Global Research

Most years the annual gray whale migration along North America’s West Coast is a sure sign of spring. But this year something has gone wrong. Since January at least 167 dead whales have washed ashore from Mexico to Alaska. Scientists expect more in the weeks ahead.

One of the dead whales came to rest at the mouth of a river near my home. This was in May, in south-central Alaska. On a sunny evening my wife and I and our four-year-old daughter went out to see it.

A dead whale has a powerful stink to it, so we approached from the massive animal’s upwind side. It lays on its side in the sun, eyes closed and flukes resting flat on the silty beach. With ravens squawking from nearby cottonwoods and a bald eagle looking on from a riverside snag, we showed our daughter its blowhole, flippers, and the feathery baleen visible along the edges of its open mouth.

With the whale visible from a busy nearby road, a mix of residents and tourists came and went during our hour-long visit. Most stayed just long enough to snap a few photos. But others lingered to peer at the animal’s features or the square incisions biologists had made during their necropsy.

Scenes like this have unfolded up and down the West Coast in recent months. From Baja, Mexico, to Puget Sound to the remote shores of British Columbia, curious humans have strolled out to the continent’s edge to marvel at dead whales. Many brought their children. Some left behind flowers. And nearly everyone asked the same question my young daughter asked: “Why did the whale die?”

Why, indeed? We weren’t the only ones asking. Just a week earlier, the sudden spike led federal scientists to declare an “unusual mortality event,” triggering a special investigation.

Image on the right is from Steven Swartz/NOAA

Teasing out a common cause amidst all of these widely dispersed deaths can be daunting. Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) have one of the longest migrations of any mammal, spanning 5,000 miles between Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and northern Alaska. This year’s dead whales have been found along nearly the whole length of their migratory route. At least 37 washed ashore in California, including twelve in San Francisco Bay. Thirty have been found in Washington. During the week of June 17 three whales discovered in Alaska brought that state’s total to ten.

Scientists say the whales on shore represent only a small portion of those that have died.

“It’s a rough calculation, but only about 10 percent of the mortalities are documented,” says John Calambokidis, a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington. The remaining 90 percent, he says, either “sink, float out to sea, or otherwise go undocumented.” That means the death toll so far this year could actually be more than 1,000 individuals.

And we’re probably not done yet. Scientists expect more whales will wash ashore in the coming weeks as they continue north toward the Arctic, where they normally spend summers feasting in the rich waters of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Seeking Answers

Dave Weller, a research wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in La Jolla, California, says the investigation begins with examining as many of the dead whales as possible before they begin decomposing.

“If we can access a dead whale in time, we can look for evidence of disease, viruses, malnutrition, or human causes such as collisions with ships,” he says.

Scientists along the West Coast have been busy performing necropsies on the dead whales, as described in a recent video from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. They measure the body, identify the sex, and take samples of the organs, blubber and feces. Each sample is a puzzle piece, helping assemble a picture of what’s occurring along the migration route.

Weller says many of the whales show signs of malnourishment. Examinations of a female gray whale found north of Seattle in early May revealed that she had starved to death. Another dead whale in Washington had eel grass in its stomach, evidence of “desperation eating,” according to one observer.

Image below: Gray whale and calf. Steven Swartz/NOAA

So far no results have been released for the gray whale I visited near my home in Alaska.

It’s not just the dead. Observers have also reported many “extremely malnourished” gray whales swimming off the West Coast this year, according to Calambokidis. Some have detoured into inland waters such as Los Angeles Harbor or San Francisco Bay, where several have been struck and killed by vessels.

Malnourishment makes scientists look north for answers. Gray whales do almost all of their feeding in Alaska, primarily by scooping tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods from muddy sediments on the ocean floor. They then rely on the fat reserves gained in Alaskan waters to survive their southward migration and the winter mating and breeding season in Mexico.

In one theory, malnourished whales may indicate the animals have reached the natural population level for their Arctic food supply. Population surveys show a steady increase in recent decades, with estimates now at 27,000 animals. It’s a successful recovery from the early 20th century, when commercial whaling reduced numbers to less than 2,000. Some researchers speculate that this year’s mortalities simply reflect the population has outpaced its Arctic food supply, leaving some whales without the reserves needed to return to Alaska.

Another theory is that dramatic warming in the Arctic in recent years has affected the gray whales’ food source. Since 2014 sustained heating in the Bering Sea has triggered an unprecedented loss of sea ice, which may have decreased the productivity of amphipods.

It’s also possible the two theories could be working in concert with each other. When a population reaches its carrying capacity, Calambokidis explains, it can become more vulnerable to environmental fluctuations such as the sudden loss of Bering Sea ice.

If rapidly changing Arctic conditions do play a role, this year’s gray whale deaths will join a growing list of wildlife mortality events connected to warming in the north. They include a massive collapse of West Coast sea star populations, a dramatic decrease in Alaskan cod harvests, and the starvation of thousands of puffins and murres in Alaska, all related to an extreme marine heat wave that began in 2013 in the northern Gulf of Alaska and lasted more than two years. Federal scientists also suspect warming contributed to unusually high mortality among fin and humpback whales in northern waters between 2015 and 2016.

Adding to questions about food web conditions in the Arctic, scores of dead ice seals have washed ashore in recent weeks in northern and western Alaska. Federal scientists have not identified a cause, but a NOAA spokesperson said reports indicate possible malnourishment or abnormal molting among some of the seals.

Image on the right: Bearded seal. Photo: NOAA News

It’s worth noting that this year’s gray whale deaths are unusual but not unprecedented. In 2000, 131 dead gray whales washed ashore on the U.S. coast during spring migration. Scientists did not conclusively determine the cause, but at least some of the whales were malnourished. Warming from a strong El Niño weather pattern was identified as a possible factor.

While scientists seek answers to the current mass mortality, the gray whale I visited with my family a few weeks ago remains stranded at the mouth of the river. Like the ones found on shores in other states, scientists may let it decompose naturally, a process that could take all summer for this 41-foot-long male.

Before his death this whale likely spent his final months swimming north toward the promise of his Bering Sea feeding grounds. What conditions he would have found there, and how they may affect other arriving whales, for now remains a mystery.

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Tim Lydon writes from Alaska on public-lands and conservation issues. He has worked on public lands for much of the past three decades, both as a guide and for land-management agencies. His writing has most recently appeared in High Country News, Terrain, The Revelator, The Hill and elsewhere.

Featured image is from the author

The Trump-Kim meeting at DMZ on June 30 took the world off guard; it was theatrical; it was historical. It gave a glimpse of hope for long waited peace on the Korean peninsula and the falling-down of the last frontier of the unholy cold war. 

Unfortunately, it seems that the media, think tanks and the political circles in the U.S. and elsewhere do not fully recognize the significance of the event.

I am asking two questions. What made the two world leaders to come to the meeting? What were the achievements of the meeting?

The objectives of the meeting can be different between Trump and Kim. We must remember how much Kim Jong-un was humiliated and angered by the failure of the Hanoi summit meeting in last February. We must remember that he took the one week-long painful train trip across China to show to the world how much he was sincere in solving the nuclear crisis.

But, he was betrayed by Trump. The Hanoi meeting has surely damaged his dignity, his pride and his leadership; he has lost his “face” in front of his people.

Since the Hanoi event, Kim had to do something to recover his leadership and find practical solutions to the nuclear issue and, at the same time, the problem of hunger and economic development.

He has taken some measures.

First, he has changed the negotiation team from the security team to the foreign affairs team possibly led by the first deputy minister of foreign affairs.

Second, this is important, Kim lost much of his faith in Washington; his mistrust about Trump, especially his advisors including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo has deepened.

Third, Kim might have abandoned the hope of freeing himself from never ending sanctions. It is possible that through the meetings with Xi Jinping and Putin, Kim has obtained the assurance for economic cooperation despite sanctions by Trump. In other words, Kim might have concluded that the relief from sanctions are not necessarily the first priority. This might have allowed Kim to meet Trump with a stronger bargaining position.

Fourth, Kim might have decided to focus, during the discussion with Trump on the preservation of his regime and national security. The regime preservation can be done through the establishment of liaison offices which will eventually become embassies.

It is likely to be easier for Trump to offer the regime preservation and security guarantee than the relief of sanctions for which the UN is involved.

If my assumptions regarding the sanctions and the regime preservation as well as security guarantee are correct, Kim might have come to DMZ without heavy burden; he might have come with a low level of hope. Therefore, he could be relatively easily satisfied with outcome of the meeting. In fact, after the 53-minute-chat with Trump, Kim looked pretty happy.

Fifth, it is important to know that it was not Kim who invited Trump; it was the latter who invited the former. This fact alone can contribute greatly the restoration of Kim’s dignity, his leadership and his “face” much tarnished in Hanoi.

In short, as far as Kim Jong-un was concerned, the DMZ meeting could offer decent rewards.

As for Trump, several factors seem to have led him to take the initiative for the meeting.

First, ever since the Hanoi event, Trump has not given up the hope for dialogue with Kim; in many occasions, he has been boasting about the good chemistry with Kim.

Second, he seems to regard the issue of North Korea differently from the Iran issue. Trump has taken much more belligerent approach to Iran, because Iran is capable of dominating the Middle East region, while North Korea has no capacity to dominate the region of East Asia. So, Trump could be more lenient toward Pyongyang.

Third, nuclear free North Korea could become friendly to the U.S. and it could be a part of China containment strategy.

Fourth, North Korea may be the true last economic frontier remaining in the region and the U.S. could participate, with ample benefits, in its economic development.

Fifth, owing to the devoted mediation of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, the 70-year-old mutual mistrust between North Korea and the U.S. elite groups has been dissipated to some degree.

Sixth, the DMZ summit had the extraordinary timing to kill the huge impact of the second Democrats presidential election debate. The DMZ summit has completely eclipsed the media coverage of the Democrats debate. Thus, the summit was an important political gain for Trump.

Thus, both Trump and Kim had good reasons to come the summit meeting

Now, I am asking the question: “What are the summit’s accomplishments?” We may look at some possible positive results.

To begin with, the summit has proved that a summit could be organized with short notice, that it could take place with minimum cost and that it can take place often.

Moreover, the closed meeting of the two leaders lasted as long as 53 minutes, much longer than five minutes originally planned. Both Kim and Trump looked satisfied with the talk. Experts of Korean nuclear crisis suggest the following possible outcomes of the meeting.

First, Kim would have promised the dismantling of the Yongbyun nuclear facilities as well as missile launching pads. In exchange, Kim would have asked for his regime preservation and peace settlement. It appears that the relief of sanctions would have been given a lower priority.

Second, Trump might have accepted the “small deal” consisting of stepwise denuclearization in exchange of corresponding rewards by the U.S. That is, the Bolton’s idea of big deal could have been abandoned. By the way, Bolton was in Mongolia when the DMZ was taking place. This could mean a change in Trump’s strategy.

Third, it is true that the meeting did not produce concrete results; it is normal, because the meeting was not organized to produce them. The meeting was valuable in that it broke the stalemate of the nuclear dialogue and the reaffirmation of the mutual intention of continuing the dialogue.

On this point, the meeting was a success; new negotiation teams will be formed in a few week; the US team will be led by Stephen Biegun, US special representative for North Korea under Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State; the North Korea team could be led by Choe Son-hui, first deputy minister of foreign affairs under the direction of Ri Yong-ho, minister of foreign affairs.

Fourth, at the meeting, both leaders could have agreed to strengthen the top-down approach assisted by the bottom up consultations. It appears that the failure of the Hanoi summit was due to the lack of communication and coordination between the top and the bottom. It seems that now on, the top will more closely check the work of the negotiation teams.

Before closing my paper, I would like to add a few words about the reaction of media and politicians and brain-trust people. Most of these people are very negative about the meeting except Senator Bernie Sanders, leading Democrats president hopefuls and Pope Francis.

Their negative perception of the meeting is based on two main accusations, namely, the North Korea’s being not trustworthy and being a country of dictatorship.

As I pointed out in my previous Global Research papers, I am not sure which of the two countries is more untrustworthy. We must remember that the Framework Agreement of 1994 was broken by the U.S. and its allies, not by North Korea. In fact, if the U.S. and its allies respected the Agreement, North Korea would never have developed the nuclear weapons in the first place.

As for dictatorship, the history will tell you that the U.S. has supported countless terrible dictators all around the world. In South Korea, the U.S. has supported the merciless dictatorship of General Park Chung-hee and General Chun Doo-hwan. The argument that the U.S. would not deal with dictators is sheer hypocrisy.

The U.S. knew in advance that the government of General Chun would murder several hundred innocent citizens of Kwangju city on the 18th of May, 1980 with tanks and helicopters, yet the U.S. supported the criminals of the Chun government.

To sum up, I say this: I am glad that the DMZ summit took place. The FFVD (the Final Full Verifiable Denuclearization) is possible. But, Washington should abandon the “Big Deal” model and accept the stepwise denuclearization matched by relief of sanctions and other compensations leading eventually FFVD and lasting peace on the Korean peninsula. But the FFVD should guarantee North Korea’s self defence capacity.

However, to succeed in his attempt to denuclearize, Trump must free himself from the trap of demonization of North Korea perpetuated by the Washington Deep State oligarchy which goes for the maintenance of status quo of tension on the Korean peninsula so that they can sell more weapons to Korea.

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

Featured image is a White House photo

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This article was first published on May 19, 2011.

Author’s Note and Update

In recent developments, Ms. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF is slated to become the next president of the European Central Bank (ECB). France’s president Emmanuel Macron acting on behalf of powerful banking interests was instrumental in Ms. Lagarde’s candidacy.

What media reports fail to mention is that Lagarde is a corrupt official involved in financial fraud. Her appointment to head the ECB is not matter of political debate or concern. She is an obedient instrument of the financial and banking establishment which controls both the IMF and the European Central Bank.

