branches of the armed forces of the United States, including reserve and National Guard components, provided ceremonial support and Defense Support of Civil Authorities during the inaugural period. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has dropped a bombshell by announcing that he could shut down the NATO-controlled Incirlik airbase that hosts U.S. nuclear bombs and the U.S. missile warning radar at Kurecik military base, in response to Washington’s threats of sanctions against Turkey. These nuclear bombs are of course placed purposefully close to Russia. The Incirlik air base in the southern Turkish province of Adana is used by the U.S. Air Force while the U.S. military also maintains a missile warning radar in the Kurecik district in Turkey’s southeastern Malatya province, which is part of NATO’s missile defense system in Europe.

“If it is necessary for us to take such a step, of course, we have the authority… We will close down Incirlik if necessary,” Erdoğan said on A Haber TV on Sunday.

Last week, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate of the United States Congress approved the “Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act” bill that directly targets Turkey’s military and economic apparatus. According to the draft bill, the Turkish acquisition of the powerful Russian S-400 missile defense system gives grounds to impose sanctions against this country, under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), including against the Minister of National Defense of Turkey, the Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, the Commander of the 2nd Army of the Turkish Armed Forces, the Minister of Treasury and Finance of Turkey, the Halkbank and a whole host of other senior officials.

This action could further isolate Turkey from NATO, especially after the latest blow against the Eurasian country came last Thursday when the U.S. Senate finally passed S.Res.150 that recognizes the Turkish perpetrated genocide(1915-1923) against Turkey’s Christian minority that saw millions of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians exterminated. There is no doubt the long-awaited U.S. recognition of the genocide is politically motivated, and Erdoğan understands this, threatening to recognize the U.S. genocide against Native Americans.

However, there are key differences between a potential Turkish recognition of the U.S. genocide against the Native Americans and the Turkish genocide against the Christians of Anatolia. There are hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians living in the U.S. who have direct ancestry to genocide survivors who lost their entire lives including houses, farms, shops and other associated wealth. These descendants could pressure Washington to seek compensation from Ankara and could intensify sanctions against Turkey if they refuse too. Although the likelihood of compensation is extremely low, it could be used as a justification to strengthen sanctions against Turkey, which in turn will only push Turkey further away from the U.S./NATO and potentially closer to Russia.

On the other side, although Turkey may acknowledge the genocide against Native Americans, I would imagine there are no Native Americans, or maybe just a few, living in Turkey. Ankara could reciprocate sanctions against the U.S., but they would be virtually ineffectual as the world’s monetary system is still overwhelmingly dominated by the U.S. Dollar, despite efforts by Russia and China to de-Dollarize the international economy.

Turkey’s potential closure of the Incirlik and Kurecik bases from the U.S. military would effectively mean freezing relations with NATO. Even a Turkish reclamation of its military bases poses problems however – the obvious being political, but also the military and budgetary costs. However, discussions of Turkey closing the bases are not new. Ankara believes the Incirlik base was a staging point for the 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan and has already contemplated kicking NATO out of there.

Despite the threat from Erdoğan, Washington will likely not be phased by the threat for a number of reasons:

1) Washington has already turned Greece into its Plan B option in case Turkey leaves NATO.

2) Turkey leaving NATO could mean the U.S. backing a number of issues that have been frozen because of Washington’s policy of appeasing Turkey for geostrategic reasons, such as the unresolved status of Cyprus.

3) The Incirlik base is also used by other NATO states at times such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, and a Turkish reclamation of the base could see Turkey further souring its relations with the European Union.

Although removing the U.S. military from the Incirlik Airbase would be a huge blow to NATO, Erdoğan is unlikely to do this despite Ankara’s strengthening relations with Moscow. Even if this were the case, the most important question still remains, would U.S. President Donald Trump accept this? It is highly unlikely that Trump will want to surrender the base that is critical for U.S. interests and aggression in the Middle East. Although Greece is a Plan B, it is a Plan B for a reason – it is not as strategically placed as Turkey towards the Middle East, and therefore the U.S. will not surrender such a great advantage it has so easily.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

So-called annual US National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs) are all about enriching the nation’s military, industrial, security complex by prioritizing militarism and endless wars of aggression against invented enemies to advance the nation’s imperium.

NDAA measures are hostile to peace, stability and security. They fund the best war machine money can buy.

This year’s NDAA, passed overwhelmingly by House and Senate members, will be signed into law straightaway by Trump, last week tweeting:

“Wow! All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA: Pay raise for our troops, rebuilding our military (sic), paid parental leave, border security, and space force! Congress – don’t delay this anymore!”

The measure includes the so-called “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act of 2019.” It imposes illegal sanctions on companies involved in constructing Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to supply European countries with energy around 30% cheaper than US liquified natural gas (LNG).

Congress retaliated against Russia for putting US LNG producers at a competitive disadvantage.

Economic powerhouse Germany strongly supports nearly completed construction. On November 13, the Bundestag passed legislation, granting the pipeline an exemption from the EU Gas Directive.

It bars the same entity from owning an offshore pipeline and supplying natural gas through it.

The legislation permits Nord Stream 2 to operate from Russia to Germany, eliminating or reducing Ukraine as a transit route to European markets.

Berlin wants unrestricted access to plentiful, cheap Russian natural gas. It’s essential for Europe’s energy needs.

Hostile US legislation is highly unlikely to stop completion of the project or prevent it from becoming operational.

Russia’s Sergey Lavrov said US sanctions won’t hinder completion of construction. It may delay its completion.

Lavrov’s German counterpart Heiko Maas slammed US sanctions, saying:

“Decisions on European energy policy are taken in Europe. We reject foreign interference and, as matter of principle, extraterritorial sanctions.”

The NDAA also targets Turkey, prohibiting sale of F-35 warplanes and parts to the country over its purchase of Russian S-400s air defense missiles.

It calls for Trump to sanction the country for its action under the so-called Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

The hostile legislation targets Russia, Iran and North Korea for not subordinating their sovereignty to US interests.

In response to removing Ankara from the F-35 program, its Foreign Ministry said “(w)e remind once more that the language of threats and sanctions will never dissuade Turkey from resolutely taking steps to ensure its national security.”

The NDAA includes the so-called Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act, imposing further sanctions on President Bashar al-Assad, members of his government, and individuals supporting it.

The measure unacceptably calls for use of “diplomatic and coercive means…to compel the government of Bashar al-Assad to halt its murderous attacks on the Syrian people (sic) and to support a transition to a government in Syria that respects the rule of law, human rights and peaceful co-existence with its neighbors (sic).”

The measure is all about supporting regime change, largely by coercion, while falsely blaming Damascus for US-orchestrated aggression against the nation and its people — including use of jihadists as imperial foot soldiers, supported by Pentagon-led terror-bombing.

It bars foreign violators of US sanctions on Syria from entering America.

It calls for continued US efforts to replace Assad with pro-Western puppet rule, falsely labeling Assad’s government a “criminal regime (sic)” — what applies to Washington, not Damascus.

The measure reflects frustration over the inability to transform Syria into a US vassal state.

Russia’s intervention in September 2015 turned the tide of battle, Syrian forces regaining control over most of the country.

Terrorist-infested Idlib province, along with illegal US and Turkish occupation of parts of the nation remain to be liberated.

The struggle for Syria’s soul continues to free its people from the scourge of US imperial war.

With all categories included, including huge black budgets, the US spends more on militarism, so-called homeland security, war-making, and the Pentagon’s global empire of bases than the rest of the world combined.

Post-9/11 alone, countless trillions of dollars were poured down a black hole of waste, fraud and abuse — at a time when the nation’s only enemies are invented. No real ones existed since WW II ended.

Instead of devoting the nation’s resources to world peace, equity and justice, discretionary US spending prioritizes endless wars for control over planet earth, its resources and populations.

If not challenged and stopped, its hegemonic rage may kill us all.

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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.

Trump is expected to sign into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020 which mandates the imposition of sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream II’s construction, but while this crafty move isn’t expected to seriously impede the project since it’s already in its final stages, its importance derives in the fact that it signals extremely strong support for the interests of the US-backed “Three Seas Initiative” whose Polish leader has objected to this game-changing pipeline on geopolitical grounds.

Britain is looking drenched at the moment; colours blue and yellow seem to be streaking through the country. The Scottish Nationalists have re-asserted control lost to the Conservatives in 2016.  In the rest of the country, seats never touched by Tory Blue have are now occupied by the party of Boris Johnson.  Yet again, British politics shows that the posh boys, when it comes to moments of crisis, can pull in the deluded, and denuded working class.  This must count as the political version of Stockholm syndrome, the working class playing hostages finding affection for their Tory tormenters.

Overall, though, the picture is one of various influences, teasing away in the background.  Johnson has returned to Downing Street in another feat to baffle the pollsters but other factors were at play.  Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, despite not winning seats, loomed large.  Ventriloquising on the issue of Brexit, his strategy to field fewer candidates, and certainly none against Conservatives, avoided a splitting of the conservative vote.   

The Tory battering ram was taken to the Brexit seats held by Labour members, those in the midlands and the north.  The aim: to cause breaches in the “Red Wall”.  With Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn dithering and umming about Europe and the sense that Johnson might be the one to seal the pact and deliver the deal, a Faustian arrangement was struck. Go for the blue devil; he, at least, might be able to take Britannia out of this mess, consecrate the fears of Europe.   

Claims of anti-Semitism within Labour’s ranks had a pecking influence, though history will probably show this to be a noisy sideshow.  The issue of Corbyn the man will remain.  As former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson claimed, “Every door I knocked on, and my team and I spoke to 11,000 people, mentioned Corbyn.  Not Brexit but Corbyn.”   

What the Johnson Brexit focus did was banish and shroud any conversation and discussion about a generous anti-austerity policy outlined in Labour’s manifesto.  It involved a promise of more funding to the National Health Service, the recruitment of more nurses and police.  Momentum was the socialist cleanser, the panacea to New Labour.  Corbyn now finds himself out on his ear.  The Labour movement finds itself wrangling.  The question as to whether Corbynism survives the man is a genuine one.   

The strategy from Labour HQ had evidently been to not mention Brexit, a dangerous gamble.  The Conservative strategy was to howl, scream and badger everybody along the electoral road from south to north about how they were the only ones capable of “getting it done”.  Johnson himself seemed to be doing political panto, pretending to be baker, milkman, fisherman, digger driver, amongst others.    

When things got complicated on policy, Johnson was found fleeing to a fridge to avoid journalists or suppressing potentially compromising reports, which was the case with the findings of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security on claimed Russian influence in Britain. 

The result was subsequently deemed a second Brexit Referendum, with the Conservatives able to unify the Leave vote.  The Remain vote, on the other hand, shattered.  Defectors and the middle ground types such as the Liberal Democrats, were spanked.  Law making moderates were ditched. “As a result,” opined Yasmeen Serhan, “those who traditionally inhabit the middle ground, or who otherwise differed with their party’s position on Brexit, were effectively left with two options: put up or shut up.”  Labour yielded its worse result since 1935.  “In the past hundred years, rued former Labour adviser Torsten Bell, “no opposition has lost seats after 9 years in opposition.”     

A form of resounding approval for an authoritarian figure was given, one who had mocked every stable British institution from the courts to Parliament itself.  As The Observer noted in October, democracy under Johnson had atrophied.  “Our political honour code is breaking down, unleashing a race to the bottom that the good men and women who sit in parliament can only watch unfold with horror.”

Long-time conservative scribe Peter Oborne, in explaining why he could never vote for Johnson, saw the challenge as not merely one against institutions, but against authentic, sensible conservatism.  Genuine conservatives had been driven out of the fold by votaries of a near revolutionary sect.  “Johnson,” he insisted, “has become the leader of a project – his adviser Dominic Cummings is an important part of this – to destroy conservatism.” 

The salutary lesson, one that Johnson managed to master, is that voters often vote against, not for, their interests.  Britain will be getting much more than Brexit.  Far from being “oven ready”, as Johnson was so keen to promote, the country will find itself in a transition period, one where the EU will retain its influence.  Single market membership will remain, financial contributions will continue as will the contentious notion of free movement.  But Britain will have lost both a vote and a voice and be poorer for it. 

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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]

The self-proclaimed president of Bolivia, Jeanine Áñez, said on Saturday that an arrest warrant could be issued for the democratically elected President, Evo Morales, in the coming days.

“If he has to come to Bolivia, he knows that he has pending accounts with the courts and that will have to be kept. Surely, in the next few days that arrest warrant will be issued because we have already made the pertinent complaints,” Añez said.

The interim president also accused Morales of being “irresponsible”, underlining that he “has to understand that Bolivia needs a change” and that his government should exist “to defend democracy and freedom.”

Currently, the Bolivian president is in Argentina where he applied for political refugee status after being removed from power by a coup d’etat, despite legitimately winning the first round of the presidential elections .

After Morales left Bolivia in mid-November, the de-facto government claimed fraud and ordered the repression of the demonstrations against the social and labor sectors that demanded the return of the democratically elected president in the last general elections on October 20.

The massacres in Sacaba and Senkata, which left at least 20 dead, and hundreds injured, are being investigated by the United Nations as possible crimes against humanity.

In this sense, Morales revealed the existence of three studies that dismantle the myth of fraud during the elections and reveal the plot of a coup, which was sponsored by the Organization of American States (OAS).

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“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.

What we learned in what is rightly being called the “Pentagon Papers” of our time, is that hundreds of US Administration officials – including three US Presidents – knowingly lied to the American people about the Afghanistan war for years. This wasn’t just a matter of omitting some unflattering facts. This was about bald-faced lying about a war they knew was a disaster from almost day one.

Remember President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Remember how supremely confident he was at those press conferences, acting like the master of the universe? Here’s what he told the Pentagon’s special inspector general who compiled these thousands of interviews on Afghanistan: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International Relations Committee, I do not recall a single “expert” witness called who told us the truth. Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we’d be celebrating the end of the war.

Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the American people as “expert” witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think tankers.

What is even more shocking than the release of this “smoking gun” evidence that the US government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century.

We’ve wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade – a conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the “Afghanistan Papers” will ever be brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice.

Just days after the “Afghanistan Papers” were published, only 48 Members of Congress voted against the massive military spending of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. They continue as if nothing happened. They will continue lying to us and ripping us off if we let them.

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

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The Sino-American hegemonic conflict has several dimensions including political and economic issues. But we cannot overlook the cultural aspect of the conflict, for the cultural factors affect the nature of socio-economic relations as well as the unfolding New Global Order. 

This is particularly so, for it is the first time that the Western super power meets the Asian giant on the hegemonic battle ground.

In a way, we are seeing the clash between Western Values and Asian values. 

It is true that the sustained interaction and the globalization of values would have narrowed the value gap between the two systems of thoughts.

Nevertheless, the Chinese way of thinking can be different from the American way of thinking. After all, the ways of thinking have been built up for thousands of years.

We are interested in examining the roles played by values in the dynamics of the Sino-American (Foreign Policy “Thucydides Trap”.

This paper has three parts.

First, I will discuss the origin of values and how the values affect human ways of thinking.

Second, I will see how the values affect the choice of a political-economic regime.

Third, I will discuss the impact of values on the formation of the New Global Order.

1. The Values

I argue that values are reflected in a set of human relations. I have selected the following relations: man-God, man-society, man-man, man-universe and man-history

1.1 Man-God

In China and East Asia, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shamanism deal with the man-God relation in a rather rudimentary fashion.

In Buddhism, the notion of Nirvana plays a central role. It is state of beatitude, or eternal happiness. But there is no god who manages the Nirvana.

For Buddhism, human life is itself suffering. To be free from suffering, one has to find four noble truths: truth of suffering (human life), truth of the origin of suffering (attachment to ephemeral things), the truth of the cessation of suffering (will power to be free) and the truth of eight ways.

The eight ways of freeing from suffering are: right vision, right thought, right words, right actions, right living, right efforts, right conscience and right meditation.

Facing the death, man has two choices. One may go to the state of Nirvana for eternal happiness. One may have to come back to the suffering earth in various forms. All depend on Karma (the way one has lived on the earth). What is important is that there is no god who governs the Nirvana. God is unknown, if there is one.

In Confucianism, one relates the “heaven” to the emperor who is regarded as “son of heaven”. Here, the heaven seems to refer to some unknown god.

Now, in Shamanism, every major object on the earth can be god. The sun, the moon, the wind, the mountains, the trees and anything which are considered as being beyond human control can be god. They are not known, however.

In short, in the Asian system of thought, the god is not known, if there is any.

The powerful religion in the West is Christianity. In this religion, God has created man (human) in the image of God. (Genesis 1.26-27) This passage in the Bible has a very important meaning.

Man being created in the image of God, he is sovereign, he is dignified, he is free and he has the right to be himself. Here is the philosophical and theological root of the notion of individual human right.

There is another crucial West-Asia difference in man-God relations. In Asia, it is not sure if there is a god. Even if there is god, no one knows who the god is. That is, the god is not revealed.

Hence, the god has little influence on man. Now, in Christianity, God is identified. God is revealed in two ways: directly through the Bible and indirectly through the nature.

Thus, there is a big difference between Asia and the West as far as the man-God relations are concerned. In the West, there is only one God; so there is only one absolute truth determined by God. Thus, Christianity is a powerful doctrine.

On the other hand, in Asia, there is no unique God. So there is no absolute truth; the truth is relative. Here, we see the philosophical and religious root of pragmatism in Asia.

1.2 Man-Society Relations

The most dominant system of thought in Asia in relation to the man-society relations is Confucianism.

In Confucianism, man is defined in function of his position within a given collective entity of which he is a part. We should remember that Confucianism was formulated by Confucius in order to show the best governance of the king (government).

For Confucius, what counts in society should be the stability and the order in a hierarchical society.

There are basically four hierarchical relations: king-subject, parents-children, husband and wife, elder children-younger children. These relations consist of rights and duties.

The subject must respect and obey the king; the latter must provide stability, security and welfare to the former.

The parents must provide the moral and physical needs and the education of children; the latter should respect, obey and look after the former at their old age.

The husband should be responsible for the welfare of his wife; the latter must obey and serve the former.

The elder children must guide and help the younger children; the latter must respect and follow the guidance of the former.

The Confucian human relationship can be summarized in terms of “Hyo” (孝)and “In” (仁).

“Hyo” means the attitude of a person of inferior social status toward the person of superior social status. It means filial piety, respect and obedience.

“In” means the attitude of a person of superior social status toward a person of inferior social status. It includes magnanimity, generosity, compassion and other forms of paternalistic attitude.

When Asian man meets a person for the first time, he often asks the age of the person just met. This may put uneasy a westerner; it is understandable. The reason for doing it is to determine his “good manner” required, when he meets the person of older age. In the absence of other known criteria, the social status is often determined by the age of the person.

The Confucian notion of man-society relationship has important implication on human rights. The whole human relationship being hierarchically integrated, man is not autonomous and man belongs to a collective entity.

In other words, human relations make sense only in the context of collectivism. Collectivism comes before individualism. It means that individual rights can be less important than the right of the collective entity. It is the opposite in the West.

In Asia, individuals are to serve the collective entity; in the West, the collective entity is to serve the individuals.

In Asia, the collective entity may give to itself the right of deciding the priority of public policies.

In the West, in a true democracy, the individual has the right to select the priority policy such as the individual freedom of speech.

In Asia, the public entity may pick the solution of hunger as the priority right. This is so called “social right” or “collective right”. In this context, the individual human right may be implemented later.

The experience of South Korea is a good example of the sequencing of rights. Under the military dictatorship and the conservative governments, in the name of economic development (social right), the individual right of freedom of speech was cruelly violated. Now, under the liberal government, the situation of individual right is much improved.

I think that a similar sequencing of human rights has taken place in the West. Even in the United State and in many other parts of the world under the domination of the West, the implementation of individual human rights took a long time before its realization.

1.3 Man-man Relations 

In the Asian system of thought, there is no real ideology related to man-man relations.

If there is one, it is the Confucian Hyo-In relations As for Buddhism, what counts is the compassion for all living beings including humans. Daoism mentions even less about such relations.

It is in the West that man-man relation is most developed and refined.  It is the Commandment of Love ordered by Jesus (Matthew 22. 37-39). The great virtue a man can have is the love of neighbour; the shortest way to salvation is the love of neighbours. This is perhaps the greatest contribution of Christianity to mankind.

The love of neighbours is the source of inspiration for human decency, social justice, the respect for the human right and true democracy.

1.4 Man-Universe Relations

In the West, the man-universe relation is also one of the key concerns of Christianity. The universe is governed by the “good” and the “bad”. Now, the relation good-bad is in eternal conflict and dichotomous.

The universe goes forward by destroying the bad and preserving the good. Thus, in Christianity, the ideology of man-man relation is very strong and dogmatic. It is the duty of man to join the battle for the victory of the good over the bad. In this way, the humanity goes forward toward a better world. In short, man must intervene in the life of the universe.

There is another important side in Christianity. It has something to do with man’s exploitation of the nature. The Bible says that man is authorized by God to look after the nature (Genesis 1.28). In fact, man has been so faithful to this part of the Bible that the nature is suffering from over exploitation by man.

In Asia, the heart of Buddhism is the love for the preservation of all kinds of living beings. Thus, in Asia, the preservation of the nature is highly valued.

In Asia, Daoism says that the universe is governed by “Chi”(energy) (氣)There is the positive chi (Yang) (陽)and the negative chi (Eum)(陰). The positive chi and the negative chi do not fight; they co-exist in harmony. Therefore, man does not need to intervene in the life of the universe; the universe is doing fine without human intervention. Here is the Asian doctrine of non-intervention in the life of the universe.

To sum up, in the West, man is encouraged to intervene in the fight for the victory of the good over the bad on the one hand and, on the other, he is allowed to dominate the nature.

In contrast, in Asia, non-intervention of man in the affairs of the universe is valued; the preservation of the nature is encouraged. 

1.5 Man-History Relations

In the West, there are two views on history. One is the deterministic view and the other, non-deterministic view. The deterministic view is represented by the Christian doctrine, the Hegelian doctrine and the Marxist doctrine. The non-deterministic view is represented by the Toynbee doctrine.

The Christian doctrine says that there is an end of history of mankind, as there was a beginning. The history ends when the whole world will be evangelized.

The Hegelian doctrine pretends that the history should march toward the world of greater freedom.

Now according to the Marxist doctrine, history moves by stages towards Communist society.

In the Toynbee doctrine, history of a society evolves through the challenge-response-change sequence with no fixed direction.

At each critical period in history, enlightened intellectuals challenge the established structure of the society; the conservative elite groups meet the challenge; the enlightened and the conservatives fight and may come up with a consensus for a change; the change occurs without any pre-fixed direction.

It must be pointed out that, in each of these doctrines, man intervenes in the evolution process of history. In other words, in the West, man is the master of the history.

In Asia, Daoism tells us that the history is governed by “Chi”. There is the positive chi (Yang)and there is negative chi (Eum). These two opposite “chis” coexist in harmony. There is no need for man to intervene. The history will go its own way.

One of the keywords of Daoism is “wu wei” meaning “act by not acting”. What these keywords are trying to tell us is that man should let the universe and the history to go their own ways.

2. Impact of Values on the Choice of the Political-Economic Regime

What has impacted the most the Chinese political and economic regime is surely the pragmatism which has allowed China to combine socialism with Confucianism.

The government provides a stable and secure living environment and decent welfare for the people. In return, the people respect the authority of the government and obey government decisions.

The head of the state is the father of the people who are the members of the big family called the nation. The government-people relation here is the Hyo-In relation.

Buddhism has a role to play here. Under the influence of Buddhism, the people do not ask much and contend with little. This could contribute to the stability of the society

Furthermore, pragmatism allows China to adopt a hybrid economic system combining planned economy with a “free market system” without major difficulties.

It must be noted that, in China, the choice of the political or economic system does not seem to be an ideological choice but rather a pragmatic selection. This suggests that China is ideologically neutral in the choice of a regime.

Capitalism or socialism is simply a pragmatic tool needed for the realization of political or economic objectives.

Pragmatism has the advantage of assuring the flexibility of the regime, but it has also the inconvenience of coordinating various parts which make up the regime.

The American political-economic regime is rigid and dogmatic. It is inspired by Christianity.

Christianity has given the socio-economic regime of liberal democracy and the capitalism of free market system. As for the origin of capitalism and free market in Christianity, we find, in several books in the Old Testament (Genesis, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Proverbs and others), such basic notions of capitalism and free market as property right, investment, profit, wage, interest rate and free competition. Moreover, in the book of Amos, we find how the unjust competition can be punished

Christianity makes it clear that each individual is sovereign, autonomous and free, which requires a regime in which individuals are the master of society.

Now, in order that the people can be the master of society, the regime should be for the people, by the people and of the people. This is how Abraham Lincoln saw liberal democracy.

In order that the people behave as the master of the regime, they must have economic means to exercise their rights and duties. But, the survival of such a democracy in the U.S. is becoming increasingly difficult.

Unfortunately, family income distribution in the U.S. is one of worst in the developed countries. The Gini coefficient is as high as 45.0 in 2019. In the same year, the Gini in China was 46.5.

But, we must remember that, in 2019, the per capita GDP (nominal) is $65,000 in the U.S. as against $10,000 in China. Thus, in terms of per capita GDP, the U.S. is 6.5 times richer than China. But, the inequality of income distribution is as bad as in China.

The Gini coefficient is a routine procedure used by economists to measure income inequality. It varies from zero to 100. The higher the Gini, the higher the inequality of the income distribution in favour of the rich. A lower Gini points to greater equality in income distribution i.e. in favour of the poor.

The United States is no longer the liberal democracy as defined by Lincoln. The American people are no longer the master of the country. Christianity once inspired the free, liberal and just democracy. But, now, it is no more.

The regime based on the love of neighbours is now replaced by the love of money. The love of God is replaced by the love of money.

3. Impact of Values on the New Global Order

The basic issue we have to deal with here is the question of knowing what kind of global order will come out of the Sino-U.S. Thucydides Trap.

Will it be a mono-polar order dominated by the U.S. or China?

Will it be a duo-polar order dominated both by the U.S. and China? Will it be a multi-polar order dominated by several major powers?

The United States had, once, a noble vision of a global order in which all countries can enjoy peace, prosperity and security.

The famous speech of John F. Kennedy made in 1963 at the American University of Washington, we could read such vision:

“What kind of peace I mean? What kind of peace we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind of peace that enables men and nations grow and to build hope and build a better life for their children-not only peace for Americans but peace for all men and women-not merely peace in our time but peace for all time” (John F. Kennedy, 10 June 1963)

Kennedy gave us the glimpse of the kind of world mankind would have hoped for; it was a noble dream.

But, this dream was ultimately shattered.

Moreover, in 1997, a group of 25 neoconservative intellectuals signed a document called “The Project for the New American Century-PNAC’ which indelibly destroyed Kennedy’s vision.

Key members of the PNAC included Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who later inspired George W. Bush to conduct the illegal Iraq war (2003). John Bolton, one of key figures of the war-loving Washington oligarchy was a part of the PNAC; he was the one who tried to impose the Libyan model for North Korea denuclearization. (see image below)

The strategy of the PNAC consisted in the outright destruction of countries which were not obedient to Washington’ demands. the PNAC was also a strategy of “regime change”.

The strategy of regime change consists of the following:

• First, diplomacy is used to persuade the target country to change their political regime, i.e into a pro-U.S. proxy government.
• Second, if diplomacy does not work, various means are taken to divide or fragment the country in favour of  U.S. interests.
• Third, if all these tactics fail, brutal military force is used.

Many countries have been the targets of US regime change. Many countries  in Latin America have been the targets. In more recent years, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Iran have been included in the long list of regime change targets.

North Korea has been the target for the last 70 years, but it is maintaining its “Juche” regime.

The Unites States was, once, considered as the place where the Commandment of Love was flourishing. But, now, it is not easy to find what might be described as “living Christianity” in the United States.

How long will the Pax Americana last? No doubt, the U.S. will remain one of the most powerful countries. But the possibility of the United States remaining as the sole global power in the World is becoming increasingly doubtful. There are several reasons for this:

First, I wonder how long the U.S. can finance Pax Americana. It is true that, in nominal terms, the US GDP in 2018 was $ 22 trillion as against $14 trillion in China. But in terms of PPP (purchasing power parity) the Chinese GDP in 2018 was $27 trillion. In other words the Chinese economy has 24% more purchasing power than the U.S. economy.

The U.S. is financing about 24% of UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO and many other international organizations. Washington has to finance the operation of 130 US military bases in the world

The defence budget of the U.S. in 2019 is $716 billion as against $177 billion in China. This means that the U.S. spends 4.0 times more money on defence than China, while its GDP has 24% less purchasing power compared to the Chinese GDP.

How long can Washington support such a heavy financial burden?

There is another problem. Given the worsening income distribution in favour of the rich (and against the middle class and the poor), the demand for goods and services in the domestic market might shrink. This might provoke decades- long deflation as has happened in Japan.

The experience of various FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) shows that international trade alone cannot guarantee the sustained growth of the US economy. The domestic market should also develop. To do that, we need more equal income distribution and a lower Gini coefficient.

Second, the political influence of Washington among developing countries is weakening, because these countries depend less on Washington’s aid.

Third, the harsh conditions of the structural adjustment programe (SAP) imposed by IMF on debtor countries is another reason for the declining influence of Washington.

Fourth, the power of the dollar which has been the loyal servant of Pax Americana is falling because of the increasing use of non-dollar currencies for central banks’ reserves and international trade. Until not long ago, the US dollars accounted for 90 % of central banks’ reserves, but now they represent only 60%.

Besides, increasing number of countries including China, Russia and several other countries are using, for international trade, non-dollar currencies. This trend is likely to continue.

Fifth, the American ordinary people do no longer want war. Since 1945, rare have been days without wars somewhere in the world. Americans don’t want war.

Americans have been paying a lot for the war. The sacrifice of human lives, the underdevelopment of welfare, especially, the medical care which is one of the most expensive systems in the world, social insecurity due to crimes and rifle violence, worsening state of social infrastructure, increasing burden of education of the poor are some of the costs of never-ending wars imposed on the American people.

For all these reasons, it will become more and more difficult for Washington to continue to dominate the world (alone).

Now, as for China, its international relations has been guided by the principles of pragmatism, the philosophy of non-interference and the preference for decision making based on consensus rather than the unilateral imposition of ideas.

Let us see how this Chinese way of thinking affects its vision in the area of international relations.

First, in accordance with the philosophy of non-interference, China is not interested to change the regime of foreign countries. China has no evangelical ideology to conquer the world under one value system. Moreover, being pragmatic, China might consider that the cost of regime change is too exorbitant.

Second, the pragmatism has led China to respect and apply the rules and norms set out by the WTO system, not because it likes them, but because they don’t hamper China’s role in the international trade system.

Third, China wants the security and the prosperity of other countries, because they are useful for China’s security and prosperity. Here again, we see China’s pragmatism.

The project One Belt-One Road, so called the BRI, is perhaps the model of Pax Sinica (China Peace). In this model, 68 countries collaborate for the common security and prosperity; it is not motivated by any dogmatic ideology; it is motivated for common objective to live better.

The primary objective of the BRI is the development of social and industrial infrastructure. One of the main reasons for the un-development and the underdevelopment of the economies of so many countries in Africa and Asia has been precisely the lack of infrastructural facilities.

Furthermore, the development of infrastructure will facilitate the integration of the whole Eurasian economic block accounting for 40 % of global GDP and 60% of the world population.

In all probabilities, China could become the most powerful country in the world, which will surely impact the destiny of mankind.

But, China will not impose Pax Sinica; it will not try to change the political regimes of other countries.

It is most likely that China will seek for peaceful cooperation with the United States geared towards global security and prosperity.

The kind of global order which China will foster could be a “duo-polar order” in which Washington and Beijing could potentially lead the world toward a “better place to live” for all humanity. This is what I wish with all my heart.

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Professor Joseph H.Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East Asia Observatory (OAE) of the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). He is Research Fellow of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

The Estonian Interior Minister was correct in calling out the new Finnish government’s extreme Europhilia which he fears is destined to turn the country into a so-called “euro-province” at the expense of its national sovereignty, but his invocation of Lenin and the Finnish Civil War-era Reds was a wink at the Russophobic tendencies that pervade his society, as well strongly hinting at the role of what right-wing forces such as him controversially describe as “Cultural Marxism” is supposedly playing in bringing about the aforementioned scenario.

Friday, Dec 6, 2019, saw the most important victory to date in the battle against Global Warming. Denmark’s “Climate Act” will entirely revamp Denmark’s climate policy – by law- and thrust it onto the world’s centre stage by showcasing the only effective political solution: Changing the “system itself.”

Eight out of the ten parties in the Danish Parliament agreed on the new national Climate Act that mandates binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent (compared to the 1990 level).

2030, not the belayed 2050, is the target date for tangible reductions.  In a world-first, Danish law requires consideration of methane gas, consumption, and imported emissions along with CO2.Denmark has also eliminated the trickery of Carbon credits while a new expert body of climate scientists will be placed with the newly formed Climate Council. They and the Climate Minister must annually submit to a parliamentary progress review. The first of two five year plans of action are now being developed for approval. Also, a new Committee for the Green Transformation will ensure that climate considerations are taken into account in every major political decision and include 13 climate partnerships with Denmark’s leading private sector organizations. The aim of this historic legislation is a path to sustainable solutions of the future.

Better, the Danish law requires it to take a leadership role in international climate engagement. Every year it will present to the world its “Climate Action Programmes” that showcase concrete political initiatives to decarbonize every Danish civic sector.

This is a victory for Denmark and also climate activists. No longer can other world leaders mitigate and marginalize Global Warming by using the tricks of denial and delay. Nor can they cast aside factual science as a mere conspiracy. One small nation, Denmark, has now vindicated-forever- climate activism and in turn, vilified the mercenary deniers of the obvious. Denmark has thus become the world’s first nation to legitimize the rebellion against Global Warming.

Said Minister for Climate, Dan Jørgensen, “We hope Denmark can inspire other countries to follow suit.”

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 180 in-depth articles over the past ten years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated and republished. On-scene reporting from important current events has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan’s Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk

Featured image is from the author

On Friday, December 12th, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reported and documented that the mainstream U.S. press has lied through its teeth about “Russiagate,” and Zero Hedge reported and documented that not only had the U.S., UK, and France, committed an international war-crime when they invaded Syria on 14 April 2018 firing 105 missiles against Damascus, but the U.N.-authorized agency OPCW that was supposed to investigate the U.S.-&-allied allegation which had been the alleged ‘justification’ for that invasion was instead lying through its teeth about what the evidence actually showed about it: that this invasion had been based upon U.S.-&-allied lies.

These lies by the U.S.-and-allied ’news’-media are not exceptions to the rule; they are the rule whenever anything happens that is contrary to the self-justificatory ‘journalism’, or actually propaganda-line, of the U.S., and of its allied governments.

The lying that got these countries into invading Iraq on 20 March 2003, and into invading Libya in 2011, and into invading and occupying Syria in 2012 until now, are not simply ‘errors’, but are instead systematic and intentional on the part of the news-managements of all of the major U.S.-&-allied ’news’-organizations, none of which will ‘rat’ on any others of them, because they all are in the same boat of liars, and for any one of them to expose the ‘journalistic’ fraudulence of any other of them would be to expose also themselves, because they’re all in the same racket: destroying democracy — making democracy in their own country an impossibility.

Why are there not consumer boycotts against each one of them? Could it be because they all are very successful in hiding from their respective publics their own criminality, their PR-gangland fascist operation?

Glenn Greenwald’s report was titled “The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media”. 

Zero Hedge’s report was titled “New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative”.

Things like this don’t routinely happen in a democracy. They do happen routinely in the U.S.-&-allied countries.

Incidentally, Greenwald previously did a blockbuster news-report that’s closely related to the one he did on December 14th, and it was titled “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story”. So: he has made this beat a particular specialty of his.

Anyone who subscribes to a major ‘news’-medium in the U.S.-and-allied countries is paying to be deceived.

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

Featured image is from Newsbud

According to official US government economic data, the US economy has been growing for 10.5 years since June of 2009. The reason that the US government can produce this false conclusion is that costs that are subtrahends from GDP are not included in the measure. Instead, many costs are counted not as subtractions from growth but as additions to growth. For example, the penalty interest on a person’s credit card balance that results when a person falls behind his payments is counted as an increase in “financial services” and as an increase in Gross Domestic Product. The economic world is stood on its head.

It is aggregate demand that drives the economy. Payments made on a rise in interest rates on credit card balances from 19% to a 29% penalty rate reduce consumers’ ability to contribute to aggregate demand by purchasing goods and the services of doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Contrary to logic, the fee is magically counted in the “financial services” category as a contributor to GDP growth. The extortion of a fee that reduces aggregate demand lowers GDP, but builds paper wealth in the financial services sector.

GDP growth is also artificially inflated by counting as GDP abstract concepts that do not produce income streams. For example, for homeowners the US Department of Commerce estimates the rental values of owner-occupied housing, that is, the amount owners would be paying if they rented instead of owned their homes, and counts this imputed rent as GDP.

These and other absurdities have caused economist Michael Hudson to conclude correctly that the “financial reality of how the U.S. economy works is no longer captured in GDP statistics.”

Today we have two economies. One is the real economy of production and consumption. The other is the financialized economy of paper wealth. The former is doing poorly, and the latter is doing well. The financialized economy is growing much faster than the real economy. Indeed, the real economy might not be growing at all.

Michael Hudson describes the difference. The stock market is at all time highs that have created massive wealth in financial assets for stock and bond owners. In the real economy the situation is totally different:

“The Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018 reports that 39% of Americans do not have $400 cash available for a medical or other emergency, and that a quarter of adults skipped medical care in 2018 because they could not afford it (see this). The latest estimates by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that nearly half (48 percent) of households headed by someone 55 and older lack any retirement savings or pension benefits (see this). Even in what the press calls an economic boom, most Americans feel stressed and many are chronically angry and worried. According to a 2015 survey by the American Psychological Association, financial worry is the “number one cause of stress in America today” (see this).

The data is completely clear. The rich are becoming much richer, and the rest are becoming poorer. Michael Hudson explains:

“The creation and trading of property and financial assets at rising prices has been fueled by rising debt levels owed to the financial sector. This sector’s returns therefore are best seen not as real wealth on the asset side of the balance sheet, but as overhead on the liabilities side. And the process is multi-layered: income accruing to the financial wealth owned by the top 10 Percent is paid mainly by the bottom 90 percent in the form of rising debt service and other returns to financial and other property.

“In the textbook models of industrial capitalism’s mass production and consumption, an asset’s price is determined by its cost of production. If the price rises above this level, competitors will offer it cheaper. But in the financialized economy an asset’s price is determined by how much credit buyers can borrow to buy it, not by its cost of production. A home is worth as much as a bank will lend to a bidder.

“The engine of industrial capitalism and its consumer society is a positive feedback loop in which widely shared income growth, expanding consumption and markets generated yet more investment and growth. By contrast, the feedback loop of financial capitalism is an exponential growth of credit-driven debt, driving up asset prices and hence requiring yet more borrowing to buy homes, retirement income and other assets. Corporate management and investment today is mainly about obtaining capital gains for real estate, stocks and bonds than about earning income.

“We illustrate this by charting the flow of income and capital gains in the real estate sector to show the dominance of asset-price gains over net rental income – and how rental income is used up paying interest in our financialized economy. Likewise, corporate income is spent (and new debt taken on) largely for stock buybacks to raise share prices. The resulting dynamic is exponential and destabilizing.”

This dynamic is destabilizing, because as more of consumers’ discretionary income is drawn off to service mortgage, credit card, automobile and student debt and for compulsory health insurance, less is left to purchase the goods and services in the real economy. Consequently, credit-driven debt grows faster than the income that services it, and this impoverishes the 90%. However, for the 10%, money creation by the Federal Reserve in order to protect the balance sheets of the “banks too big to fail or jail” drives up the values of financial assets. As a result the distribution of income and wealth becomes hightly polarized.

Think about the many Americans who meet their living expenses by making only the minimum payment on their credit card balance. At 19% interest their debt grows monthly. Eventually they hit a credit card debt cap and can no longer use the card to cover their living expenses. But they have the burden of a large debt balance to service without an income stream capable of servicing it.

Think about the corporation that decapitalizes itself in order to produce short to intermediate term capital gains for shareholders and executives by indebting the firm in order to buy back the firm’s shares. The end result is that all income goes for debt service.

In a financialized economy, the only possible outcomes are debt forgiveness or collapse.

As Michael Hudson makes clear, the combination of nonsensical categories in the National Income and Product Accounts and a financialized economy means we have no accurate picture of the economy’s condition. Michael Hudson has a proposal for correcting these problems and making GDP accounting more accurate, but as ecological economists such as Herman Daly have made clear, GDP measurement also omits the external costs of production. This means that we do not know whether GDP is growing or declining. It is entirely possible that the ecological and social costs of an increase in GDP (as currently measured) are greater than the value of the increased output. (See Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism, see this)

Perhaps the major way in which GDP is overstated is the exclusion of external or social costs. External or social costs are costs of producing a product that the producer does not incur but imposes on third parties or on the environment. For example, untreated sewage dumped into a stream imposes costs on people downstream. Runoff of chemical fertilizers from commercial farming produces dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and toxic algal blooms such as Red Tide that result in massive fish kills, make seafood unsafe, cause human ailments and adversely impact the tourist trade of beach areas. The result is lost incomes, ruined vacations, health expenses, and none of these costs are born by the commercial farmers.

Real estate development produces massive external costs. Scenic views from existing properties are blocked, thus reducing their values. Construction noise and congestion impose costs on existing residents and reduces the quality of their lives. Water runoff problems are often created. Infrastructure has to be provided, such as larger highways to provide evacuation from hurricane-impacted areas, usually financed by taxpayers. If the global warming case is correct, the external cost of human economic activity can be the life of the planet.

Lakshmi Sarah in the May/June, 2019, issue of the Sierra Club magazine provides an excellent detailed account of the external costs of coal-fired power plants being built in India by the Indian conglomerate Tata with a loan from the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank. The ground water in the area has been ruined and is no longer drinkable. Farmers are no longer able to grow crops on half of the area farmland. Heated wastewater that is dumped into the Gulf of Kutch is destroying fishing. The ecology and the livelihoods of the population are essentially destroyed. None of these costs are born by the private power companies.

Tired of being doormats for capitalists and the World Bank, the residents of the affected provinces rebelled. They have succeeded in getting their case before the US Supreme Court. It seems that the International Finance Corporation is so accustomed to financing projects that produce large external costs that it overlooked its obligation to examine the environmental impact of the projects it finances. This oversight resulted in Indian farmers and fishermen getting their case before the US Supreme Court. The International Finance Corporation’s lawyers argued that the World Bank lending agency had “absolute immunity.” The Supreme Court said no and remanded the case to the circuit court to rule on the damages.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this apparent victory for ordinary faraway little people in an American court against the World Bank, a principle instrument of American imperialism, is that the Trump administration appeared in court as a friend of the Indian farmers and fishermen. The US Solicitor General, represented by Jonathan Ellis, rejected the notion that international orgnizations have absolute immunity. The Establishment exists on its immunity. Here we see the ultimate reason that the ruling Establishment wants rid of Trump.

Already the senior staff of the International Finance Corporation have come to the realization that they have other responsibilities than just to shuffle money out the lending shute. If the Indian farmers and fishermen succeed in protecting themselves from ruination by external costs, perhaps Americans who suffer external costs will follow their lead.

Perhaps economists will also come to the realization that they owe us accurate GDP accounting and not fanciful accounts that serve elite wealth in the financialized economy.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

One country, two systems. Britain is leaving the European Union. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not leaving on the same terms.

In the UK election, more Irish nationalists than Unionists were elected in Northern Ireland for the first time since Ireland was partitioned in 1921. Not surprisingly, it led to Sinn Fein renewing its calls for a vote to leave the UK and unite with the Irish Republic. This is not going to happen for reasons steeped in history. But also crucially there is not a groundswell of opinion, on either side of the border, for it. But Northern Ireland feels a lesser part of the UK today than at any time since Lloyd George was prime minister.

Hold the front page, as they used to say in pre-internet and website days. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is talking nonsense. There was, he said adamantly, no question of checks being needed on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom under his European Union withdrawal agreement.

“There will not be checks on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain,” Johnson said in November.

Not so fast. His own Brexit secretary, Steve Barclay, had to contradict him. Goods going from Northern Ireland will have to be accompanied by exit declarations and “targeted interventions” from customs officers, he said.

Johnson, according to his own allies, is a non-starter regarding trust. Let us not forget, he is actually the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. The Democratic Unionist Party feel they have been abandoned by him. On this, they are right. The DUP were convenient bedfellows when it suited him and when their usefulness was up, they were ruthlessly pushed out. This is no reason for non-Unionists to gloat. If the prime minister can dispatch his allies, then for those of a different political persuasion the occupant of No 10 Downing Street poses, at the very least, a troubling dilemma. Can he be taken at his word or trusted? The evidence suggests not.

Johnson is reneging on his absolute commitment to his allies in the DUP that a “border in the Irish Sea” is something “no British government could or should” ever accept.

DUP leader Arlene Foster was in no doubt. She said the British prime minister betrayed Unionist voters in Northern Ireland when he sealed a deal with the European Union that would introduce a trade barrier down the Irish Sea, jettisoning Northern Ireland from British customs procedures. He reneged on a promise he made when he spoke at their annual conference.

Foster said the party could no longer take Johnson at his word and would have to check if what he said “was actually factually correct”.

“Once bitten, twice shy, we will certainly be looking for the detail of what this [Brexit] is going to look like,” Foster said.

In his victory speech on Friday morning, Johnson said the UK is “leaving the EU as one United Kingdom”. Even if we ignore the Scottish question, this is utterly fraudulent. It is a matter of fact that Northern Ireland is not about to leave the EU on the same terms as Britain.

Crown subjects in Northern Ireland have a right to be told by their prime minister the truth about their status. Johnson displays a reluctance to tell the obvious truth that on the border, borders, literally, on the schizophrenic.

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Tom Clifford is an Irish journalist based in China. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The powers that be in the US are now viewing China as a deadly rival in a duel for global supremacy. Their aim at the summit was to draw their European allies into their China containment strategy.  This was made clear at a recent meeting of NATO ministers of foreign affairs in Brussels in November, when US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, called on the alliance to address ‘the current and potential long-term threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,’ and to stand together in ‘the cause of freedom and democracy,’ to make the world safe against threats of authoritarianism. (1)

Pompeo’s demand came in response to deepening doubts among the European allies about US commitment to their defence following the failure by Washington to consult NATO before pulling forces out of northern Syria.  Calling up NATO’s original ideological Cold War mission to once again stiffen its purpose, Pompeo seemed to be suggesting that there was a trade off to be made: if Europe wants commitment from the US, they should themselves commit to the US and forge a united front against China.

But to what extent did the Europeans buy into this call for a NATO anti-China pivot? Whilst the US has cemented a Cold War view of China, Europe has struggled to find a common position on the emergence of the new major power, and besides their own preoccupations over security remain focussed on Russia and the Middle East.

Trump’s Cold War on China

Over the last four years, the Trump administration has single-mindedly sought to turn US China policy right around from engagement to containment, at the same time bringing China’s rise to the centre of the foreign policy agenda.  The 2017 National Security Strategy shifted the focus from the ‘war on terror’ to ‘great power competition’ identifying Russia and China as ‘revisionist powers’. The Indo Pacific was seen as ‘the centre of the most fundamental geopolitical change since the end of WW2,’ with China seeking to displace the US, expanding the reaches of its state-driven economic model to reorder the region in its favour.  Against this, a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue was planned to draw Australia, Japan and India closer to the US; and a massive defence budget was agreed to pay for nuclear weapons modernisation and the establishment of a Space Command.

In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence proceeded to launch an offensive on China across multiple fronts  – trade, technology, ideological, diplomatic and military. (2) Then earlier this year, following the US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and with the trade war escalating, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper hinted that the first deployments of US intermediate-range missiles would be in the Asia-Pacific region to counter Chinese missiles.(3) China was being lined up as a much more formidable long term strategic rival than Russia.  As the world’s second largest economy, it has far greater influence around the world than Soviet Union ever had.  In the words a former Senior Director of Strategic Planning in the Trump administration, China poses ‘the most consequential existential threat since the Nazi Party in World War 2’.(4)

What direction Europe? 

No doubt with Trump’s earlier remark on NATO’s obsolescence in mind, European members have begun to bend to US pressure on increasing defence spending to prove their relevance: by taking a greater share of the costs of containing Russia, the Allies will help to free the US to focus on  Asia and China.

However NATO’s European members are rather more equivocal about the so-called China threat. Earlier this year, the European Commission, in its EU-China: a Strategic Outlook Report, characterised China as a ‘systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance’.  Nevertheless, the EU has sought to distance itself from the US tactics of trade war with China.  Business and economic relations between Europe and China have been growing and, earlier in the year, EU-China negotiations made advances towards an investment agreement to be sealed in 2020.  At the same time, Italy, despite warnings from other European leaders, went ahead in signing up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, becoming the 14th EU member state – and the first G7 state – to join in the Chinese project,

For the US now it is imperative to stop this Eurasian drift, resorting then to a Cold War militarism through the heavy hand of the alliance to rein the Europeans in.

Shifting NATO’s focus towards Asia  

In light of the European Commission’s view, the Trump administration’s question to the EU has been: if China is a systemic rival, then how should this be managed?

To prepare for the London Summit, NATO began a review of the security implications of China’s rise to the EuroAtlantic. This was set as part of a wider overhaul of NATO defence planning and doctrine in the post-INF context. The collapse of the INF treaty has left Europe exposed to Russia missiles, but the US now insists that China’s intermediate-range and new missile capabilities must also be included in arms control proposals and that Europe needs to recognise that safety can only be found together in NATO. (5)

Warning of China’s rapidly expanding military might, Stoltenberg argued: “…we have to address the fact that China is getting closer to us… We see them in Africa; we see them in the Arctic; we see them in cyberspace and China now has the second largest defense budget in the world.’ (6) Chinese hypersonic weaponry and missiles, he argues, are capable of reaching Europe, a de facto ‘operational alliance’ with Russia is in evidence in recent military exercises in the Pacific, Central Asia and the Baltic, and, with China getting more involved in Europe through its Belt and Road Initiative, it has become necessary to question the strategic intentions of China’s Eurasian project. (7)

These effort to link EuroAtlantic security to the Indo-Pacific strategy raise the prospects of a global NATO.  The idea of a military alliance, spanning both the Atlantic and Pacific, has long been an aspiration on the part of the US.  A South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) was set up in 1954 as a counterpart to NATO, however it never really established itself, and, with regional states asserting their newly gained independence, was eventually dissolved in 1977.  More recently, since 2012, through its ‘partners across the globe’ programme, NATO has forged new links with US allies in the Asia Pacific region including Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

In 2016, NATO began to align with US Indo-Pacific priorities, agreeing to extend its operations to cover maritime security in parallel with US freedom of navigation exercises (FONOPs) which were stoking the militarisation of the South China Sea. In 2018, the UK and France announced their intentions to join the US FONOPs, subsequently sending warships into the vicinity. (8)

At this time also, the Five Eyes security intelligence network began to share classified information with Germany, Japan and France.(9)  This Cold War instrument, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, has gained a new importance with the rapid development of the new technologies and is the main instrument of surveillance of China’s foreign activities, such as cyberattacks.  Although such information is so far being shared with the other US allies on a bilateral basis, it points the way towards closer links between NATO and the Five Eyes with the potential to upgrade of NATO’s East Asian partnerships towards more extensive intelligence sharing, joint planning and military exercises.

Securing technology

This then comes to the heart of the matter: the issue of securing NATO’s communications technologies from the so-called Huawei ‘threat’.  It is China’s challenge in the digital world that concerns the US above all else. China’s emergence as a global leader in the development of new technologies, and its growing capacity to gather vast amounts of global data, is seen to have brought the world to a turning point.

With NATO and the Five Eyes partners reliant on 5G networks, the hype is of China leveraging Huawei’s commercial networks for military purposes to access highly classified information flowing among allies or even to block services in the event of conflict. (10)  But Europe has its doubts: GCHQ in the UK has found Huawei involvement to be manageable; and Merkel, rejecting the Cold War logic, has been reluctant to discriminate against a single company or a single country. (11) It is no doubt to enforce the Huawei ban, that Pompeo is turning on the ideological pressure.  The rhetoric is all about protecting freedom and democracy and securing the unfettered flow of information across the globe; the real fear is of the US losing the technological edge.

Is China a threat?

China has been upgrading its military forces, including its naval and missile capabilities, on a considerable scale.  Its military budget  however, despite its increase remains dwarfed by the US military spending and is just a fraction of the budgets of US and its Asian allies combined.  US military power is still far superior to that of China however, with China’s efforts concentrated on its own defence, it is its strengths in A2AD – anti-access and area denial – that particularly frustrate the US military.

China argues that having capability is not the same as intention to use.  It adheres to a no first use nuclear policy.  A similar commitment from the other nuclear powers should be at least one of the conditions of China signing up to any new arms control treaty; the inclusion of sea- and air-based as well as the land-based missiles covered by the INF, being another. China can also point to its years-long efforts together with Russia to gain agreement on a convention on the prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS).  A Xi-Obama agreement on cyber-security had a degree of success. (12)

With Obama’s Asian pivot upgraded by Trump into the Indo-Pacific strategy, together with a deepening of the Cold War mindset, China has drawn closer to Russia to safeguard security and promote safety and stability through multipolarity.  Recent Sino-Russian joint military exercises with India, Pakistan and Central Asian states in September and with South Africa in November are a demonstration of this.

China then is not seeking to engage in an arms race with the US; it does not intend to follow the Soviet Union and risk its own downfall. In challenging US hegemony, its chosen battleground is the digital world; its race of choice is to the technological frontiers – a pre-arms race over innovation upon which the US military ‘full spectrum dominance’ relies for advantage.

An anti-China NATO?

To contain European wavering, Stoltenberg was careful with his words at the summit, recognising China’s rise as ‘presenting opportunities as well as challenges’ to avoid any overt suggestion that China was NATO’s next adversary.  Macron, in particular, concerned that NATO maintain its focus on the Middle East, had cautioned against China being classified as an enemy in a military way as is ISIS.  Nevertheless, there was broad agreement that China was a ‘part of our strategic environment’ and that NATO needed to coordinate its response to the challenges posed by China’s growing influence.

The commitment to a NATO space force was a particular mark of willingness on the part of the Allies to deter China’s rise as a rival military power. There was agreement to increase tools to respond to cyber attacks, and whilst a NATO maritime task force in the South China Sea is still a long shot, the organisation’s maritime posture is to be bolstered.

With the new US Cold Warriors looking to increase NATO cooperation with Japan and Australia in order to counter the Russian and Chinese multipolar moves, the call to further strengthen NATO’s political coordination is of particular significance in opening the door to wider consultation with these Indo Pacific partners.  The summit agreement on coordination on arms control may provide such a forum to build the case for the expansion of the INF to include China, in effect a means of containment, as a preliminary step towards a broader international front against Chinese influence.

Conclusion

What lies behind the disagreements among NATO members that have surfaced this year about its future is then the question of how to respond to the rise of China.  The US was looking for NATO summit to present a United Front in sending a clear message of deterrent to China.  However, European states see China not simply as a ‘systemic rival’ but also as an economic opportunity.  It is not just Greece and Italy which seek dialogue over ideological confrontation – even Macron, who warned Italy earlier this year against naivety in engaging with China, appeared recently at a major import-expo fair in Shanghai, coming away with a host of trade deals.

Around the world, Huawei offers a cheap upgrade to 5G networks. Around half of the 65 commercial deals that have been signed have been with European customers.  The US is demanding that its allies to put security first, a security set on its own terms but how much, the Europeans might ask themselves, does the US ambition to monopolise new technologies matter to them? European states have in the past resisted the US when it acted against their interests, for example over the Iraq war. What was perhaps most notable about the NATO summit communique was that, whilst there was a commitment on the part of all the leaders to ensuring their countries had secure 5G communications, there was no mention of Huawei.  In this, then, the United anti-China Front fell short.

However, caught between the old TransAtlanticism and a longer term rebalancing towards Eurasia, the Europeans seem incapable of rising to the challenge of repositioning and the kind of radical rethink of the very meaning security that this entails. Instead Merkel appeals to Macron that Europe must still rely on NATO for its defence.   An openly anti-China NATO is unlikely – this would divide Europe.  The danger nevertheless is that further small shifts towards the US Indo Pacific strategy might embolden the US in its ideological attacks on China and in moves to foment demands for independence in Taiwan with increased military backing. In that case, the outcome of the NATO summit may turbo-charge the already escalating US-China tensions. Indeed the US Secretary of Defence Mark Esper has now designated China the top US military priority ahead of Russia (13).  2020 may prove a momentous year with an EU-China investment deal on the cards but at the same time with a new US-led military build up against Russia and China with two huge exercises, Defender 2020 in Europe, and Defender 2020 in the Pacific. The level of coordination between the two and the extent of participation by European allies in the latter remains to be seen.

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Dr. Jenny Clegg writes and researches on China’s development and international role.  She has published numbers of articles in academic and other journals.  Her book, ‘China’s Global Strategy: towards a multipolar world’ was published by Pluto Press in 2010.

Notes

1. https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-at-a-press-availability-2/
2. https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence-s-remarks-on-the-administration-s-policy-towards-china102018.
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/world/asia/inf-missile-treaty.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer
4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bkxy/rivals-americas-endgame
5. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/07/nato-stoltenberg-shoots-back-france-emmanuel-macron-calls-brain-death-dead/
6. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/china-should-be-natos-main-focus-at-summit-experts-say.html
7. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/08/its-time-nato-china-council/159326/
8. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2019/09/nato-respond-china-power
9. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2149062/france-britain-sail-warships-contested-south-china-sea
10. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190204/p2a/00m/0na/001000c
11. https://gallagher.house.gov/media/columns/five-eyes-must-lead-5g
12. https://www.politico.eu/article/merkel-pushes-back-on-calls-for-huawei-ban-in-germany/
13. https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/did-the-obama-xi-cyber-agreement-work/
14. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3042083/pentagon-head-says-china-has-become-top-us-military-priority?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=enlz-scmp_today&utm_content=20191214&MCUID=80088feeea&MCCampaignID=7575aef910&MCAccountID=3775521f5f542047246d9c827&tc=26

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Cruising Pamir Highway, the Heart of the Heartland. The New Silk Roads and Greater Eurasia

By Pepe Escobar, December 17, 2019

Traveling the Pamir Highway, we’re not only facing a geological marvel and a magic trip into ancient history and customs. It’s also a privileged window on a trade revival that will be at the heart of the expansion of the New Silk Roads.

Khorog is the only town in the Pamirs – its cultural, economic and educational center, the site of the multi-campus University of Central Asia, financed by the Agha Khan foundation. Ismailis place tremendous importance on education.

The Child that Christmas Forgot: How Would Jesus Fare in the American Police State?

By John W. Whitehead, December 17, 2019

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

Our Vanishing World: Birds

By Robert J. Burrowes, December 17, 2019

Birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic and in the 65 million years since the extinction of the rest of the dinosaurs, this ancestral lineage diversified into the major groups of birds alive today. See ‘The origin of birds’.

Because they did not exist during the first five mass extinction events on Earth, birds have been spared the widespread extinctions suffered by those species that did exist in earlier eras.

Bulgaria’s Willingness to Host NATO Naval Center Is Aimed at Containing Russia in the Black Sea

By Paul Antonopoulos, December 17, 2019

In a joint statement between NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, the latter announced last Thursday that the Bulgarian Black Sea city of Varna is a willing new home of NATO’s Naval Force Coordination Center. NATO’s Maritime Headquarters is currently located in the United Kingdom, but Stoltenberg thanked his Bulgarian counterpart for its “strong commitment” and “strong focus” on so-called “Black Sea security.” By Black Sea security, it was of course meant that they want to contain Russia.

Video: President Assad Discusses Syria’s Reconstruction, China’s “Belt and Road” and US Aggression

By Bashar al Assad, Phoenix Television, and Miri Wood, December 17, 2019

In the third of recent international interviews, Syria’s President Bashar al Assad met with Phoenix Television, to discuss Belt and Road development projects with China’s Phoenix Television.

Given that Syria and China are both part of the original Silk Road that created a beautiful explosion of the development and trade that uplifted humanity, this interview has greater importance than the recent one with France’s Paris Match and that with Rai News 24, subsequently banned in Italy. Transcript courtesy of SANA.

Video: Douma ‘Chemical Attack’ Narrative Collapses, Russia Trains New Militia in Hasakah

By South Front, December 17, 2019

Russia has started creating a local force that will operate in northeastern Syria areas abandoned by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, several Syrian media outlets claim.

According to reports, the Russian military will train and equip a new pro-government militia in the province of al-Hasakah. This militia will be deployed at former positions of the SDF, which have not been taken by the Syrian Army.

The Real Interest of the U.S. in Latin America and the Caribbean. Preserve Imperialism

By Enrique Moreno Gimeranez, December 17, 2019

Our America is again suffering escalating aggression by U.S. imperialism and local oligarchies. The region is experiencing a sad reality involving dangerous turmoil and socio-political instability, promoted by Washington. The hemisphere’s most reactionary forces are attacking sovereign governments with coups, methods of unconventional war, brutal police repression, militarization, unilateral coercive measures, rigged judicial persecution of progressive leaders, while proclaiming the validity of the Monroe Doctrine and McCarthyism.

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Na Declaração de Londres (3 de Dezembro de 2019), os 29 países da NATO reafirmaram “o empenho na segurança e na estabilidade, a longo prazo, do Afeganistão”. Uma semana depois, de acordo com a “Lei da Liberdade de Informação” (usada para esvaziar, depois de vários anos,  alguns esqueletos dos armários, de acordo com a conveniência política), o Washington Post tornou públicas 2.000 páginas de documentos que “revelam que as autoridades americanas enganaram o público sobre a guerra do Afeganistão”. Essencialmente, ocultaram os efeitos desastrosos e também as implicações económicas, de uma guerra em curso há 18 anos.

Os dados mais interessantes que surgem são os dos custos económicos:

Ø  Para as operações militares, foram desembolsados 1.5 triliões de dólares, cifra que “permanece opaca” – por outras palavras, subestimada – ninguém sabe quanto despenderam na guerra os serviços secretos ou quanto custaram, realmente, as empresas militares privadas, os mercenários recrutados para a guerra (actualmente, cerca de 6 mil).

Ø  Visto que “a guerra foi financiada com dinheiro tomado de empréstimo”, os juros atingiram 500 biliões, o que eleva a despesa para 2 triliões de dólares.

Ø  Acrescentam-se a esta verba, outros custos: 87 biliões para treinar as Forças afegãs e 54 biliões para a “reconstrução”, grande parte dos quais “foram perdidos devido à corrupção e aos projectos fracassados”.

Ø  Pelo menos, outros 10 biliões foram gastos na “luta contra o tráfico de drogas”, com o bom resultado de que a produção de ópio aumentou fortemente: hoje o Afeganistão fornece 80% da heroína aos traficantes de drogas do mundo.

Ø  Com os juros que continuam a acumular-se (em 2023, chegarão a 600 biliões) e o custo das operações em curso, a despesa supera, amplamente, os 2 triliões.

Ø  Também é preciso considerar o custo da assistência médica aos veteranos, saídos da guerra com ferimentos graves ou inválidos. Até agora, para os que combateram no Afeganistão e no Iraque, foram despendidos 350 biliões que, nos próximos 40 anos, subirão para 1.4 triliões de dólares.

Visto que mais da metade dessa verba, é gasta com os veteranos do Afeganistão, o custo da guerra, para os EUA, sobe para cerca de 3 triliões de dólares.