On December 20, 2016, A French court found IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde guilty of “negligence” in relation to a multimillion dollar Euro fraud while she was France’s finance minister in 2008. She is said to have approved “an award of €404m ($429m; £340m) transfer to businessman Bernard Tapie, [a crony of president Sarkozy] for the disputed sale of a firm.”

“Ms Lagarde, who always denied wrongdoing, was not present in court, having left Paris for Washington DC.”

The IMF board said it retained “full confidence” in her leadership. (BBC, December 20, 2016)

No questions asked: Despite her involvement in financial fraud at tax payers’ expense,  the French government at the time confirmed that they had full confidence in Ms. Lagarde.

Her leadership as head of the IMF has not been questioned. Christine Lagarde was reappointed in February 2016 to a second five-year term at the IMF.

Despite her record, she is now considered (July 2019) for the position of president of  the European Central Bank (ECB).

Eight years ago, Flashback to May-June 2011. The Dominique Strauss Khan (DSK) Honey Trap Scandal was instrumental in Lagarde’s accession to the IMF. And her role in the Euro 400 million financial transfer was casually ignored.

Regime Change: Dominque Strauss Khan (DSK), managing director of the IMF was framed and Christine Lagarde was appointed to replace him.

Media focus at the time centered on the story of  the alleged victim, the hotel housemaid, rather than on who was pulling the strings behind the scenes in what visibly was a political frame-up.

There was no firm evidence against Strauss-Kahn.  This was known to prosecutors at an early stage of the investigation. Had they released it, Lagarde would not have been chosen to replace DSK.

France’s Finance Minister Christine Lagarde was confirmed as Managing Director of the IMF on June 26th 2016. The report from the prosecutor was released to the media three days later, on  June 29.  

Lagarde was chosen to succeed Strauss Khan at the IMF, a few days prior to a New York Court ruling which completely exonerated Dominique Strauss Khan on the basis of lack of evidence.

If this information had been revealed a few days earlier, Lagarde’s candidacy would no doubt have been questioned.

Regime change was implemented at the IMF, not to mention preparations for the French presidential elections.

While Strauss Khan was dismissed following the 2011 scandal (despite the ruling of the New York court case which abandoned all charges again him) the 2008 financial scam involving Christine Lagarde was known to the French government. This however did not prevent her 2011 June appointment to the IMF.

Needless to say, not only did she retain her position at the IMF despite having been involved in a financial scam, she was appointed for a second term.

The appointment of Christine Lagarde in 2011 marks a major political turning point. Since the DSK affair, Europe’s political landscape has become increasingly pro-American.

The Washington consensus prevails. The application of IMF economic medicine had already been applied in several EU countries including Greece and Portugal during DSK’s mandate.  But in the course of the last few years, it has reached new heights. Drastic austerity measures have triggered unprecedented levels of unemployment. The entire European social  landscape is in crisis.

In many regards the DSK scandal was a watershed in the evolution of EU-US relations, with European governments becoming increasingly subservient to Washington’s demands.

Regime Change at the IMF. The Obama administration had demanded DSK’s replacement by a more compliant individual.

In retrospect, the framing of Strauss Kahn and the appointment of Lagarde had an impact not only on EU economic restructuring including the crisis in Greece, but also on the State structures of the French Republic.

The “Honey Trap” is a powerful instrument. Had DSK not been framed, Francois Hollande — who largely served US interests– would no doubt not have been elected president of the French Republic and Christine Lagarde would not have acceded to the positon of Managing Director if the IMF.

Michel Chossudovsky, February 27, 2o15, December 21, 2016, July 3, 2019

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Regime Change at the IMF: The Frame-Up of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, 19 May 2011

The arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has all the appearances of a frame-up ordered by powerful members of the financial establishment, in liaison with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, whose presidency has served the interests of the US at the expense of those of France and the European Union. While there is for the moment no proof of a plot, the unusual circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment require careful examination.

Immediately following Strauss Kahn’s arrest, pressures were exerted by Washington to speed up his replacement as Managing Director of the IMF preferably by a non-European, an American or a handpicked candidate from an “emerging market economy” or a developing country.

Since the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1945, the World Bank has been headed by an American whereas the IMF has been under the helm of a (Western) European.

Strauss-Kahn is a member of elite groups who meet behind closed doors. He belongs to the Bildeberger. Categorized as one of the world’s most influential persons, he is an academic and politician rather than a banker. In contrast to his predecessors at the IMF, he has no direct affiliation to a banking or financial institution.

But at the same time he is the fall guy. His “gaffe” was to confront the Washington-Wall Street Consensus and push for reforms within the IMF, which challenged America’s overriding role within the organization.

The demise of Strauss-Kahn potentially serves to strengthen the hegemony of the US and its control over the IMF at the expense of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe”.

Blocking Strauss-Kahn, the Presidential Candidate

In recent years, a major shift has occurred in Europe’s political landscape. Pro-American governments have been elected in both France and Germany. Social Democracy has been weakened.

Franco-American relations have been redefined, with Washington playing a significant role in grooming a new generation of European politicians.

The presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy has, in many regards, become a de facto US “client regime”, broadly supportive of US corporate interests in the EU and closely aligned with US foreign policy.

There are two overlapping and interrelated issues in the DSK frame-up hypothesis.

The first pertains to regime change at the IMF, the second to Strauss-Kahn as a candidate in France’s forthcoming presidential elections.

Both these processes are tied into the clash between competing US and European economic interests including control over the euro-currency system.

Strauss-Khan as a favorite of the Socialist Party, would have won the presidential elections leading to the demise of “Our Man in Paris” Nicolas Sarkozy. As documented by Thierry Meyssan, the CIA played a central undercover role in destabilizing the Gaullist party and supporting the election of Nicolas Sarkozy (See Operation Sarkozy: How the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic, Reseau Voltaire, September 4, 2008)

A Strauss-Kahn presidency and a “Socialist” government would have been a serious setback for Washington, contributing to a major shift in Franco-American relations.

It would have contributed to weakening Washington’s role on the European political chessboard, leading to a shift in the balance of power between America and “Old Europe” (namely the Franco-German alliance).

It would have had repercussions on the internal structure of the Atlantic Alliance and the hegemonic role of the US within NATO.

The Eurozone monetary system as well as Wall Street’s resolve to exert a decisive influence on the European monetary architecture are also at stake.

The Frame-Up?

Fifty-seven percent of France’s population, according to a May 17 poll, believe that Strauss-Kahn was framed, victim of a set-up. He was detained on alleged sexual assault and rape charges based on scanty evidence. He was detained based on a complaint filed by the Sofitel hotel where he was staying, on behalf of the alleged victim, an unnamed hotel chamber-maid:

The 32-year-old maid told authorities that she entered his suite early Saturday afternoon and he attacked her, New York Police Department spokesman Paul J. Browne. She said she had been told to clean the spacious $3,000-a-night suite, which she thought was empty.

According to an account the woman provided to police, Strauss-Kahn emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway and pulled her into a bedroom, where he began to sexually assault her. She said she fought him off, then he dragged her into the bathroom, where he forced her to perform oral sex on him and tried to remove her underwear. The woman was able to break free again and escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened, authorities said. They called police.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7565485.html#ixzz1MfFWFlnY

Challenging the Washington Consensus 

What is at stake in the immediate wake of Strauss Kahn’s demise is “regime change” at the IMF.

The Obama administration has demanded his replacement by a more compliant individual. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank is pushing for the replacement of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, “suggesting he can no longer perform his duties” as IMF Managing director.

“Geithner called for greater formal recognition by the IMF board that John Lipsky, the fund’s second-in-command, will continue serving as temporary managing director for an interim period. Although Strauss-Kahn has yet to resign, sources say the IMF is in touch with his legal counsel to discuss his future at the organization.”

What lies behind the frame-up scenario? What powerful interests are involved? Geithner had a close personal relationship with Strauss-Kahn.

On the floor of the US Senate (May 18), Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, called for the resignation of DSK while calling upon the IMF’s deputy managing director John Lipsky to “assume full responsibility of the IMF” as interim managing director. The process of “permanent replacement should “commence at once,” he said. John Lipsky is a well connected Wall Street banker, a former Vice Chairman at JPMorgan Investment Bank.

While the IMF is in theory an intergovernmental organization, it has historically been controlled by Wall Street and the US Treasury. The IMF’s “bitter economic medicine”, the so-called Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), imposed on countless developing countries, essentially serves the interests of creditor banks and multinational corporations.

The IMF is not the main architect of these devastating economic reforms which have served to impoverish millions of people, while creating a “favorable environment” for foreign investors in Third World  low wage economies.

The creditor banks call the shots. The IMF is a bureaucratic entity. Its role is to implement and enforce those economic policies on behalf of dominant economic interests.

Strauss Kahn’s proposed reforms while providing a “human face” to the IMF did not constitute a shift in direction. They were formulated within the realm of neoliberalism. They modified but they did not undermine the central role of IMF “economic medicine”. The socially devastating impacts of IMF “shock treatment” under Strauss-Kahn’s leadership have largely prevailed.

Dominique Strauss Kahn arrived at the helm of the IMF in November 2007, less than a year prior to September-October 2008 financial meltdown on Wall Street. The structural adjustment program (SAP) was not modified. Under DSK, IMF “shock treatment” which historically had been limited to developing countries was  imposed on Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Under the helm of DSK as Managing Director, the IMF demanded that developing countries remove food and fuel subsidies at a time of rising commodity prices on the New York and Chicago Mercantile exchanges.

The hikes in food and fuel prices, which preceded the September-October 2008 Wall Street crash, were in large part the result of market manipulation. Grain prices were boosted artificially by large scale speculative operations. Instead of taming the speculators and containing the rise in food and fuel prices, the IMF’s role was to ensure that the governments of indebted developing countries would not in any way interfere in the “free market”, by preventing these prices from going up.

These hikes in food prices, which are the result of outright manipulation (rather than scarcity) have served to impoverish people Worldwide. The surge in food prices constitutes a new phase of the process of global impoverishment.

DSK was complicit in this process of market manipulation. The removal of food and fuel subsidies in Tunisia and Egypt had been demanded by the IMF. Food and fuel prices skyrocketed, people were impoverished, paving the way towards the January 2011 social protest movement:

Fiscal prudence remains an overarching priority for the [Tunisian] authorities, who also see the need for maintaining a supportive fiscal policy in 2010 in the current international environment. Efforts in the last decade to bring down the public debt ratio significantly should not be jeopardized by a too lax fiscal policy. The authorities are committed to firmly control current expenditure, including subsidies,… (IMF Tunisia: 2010 Article IV Consultation – Staff Report; Public Information Notice on the Executive Board Discussion; and Statement by the Executive Director for Tunisia)

“[The IMF] encouraged the [Egyptian] authorities to press further with food and fuel subsidy reforms, and welcomed their intention to improve the efficiency and targeting of food subsidy programs. [meaning the selective elimination of food subsidies].

“Consideration should be given to introducing automatic adjustment mechanisms for domestic fuel prices to minimize distortions [meaning dramatic increases in fuel prices without State interference], while strengthening cash-based social programs to protect vulnerable groups. (IMF Executive Board Concludes 2008 Article IV Consultation with the Arab Republic of Egypt Public Information Notice, PIN  No. 09/04, January 15, 2009)

Under the helm of DSK, the IMF also imposed sweeping austerity measures on Egypt in 2008, while supporting Hosni Mubarak’s “efforts to broaden the privatization program”.(Ibid)

The Frank G. Wisner Nicolas Sarkozy Connection 

Strauss-Kahn was refused bail by Judge Melissa Jackson, an appointee and protégé of Michael Bloomberg, who in addition to his role as Mayor is a powerful figure on Wall Street.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. charged (using scanty evidence) Strauss-Kahn “with seven crimes, including attempted rape, sexual abuse, forcible touching and unlawful imprisonment”.

Who is Cyrus Vance Jr.?

He is the son of the late Cyrus Vance who served as Secretary of State (1977-1980) in the Carter administration.

But there is more than meets the eye. Nicolas Sarkozy’s step father Frank G. Wisner II, a prominent CIA official who married his step mother Christine de Ganay in 1977 served as Deputy Executive Secretary of State under the helm of Cyrus Vance Senior, father of District Attorney Cyrus Vance Junior.

Is it relevant?

In this courtroom drawing, Dominique Strauss-Khan, next to his lawyer

The Vance and Wisner families had close personal ties. In turn Nicolas Sarkozy had close family ties with his step father Frank Wisner (and his half brothers and sisters in the US and one member of the Wisner family was involved in Sarkozy’s election campaign).

It is also worth noting that Frank G. Wisner II was the son of one of America’s most notorious spies, the late Frank Gardiner Wisner (1909- 1965), the mastermind behind the CIA sponsored coup which toppled the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Wisner Jr. is also trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Trust.

While these various personal ties do not prove that Strauss-Kahn was the object of a set-up, the matter of Sarkozy’s ties to the CIA via his step father, not to mention the ties of Frank G. Wisner II to the Cyrus Vance family are certainly worth investigating. Frank G, Wisner also played a key role as Obama’s special intelligence envoy to Egypt at the height of the January 2011 protest movement.

Did the CIA play a role?

Was Strauss-Kahn framed by people in his immediate political entourage including President Obama and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner?

What was the role of Sarkozy’s Step-father:

• Sarkozy’s Step Father Frank G Wisner II, Deputy Executive Secretary of State (1976-79)
  under Cyrus Vance Senior during the Carter administration
• District Attorney Cyrus Vance Junior, son of the late Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State in the Carter administration

DSK and Timothy Geithner

DSK and Timothy Geithner

Fair Trial?

Innocent before proven guilty? The US media has already cast its verdict. Will the court procedures be manipulated?