Após 18 anos de guerra e um número não quantificável de vítimas entre os civis, ao nível militar, o resultado é que “os Taliban controlam grande parte do país e o Afeganistão permanece uma das principais áreas de proveniência de refugiados e migrantes”.

Portanto, o Washington Post conclui que, dos documentos vindos a público, surge “a dura realidade dos passos falsos e dos fracassos do esforço americano em pacificar e reconstruir o Afeganistão”. Desta maneira, o prestigioso jornal, que demonstra como as autoridades americanas “enganaram o público”, por sua vez engana o público, ao apresentar a guerra como “um esforço americano para pacificar e reconstruir o Afeganistão”.

O verdadeiro objectivo da guerra conduzida pelos EUA no Afeganistão, na qual a NATO participa, desde 2003, é o controlo dessa área de importância estratégica fundamental na encruzilhada entre o Médio Oriente, a Ásia Central, Meridional e Oriental, sobretudo, na periferia da Rússia e da China.

Nesta guerra participa a Itália, sob o comando USA, desde que o Parlamento autorizou, em Outubro de 2002, o envio do primeiro contingente militar, a partir de Março de 2003. A despesa italiana, subtraída ao erário público, tal como a dos EUA, é estimada em cerca de 8 biliões de euros, à qual se junta vários custos indirectos.

Para convencer os cidadãos, atingidos pelos cortes nas despesas sociais, de que são necessários outros fundos para o Afeganistão, diz-se que eles servem para trazer melhores condições de vida ao povo afegão. E os Frades do Sagrado Convento de Assis deram ao Presidente Mattarella, a “Lâmpada da Paz, de São Francisco”, reconhecendo assim, que “a Itália, com as missões dos seus militares, colabora activamente para promover a paz em todas as partes do mundo.”

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

3000 miliardi $ nel pozzo afghano senza fondo

il manifesto

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Read part 1 here.

Traveling the Pamir Highway, we’re not only facing a geological marvel and a magic trip into ancient history and customs. It’s also a privileged window on a trade revival that will be at the heart of the expansion of the New Silk Roads.

Khorog is the only town in the Pamirs – its cultural, economic and educational center, the site of the multi-campus University of Central Asia, financed by the Agha Khan foundation. Ismailis place tremendous importance on education.

Badakhshan was always world-famous for lapis lazuli and rubies. The Kuh-i-Lal ruby mine, south of Khorog, was legendary. Marco Polo wrote that in “Syghinan” (he was referring to the historical district of Shughnan) “the stones are dug on the king’s account, and no one else dares dig in that mountain on pain of forfeiture of life”.

Shughnan worshipped the sun, building circular structures with the corresponding solar symbolism. This is what we see in Saka graves in the Eastern Pamir. As we keep moving east, the settled Pamiri culture, with its profusion of orchards of apricots, apples and mulberries, gives way to semi-nomadic Kyrgyz life and irrigated villages are replaced by seasonal yurt camps (not at this time of the year though, because of the bitter cold.)

At Langar, the last village of the Wakhan, rock paintings depict mountain goats, caravans, horse riders with banners, and the Ismaili symbol of a palm with five fingers. Archeologist A. Zelenski, in fascination, called the historical monuments of the Wakhan “the Great Pamir Route.” Aurel Stein stressed this was the main connection between Europe and Asia, thus between the whole classical world and East Asia, with Central Asia in between. We are at the heart of the Heartland.

Last stop before Xinjiang

Following the Wakhan all the way would lead us to Tashkurgan, in Xinjiang. The Pakistani border, close to the Karakoram Highway, is only 15 km to 65 km away, across forbidding Afghan territory.

It’s the Koyzetek pass (4,271 meters) that finally leads to the Eastern Pamir plateau, which the Chinese called Tsunlin and Ptolomy called Iamus, shaped like a giant shallow dish with mountain ranges at the edges and lakes at record altitudes. Marco Polo wrote, “The land is called Pamier, and you ride across it for twelve days together, finding nothing but a desert without habitations or any green thing, so that travelers are obliged to carry with them whatever they need. The region is so lofty and cold that you don’t even see any birds flying. And I must notice also that because of this great cold, fire does not burn so brightly and give out so much heat as usual, not does it cook effectually.”

Murghab, peopled by Kyrgyz – whose summers are spent in very remote herding camps – revolves around a mini-bazaar in containers. If we follow the Aksu river – once considered the source of both the water and the name of the Oxus – we reach the ultimate, remote corner of Central Asia: Shaymak – only 80 km from the tri-border of Afghanistan, Pakistan and China.

The Little Pamirs are to the south. As I reported for Asia Times way back in 2001, it was in this area, crammed with the most important Silk Roads passes of both China and Pakistan, that Osama bin Laden might have been hiding, before he moved to Tora Bora.

From Murghab, I had to inspect the Kulma pass (4,362 meters high), a New Silk Road border. The road – made by China – is impeccable. I found lonely Chinese container truck drivers and businessmen from Kashgar driving made-in-China minivans across the Pamirs to be sold in Dushanbe.

The deep blue waters of Lake Karakul, not far from Xinjiang. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

On the High Pamirs we find around 800 ancient lakes created by earthquakes, tectonic activity and glaciers. Yashilkul lake (“Blue Water”), at 3,734 meters frozen this time of the year, sits in a plateau scouted by Stone Age hunters. Tajik archeologist V. Ranov found rock paintings of horses and carts, attributes of Mitra, the Persian god of the Sun. During the 10^th to 3^rd centuries B.C, the plateau was inhabited by nomadic tribes of the Persian-speaking Sakas.

From Shughnan to Ishkoshim, here we are in what the ancients called “The country of the Sakas.”

From Scythians to containers

The vast Scythian steppes that range from the Danube all the way to China were inhabited by a vast confederation of tribes. Then, in the 2^nd to 1^st centuries B.C., the tribes started moving to the east of the Greco-Bactrian state. Some of them settled in the Pamirs and became the ethno-genetic component of the Pamiri ethnicity. Alex, my driver, is a true Pamiri from Khorog. He’s also the real Pamir Highway Star with his badass black Land Cruiser. (“It’s a killing machine/ it’s got everything,” as Deep Purple immortalized it.)

Alex, Pamiri from Khorog, the Highway Star. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

The highlight of the Eastern Pamirs is the spectacular blue inland, saltwater Karakul Lake, formed 10 million years ago by a meteor. Under the sun, it’s a radiant turquoise; this time of the year, I saw it deep, deep blue, not really the “Black Lake” that its name implies. Karakul because of its slight salinity was not frozen. This is chong (big) Karakul, the older brother of the kichi (small) Karakul across the border in Xinjiang, which I had the pleasure of visiting in my Karakoram Highway travels.

The High Pamirs are right behind Karakul, concealing the 77-km-long Fedchenko glacier. East of the lake, if you could survive a trek in Arctic conditions, is Xinjiang. The early Tang dynasty wandering monk Xuanzang was here in 642 (he thought the lake was people by dragons). Marco Polo was here in 1274.

It’s a tough life at Bulungkul, with the atmosphere of an Arctic station. Temperatures can drop as low as -63C in winter. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

Our base to explore Yashilkul and later Karakul was Bulungkul – this time of the year a sort of Arctic station, with only 40 houses served by solar panels in the middle of nowhere, and temperatures hovering around minus 22 Celsius. It’s the toughest of lives. They told me that in winter the temperature drops to -63C.

Farther down the road, I took a diversion east to observe the Kulma pass, at 4,363 meters the official Tajik border with China, reached by a – what else? – made-by-China road, opened in 2004 following the ancient Silk Road.

The Tajik-Kyrgyz border at the Kyzyl-Art pass looked like a scene from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, utterly Soviet-style desolate except for a shared taxi loaded with Kyrgyz going to Khorog. From there, it’s a spectacular drive all the way to the crossroads of Sary Tash, and through the head-spinning, 3,615 meter-high Taldyk pass, towards Osh, the gateway to the Ferghana valley.

The Taldyk pass in southern Kyrgyzstan, all the way to Osh. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

All across this mesmerizing Central Asia/Heartland journey, especially in the bazaars, we see in detail the crossroads of pastoral nomadism and irrigation culture, fertilized century after century by cross-cultural Silk Road trade involving herders, farmers, merchants, all of them part of commodity trading and provisioning for the caravans.

We delve into the vortex of immensely rich social, religious, scientific, aesthetic and ideological influences – especially from Persia, India, China and Iran. The shift from overland to sea trade in the 16^th century – the start of European world domination – in fact never erased the traditional routes to India via Afghanistan, China via Xinjiang and Europe via Iran. Trade remains the top factor in Central Asian life.

Today the Pamir Highway is a privileged microcosm of what is slowly but surely evolving as the intersection between the New Silk Roads and Greater Eurasia – with its main hubs configured by Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and – it may be hoped – India.

The ultimate crossroads of civilizations, the Heartland, is back – once again at the heart of history.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Chinese container cargo trucks after crossing the Kulma pass at the Tajik-China border. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

Russia has started creating a local force that will operate in northeastern Syria areas abandoned by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, several Syrian media outlets claim.

According to reports, the Russian military will train and equip a new pro-government militia in the province of al-Hasakah. This militia will be deployed at former positions of the SDF, which have not been taken by the Syrian Army.

Since the start of the Russian military operation in Syria, Moscow has trained and equipped several pro-government factions that successfully operate in the provinces of Aleppo, Homs, Daraa and near Damascus. The Russian military also helped to create the 5^th Assault Corps of the Syrian Army. The al-Hasakah-based militia will likely be used as a part of the wider plan to de-escalate the situation on the border with Turkey.

A team of experts from Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco has reportedly visited and inspected the al-Omar oil fields in southeastern Deir Ezzor. Local sources suggest that the US-led coalition is going to involve experts and entities linked to the Saudi company in an attempt to expand the scale of its oil smuggling business.

In November, the Syrian military carried out a series of strikes on oil smuggling facilities near the Turkish-occupied city of Jarabulus in northern Aleppo. Back then, sources in Damascus warned that these strikes were only a first step in a campaign to put end to the smuggling of the Syrian oil by foreign forces.

More and more data contradicting the mainstream narrative blaming the Assad government for the April 7, 2018 Douma incident become available to the public. On December 14, WikiLeaks released another batch of documents that reveal mass dissent within the OPCW’s experts over the formal decision to lay blame for the supposed chemical attack on Assad. The leaked data includes a memo stating 20 inspectors think that the officially released version of the OPCW’s report on Douma “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”. Another revelation is that the OPCW possessed scientifically credible evidence showing the victims of the alleged attack had symptoms not consistent with chemical gas exposure.

These documents became the latest in a series dissent memos and documents destroying the “Assad chemical weapons” narrative. The previously released evidence revealed that the OPCW had doctored the Douma report and manipulated the collected evidence. It should be recalled that the United States, the United Kingdom and France carried out a joint missile strike on Syria in 2018 justifying the move by claims that it was a needed response to the supposed “Assad chemical weapon attack” in Douma.

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In the third of recent international interviews, Syria’s President Bashar al Assad met with Phoenix Television, to discuss Belt and Road development projects with China’s Phoenix Television.

Given that Syria and China are both part of the original Silk Road that created a beautiful explosion of the development and trade that uplifted humanity, this interview has greater importance than the recent one with France’s Paris Match and that with Rai News 24, subsequently banned in Italy. Transcript courtesy of SANA.

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Journalist:  Mr. President, on behalf of the Chinese television channel, Phoenix, I would like to thank you for giving us this interview.

President Assad:  You are welcome.

Question 1:  Mr. President, allow me to start straight away…  Syria has been able to make great achievements in fighting terrorism and large areas of Syrian territories have been restored.  Now, where will you begin the reconstruction of Syria?

President Assad:  In fact, we are not waiting for the end of a particular stage of the war in order to start reconstruction; reconstruction starts immediately after the liberation of any area, whether it is big or small, a village or a city.  Reconstruction has stages, the first of which is rebuilding the infrastructure, particularly in the areas of water and electricity.  Later, the state shifts its focus to schools, health centers and hospitals.

However, the most important stage in reconstruction, which comes later and constitutes the most serious challenge for us, is restoring daily activity especially economic livelihood.  This requires a great deal of effort and is affected by internal factors and the external environment – namely the embargo imposed by Western countries on Syria, which has a negative affect and slows the process down.  So, reconstruction has already started, but we need more investments from within and outside the country in order to scale it up.

Question 2:  And here we ask, Mr. President, what are the most important areas in which Syria needs the help of friendly countries, including China?

President Assad:  China specifically provides assistance in reconstruction particularly in the humanitarian domain.  As I mentioned earlier, life’s necessities are water and electricity and China is providing support in these areas through humanitarian grants which we apply to the areas most in need.

In the past, we did not engage in discussions with our friends – and at the forefront China, on reconstruction because the security situation did not allow us to initiate this process on a large scale.  Now, with the liberation of most areas, we have started discussions with a number of Chinese companies experienced in reconstruction.  As I mentioned, the most important stage and the greatest challenge is the full restoration of the economic cycle.  We would hope that Chinese companies start looking and studying the Syrian market which is improving quickly and constantly in terms of security.

It is essential that we start discussing investment opportunities, because it is well-known that rebuilding countries destroyed partially or totally by war is very profitable and has high returns-on-investment.  The process is not limited to loans or providing aid without any returns, it is a profitable investment in every sense of the word.

We have started talking to a number of Chinese companies on finding ways to evade sanctions and have access to the Syrian market.  They have shown an interest because the process is profitable, but investors and investment companies still have concerns about the way sanctions could impact them.  We have found certain formulas, which will not be disclosed of course, for them to enter the Syrian market safely and consequently contribute to the reconstruction process in Syria.

I would like to emphasize that this support is not limited to the economy; reconstruction ultimately means contributing to Syria’s stability for two reasons.  First, in the past two years, millions of Syrians have returned from abroad without finding sufficient job opportunities, which in itself is a factor that can be used by terrorists and outside powers.  Second, the reconciliation we have achieved in Syria, was in part with those who worked with the militants or the terrorists at a certain period.  They agreed to lay down their weapons and return to their normal lives – this return requires job opportunities.  So, the support from China and other friendly countries in Syria’s reconstruction, is as important as the military efforts to restoring stability in Syria, and striking and fighting terrorism.

Question 3:  So, can we ask about the concrete measures that are being taken by the Syrian government in order to attract investors coming from China and other friendly countries?

President Assad:  The first thing an investor needs is security.  When we talk about a country coming out of war: we have achieved great milestones in this respect, but we are not completely finished.  The first question an investor asks is about security, this is what we are doing on a daily basis – fighting terrorists and liberating areas one by one.

As to the investment environment, there are requirements any investor would need, regardless of whether there is a war or not.  In this regard, we are focusing on two things:  the urgent, which is improving this investment environment by addressing necessary measures, like transparency, clarity on investors’ rights and obligations in the country and the legal or judicial aspects of their investments.  With all these issues, we are currently drawing up clear guidelines for investors.

However, the more important and comprehensive step is the investment law.  We have achieved significant progress in developing our investment law in-line with similar laws in many other countries around the world, thus ensuring it is based on international investment standards.

This law clearly identifies the guarantees given to investors concerning their investment in Syria:  legal guarantees, financial guarantees, exemptions clearly laid out, the tax situation for their investments – and any other aspects which constitute a guarantee to ensure that this investment is completely safe and profitable.  We are now in the final stages of this law and it will be passed soon.

Question 4:  Well, Mr. President, are there specific measures taken to ensure the existence of a safe investment environment which assure Chinese investors to come and not face any security problems?  Chinese investors are very concerned about this.

The second issue is the fear that many Chinese companies still have.  Today, there are companies which are willing to send experts to Syria.  This is important because many Syrian industries have started to show interest in the Chinese market, for example Syrian factories which buy their equipment from China.  Previously, Chinese experts had concerns about coming to Syria; this has recently started to improve, which is a new step.

However, when we talk about Chinese investment with Chinese capital, this needs more assurances; we must exert greater effort in this regard as a Syrian state and we hope the Chinese state with its relevant institutions – like the China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation, to encourage investors to come to Syria or at least to the areas which have become completely safe.  In this interview I confirm this and since you are in Syria, you are able to convey the true, unexaggerated picture about the extent of security achieved recently.

Intervention: So, the Syrian government guarantees security to all Chinese companies which might come to Syria, and that there is no problem in terms of safety?

President Assad:  Certainly.

Question 5:  Mr. President, I would like to ask you about the Belt and Road Initiative.  How do you see this initiative in general?

President Assad:  From a strategic perspective, it constitutes a worldwide transformation, a transformation in the nature of international relations.  If we look at the current situation in the world, we see that it is governed by Western attempts of domination, particularly on the part of the United States.  In the past during the Cold War, there was a period of conflict among states.  This conflict was based on the degree of dominance of each pole, particularly the Western pole over a group of states, in order to achieve its interests against the other pole.

Before that, World War II and the preceding period of full colonialization; states occupied other nations and wherever they did so, they defined the interests of those peoples under their domination.  In most cases there were no mutual interests; those peoples were enslaved by the more powerful states.

Today, we see that there is a superpower – China, trying to strengthen its influence in the world. But what kind of influence?  It is not the negative influence we have become accustomed to, but rather an influence in the sense of relying on friends and an influence based on mutual interests.  When we in Syria think about being part of the Silk Road and Syria is a small country – by international, geographic, demographic, economic and military standards…

Intervention: But historically, it is on the Silk Road.

President Assad:  It is exactly on the Silk Road, but what is more important is that this new approach is derived from history but is suitable for the 21^st century; it is an approach built on parity.  When we are part of this Road, China treats us as equals and not as a superpower dealing with a small country.  There are mutual interests: it is beneficial to China, Syria and all the countries on this Road.

Another aspect, is that it is not limited to China’s bilateral relations with these countries but rather it is a relationship among all the countries on this axis.  So, it is a relationship of culture and civilization which ultimately leads to greater prosperity and investment, and the improvement of the social, economic and security conditions in these countries.  This means more stability in the world, which is contrary to what we have known in our modern and recent history.  This is what we see in the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative): stability and prosperity.

Question 6:  Syria, for its part, expressed its desire to take part in the Belt and Road Initiative.  Are there any developments in this regard?

President Assad:  During the previous period, and especially in the early years of the war due to the instability, it wasn’t our priority.  Perhaps because it didn’t make sense to talk about infrastructure when you are in a state of life or death, not as individuals but as a homeland, as a nation – Syria.

Now that we have overcome this stage and with the increased stability and the improvement of the economic cycle in Syria, we have started this year a serious dialogue with the Chinese government on how Syria can become part of the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative).  At present Syria is not on the route; there are different routes and Syria is not on them.  However, part of the initiative includes cultural, educational and scientific domains, and through the direct relationship between us and China, there has been a large number – which has increased in recent years – of scholarships offered to Syria that we are benefitting from.  The discussions have recently started concerning infrastructure, which is one of the most important elements and could make Syria a part of the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) in the future.  We have proposed a number of projects only a few months ago.

Intervention:  In specific areas.

President Assad:  Of course.  In areas related to infrastructure, we have proposed around six projects to the Chinese government in line with the Belt and Road methodology and we are waiting for the Chinese government to determine which project, or projects, is in line with their thinking.  I think when this infrastructure is developed, with time, the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) passing through Syria becomes a foregone conclusion, because it is not a road you only draw on a map.  Whilst it is true that historically the Silk Road passed through Syria, Iraq and this region, today however, this initiative takes into account the available infrastructure required for these routes.  Therefore, by establishing, strengthening, and developing this infrastructure, the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) will pass through Syria in the future.

President Assad:  Precisely, because we are ready security-wise, we have started discussions with our Chinese friends.  Before that, it wasn’t logically or practically possible to initiate such a dialogue.

Question 8:  Mr. President, I would like to ask you about the situation in America.  The United States holds presidential elections next year.  If Trump is not reelected for a new presidential term, would that failure, in your opinion, be useful to Syria or not?

President Assad:  In one of my interviews, I referred to Trump as being the best because he is the most transparent.  Of course, being the best doesn’t mean that he is good; but transparency is a good thing especially that when it comes to Western politics because we have become accustomed to masks which hide real Western intentions regarding the world.

However at the same time, we need to realise that the American political system is not a state system in the sense that we understand.  It is a system comprised of lobbies.  The rulers of America are the money lobbies, whether in the form of oil, weapons, banks, or others. These lobbies control all parts of American politics.

When Trump tried to be independent, albeit in a very limited degree, the attack against him started.  We are now witnessing the impeachment process aimed at bringing the President back into line with the lobbies.  All the presidents we have dealt with in Syria, from Nixon in 1974 – when relations with America were restored, up to Trump today are controlled by these lobbies.   No matter how much good will any president has, he cannot act outside the policies of these lobbies.  Therefore, betting on the change of presidents is misplaced and unrealistic and I don’t think that this American policy will change in the next few years.  That’s why during the election campaign, they say one thing and once they are elected, they do the complete opposite.  For those reasons in Syria we never consider which American president comes and which one leaves.

Intervention:  In this context, I pose the question: after the American president announced his intention to withdraw American forces from Syria, he suddenly backtracked and said that he will leave American troops in Syria in order to protect oil wells in the area east of the Euphrates.  So, he suddenly takes a decision, and then goes back on it.

President Assad:  Exactly, what you are saying confirms my point that the lobbies are the ones in charge of the policies.  It also confirms that this state is not governed by principles, but rather by the interests of those companies; if they have an interest in occupying the oil wells, stealing and selling them one way or another, then this state and this regime will act in favor of these companies, regardless of international law and regardless of American law.  They violate American laws for the sake of these companies because if they don’t make them happy, the president might be impeached.

Question 9:  Mr. President, what is the number of the remaining American troops on Syrian territories now?

President Assad:  The funny thing in American politics is that they announce the number between thousands and hundreds.  When they say thousands: it is to make the the pro-war lobby – particularly the arms companies, happy that they are in a state of war.  When they say hundreds: they are addressing the people who oppose the war by saying that they are only “a few hundred.”  In actual fact, both figures are incorrect for a simple reason; even if these figures were correct, they are based on the number of American soldiers and not the number of individuals fighting with the American army.  The American regime relies significantly in its wars on private firms like Blackwater in Iraq and others.  So even if they had a few hundred American soldiers in Syria, they still also have thousands – maybe tens of thousands, of civilians working for such companies and fighting in Syria.  That’s why it is difficult to know the real number, but it is certainly in the thousands.

Question 10:  The Americans say that they will protect oil wells in the east of Euphrates area in Syria; but in the end, what are they going to do with the oil produced from those wells?

President Assad:  Before the Americans, in the early days Jabhat al-Nusra used these wells; after ISIScame and drove out al-Nusra – or rather when ISIS merged with al-Nusra and they all became ISIS, it also stole and sold oil.  Where? It used to sell it through Turkey.  Now America is the one stealing oil and selling it to Turkey.  Turkey is an accomplice, with all these groups, in selling oil; it doesn’t have a problem – Turkey is ready.  The Turkish regime plays a direct part in selling the oil, previously with al-Nusra, later with ISIS and today with the Americans.

Question 11:  In this situation, what is the impact on Syrian oil returns?

President Assad:  At a certain point at the beginning of the war, oil returns dropped to almost zero.  Today – after restoring a small number of wells during the past two years – we have a little amount of oil.  However, there is still limited positive impact on the Syrian economy from oil because most of the wells are either under the control of terrorist groups or groups acting outside the law and under American command.  So, the situation with the oil has not changed much.

Question 12:  Yes. So, how is the Syrian government going to face the question of American presence in the oil fields area east of the Euphrates?

President Assad:  First, the Americans rely on terrorists.   The terrorists must be attacked, this is a priority for us in Syria.  Striking the terrorists weakens the American presence one way or another.  At a later stage: there are Syrian groups acting under American command and these groups must be persuaded, one way or another and particularly through dialogue, that it is in all our interests in Syria that they embrace the homeland and join the Syrian state’s efforts to liberate all its territories.  At that point, it’s only natural that there will be no prospect for an American presence.  However, if they remained, they have their experience in Iraq to consider; there will be a popular resistance and they will pay the price.  Ultimately, the Americans will leave.

Question 13:  Mr. President, we have witnessed recently popular protests and riots in some neighboring countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, and even Iran.  In fact, these countries are considered, to a certain extent, Syria’s allies.  How do you view what happened and is happening in these countries?

President Assad:  Of course, neighboring countries have a direct impact on us because there are direct family and economic relations, as well as other types of relations that exist between any two neighboring countries.  At the same time, the Middle East as a whole is one area; the social fabric is similar, beliefs are similar and interests are intertwined even when these countries are not direct neighbors.

If we assume that the movements taking place aim to address the problems faced by the population and that they would lead to improving economic, political and other conditions in these countries, then I can say that the impact will be positive.

However, if we think logically, would the Western countries and in particular the United States, leave these countries to continue spontaneously?!  They would definitely interfere and would certainly exploit every movement in order to create chaos, because American policy – at least since 2000 and since the Iraq war – is to create chaos. This is what they called ‘constructive chaos;’ that is how George Bush and Condoleezza Rice referred to it.  This ‘constructive chaos’ which they are looking for, is a type of chaos that achieves their interests.  That’s why when this chaos takes place in our region, or in any other region, it will have a negative impact on us.  Chaos is contagious, it’s like a disease, it spreads; so, we can only hope that these events remain in the internal, spontaneous, popular framework.

Question 14:  Would it be possible to say that one should look for an American role wherever there is chaos?

President Assad:  This is self-evident and has become well-known throughout the world.  What is the difference between the policies of superpowers: America, and those who stand with it – like France and Britain, believe or think – which we see as wrong but they see as right – that the interests of these countries or this axis, lies in creating chaos; whereas Russia, China and most other countries believe that stability and international law are in the best interest of the world and its states, big or small.

Journalist:  Mr. President, thank you very much for availing us this opportunity and we wish you continued success and progress.

President Assad:  Thank you and I also thank Phoenix Television for this interview.

Journalist:  Thank you very much.

President Assad:  You are welcome.

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Nella Dichiarazione di Londra (3 dicembre) i 29 paesi della Nato  hanno riaffermato «l’impegno per la sicurezza e stabilità a lungo termine dell’Afghanistan». Una settimana dopo, in base alla «Legge sulla libertà di informazione» (usata per svuotare dopo anni alcuni armadi dagli scheletri a seconda della convenienza politica), il Washington Post ha desecretato 2.000 pagine di documenti i quali «rivelano che funzionari Usa hanno ingannato il pubblico sulla guerra in Afghanistan». In sostanza hanno nascosto i disastrosi effetti, anche economici, di una guerra in corso da 18 anni.

I dati più interessanti che emergono sono quelli dei costi economici:

Per le operazioni belliche sono stati spesi 1.500 miliardi di dollari, cifra che «rimane opaca», in altre parole sottostimata: nessuno sa quanto abbiano speso nella guerra i servizi segreti o quanto costino in realtà i contractors, i mercenari reclutati per la guerra (attualmente circa 6 mila).

Poiché «la guerra è stata finanziata con denaro preso a prestito», sono maturati interessi per 500 miliardi che portano la spesa a 2.000 miliardi di dollari.

Si aggiungono ad essa altre voci: 87 miliardi per addestrare le forze afghane, 54 miliardi per la «ricostruzione», gran parte dei quali sono andati «perduti per corruzione e progetti falliti».

Per lo meno altri 10 miliardi sono stati spesi per la «lotta al narcotraffico», col bel risultato che la produzione di oppio è fortemente aumentata: oggi l’Afghanistan fornisce l’80% dell’eroina al narcotraffico mondiale.

Con gli interessi che continuano ad accumularsi (nel 2023 saliranno a 600 miliardi) e il costo delle operazioni in corso, la spesa supera ampiamente i 2.000 miliardi.

Vi è inoltre da considerare  il costo dell’assistenza medica ai veterani usciti dalla guerra con gravi ferite o invalidità. Finora, per quelli che hanno combattuto in Afghanistan e Iraq,  sono stati spesi 350 miliardi, che nei prossimi 40 anni saliranno a 1.400 miliardi di dollari.

Poiché oltre la metà viene spesa per i veterani dell’Afghanistan, il costo della guerra sale per gli Usa a circa 3.000 miliardi di dollari.

Dopo 18 anni di guerra e un numero inquantificabile di vittime tra i civili, il risultato sul piano militare è che «i taleban controllano gran parte del paese e l’Afghanistan rimane una delle maggiori aree di provenienza  di rifugiati e migranti».

Il Washington Post conclude quindi che dai documenti desecretati emerge «la cruda realtà di passi falsi e fallimenti nello sforzo americano di pacificare e ricostruire l’Afghanistan». In tal modo il prestigioso giornale, che dimostra come funzionari Usa abbiano «ingannato il pubblico», inganna a sua volta il pubblico presentando la guerra quale «sforzo americano di pacificare e ricostruire l’Afghanistan».

Il vero scopo della guerra condotta dagli Usa in Afghanistan, alla quale partecipa dal 2003 la Nato in quanto tale, è il controllo di quest’area di primaria importanza strategica al crocevia tra Medio Oriente, Asia centrale, meridionale e orientale, soprattutto nei confronti di Russia e Cina.

A questa guerra partecipa sotto comando Usa l’Italia da quando il Parlamento ha autorizzato nell’ottobre 2002 l’invio di un primo contingente militare a partire dal marzo 2003. La spesa italiana, sottratta alle casse pubbliche come quella statunitense, viene stimata in circa 8 miliardi di euro, cui si aggiungono diversi costi indiretti.

Per convincere i cittadini, colpiti dai tagli alle spese sociali, che occorrono altri fondi per l’Afghanistan, si racconta che essi servono a portare migliori condizioni di vita al popolo afghano. E i Frati del Sacro Convento di Assisi hanno donato al presidente Mattarella la «Lampada della pace di San Francesco», riconoscendo in tal modo che «l’Italia, con le missioni dei suoi militari, collabora attivamente per promuovere la pace in ogni parte del mondo».

Manlio Dinucci

The struggle over interpretation or meaning has emerged as a critical terrain of struggle as the ruling class desperately attempts to maintain the dominance of the liberal capitalist/democratic discourse as the only legitimate interpretative framework.

The ruling elite’s efforts to impose meaning and to control the narrative are becoming more difficult as a result of the irreconcilable contradictions of the global neoliberal capitalist order that is producing both mass opposition and state repression. But these forces have not given up. For example, corporate media attempts to suppress the scale and scope of the global popular rebellions against neoliberal rule by omission even while images of mass opposition and corresponding state repression inundate social media.

That is why independent channels of information are under attack. The divergence between information communicated via social media and information and interpretation conveyed by corporate media is being narrowed by more intense policing of social media by the capitalist corporations that control those platforms.

This war of information provides the context in which BAP must operate as we try to counter the pro-war, pro-imperialist agenda of the U.S. state. It is why we ask our members and supporters to assist with breaking the information barriers by aggressively circulating information and analysis that we provide.

It is also why we are devoting this issue of our news blast to highlighting some of our efforts over the last few weeks to challenge the dominate narrative.

BAP member Erica Caines discusses the weaponization of the Hong Kong protests.

Netfa Freeman, Pan African Community Action and member of BAP Coordinating Committee takes on the collaboration of Northern leftists with imperialism.

In line with BAP’s campaign to “Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad, Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report’s Senior editor and columnist, reminds us of the role of the police as an instrument of oppression.

Max Rameau, organizer with the Pan African Community Action (PACA) is interviewed by BAP member Jacqueline Luqman of the Real News Network to discuss the historic relaunching of the National Alliance Against Police and Political Repression.

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka on why disarray of NATO is a good thing for the colonized and oppressed.

Erica Caines looks at how liberalism has become the dominate framework for many members of the Black petit bourgeoisie. A framework that she says can end up getting Black folks killed.

Margaret Kimberley, discusses the  bipartisan commitment to advancing the U.S. imperialist agenda.

Ajamu follows up on BAP’s concerns with U.S. interventionism on the critical hour, discussing issue of U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

Ajamu joins Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon to discuss the implications of NATO and the need for ideological clarity in an era where capitalism finds itself in crisis.

On CounterSpin, BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman talks about the announcement by the Trump administration to implement a so-called surge by law officials to stamp out a non-existent increase in crime.

Margaret Kimberley again brings some clarity on the real terms of the coup in Bolivia.

BAP issued a statement condemning the coup in Bolivia that was also made into an audio track and played on radio stations across the country. Listen and download here.

Ajamu lays out some of the history of the Anti-war movement in the United States going back to the Vietnam period.  He outlines the importance of rooting all our progressive struggles in an understanding of colonialism and imperialism.

Netfa Freeman discusses the circumstances that led to Bolivia’s Indigenous President Evo Morales to resign and flee to Mexico on Watching the Hawks.

Voices With Vision: Jesus Chucho Garcia, Special Commissioner for the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs for African joins host Netfa Freeman to discuss the “Congreso Internacional Afrodescendiente: Cimarronaje Contra El Imperialismo” that just took place in Venezuela.

BAP will continue to attempt to engage the public with cutting edge alternative perspectives and educational materials to arm organizers involved in the critical work of building organization. If you see the importance of this work, please help us to amplify the voices and perspectives of BAP with a generous donation today.

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Featured image is from The Grayzone

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon:

‘I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose… Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.’See ‘Passenger Pigeon’.

So numerous was this bird that, in the nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon was one of the most abundant birds on Earth.

In 1914 it was extinct.

While new settlements kept reducing the bird’s habitat, more importantly, it was literally hunted from the sky. Shot for its meat.

So I have two questions for you? When is the last time that you saw a flock of birds so vast that ‘the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse’? And when did you last see a flock of just 20 birds?

Sobering to ponder, isn’t it?

The origin of birds

Birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic and in the 65 million years since the extinction of the rest of the dinosaurs, this ancestral lineage diversified into the major groups of birds alive today. See ‘The origin of birds’.

Because they did not exist during the first five mass extinction events on Earth, birds have been spared the widespread extinctions suffered by those species that did exist in earlier eras.

Extinctions of birds in prehistory and history

Nevertheless, the fossil record tells us of the existence of prehistoric birds that became extinct before the Late Quaternary (that is, the past half to one million years) and thus occurred in the absence of significant human interference – see ‘List of fossil bird genera’– while various sources tell us of both prehistoric and historic bird species, including flightless megafauna birds, that became extinct between 40,000 BCE and 1500 AD and ‘was coincident with the expansion of Homo sapiens beyond Africa and Eurasia, and in most cases, anthropogenic factors played a crucial part in their extinction, be it through hunting, introduced predators or habitat alteration’. See ‘List of Late Quaternary prehistoric bird species’.

Of course, there is an even wider range of evidence of bird extinctions since 1500. See ‘List of recently extinct bird species’. Most notably perhaps, given the symbolism it has since acquired, the dodo, a flightless bird of Mauritius, was driven to extinction by 1681 but not before it was carefully drawn. See ‘Dodo’.

How many bird species are there on Earth now?

While one recent estimate – see ‘Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity’ – indicates that Earth may be the home to one trillion species (the vast bulk of which are microorganisms such as bacteria, archaea and microscopic fungi), of which only an estimated 8.7 million species fall into the usual and simpler categories of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles, the most recent research conducted by George F. Barrowclough, Joel Cracraft, John Klicka and Robert M. Zink and published in 2016 indicated that there are just 18,043 species of birds worldwide. See ‘How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter?’

Somewhat controversially – see ‘New Study Doubles the World’s Number of Bird Species By Redefining “Species”’– this figure is nearly twice as many as previously thought because the study focused on ‘hidden’ avian diversity: birds that look similar to one another or were thought to interbreed but are actually different species. In any case, whether there are just 10,000 species of birds, 11,000+ as estimated by the recognized international authority BirdLife International – see ‘Introducing the IUCN Red List’–  or even18,000, just like other species of life on Earth, birds are now under siege in a way they have never been before.

Killing birds in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

More than 100 years have passed since the passenger pigeon became extinct. However, while one might have hoped that humans had become more adept at nurturing populations of birds, the reality is that we are continuing to drive bird populations to extinction. Moreover, we are now doing this with breathtaking efficiency, slaughtering birds by the millions in ever-shortening timeframes.

As a result, the fate of the passenger pigeon has been replicated many times over with a vast number of bird species passing through the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s eight preliminary categories – Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild – before reaching the ninth and final category: Extinct. See ‘IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria’. At the moment, the ‘IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’ identifies 14% of remaining bird species as ‘threatened with extinction’. Also see ‘Introducing the IUCN Red List’.

Of course, this ongoing assault on birds is well documented in the scientific literature, along with descriptions of long-standing causes as well as those that are more recent.

In recently published research on the status of birds in North America, Dr. Kenneth V. Rosenberg led an international team of scientists from seven institutions in analyzing the population trends of 529 bird species on the North American continent. Their study quantified, for the first time, the total decline in bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada: a loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds, with devastating losses among birds in every biome, since 1970. Moreover, their research revealed that ‘declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species – those once considered common and widespread are also diminished’. See ‘Decline of the North American avifauna’ and ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Like scholars researching dramatic declines and extinctions of other species, such as insects, Rosenberg and his colleagues stress that their results have ‘major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend’. While species extinctions ‘have defined the global biodiversity crisis’, extinction ‘begins with loss in abundance of individuals that can result in compositional and functional changes of ecosystems’. Hence, the staggering loss of bird abundance ‘signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function, and services’. See ‘Decline of the North American avifauna’.

In more blunt language ‘the most comprehensive inventory ever done for North American birds, points to ecosystems in disarray because of habitat loss and other factors that have yet to be pinned down’. See ‘Billions of North American birds have vanished’. And, yet more bluntly: ‘The scale of loss portrayed in the [Rosenberg et.al.] study is unlike anything recorded in modern natural history.’ See ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Even more importantly, however, pointing out that the study results ‘transcend the world of birds’, Rosenberg explained that ‘These bird losses are a strong signal that our human-altered landscapes are losing their ability to support birdlife’ and ‘that is an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.’ See ‘Vanishing: More Than 1 in 4 Birds Has Disappeared in the Last 50 Years’.

Is North America alone in its decimation of bird populations? Far from it. Other research and data have revealed that ‘farmland birds in Europe have declined by over 50 per cent collectively in the last 30 or 40 years’ according to Professor Richard Gregory, head of species monitoring and research at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in the UK where, according to Martin Harper, director of conservation at the RSPB, ‘Our beleaguered farmland birds have declined by 56 per cent between 1970 and 2015 along with declines in other wildlife linked to changes in agricultural practices, including the use of pesticides’.

And, Professor Romain Julliard, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, confessed his ‘shock’ when the latest research revealed that France has lost one-third of its birds in the past 15 years in what is being labeled a ‘dramatic collapse’ and ‘ecological catastrophe’ particularly because the decline has accelerated dramatically in recent years. See ‘“Shocking” decline in birds across Europe due to pesticide use, say scientists’.

In Germany, bird populations are vanishing with scientists using words like ‘decimated’ and ‘collapse’ to describe the enormity of the problem. In a recent study of government data, the German environmental organization Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) estimated ‘that more than 25 million birds [15% of the country’s total bird population] disappeared from Germany over the past 12 years’. See ‘Über zwölf Millionen Vogelbrutpaare weniger in Deutschland’, ‘Insect and bird populations declining dramatically in Germany’ and ‘“Decimated”: Germany’s birds disappear as insect abundance plummets 76%’. But why?

While habitat destruction and other factors played roles, scientists have also long linked pesticide use to insect decline – a reasonable assumption given that killing insects is the purpose of pesticides – and research clearly demonstrates that pesticides are killing more than target insects. For instance, a 2008 study demonstrated low but persistent levels of a common neonicotinoid pesticide in aquatic ecosystems can kill off or reduce the growth of insects (such as mosquitoes) that have an acquatic phase. See ‘Acute and Chronic Toxicity of Imidacloprid to the Aquatic Invertebrates Chironomus tentans and Hyalella azteca under Constant- and Pulse-Exposure Conditions’ and ‘“Decimated”: Germany’s birds disappear as insect abundance plummets 76%’.

In essence, the problem is that killing the insects is tantamount to killing the birds that feed on them.

Another recent study came to the same conclusion. The study, conducted in the Lake Constance area in southern Germany, found that the population of six of the most common birds had ‘declined massively’. According to Hans-Guenther Bauer of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology: ‘These are truly shocking figures, especially when you consider that the decline in birds began decades before our first data collection in 1980.’ Why is it happening? According to Bauer, a key reason for the decline is the loss of food. ‘This confirms what we have long suspected. The death of insects caused by humans has a massive impact on our birds.’ To stem the tide of losses, scientists are calling for a rethink in agricultural and forestry policy including ‘drastic restrictions on insecticides and herbicides in agriculture, forestry, public areas and private gardens’ and significantly less fertilization. See ‘Scientists fear “collapse” of bird populations in Germany’.

As is the case elsewhere around the world, birds in Africa also face a wide variety of threats, the most significant of which are habitat fragmentation, degradation and destruction as well as direct impacts including hunting and trapping (mainly for meat and trafficking). See ‘Multiple threats are driving threatened birds towards extinction in Africa’.

But nowhere is safe with the killing of migratory birds in China – see ‘Market trade is fuelling the killing of migratory birds in Northern China’– and various factors adversely impacting penguins in Antarctica – see ‘Climate-driven reductions in krill abundance have caused Adélie penguin declines’– just two more of many examples that could be cited.

Illegal hunting and trapping of birds

According to Birdlife International, the organization responsible for monitoring the welfare of birds for the IUCN’s Red List, ‘The illegal killing and taking of wild birds remains a major threat on a global scale’ with recent examples including the illegal poisoning of vultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, the illegal shooting of raptors in Europe and North America, the illegal trapping of passerines (perching birds) in Asia and the illegal capture for the bird trade in South America.

For example, based on extensive research over many years in relation to bird killing during migratory flights across the Mediterranean and through Northern and Central Europe and the Caucasus, BirdLife International has compiled a series of reports. These reports document massive illegal killing of birds, often in ways that constitute torture, and totaling in excess of 25 million birds annually, including birds of species that are threatened with extinction. For recent reports, see ‘The Killing 2.0: A View to a Kill’, ‘Assessing the scope and scale of illegal killing and taking of birds in the Mediterranean, and establishing a basis for systematic monitoring’ and ‘Review of illegal killing and taking of birds in Northern and Central Europe and the Caucasus’. For a more detailed scientific report on this issue, see ‘Preliminary assessment of the scope and scale of illegal killing and taking of birds in the Mediterranean’.

But if you would simply prefer to be revolted, then watch BirdLife’s one minute video: ‘Help us STOP illegal #birdkilling’. Or read a straightforward account of how ‘innocent’ human behaviours can be deadly for birds, in this case by ‘vacuuming’ millions of sleeping birds into oblivion each year during olive harvesting at night. See ‘Millions of Birds Killed by Nighttime Harvesting in Mediterranean’.

Unfortunately, if you think the descriptions and video of birdkilling above are bad, you won’t be impressed with the sheer insanity that militarized humans can display: ‘The Farmagusta area of Cyprus comes out as the worst place for illegally killing birds in the Mediterranean, while the British Territory in Cyprus is also affected, with the Dhekelia UK military base seeing hundreds of thousands of birds killed each autumn. The Ministry of Defence has started a programme to remove illegally planted trees and shrubs in the area, which trappers use for cover and to lure birds in.’ See ‘Millions of Birds Killed in the Mediterranean’. So, instead of ordering soldiers to stop shooting birds while using a combination of education and law enforcement measures to prevent civilians doing so, they removed ‘illegally planted trees and shrubs’!

Wild Bird trafficking

Another major killer of birds is the wildlife trade. Birds are often killed as a ‘byproduct’ of the trade in exotic birds, most of which is illegal, but which is a multi-billion dollar a year industry along with human, weapons, currency and drug trafficking. Equally importantly, however, once traded, birds no longer form part of their original habitat and hence they are lost as contributing and breeding members of that ecosystem. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), species listed in Appendix I of the Convention are considered to be threatened with extinction and are not allowed to be traded commercially. There are currently 161 bird species on Appendix I. However, birds included on Appendix II are allowed to enter international trade ‘under specific controlled circumstances’; there are 1,300 bird species on this appendix. See ‘Wild Bird Trade and CITES’ and ‘CITES Appendices I, II and III’.

In theory, state parties are obliged to develop national legislation effectively implementing the obligations of the Convention including setting sustainable quotas for Appendix II species. But I am sure that you can imagine how well this regime works given the incredibly profitable wildlife trafficking industry, in which birds are a crucial component. In fact, ‘one third (3,337) of living bird species [that is, 2,000 species more than those that are “legal”] have been recorded as traded internationally for the pet trade and other purposes’. Of these species, 266 (that is, 8% of those internationally traded) are considered globally threatened. See ‘The Red List Index for internationally traded bird species shows their deterioration in status’.

And if the domestic trade in birds is taken into account as well, then ‘Nearly 4,000 bird species involving several million individuals annually are subject to domestic or international trade with finches, weavers, parrots and raptors being some of the most heavily affected groups.’ See ‘Wild Bird Trade and CITES’.

For a candid account of bird trafficking at its origin which describes the fate of macaw chicks being stolen from their forest nests in Ecuador, see ‘Wildlife Trafficking’.

Seabirds

In relation to seabirds, one recent study found that the global population of these birds declined by 70% between 1950 and 2010 as a result of a multiplicity of threats. These threats included ‘entanglement in fishing gear, overfishing of food sources, climate change, pollution, disturbance, direct exploitation, development, energy production, and introduced species (predators such as rats and cats introduced to breeding islands that were historically free of land-based predators)’. See ‘Population Trend of the World’s Monitored Seabirds, 1950-2010’.

Another study concluded just recently, was ‘the first objective quantitative assessment of the threats to all 359 species of seabirds’ and identified the main threats to their survival while outlining priority actions for their conservation. Using the standardized ‘Threats Classification Scheme’ developed for the IUCN Red List to objectively assess threats to each species, a team of ten scientists identified the top three threats to seabirds – in terms of number of species affected and average impact – to be as follows: invasive alien species (particularly rats and cats) which affected 165 species across all of the most threatened groups; bycatch in fisheries which ‘only’ affected 100 species but with the greatest average impact; and the climate catastrophe which affected 96 species. ‘Overfishing, hunting/trapping and disturbance were also identified as major threats to seabirds.’ The study emphasized that 70% of seabirds, especially those that are globally threatened, face multiple threats. For the three most threatened groups of seabirds – albatrosses, petrels and penguins – it is essential to tackle both terrestrial and marine threats to reverse declines. See ‘Threats to seabirds: A global assessment’.

In addition, however, another problem that has been getting insufficient attention is the result of the expanding impacts of the rapidly increasing levels of ocean acidification, ocean warming, ocean carbon flows and ocean plastics. Taken in isolation each of these changes clearly has negative consequences for the ocean. All these shifts taken together, however, result in a rapid and serious decline in ocean health and this, in turn, adversely impacts all species dependent on the ocean, including seabirds. Moreover, on top of these problems is the issue of oxygen availability given that oxygen in the air or water is of paramount importance to most living organisms. As the recently released report ‘Ocean deoxygenation: Everyone’s problem. Causes, impacts, consequences and solutions’ describes in some detail, oxygen levels are currently declining across the ocean.

But to graphically illustrate just one of the threats to seabirds, consider the impact of our chronic overfishing which is depleting the oceans of fish. In November 2019, thousands of short-tailed shearwater birds migrating from Alaska were washed up dead on Sydney’s iconic beaches in Australia. Moreover, thousands more shearwaters died out at sea in clear confirmation of the incredible fish shortages in the Pacific Ocean. After spending the summer in Alaska, the shearwaters were migrating back to southern Australia to breed: a 14,000km trip over the Pacific that requires the birds to be at full strength.

Unfortunately, vast numbers died due to lack of food because the krill and other fish they feed on have vanished. But if you think the problem only occurred along or at the end of their journey, in fact there had been ‘a series of catastrophic die-offs’ before and shortly after the birds departed to head south with thousands of shearwaters (along with puffins, murres and auklets too) lying dead from starvation on the beaches of Alaska and on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula back in mid-year as well. The overall ‘large die-off’ pattern has been repeating since 2015 with little knowledge of the full extent of the crisis because millions of the birds ‘die at sea’. See ‘Fish all gone!… Millions of small sea birds died since 2015’.

Tragically though, as touched on above, an ocean emptied of fish is not the only hazard that seabirds have no choice but to attempt to navigate. An ocean full of plastic – with concentrations up to 580,000 pieces per square kilometer – is also deceiving many seabirds into attempting to eat pieces of plastic and this only complicates efforts by seabirds to get adequate nutrition. See ‘Threat of plastic pollution to seabirds is global, pervasive, and increasing’ and ‘Nearly Every Seabird on Earth Is Eating Plastic’. This is graphically illustrated in this photo of a dead albatross – see ‘Laysan Albatrosses’ Plastic Problem’ – although, tragically, plastic is not the only non-food item that is consumed by and is killing these majestic birds, with an abandoned US military base on Midway Atoll – where 65% of the global albatross population breeds – playing a vital role too. See ‘Study shows lead-based paint is poisoning albatross chicks at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge’.

But why do seabirds eat plastic instead of correctly identifying food? Well, one recent research project provided ‘the first evidence that, in addition to looking like food, plastic debris may also confuse seabirds that hunt by smell’. See ‘Marine plastic debris emits a keystone infochemical for olfactory foraging seabirds’ and ‘The oceans are full of plastic, but why do seabirds eat it?’

Other threats to birds

Another threat faced by birds in the nuclear age is the outcome of the radioactive contamination of the Earth in many places. For example, while there are ‘severe reductions in species richness and density’ in the regions surrounding the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear catastrophes, surviving birds display a wide range of deformities and dysfunctionalities, notably including impaired brain development as reflected by head volume with its negative implications for cognitive ability and hence viability. See ‘Chernobyl Birds Have Smaller Brains’ and ‘Bird populations near Fukushima are more diminished than expected’.

Yet another threat to birds is posed by the deployment of 5G. ‘Typical effects of radiation from cellular communication antennas on resident, breeding, and migratory birds [include] site abandonment, feather deformation, locomotion problems, weight loss, weakness, reduced survivorship and death.’ Moreover, it can ‘blot out a bird’s perception of the earth’s field, causing the bird to fly in the wrong direction, and also disrupt a bird’s internal clock based on the sun’s changing position’. See ‘5G to Kill the Birds, Bees and Your Loved Ones?’ and ‘Western Insanity and 5G Electromagnetic Radiation’.

Finally, without elaboration, vast numbers of birds are also killed each year by warfare and other military activities – see, for example, ‘The impact of the 1991 Gulf War oil spill on bird populations in the northern Arabian Gulf – a review’ – by industrial activity and accidents – see, for example, ‘Effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Birds: Comparisons of Pre- and Post-spill Surveys in Prince William Sound, Alaska’ – by road and air traffic, the spread of certain avian diseases to previously unaffected species – see ‘Avian diseases are spreading to impact hitherto unaffected populations’ – wind turbines, cats, windows and communication towers, with 7 million birds losing their lives each year in the United States alone to the ‘web-like traps of wire and metal’ used for communication. See ‘Communication Towers Are Death Traps for Threatened Bird Species’. Other birds are now being killed in response to conflict generated between birds. See ‘Climate Change Leading to Fatal Bird Conflicts’. And, of course, ‘domesticated’ birds such as chickens and turkeys are farmed and consumed in prodigiously huge quantities, including for Christmas.

Sadly, too, millions of birds of many species are imprisoned in cages as ‘pets’ denied the freedom that all humans crave for themselves.

So, in essence, if you were a bird, here is a survival strategy that should work. Only live in a habitat that will not be impacted, in any way, by human beings and their activities. That is, don’t live on Earth.

Saving the birds

Given the vast range of threats posed to birdlife by humans – see a straightforward summary of ‘The greatest threats facing Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas today’ which doesn’t mention all threats and those that are emerging – it is clearly going to take a monumental effort on many fronts to contain the killing of birds and avert the ongoing extinction of bird species on Earth.

And, unless you are naive enough to believe that elite-controlled governments or international organizations and processes are going to do something that is actually effective – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – then it is up to us to make the difference. Of course, we can do a few things that are specific to saving birds but the bulk of what must happen is really about saving the biosphere (which includes birds) generally. The biosphere is, after all, one deeply-interconnected living entity.

This is why, according to some biologists, laws that focus on the protection of rare species miss the big picture. Joel Cracraft,  for example, argues that ‘We’re losing the battle because we’re fighting over single endangered species’. Species protection tends to focus on charismatic species – beautiful birds and mammals – and doesn’t value rare ecosystems or collections of species. See ‘New Study Doubles the World’s Number of Bird Species By Redefining “Species”’. Nor does it value the biosphere as a whole.

Still, some superlative efforts have been made on behalf of birds. For example, you can read some inspirational success stories by BirdLife International: ‘10 vital bird habitats saved through conservation action’.

And for one man’s initiative 120 years ago that is having ongoing impact, see ‘How one man changed a Christmas tradition forever – to save birds’.

So you can, of course, support the efforts of Birdlife International and the local, national and other organizations like it. See ‘Welcome to BirdLife’s Globally Threatened Bird Forums’ and, for example, ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’.

Separately from initiatives that focus specifically on birds, if you wish to fight powerfully to save Earth’s biosphere consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a simple program to systematically reduce your consumption and increase your local self-reliance over a period of years. Among many other beneficial environmental outcomes, this will reduce the ongoing destruction of bird habitat to produce the products we all consume.

But given the fear-driven violent parenting and education models that drive all violence in our world and which, among a multitude of other adverse outcomes, generates the addiction of most people in industrialized countries to the over-consumption that is destroying Earth’s biosphere – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – then consider addressing this directly starting with yourself – see ‘Putting Feelings First’ – and by reviewing your relationship with children. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. For fuller explanations, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you wish to campaign strategically to defend birds against particular threats, such as the climate catastrophe, military violence or the deployment of 5G, for example, consider joining those campaigning to halt these and other threats as well. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy which already includes a comprehensive list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes in two key contexts in ‘Strategic Aims’.

But, whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of fearfully begging elites to act on your behalf as, for example, the antiwar and climate movements are doing (with climate ‘activists’ marginalized at the latest COP25 gathering in Madrid). If we do not focus our efforts on engaging all people who are powerful enough to do so to respond strategically, then we will fail. And our failure will not only be the result of the elite refusing to take the requisite action despite your entreaties but also because the elite, as a group, is powerless to make sufficient difference: only a massive response from the wider population can produce the outcome we now need. For explanations of this, see ‘Why Activists Fail’, ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’ and ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’.

Moreover, in those cases where corrupt or even electorally unresponsive governments are leading the destruction of the biosphere – by supporting, sponsoring and/or engaging in environmentally destructive practices – it might be necessary to remove these governments as part of the effort. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

You might also consider joining the global network of people resisting violence in all contexts, including against the biosphere, by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Do all these options sound unpalatable? Prefer something requiring less commitment? You can, if you like, do as most sources suggest: nothing (or its many tokenistic equivalents). I admit that the options I offer are for those powerful enough to comprehend and act on the truth. Why? Because there is so little time left and I have no interest in deceiving people or treating them as unintelligent and powerless. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

Conclusion

Birds are being killed with ruthless efficiency by human beings and their activities all over the world. Obviously, this is an unmitigated tragedy for Earth’s birds, the biosphere as a whole and those humans who love life generally. But what are the practical implications of this ongoing bird killing for us?

Well just as the death of one canary in a coal mine warned miners about their dangerous environment, the mass death of birds is yet another warning that we are destroying the planetary biosphere.

However, in this case, we are not treating the canary’s death as a warning and, even if we were, it does not mean that we can escape because there is nowhere else to go.

In short, if we don’t save the birds, we won’t save ourselves.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Sierra Club

“Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child’s cry, a blazing star hung over a stable, and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven’t forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, with the sound of bells, and with gifts… We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled, all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It’s his birthday we’re celebrating. Don’t let us ever forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most. And then, let each put in his share, loving kindness, warm hearts, and a stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”—The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?

A singular number of churches across the country are asking those very questions, and their conclusions are being depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

These nativity scenes are a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer risked his life to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”

As the parable states:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”

This is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebrations and gift-giving, we would do well to remember that what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

What are the real interests of the U.S. and corporations in the region? Freedom, democracy, human rights? No. Their goal is to preserve imperialist domination of our natural resources

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Our America is again suffering escalating aggression by U.S. imperialism and local oligarchies. The region is experiencing a sad reality involving dangerous turmoil and socio-political instability, promoted by Washington. The hemisphere’s most reactionary forces are attacking sovereign governments with coups, methods of unconventional war, brutal police repression, militarization, unilateral coercive measures, rigged judicial persecution of progressive leaders, while proclaiming the validity of the Monroe Doctrine and McCarthyism.

What are the real interests of the U.S. and corporations in the region? Freedom, democracy, human rights? No. Their goal is to preserve imperialist domination of our natural resources

Is Our America’s Wealth Also Our Curse?

Since European empires first found important resources in the Americas, plundered and colonized our lands, the history of the region’s countries has been the theft of their natural wealth, a story similar to that of other geographical areas on the planet. In our case, Spain, France, Portugal and England came first, in the colonial period; later, the United States and giant transnational corporations. Once our formal independence was won, imperialist economic domination continued, and continues, in most nations in the hemisphere.

“Just like the first Spanish conquistadors, who gave Indians mirrors and trinkets for gold and silver, the United States trades with Latin America. To conserve that torrent of wealth, to seize more and more of America’s resources and exploit its suffering peoples: that is what is hidden behind Washington’s military pacts, military missions and diplomatic lobbies,” warned the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, in the Second Declaration of Havana, February 4, 1962.

Progressive governments challenged monopoly interests when they nationalized, and recovered for the people, a large portion of their natural resources. These economic emporiums, which see the world as a cake to be divvied up, cannot accept losing the “juicy slice” that is Latin America and the Caribbean.

Suffice it to say that several countries in the region hold a significant portion of the world’s mineral deposits: 68% of the world’s lithium (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia), 49% of silver (Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Mexico), 44% of copper (Chile, Peru and, to a lesser extent, Mexico), 33% of tin (Peru, Brazil and Bolivia), 26% of bauxite (Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and Jamaica), 23% of nickel (Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and Dominican Republic), and 22% of iron (Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico), according to the Natural Resources report: Situation and trends for a regional development agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Hence the strategic importance to U.S. interests of this part of the world, also the region closest to its national borders. Any direct or indirect intervention, under any pretext, would be less costly as compared to others carried out in Africa or Asia, although these are not renounced either. A look back at regional history shows the astonishing clarity of the phrase expressed by Simón Bolívar in 1829: the United States “appears destined by providence to plague America with miseries in the name of freedom.”

Washington’s Interest in Venezuela and Brazil

The term petro-aggression refers to the tendency of oil-rich states to be targeted by foreign aggressors, using pretexts of all kinds. The recent wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria) promoted by the United States and its allies have this character.

According to data from the Venezuelan corporation Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), the Hugo Chávez Frías Orinoco Oil Belt is the largest oilfield in the world. On December 31, 2010, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) made official the certification of these reserves conducted by the country’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mining. In this way, OPEC “revealed the true situation of the oilfields that exist in the Hugo Chávez Frías Oil Orinoco Belt, with the certification of 270,976 million barrels (MMbls) of heavy and extra-heavy crude oil… With this certification, in addition to the certified reserves of 28,977 MMbls of light and medium crudes, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela totals 299,953 MMbls, attesting to the fact that the country holds the largest reserve of crude on the planet,” states PDVSA in its Oil Sovereignty Notebooks Collection.

According to the publication, Venezuela has 25% of OPEC’s reserves and 20% of those known on a world scale – oil that could provide for the country’s development over the next 300 years, at a recovery rate of 20%.

The history of Latin America has been one of plunder and the theft of our natural wealth. Photo: Heinrich Bóll Foundation

Likewise, in 2007, Petróleo Brasileiro S. A. (Petrobras) announced the discovery of substantial oil and natural gas resources in reservoirs located beneath an impermeable layer of salt on the country’s coastline, deposited 150 million years ago. The discoveries in Brazil’s pre-salt reserves are among the most important in the world, during the last decade. These reservoirs contain a large volume of excellent quality light oil, with significant commercial value, according to information from Petrobras.

The Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy highlights that the pre-salt field is currently one of the most important sources of oil and gas on the planet, and that around 70% of the nation’s reserves are located in these areas.

The Lithium Triangle in South America

Who doubts that the recent coup in Bolivia, promoted by the United States, was motivated by economic and political interests? The nationalization of hydrocarbons and strategic companies led by President Evo Morales meant economic freedom for Bolivia, but also a blow to the energy monopolies. For imperialism it was intolerable that the Bolivian people recover earnings from oil and gas, or that U.S. companies lose out on the business of mining a coveted mineral like lithium, in the nation with 30% of the world’s deposits.

This metal is referred to as “white gold” or “the mineral of the future” for many reasons. Its chemical properties make it the lightest solid element known, with half the density of water, excelling as an efficient conductor of heat and electricity. These electrochemical properties make lithium ideal for electric batteries (Li-Ion batteries), essential to the manufacture of electronic devices (cell phones, tablets, etc.) and electric cars, among other uses.

Access to this mineral is now at the center of global disputes. “Coincidentally,” the world’s largest known reserves are located in the so-called Lithium Triangle, in the border region between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Some 68% of the global reserves are concentrated here, and Bolivia has 30%, with the largest deposit on the planet in the Uyuni salt flats; Chile has 21%, and Argentina 17% of the total, according to a study published in the Revista Latinoamericana Polis, quoted by RT.

Some analysts are already predicting future wars over lithium, as has occurred with oil. Another sign to alert those of us south of the Rio Bravo, all the way to Patagonia, as to the importance of defending the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, against the voracity of the United States and local oligarchies. Only regional unity can prevent a new predatory war and the balkanization in Our America.

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Trump was elected president in 2016 partly because he railed against America’s wasteful wars.  So, what did his advisers talk him into?  A mini-surge of troops to Afghanistan.  I still recall the odd news of Trump being shown photos of Afghan women in skirts (vintage 1972) to convince him that westernization and modernization of Afghanistan was possible.

Several thousand additional U.S. troops were sent to Afghanistan in 2017, predictably achieving nothing of note.  A little more than two years later, we have another item of “big” news today, according to CNN:

The Trump Administration is preparing to announce a long-awaited reduction of US troops in Afghanistan, a senior administration official confirmed to CNN. There are between 12,000 and 13,000 US troops in the country right now, and the US has maintained a solid presence throughout the 18-year war in the area. This drawdown would remove up to 4,000 troops, with more possible reductions in the future, the official said. That matches the claim Trump made on Fox News Radio in August that his administration would take the number “down to 8,600.” The reduction comes at the same time the US is restarting peace talks with the Taliban, and some worry the troop drawdown could be seen as a concession to the terrorist group.

Where to begin with this CNN snippet?

1.  The “reduction” is not a reduction but a return to previous troop levels at the end of the Obama administration.
2. The U.S. “has maintained a solid presence”?  Good god.  You’d never know about all the bombing, droning, and killing the U.S. has done over the last 18+ years.  Or is that the “solid presence” we’ve been maintaining?
3. The troop “drawdown” as a “concession” to the Taliban?  Guess what: The Taliban aren’t going anywhere, and they’re winning.  A few thousand U.S. troops, either as a “plus-up” or “drawdown,” have had and will have no impact on the reality on the ground.

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or do both.  Perhaps my dad put it best: “We laugh to hide the tears.”

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Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

In a joint statement between NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, the latter announced last Thursday that the Bulgarian Black Sea city of Varna is a willing new home of NATO’s Naval Force Coordination Center. NATO’s Maritime Headquarters is currently located in the United Kingdom, but Stoltenberg thanked his Bulgarian counterpart for its “strong commitment” and “strong focus” on so-called “Black Sea security.” By Black Sea security, it was of course meant that they want to contain Russia.