One would expect that Strauss-Kahn be granted a fair trial, namely the same treatment as that granted to thousands of arrests on alleged sexual aggression charges in New York City.

How many similar or comparable alleged sexual aggressions occur on a monthly basis in New York City?  What is the underlying pattern? How many of these are reported to the police?  How many are the object of police follow-up once a complaint has been filed?

What is the percent of complaints submitted to police which are the object of police arrest? How many of these arrests lead to a judicial procedure? What are the delays in court procedures?

How many of these arrests lead to release without a judicial procedure?

How many of the cases submitted to a judicial procedure are dismissed by the presiding judge?

How many of the cases which are not dismissed are refused bail outright by the presiding judge? What is the basis for refusing bail?

How many are granted bail?  What is the average amount of bail?

How many are imprisoned without bail based on scanty and incomplete evidence?

How many of those who are refused bail are sent to an infamous maximum security prison on Rikers Island on the orders of  Michael Bloomberg.

Diplomatic Immunity

Press reports state that full diplomatic immunity does not apply to officials of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, namely that the US did not ratify the protocol.

“U.N. convention on privileges and immunities for international agencies that most countries have ratified. It gives the heads of U.N. agencies broad immunity in the countries where they are based. But the U.S. government never became a party to that treaty. Employees of international agencies are covered by a U.S. statute that gives only limited immunity.”

The relevant question is how has this limited immunity provision been applied in practice?  Namely how many people with limited immunity (UN officials, officials of the Bretton Woods institutions) have been arrested and sent to a high security prison?

Has Strauss Kahn been given the same treatment as those arrested under the provisions of “limited immunity”?

Does the Strauss Kahn arrest fit the pattern? Or is Strauss Kahn being treated in a way which does not correspond to the normal (average) pattern of police and judicial procedures applied in the numerous cases of persons arrested on alleged sexual assault charges?

Without a frame-up instrumented by very powerful people acting in the background, the head of the IMF would have been treated in an entirely different way. The mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and Timothy Geithner would have come to his rescue.  The matter would have been hushed up with a view to protecting the reputation of a powerful public figure. But that did not happen.

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The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Order Online Here

In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this new enlarged edition –which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction– the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

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Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

Michel Chossudovsky

Published in 14 languages. More than 140,000 copies sold Worldwide.

In these unprecedented economic times, the world is experiencing as a whole what most of the non-Industrialized world has experienced over the past several decades. Michel Chossudovsky takes the reader through a nuanced examination of the intricacies of the global political-economic landscape and the power players within it; specifically, looking at how the World Bank and IMF have been the greatest purveyors of poverty around the world, despite their rhetorical claims to the opposite. These institutions, representing the powerful Western nations and the financial interests that dominate them, spread social apartheid around the world, exploiting both the people and the resources of the vast majority of the world’s population. As Chossudovsky examines in this updated edition, often the programs of these International Financial Instittutions go hand-in-hand with covert military and intelligence operations undertaken by powerful Western nations with an objective to destabilize, control, destroy and dominate nations and people, such as in the cases of Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

To understand what role these international organizations play today, being pushed to the front lines and given unprecedented power and scope as ever before to manage the Global Economic Crisis, one must understand from whence they came. This book provides a detailed, exploratory, readable and multi-faceted examination of these institutions and actors as agents of the ‘New World Order,’ for which they advance the ‘Globalization of Poverty.’

Published by Global Research: Order Online Here

Hostile White House rhetoric against nonbelligerent Iran continues menacingly.

It should terrify everyone for pushing things toward possible war on the country, a nation of 81 million people, second in regional population size to Egypt, armed with sophisticated weapons able to hit back hard if attacked. 

Trump regime hardliners Bolton and Pompeo want war on the country, pushing Trump in this direction.

He’s manipulated by hardliners in charge of his geopolitical agenda, including Pentagon hawks, somewhat restrained by their cooler head counterparts — knowing war on Iran would be a far greater undertaking than other nations the US attacked since Vietnam.

A similar quagmire could result, including body bags returning home, highlighted by media hostile to Trump, wanting him defeated in 2020.

At the same time, the fourth estate is militantly hostile toward Iran, on board for transforming the country into a US client state, wanting Israel’s main regional rival eliminated by restoring pro-Western fascist rule over Iranian sovereign independence.

The fullness of time will tell what’s coming. Will or won’t the Trump regime attack Iran preemptively?

If happens it’ll likely follow a significant false flag incident, most likely resulting in US casualties, the way to arouse public anger and enlist congressional support — the Islamic Republic wrongfully blamed for what it surely won’t have anything to do with.

Trump regime arrogance is breathtaking. A July 1 White House statement threatened Iran more than already.

It came in response to Tehran’s legal JCPOA right to increase its uranium enrichment beyond limits it voluntarily agreed to observe.

Foreign Minister Zarif said his nation “surpassed the 300kg (low-uranium enrichment) limit, and we had already announced” an intention to exceed it,” adding:

“(W)e have said very clearly what we are doing and consider this as part of our rights as per the JCPOA.”

He, President Rouhani, and other Iranian officials said uranium enrichment would increase because Britain, France, Germany, and the EU breached their JCPOA obligations.

If they fulfill them ahead, Iran will reduce the amount of uranium it enriches, so far not exceeding a 3.67 level, far below the 90% level required to produce nukes.

No evidence whatever suggests Iran wants to develop and produce these WMDs it considers hostile to Islam, wanting them eliminated everywhere.

Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball explained that no international standard prohibits Iran from enriching uranium, saying it “is not the case” that Tehran is in breach of its nuclear obligations. “That is the (unjustifiable) American position.”

The White House called it “a mistake under the Iran nuclear deal to allow Iran to enrich uranium at any level” — its legal right, the same as 31 other nations with nuclear reactors, and over 50 others with nuclear research reactors.

The White House claim that

“(t)here is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms” sounded like a nonsensical (GW) Bushism adding:

“We must restore the longstanding nonproliferation standard of no enrichment for Iran” — legal under Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and JCPOA.

“The United States and its allies will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons” it clearly doesn’t want.

At the same time, US officials ignore nuclear armed and dangerous Israel, also maintaining illegal stockpiles of chemical, biological and other banned weapons.

A same-day State Department disinformation statement was more hostile than the White House.

It falsely accused Iran of “tak(ing)  new steps to advance its nuclear (weapons) ambitions” — a bald-faced Big Lie.

Nor is the Islamic Republic the “world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism (sic)…us(ing) its nuclear program to extort the international community and threaten regional security (sic)” — dubious distinctions applying to the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners.

These nations “pose (the) great(est) danger to the region and to the world,” mainly because of Washington’s hegemonic rage to control all other nations, their resources and populations.

Wars of aggression against sovereign independent countries threatening no one is its longstanding favored strategy — military Keynesianism on steroids.

Throughout most of the post-WW II era, Washington’s permanent war agenda has been and remains official policy by both right wings of the one-party state.

The late Seymour Melman explained that “every major aspect of American life is being shaped by our Permanent War Economy.”

Its horrific toll includes aggressive prioritizing wars over essential homeland needs, thirdworldizing the nation at the same time.

Half or more of US households are poor, disadvantaged, uneducated, “disconnected from society’s mainstream, restless and unhappy, frustrated, angry, and sad,” Melman stressed.

“State Capitalism” reflects the American way, an insidious government/business partnership.

It features permanent wars, debauched leadership, lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, and deprived millions on their own, uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten to assure steady funding for America’s wars and corporate handouts at the expense of peace, equity and justice.

Things have been on an ominous trajectory toward possible US war on Iran since Trump illegally withdrew from the JCPOA, an international agreement, unanimously adopted by Security Council members, making it binding international law, requiring all nations to observe its provisions.

Trump accusing Iran of “playing with fire” sounds ominously like his earlier “fire and fury like the world has never seen” threat against North Korea.

There’s no way to know for sure what’s coming, but some signs give hope. Pompeo and Bolton haven’t swayed NATO nations to join a US coalition for war on Iran — except perhaps for Britain, joined at the hip with Washington for all its wars of aggression.

Most Dems, some Republicans, and cautious Pentagon commanders oppose attacking Iran. Future events could change things dramatically.

Pre-WW II, Congress and the US public overwhelmingly opposed US involvement in Europe’s war. Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack transformed national sentiment from pacifism to raging anger against Japan.

House and Senate members near-unanimously approved a declaration of war, one congressional member alone opposing it.

As the saying goes, the rest is history. The 9/11 mother of all false flags was a second Pearl Harbor. Will a third one launch war on Iran?

False flags are a longstanding US tradition since the mid-19th century. No matter how many times Americans are fooled, they’re easy marks to be duped again.

War on Iran would be disastrous for the country, region, and world peace — why it’s crucial for nations and activists against it to go all-out to prevent US aggression against another nonbelligerent nation, supporting the rule of law, threatening no one.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Iranian Presidency/Anadolu Agency

It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…

• Temperatures in Greenland were 40 degrees above normal in June, causing 2 billion tons of ice to melt away in a single day. That’s the equivalent of 800,000 Olympic swimming pools.
• Scientists observed that the Arctic permafrost has begun to thaw a full 70 years before they expected it to—indicating the climate is warmer than it has been in at least 5,000 years—and potentially unearthing vast quantities of greenhouse gases trapped underground.
• Arctic sea ice coverage neared record lows this spring. Loss of arctic ice threatens plant and animal life, indigenous communities, and leads to extreme weather in other parts of the world.

It’s all alarming. But to officials in the Trump administration, it represents just another golden opportunity to profit. In April, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to the Arctic Council—that’s the governmental group that gathers countries with territory in the Arctic region and indigenous peoples to cooperate on “issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.”  Pompeo didn’t seem concerned about sticking to the council’s formal mission statement; he could barely contain his excitement about the new waterways and resources opening up due to the accelerating sea ice melt.

“The Secretary is looking at this with blinders on,” says Ray Pierrehumbert, Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. For the latest installment of Say WHAT?—the Bulletin’s video series that casts a wry eye at wrongheaded policy—we watched the Arctic Council speech with Pierrehumbert and captured his reaction to some of Pompeo’s most flabbergasting statements.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has taken steps to ban the sale of Cuban cigars Cohiba in Brazil.

According to O Globo, Bolsonaro’s administration justified the measure saying that the cigars had “excessive sorbic acid” when evaluated by the Brazilian National Health Oversight Agency (Anvisa).

Yet the company, Emporium, which has been managing the cigars’ importations for the past two decades, denied the allegations.

“There is no additive of any kind in the cigars, this is a 100 percent natural product.”

As a result of Anvisa’s evaluation on May 23, the registration of Cohiba’s brand was not renewed, and the agency gave the company a 30-day deadline to collect the product, automatically prohibiting its sales across the country.

However, Cohiba contested the measure, temporarily lifting the ban until an administrative court judges the case.

Cohiba, as a brand, was born in 1966 and for decades it has been recognized worldwide as a top brand for cigars and cigarettes. The products are sold all over the world, except the United States, where its sale is prohibited by the commercial, economic and financial blockade imposed on Cuba for more than six decades.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

There had been earlier skirmishes, threats, talk of retaliation and warnings of dire consequences, but the trade war between the United States and China started in earnest on July 6, 2018 when Washington implemented its first China-specific tariffs. It ended just short of a year later, and though Chinese officials are too polite to publically proclaim victory, from their point of view, the outcome can be viewed in a favorable light.

At first glance, it hardly seemed a telling blow. No trumpets sounded, no flags were lowered, no treaties signed. But a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to resume trade talks that had broken down in May. So? Hardly a surrender. Just a brief lull, a pause before hostilities re-commence? No. This is a moment of far more significance and one that many in the West do not fully appreciate. If the deal had been just to postpone tariffs Trump had threatened to impose on an additional $300 billion annually in Chinese imports then it could be considered a strategic retreat. After all, Trump will not overhaul the relationship with the world’s second-biggest economy as the 2020 election looms.

But lifting certain commercial restrictions in the US on Huawei, a computer firm seen as a Trojan Horse for the Chinese military, and reports that the Trump administration will allow North Korea to keep its nuclear weapons suggest a more defining moment has arrived. The Chinese have always denied that Huawei has links to its military. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they? But from the Chinese perspective, they believe many US companies operating in China have links to the US military. After all, did not Ike Eisenhower warn in his 1961 farewell presidential address of the threat posed by the industrial military complex. It hasn’t lessened since then.

This is a major reversal by Washington who had told its European allies, especially Britain, that any dealings with Huawei would endanger defense ties.

Just in May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned London to prioritize its security interests and those of its allies when dealing with Huawei.

He hinted that the US could re-consider some of its extensive defense and economic interests in the UK.

This is the second time the Trump administration has backed down with a Chinese tech giant.

In June 2018, about the time the trade war started, the US Commerce Department lifted a ban on selling components to Chinese firm, ZTE Corps which had been accused of violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea. It coughed up more than $1 billion in fines. That came after a personal appeal from Xi to Trump.

North Korea seems less clear cut but the genie is out of the bottle. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, dismissed media reports that claimed the Trump administration was considering negotiating a nuclear freeze by North Korea, rather than complete denuclearization.

Trump said in March that

“North Korea has an incredible, brilliant economic future if they make a deal, but they don’t have any economic future if they have nuclear weapons’’.

But crucially North Korean leader Kim Jong-un believes that he can have both a developing relationship with the US and maintain his nuclear arsenal. A nuclear freeze is on the table. Beijing may not like Kim but it views a stable and more prosperous North Korea as vital for its own security. And China knows that, when dealing with Trump, the art of the deal is not boasting about it.

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Tom Clifford is an Irish journalist based in China.

Featured image is from The Bullet

In spite of online censorship efforts directed against the independent media, we are happy to say that readership on globalresearch.ca has recently increased. We wish to thank all of you who share our articles far and wide.