As revealed by Stoltenberg, “NATO as an alliance has stepped up our presence in the Black Sea region, in the air, on land, but also at sea, with also more naval exercises.” The potential establishment of a NATO Coordination Center on the Black Sea is an obvious attempt by the U.S.-led NATO to duplicate infrastructure and missile systems in the region aimed against Russia and is accelerating because of NATO’s complex relations with Turkey. Given that they cannot control the Black Sea region on their own because of the complex geopolitical situation, a NATO presence in Varna is very important as it is close to Russia’s ports and Ukraine, in which the latter can be used provocatively.

However, as NATO is aimed against Russia, Bulgaria now risks becoming a legitimate target for Russian strategic forces. NATO hopes that by using Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia, all Black Sea countries, Russia can be contained in the event that Turkey truly becomes rogue against the alliance and does not block Russia from leaving the Black Sea via the Bosporus and Dardanelles. These strategic straits are crucial for Russia’s maritime trade, and it is expected by NATO that Turkey would block these water lanes in the event of a hypothetical war against the Eurasian Giant.

NATO is working closely with Georgia that has openly announced its desires to join NATO and is well on the path of becoming a member. On the opposite side of the Black Sea and neighboring Bulgaria to the north is Romania, whose air bases, are for U.S. use. In Ukraine, an American center was built, which is basically a military base. Bulgaria’s latest desire for American servitude shows that Washington’s interests are through all NATO structures in all countries in the Black Sea region, besides Turkey. Although Turkey has mostly been a loyal NATO member, its recent independent policies under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has caused worry and angst with leading NATO countries.

The 1936 Montreux Convention, which gives Turkey control of passage through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, regulates the transit of naval warships, but also guarantees the passage of civilian ships during peacetime. Because of that convention and complicated relations with Turkey, the possibility of a large number of U.S. warships being passed through is precluded. For these reasons, Washington are looking for ways to destroy that convention.

The truth remains that only Turkey and Greece have the potential capability to block Russia in the Black Sea. It is for this reason that the U.S. has turned to Greece as a Plan B. Although It may appear at first that the combined strength of Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Georgia could be enough to contain Russia in the Black Sea, their combined navies actually do not have the strength to challenge Russia in the Black Sea without the participation of Turkey. However, Russia still faces significant problems as not only it can be opposed in the Black Sea, but Russia will still have to navigate into the Greek-controlled Aegean Sea. Any full NATO participation against Russia in the Black Sea region will be highly problematic for Moscow.

Therefore, with Bulgaria’s continued submission into NATO interests, Russia will be forced to identify all of these facilities in Bulgaria, as well as Romania and other countries, as legitimate military targets as the U.S. and NATO have already put Russia in an unenviable position.

It remains to be seen how the general Bulgarian people view these latest provocations considering that the root of Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman yolk was only achieved because of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) and there is still strong Orthodox solidarity. However, with Bulgaria willingly wanting to open a NATO Naval Center on its territory, and the country’s political establishment being controlled by Atlanticists, it is unlikely that Bulgaria will retract from its anti-Russian agenda anytime soon. Regardless, the opening of a NATO Naval Command Center on the Black Sea will be a serious concern and one that Moscow’s policymakers must immediately consider.

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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 InfoBrics

Emboldened by a landslide electoral triumph last week, gaining a parliamentary majority, getting no-Brexit/Brexit done and passing anti-BDS legislation are two Boris Johnson-led Tory priorities.

More below on his aim to compromise free expression in Britain.

Efforts to enact anti-boycotting Israel legislation in the US failed so far, including the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (2017) and Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 (SASME).

On February 5, the latter measure was passed in the Senate, not the House. According to Gov Track, it stands a 3% chance of becoming US law.

Following Senate passage, the ACLU said the measure “encourage(s) states to pass unconstitutional laws that would require government contractors — including teachers, lawyers, speech pathologists, newspapers and journalists, and even students who want to judge high school debate tournaments — to certify that they are not participating in politically-motivated boycotts against Israel.”

Banning or otherwise compromising the right to boycott flagrantly violates the First Amendment, senior ACLU legislative counsel Kathleen Ruane, saying at the time:

“Adoption by the Senate trampled on the First Amendment rights of all Americans (by endorsing) McCarthy-era tactics…”

“(T)he right to boycott…is protected under the First Amendment.”

SASME has nothing to do with “improv(ing) defense and security…in the Middle East” – everything to do with banning constitutionally guaranteed views on all issues, no matter how divergent from Washington’s agenda – notably criticism of Israeli apartheid rule.

Congressional Anti-Boycott legislation sought to punish US individuals and entities engaged in or supporting a boycott against nations allied with Washington – specifically with Israel in mind, notably by wanting legitimate BDS activities banned.

The measure lacked majority congressional support. If similar legislation is enacted ahead, US authorities will have a formidable new weapon to use against views considered politically objectionable — in violation of the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings.

According Palestine Legal, 27 US states adopted anti-boycott legislation, 14 others considering it — as of November 26, 2019, adding:

“In response to the growing movement for Palestinian freedom, over 100 measures targeting boycotts and other advocacy for Palestinian rights have been introduced in state and local legislatures and the US Congress since 2014.”

In February 2016, a Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) statement said the following:

“For decades, Israel has failed to uphold its duties as Occupying Power and has instead deepened its occupation and regime of colonialism and apartheid,” adding:

“Human rights violations rising to the level of international crimes, including unlawful killings, torture, forced transfer, and other forms of collective punishment have become the norm.”

“Rather than uphold their responsibilities under international law and take measures to hold Israel accountable, third states have largely turned a blind eye.”

“(T)he Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has grown to provide an important nonviolent counter-narrative and alternative for achieving the enjoyment and exercise of freedom, dignity, and justice for Palestinians.”

Global BDS activism is the most effective way to challenge Israeli colonialism, occupation and apartheid, an essential initiative to preserve, support and strengthen.

The UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is “dedicated to securing Palestinian rights and freedom.” It strongly supports BDS, opposes measures to compromise it.

Tory PM Johnson intends legislation to prohibit UK agencies, other public bodies, and universities from involvement in supporting BDS activism.

The Tory party manifesto states: “We will ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, divestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries,” falsely claiming:

“These undermine community cohesion.”

According to the Jerusalem Post, UK special envoy for post-holocaust matters Eric Pickles called BDS “anti-Semitic and should be treated as such (sic),” adding:

It’s “an attack on the British way of life and British identity” — his remarks made at a conference in Jerusalem last Sunday.

In her so-called “Queen’s Speech” scheduled Thursday in opening the new parliament, prepared by Johnson, she’ll reportedly announce the intention of Tories to adopt anti-boycott legislation.

Britain’s Supreme Court ruled against earlier measures to ban or restrict the right to freely express views publicly.

Speech, press, and academic freedoms are fundamental. Compromising them jeopardizes all other rights.

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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.

Intervention by one nation in the internal affairs of others breaches the UN Charter and other international law.

Non-intervention is a core Charter principle, calling for disputes to be settled “by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

All member states “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…”

The principle of non-intervention protects the sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity of all nations — notions the US ignores in pursuing its imperial agenda.

Unilaterally imposed US sanctions constitute warmaking by other means, a UN Charter breach, the Security Council alone authorized to impose them, not individual nations against others for any reasons.

On December 12, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 18-4 in support of the “Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act of 2019 (S. 2641)” — a Senate floor vote to follow, passage highly likely.

House members passed a similar measure earlier. The legislation has nothing to do with combating ISIS the US created and supports.

It’s all about imposing more illegal sanctions on Russia for helping Syria obtain weapons for self-defense, along with targeting Turkey for buying Russian S-400 air defense missiles, its legal right.

S. 2641 is co-sponsored by GOP Senator James Risch and undemocratic Dem Senator Robert Menendez, Risch saying:

“Now’s the time for the Senate to come together and take this opportunity to change Turkey’s behavior,” adding:

“This is not some minor dustup with this country. This is a drift by this country, Turkey, to go in an entirely different direction than what they have in the past.”

“They’ve thumbed their nose at us, and they’ve thumbed their nose at their other NATO allies.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry responded to proposed US sanctions, saying:

It’s “a new manifestation of disrespect for our sovereign decisions regarding our national security.”

“These initiatives do not have any function other than to harm Turkish-US relations” — calling on Congress to reconsider its hostile action.

Turkish Foreign Minister Melvut Cavusoglu said:

“If sanctions are applied, Turkey will have to respond. We are trying to overcome this issue without sanctions and through dialogue and mutual understanding.”

President Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin slammed the measure, saying:

“It is understood that members of (the US) Congress have shut their eyes and ears to the truth” by ignoring Turkey’s sovereign rights.

Weeks earlier, Trump signed an executive order, authorizing Treasury Department sanctions on Turkey, Secretary Mnuchin saying:

“We can shut down the Turkish economy if we need to.”

A Treasury Department statement said Trump’s EO authorizes Mnuchin to sanction “designate(d) individuals and entities of the government of Turkey…”

On Sunday, Erdogan threatened to “close down (Turkey’s) Incirlik (airbase) and (the) Kurecik” radar station in response to hostile US legislation, adding:

“If they are threatening us with the implementation of these sanctions, of course we will be retaliating.”

“It is very important for both sides that the US does not take irreparable steps in our relations.”

“We regret that the polarization in US domestic politics has had negative consequences for us and that some groups abuse developments about our country for their own interests…”

Pentagon personnel are located at other Turkish military bases. They could be ordered out if a significant breach in bilateral relations occurs.

According to retired Russian Col. Mikhail Khordarenok, losing Ircilik “would seriously reduce both (US regional) defense and offense capabilities.”

Located 155 miles from the Syrian border, around 5,000 US military personnel are stationed there, along with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads.

Hardened aircraft shelters protect US warplanes. If legislation hostile to Turkish interests is signed into law by Trump, uneasy bilateral relations will move closer to rupturing — notably if Erdogan follows through on his threat to “close down Incirlik and (the) Kurecik” radar station.

He’s further angered by unanimously adopted Senate legislation last week, recognizing the 1915 Ottoman Armenian genocide during WW I.

In response, he said:

“We are not going to stand empty-handed. Let me say very clearly and openly: Is it possible to speak about America without mentioning (native) Indians?”

“It is a shameful moment in US history. Similar things happened in Africa. Is it possible to put aside the French massacres in Rwanda, Algeria?”

“They did slave trade in cells from Senegal to America. What will we do to explain these to the international community?”

“We have documents in our archive. We will reveal that the history of the West is the history of racism and colonialism.”

“While all these massacres and genocides are standing, they cannot say anything to the nation which has a proud history like us.”

According to Ankara academic Huseyin Bagci, “losing” Turkey would be a major US strategic defeat.

“Unless Washington can get its story straight, and Congress take a new line, (it) may become a reality” — while Russian/Turkish relations grow stronger.

A Final Comment

US war secretary Mark Esper intends meeting with his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar over the threat to shut down Incirlik and the Kurecik radar station, saying:

“I need to talk to my defense counterpart to understand what they really mean and how serious they are,” adding: “(T)his is a alliance matter, (Erdogan’s) commitment to” NATO.

Main Turkish CHP opposition party deputy chairman Veli Agbaba expressed support for closing these bases, saying:

“We are tired of repeating this for nine years. They established a US base in the middle of Anatolia…Does Turkey need to be attacked (for the bases) to be closed?”

He urged immediate closure of the facilities that “pose a threat to Turkey.” They’re US bases “disguised” as NATO ones, Turkish lawmakers “not allowed…inside.”

Hostile US legislation and threats risk a major rupture in bilateral relations, where things appear to be heading if US actions toward Turkey don’t change.

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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.

In 2002, John Kiriakou captured the Guantanamo prisoner who drew those sickening pictures. Abu Zubaydah has a constitutional right to face his accusers in court, or be released, Kiriakou says.

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The New York Times last week published shocking drawings by Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah showing in graphic detail the types of tortures he endured at the hands of CIA officers and contractors at secret prisons around the world.  The drawings were sickening.  With a child’s simplicity, they showed the irrational cruelty of the CIA’s torture program, which weakened our country, violated domestic and international law and ended up saying so much more about us, as Americans, than it did about the terrorists who wished us harm.

The Times did its duty of reminding us what monsters the CIA produced in the early years of its so-called war on terror, people introduced to most Americans in the Senate’s torture report.  These are people such as the CIA’s former Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin.  They include unapologetic torture proponents such as former Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez and current CIA Director Gina Haspel.  They are the creators of the torture program: psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. And in the photos of Abu Zubaydah’s drawing that the Times ran, the CIA dutifully blacked out even the stick-figure sketches of the actual torturers, those CIA officers who sold their souls to break the law, all in honor of that false god called “national security.”

Woefully Inadequate Article

With that said, the Times article, although revelatory in terms of Abu Zubaydah’s personal story, was woefully inadequate.  It never mentioned, for example, how the Obama administration did literally nothing to make any of this right.  Remember former President Barack Obama’s decision to hold no one accountable for the torture program and instead “look forward, not backward?”  That didn’t serve justice.  It just protected the torturers and the criminals who supported them. Remember the promise to close Guantanamo?  It never happened.

And what about that Senate torture report?  We talk about “the Senate torture report” like we actually know what was in it.  We don’t. The 5,500-page report was never released.  Instead, after a battle royal with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Obama finally allowed only a heavily redacted version, less than 700 pages, of the report’s executive summary to see the light of day.  And all of that happened after then-CIA Director and Obama loyalist John Brennan ordered CIA officers to secretly hack into the SSCI’s computer system to see what committee investigators were up to.  Of course, no charges for that were ever filed.

Abu Zubaydah has been in U.S. custody for a long time.  It’s already been nearly 18 years.  I know. I captured him on the night of March 22, 2002, in an al-Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.  We were convinced at the time that he was the third-ranking person in al-Qaeda.  That was wrong.

He was certainly a bad man.  He had founded both of al-Qaeda’s training camps in southern Afghanistan and he had also created an al-Qaeda safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan, called the “House of Martyrs.”  Want to go to Afghanistan to make jihad?  Call Abu Zubaydah.  Already in Afghanistan and you want to go home?  Call Abu Zubaydah.  But he was not the No. 3. He had never even joined al-Qaeda.  And he had never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden.

A Pakistani policeman shot and severely wounded Abu Zubaydah on the night we captured him.  He was then transported to a secret CIA prison to recover and to be tortured.  As you can imagine, he confessed to a wide variety of terrorism-related crimes, whether he had actually committed them or not.  A torture victim will tell his torturer literally anything just to make the torture stop.  None of that information, because it was collected illegally, is admissible in a court of law.

And so, Abu Zubaydah, like every other Guantanamo detainee with the dubious exception of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, sits in solitary confinement year after year without ever having been charged with a crime.

There is only one way out of this national embarrassment.  Abu Zubaydah has a constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law.  He has a right to be tried by a jury of his peers. If he is not charged — if he cannot be charged — with a crime, he must be released. That’s the law.  It’s the American way.

Former President George W. Bush got us into this situation by allowing the likes of his Vice President Dick Cheney to run the country. Barack Obama did nothing to improve the situation.  Indeed, he sided with the CIA at every opportunity.  President Donald Trump (who has publicly supported torture), well…  it’s not even worth having that conversation.  But the bottom line is that what Abu Zubaydah and others have endured in secret prisons and at Guantanamo is not the American way.  It’s not constitutional.  It’s not legal. We have to correct this immediately.

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John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

This carefully research article by Kitty S. Jones (first published on March 20, 2019) provides us with an understanding of what happened to the U.K. on election night, December 12, 2019.

It informs us on the insidious election strategies envisaged by the Tories to destroy the Welfare State, using advanced digital PR technologies, social media and voter profiling procedures, on behalf of  powerful financial interests.

The objective of this dirty game was to suck British voters into electing an incompetent proxy government headed by a prime minister whose mandate (in consultation with the Trump presidency) was to trigger a divisive and deap-seated economic and social crisis. 

According to Kitty S. Jones: 

“Profit-seeking private PR companies are paid to brand, market, engineer a following, build trust and credibility and generally sell the practice of managing the spread of information… Most of these companies use ‘behavioural science’ strategies (a euphemism for psychological warfare) to do so.

It’s a dark world where governments pay to be advised not to talk about “capitalism,” but instead discuss “economic freedom” , “business friendly policies” or the “free market”.

What is described in this article are the techniques used by the Tories to “subvert democracy” in Britain’s snap October 2017 elections. Similar techniques were applied in relation to the December 2019 General Elections, which have led the United Kingdom into a political impasse. 

Michel Chossudovsky, December 16, 2019

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I wrote an article about Cambridge Analytica, the commodification of voter decision making and the marketisation of democracy, along with previous articles about western government strategies for subverting democracy. I have also extensively criticised governments’ use of ‘behavioural economics‘, and the authoritarian “neuroliberal” turn more generally. 

Within the neoliberal framework, it seems that anything which may be commodified and marketised is, including our consumer preferences, Facebook likes, behaviours, emotions, subconscious inclinations, cognitive habits, perceptions and decisions. If companies like Cambridge Analytica could mine and sell our souls, they would do so in much they same way they did their own collective conscience.

The CEO of Cambridge Analytica has been suspended, Alexander Nix, has been suspended. However, Nix is a symptom of a problem, rather than being the problem itself.

Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of a very dirty, subterranean iceberg. It’s worth keeping in mind that without paying clients, among which are governments, antidemocratic companies like this would not thrive and profit. The extensive Public Relations (PR) and ‘strategic communications’ industry, along with the ‘behavioural economics’ technocrats, are all working on sustaining power relations and extending corporate and right wing political interests.

The hidden persuaders behind the Conservative government

During last year’s general election [2017], the government used a number of companies that bear a lot of similarity to Cambridge Analytic during their election campaign.

From the Crosby Textor Group site

The government used data from Experian (paid £683,636.34),
Reed Consultancy (paid £178,558.03),
Google Analytics  (paid £1,020,232.17),
Facebook  (paid £3,177,416.68),

Twitter was paid £56,504.32, to “research, canvass and advertise” their party ‘brand’. And £76,800 was spent advertising through Express Newspapers.

Another company that the Conservatives used for their campaign, paying them £120,000 for market research and canvassing, is Outra. Jim Messina is the executive director, and the team includes Lynton Crosby.

However, Crosby Textor (listed as CTF) also earned £4,037,400 for market research/canvassing.

The Messina Group Inc were also paid £544,153.57 for transport, advertising, market research and canvassing. This company uses data analytics and ‘intelligence’ services. The company conducts “Targeted Ads Programs [….] ensuring precise targeting via Facebook, geo-targeting, zipcodes, IP addresses, and other tactics”.

Crosby and Messina made staggering amounts of money from the Conservative’s election campaign, using three separate, listed companies between them.

The company also says:

Apparently, the Messina Group are in a ‘strategic partnership’ with Outra, “serving as one of Outra’s primary advisors on data, analytics, and ‘customer engagement’.”

(See also: World leaders across 5 continents trust TMG with the highest stakes in politics.)

British electoral law forbids co-ordination between different campaign groups, which must all comply with strict spending limits. If they plan tactics or co-ordinate together, the organisations must share a cap on spending.

Combobulate Limited, which is listed as a management consultancy, earned £43,200 for research/canvassing and for ‘unsolicited material to electors’.

Populus Data Solutions, who say they provide “state of the art data capture”, were paid £196,452 for research/canvasing and ‘unsolicited material to electors’. This company have also developed the use of biometrics – facial coding in particular.

St Ives management services (SIMS) were paid £3,556,030.91, for research/canvasing, ‘unsolicited material to electors’, advertising, overheads and general administration, media and rallies, and manifesto material.

Edmonds Elder Ltd, a digital consultancy, were paid £156,240.00 for advertising. The site  says the company also provides services in vague sounding ‘government affairs’ :

 “We use cutting-edge digital techniques to help government affairs teams make the case for their policy and regulatory positions – harnessing support from communities across the country to ensure a positive outcome.” 

Craig Elder is also the Conservative party’s digital director. Tom Edmonds was the Conservative party’s ‘creative director’ between 2013 and 2015.

Hines Digital  who is a partner of Edmonds Elder Ltd, “is a conservative digital agency that builds strong brands, huge email lists, and big league fundraising revenue for our clients, helping conservative campaigns & causes, and companies, achieve their goals.”

It says on the site that “Hines worked with conservative campaigns & causes in fifteen U.S. states and nine countries.” The company designed the ‘digital infrastructure’ of Theresa May’s leadership campaign launch in 2016, they built her website (but aren’t listed in election expenses.) Hines says:

“That timely initial website launch proved invaluable. Approximately 35% of her overall email list signed up on that first day, a significant shot in the arm on Day One made possible because her team — led in part by our partners at Edmonds Elder—was prepared to capitalize on the day’s earned media through effective online organizing.

Overall, the initial holding page saw a 18% conversion rate on day one — meaning nearly 1/5 people who visited the website signed up to join the campaign. That’s a fantastic response to a site optimized for supporter recruitment.”

And: “We are experts at identifying people online – and targeting them to drive the activity your organisation needs.”

With political adverts that are targeted and ‘dark’, which aren’t fact checked as only the person targeted gets to see them.

Walker Media Limited are a digital marketing and media company, they facilitate Facebook adverts and campaigns, among other services. They were paid £798,610.21 from the Conservatives’ election campaign. One of their other social media marketing campaigns listed on their site is for “The Outdoor and Hunting Industry”.

Simon Davis serves as the Chief Executive Officer at Walker Media Holdings Limited and Blue 449. Davis served as Managing Director of Walker Media at M&C Saatchi plc, a global PR and advertising company, who have worked for the Conservatives before, designing campaign posters and anti-Labour adverts – including the controversial ‘New Labour, New Danger’ one in particular.

There are a few subsidaries of this company which include “harnessing data to find, engage and convert customers efficiently through digital media.” M&C Saatchi acquired the online media ‘intelligence agency’ Human Digital, whose “innovative approach marries rich behavioural insight with robust metrics.”

Under the 1998 Data Protection Act, it can be illegal to process ‘sensitive’ data – a category that includes ‘political opinions’ – without explicit consent from the individuals concerned, though consent is only one of a number of conditions under which sensitive personal data may be legally processed. Despite numerous attempts to contact Conservative HQ last week, the party refused to say if they used any data, modelling or insight gathered during either the election or the referendum campaigns.

There is a whole submerged world of actors making huge profits from data mining and analytics, ‘targeted audience segmentation’, behaviour change techniques, ‘strategic communications and political lobbying. Much of the PR industry is built upon the same territory of interests: financial profit, maintaining power relations and supporting the vested interests of the privileged class. The subterranean operations of the surveillance and persuasion industry and citizen manipulation has become the establishment’s normative tool of authoritarian control, and it is hidden in plain view.

Blue Telecoms were paid £375,882.56 for ‘unsolicited material to electors’ and ‘advertising’. It says on their site that Blue Telecoms is a trading name for Direct Market Solutions Ltd. The company director is Sascha Lopez , a businessman who stood as a local council candidate for the Tories in the 2017 local elections. He is also an active director of the Lopez Group, although that company’s accounts are very overdue, there is an active proposal to strike off on the government’s Companies House page. If directors are late in filing their company accounts, and don’t reply to warnings from Companies House, their company can be struck-off the Companies House register and therefore cease to exist. Other companies he was active in have been liquidated (3) and dissolved (2).

A Channel Four investigation uncovered underhand and potentially unlawful practices at the centre, in calls made on behalf of the Conservative Party. These allegations include:

• Paid canvassing on behalf of Conservative election candidates – illegal under election law.
• Political cold calling to prohibited numbers
• Misleading calls claiming to be from an “independent market research company” which does not appear to exist

The Conservative Party have admitted it had commissioned Blue Telecoms to carry out “market research and direct marketing calls” during the campaign, but insisted the calls were legal.

The government is attempting to align citizen perceptions, decisions and behaviours with the desired outcomes of the government, turning democracy on its head

The internet has rapidly become an environment in which citizens and populations are being sorted, profiled, typed, categorised, ranked and “managed”, based on data mining  mass surveillance and psycho-profiling.

It was only a matter of time before the powerful tools of digital tracking and corporate surveillance, including techniques designed for  manipulating opinions and behaviours, shifted from the realm of PR, product and service marketing to politics and voter targeting. The markets for personal data have always been markets for behavioural control also. And markets of behavioural control are composed of those who sell opportunities to influence behaviour for profit and those who purchase such opportunities.

Profit-seeking private PR companies are paid to brand, market, engineer a following, build trust and credibility and generally sell the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organisation (such as a business, government agency, the media) and the public.

Most of these companies use ‘behavioural science’ strategies (a euphemism for psychological warfare) to do so.

It’s a dark world where governments pay to be advised not to talk about “capitalism,” but instead discuss “economic freedom” , “business friendly policies” or the “free market”.

Austerity is simply translated into “balancing the budget” or “living within our means”.

The political coercion of sick and disabled people to look for work by cutting their lifeline support is “equality and social justice” or “helping to move them closer to employment”.

Propaganda and deception is “strategic communications” and “PR”.

Psychological coercion is “behavioural science”.

The democratic opposition are described as “virtue signallers”, “snowflakes”, “marxists”, “militants” and “the hard left.”

Chris Wylie on Cambridge Analytica, microsurveilance, information weapons and the politics of psychological warfare.

PR is concerned with selling products, persons, governments and policies, corporations, and other institutions. In addition to marketing products, PR has been variously used to attract investments, influence legislation, raise companies’ public profiles, put a positive spin on policies, disasters, undermine citizens campaigns, gain public support for conducting warfare and to change the public perception of repressive regimes.

The revolving door of mutually exclusive political and corporate favour operates by keeping up the spin.

The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach has boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, the recent Channel 4 investigation has revealed.

Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the “dark arts” used by the company to “help” clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.

In one filmed exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”

The excellent Channel 4 News investigation, broadcast on Monday, despite threats of legal action from the company, comes two days after the Observerreported that Cambridge Analytica had unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles in one of the social media company’s biggest data breaches.

Nix detailed the deception, glorified propaganda techniques, entrapment and other dirty tricks that the company would be prepared to pull for money behind the scenes to help its clients. When the Channel 4 reporter asked if Cambridge Analytica could offer investigations into the damaging secrets of rivals, Nix said it worked with former spies from Britain and Israel to look for political dirt. He also volunteered that his team were ready to go further than an ‘investigation’.

“Oh, we do a lot more than that,” Nix said. “Deep digging is interesting, but you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded.

“You know these sort of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption.”

Nix suggested one possible scenario, in which the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, Mark Turnbull, would pose as a wealthy developer looking to exchange campaign finance for land. “I’m a master of disguise,” Turnbull said.

Another option, Nix suggested, would be to create a sex scandal. “Send some girls around to the candidate’s house, we have lots of history of things,” he told the reporter. “We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying.

Facebook seems to have missed its opportunity to get a handle on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, having been told to stay out of its offices by the UK Information Commissioners Office.

Digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg was hired by Facebook yesterday “to conduct a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica,” according to a Facebook announcement. Apparently the private company at the centre of the scandal was happy to give Facebook full access to its servers and systems but the UK Information Commissioners Office (ICO), which is ‘sponsored by the governmental department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, apparently had other ideas.

“On 7 March, my office issued a Demand for Access to records and data in the hands of Cambridge Analytica,” said Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

“Cambridge Analytica has not responded by the deadline provided; therefore, we are seeking a warrant to obtain information and access to systems and evidence related to our investigation.

“On 19 March, Facebook announced that it will stand down its search of Cambridge Analytica’s premises at our request. Such a search would potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.”

It’s not known how long Facebook, via its proxies, had access to Cambridge A’nalytica‘s files and how much investigating it managed to do, but being kicked out by the ICO is presumably a major inconvenience.

The Information Commissioner, Denham, has criticised Cambridge Analytica for being “uncooperative” with her investigation, and she confirmed that the watchdog will apply for a warrant to examine the company’s activities.

It is fundamentally wrong for private companies and authoritarian governments to use /alter public information, use personal information, data mining, psychological profiling, targeted ‘strategic communications’ (a euphemism for propaganda) , ‘behavioural science’, ‘social science insights’ and military grade psyops – in short, deception – in order to manipulate citizens’ decision-making, perceptions and behaviours in order to profit and maintain their power.

All of this has profound and dark implications for democracy, or at least what is left of it. Totalitarians throughout history have sought to change the perceptions, decisions and behaviours of populations. These are the intentions and actions of tyrants.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power. The more informed we are the harder it becomes to deceive us.

We are currently facing an unprecedented threat to the independent media and freedom on the Internet. The ultimate goal is the silencing of any voice of opposition to the mainstream narrative. If these voices get silenced it will be too late, the lie will have defeated the truth: fight-back was never more needed.

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The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, detailing a true history of the nation’s longest official war, reveals nothing new about the war’s futility or about the fact that it was doomed to failure from almost the beginning. The Post fought a legal battle for three years to obtain the documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog agency that interviewed hundreds of officials about their honest assessments of the war.

What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply destructive at worst.

More than 10 years ago I wrote, together with James Ingalls, a critical assessment of the Afghanistan war. The title of our book was Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Those last three words, “the Propaganda of Silence,” are a direct reference to poor media coverage and the irresponsible manner in which the press took an uncritical view of the war. The evidence was there for all to see that the U.S. war was doomed to failure once you scratched beneath the surface of officials’ rosy rhetoric.

The most important function of the Afghanistan Papers is to confirm that government officials have been utterly dishonest with the public about U.S. achievements and progress in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General at SIGAR, admitted to the Post that the documents prove that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The picture that emerges of how insiders have viewed the war is startlingly similar to how critics have portrayed it over the years. Earlier this year I wrote a “Brief History” of the Afghanistan war for Truthdig in which I assessed the early years of the conflict:

The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

In comparison, one economist told SIGAR, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, that he:

… blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

In my history of the war, I also wrote: “Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick.” But, I continued, “The Taliban appears to have had a ‘wait it out’ strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power.”

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that “Obama’s strategy was also destined to fail,” as it relied on “a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” In the end, I concluded: “Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.”

In 2015 I wrote in another piece for Truthdig titled “We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again,” that:

Despite spending billions of dollars—the U.S. offered its largest share of foreign aid to Afghans last year—there is little to show for it. Nearly $10 billion was spent on arming and training Afghan forces. But as the dismal state of the Afghan National Army shows, that money may as well have been poured down the drain.

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers reveal that officials privately knew they were fueling corruption, and that “Much of the money … ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.”

The U.S. has also been lining the pockets of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, who have a long and bloody history going back to the era of Soviet occupation, when the CIA doled out cash to fight its Cold War enemy. In my 2006 book, my co-author and I warned against this practice, devoting a whole chapter to it, titled “Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another.” We suggested that instead of rewarding them with cash and government positions, the U.S. ought to disarm the warlords and help Afghans bring them to justice. The U.S. did the opposite, and the result was entirely predictable.

The Afghanistan Papers confirm that:

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years.

One senior government official told SIGAR, “We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.” American tax dollars have lined the pockets of mass killers to an unimaginable extent. In my 2015 article, I referred specifically to Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was elevated to the position of vice president even though he had been “implicated in numerous atrocities and mass killings.” Among the few new revelations from The Washington Post’s investigative report is the assertion that “the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month ‘to not cause trouble.’ ”

Now the Trump administration is hoping to resume peace negotiations with the Taliban with a plan to reinstall the very regime the U.S. claimed was harboring terrorists and harming Afghans. If the point of the war was to go from point A to point B and then back to point A, with an unimaginably high death toll in between, then by that measure alone the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been a success.

What American officials and the mainstream media has consistently failed to do in Afghanistan is actually pay attention to what ordinary Afghans say and want. The biggest toll of the failed American war has been the death and destruction of lives in a country that was already torn apart by years of war in 2001. We may never get a full accounting of how many Afghans have died or been maimed for life as a direct result of a war that insiders knew was a mistake.

But what we do know is all armed forces in Afghanistan are implicated in war crimes. In 2018, in a little-covered story, Afghans submitted a whopping 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court that “include accounts of alleged atrocities, not only by groups like the Taliban and the ISIS, but also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies.”

The Post’s investigative series is a welcome addition to mountains of evidence that the Afghanistan war is a failure. But it was clear to those of us who had been paying attention that U.S. officials were lying about the war for nearly two decades. The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?

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Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA and affiliates.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

Former Vice President, turned journalist and TV host José Vicente Rangel recently returned to the screen in a big way with an interview with President Nicolas Maduro, in which Maduro shook the hornet’s nest with his comments concerning dollarisation.

Asked about the serious economic problems in the country, Maduro said he did not see the increasingly open presence of the US dollar in everyday transactions (1) as a bad thing, praising it as a mechanism which helps some people supplement their [Bolivar currency] incomes.

Following the interview, Troy began to burn, and continues to smoulder, albeit with low intensity given that news from neighbouring countries is dominating headlines.

Maduro’s opinion received major criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Some described this position as inconsistent and contradictory, while others deemed it improvised, heterodox and legitimising ever deeper inequalities.

Accuracy required

Chavista economist and National Constituent Assembly deputy Jesus Faría made some clarifications regarding what the president said.

“At no time did he hail dollarisation as an economic framework for our country nor did he say that promoting it is part of his economic policy. Likewise, he did not say that the deliberate and open incorporation of dollarisation is in the Bolivarian government’s plans,” Faria says.

The economist also explains that almost all opinions circulating regarding the president’s comments stem from a misrepresentation of his statement, which merely said that this is a situation which exists, is quantifiable, and must be evaluated. According to Faria, the president was observing that the phenomenon has helped some sectors to alleviate their immediate economic situation.

“This has been positive when you consider the impact that US sanctions have had on the foreign exchange revenue generated by our oil industry.” The president referred to a situation that already exists in our economy, which is the growing existence of international payment methods, not just the dollar, in everyday transactions. This has allowed some consumer needs to be met in one way or another in certain sectors. In that context, dollarisation need not surprise anyone. It is normal for a [hard] currency to be incorporated into our economy in the face of the impact which hyperinflation (2) has had on our monetary system,” he continued.

Faría predicts that the dollarisation process is going to be reversed when the accelerated price rises are slowed, which must happen with the revival of the economy and oil production.

“These are plans which are in place, but in the international context in which we are in, they are hampered by the blockade and sanctions,” he said.

He adds that dollarisation has always existed in Venezuela, because the economy depends on oil revenues, which has historically created income in US currency. Therefore, to a very high degree, the economic apparatus has always been determined by the amount of dollars entering the country.

“The incidence of the dollar is an old story. In the last forty years, the price of the [Bolivar] currency has had numerous cycles of peaks and troughs, of much speculation and currency flight. The economy has traditionally been affected by the administration of the foreign exchange systems,” he explained.

Discursive inconsistency

Many of those who have castigated the head of state for his comments point to a lack of coherence with his own discourse in the recent past.

Indeed, Maduro himself and some senior government and party officials have criminalised the dollar, describing it as a factor which detracts from national sovereignty. They also point out that dollarisation is one of the quintessential mechanisms of economic warfare.

This contradiction is even more drastic when one remembers that the US currency has even been outlawed from official references and valuations, rather opting to use Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency or a collection of other foreign currencies, including the euro, the ruble or the yuan.

The president’s defenders claim, however, that this is a tactical change of approach and that it is up to official experts to better explain the importance of this shift.

A heterodox dollarisation

Stemming mainly from the opposition, this criticism relates more to the fact that, in Maduro’s words, dollarisation is not a government policy but a resultant phenomenon which the executive now considers positive.

Assessing this criticism, it is stated that the dollarisation phenomenon is not governed by any public institution nor, in reality, by the financial system. There are no rules of the game or financial requirements which, among other things, allow tax collection.

Pollster Luis Vicente Leon states that

“it does not represent a formal dollarisation of the economy, but a permit for a de facto dual monetary system,” adding that “it is not a process of formal, comprehensive, rational and efficient dollarisation, that helps restore a feeling of economic balance, but a de facto and disorderly generalisation of the use of foreign currencies to respond to the loss of value, confidence and liquidity of the Bolivar currency.”

Another opposition economist, Jose Toro Hardy, has compared what is happening to what he calls “a normal dollarisation.”

He explains that if a coherent policy were to be in place, the Central Bank (BCV) would deliver dollars in exchange for local currency, which would be automatically withdrawn from circulation.

“There are no dollars in the BCV. Atypical dollarisation is taking place, without anyone knowing the origin of most of the dollars circulating,” he says.

At the opinion of far-right opposition banker Oscar García Mendoza, the dollars which nourish the system and generate a certain sense of calm come from drug trafficking. He predicts that this bubble of prosperity will burst and the consequences will be catastrophic.

Inequality

In the revolutionary camp, there are many who cried out after the president’s statement. This criticism focuses on the fact that dollarisation is openly biased: it applies to prices, but not to workers’ wages, which makes it an aggravating factor in social inequalities.

“Corruption and prices are dollarised, the only things left to dollarise are the most important things: wages, pensions and retirement packages,” says a tweeter named Malayo, representing the opinion of a portion of those who depend on Bolivar currency income in the middle of an economy in which green paper reigns supreme.

The complaint comes mostly from public sector employees, given that the private sector has been [partially] imposing dollar wages as a mechanism to retain their workforce, particularly if they are skilled workers.

Sociologist Luis Salas, who briefly served finance minister under Maduro’s first government, has emphasised the political component of the presidential about-face.

In his view, Maduro’s comments prove “how what only a real or imaginary crisis can make happen, how the politically impossible becomes politically ‘inevitable’: a Bolivarian government sympathetic to dollarisation.”

Other dollarisations

In the global context, dollarisation has, in some cases, been a public policy decision, while in others it is a phenomenon closer to the Venezuelan case, that is, a reality that imposes itself.

Officially in Latin America, Panama, Ecuador, El Salvador and the Bahamas are dollarized. Each case has its specificities and peculiarities, but in general US money circulates as an internal currency.

In several other countries across the continent, dollarisation has been proposed, in particular as a possible way out of serious inflationary crises. In almost all of these cases there is already a real circulation of the US currency as a way of saving and preserving the international value of goods and services.

Another example of a country that became dollarised – and a very negative case – is Zimbabwe, which did so about a decade ago and has seen its economic situation deteriorate severely.

Other, non-dollar, foreign currencies are also used in the African country as domestic forms of payment, including the euro, UK sterling, the Australian dollar, as well as currencies of neighbouring countries such as the South African rand and the Batswana pula. This resembles Venezuela, as in the regions bordering Colombia there is a replacement of the Bolivar by the [Colombian] peso more than the US dollar.

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Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis.

Clodovaldo Hernández is a Venezuelan journalist who has written for left leaning news sites Supuesto Negado and Aporrea.

Notes

(1) Since August 2018, when the National Constituent Assembly overturned a law prohibiting foreign currency transactions in Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro pegged the minimum wage to the value of the Petro, legal dollar-based trade has taken off, especially in high-value markets, such as real estate, vehicles, or even phones. This has coincided with the opening up legal exchange shops in some banks, and a 2018 decree enabling some wages to be dollarised.

(2) Recent economic data suggests that Venezuela has technically come out of “hyperinflation.” Nonetheless, inflation is still rampant, despite having slowed since the start of the year.

Featured image: Dollar bills are increasingly common in the Venezuelan economy as a form of payment. (Supuesto Negado)

Over a century ago, the systematic mass extermination and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman Empire took place between 1914 and 1923 (some accounts state 1915-1922). For decades, Turkish and Israeli lobbies in Washington have successfully prevented the United States from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, despite thirty-one other nations having already done so.

Last Thursday, the Senate unanimously passed S.Res.150 which officially commemorates the Armenian Genocide through recognition and remembrance. This was after three consecutive weeks of Washington recruiting three different Republican Senators to veto the resolution. In October, the House passed a similar resolution H.Res.296 affirming the United States record on the Armenian Genocide.

Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) said

“The Senate today joined the House in rejecting Ankara’s gag-rule against honest American remembrance of the Armenian genocide — overriding the largest, longest foreign veto over the US Congress in American history.”

Turkey has accused American lawmakers of politicizing history and summoned their US ambassador back to Ankara in protest. In fear of further damaging relations between Ankara and Washington, US President Donald Trump opposed the resolution. However, that argument doesn’t hold much water considering relations between Turkey and other countries who have already recognized the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks and Kurds have remained in place with little effect on their existing normalization of political and trade relations. Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Brazil, etc. are just a few examples.

Armenia’s closest neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan do not recognize the Armenian Genocide. I asked Andrew Korybko, a political analyst, about Georgia’s reasoning and he said,

“Likely because Turkey is a key trading partner and the two are connected to Azerbaijan with pipelines and now even a railroad, there are considerable economic interests at stake if Georgia recognized the Armenian Genocide, though its relations with Armenia are pretty good even though it hasn’t done that. I don’t think there’s any incentive for it to change its stance”.

According to The Armenian National Institute,

“The Armenian Genocide was perpetrated by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the radical wing of the Young Turk party that seized power in the Ottoman Empire. In their zeal to create a homogeneous society exclusively Turkish and Muslim, the Young Turk radicals sought to exclude the Christian populations that had inhabited Asia Minor. Through expulsions, expropriations, and extermination, by 1923 no Christians to speak of, including Assyrians and Greeks remained across Anatolian Turkey”.

Historical accounts identify three Ottoman Empire leaders known as the “Three Pasha’s” as the architects of this ideologically motivated genocide; Ismail Enver, Ahmed Djemal, and Mehmet Talaat. However, there is another leading figure in the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire Dr. Mehmet Nazim (also known as Nazim Bey or simply Dr. Nazim) that along with other members of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa special organization played an important role. Dr. Nazim was from a Dönmeh background, a group of Sabbatean crypto-Jews who converted publicly to Islam but retained their beliefs in secret.

During a CUP meeting Dr. Nazim made a chilling speech,

“If we remain satisfied with the sort of local massacres which took place in Adana and elsewhere in 1909…if this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished.” And continued by saying, “the procedure this time will be one of total annihilation, it is necessary that not even one single Armenian survive this annihilation”.

During a secret meeting of the Young Turks, Dr. Nazim said,

“The massacre is necessary. All the non-Turkish elements, whatever nation they belong to, should be exterminated”.

Two months prior to the Armenian Genocide in February 1915, Dr. Nazim Bey declared a new government policy for the total annihilation of Armenian’s stating his plan of “freeing the fatherland of the aspirations of this cursed race” referring to the Armenians.

Dr. Nazim fled to Germany three years later and was sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the Armenian genocide but this was never carried out, he was however executed for attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1926.

A lesser known fact is that the Kurds played a significant role in the massacre of Armenian, Assyrian, Aramean, and Yezidi people as well, in order to win favor with Turkey and in hopes of claiming their lands. Five years ago, Ahmed Turk, a Kurdish politician in Turkey, declared that the Kurds have their share of “guilt in the genocide, too,” and apologized to the Armenians. “Our fathers and grandfathers were used against Assyrians and Yezidis, as well as against Armenians. They persecuted these people; their hands are stained with blood. We as the descendants apologize,” Turk said. 33 years after the Armenian Genocide the UN Genocide Convention was adopted.

By recognizing and condemning the first genocide of the century and providing relief to the survivors of the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, and other Christians the United States is taking a step in the right direction, but one can’t help but wonder when will the United States be held responsible for their many massacres and the deaths that have recently resulted from their supposed “war on terror”.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

When it comes to Mexico, one can at this point easily spot the signs of a brewing U.S. regime change operation. Since Mexico’s president Andre Manuel López Obrador was elected last year, he’s been thoroughly vilified by the U.S. media. After Brazil’s fascist president Jair Bolsonaro was elected, the Financial Times’ John Paul Rathbone even argued that Obrador is a greater threat to liberal democracy than Bolsonaro. Such views of Obrador have come from claims that he’s an authoritarian, or “too strong” as the Washington Post recently put it.

From the perspective of the global capitalist class, Obrador is indeed a much bigger threat than Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s agenda of neoliberal hyper-capitalism made plutocrats around the world celebrate his election, while the presence of the anti-neoliberal Obrador has rattled markets. In March, Obrador declared that “The neoliberal model and its economic policy of pillage and handouts are abolished” in Mexico, starting on a 2019-through-2024 plan to undo the country’s privatization and redistribute wealth. Since Obrador has given Asylum to Evo Morales and said that Morales is the victim of a coup, the U.S. has gained further interest in advancing regime change in Mexico.

As the international implications of the Bolivia coup have developed, it’s become more clear how the U.S. aims to destabilize and take over Mexico. Last week, Trump declared that he’s going to classify Mexico’s cartels as terrorist groups, opening the possibility for military intervention in Mexico. This has gone along with the Mexican right’s recent efforts to attack Obrador for a recent botched raid on the Sinaloa Cartel, a cry of outrage which the U.S. media has amplified through headlines like“Mexico loses its sovereignty to cartels.” The fact that the right-wing President Felipe Calderón was the one who helped create the rise of the Sinaloa Cartel has been omitted from the prevailing narrative about this incident.

Washington seeks to revamp Mexico’s destructive war on drugs so that it can exploit these ruptures in Obrador’s control over the country. Trump and some Democrats are willing to send in troops to make this happen, raising the possibility of yet another U.S. war against Mexico.

If Washington gets its way, Obrador will be replaced with a U.S.-backed neoliberal president as soon as possible, perhaps through a military coup. The victory of Washington’s plans for Mexico depend on the popular acceptance of the narrative that Obrador is an aspiring dictator who must be removed; to advance this narrative, the U.S. media has compared Obrador to Turkey’s genocidal far-right president Recep Erdogan, creating the perception that Obrador is part of the worldwide trend of anti-democratic populist leaders.

But Obrador’s populism isn’t reactionary or authoritarian like the phony right-wing “populism” of Trump, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro. He’s won his great support by delivering upon his promises for lifting people out of poverty, and by helping advance the gains of Mexico’s indigenous communities. Far from being the strongman that the U.S. media makes him out to be, he’s much more pro-democracy than his reactionary predecessors, and within mainstream Mexican politics he’s uniquely in favor of the rights of poor and working people.

Obrador isn’t a communist like I would prefer for him to be. He only seeks to reform capitalism, and he’s increased migrant deportations and carried out self-described “austerity budgets.” But in terms of the issue of imperialism-which is the issue that American socialists should prioritize the most when they’re deciding whether or not to support foreign leaders-Obrador is not on the side of the U.S. empire. He therefore deserves to be supported, and to be defended when necessary.

This is the gist of how anti-imperialists should view Mexico right now; it’s a predictable situation of the U.S. characterizing a disfavored leader as a tyrant so that it can get them out of power. What’s unusual about this regime change project is the global geopolitical dynamic that surrounds it. The U.S. is rapidly losing its global influence, an imperial decline that correlates with the slow-motion collapse of neoliberal capitalism and the intensification of class conflict worldwide. The American bourgeoisie is in danger of losing their power and resources, so they’re in the process of clamping down on the assets they can more solidly control.

This U.S. imperial clampdown is taking place primarily throughout the Pan-American hemisphere. Washington is consolidating and attempting to expand its hold over Latin America. This has become apparent as the U.S. has meddled in Brazil’s election last year in order to get Bolsonaro elected; as the U.S. has escalated its efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s Chavista government, as well as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; as the U.S. has overthrown Bolivia’s government; as Washington has begun to try to suppress the protests against U.S.-backed neoliberal regimes throughout Latin America; and of course as the campaign against Obrador has intensified.

We’re seeing a repeat of Operation Condor, the Cold War campaign from the U.S. to carry out violence throughout Latin America and redraw the region’s political map. Trump’s decline to rule out drone strikes in Mexico in response to the “terrorist” cartels shows how much this new effort may escalate in the coming years.

Washington’s ultimate goal is to establish fascism throughout the entire Pan-American Hemisphere. If the imperialists won’t be able to regain domination over the globe, they’ll try to suppress the re-emergence of socialist and anti-colonial movements in both Americas through brute force. We must make them fail.

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Featured image is from Flickr/Eneas

La Denuncia Del Magistrato Imposimato:

Nel 50° anniversario della strage di Piazza Fontana, ripubblichiamo l’intervento del magistrato Ferdinando Imposimato, Presidente Onorario della Suprema Corte di Cassazione, al Convegno del Comitato No Guerra No Nato, svoltosi a Roma il 26 Ottobre 2015.

Imposimato riassume i risultati delle indagini da lui compiute, dalle quali emerge il ruolo della Nato nelle stragi che hanno insanguinato l’Italia. Una precisa denuncia, ignorata da quel mondo politico-mediatico che formalmente oggi commemora il tragico anniversario.

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Source: PandoraTV

It’s unsurprising that political parties are becoming more sophisticated in their attempts to use data to profile voters whilst campaigning during elections. However, getting insight into what they think they know about us is often challenging. 

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has conducted some research to shed some light on this by asking the UK’s main political parties – ‘who do you think we are?’. And the results are quite interesting.

For example, did you know that Experian is selling commercial datasets to the Labour and Conservative Parties for profiling? Or did you know that the Labour Party essentially has massive league tables, ranking you based on how you feel about certain issues?

These are some of the revelations that have been released by the ORG ahead of the upcoming 12th December election. The group was able to pull together the findings by exercising its rights under GDPR to find out what UK political parties are doing with personal data.

Staff and supporters of ORG were asked to write to parties across Britain to find out what personal data they are holding, which has given them a “sketch” of how data is being used to profile, target and shape voters intentions.

The ORG has now also built a tool that makes it easy for anyone to submit similar data requests to all political parties, which it hopes will help it build a more “detailed portrait”.

The group said:

We want to know what exactly is going on with personal data in politics, and at what scale, and use this knowledge to stop shady data practices that break trust and the law, polarise society and damage democracy.

We’ve created an automated online tool that allows you to easily ask all active UK political parties what data they’re holding on you. With a few simple clicks you can discover what parties think about you and who they’ve decided you are.

Our data requests uncovered some strange and troubling practices. To help you see what your “political data self” might look like, we wanted to share what we’ve learned so far from the three major parties: Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats.

Key findings

The ORG’s research found that all three major parties – the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrat’s – are collecting personal data and doing some kind of internal score to target and/or screen out people.

For example, the Lib Dems are scoring voters on how likely they are to vote for Brexit, how much of a “pragmatic liberal” you are, what connection you have to other parties and whether that means you are likely to swing to the Lib Dems.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, are giving people a “priority” rating which will determine whether they should try to encourage you to vote or not.

Labour is ranking people in massive local league tables based on where they think you stand on issues such as housing, tax, health, austerity and Brexit. For example, ORG found that its Scotland Directo was ranked 12,966 out of a possible 65,801 in his his whole constituency on the issue of tax.

ORG said:

This “trading and grading” of data is deeply troubling. We think it is going to vary based on where you live, whether in a marginal constituency, or who you are, if you belong to a particular community. This would make sense as some kinds of people and some places are of particular importance to the different parties, and with increased importance will come an increased focus on profiling and scoring.

We will be able to explore this theory with more data from a more diverse range of people. This is one of the reasons we are so keen for lots and lots of people all over the UK to ask parties what personal data they currently hold.

Inaccuracy

Interestingly, some of the profiling being done by parties is highly inaccurate. For example, ORG’s Scotland Director Matthew Rice was found by the Labour Party to likely be retired, over-65, childless and owning the flat he was registered to vote from. None of this is correct.

The ORG said that this will obviously be less than helpful during campaigning:

Parties are still trying to target every voter, not with particularly narrow data but with big wide data that they then tie to everyone in a given area. This isn’t accurate but it is invasive. Because it is also wrong, it creates further issues down the line in political campaigns for Matthew and others that live in the same area but may have different views, values or lifestyles.

What Labour’s deducastions mean ultimately is that they are relying on concocted fictions to make decisions about what messaging to send Matthew, or even whether to include him in a campaign. They’re not only wasting both their time and his, but limiting his opportunity to genuinely engage with what their party stands for and how they compare to other political voices.

Finally, the ORG also found that Labour and the Conservatives are using Mosaic codes in their voter profiles. This is a system of household and individual classification owned by corporate data broker company, Experian. Mosaic contains over 500 variables and segmentation and is traditionally used for targeted commercial advertising.

The Lib Dems are also using commercial datasets to get their scores, but the ORG wasn’t able to find out what data sources they rely on.

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Donald John Trump has turned back the clock in the Western Hemisphere to an era that saw coups and political unrest as the order of the day. Trump and his administration of far-right and pro-fascists have already overthrown the democratically-elected government of President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Trump has announced a policy of turning up the heat on President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela by ratcheting up the economic blockade of Cuba, a Venezuelan ally.

Trump’s reinvigoration of the 19^th century imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which Washington uses as a political lever to prevent the Western Hemisphere from adopting its own foreign and domestic policies, has, once again, cast the United States in the light of an oppressive overlord over the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Trump regime has returned to a Cold War playbook of color-coding Western Hemisphere nations with red or pink for “socialist” and “communist.” Falling into the “red” category are Venezuela, which is suffering from crippling US-led economic, diplomatic, and trade sanctions, and Nicaragua and Cuba, which are also subject to sanctions. Color-coded “pink” are Mexico and Argentina, led by progressive presidents and which have shifted from their heretofore pro-US stances. Argentina elected progressive leftist Alberto Fernández as president and, as vice president, former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The Peronista left ticket defeated incumbent right-wing president Mauricio Macri, a one-time real estate business crony of Trump and someone who had abused the nation’s security services in a failed attempt to dig up dirt to target former President Kirchner in a bogus corruption court case. The same CIA-backed “lawfare” operation was used to impeach and remove from office Brazilian leftist president Dilma Rousseff and imprison her predecessor, the wildly popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, recently freed from prison after his trial and conviction were deemed by the Supreme Court to have been a right-wing ruse, is vowing to challenge neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro in the next presidential election.

Trump and his Central Intelligence Agency’s aggressive stance toward progressive hemispheric governments have seen more transitions from the “red/pink” bloc to the fascistic and pro-US bloc than the other direction. Ecuador has moved from the red/pink bloc to the blue as a result of the pro-US policies of President Lenin Moreno, who served as vice president under the leftist president Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013. Moreno’s threats against his predecessor forced Correa to flee to political exile in Belgium. The recent right-wing coup in Bolivia was supported by fascist leaders of Brazil and Colombia. Bolivia’s democratically-elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee to Mexico, which granted him political asylum.

The revanchist imperialism of the Trump administration has witnessed Moreno and Morales being forced to flee the fascist “thugocracy” policies of their respective nations, which rely on abusing the legal system to stifle dissent and imprison opposition politicians. The governments of Chile and Peru have also firmly lined up with Washington and have engaged in anti-opposition policies that, in the case of Chile, has led to bloodshed in the streets as a result of brutal police actions.

A recent addition to the blue bloc from the pink/red coalition is Uruguay. After fifteen years of rule by the left-wing Broad Front, the right-wing National Party’s presidential candidate, Luis Lacalle Pou, declared a razor-thin victory over Broad Front candidate Daniel Martinez. One of Lacalle Pou’s first decisions was to recognize the opposition Venezuelan regime of the CIA puppet, Juan Guaido. Lacalle Pou also decided to align Uruguay with the Lima Group, a bloc of US lackey regimes dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government of Venezuela. Lacalle Pou has also signaled his willingness to develop closer ties with the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and distance Uruguay from the Fernandez- Kirchner government of Argentina. It is not secret that Argentina’s Alberto Fernández supported the Broad Front’s Daniel Martinez for president.

Of special concern to progressive Uruguayans is the role that Lacalle Pou’s coalition partner, the Cabildo Abierto party of far-right winger Guido Manini Ríos, will play in his government. If the CIA’s lawfare operations in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia are any indication, the Cabildo Abierto elements in Lacalle Pou’s government, all supporters of the former military junta’s war against leftists in the 1970s, may seek the arrest of former leftist presidents Jose Mujica, a leader of the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas in the 1970s, and Tabaré Vázquez. The Latin American fascist acolytes of Trump, from Bolsonaro and Bolivian politician Luis Fernando Camacho – known as the “Bolivian Bolsonaro” – to Manini Ríos and Colombian President Ivan Duque, all share in common a desire to imprison and even torture and execute the leftist opposition of their respective nations.

If the fascistic foreign policy power levers of the Trump White House, CIA, and State Department have their way, another leftist leader in South America will face prison or worse. Suriname’s leftist president Desi Bouterse was recently convicted by a military court of the extrajudicial executions of 15 political opponents in 1982, while he served as the military leader of the former Dutch colony.

The death of the 15 opposition leaders may have been the work of the CIA, which launched a coup attempt against Bouterse in 1982. In December 1982, the CIA worked closely with Dutch intelligence to establish contacts with Bouterse’s opposition in Suriname, including politicians, businessmen, and journalists. The Dutch provided assistance to former President Henck Chin a Sen and his Amsterdam-based opposition forces. The CIA plan included landing Surinamese rebels in Paramaribo, the Suriname capital, and seize power. There were also reports that the CIA planned to assassinate Bouterse during the coup, a direct violation of a White House executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders. The CIA’s chief in-country liaison for the coup was US ambassador to Suriname Robert Duemling.

A CIA dispatch from Suriname, dated March 12, 1982, describes the CIA’s hands-on involvement in the coup against Bouterse: “Dissident military officers opposing the leftist trend of the military leadership launched a coup yesterday, but forces loyal to the government are still resisting. The group, calling itself the Army of National Liberation, is led by two officers who have been associated with conservative elements of the Surinamese society . . . Although the rebels have control of the Army’s main barracks and ammunition depot in Paramaribo, government strongman Army Commander Bouterse and troops loyal to him apparently have taken up a defensive position in the capital’s police camp some 6 kilometers away. Fighting subsided somewhat last night, with both sides claiming to be in control and appealing for support from military troops and citizenry. A large number of rank-and-file military, who had objected to Bouterse’s leftist policies several months ago, probably will join the dissidents if Bouterse’s position weakens further.” If anyone is responsible for the deaths of the opposition figures in 1982, one does not need to look beyond CIA headquarters in Langley and its interlocutors with the Ford Foundation in New York.

Suriname’s third largest ethnic group is Javanese, people who originally were settled by the Dutch colonizers from Indonesia. In 1982, Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who spoke fluent Javanese, was already well-entrenched with CIA programs in Java through her employment with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation. Dunham, who used her Indonesian last name, re-spelled Sutoro from Soetoro, was a valuable asset for the CIA’s program to destabilize Suriname through its business-oriented and very anti-Bouterse Javanese minority. Curiously, Ann Sutoro’s employment contract with the Ford Foundation ended in December 1982, the same month that the CIA attempted to oust Bouterse. During her 1981-1982 contract with the Ford Foundation, Dunham Sutoro spent much of her time liaising with the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in New York, a city that was also a base for the CIA-backed Surinamese opposition.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Bouterse was on a state visit to China when the court delivered its guilty verdict, along with a 20-year prison sentence. Bouterse seized power in 1980 during an era that saw leftist leaders like Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas, Panamanian President Omar Torrijos, Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos, Bolivian President Hernán Siles Zuazo, Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, and Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop all buck Washington’s influence in the hemisphere. Bouterse became a destabilization target of the Ronald Reagan-George H. W. Bush administration. After stepping down from power in 1987, Bouterse and his National Democratic Party returned to power when Bouterse was elected president in 2010 and re-elected in 2015. In 2012, the National Assembly passed a bill that granted Bouterse immunity from prosecution. It was later overturned by a court in another blatant display of Washington-orchestrated lawfare. In 1999, the Dutch weighed in against Bouterse by being convicted by a Netherlands court of drug-trafficking. Bouterse denies all the claims against him and remains popular among the primarily Afro-Surinamese population.

The legal action against Bouterse appears to be part of the Trump administration’s program to curb China’s international “Belt and Road Initiative,” particularly in Latin America. Trump has countered with his own contrivance, called the “Growth in the Americas” program. Peru has signaled that it will join Argentina, Chile, Jamaica, and Panama in supporting the American anti-Chinese bloc. It is clear that if Washington is able to depose Bouterse from power in Suriname, it can prevent China from establishing a foothold in the country.

The Trump regime is attempting to move its chess pieces around on the Western hemisphere’s political chessboard. Increasingly, it will be up to exiled progressives like Correa and Morales, as well as the recently-liberated Lula, to counter the march to fascist rule from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande.

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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.

Featured image is from SCF

Ltamenah is a village in Hama countryside which the Syrian Arab Army recently cleansed of foreign-owned and armed terrorist savages. Last week, authorities discovered a mass grave. This week, they have found a massive quantity of weapons left behind: Mortar, missiles, cannons, rockets, launching pads, and shells. 

Ltamenah was occupied by the Jaish al Ezza faction of al Qaeda in Syria. The Ezza thugs are aligned with the al Saud tyrants occupying Arabia. This gang of armed savages was responsible for the ongoing mass slaughter of civilians in Mhardeh, Saleh, and Sqaiblbieh, in addition to having bombed the Mhardeh power plant.

From Ltamenah, the criminally insane serial killers carried out their massacres. The people of Mhardeh were forced to hold a mass funeral, in mid-September 2018.

We again remind our readers that the al Ezza pathogens were the primary source of the chemical hoax claims in Ltamenah, March 2017.

OPCW’s FFM were better called “FFS.” “Confidence” & “very likely” are not synonymous with any variation of “confirm.”

Though the OPCW was cautious not to explicitly note the Ezza vermin in its report, UC Berkeley School of Law’s Human Rights Investigations Lab was not so discerning. This ‘lab’ gave the murderous and monstrous human garbage entourage credibility in its claim of building a surgical hospital that was chemical weapons bombed while leaving its pristine sign intact.

The prestigious ‘lab’ has not issued an apology, nor a retraction.

No matter, as Syrians celebrate the liberation of Ltamenah.

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All images in this article are from Syria News

This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient Silk Road but a glimpse of what the future may bring in the form of the New Silk Roads.

This is a trip steeped in magic ancient history. Tajiks trace their roots back to tribes of Sogdians, Bactrians and Parthians. Indo-Iranians lived in Bactria (“a country of a thousand towns”) and Sogdiana from the 6-7^th centuries BC to the 8^th century AD Tajiks make up 80% of the republic’s population, very proud of their Persian cultural heritage, and kin to Tajik-speaking peoples in northern Afghanistan and the region around Tashkurgan in Xinjiang.

Proto-Tajiks and beyond were always at the fringe of countless empires – from the Achaemenids, Kushan and Sogdians to the Greco-Bactrians, the Bukhara emirate and even the USSR. Today many Tajiks live in neighboring Uzbekistan – which is now experiencing an economic boom. Due to Stalin’s demented border designs, fabled Bukhara and Samarkand – quintessential Tajik cities – have become “Uzbek.”

Bactria’s territory included what are today northern Afghanistan, southern Tajikistan and southern Uzbekistan. The capital was fabled Balkh, as named by the Greeks, carrying the informal title of “mother of all cities.”

Sogdiana was named by the Greeks and Romans as Transoxiana: between the rivers, the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya. Sogdians practiced Zoroastrianism and lived by arable agriculture based on artificial irrigation.

Western Pamirs: Road upgrade by China, Pyanj River, Tajikistan to the left, Afghanistan to the right, Hindu Kush in the background. Photo: Pepe Escobar

We all remember that Alexander the Great invaded Central Asia in 329 B.C. After he conquered Kabul, he marched north and crossed the Amu-Darya. Two years later he defeated the Sogdians. Among the captured prisoners was a Bactrian nobleman, Oxyartes, and his family.

Alexander married Oxyartes’s daughter, the ravishing Roxanne, the most beautiful woman in Central Asia. Then he founded the city of Alexandria Eskhata (“The Farthest”) which is today’s Kojand, in northern Tajikistan. In Sogdiana and Bactria, he built as many as 12 Alexandrias, including Aryan Alexandria (today’s Herat, in Afghanistan) and Marghian Alexandria (today’s Mary, formerly Merv, in Turkmenistan).

By the middle of the 6th century, all these lands had been divided among the Turkic Kaghans, the Sassanian Empire and a coalition of Indian kings. What always remained unchanged was the emphasis on agriculture, town planning, crafts, trade, blacksmithing, pottery, manufacture of copper and mining.