We cover a diversity of key issues you would be hard pressed to find on any other single online news source. This is truly independent news and analysis, a dying breed.

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Europe’s Missing Islamic State Fighters

By Soeren Kern, July 02, 2019

The German government has lost track of scores of Germans who travelled to Iraq and Syria in recent years to join the Islamic State (IS). The revelation comes amid growing fears that some of these fighters are returning to Germany undetected by authorities.

Provoking Iran Over and Over: US “Throwing Kitchen Sink” at Islamic Republic

By Makia Freeman, July 02, 2019

Provoking Iran has become a favorite US pastime, it seems. The CIA, along with the Mossad and MI6, just can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to bullying, meddling with and provoking the Persian nation.

After Supreme Court Refusal, It’s Up to the People to End Gerrymandering

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, July 02, 2019

The Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to strike down partisan gerrymandering. This occurs when one party intentionally manipulates district boundaries to skew its voting power, notwithstanding the will of the voters. Although both parties engage in partisan gerrymandering, Republicans benefit from it far more than Democrats.

Trump’s Peace Plan Has Been Designed to Fail – Exactly Like Its Predecessors

By Jonathan Cook, July 02, 2019

Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century”, offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peace-making, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.

Perceptions vs Reality. Canada’s Stance on Islamophobia and Racism

By Mark Taliano, July 02, 2019

Wahhabism, grown and nurtured in Canada’s ally, Saudi Arabia, is an archetype of exclusivism and sectarianism.  It is anti-Islamic, and instrumentalized by imperial powers, including Canada, to destroy prey nations such as secular, pluralist, democratic Syria, a country that takes pride in being inclusive and tolerant.

Democratic Party Candidates for 2020: Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard Let the Genie out of the Bottle

By Philip Giraldi, July 02, 2019

Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates, confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously avoided.

The Iran Nuclear Deal: Letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

By Global Research News, July 01, 2019

With the JCPOA nuclear deal in place, not only was the shadow of war and destruction lifted, but after a long time, the people of Iran began to enjoy relative economic stability and security. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) Iran has continued to carry out all its obligations under the JCPOA. But, in May of 2018, the United States government arbitrarily decided to abrogate the Agreement—disregarding the SCR 2231.  Clearly, this action has caused crises for the world, the region and the people of Iran.

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The head of Mossad dispelled whatever doubt may have remained among some in the Alt-Media Community about the existence of “Putinyahu’s Rusrael” when he credited “channels of communication with the Kremlin” for contributing to what he described as the “one-time window of opportunity” to clinch an “Israeli”-Arab peace deal “for the first time in Middle East history”.

Russia and “Israel” are allies, so much so that one can even speak about them as a singular political entity nowadays using the neologism “Putinyahu’s Rusrael“. The hyperlinked source in the preceding sentence is chock full of proof supporting this assertion, but the smoking gun if one was even needed at this point came on Monday during the Herzliya Conference, a yearly security forum held in the self-professed “Jewish State”. Mossad chief Yossi Cohen made it clear just how important of an ally “Israel” regards Russia as being when he credited “channels of communication with the Kremlin” for contributing to what he described as the “one-time window of opportunity” to clinch an “Israeli”-Arab peace deal “for the first time in Middle East history”, with Reuters quoting him as saying the following:

“The Mossad today espies a rare opportunity, perhaps for the first time in Middle East history, to arrive at a regional understanding that would lead to a comprehensive peace accord. Common interests, the fight against rivals such as Iran and Jihadist terrorism, the close relations with the White House and channels of communication with the Kremlin all combine to create what might be a one-time window of opportunity.”

The outlet also reported that the spymaster “said his agency had formed a task force designed to spot peacemaking opportunities in a region where only two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, have full ties with Israel”, thus suggesting close collaboration between the Mossad and its counterparts in Moscow, seeing as how the Eurasian Great Power is the most influential extra-regional actor in the Mideast since its 2015 anti-terrorist intervention in Syria. Russia’s 21st-century grand strategy is to become the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, to which end it’s entered into game-changing cooperation with non-traditional partners like “Israel”, with whom it shares the joint goal of ensuring Iran’s withdrawal from Syria. Whereas Tel Aviv seeks this outcome because it fears Tehran, Moscow sees it as the key to reaching a “New Detente” with Washington.

In terms of how “channels of communication with the Kremlin” relate to the “one-time window of opportunity” to clinch an “Israeli”-Arab peace deal “for the first time in Middle East history”, it shouldn’t be forgotten that President Putin is a staunch defender of the self-professed “Jewish State” as proven by the many statements of support that he’s made in this respect over his nearly two decades in office that are easily accessible at the official Kremlin website. In addition, the head of Russia’s National Security Council reaffirmed that “Russia puts special attention on ensuring Israel’s security” during the unprecedented National Security Advisor Summit that took place last week in Jerusalem, so with “Israel” believing that a peace deal with the Arab countries is a non-negotiable prerequisite for securing its existence, it’s natural that its Russian ally would support this in all ways.

Bearing in mind Moscow’s envisaged “balancing” role in the region and desire to replace Washington’s fading leadership there, it’s highly likely that its diplomats are frantically working behind the scenes to encourage as many Arab states as possible to publicly come out and normalize their not-so-secret ties with “Israel”, albeit ideally doing so without advertising this move as being aimed against Iran so that Russia’s ties with it aren’t further complicated any more than they already are because of this. The Mossad’s “channels of communication with the Kremlin” are therefore extremely important for facilitating the success of “Israel’s” plans, so much so that one could describe them as indispensable since the chief of this intelligence agency mentioned them in the same sentence as other seemingly more important factors such as “the close relations with the White House”.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The mainstream media was too busy obsessing over Russiagate to notice that, according to an annual Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees report, the Social Security trust fund will run out of money by 2035. The trustees also reported that the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund will be empty by 2027.

The trustees’ report is actually optimistic. Social Security is completely funded, and Medicare is largely funded, by payroll taxes. Therefore, their revenue fluctuates depending on the employment rate. So, when unemployment inevitably increases, payroll tax revenue will decline, hastening Medicare and Social Security’s bankruptcy.

Another dark cloud on the government’s fiscal horizon involves the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which provides federal bailouts to bankrupt pension plans. The PBGC currently has an over 50 billion dollars deficit. This deficit will almost certainly increase, as a number of large pension funds are likely to need a PBGC bailout in the next few years. Congress will likely bail out the PBGC to avoid facing the wrath of voters angry that Congress did not save their pensions.

Unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare are not included in the official federal deficit. In fact, Congress raids the Social Security trust fund to increase spending and hide the deficit’s true size, while leaving the trust fund with worthless IOUs.

The media also ignored last week’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report predicting the federal debt will increase to an unsustainable 144 percent of the gross domestic product by 2049. The CBO’s report is optimistic as it assumes interest rates remain low, Congress refrains from creating new programs, and there are no major recessions.

Few in Congress or in the Trump administration are even talking about the coming fiscal tsunami, much less proposing the type of spending cuts necessary to pay down the debt and have the funds to unwind the entitlement programs without harming those currently reliant on them. Instead, both parties support increasing spending and debt.

Republican control of both houses of Congress and the While House led to increased federal spending of over $300 billion dollars. The House Democratic majority now wants even more spending increases. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is threatening to not raise the debt ceiling unless President Trump and congressional Republicans agree to lift the spending caps put in place by the 2011 budget deal.

The Republican Congress routinely exceeded the caps’ minuscule spending limits. Therefore, Speaker Pelosi should have no problem getting President Trump and his Republic congressional allies to once again exceed the caps on welfare spending as long as Democrats agree, as they are likely to agree, to bust the caps on warfare spending.

America’s military budget already equals the combined budgets of the next seven highest-spending countries. Instead of allowing himself to be neoconned into wasting trillions on another Middle East quagmire, President Trump should bring home the nearly 170,000 troops stationed in almost 150 countries.

Unless Congress immediately begins making substantial spending cuts, America will soon face a major economic crisis. This crisis will likely involve the Federal Reserve’s debt monetization resulting in a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. Since the media and most politicians refuse to discuss this topic, it is up to those of us who understand the truth to spread the word, grow the liberty movement, and force politicians to make real cuts right now.

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The German government has lost track of scores of Germans who travelled to Iraq and Syria in recent years to join the Islamic State (IS). The revelation comes amid growing fears that some of these fighters are returning to Germany undetected by authorities.

The German Interior Ministry, in response to a question from the Secretary General of the classical liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), Linda Teuteberg, revealed that German authorities lack information on the whereabouts of at least 160 Germans who left to fight with the IS, according to Welt am Sonntag. The ministry said that while some had probably been killed in combat, others have gone into hiding and may be trying to resettle in Germany.

“In view of the very fragmented protection of the EU’s external borders, it is particularly worrying that the federal government appears to have taken no further measures to prevent the uncontrolled re-entry of underground IS fighters,” Teuteberg told Welt am Sonntag. She added that the government “still has no concept” for dealing with former IS fighters from Germany, including “Germans detained in the war zone as well as the more than 200 former IS supporters who are now back in Germany.”

Teuteberg said that the Interior Ministry should come up with a plan for how to deal with IS returnees and how to hold them accountable, by, for example, strengthening the legal capacity to investigate and prosecute war crimes abroad.

Of the estimated 1,050 Germans who travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight in recent years, approximately one-third (350) have returned to Germany. Another 220 are believed to have been killed on the battlefield. According to government sources cited by the German television program Tagesschau, approximately 120 are being detained in Iraq and Syria. In addition, at least 138 children of German IS fighters are being held Iraq and Syria. The whereabouts of the others are unknown.

The German government downplayed Teuteberg’s concerns that IS fighters can return to Germany unnoticed:

“Given the different measures (including most-wanted lists or entry barriers) that make uncontrolled re-entry significantly more difficult, it is also assumed in the future that entry without the knowledge of the German security authorities should remain the exception.”

It is known, however, that IS fighters have entered Europe — including Germany — undetected by posing as migrants: a majority of the terrorists who carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed and 360 injured, entered Europe by posing as migrants, according to counter-terrorism investigators. Most of the attackers were well-known to police and at least nine were on terrorist watch lists. Once they passed through the EU’s porous borders in southern Europe, they were able to travel throughout the rest of Europe undetected.

Missing IS fighters are a Europe-wide problem. A July 2018 study by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR) at King’s College London estimated that more than 5,900 people — 3,379 men, 1,023 women, 1,502 minors — from Western Europe joined the Islamic State. Another 7,250 people from Eastern Europe joined the group.

According to ICSR estimates, around 1,765 IS fighters have returned to Western Europe, and 784 have returned to Eastern Europe. At least 800 IS fighters are being held at Kurdish detention camps in northern Syria. Around 700 of the fighters’ wives and 1,500 of their children are also in camps, according to Reuters. It remains unclear how many of the unaccounted IS fighters have been killed on the battlefield, and how many have gone into hiding.

In Austria, for instance, of the 250 IS fighters, 93 have returned. In Belgium, of the 500 IS fighters, 123 have returned. In Britain, of the 850 IS fighters, 425 have returned. In Denmark, of the 145 IS fighters, 72 have returned. In France, of the 1,900 IS fighters, 400 have returned. In Italy, of the 129 IS fighters, 11 have returned. In the Netherlands, of the 300 IS fighters, 60 have returned. In Spain, of the 210 IS fighters, 30 have returned.

In Sweden, of the estimated 300 people who left the country to join the Islamic State, approximately 150 have returned, according to the Swedish Security Service (Säpo). Around 100 Swedish fighters are believed to have died on the battlefield; the government does not have information on the whereabouts of the others.

Between 35 and 40 Swedish IS fighters have returned to Stockholm, but the municipality has not made contact with a single returnee, and may not even know where any of them live, according to an exposé by Swedish Television (SVT), the national public television broadcaster.

SVT surveyed officials in the five Swedish municipalities — Gothenburg, Stockholm, Örebro, Malmö and Borås — that are home to most of the 150 IS returnees, and found that those municipalities combined only have knowledge of the whereabouts of a maximum of 16 adults and 10 children.

The apparent apathy has been attributed to Sweden’s lack of legislation.

“We are almost the only country in the EU that lacks legislation against participation and cooperation with terrorist organizations,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a counter-terrorism expert at the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm. “We are of course vulnerable,” he added. “Those who are dangerous and out on our streets can recruit more, and they can even plan terrorist acts.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of foreign jihadi fighters who are being held in Syria represent a “time bomb” and could escape and threaten the West unless countries do more to take them back, according to the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed authorities holding them.

“It seems most of the countries have decided that they’re done with them, let’s leave them here, but this is a very big mistake,” said Abdulkarim Omar of the Syrian Democratic Forces. “Their home countries must do more to prosecute foreign fighters and rehabilitate their families, or else this will be a danger and a time bomb.”

In February 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump called on European countries to repatriate and prosecute their foreign fighters:

“The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial. The Caliphate is ready to fall. The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them…

“The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go. We do so much, and spend so much. Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing. We are pulling back after 100% Caliphate victory!”

In April, Trump tweeted:

“We have 1,800 ISIS Prisoners taken hostage in our final battles to destroy 100% of the Caliphate in Syria. Decisions are now being made as to what to do with these dangerous prisoners…. European countries are not helping at all, even though this was very much done for their benefit. They are refusing to take back prisoners from their specific countries. Not good!”

We have 1,800 ISIS Prisoners taken hostage in our final battles to destroy 100% of the Caliphate in Syria. Decisions are now being made as to what to do with these dangerous prisoners….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 30, 2019

On June 24, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, called for all foreign fighters who are being detained in Syria and Iraq to be repatriated, investigated and prosecuted, or released.

“The continuing detention of individuals not suspected of crimes, in the absence of lawful basis and regular independent judicial review, is not acceptable,” she said.

Europe’s reluctance to take back their IS fighters is based on a mix of legal, financial and political factors. Some countries have begun repatriating the children of IS jihadis on a case-by-case basis but taking back foreign fighters and their families is deeply unpopular and carries political risk.

In France, for instance, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe recently said that he preferred that French jihadis were repatriated rather than them risk evading justice. They should be “tried, convicted and punished in France rather than disappearing in the wild to plan other actions, including against our country,” he said in a January 30 interview with France Inter. His comments sparked an immediate backlash. Valérie Boyer of the center-right party Les Républicains told parliament that the government must “prevent the return of jihadists who betrayed France and fought against our civilization.”

National Assembly MEP Nicolas Bay, who is also a member of the executive board of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), added:

“The French jihadis, by their commitment alongside groups that declared war on our country, having committed ignoble attacks on our territory, these jihadists have deliberately chosen to break with France and there is no justification for granting them any protection.

“Rather than preparing for their return, the government should do everything possible to prevent them from returning to French territory! They must be judged by the competent Syrian and Iraqi authorities.”

Philippe subsequently did an about-face. In a March 6 interview with BFM TV, he said:

“We will not bring back anybody. The French doctrine has always been that the French fighters who are going to combat zones are fighting against us. When they are detained, they are to be judged and, if necessary, punished on the spot [in Iraq or Syria].”

The Wall Street Journal, in a recent editorial, “The West’s Foreign Fighter Problem,” noted that European governments face a “Catch-22” situation: either repatriate and prosecute their jihadis, or risk that they disappear off the radar and carry out new attacks in Europe. The Journal wrote:

“In February President Trump tweeted that the U.S. ‘is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back’ their ISIS fighters and prosecute them at home. Indonesia, Morocco, Russia, and Sudan started the process months ago, but Western European governments are resisting.

“Bending to domestic political pressure, European politicians like U.K. Home Secretary Sajid Javid have vowed to reject ISIS members and even strip them of citizenship. German and French officials also publicly express skepticism about accepting imprisoned terrorists. Countries that criticized the U.S. over Guantanamo Bay now are turning a blind eye to the detention of their citizens elsewhere….

“The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have treated detainees humanely, but it can’t hold them forever. The group eventually will have no choice but to let the prisoners go — making a manageable security threat much worse. These battle-hardened fighters are especially dangerous given their practical knowledge and the respect they could command among would-be jihadists.

“Many released fighters would slip into Iraq, blend in with sympathetic Sunni populations, and prepare for an ISIS revival. Others could exploit security vacuums in Libya or Somalia or jump-start conflicts in other unstable regions. Perhaps the greatest risk is that some will return to the West undetected alongside refugees. Countries hesitant to take back their citizens now should realize they might return anyway—clandestinely.”

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Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

Featured image: Linda Teuteberg (Source: Olaf Kosinsky / CC BY-SA 3.0-de via Wikimedia Commons)

Provoking Iran has become a favorite US pastime, it seems. The CIA, along with the Mossad and MI6, just can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to bullying, meddling with and provoking the Persian nation. From Operation Ajax in 1953 to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, from shooting down an Iran Air commercial passenger plane in 1988 to pulling out of JCPOA in 2018 to (last week) violating Iranian air space in 2019, the USG (United States Government) is engaging in extreme provocation of the Islamic Republic in the hopes of getting it to take the bait. If you’re relatively new to this topic and can’t quite figure out what to believe, or to understand who is provoking whom, read on to find out the shocking history of US interference in Iran.

Operation Ajax: US-CIA Coup to Oust Mosaddegh

How would you feel if your country democratically elected a leader (a prime minister), then foreign powers orchestrated a coup to overthrow his government and install a puppet dictator – and a king at that? That is exactly what happened in 1953 when then US President Eisenhower signed off on the CIA’s Operation Ajax, on behalf of the UK, multinational Western oil corporations and other rich powerbrokers who wanted control of Iran’s hydrocarbons. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi went on to rule with an iron fist after prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was ousted for wanting to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. With the help of the CIA/Mossad, Pahlavi created the SAVAK – a brutal secret police and intelligence service that reigned in Iran during his dynasty. According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), SAVAK probably employed more than 15,000 full-time agents. It had virtually unlimited powers to surveil, arrest, torture and execute anyone it wanted.

Overthrowing the Shah, Supporting Iraq Against Iran and Shooting Down an Iranian Passenger Plane

The CIA was again involved in an overthrow in Iran in 1979. This time, the very same Shah Pahlavi was on the receiving end of the coup, having fallen out of US favor. The CIA backed Khomeini and the “Islamic Revolution” which changed Iran from a monarchical tyranny to a theocracy. US interference in Iran became highly politicized during the Iran hostage crisis, with the Republicans (Bush, Reagan, etc.) making behind-the-scene deals with Iran in what was ultimately a successful attempt to prevent Democrat Jimmy Carter from winning a 2nd presidential term. Later in the 1980s, the infamous Iran-Contra scandal became public, when we learned that the US was using funds from selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Also in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq attacked Iran, which began the Iraq-Iran War that lasted 8 years. The US was secretly helping Iraq during the start of the war. In 1988, the US audaciously shot down an Iranian commercial passenger plane – Air Iran Flight 655 – in Iranian air space, offering lame excuses. The US SM-2 surface-to-air missile killed 290 passengers, including 66 children. Imagine the US reaction if Iran had shot down a commercial American plane in US air space!

Trying to Get to War with Iran

Provoking Iran is one thing. War with Iran is another, and it has been a bad obsession for awhile, picking up speed in 2001. Recall General Wesley Clark’s famous admission that the Pentagon was planning to attack 7 nations in 5 years in the aftermath of the 9/11 false flag operation. The 7 nations (in the order they were to be invaded) were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing with … Iran. Recently, James Corbett put together a short video with examples of 4 times US officials or think tanks have openly discussed the idea of war with Iran. The first was Patrick Clawson, of the The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Zionist think tank, who suggested we need a false flag to get into war with Iran, just as other wars have started with false flag events. It’s all about crisis initiation. The second was the late arch-NWO insider Zbigniew Brzezinski, who suggested the US cold go to war with Iran as a “defensive measure.” The third is a former frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, US politician Gary Hart, who wrote an article on HuffPost entitled Unsolicited Advice to the Government of Iran where he warned Iranian officials to “not tempt fate” and “not only not take provocative actions, [but also] not seem to be doing so.” The fourth is where journalist Seymour Hersh revealed ex-VP Dick Cheney’s plan to stage an incident in order to go to war with Iran.

The Brookings Think Tank Plan: Which Path to Persia?

Independent reporter Tony Cartalucci did a great job of drawing people’s attention to a 2009 analysis paper by the Brookings Institution (another Zionist think tank) entitled Which Path to Persia? The report considers the various ways that the US could “topple Tehran” (regime change) by means of a color revolution/supporting a popular uprising, allowing/encouraging Israel to strike first or outright invasion.

NGO-led Fake Color Revolution, JCPOA Pullout and MKO/MEK

On the topic of color revolutions, it was interesting to hear Trump, Pompeo and the other official US gangsters express their heartfelt care and compassion for the Iranian people during the “popular uprising” in January 2018. It’s funny how top US leaders always feel such sympathy and concern for people in other countries when the US leaders want those countries’ elected leaders to be toppled. In May 2018, in a unilateral move, the US withdrew from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), an agreement among Iran, the US, the UK, Russia, China, France, Germany (P5+1) and the EU which prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons while allowing them a path to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Trump gave the excuse that Iran was not keeping its part of the deal despite repeated assurances by the US intelligence community, Israel’s Shin Bet (internal security service) and the IAEA that Iran was in compliance, as covered in my article Iran is Fully Compliant in Nuclear Deal; Israel is Still a Rogue Nuclear State. The US began sanctioning Iran hard, again and again, trying to stop Iran from being able to trade and export on the international market. The US also threatened so-called allies (vassal nations) that they had better not try to bypass the sanctions and trade with Iran, but many nations ignored this and did anyway. The EU enacted a blocking statute in August 2018 to effectively nullify US sanctions. War hawks like the late John McCain and now John Bolton have openly admitted US support of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO or MEK), hoping it will conduct a coup against the current Iranian government. However, MKO is widely recognized as a terrorist group; they recently announced a plan to assassinate a senior Iranian military commander and a new judiciary chief. The latest is that the USG is now threatening to sanction any nation that imports Iranian oil!

Blaming Iran for Everything: 9/11, Nuclear Weapons and the ‘Biggest State Sponsor of Terror’

The Zionist neocons running the USG have been trying to pin everything on Iran. They keep accusing Iran of wanting to develop, or actually developing, nuclear weapons, when all the evidence suggests they are not. Iranian leaders have repeatedly stated nukes are against Iranian beliefs and Islamic religious tenets. US officials have repeatedly parroted the phrase Biggest State Sponsor of Terror while pointing the finger at Iran – despite the fact the US itself, as well as Israel and Saudi Arabia, win this award hands down. This is the real troika of tyranny which committed 9/11. In May 2018, even a US District court judge issued a default judgment against Iran in a lawsuit accusing the Islamic Republic of the deaths of 1000+ people on 9/11! The judge ordered Iran to pay over US$6 billion to 9/11 victims. Hmm … jurisdiction, anyone? A high percentage of the American public got confused and thought Iraq was behind 9/11, so why not try Iran too? There’s “bad guys” hiding “in caves” over there in the Middle East who “hate our freedoms”, right?

Iran downed a US RQ-4A Global Hawk drone, pictured above.

More Provoking Iran: The Story of 2 Tankers and 1 US Drone

Blaming Iran never seems to stop. In May 2019, 2 tankers were partially blown up in the Gulf of Oman. The US was quick to blame Iran, despite absolutely no motive and the fact that even the United Arab Emirates (usually hostile to Iran) admitted there was “no clear, scientific and convincing evidence” that Iran did it. However, evidence should never get in the way of good propaganda. On June 20th, 2019, Iran shot down a US spy drone (RQ-4A Global Hawk), illegally operating in stealth mode and violating Iran’s air space, though the US claimed it was international waters. Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, revealed Russia had military intelligence proving the downed drone was in Iranian air space when it was shot down by Iran. He also said that the “evidence” presented by the USA alleging Iran was behind attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman was “poor quality and unprofessional.” Yes, of course – but that’s bound to happen when you mislead and deceive; it’s hard to make all the lie convincing.

3 Final Thoughts: It’s not Just About Provoking Iran

There are 3 important things to takeaway from this article. Firstly, the phenomenon of the US provoking Iran has a demonstrably long history based on historical fact, rather than the flimsy, evidence-free claims it makes against the Islamic Republic by trying to blame it for everything, from 9/11 to developing nukes to sponsoring terror to attacking oil tankers with no motive. US provocation of Iran is a long-held, 66+ year Deep State strategy.

Secondly, the US provoking Iran is not just about Iran. If you haven’t noticed, this is how the US treats everyone outside its orbit who isn’t ‘toeing the line’ or ‘doing what they are told.’ Look at all the Russophobia and blatant lies of Russian interference that were whipped up in the last decade against Russia and Putin. Look at the propaganda against Venezuela and Maduro. Look at the scheme to oust Assad and divide and destroy Syria. Look at the demonization of North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua, and at how warmonger Bolton proclaimed Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua to be the “troika of tyranny.” Look at the game plan! Look at the NWO agenda! It’s all about using the US to bully, subjugate, oppress, interfere with and provoke any nation that won’t ‘join the Empire’ and submit to being a vassal in the coming New World Order One World Government. Keep that in mind whenever you read world news, geopolitics or international affairs. That is the endgame.

Thirdly and lastly, provoking Iran is the dangerous path to WW3. The US can knock off weak nations like Libya and Iraq. They can even attack smallish nations like Syria and afford to have things not go to plan. However, Iran is a formidable opponent with a considerable military, highly advanced weaponry and friends in high places. If the Zionist-led USG is foolish enough to start a war with Iran, Russia and China will come to its defense, and soon the world will be embroiled in a bigger world war than we have ever seen before. The rest is just details, just means towards that nightmarish goal. The question remains the same: are enough people aware of it so that it can be stopped?

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

Sources

*https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/26/world/us-secretly-gave-aid-to-iraq-early-in-its-war-against-iran.html

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTbg11pCwOc

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhqLaYBtvXA

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zl4NpPLV3I

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/brzezinski-easier-to-kill-than-control/

*https://www.huffpost.com/entry/unsolicited-advice-to-the_b_65984

*https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/us-israeli-uk-war-with-iran-has-it/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/iran-is-fully-compliant-nuclear-israel-rogue/

*https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/06/27/599593/MKO-plan-assassinate-Iran-general-Judiciary-chief-Soleimani-Raeisi

*https://theantimedia.com/us-threatens-to-sanction-any-nation-that-imports-iranian-oil/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/911-attacks-15-years-3-guilty-groups-2/

*https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/judge-iran-pay-6bn-victims-911-attacks-180501120240366.html

*https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/06/26/599507/UAE-tanker-attacks-bin-zayed-Iran-Sea-of-Oman

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/destroy-syria-us-west-plot-leaked-cable/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/venezuela-lies-8-want-you-believe/

*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/russian-hack-supposedly-confirmed-cia/

All images in this article are from The Freedom Articles

In response to reports that Iran has surpassed the enriched uranium stockpile limit set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, Jamal Abdi, President of the National Iranian American Council, released the following statement:

“The consequences of President Trump’s abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal continue to mount. Less than two weeks after the “maximum pressure” campaign nearly brought the U.S. into war, Iran has now exceeded nuclear stockpile limits that had been in place before Trump took office. President Trump inherited a successful nuclear deal and, with the goading of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, shredded that agreement with no serious endgame in place besides war.