The caravan route across the Pamirs – from Badakshan to Tashkurgan – is the stuff of legend in the West. Marco Polo described it as “the highest place in the world.” Indeed: the Pamirs were known by the Persians as Bam-i-Dunya (translated, appropriately, as “roof of the world”).

The highest peaks in the world may be in the Himalayas. But the Pamirs are something unique: the top orographic crux in Asia from which all the highest mountain ranges in the world radiate: the Hindu Kush to the northwest, the Tian Shan to the northeast, and the Karakoram and the Himalayas to the southeast.

Ultimate imperial crossroads

The Pamirs are the southern boundary of Central Asia. And let’s cut to the chase, the most fascinating region in the whole of Eurasia: as wild as it gets, crammed with breathtaking peaks, snow-capped spires, rivers ragged with crevasses, huge glaciers – a larger-than-life spectacle of white and blue with overtones of stony gray.

This is also the quintessential crossroad of empires – including the fabled Russo-British 19^th century Great Game. No wonder: picture a high crossroads between Xinjiang, the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan and Chitral in Pakistan. Pamir may mean a “high rolling valley.” But the bare Eastern Pamirs might as well be on the moon – traversed less by humans than curly-horned Marco Polo sheep, ibex and yaks.

Countless trade caravans, military units, missionaries and religious pilgrims also made the Pamir Silk Road known as “road of Ideologies.” British explorers like Francis Younghusband and George Curzon hit the upper Oxus and mapped high passes into British India. Russian explorers such as Kostenko and Fedchenko tracked the Alai and the great peaks of the northern Pamir. The first Russian expedition arrived in the Pamirs in 1866, led by Fedchenko, who discovered and lent his name to an immense glacier, one of the largest in the world. Trekking toward it is impossible as winter approaches.

And then there were the legendary Silk Road explorers Sven Hedin (in 1894-5) and Aurel Stein (1915), who explored its historical heritage.

Chinese container cargo trucks negotiate the Western Pamirs. Photo: Pepe Escobar

The Pamir Highway version of the Silk Road was actually built by the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1940, predictably following ancient caravan tracks. The name of the region remains Soviet: the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). To travel the highway, one needs a GBAO permit.

For no less than 2,000 years – from 500 B.C. to the early 16^th century – camel caravans carried not only silk from East to West, but goods made of bronze, porcelain, wool and cobalt, also from West to East. There are no fewer than four different branches of the Silk Road in Tajikistan. The ancient Silk Roads were an apotheosis of connectivity: ideas, technology, art, religion, mutual cultural enrichment. The Chinese, with a keen historical eye, not by accident identified “common legacy of mankind” as the conceptual/philosophical base for the Chinese-led New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative.

Afghan village by the Pyanj River, Hindu Kush in the background. Photo: Pepe Escobar

Have China upgrade, will travel

In villages in Gorno-Badakhshan, stretched out along stunning river valleys, life for centuries has been about irrigation farming and seasonal-pasture cattle farming. As we progress toward the barren Eastern Pamirs, the story mutates into an epic: how mountain people eventually adapted to living at altitudes as high as 4,500 meters.

In the Western Pamirs, the current road upgrade was by – who else? – China. The quality is equivalent to the northern Karakoram Highway. Chinese building companies are slowly working their way towards the Eastern Pamirs – but repaving the whole highway may take years.

The Chinese are coming: upgrading the highway in the Western Pamirs. Photo: Pepe Escobar

The 3rd century BC Yamchun fortress, known as ‘The Castle of the Fire Worshippers.’ Photo: Pepe Escobar

The Pyanj river draws a sort of huge arc around the border of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. We see absolutely amazing villages perched on the hills across the river, including some nice houses and owners with an SUV instead of a donkey or a bike. Now there are quite a few bridges over the Pyanj, financed by the Aga Khan foundation, instead of previous planks jammed with stones suspended above vertiginous cliffs.

From Qalaykhumb to Khorog and then all the way to Ishkoshim, the Pyanj river establishes the Afghan border for hundreds of kilometers – traversing poplar trees and impeccably-tended fields. Then we enter the legendary Wakhan valley: a major – barren – branch of the Ancient Silk Road, with the spectacular snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush in the background. Farther south, a trek of only a few dozen kilometers of trekking, it’s Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan.

The Wakhan could not be more strategic – contested, over time, by Pamiris, Afghans, Kyrgyz and Chinese, peppered with qalas (fortresses) that protected and taxed the Silk Road trade caravans.

The star of the qalas is the 3^rd century B.C. Yamchun fortress – a textbook medieval castle, originally 900 meters long and 400 meters wide, set in a virtually inaccessible rocky slope, protected by two river canyons, with 40 towers and a citadel. Legendary Silk Road explorer Aurel Stein, who was here in 1906, on the way to China, was gobsmacked.The fortress is locally known as the “Castle of the Fire Worshippers”.

Pre-Islamic Badakhshan was Zoroastrian, worshipping fire, the sun and spirits of ancestors and at the same time practicing a distinct Badakhshani version of Buddhism. In fact, in Vrang, we find the remains of 7^th-8^th century Buddhist man-made caves that could have also been a Zoroastrian site in the past. The early Tang dynasty wandering monk Xuanzang was here, in the 7^th century. He described the monasteries and, tellingly, took notice of a Buddhist inscription:  “Narayana, win.”

Ishkoshim, which Marco Polo crossed in 1271 on the way to the upper Wakhan, is the only border crossing in the Pamirs into Afghanistan open to foreigners. To talk of “roads” on the Afghan side is audacious. But old Silk Road tracks remain, negotiable only with a study Russian jeep, delving into Faizabad and farther into Mazar-i-Sharif.

Here are the parts the 18-year-long, trillion-dollar, Hindu Kush-of-lies-told American war on Afghanistan never reaches. The only “America” available is Hollywood blockbusters on DVDs at 30 cents apiece.

I was very fortunate to spot the real deal: a camel caravan, straight from the ancient Silk Road, following a track on the Afghan side of the Wakhan. They were Kyrgyz nomads. There are roughly 3,000 Kyrgyz nomads in the Wakhan, who would like to resettle back in their homeland. But they are lost in a bureaucratic maze – even assuming they secure Afghan passports.

These are the ancient Silk Roads the Taliban will never be able to reach.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Straight from the Ancient Silk Road: a camel caravan on the Afghan Wakhan Corridor. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

As we transition into 2020, our World is in the grip of a deliberate attempt to destroy the fundamental values upon which all civilised life depends.

Humanitarian values of love, kindness, compassion and mutual support – are being deliberately blocked, distorted and down-graded as part of a global propaganda regime designed to indoctrinate the people of this planet into selfish, materialistic and essentially passive ‘convenience’ life styles. 

While today’s ‘world media headlines’ are strictly confined to reflect the ethos of the corporations that sponsor and control them. That ethos is profit and power – the methodology is coercion. 

Meanwhile ‘social media’ brainwashes its users with a ‘virtual reality’ world of superficial and emotional trivia – making young people, in particular, slaves to instant access convenience. 

As if this wasn’t enough – a huge push is being made to sell ‘global warming/climate change’ as the definitive cause of various predicted ‘extinction events’ which, we are told, will bring about the collapse of all the natural systems that supply humanity with its present needs. Fear is being used as the primary tool for the uptake of this doctrine. 

The villain chosen to lead this war against humanity is a harmless natural gas called carbon dioxide (CO2)  which is now being cited as the undisputed killer of all killers, by governments, corporations and multi millionaires – who just yesterday were claiming fossil fuel energy as the only way that global industry can maintain necessary levels of production to meet the needs of the majority of the world’s people. 

Soros, Rockerfeller, Rothschild, Zuckerberg, Gates and fellow members of an elite cabal, have noted that even more money can be made out of managing a ‘green economy’ than a dark brown one.  Green New Deal – aka ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ – is their current slogan for capturing and controlling all aspects of the green market place. Under the cooked-up pretext of preventing global warming/climate change. 

While public attention is turned towards this planetary wide deception – telecom corporations are  rolling-out their deeply toxic 5G microwave technologies, as the so called ‘smart solution’ to just about everything.  A solution that perfectly fills the bill for these corporations, since it makes mankind a servant to the machine rather than its master. In this case, the 100% wireless machines that exert a rapidly tightening control over all aspects of our daily lives as well as 100% surveillance of all our activities, from the bedroom to the board room. 

Surveillance, that comes from largely invisible weapons, whose radiated microwave emissions wage a highly destructive war on all human, animal, insect and plant life of the planet; leading to the subsequent introduction of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as a synthetic replacement for sentient human beings. A subject I deal with at length in my new book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’. 

All of this, you understand, is being spun on the back of a purported ‘climate emergency’ and the subsequent need for a Green New Deal – as a means to make money from this emergency. 

But, let us tell the facts: the world is not warming, the climate change that is occurring – and the climate is always changing – is doing so not due to an excess of CO2, which constitutes just 0.039 % of atmospheric elements – but due to unreported human and natural causes. Unreported because mainstream media defends the great deception, and not the truth. 

The most significant ‘human’ causes associated with the disruption of the climate at this time are atmospheric aerosol geoengineering (chemtrails), ubiquitous electro-smog, HAARP ionospheric heaters, war and war games.

The most significant ‘natural’ causes come from changing sun spot activity, a weakening magnetosphere, the shifting Poles and changes in ocean current oscillations – amongst others. 

‘Green New Deal’ (Fourth Industrial Revolution) is neither green, nor new, nor a deal. It is an unprecedented scam, which, if put into effect, will involve a global mining operation many times greater than than the one which produces the world’s present requirements for oil, coal and gas – combined. The objective, as stated by the leading institutions promoting it – is ‘Zero Carbon’. 

To switch the world over to the new renewable energy machinery necessary to generate 100% of the population’s manufactured energy requirements – will require the construction of a vast new corporate owned and tax payer sponsored infrastructure. One whose ‘non-green’ embedded energy requirement would far outstrip the amount of genuinely green energy subsequently generated. 

A vast manufacturing programme which would involve the mining and processing of exponential volumes of fossil fuels and rare earth minerals in every region of the world – raising the spectrum of the almost certain extinction of our species. 

It is surely abundantly clear that this is an entirely insane idea, which would be immediately consigned to the dustbin, if anyone still capable of rational human thought was at the helm of world affairs. 

Yet this is the present agenda being proposed by leading Green NGO’s, governments, bankers, super-states, billionaires and even well paid climatologists; all of whom have demonstrated themselves to be immune to the fact that they are pushing forward a programme which combines  genocide, ecocide and homicide all rolled into one. A ‘big brother’ overseen global package, under the perverse and twisted moniker of ‘sustainable development’. Brain-child of the two faced United Nations. 

SOLUTION: We need Resistance. Absolute, uncompromising and sustained resistance – until our job is done –  and the perpetrators of this anti-life programme have been unceremoniously removed from their despotic thrones. Such an action has to be done in order to enable the flowering of ‘true humanity’ to finally take centre stage – leading to an unstoppable process of global healing. 

For this flowering to become manifest, we need decentralised, people-led local economies and local – not central – governance. The imperative is for ‘we the people’ to now take back full control of our destinies and reclaim our true relationship with nature and with each other; before both we and nature are beyond the point of being rescued.   

That means the propagation of truly ‘human scale’ ecological and community oriented land management practices, skilled civil engineering and traditional artisan building programmes and  farming methods that ensure the widespread availability of nutritious, fresh ‘real food’ – as well as essential quality-crafted products that are built to last. It means an end to vast banker led global marketing and centralised energy distribution structures, and an end to the supermarket ‘convenience’ stores that sell over-packaged, overpriced, over travelled, and over rated fake foods. 

We are talking about a major shift of emphasis that rids this world of the agrichemical and genetically modified toxic foods responsible for an ever larger number of people getting ever more sick; while real farmers loose their ability to survive, due to consumers abandoning them for the very corporations that are systematically destroying the resource base of the planet.

Let an aware body of citizens become firmly established – and lead by example – thereby demonstrating that they will not live ‘the life of hypocrisy’ ubiquitous amongst the political class of the planet, with all the disastrous results that follow. 

The first major step in all this, is to demonstrate that we can be responsible enough to govern ourselves, according to the deeper values we claim to believe in. For only once a ‘responsible’ self-governing foundation is firmly laid, can that which follows reflect the true path of spiritual and human evolution which is our ever beckoning destiny. 

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Julian Rose is author of  ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through, now available from independent book stores and Amazon. See www.julianrose.info for more information. Julian is an international activist, writer, broadcaster, organic farming pioneer and actor.  In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Demonstrators at the anti-5G protest in Bern on Friday. (© Keystone / Peter Klaunzer)

More than 100 medical doctors have issued an urgent appeal to the Australian government to protect the life of its citizen, imprisoned WikiLeaks journalist and publisher Julian Assange.

The doctors’ action follows warnings from medical and human rights experts that Mr Assange’s health is rapidly deteriorating and that he might die in a UK prison where he is being held pending US extradition hearings that begin in February.

In an open letter to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (dated 16/12/2019), the doctors urge Marise Payne to negotiate Julian Assange’s safe passage from Belmarsh Prison to an appropriate hospital setting in Australia, “before it is too late.”

“It is an extremely serious matter for an Australian citizen’s survival to be endangered by a foreign government obstructing his human right to health. It is an even more serious matter for that citizen’s own government to refuse to intervene, against historical precedent and numerous converging lines of medical advice,” the letter states.

“Should Mr Assange die in a British prison, people will want to know what you, Minister, did to prevent his death.”

On November 22, more than 60 medical doctors wrote to the UK Home Secretary urging that Mr Assange be transferred from Belmarsh maximum-­‐security prison to a university teaching hospital for expert medical assessment and care. Despite worldwide media attention, the doctors’ urgent advice was ignored.

Signatory and Australian medical practitioner, Arthur Chesterfield-­‐Evans said that sacrificing Mr Assange by aiding and abetting the obstruction of his medical care reflected a chilling example of Australia ceding its sovereignty, freedoms and laws.

“If Australia believes in universal moral values of truth ahead of authoritarian regimes using fear and abusing legal process to silence journalists, it must act to protect Julian Assange, his life, and his health,” Dr Chesterfield-­‐Evans said.

Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (UK and Sweden) and signatory, Stephen Frost said the doctors agreed with the assessment of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, that Julian Assange had been ‘psychologically tortured’.

“That doctors should have to write open letters to the UK and Australian governments to demand appropriate health care for a victim of torture is beyond belief,” Dr Frost said.

“The torture must stop now, and Mr Assange must be provided with immediate access to the health care which he so obviously needs before it is too late.”

“We appeal to the Australian public to support us in ensuring that the Australian government protects the rights of its citizens, which is its primary duty. There can be no exceptions,” he said.

Copies of the letter have also been sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong.

The open letter will be publicly accessible online along with an accompanying addendum explaining the medical basis for the doctors’ warnings and concerns.

The full text of the November 22 open letter and list of signatories can also be found here.

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Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck.  Weariness and frustration came in the wake of initial high minded optimism. Delegates spent an extra two days and nights attempting to reach a deal covering carbon reduction measures before the Glasgow conference in 2020.  The gathering became the longest set of climate talks in history, exceeding the time spent at the 2011 Durban meeting by 44 hours.

As Climate Home News noted, Durban still stood out as being worthier for having “produced a deal between countries that laid the foundations for the Paris Agreement.”  In stark contrast, “Madrid produced a weak gesture toward raising climate targets and failed to agree for the second year in a row on rules to govern carbon markets.”

The UN Secretary General António Guterres was all lament.  “The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaption and finance to tackle the climate crisis.”  He hoped that the next year would see “all countries commit to do what science tells us is necessary to reach carbon neutrality in 2050 and no more than 1.5 degree temperature rise.” 

The wisdom of COP25 remains similar to that of previous gatherings on climate: politics and environment do not mix well.  Big powers and heavy polluters stuck to their stubborn positions, stressing the merits of loose, open markets to solve the problem, notably in terms of reducing carbon emissions; smaller states more concerned by their actual disappearance lobbied European, Latin American and African allies for firmer commitments and pledges. 

Australia was also confirmed as one of the chief spoilers, if not outright saboteurs, at the show, noted for its insistence that it be allowed to claim a reduction of its abatement for the 2021-30 Paris Accord.  This, went the argument, was due to its own excelling in meeting the 2012-20 Kyoto Protocol period.  Previous good conduct could justify current bad and future behaviour.  What Canberra offered the globe was an accounting model of deception, exploiting a regulatory loophole in place of lowering emissions.  It lacked legal plausibility, given that both Kyoto and Paris are separate treaties. 

Former French environment minister Luciana Tubiana was clear about the implications of this idea.  “If you want this carryover,”she told the Financial Times, “it is just cheating.  Australia was willing in a way to destroy the whole system, because that is the way to destroy the whole Paris agreement.” 

Other states were also noted in performing roles of obstruction, including Saudi Arabia, Brazil and the United States.  These parties were particular keen to push their differences with other states over Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a provision dealing with mechanisms and models of trading in emission reductions.  Such trade can have a habit of losing validity when put into practice; the issue of transparency remains a considerable problem in such markets. 

The US statement at the conference emphasised realism and pragmatism “backed by a record of real world results.”  (Real world results tend to exclude environmental ruination for unrepentant polluters.)  Market results were primary; environmental matters were subordinate to such dictates.  Usual mantras were proffered: innovation and open markets produced wealth, but also “fewer emissions, and mores secure sources of energy.”  Despite leaving as a party to the Paris Agreement, “We remain fully committed to working with you, our global partners, to enhance resilience, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and prepare for and respond to natural disasters.” 

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro reconfirmed his climate change scepticism, claiming that the entire issue of COP25 could be put down to commerce.  “I don’t know why people don’t understand that it’s just a commercial game.”  The Europeans, he suggested, were merely being irksome about cash and meddling.  “I’d like to know,” he posed rhetorically to journalists, “has there been a resolution for Europe to be reforested, or are they just going to keep bothering Brazil?”   

Brazil’s environment minister Ricardo Salles, known to some as Minister for Deforestation, was similarly keen to place the blame elsewhere.  He had demanded, bowl in hand, some $10 billion under the Paris Climate deal to combat deforestation in 2020.  All in all, he was not optimistic. “Rich countries did not want to pay up.”   

Like Australia, Brazil’s environmental ploy is driven by creative accounting, an attempt to leverage previous supposed good conduct in the climate change stakes, playing accumulated carbon credits from Kyoto to meet those under the Paris arrangements.  Using open market rationales, Salles condemned the “protectionist vision” that had taken hold: “Brazil and other countries that could provide carbon credits because of their forests and good environmental practices came out losers.”  In an act of some spite, the minister would subsequently post a tweet featuring a photo of a platter heavy with meats.  “To compensate for our emissions at COP, a vegetarian lunch!” 

Madrid will be remembered for its stalemate on carbon credits and the botched rule book on carbon trading.  An effort spearheaded by Costa Rica, including Germany, Britain and New Zealand, to convince states to adopt the San Jose principles, with a prohibition on the use of carbon credit carryover along with other Kyoto gains, was rejected. 

COP25 again exposed that degree of prevalent anarchy, if not gangsterism, in global climate change policy.  The emphasis, then, is on attempts and arrangements made within regional areas: EU policy on de-carbonised economies (albeit resisted within by such states as Poland), and bilateral arrangements (the EU and China).  As these take place, the apocalyptic message led by activists such as Greta Thunberg will become more desperate. 

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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 Countercurrents

The chorus of smear attacks on Jeremy Corbyn was so vile and relentless that it is unseemly to blame him personally for the defeat of his party in the December 12 parliamentary elections.  Perhaps Labour’s defeat was inevitable.  But with a different strategy, it would have been a defeat with more promise for the future.

Tactically, Corbyn’s great error was to submit so blandly to the smear campaign accusing Labour of anti-Semitism.  The “danger to Jews in Britain” was totally imaginary and should have been vigorously denounced as politically motivated slander. If Corbyn did anything to promote anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, it was by allowing self-appointed spokesmen and women of a small minority to destroy the reputation of party members whom he should have defended. But not even the smear campaign’s identification of British Jews with unquestioning defense of Israel can endanger the secure position of Jews in British society.

But Corbyn’s strategic error was the total failure to develop a Labour-friendly Brexit strategy.  His campaign failed to project his program into a post-EU context. Instead, he accepted the prospect of a second referendum that would reverse the first one. A prospect of endless confusion and division.

Comparison with France

Adapting a left policy to leaving the EU would have been much easier here in France.  Since enactment of the post-World War II Resistance Council program, France has had a very special attachment to its public services, understood as both a national asset (providing a favorable environment for business and daily life) and an egalitarian method of redistribution of wealth.  The Macron regime’s attacks on public services are a major cause of the massive Gilets Jaunes street protests and trade unions strikes.  Macron’s program to introduce a uniform national retirement scheme, aside from its prospect of more work for less pension, is also an attack on public services, since it would undermine the esprit de corps necessary to perpetuate the publicly useful professions needed by key public services such as nursing, education, energy production and rail transport.

Active opposition to Macron’s policies is raising awareness that all these unwelcome reforms have been dictated to France by the European Union, in order to promote privatization and unimpeded competition of private capital. The unwelcome retirement measures are simply one of the items dictated by the Grandes Orientations des Politiques Economiques or GOPE (Broad Economic Policy Guidelines in English) determined by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels and imposed on Member States.

In France, popular unrest is thus fostering increasing criticism of the EU. A “Frexit” would easily take on a socializing coloration because it would be so closely tied to the prospect of rescuing public services and key economic sectors from privatization. The successful mixed economy of the Gaullist years survives as the memory of a better system than neoliberalism. Return to such a system is impossible within the EU.

Ideological Defeat

In the UK there is no tradition of a successful mixed economy as in France. Nevertheless, Corbyn campaigned for renationalization of the railroads and preservation of the National Health Service, which were the achievements of the Labour Party after World War II, parallel to similar social advances in France. But he failed to link his strong defense of public services to independence from the EU. Such linkage could have been the basis of a “left Brexit”, in clear opposition to the EU drive for massive privatization and lower labor costs. In the absence of a socio-economic left Brexit, there was no vigorous counter to the notion that the working class voted for Brexit only to oppose immigration for reasons of racism and xenophobia – the line pushed by the Blairite open society crowd, which hates Corbyn and cares more for “minorities” than for the British working class.

Corbyn’s failure to take a strong stand illustrated the ideological weakness of the left faced with globalization.  Much of the left has allowed its traditional “internationalism” to be redefined as “open borders”. This apparent generosity toward outsiders in fact is highly compatible with the demands of globalized finance capital.  Old-fashioned Socialist internationalism meant solidarity with workers in their struggle against the capitalist ruling class in each and every country where they lived and worked. Open borders means weakening the position of workers everywhere, and strengthening global capitalism.

Corbyn’s desire to compromise with his enemies led him to capitulate to those who consider that the primary if not unique task of “the left” is to decry “racism” and “anti-Semitism”.  Such a left merely provides a moral cover for global capitalism by demonizing popular resistance as “populism”.

I have the impression that in Britain, many more or less progressive people wanted to stay in the EU out of fear of being left alone with their own horrible ruling class, with its MI6, its aggressive imperialist traditions, its virtual caste system.  “Europe” seemed more gentle and “social” than Britain itself – even though the task of the EU is to wreck the social state to make way for the global reign of finance capital.

Aside from economic or social issues, the vote to leave the European Union was a profound expression of fidelity to Britain’s democratic institutions, to the right of British citizens to make their own laws.  The British were never comfortable with accepting regulations and directives drafted in Brussels.  They were never totally “in” Europe, having rejected the euro and the Schengen rules on borders. A party that is unwilling to govern a nation reclaiming its sovereignty has disqualified itself.

Failing to embrace Brexit and give it a social program was a fateful timidity. It meant handing Brexit to Boris Johnson. A BoJo Brexit appears more than likely to strengthen the UK’s imperialist ties with the United States and Israel and pursue drastic privatizations at home.  And it seems most unlikely to set an appealing example to citizens of other European countries whose dissatisfaction with socio-economic decline under EU direction is growing.

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According to the London Daily Mail, the Trump regime intends to use secret evidence against Assange — undisclosed to him and his legal team, wanting them prevented from preparing a proper defense.

He faces 18 spurious charges under the long ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act, a WW I relic, pertaining solely to the war, used to persecute state victims for exposing dirty imperial secrets.

Assange is a journalist, WikiLeaks a publisher, phony charges against him all about wanting truth-telling that conflicts with the official narrative silenced — the hallmark of totalitarian rule.

According to a member of his defense team Gareth Peirce:

“The summary case which we have prepared is a dense document.”

“Mr. Assange has not been given what he must be given, and we are keen to go through this to the best of our abilities to keep with the requests of the court.”

“It is predicated on the underlying evidence that Mr. Assange has not reviewed.”

Britain in cahoots with the Trump regime wants Assange pronounced guilty by accusation.

A rigged process wants him imprisoned longterm, likely never to be free again for publishing uncomfortable hard truths.

What’s going on is a message to other investigative journalists that they risk a similar fate if reveal information the US wants suppressed.

In the US and elsewhere, pre-trial judicial proceedings afford all parties the right to as much information as possible – nothing kept secret except for constitutional protection from self-incrimination.

Defendants and their lawyers have the right to all relevant documents, witness depositions, questions and answers from interrogations, crime scene and other forensic evidence including toxicology results, police reports, “raw evidence,” arrest and search warrants, grand jury testimony, and other relevant data.

The purpose of what’s called “discovery” is to assure judicial fairness.

Prosecutors are prohibited from withholding relevant evidence and related materials from the defendant and counsel.

Unlike film-portrayed crime dramas, actual ones rarely include surprise evidence by any party during proceedings, especially anything introduced near their conclusion.

According to the law dictionary: “The theory of broad rights of discovery is that all parties will go to trial with as much knowledge as possible and that neither party should be able to keep secrets from the other” — to give one side an unfair advantage over the other.

That’s what appears in play against Assange, Trump regime prosecutors wanting no chance that he’ll be ruled innocent and released.

Given his brutal mistreatment, languishing under draconian conditions, ill-fed and denied vitally needed medical treatment, his health greatly deteriorated, he may die from neglect in Britain.

The Trump and Boris Johnson regimes may plan his fate this way — to avoid a possible judicial defeat if US courts support First Amendment speech and media freedoms — what earlier Supreme Court rulings upheld.

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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.

The United States has recently deployed more military reinforcements to Syria’s northeastern oil fields controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, Anadolu reported.

The agency quoted local sources in the Syrian governorate of Deir Ez-Zor as saying that the US troops entered the area on Saturday night from the Al Waleed border crossing – also known as Al-Tanf crossing – with Iraq and headed towards the oil fields south of Hasakah governorate.

According to the sources, the convoy of logistic reinforcements consisting of about 100 trucks, ambulances as well as buses and fuel tanks.

In early December, a US reinforcements convoy of 150 trucks entered Syria from the Al Waleed and Zamalka border crossings and headed towards the oil fields of Deir Ez-Zor.

US President Donald Trump has previously said he will not allow Daesh to seize the oil fields in northern Syria and will keep troops in the country to this end.

Russia, however, questioned America’s intentions saying it only wants to steal Syria’s oil.

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Increasingly violent protests are sweeping the self-professed “world’s largest democracy” as its people fight to protect the secular nature of their state following Prime Minister Modi’s decision to push forward with a religiously discriminatory citizenship amendment, with this national uprising being met with the disproportionate use of force by law enforcement authorities who are showing zero concern for the collateral damage that they’re causing, especially after they stormed the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMU) university on Sunday and injured at least 100 students.

The war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, is based on lies made by top U.S. officials and was “idiotic” as there was no clear plan, according to the documents published by the Washington Post, dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers.’ According to the papers, the U.S. has wasted nearly $1 trillion of taxpayers money in war against Afghanistan, with it expecting to cost trillions more. Effectively, it is the taxpayer’s money being wasted to maintain the war and occupation so that shareholders in U.S. military industries can profit while millions of Americans remain in poverty.

Almost half a century ago, the famous Pentagon Papers revealed the secret history and embarrassing truth about the Vietnam War. Documents published by the Washington Post have effectively replicated this in relations to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which have been led with equal stubbornness by three different U.S. presidents – George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Although Trump proclaimed withdrawing from Afghanistan, approaching the end of his first mandate and 18 years into the war, there has been hundreds of thousands of victims and nearly a trillion dollars spent, with no end in sight.

General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, behind closed doors, unaware that his words would once reach the public, testified that:

“There is a machinery that is behind what we do, and it keeps us participating in the conflict because it generates wealth.”

After all, former US diplomat James Dobbins was quoted as saying:

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

And the “staggering” amount of money spent so far on the war in Afghanistan – between $934 billion and $978 billion at no cost to the CIA, caught the attention of the Washington Post as it has never been audited and justified. We must not be mistaken and think it is conspiratorial, there is a powerful Military Industrial Complex that needs war for profit.

The Afghanistan Papers demonstrates that there is inertia in Washington’s endless war strategy that has been going on for decades. It has been shown time and again that the overwhelming U.S. forces cannot subjugate Afghanistan with the existence of the Taliban that are determined to fight for their country. This is not to endorse the Taliban, but it is to say that Afghanistan since the times of Alexander the Great around 2,300 years ago, has been a place of strong resistance to foreign occupation.

The Afghanistan Papers reveal that 775,000 U.S. troops have passed through Afghanistan since 2001, with some 2,300 killed and 20,589 wounded, yet, U.S. officials acknowledge that their military strategies have been fatally flawed. The documents reveal confusion on whether Al-Qaeda or the Taliban is the enemy; is Pakistan a friend or an adversary; or if there are jihadists on the CIA payroll. As the documents reveal, Washington has never been able to agree on a response. As a result, on the ground, U.S. troops were often unable to distinguish friend from enemy.

Officially, according to the Washington Post, one of the intentions of the occupation forces was to curb opium production. However, Afghan farmers now produce more poppies than ever before, with strong evidence that the CIA are involved in the cultivation and smuggling of the poppies. Last year, according to the United Nations, Afghanistan was responsible for 82% of global opium production. With over $133 billion invested in Afghanistan alone – more than the Marshall Plan for all of Western Europe, when the figures adjust for inflation, the achievement has only “been the development of mass corruption,” said former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and from 2011 to 2012. He added, “Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

The true goal of occupation of Afghanistan is actually quite clear: it is a central strategic point in the Eurasia area to counter Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia. The true reason for the occupation of Afghanistan is actually quite clear, to control the more than $1 trillion of riches found in the country, and have access to other rich deposits of natural resources in Central Asia, a space traditionally influenced by Russia and China.

Although Washington knew these reasons for the invasion in 2001, the overwhelming majority of the American people and military did not know. As revealed in the Afghanistan papers:

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” said one general.

A former commanding general in Afghanistan said:

“I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant . . . and nobody could. Some people were thinking in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, but that’s just not going to happen in Afghanistan.”

If the American people can escape the vicious cycle of endless wars and the accompanying lies that justify them, they will be driven by the very processes that are taking place in the rest of the world that are inevitably leading us to a balanced Multipolar system in which this kind of intervention will no longer be possible. The Afghanistan war was built on a system of lies, deceit and confusion and eventually has accelerated multipolarism.

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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 New Eastern Outlook

Educators are ramping up their fight against the Tories’ 18-month attack on public education.

On Tuesday, public elementary teachers stepped up their work-to-rule refusing, for example, to participate in performance evaluations, plan new field trips, buy school supplies on their own time and register for additional qualifications courses.  Yesterday, many Ontario Secondary teachers staged another one-day strike in districts including Toronto, Grand Erie, Simcoe County, Muskoka and Rainy River.

Cranking up pressure on the government was pretty clear at the Elementary Teachers of Toronto’s (ETT) Federation Day last Friday. Mind you, both local president Joy Lachica and Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) head Sam Hammond, were keeping their cards close – acknowledging the 98 percent strike vote of teachers, and the need to “harness our power” though not getting too specific about what comes next if the work-to-rule doesn’t produce results.