“Thanks to Iran’s continued voluntary adherence to other provisions in the nuclear deal, Iran remains far from an undetectable nuclear breakout capability. Yet the further fraying of the nuclear deal is a setback for those who support diplomatic solutions to the standoff with Iran, and risks providing fodder for hawks like National Security Advisor John Bolton who are eager for military action.

“Make no mistake: the Trump administration’s approach towards Iran has senselessly and recklessly restarted the Iranian nuclear crisis. The goal of hawks like Bolton has from the get-go been to collapse the deal, and according to recent reports Bolton is now seeking even more aggressive sanctions to goad Iran towards this end.

“When you’re in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging. Returning the U.S. to compliance with the nuclear deal would be the best way to reverse the damage of Trump’s withdrawal. At minimum, Trump should suspend the “maximum pressure” sanctions in exchange for Iran suspending recent breaches of the nuclear deal and to allow space for negotiations. The top priority of the Trump Administration should be to reopen communication channels with Iran and engage in serious talks. Unless and until he does so, the U.S. and Iran will remain on the path to war.”

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Conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit today challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ illegal approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to be constructed through hundreds of rivers, streams and wetlands without evaluating the project’s impacts as required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

The groups also sent notices of their intent to sue President Donald Trump, the Army Corps and the companies seeking to build Keystone XL and its power line infrastructure over the project’s lethal threats to endangered species, including the whooping crane.

Late last year the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana ruled that the Trump administration violated bedrock environmental laws by issuing a permit for Keystone XL without adequately evaluating critical information on the project’s environmental impacts, including tar-sands oil spills and climate change. Although Trump effectively circumvented that ruling by issuing a new permit in March, the fact remains that no federal agency has yet completed the requisite analysis.

The new lawsuit, filed in the same federal court in Montana, challenges the Army Corps’ approval of Keystone XL under its streamlined “Nationwide Permit 12” process, under which the Corps avoids the transparent and comprehensive review normally required for major projects. In fact the Corps has approved the Keystone XL route completely behind closed doors, without evaluating the risk of oil spills into waterways. The lawsuit alleges that these approvals violate both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

The groups sent notices to the Army Corps, President Trump, TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) and the power line companies that would construct the hundreds of miles of lines needed for the pipeline’s pump stations. These letters clear the way for future legal action under the Endangered Species Act by putting the parties on notice that their approvals and proposed actions to build the pipeline violate the law.

Construction activities and spills from the pipeline would threaten protected species like the pallid sturgeon, the American burying beetle, and the critically endangered whooping crane, which remains at the brink of extinction.

“The Trump administration has proven to be just as reckless with our Constitutional separation of powers as this dangerous Keystone XL pipeline is to the safety of our water and climate,” said Dena Hoff, a Northern Plains Resource Council member and Glendive, Mont. farmer. “The United States is still a country of laws, and this foreign corporation’s proposed tar sands pipeline has yet to prove it meets legal standards in the American court system. We will continue this fight for the safety of Montanans and the livelihoods of farmers and ranchers who depend on clean water.”

“We won’t stop fighting Trump’s underhanded attempt to dodge the courts and ram this dirty fossil fuel project down America’s throat,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ll continue working to ensure this destructive pipeline never has the chance to ruin clean water that’s crucial to people and endangered species.”

“Though he seems to think otherwise, Donald Trump is not above the law, and we won’t allow him to endanger wildlife, clean water, and the climate to allow a Canadian company to move more tar sands through the United States,” said Sierra Club Senior Attorney Doug Hayes. “We’ve held off construction of Keystone XL for more than a decade, and we won’t stop until this dirty tar sands proposal is put to rest for good.”

“While Trump states over and over again the Keystone XL pipeline is already being built, those of us who live in the states know the reality and risks. Our scenic Niobrara River and the Platte River, where Sandhill and Whooping Cranes migrate, along with farmers’ water wells, are all at risk with this foreign, export pipeline. Trump may not believe in the rule of law, but we the people do, and we will take to the streets, courts and cornfields to ensure this pipeline is never built,” said Jane Kleeb, Bold Alliance founder.

“The Army Corps’ lack of transparency in their review process for the Keystone XL pipeline is deeply disturbing,” said Marcie Keever, legal director at Friends of the Earth. “On such a major project, the communities who are on the frontlines deserve a comprehensive environmental review to protect themselves and our environment. Rubber-stamping Trump’s attempt to build the dirty Keystone XL pipeline behind closed doors is devastating for the farmers, tribes and communities along its route. Stopping this pipeline is an environmental priority and will help put a stop to Trump’s ongoing corruption.”

“After we won in court, Trump tried to skirt the law by issuing an unjustified permit for Keystone XL,” said Jackie Prange, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But as this new lawsuit shows, no president can, on a whim, unilaterally exempt the government from complying with our nation’s bedrock environmental laws. We will never stop fighting to protect the country’s wildlife, water, communities and climate from this disastrous tar-sands oil pipeline.”

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The Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to strike down partisan gerrymandering. This occurs when one party intentionally manipulates district boundaries to skew its voting power, notwithstanding the will of the voters. Although both parties engage in partisan gerrymandering, Republicans benefit from it far more than Democrats.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative 5-4 majority in Rucho v. Common Cause, admitted that excessive partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But, the Court held, challenges to the practice “present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

In her passionate dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan noted that extreme partisan gerrymanders “deprive citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights” — the rights of equal participation in the political process, “to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.” Kagan wrote,

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”

The Court consolidated two partisan gerrymandering cases for decision in Rucho. The North Carolina case involved gerrymandering by Republicans. In the Maryland case, it was Democrats who engaged in gerrymandering.

North Carolina’s Republican legislative leadership drew a congressional map to entrench long-term Republican majorities. Although they won roughly 50 percent of the popular vote, Republicans picked up a majority of available seats in the 2018 Midterm elections by the extreme margin of 10-3.

In Maryland, Democrats used voters’ histories and party affiliations to move 70,000 Republican voters out of a district and 24,000 Democratic voters in.

Federal district courts in both North Carolina and Maryland struck down the partisan gerrymanders. The high court reversed the district court decisions and concluded there are no standards for federal courts to use in gauging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders.

But federal courts have actually devised formulas to strike them down. “The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country … have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims,” Kagan pointed out. These courts used “neutral and manageable — and eminently legal — standards.”

Kagan cited the three-part test the federal district courts in North Carolina and Maryland, and other courts around the country, used to decide vote dilution claims. The test examines intent, effects and causation. First, plaintiffs must show that the state officials’ “predominant purpose” in drawing district lines was to “entrench [their party] in power” by diluting the votes of the rival party. Second, plaintiffs must establish that the lines drawn “substantially” diluted their votes. Third, the burden shifts to the State to posit a “legitimate, non-partisan justification to save its map.”

Applying that test to the North Carolina and Maryland cases, Kagan determined that illegal partisan gerrymandering had occurred in both.

“By substantially diluting the votes of citizens favoring their rivals, the politicians of one party had succeeded in entrenching themselves in office,” she wrote. “They had beat democracy.”

But the majority was willing to sacrifice democracy on the altar of partisanship. There is no case more impactful than this one, and it’s no accident that it was the right-wing Republicans who upheld partisan gerrymandering.

In a 2004 concurrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy signaled his openness to striking down extreme partisan gerrymanders, which amount to “rigging elections.” He wrote in Vieth v. Jubelirer,

“It is not in our tradition to foreclose the judicial process from the attempt to define standards and remedies where it is alleged that a constitutional right is burdened or denied.”

Kennedy’s retirement and Mitch McConnell’s replacement of Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch all but foreclosed the possibility that the Court would review partisan gerrymandering.

Kagan ended her powerful dissent by warning that this is not the moment for the Court to back down.

“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” she wrote. “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”

Looking Ahead

Partisan gerrymandering is “far more effective and durable” now than in the past, Kagan observed, because advances in technology provide mapmakers with “more granular data about party preference and voting behavior than ever before.” They can utilize it “with unprecedented efficiency and precision.”

The Rucho decision “is almost guaranteed to facilitate massive election rigging in the future,” Ari Melber, senior writer at Mother Jones, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. We can no longer look to the federal courts, to which the disenfranchised have traditionally turned for relief, he said.

Now that the high court has denied judicial review of partisan gerrymandering in federal courts, it is up to the people in the several states to remedy it.

Independent citizen-led commissions in states such as Michigan, Colorado, Utah and Missouri draw fair and representative district maps.

But in most states, “the party that controls the legislature draws districts for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the state legislature,” Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “They inevitably do so in a way to maximize their political control.”

The Supreme Court has struck down racial gerrymandering as violative of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. But after Rucho, claims of partisan gerrymandering will no longer be reviewed by federal courts.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Eric Holder, attorney general in the Obama administration, plans to file racial gerrymandering claims in federal court and partisan gerrymandering claims in state courts. The organization is also considering support of constitutional amendments to establish independent redistricting commissions in Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Hampshire.

The House has passed H.R. 1 — the For the People Act — that would require states to draw congressional districts utilizing independent redistricting commissions. Members of these commissions would “represent diverse communities across the state, by establishing fair redistricting criteria, and by mandating greater transparency for the redistricting process,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) has introduced the Fair Maps Act, which would establish baseline criteria for map-drawing and provide a private legal cause of action for voters to challenge skewed maps in court.

But, as Kagan noted,

“The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for legislative reform are slight.”

The remedy for partisan gerrymandering lies with the people.

“The Supreme Court’s decision has made one thing clear,” Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said. “The only way we’ll end partisan gerrymandering is by voting Republicans out of power in state legislatures.”

One-half of the states allow voter ballot initiatives. Voter advocates can organize campaigns to put measures on the ballot that require independent redistricting commissions rather than politicians to draw the maps. It is up to the people to make the voting system fair.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Demonstrators protest against gerrymandering at a rally at the Supreme Court during the gerrymandering cases Lamone v. Benisek and Rucho v. Common Cause on March 26, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES)

For the third year in a row, the Democrats are voting for a massive increase in military spending, to put at the disposal of the fascistic Trump administration money it can use, not just to launch wars, but also to create a police state in America.

Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly Thursday to approve the largest Pentagon budget ever, rejecting calls to stop President Trump from building “usable” nuclear weapons and retaliate for his misappropriation of Pentagon funds to carry out the crackdown on the border.

The biggest military budget ever

Under Trump, the US military budget has gone from $619 billion in 2016 to $700 billion in 2018, $716 billion in 2019 and the $750 billion passed Thursday by the Senate.

Defense spending now accounts for nearly 60 percent of the government budget, with everything from education, roads and bridges to scientific research and space exploration squeezed into the remaining two-fifths.

If the Senate version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act passes in the House of Representatives, Congress will have granted Trump a total annual increase in the military budget of $131 billion, a figure more than twice as large as Russia’s $61 billion annual military budget. The Democratic-controlled House, for its part, is proposing a military budget of “only” $733 billion—another US record.

In Thursday’s vote, 36 Democrats joined 49 Republicans to pass the largest military budget in American history. Only five Democrats voted against the bill, while six others, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were too busy running for president to vote one way or another on a bill granting massive war-making powers to the fascistic president.

War with China

The bill squarely targets China, placing sanctions on Chinese banks that do business with North Korea, while prohibiting federal funds from being used to purchase products from the world’s largest maker of passenger rail cars, the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation.

In one of its most draconian restrictions, the bill places limits on the availability of visas to Chinese students and academics, treating them, in language reminiscent of the internment of the Japanese in World War II, as potential spies.

War with Iran

The day after they voted to pass the budget, Senate Democrats staged a farcical vote on a separate amendment, doomed from the start, to require Trump to obtain congressional approval before attacking Iran. Predictlably, the vote failed. Commenting on the defeat of the amendment, the New York Times wrote curtly, “Mr. Trump has said he has the power to launch a military strike against Iran without Congress’s permission, and in effect, the Senate agreed.”

No limits on nuclear weapons and Guantanamo Bay

The Senate bill rejected all provisions in the House version that would place even the most token limits on the development of “low-yield” nuclear weapons, in effect giving Trump the go-ahead for his quest to develop “usable” nuclear bombs and missiles. The Senate version also rejected calls to ban new detainees from being placed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Rubber-stamping Trump’s border crackdown

In perhaps the most significant measure stealthily included in the deal, the Senate voted to “back-fill” the $3.6 billion Trump misappropriated from the Pentagon budget to build his border wall by proclaiming a state of emergency and bypassing congressional opposition.

With this measure, the Senate Democrats effectively endorsed the greatest violation by Trump of the US Constitution to date: using the Pentagon budget in his role as “commander in chief” to short circuit Congress’s power of the purse. These are grounds for not only immediate impeachment, but also criminal indictment for conspiracy to subvert the Constitution.

Democrats back Trump

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, a Republican, made clear that the bill is aimed squarely at China, declaring, “The National Defense Strategy gave it to us straight” with its emphasis on “strategic competition with China and Russia.”

The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed, agreed. “This is a very good bill,” he said. “It contains many needed authorities, funding authorizations and reforms that will help the men and women of our armed services.”

“The right place to be is ‘yes,’ said Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. ‘Yes,’ an increase, ‘yes,’ a pay raise, ‘yes,’ a significant Defense Department budget.”

In last week’s debates, the 20 Democrats running for president spoke broken Spanish and pulled long faces to condemn Trump’s treatment of refugee children, grandstanded about Trump’s “erratic” threats against Iran, and demanded an expansion of government social programs, including “Medicare for all.”

But actions speak louder than words. For all their denunciations of Trump as a sexual pervert, Russia spy, or both, the Democrats function as though they were in a coalition government with the American Mussolini, rubber-stamping his illegal wars, green-lighting his attacks on democracy and funding his concentration camps.