Messages of activism

But the messages sent by the speakers ETT invited to the gathering of public elementary teachers across Toronto delivered a message of activism more plainly. Rachel Huot of Ontario Parent Action Network assured teachers that despite the government’s attempt to drive a wedge between them and parents, they won’t be on opposite sides of job actions. “This is our fight,” she said.

There was Maggie MacDonell winner of the 2017 Global Teacher Prize describing how she pushed, badgered and organized her way to create programs for Innuit youth in her Nunavik community of Salluit; about the bicycle repair shop worked by a notorious but reformed ex-bicycle thief or the Nunavik Running Club which has enabled young people to travel widely to compete.  She spoke about the community hauling equipment for a rec centre overland by snow machines because the ship that was supposed to bring it all in, couldn’t make it into port. It was all about what a teacher can do as an organizer in her community.

Geneticist David Suzuki might have been talking directly to the Ford government as he outlined the dire environmental situation in which humans find themselves, the multiplier effect of our vast destruction of the natural world: “we think we’re so clever, but we have no idea what the long-term ramifications will be.”

But it was Jollene Levid who concentrated on the task facing Ontario educators right now. She is an organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) which won major concessions after a 6 day strike last winter.

Organizing Los Angeles educators

Los Angeles schools had been crumbling for years. Class sizes had risen anywhere from 30 in elementary schools to as high as 50 in high schools. Since 2008, austerity measures deprived many schools of caretakers, guidance counsellors and librarians. It was normal practice for school administrators to run random searches of their kids. Teachers and educational workers struck for liveable wages, but also for improvements to the conditions in schools as well as the neighbourhoods around them. They demanded more teaching, less testing and for a cap on privatized charter schools so popular across the United States.

UTLA won a 6 percent retroactive pay increase for education workers, a nurse in every school 5 days a week, some reductions in class size, more librarians in secondary schools and more counsellors. LA educators also managed to get the Los Angeles school board to cap the number charter schools allowed to open.

The gains they won came from organizing and building a coalition with neighbourhood groups as well as organizations like Black Lives Matter. Over 5 years, UTLA transformed itself from a service union focusing on wages and working conditions for its members, to a movement for social and economic change. The union, Ms. Levid explained, recruited natural leaders from school sites and taught them how to organize. It created a research department and kept track of educators’ commitment for organizing. To pay for this, it raised members’ dues after getting a commitment from them that this was the right way to go. To further test that commitment, it re-signed 98 percent of UTLA members to their own union.  Eighty-nine percent of them voted in favour of a strike.

Union leaders tested the water as they moved towards the strike and the campaign was built around escalating actions: handing out flyers, then picketing, then holding regional rallies and when it was clear there was support for it, going for the strike vote.

“Everything we did,” said Jollene Levid, “was building towards our capacity to strike.” All the members knew this was where they, as a union, were heading. UTLA was “unapologetically ideological” she said, adding that in these times of intense political and economic oppression, we all need to move to the left.

What about Ontario?

This is where educators across Ontario find themselves. They face a government that has been reckless with everything it has put its hands on and is now trying to touch up its image after a precipitous fall in popularity. After a disastrous federal election, the Tories are vulnerable.

But the Ford government is never going to be reasonable despite what Education Minister Stephen Lecce claims; it’s in too deep. It can’t afford to look weaker than it already does. If it had any sense of reason it would never have cut health care, social services, child care, environmental programs, the cap and trade agreement, half of Toronto’s city councillors, the Basic Income Pilot Project, the province’s child advocate, school board budgets and endlessly so on, while it appointed friends to key government positions.

No one, likely not even the Minister, believes that this government is bargaining in good faith with educators. It capped wage increases to 1 percent and offered to increase class sizes to only 25 rather than 28; to require secondary school kids to take only 2 credits online rather than 4. This doesn’t take into account that slashing school board budgets alone, resulted in higher class sizes, cuts to programs and cuts to services.

Education sector unions tested the waters and have seen tens of thousands of people show up to rallies over the past year. Parent and community groups are cropping up everywhere; students have gone out on strike to stop education cuts. Unions need to keep moving forward as they build a coalition of public and Catholic teachers in both elementary and secondary panels to put an enormous strain on Doug Ford and the sycophants who enabled his policies. As one teacher on the strike line last Wednesday said:

I think it’s great that we’re out today. I think it’s what it’s going to take, really causing that disruption that puts the pressure on the government that forces them to come to the bargaining table. It’s also really heartening to hear all the public support—you can hear that in the background… it sends a really clear message to the government that the public, parents, students and teachers united are against these cuts.

Keep pushing

Educators along with parents and other allies have the numbers and credibility to push this government hard.

Unions should not back down; they should keep demanding a full restoration of all the money and staff taken from education over the past 18 months. They also need to be mindful of parents’ support, something that Stephen Lecce is doing his best to split away from educators as he puts out the fiction that their job actions are mostly about wages. Still, if this all comes to a longer strike, unions need to be prepared to address the needs of parents like those who require supervision for their children while they’re at work. They have got to keep parents on their side and be willing to go to a lot of trouble to do so.

As the Los Angeles educators understood, what’s at stake here is not just wages or even class size and the number of courses kids might have to take by computer. It’s much bigger than that. Ontario is stuck with a government that has no progressive ideas- a government bent on squeezing the health out of this province to make a case for privatization of basic services. This government ignores the future and we can thank educators and the people who support them for doing all they can to bring it down.

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Global Research strives to shine light on the under-reported, less known injustices ignored or buried.

Governments know it too, which is why there is an unprecedented threat to the independent media and the Internet. Fight-back was never more needed.

Please, during this season of giving, consider donating something, however large or small, to Global Research’s continuation.

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The Hidden Military Use of 5G Technology

By Manlio Dinucci, December 16, 2019

At the London Summit, the 29 member countries of NATO agreed to “guarantee the security of our communications, including 5G”. Why is this fifth generation of mobile data transmission so important for NATO?

While the earlier technologies were perfected to create ever more advanced smartphones, 5G is designed not only to improve their performance, but mainly to link digital systems which need enormous quantities of data in order to work automatically. The most important 5G applications will not be intended for civil use, but for the military domain.

New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent from Syria Chemical Attack Narrative. Leaked Documents and Emails of OPCW

By Zero Hedge, December 16, 2019

Late Saturday WikiLeaks released more documents which contradict the US narrative on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, specifically related to the April 7, 2018 Douma incident, which resulted in a major US and allied tomahawk missile and air strike campaign on dozens of targets in Damascus.

US/NATO Staged “False Flag”: More Evidence of OPCW Doctored Douma Chemical Weapons Attack, Syria Documents

By Stephen Lendman, December 16, 2019

On Saturday, WikiLeaks released more information on how the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) doctored its report on an alleged April 7, 2018 CW attack in Douma, Syria that never happened.

WikiLeaks revelations are more evidence of a pro-Western organization that plays fast and loose with alleged facts, inventing them to serve a higher power in Washington.

UN Renews Agency Helping Palestinian Refugees in Defiance of US

By Telesur, December 16, 2019

With 169 votes in favor, nine abstentions, and two votes against, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Friday extended the mandate for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) until June 30, 2023.

Members of Argentine Delegation in Bolivia Tell the Horror They Recorded (Coup Repression)

By Orinoco Tribune, December 16, 2019

On Thursday night, the members of the delegation arrived at the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to connect with another flight to La Paz. Upon arrival, the Bolivian police detained them, separated them from the rest of the travelers and identified, by name and surname, 12 of the members of the entourage and took them to another room to interrogate them.

Europe Was the Main Player in Destroying Syria and Creating the Refugee Crisis

By Steven Sahiounie, December 15, 2019

Monica Maggioni is an Italian journalist and is CEO of Rai.com, which broadcasts ‘Rai News 24 TV’, among others.  She interviewed Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, on November 26, and the interview was to be broadcast on December 2; however, it was mysteriously postponed.

Behind the scenes, at Rai.com there was conflict over the interview, with Fabrizio Salini declaring the interview was not commissioned, therefore it would not be broadcast, while Antonio Di Bella, director of news, declared it was not suitable to be broadcast, and Italian Senator Alberto Airola requested Maggioni to explain her role in the interview and answer charges of creating a diplomatic incident.

The Bogus Legend of Paul Volcker. The Break with Gold

By F. William Engdahl, December 15, 2019

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve during the 1980’s, has died at age 92. Major media are writing words of praise for the banker who “killed inflation” in the wake of the 1970’s oil crises and food price crisis. Volcker’s true legacy is far less positive. No one person did more to bring about the dysfunctional debt-bloated financial system we have today than the former Chase Manhattan Bank economist who spent most of his life in the employ of America’s most powerful oligarch family.

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I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer’s account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press, convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.

Then the Reich, with no justification whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon of evil. It was.

How did Nazi Germany differ from the United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press, informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn’t challenge any of this.

Having prepped the American public as the Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)

Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward’s war with warplanes butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis different?

The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these, men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian, or German, are Nazis.)

Photos of Iraqis at the American torture operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to have been edited.)

Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.

Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.

An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having fun yet?

President Trump has just pardoned several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the “confidence to fight.” This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was “Crush Their Skulls and Eat Their Faces.”)

Perhaps the best known example of implied approval was Nixon’s pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which he received three years of house arrest.

The Germans wanted empire, lebensraum, and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have lots of oil, while it has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.

As Shirer points out, the German public was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today. Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is the difference?

The parallels with the Reich are not complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler, Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically aggressive as any in the Fuehrer’s entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are connected to God on broadband. O’Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.

My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div…excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say, brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.

Wikipedia: “Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers …Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as 12.”)

For this Calley got three years house arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said, and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.

The German Nazis worshiped Blood and Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all others. Americans can’t easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance, slightly different foundation.

Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America, intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).

Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway, Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.

The Third Reich was, and America is, the chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.

Is this something to be proud of?

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All images in this article are from The Unz Review

At the London Summit, the 29 member countries of NATO agreed to “guarantee the security of our communications, including 5G”. Why is this fifth generation of mobile data transmission so important for NATO?

While the earlier technologies were perfected to create ever more advanced smartphones, 5G is designed not only to improve their performance, but mainly to link digital systems which need enormous quantities of data in order to work automatically. The most important 5G applications will not be intended for civil use, but for the military domain.

The possibilities offered by this new technology are explained by the Defense Applications of 5G Network Technology, published by the Defense Science Board, a federal committee which provides scientific advice for the Pentagon –

“The emergence of 5G technology, now commercially available, offers the Department of Defense the opportunity to take advantage, at minimal cost, of the benefits of this system for its own operational requirements”.

In other words, the 5G commercial network, built and activated by private companies, will be used by the US armed forces at a much lower expenditure than that necessary if the network were to be set up with an exclusively military goal. Military experts foresee that the 5G system will play an essential role for the use of hypersonic weapons – missiles, including those bearing nuclear warheads, which travel at a speed superior to Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound). In order to guide them on variable trajectories, changing direction in a fraction of a second to avoid interceptor missiles, it is necessary to gather, elaborate and transmit enormous quantities of data in a very short time. The same thing is necessary to activate defences in case of an attack with this type of weapon – since there is not enough time to take such decisions, the only possibility is to rely on 5G automatic systems.

This new technology will also play a key role in the battle network. With the capability of simultaneously linking millions of transceivers within a defined area, it will enable military personnel – departments and individuals – to transmit to one another, almost in real time, maps, photos and other information about the operation under way.

5G will also be extremely important for the secret services and special forces. It will enable control and espionnage systems which are far more efficient than those we use today. It will improve the lethality of killer drones and war robots by giving them the capacity of identifying, following and targeting people on the basis of facial recognition and other characteristics. The 5G network, as a weapon of high-tech capacity, will also become the target for cyber-attacks and war actions carried out with new generation weapons.

As well as the United States, this technology is under development by China and other countries. The international disagreement concerning 5G is therefore not only commercial. The military implications of 5G are almost entirely ignored, because the critics of this technology, including many scientists, are concentrating their attention on its toxic affects for health and the environement, due to exposure to very low-frequency electromagnetic fields. This engagement is of course of the greatest importance, but must be linked to research on the military use of this  technology, financed indirectly by ordinary users. One of its greatest attractions, which favours the dissemination of 5G smartphones, will be the possibility of participating, by subscription, in war games of impressive realism in direct contact with players from all over the world. In this way, without realising it, the players will be financing the preparation for war – but this time it will be a real war.

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This article appeared on Dec. 10 in the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto. Translation:Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Late Saturday WikiLeaks released more documents which contradict the US narrative on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, specifically related to the April 7, 2018 Douma incident, which resulted in a major US and allied tomahawk missile and air strike campaign on dozens of targets in Damascus.

The leaked documents, including internal emails of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — which investigated the Douma site — reveal mass dissent within the UN-authorized chemical weapons watchdog organization’s ranks over conclusions previously reached by the international body which pointed to Syrian government culpability. It’s part of a growing avalanche of dissent memos and documents casting the West’s push for war in Syria in doubt (which had resulted in two major US and allied attacks on Syria).

This newly released batch, WikiLeaks reports, includes a memo stating 20 inspectors feel that the officially released version of the OPCW’s report on Douma “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”. This comes amid widespread allegations US officials brought immense pressure to bear on the organization.

RELEASE: Third batch of documents showing doctoring of facts in released version of OPCW chemical weapons report on Syria. Including a memo stating 20 inspectors feel released version “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 15, 2019

The Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens, who saw the leaked documents just prior to WikiLeaks going public with them had this to say:

Sources stress that the scientists involved are ‘non-political, utterly uninterested in any strategic implications of what they reveal’.

They just ‘feel that the OPCW has a duty to be true to its own science, and not to be influenced by political considerations as they fear it has been’.

An internal memo seen by The Mail on Sunday suggests that as many 20 OPCW staff have expressed private doubts about the suppression of information or the manipulation of evidence.

This suppression of information included key evidence which undermined claims Syrian military helicopters dropped a gas cylinder from the air, which had long been the linchpin in Washington’s accusation that “Assad gassed his own people” at Douma.

Like waking up from a long nightmare that almost led to WWIII:
"The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a senior official at the @OPCW demanded the ‘removal of all traces’ of a document which undermined claims that gas cylinders had been dropped from the air.."https://t.co/MvMwX1xrEr

— Ian Wilkie (@Wilkmaster) December 14, 2019

The leaks also suggest the OPCW possessed scientifically credible evidence showing the victims of the alleged attack had symptoms not consistent with chemical gas exposure (prior OPCW statements pointed to chlorine use), casting further doubt on that aspect of the investigation.

OPCW memo raising concerns: pic.twitter.com/UHFJbm0iDQ

— Koen (@KoenSwinkels) December 15, 2019

But perhaps the most important leak in the new trove of emails centers on a raging debate among scientists over whether to include in their report the phrase “chlorine containing compounds were detected” and how to qualify it — given it was found only in such trace amounts as to be consistent with common household levels of chlorine-related items.

That final report claimed there were ‘reasonable grounds’ that chlorine gas was used in Douma, but an OPCW whistleblower says only tiny quantities of chlorine were detected in forms possible to find in any household. — Daily Mail

OPCW inspector tries to argue to FFM team leader Sami Barrek that the low levels of chlorinated organic chemicals need to be reported to avoid misrepresentation and confusion. Barrek says he'll unilaterally overrule the inspectors and omit the information.https://t.co/nPZtMbakAF pic.twitter.com/norATrlc7l

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 15, 2019

This crucial document (among others), which expresses concern that the media would wrongly assume a “chlorine attack” based on common household trace levels is found in the following memo:

And here’s another example:

Another stunning OPCW admission heretofore unreleased to the public:

Hitchens continues commenting on the trove of leaked documents as follows:

Alleged casualties shown in videos of the attack were foaming at the mouth in a way that might be expected of victims of sarin, but not by victims of chlorine. Yet all the reports agree that no traces of sarin were found at Douma.

These doubts were confirmed by expert toxicologists consulted by the OPCW investigation team on a visit to Germany in June 2018.

They concluded ‘there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure’.

In a key passage it adds ‘the team considered two possible explanations for the incongruity.

‘A) The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.

‘B) The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident.’ In other words, either the victims died from an unknown, undetected gas for which no evidence exists or there never was a chemical attack.

These severe doubts which were expressed internally among scientists, analysts, and technicians were never made public by the OPCW, hence the new leaks, apparently facilitated by frustrated staff who want to make the case to the world about the significant doubts.

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14 December, 2019

Today WikiLeaks releases more documents showing internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of a report on an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Amongst these is a memorandum written in protest by one of the scientists sent on a fact finding mission (FFM) to investigate the attack. It is dated 14 March 2019 and is addressed to Fernando Arias, Director General of the organisation. This was exactly two weeks after the organisation published its final report on the Douma investigation.

WikiLeaks is also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission. These documents should help clarify the series of changes that the report went through, which skewed the facts and introduced bias according to statements made by the members of the FFM.

The aforementioned memo states that around 20 inspectors have expressed concerns over the final FFM report, which they feel “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma”. Only one member of the fact finding team that went to Douma, a paramedic, is said to have contributed to the final version of the report. Apart from that one person, an entirely new team was gathered to assemble the final report, referred to as the “FFM core team”…

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Read the full WikiLeaks press release

See the new batch of leaked documents

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The European Commission is “irresponsible” in not addressing the health risks associated with the future rollout of next-generation mobile network, Bulgarian MEP Ivo Hristov has said.

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His comments echo concerns recently highlighted by EU telecoms ministers, related to “non-technical” elements of 5G cybersecurity, as the debate continues around Europe’s ability to keep pace with the rest of the world on 5G deployment.

However, discussion over the potential health risks of establishing denser network infrastructures consisting of considerably higher capacities has recently surfaced as a growing concern among Parliamentarians in Brussels.

Speaking at an event at the European Parliament on Tuesday (10 December), S&D’s Hristov hit out at the Commission for failing to conduct a health impact assessment report on 5G, despite warnings being highlighted by many in the scientific community.

“Currently the EU has no assessment of the human health risk of the introduction of 5G technology,” he said. “The European Commission took the position that such an assessment was not necessary, despite warnings of the scientific community. I find this irresponsible.”

He added that he has asked the Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel to prepare a study of the potential effects on health and the environment from the introduction of 5G networks.

Hristov’s point was supported on Tuesday by a contingency of Green MEPs who came out in force to challenge various telecom industry representatives, keen on making sure that Europe doesn’t lag further behind in its deployment of 5G network infrastructure.

5G technologies were described as an “inevitability” by Prof. Vladimir Poulkov, head of the intelligent communications infrastructure R&D Laboratory at Sofia Tech Park.

Poulkov said there were “forces at play” that would mean 5G deployment in the EU would become a necessity in order to keep up with the demand for higher capacity data transfers and speeds, something, he said, may help with wider goals in reducing Europe’s energy consumption.

This point in particular was heavily refuted by Paul Lannoye, former MEP and chairman of the Environmental Group Grappe, who claimed that there are no benefits whatsoever to the application of 5G in the energy sector.

In terms of the environment, Lannoye referred to several scientific studies that claim radio waves emitted from 5G transmitters could negatively impact insect populations, causing disruption to natural ecosystems.

Along this axis, German Green MEP Klaus Buchner was keen to highlight the importance that the EU follow its own commitments in exercising the ‘precautionary principle’ with regards to the future deployment of 5G across the bloc, which involves potentially taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty or possible risk.

Enshrined in Article 191 of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s precautionary principle states that “environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source.”

In 2016, the European Commission put forward plans to provide an EU-wide commercial launch of commercial 5G by 2020, with additional targets to cover urban areas by 2025.

However, these plans have faced a series of potential setbacks, thus far principally concerning the security of 5G network infrastructure, and allowing third-party access to the bloc’s next-generation telecommunications networks.

Last week, EU ministers adopted conclusions concerning the importance and security of 5G technology, stressing that an approach to 5G cybersecurity should be comprehensive and risk-based, while also taking into account ‘non-technical factors’.

Europe currently finds itself under pressure to take a stance on the involvement of China’s Huawei in the EU’s 5G networks. The US has already signed agreements with several EU member states including Poland and Romania, stressing that they will work together on a 5G approach.

Meanwhile, Bulgaria Prime Minister Boyko Borissov has recently met with US President Donald Trump in Washington, and the two released a joint statement saying that the “United States and Bulgaria declare the shared desire to strengthen cooperation” in the field of 5G.

More broadly, in order to reach Bulgaria’s 2023 targets for connectivity and e-government, the country’s Minister of Transport, Information Technology and Communications, Rosen Zhelyazkov, recently said that people need to be won around on some of the issues currently holding up the wider rollout of 5G infrastructures, such as security and health.

For Bulgarian MEP Hristov, however, these issues should be at the top of the list.

“It is the irreversibility of the process that should cause us to pay attention to fifth-generation mobile networks,” he said on Tuesday. “Along with the numerous advantages, I believe that we should pay serious attention to the possible risks related to cybersecurity and potential effects on the environment and human health.”

For the Commission at least, it appears that security rather than health is the most important issue.

An October report from the Commission about the coordinated risk assessment of 5G networks noted that “threats posed by states or state-backed actors are perceived to be of highest relevance,” and member states have now been tasked with working on a set of risk alleviating measures to mitigate the cybersecurity risks outlined in the report.

EU nations will work alongside the Commission and ENISA, the European Agency for Cybersecurity, in the drawing up of the plans, which are set to be ready by the end of December this year.

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Turkey’s recent maritime and military deals with the UN-recognized authorities in Libya are shrewd geostrategic moves intended to ensure that Ankara remains the dominant player in the Eastern Mediterranean in the face of a concerted effort by its rivals to undermine its influence with a game-changing pipeline that could set the stage for an anti-Turkish alliance if it’s successfully completed.

On Saturday, WikiLeaks released more information on how the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) doctored its report on an alleged April 7, 2018 CW attack in Douma, Syria that never happened.

WikiLeaks revelations are more evidence of a pro-Western organization that plays fast and loose with alleged facts, inventing them to serve a higher power in Washington.

The so-called incident was fake, a US/NATO-staged false flag, Syria wrongfully blamed for a victimless nonevent.

No one in Douma died, was hospitalized, or became ill from exposure to chemical or other toxins.

Local eyewitnesses and medical personal debunked the falsified narrative. Russian technical experts found no evidence of chemical or other toxins in soil samples and other analysis of the site.

According to new WikiLeaks information, documents it obtained show “internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of” its initial Douma report.

Twenty OPCW inspectors objected to the final Fact Finding Mission (FFM) report that “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma.”

Only one FFM member contributed to the redacted report, prepared by a new “FFM core team” that “only operated in country X” — “presumably not Syria,” said WikiLeaks.

A memorandum by one FFM member, dated March 14, 2019, was written two weeks after publication of the OPCW’s final report.

He “was tasked with analysis and assessment” of what was found at the site of the alleged CW attack because of his scientific expertise.

Yet “(i)n subsequent weeks, I found that I was being excluded from the work, for reasons not made clear,” he said.

Despite repeatedly asking to be informed on information to be included in the final report, his request was denied. “The response was utmost secrecy,” he explained.

When the final report was released on March 1, conclusions of the initial one were doctored.

“At the conclusion of the in-country activities in the Syrian Arab Republic, the consensus within the FFM team was that there were indications of serious inconsistencies in findings,” he wrote in his memorandum, adding:

“After the exclusion of all team members other than a small cadre of members who had deployed (and deployed again in October 2018) to Country X, the conclusion seems to have turned completely in the opposite direction.”

“The FFM team members find this confusing, and are concerned to know how this occurred.”

His memorandum concluded saying

“I must stress that I hold no opinion, interest or strong views on the technical part of the matter, nor any interest in the political outcomes.”

“My interest is in sound technical rigor; the science, engineering and facts will speak for themselves.”

All wars are based on Big Lies and deception, time and again false flags used to justify what’s unjustifiable, blaming victims for hostile acts against them.

The alleged April 2018 Douma CW incident was false flag deception, Syria wrongfully blamed.

Throughout nearly nine years of war, Damascus was falsely blamed for numerous CW incidents it had nothing to do with — committed by US-supported terrorists every time.

Government forces are combatting them to liberate the country and its people from their scourge.

Unasked by US-led Western officials and supportive establishment media is why would these troops harm civilians they’re going all out liberate?

When cities, towns and villages are freed from occupation by ISIS and other jihadists, civilians joyously welcome government forces.

On occasions when Assad visited liberated areas, residents welcomed him warmly, thanking him for freeing them from US-supported terrorists.

In November 2018, he greeted residents of liberated Suwayda province, bordering Daraa in the country’s southwest where Obama regime aggression began in March 2011.

Al-Watan video showed him cheered and lifted onto the shoulders of a Syrian man, people thanking him for their freedom from US-supported terrorists – the scene repeating what happened in earlier liberated areas.

In March 2018, he drove a Honda through liberated East Ghouta, a videographer filming him, no aides or security forces in the vehicle, saying he went there “to see the situation” for himself, adding:

“We’ll see the armed forces that are fighting and the areas that have been liberated” – telling them “(y)ou are the sons of our country.”

“We will protect all the people of Ghouta. In these areas, every meter has a drop of blood from a Syrian fighter. A hero among heroes.”

There’s nothing “civil” about Obama regime orchestrated aggression in Syria, begun in March 2011, escalated by Trump, a forever dirty war like other US post-9/11 conflicts.

Last week, US war secretary Mark Esper said Pentagon forces will stay in Syria for years — on the phony pretext of combatting ISIS the US created and supports, along with likeminded jihadists.

In his important book titled “The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance,” Tim Anderson explained what the official narrative suppressed, saying:

“Washington and its allies try another ‘regime change’ in Syria. A fake ‘revolution’ uses Islamic gangs, during an ‘Arab Spring.’ The Western media constantly lie about this covert, dirty war.”

“A political reform movement is driven off the streets by Islamic violence. (The misnamed pro-Western) ‘Free Syrian Army’ slaughters minorities and government workers.”

“Saudi and Qatari backed Islamists carry out a series of massacres, falsely blaming them on the Syrian Army and President Assad.”

“Most of Syria’s opposition backs the state and army against terrorism. Washington calls a puppet exile group ‘the Syrian opposition.’ ”

“Washington (using NATO, the Saudis, Qatar, Turkey and Israel) backs all the armed Islamist groups, pretending some are ‘moderate rebels.’ ”

“A resistance coalition rallies to Syria. Iran, Hezbollah, Iraq and Russia join the Syrian Army in destroying western backed terrorist groups.”

Anderson explained Washington’s dirty war in great detail, his documented facts polar opposite official narrative propaganda.

Over the weekend, Michel Chossudovsky republished an article on Syria he wrote in May 2011 on “the inception of the jihadist terrorist insurgency.”

Things began in mid-March 2011 “in Daraa, a small border town with Jordan…instigated by Washington…(events) documented from” when US-orchestrated aggression began.

No protest movement uprising occurred. “(I)t was an armed insurgency integrated by US-Israeli and allied supported ‘jihadist’ death squads,” he explained.

They were “trained and equipped by NATO and Turkey’s High Command.” What happened and continues was “a staged event involving covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence.”

The official narratives of all wars are exercises in mass deception. Establishment media reports on years of war in Syria are some of the worst in modern memory.

Endless US-orchestrated aggression continues for regime change.

It’s all about wanting overwhelmingly popular Bashar al-Assad replaced with pro-Western puppet rule, Iran isolated ahead continued economic war aiming to topple its legitimate government.

US wars are all about making the world safe for America’s military, industrial, security, media complex, Wall Street and other corporate interests.

They have nothing to do with combatting the scourge of ISIS or other jihadists — elements the US uses as proxy foot soldiers to advance its imperial interests.

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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.

How resilient the human spirit is! Within hours of Boris Johnson’s shock election triumph on Thursday night, the crushed ‘metropolitan elite’ had begun to console itself with an optimistic forecast. Boris, the idea circulated, is really a closet centrist, and the scale of his victory means that he can now turn his back on the radical right who put him into power, and govern as the One Nation Conservative he claims to be. Did he not, after all, re-enter Downing Street on Friday morning with the words “healing” and “unite” on his lips?

Alas, we have been there before – as Donald Trump approached the White House. Remember all those confident predictions that Trump was more interested in the trappings of power than its exercise? “More Berlusconi than Mussolini”, we were assured. He would be “managed” by the “adults in the room”. That worked out well, didn’t it?

Johnson, of course, is a very different figure from Trump. But they have certain crucial characteristics in common, most obviously: mendacity, ruthlessness, and, it is becoming increasingly apparent, vindictiveness. Both men can be genial when things are going their way – but neither responds well to opposition, and each has a well-developed instinct for scapegoating when things go wrong.

And things will certainly go wrong for Boris. The great “Get Brexit Done” lie may have helped him back to Downing Street, but it left untouched the insoluble conundrum at the heart of Brexit – the fact that we can maintain the close economic relationship with the European Union on which Britain’s prosperity depends; or we can go for the sort of low-cost, low-regulation “Singapore-on-Thames” that Johnson’s financiers (oligarchs, hedge funds, expatriate media barons) demand; but we cannot have both. Looking ahead to negotiations on the “comprehensive free trade agreement” with the EU that Boris has sworn to deliver by next year’s end, it is hard to see any outcome other than breakdown or capitulation. It will be tough to spin either as a success.

So, too, with the terms of the US trade deal that American healthcare and agricultural interests will then force on us. And so, too, with the looming disintegration of our once-United Kingdom, as Scotland’s comprehensive rejection of both Brexit and Johnson precipitates Britain’s own Catalonia-style crisis.

One could go on. As the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies made clear in its analysis of the Conservative manifesto, apart from much-bruited pledges of more money for health and education what we have been promised is an economic future with austerity “baked in”. In other words, the voters who put their faith in Johnson as the unlikely champion of the working class will find that the bulk of public services continue to deteriorate, and the holes in the welfare safety net will become ever harder to overlook. They may not react well.

So the going will get tough – and the tough will get nasty. Johnson’s pieties on the steps of Downing Street were at once followed by a trip to Sedgefield, the newly Tory constituency once held by Tony Blair, for a little dance on the grave of the Labour Party. And of course the way ahead was clearly signposted by Johnson’s autumn purge of 21 Conservative moderates who had voted to block a no-deal Brexit. Opposition will not be tolerated, or forgotten – and Johnson has a hit-list.

Some items were clearly foreshadowed in Johnson’s manifesto: in a section with the Orwellian title “Protect our democracy”, we are given a brief preview of what “the necessary task of restoring public trust in government and politics” will entail. Obviously, the First Past The Post voting system, which worked so well to disenfranchise Britain’s “Remainers”, will be preserved. Equally obviously, the media barons will get their payoff in the final abandonment of efforts to impose some minimum standards on the press. Such long-standing rightwing aspirations as voter ID and a dilution of the Human Rights Act are also promised.

What is new, however, is the proposal for a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission. There are no details, of course, on how it will be selected or operate, but among other things, it will target the judiciary, and even the Royal Prerogative. So the Supreme Court, which had the temerity to judge illegal Johnson’s autumn attempt to shut down parliament, will have its wings clipped; and though the monarchy may have connived in that same illegal move, it will find itself punished for supporting the suggestion that Johnson lied to the Queen.

So much for what was advertised in advance. Post-election announcements have already identified two further pillars of Britain’s traditional political dispensation that are to pay the price for insufficient enthusiasm for Johnson. The Svengali-like Dominic Cummings is to drive a “radical reform” of the civil service, “including a review of processes for hiring and firing officials”; so Britain’s widely admired public administration, with its 150-year tradition of political impartiality and “speaking truth unto power”, is to get its comeuppance. And so too the BBC, where a review of whether to decriminalise failure to pay the licence fee is in effect a threat to cut that institution’s financial legs off.

In sum, the political culture of Britain as we have known it for generations is earmarked for demolition. Anyone or anything that has tried, however ineffectually, to scrutinise Johnson’s plans or hold him to account will reap the coming authoritarian whirlwind. Trump will no doubt represent himself as this revolution’s enabler, and he will be right. But Johnson may well outdo even his mentor – Britain, after all, lacks the protection of a written constitution. A resilient human spirit that hopes for the best and adapts to circumstances looks sadly inadequate for what is now in prospect.

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