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Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century”, offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peace-making, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.

For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.

The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away – to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.

Even Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducement he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.

That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.

But Israel’s image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

It is worth examining what those landmark “missed opportunities” consisted of.

The first was the United Nations’ Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel’s telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians’ homeland.

But the real story is rather different.

The recently formed UN was effectively under the thumb of the imperial powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. All three wanted a Jewish state as a dependent ally in the Arab-dominated Middle East.

Fuelled by the dying embers of western colonialism, the Partition Plan offered the largest slice of the Palestinian homeland to a minority population of European Jews, whose recent immigration had been effectively sponsored by the British empire.

As native peoples elsewhere were being offered independence, Palestinians were required to hand over 56 per cent of their land to these new arrivals. There was no chance such terms would be accepted.

However, as Israeli scholars have noted, the Zionist leadership had no intention of abiding by the UN plan either. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, called the Jewish state proposed by the UN “tiny”. He warned that it could never accommodate the millions of Jewish immigrants he needed to attract if his new state was not rapidly to become a second Arab state because of higher Palestinian birth rates.

Ben Gurion wanted the Palestinians to reject the plan, so that he could use war as a chance to seize 78 percent of Palestine and drive out most of the native population.

For decades, Israel was happy to entrench and, after 1967, expand its hold on historic Palestine.

In fact, it was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who made the biggest, unreciprocated concessions to peace. In 1988, he recognised Israel and, later, in the 1993 Olso accords, he accepted the principle of partition on even more dismal terms than the UN’s – a state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine.

Even so, the Oslo process stood no serious chance of success after Israel refused to make promised withdrawals from the occupied territories. Finally, in 2000 President Bill Clinton called together Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to a peace summit at Camp David.

Arafat knew Israel was unwilling to make any meaningful compromises and had to be bullied and cajoled into attending. Clinton promised the Palestinian leader he would not be blamed if the talks failed.

Israel ensured they did. According to his own advisers, Barak “blew up” the negotiations, insisting that Israel hold on to occupied East Jerusalem, including the Al Aqsa mosque, and large areas of the West Bank. Washington blamed Arafat anyway, and refashioned Israel’s intransigence as a “generous offer”.

A short time later, in 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Peace Initiative offered Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a minimal Palestinian state. Israel and western leaders hurriedly shunted it into the annals of forgotten history.

After Arafat’s death, secret talks through 2008-09 – revealed in the Palestine Papers leak – showed the Palestinians making unprecedented concessions. They included allowing Israel to annex large tracts of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ expected capital.

Negotiator Saeb Erekat was recorded saying he had agreed to “the biggest [Jerusalem] in Jewish history” as well as to only a “symbolic number of [Palestinian] refugees’ return [and a] demilitarised state … What more can I give?”

It was a good question. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s negotiator, responded, “I really appreciate it” when she saw how much the Palestinians were conceding. But still her delegation walked away.

Trump’s own doomed plan follows in the footsteps of such “peace-making”.

In a New York Times commentary last week Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, candidly encapsulated the thrust of this decades-long diplomatic approach. He called on the Palestinians to “surrender”, adding: “Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission.”

The peace process was always leading to this moment. Trump has simply cut through the evasions and equivocations of the past to reveal where the West’s priorities truly lie.

It is hard to believe that Trump or Kushner ever believed the Palestinians would accept a promise of “money for quiet” in place of a state based on “land for peace”.

Once more, the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it – it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leaderships are united – again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.

The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens.

When Trump’s plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory.

The Palestinans will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos. And decades of western diplomacy will finally have arrived at its preordained destination.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

The Canadian government’s efforts to publicly oppose Islamophobia[1] and racism yet again belie sinister undercurrents that are the real “Canada”.

The real Canada supports Zionism and Wahhabism, and sectarianism. It supports exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness and tolerance.

Wahhabism, grown and nurtured in Canada’s ally, Saudi Arabia, is an archetype of exclusivism and sectarianism.  It is anti-Islamic, and instrumentalized by imperial powers, including Canada, to destroy prey nations such as secular, pluralist, democratic Syria, a country that takes pride in being inclusive and tolerant.

The coalition currently committing daily war crimes against Syria uses ISIS, al Qaeda, and affiliates as proxies. Sectarianism is used as a tool to destroy and balkanize.Terrorist- occupied areas are blank slates where extremist, literalist derivations of Sharia law are imposed, where religious icons and institutions of all faiths are destroyed, where women have no rights.

There is no basis in the Qur’an, argues Zafar Bangash[2], for any of these depravities.  Further, he adds, Wahhabism is at odds with the vast majority of Muslims, labelled “kaffirs” by Wahhabis, despite the influence of petrodollars and Western governments and agencies that propagate it.

One tactic used by deep state agencies to create the necessary domestic preconditions for slaughtering multitudes of all faiths in what is now an overseas holocaust, is the false flag. In Canada[3], for example, Canadian agencies set up a hapless couple to stage a bombing incident on Canada Day, July 1, 2013, with a view to creating Islamophobia.

Another tactic is to disappear the vast majority of Muslims from the Canadian mindset, hence Syrians – mostly secular and pluralist like most Canadians – are disappeared from the Canadian consciousness while the savage ISIS/al Qaeda terrorists (covert proxies) and the Saudi absolute Monarchy (allies) are presented as the norm. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the same Canadian agencies that commit war crimes as policy also control the public consciousness. The truth about the “Anglo/Zionist/Wahhabi” -led axis is submerged and disappeared at all levels in Western societies.  Not only does mainstream messaging consist of war propaganda, but public libraries and book shops also submerge the truth.

Madeleine Albright, who intoned that killing  500,000 (the real number is closer to 600,000) Iraqi children was “worth it” is thought to be a reliable source to preach against fascism[4]— which the West supports and grows at this very moment in Kiev and beyond – and fake stories about a non-existent “revolution” in Syria are amplified.

Meanwhile, Zionist apartheid Israel, another strong supporter of the terrorists in Syria, is increasingly being protected by Canadian agencies and legislation. Canada recently adopted the Israeli lobby’s definition of anti-semitism which, according to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, “is extremely vague, open to misinterpretation” and a “threat to freedom of expression.”[5]

So there we have it. The real Canada is largely misgoverned by an axis of unelected polities which intentionally fabricate Islamophobia and other hatreds so that globalized war and poverty and walls and concentration camps can continue to flourish.  And the crimes are being committed behind the Big Lies of humanitarianism, freedom, democracy, and inclusiveness.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net.

Notes

[1] Maura Forrest, “Ottawa unveils anti-racism strategy, which includes definition of Islamophobia.” National Post, 25 June, 2019. (https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/ottawa-unveils-anti-racism-strategy-which-includes-definition-of-islamophobia) Accessed 1 July, 2019.

[2] Zafar Bangash, The Doomed Kingdom Of The House Of Saud. (Crescent international newspapers Inc., 2015) p. 29.

[3] Mark Taliano, “Interlocking Agencies that Conspire to ‘Create Terror’: We Do Not Need the Police to ‘Create More Terrorists.’ “Global Research, 9 August, 2016. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/interlocking-agencies-that-conspire-to-create-terror-we-do-not-need-the-police-to-create-more-terrorists/5540454) Accessed 1 July, 2019.

[4] Ben Norton, “New NATO-approved US monument honors fascist Lithuanian Nazi collaborator as anti-Soviet hero.” The Gray Zone, 15 May, 2019. (https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/15/nato-us-monument-lithuanian-nazi-collaborator-adolfas-ramanauskas/) Accessed 1 July, 2019.

[5] Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Canada adopts Israel lobby’s contested definition of anti-Semitism.” The Electronic Intifada, 28 June, 2019. (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/canada-adopts-israel-lobbys-contested-definition-anti-semitism) Accessed 1 June, 2019.

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Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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Russia is making rapid progress in presenting a “balancing” alternative to French domination in Paris’ Françafrique “sphere of influence” in Africa after signing a military deal with the terrorist-plagued but geostrategically significant state of Mali during the visit of its Defense Minister to Moscow last week.

Russia’s “Pivot to Africa” is accelerating after the Eurasian Great Power just signed a military deal with the West African nation of Mali and pledged to help it eradicate the terrorists that have plagued it for most of the last decade. For those who haven’t been following events too closely, Moscow recently succeeded in creating a bi-coastal “African Transversal” between the Atlantic Ocean and Red Sea via the Congo Republic, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Sudan after it clinched a separate military agreement with Brazzaville in late May, which in turn caught France’s attention and compelled it to seek the full restoration of ties with Russia. Paris has made some progress in this respect after hosting Russian Prime Minister Medvedev at the end of June, during which time his French counterpart announced that their Foreign and Defense Ministers will meet sometime in September for talks along the 2+2 format.

That couldn’t come at a better time either since Russia is further encroaching on France’s Françafrique “sphere of influence” in Africa after signing its military agreement with Mali, where Paris has deployed several thousand troops as part of its years-long anti-terrorist intervention from 2013 onward. The former colonizer has been unable to thwart these threats and the situation continues to spiral further out of control as the instability there begins to spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, ergo Bamako’s interest in seeking Moscow’s “Democratic Security” services. About the latter, this refers to Russia’s unique method of defeating Hybrid War threats through “military diplomacy”, which in the African instance concerns the sale of military equipment, the dispatch of advisors, and/or the employment of private military contractors (“mercenaries”), all of which combine to create a low-cost but highly effective solution that’s proven its success in the CAR.

Russia’s 21st-century grand strategic vision is to become the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, to which end it’s utilizing creative methods to position itself in this role, which is becoming increasingly attractive for African countries who are willing to give Moscow lucrative extraction contracts in exchange for its state stabilization services. The surge of Russian influence in Africa over the past two years poses a threat to France’s neo-imperial dominance in the broad swath of the continent that comprises Françafrique, from where the European Great Power derives infathomable riches and exercises control over a myriad of countries. These vassal states veritably receive some token advantages such as the rare opportunity for their citizens to travel to the imperial center for education and tourism (provided that they can afford it), as well as low-paying jobs if they’re willing to risk the deadly journey across the Saharan Desert and Mediterranean Sea to get there illegally, but their basic needs aren’t being met and that’s created an opportunity for Russia to step in and replace France.

The explosion of terrorism in West Africa that followed Mali’s descent into civil war and short-term capture of two-thirds of the country by terrorists has forever altered the regional strategic dynamics, especially since it’s been proven beyond any doubt that Paris is powerless to reverse this trend and ensure security for the average citizen. Moscow, meanwhile, has already proven its effectiveness int his respect when it comes to the CAR, which was previously written off by the international community as a so-called “lost cause” prior to Russia’s UN-approved “Democratic Security” intervention. With that war-torn country’s successful stabilization (relative to what it used to be of course) as the crowning achievement showcasing the viability of Moscow’s “Democratic Security” model, it’s no wonder that similar conflict-beleaguered countries such as Mali are lining up to seek its services, which threatens France’s control of Françafrique and compelled it to enter into talks with Russia.

The upcoming 2+2 meeting sometime in September will come roughly a month before the Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi in late October, which is expected to formalize Moscow’s “Pivot to Africa” by comprehensively building upon is “Democratic Security” successes in order to expand the Eurasian Great Power’s influence in other domains such as the economic and political ones. France might understandably be interested in partnering with Russia in that case or at least reaching a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” for an unofficial “New Detente” between the two in Africa, especially after Moscow demonstrated how quickly it can expand its strategic presence in the West African nation of Mali where Paris has already deployed several thousand troops, so they’ll either cut a deal with one another or their competition will inevitably rev up even further than ever before.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Maybe I should say ‘Co Dependence’ Day.

This writer was never a gung ho fan of Bruce Springsteen, but some of his songs do hit home. How about this one:

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Born in the U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said “son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “son, don’t you understand”

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., I’m a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., I’m a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A

The power of those lyrics resounds so well for a product of the turbulent 1960s. To have lived as a teenager morphing into a man during that Vietnam debacle and horror show, Springsteen’s lyrics cover lots of ground. He alliterates the plight of young, low income working stiffs from dead end towns across this nation…. then just substitute Afghanistan and Iraq for Vietnam, and nothing has changed. It is mostly the working stiffs and uber poor who kill and die in phony wars. The song implies that both the job market and our Veterans Administration didn’t give a rat’s ass for returning GIs from the Nam. The most saddened lyrics are those that remember the poor soul who returned home in a box. Nuff Said.

As the 4th approaches the movers and shakers of empire are making sure that the suckers are served a bundle of propaganda along with their burgers, dogs, soda pop and brew. The army of flags will appear, along with the others already hung up by worshippers in this temple of war. You see, our great MAGA is still fighting back against the terrorists and brown faced aliens, all who wish to destroy our great ‘Land of the 1/4 of the 1 %’. The great journalist Greg Palest renamed our country the ‘Armed Madhouse’. Yet, so few of our fellow citizens realize they are being had by phony celebrations of our military strength and resolve. Trump wants a mega ‘march of the Pentagon’ complete with even tanks on the Capital Mall, to frame this con that we are a nation at war. WE HAVE NOT BEEN AT WAR SINCE WW2!

When the effects of either your electronic gadgets, alcohol, cigarettes, 24/7 sports and news gossip, and of course opioids, wears off a bit, maybe then you working stiffs will see more clearly. The clock is ticking towards the end of this empire… morally, financially and physically. Those who rule always need the co dependence of their serfs. Put that in your firework and light it!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

Last Wednesday’s debate among half of the announced Democratic Party candidates to become their party’s nominee for president in 2020 was notable for its lack of drama. Many of those called on to speak had little to say apart from the usual liberal bromides about health care, jobs, education and how the United States is a country of immigrants. On the following day the mainstream media anointed Elizabeth Warren as the winner based on the coherency of her message even though she said little that differed from what was being presented by most of the others on the stage. She just said it better, more articulately.

The New York Times’ coverage was typical, praising Warren for her grasp of the issues and her ability to present the same clearly and concisely, and citing a comment “They could teach classes in how warren talks about a problem and weaves in answers into a story. She’s not just wonk and stats.” It then went on to lump most of the other candidates together, describing their performances as “ha[ving] one or two strong answers, but none of them had the electric, campaign-launching moment they were hoping for.”

Inevitably, however, there was some disagreement on who had actually done best based on viewer reactions as well as the perceptions of some of the media that might not exactly be described as mainstream. The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner, a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google’s search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate.

On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled “Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi,” similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz “She’s a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense.”

Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates, confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously avoided. In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain “engaged” in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying

“Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable.”

At another point she expanded on her thinking about America’s wars, saying

“Let’s deal with the situation where we are, where this president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms’ lives. The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee crisis. And it wouldn’t be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war. This is why it’s so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say no war with Iran.”

Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that

“For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end.”

Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to “defense” or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging. So why was there such a difference between what ordinary Americans and the Establishment punditry were seeing on their television screens? The difference was not so much in perception as in the desire to see a certain outcome. Anti-war takes away a lot of people’s rice bowls, be they directly employed on “defense” or part of the vast army of lobbyists and think tank parasites that keep the money flowing out of the taxpayers’ pockets and into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin like a perpetual motion machine.

In the collective judgment of America’s Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. McCarthy was right and Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the Democratic Party were wrong. More recently, Congressman Ron Paul tried twice to bring some sanity to the Republican Party. He too was marginalized deliberately by the GOP party apparatus working hand-in-hand with the media, to include the final insult of his being denied any opportunity to speak or have his delegates recognized at the 2012 nominating convention.

And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China.

Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of “end the forever wars” out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party’s priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. To qualify for the second round of debates she has to gain a couple of points in her approval rating or bring in more donations, either of which is definitely possible based on her performance. It is to be hoped that that will occur and that there will be no Debbie Wasserman Schultz hiding somewhere in the process who will finagle the polling results.

Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate. On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu’s ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel’s killing of “unarmed civilians” in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently.

To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. It is essential that we Americans who are concerned about the future of our country should listen to what she has to say very carefully and to respond accordingly.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

Featured image is from The Unz Review

There is hope for some real progress in U.S.-North Korean relations after Sunday morning’s unscheduled meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, largely because Russia and China seem more determined than ever to facilitate forward movement.

Sitting down before the talks began, Kim underlined the importance of the meeting.

“I hope it can be the foundation for better things that people will not be expecting,” he said. “Our great relationship will provide the magical power with which to overcome hardships and obstacles in the tasks that need to be done from now on.”

Trump was equally positive speaking of Kim:

“We’ve developed a very good relationship and we understand each other very well. I do believe he understands me, and I think I maybe understand him, and sometimes that can lead to very good things.”

Trump said the two sides would designate teams, with the U.S. team headed by special envoy Stephen Biegun under the auspices of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to start work in the next two to three weeks.

“They’ll start a process, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.

pic.twitter.com/ctb5YJL1Vb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2019

New Impetus

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met individually with President Trump at the G20 in Osaka, have been singing from the same sheet of Korea music — particularly in the wake of Xi’s visit to North Korea on June 20-21. Putin’s remarks are the most illuminating.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Putin pointed to “the tragedies of Libya and Iraq” — meaning, of course, what happened to each of them as they lacked a nuclear deterrent. Applying that lesson to North Korea, Putin said,

“What we should be talking about is not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure the unconditional security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea, feel safe and protected by international law. …”

“We should think about guarantees, which we should use as the basis for talks with North Korea. We must take into account the dangers arising from … the presence of nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that if a way can be found to satisfy North Korea’s understandable determination to protect its security, “the situation may take a turn nobody can imagine today.”

“Whether we recognize North Korea as a nuclear power or not, the number of nuclear charges it has will not decrease. We must proceed from modern realities …” And those realities include fundamental, immediate security concerns for both Russia and China. Putin put it this way:

”[W]e have a common border, even if a short one, with North Korea, therefore, this problem has a direct bearing on us. The United States is located across the ocean … while we are right here, in this region, and the North Korean nuclear range is not far away from our border. This why this concerns us directly, and we never stop thinking about it.”

Xi’s ‘Reasonable Expectations’

Last week in Pyongyang, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China is waiting for a desired response in stalled nuclear talks with the United States.

“North Korea would like to remain patient, but it hopes the relevant party will meet halfway with North Korea to explore resolution plans that accommodate each other’s reasonable concerns,” he said.

A commentary in China’s official Xinhua news agency said China could play a unique role in breaking the cycle of mistrust between North Korea and the U.S, but that both sides “need to have reasonable expectations and refrain from imposing unilateral and unrealistic demands.”

There is little doubt that the Russians and Chinese have been comparing notes on what they see as a potentially explosive (literally) problem in their respective backyards, the more so inasmuch as the two countries have become allies in all but name.

On a three-day visit to Moscow in early June, President Xi spoke of his “deep personal friendship” with Putin, with whom he has “met nearly 30 times in the past six years.” For his part, Putin claimed “Russian-Chinese relations have reached an unprecedented level. It is a global partnership and strategic cooperation.”

A Fundamental Strategic Change

Whether they are “best friends” or not, the claim of unprecedented strategic cooperation happens to be true — and is the most fundamental change in the world strategic equation in decades. Given the fear they share that things could get out of hand in Korea with the mercurial Trump and his hawkish advisers calling the shots, it is a safe bet that Putin and Xi have been coordinating closely on North Korea.

The next step could be stepped-up efforts to persuade Trump that China and Russia can somehow guarantee continued nuclear restraint on Pyongyang’s part, in return for U.S. agreement to move step by step — rather than full bore — toward at least partial North Korean denuclearization — and perhaps some relaxation in U.S. economic sanctions. Xi and Putin may have broached that kind of deal to Trump in Osaka.

There is also a salutary sign that President Trump has learned more about the effects of a military conflict with North Korea, and that he has come to realize that Pyongyang already has not only a nuclear, but also a formidable conventional deterrent: massed artillery.

“There are 35 million people in Seoul, 25 miles away,” Trump said on Sunday. “All accessible by what they already have in the mountains. There’s nothing like that anywhere in terms of danger.”

Obstacles Still Formidable

Trump and Kim meet Sunday before Trump became first US president to step on North Korean territory. (White House photo)

Trump will have to remind his national security adviser, John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that he is the president and that he intends to take a firmer grip on reins regarding Korean policy. Given their maladroit performance on both Iran and Venezuela, it would, at first blush, seem easy to jettison the two super-hawks.

But this would mean running afoul of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academe-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) complex, in which the corporate-controlled media play the sine-qua-non role today.

In a harbinger of things to come, The Washington Post’s initial report on the outcome of the Trump-Kim talks contained two distortions: “Trump … misrepresented what had been achieved, claiming that North Korea had ceased ballistic missile tests and was continuing to send back remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the Korean War.”

The Trump administration could reasonably call that “fake news.” True, North Korea tested short-range ballistic missiles last spring, but Kim’s promise to Trump was to stop testing strategicnot tactical missiles, and North Korea has adhered to that promise. As for the return of the remains of U.S. servicemen: True, such remains that remain are no longer being sent back to the U.S., but it was the U.S. that put a stop to that after the summit in Hanoi failed.

We can surely expect more disingenuous “reporting” of that kind.

Whether Trump can stand up to the MICIMATT on Korea remains to be seen. There is a huge amount of arms-maker-arms-dealer profiteering going on in the Far East, as long as tensions there can be stoked and kept at a sufficiently high level.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His first portfolio at CIA was referent-analyst for Soviet policy toward China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, David Meiswinkle, and the Lawyers’ Committee’s litigation director, Mick Harrison, spoke last month by telephone with Michael Ferrara, the chief of the terrorism unit of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Ferrara is one of two officials who signed the November 7, 2018, letter to the Lawyers’ Committee on behalf of Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In this phone conversation, Mr. Ferrara confirmed that the November 7, 2018, letter he signed was sent with the intention of conveying to the Lawyers’ Committee that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had received the Lawyers’ Committee’s petition and amended petition (both of which reported federal crimes and evidence relating to the use of explosives at the World Trade Center on 9/11) and that the U.S. Attorney would comply with the federal statute regarding Special Grand Juries as it relates to the two petitions. He said, however, that he could not disclose any information regarding the status of the Lawyers’ Committee’s petition and amended petition due to the secrecy requirements for federal grand jury proceedings imposed by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e). Attorneys Meiswinkle and Harrison thanked Mr. Ferrara for taking their call.

Rule 6(e) does in fact impose substantial secrecy requirements on federal grand jury proceedings, although federal courts can order disclosure under certain circumstances. Given that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is reading this rule as preventing any disclosure to the Lawyers’ Committee (and all the petitioners) regarding the status of the Lawyers’ Committee’s petition and amended petition, the Lawyers’ Committee is preparing to file a mandamus petition and a petition for disclosure in federal court prior to the upcoming anniversary of 9/11.

Source: ae911truth.org

The goal of this federal court filing will be to have the court confirm that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has acted in good faith by presenting the Lawyers’ Committee’s petition, amended petition, and petition supplements with accompanying evidence to a federal Special Grand Jury or to confirm that this has not occurred — and, if the latter, to obtain a court order requiring the U.S. Attorney to present the petition, amended petition, and petition supplements with accompanying evidence to a federal Special Grand Jury.

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In this squalid era of compromised data and hollowed privacy, it would be fitting that the company largely responsible for such mishaps would steer another technological innovation.  Distractions are needed, and while Mark Zuckerberg cannot launch missiles, as yet, he can certainly launch platforms and what can be coarsely termed “deliverables”.

Having become the object of derision and resentment from the political fraternities of many countries, Facebook has been brazen enough to launch a crytocurrency it hopes will be boosted by support from major currencies.

Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency generated more than a smattering of interest last month when its early-access code made its way to GitHub. By the end of the month, it had been “saved” by some 10,000 users, while a 1,000 clones of the codebase were also generated, very much in a playful effort to test its reliability.

The site for the new currency is spritzed by the usual immodest lingo we have come to associate with technology that is meant to assist, and transform (naturally).  “A simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people,” toots the message.  The vision is then broken down, staccato like: “Reinvent money.  Transform the global economy.  So people everywhere can live better lives.”

The world of cash is also given an unveiling.  The cost of transferring money is seen as unnecessarily expensive, an impediment to smoothness.  “Moving money around the world should be as easy and cheap as sending a text message.”  Libra also promises to be free of the fluctuations afflicting Bitcoin using a variant of the “currency board”, described by John Hawkins as a “rule-based monetary policy regime, involving much less (or no) discretion than most other monetary regimes.”  Volatility will also be dampened by the backing of Libra Reserve, a genuine asset base.

Leaving aside the staple bombast that accompanies such projects, there have been the usual reservations.  Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, fears it.

“This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals.”

He persists in believing that the central banking system has merit, having been established through costly trial and error: “we want a central bank to act to increase or decrease the money supply in moments of contraction and expansion.”

The paradox with currency is that financial regulators can be fickle, almost tortiously so.  Financial disasters arising out of the crisis of 2008 were as much a product of rapacious banking practices as they were regulatory sloth and boardroom sleepwalking.  But come a new currency, notably in digital format, then the eyes widen and scurrying takes place.

Hardly unusual, then, that governments have given their standard line, usually congregated around the issue that Libra can never become, in of its own, an independent currency if it ever gets off the ground.  Any currency threatening to knock on the door of acceptable legal tender is bound to be scorned or feared rather than tested on its own merits.

The G7, with France taking the lead, has decided to busy itself with a taskforce examining any attendant risks.  The theme has already been set, and there is a feeling the conclusions have already being pre-empted.

“It is out of the question,” France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire stated, that Libra would “become a sovereign currency.  It can’t and it must not happen.”

Like pornography, the feeling of regulatory authorities is one tinged with a degree of cant: people will use it, and some form of circulation is bound to happen.  Like sex, it is good to be principled in rationing it, but the laws doing so eventually become dead letters.  The Promethean desire to subvert is perennial; innovation must be encouraged.  François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of France’s central bank, exemplifies such a position: innovate, but regulate with steely determination.

The US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has already booked a hearing on July 16.  Within 48 hours of Facebook’s announcement of its Libra vision, House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters demanded a cessation of development altogether – at least till things at her end could be sorted out.

“Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action”.

A cynic acquainted with the acerbic writings of H. L. Mencken might well take issue with “examine” and “take action” when it comes to inertia on the Hill, but Congress is as much there to entertain as it is to vacillate.  In the meantime, Facebook will duck and weave, convinced it has the staying power to defer any genuine move to stop its inexorable momentum.  In an environment of short attention spans, attrition and patience are cardinal virtues.

Waters is, on some level, sincere: the company’s record on privacy protections are not so much shoddy as horrendous, if only because they anathemize them altogether.  Monetisation is premised on doing away with privacy, usually under the false impression that consent has been extracted in the process.  Data is the secular version of religion’s soul, to be prized away from the human subject, and sold.

Other states are qualified in assessing the currency.  The Russian Ministry of Finance, through deputy minister Alexei Moisseev, told reporters this week that Libra would receive the treatment afforded any other digital asset.  Such regulatory treatment has legislatively stalled thus far, but the minister was emphatic enough.  “Nobody is going to ban it.”

This was not be confused with the status of the currency: as with other crytocurrencies, legal tender was out of the question.  Purchasing goods and services with such assets would be impossible, though it would “be possible to buy it, sell it, keep it”.

Like other behemoths of history, Facebook realises that a degree of dissimulation is necessary.  Knowing privacy to be its Achilles heel in any regulatory scrap, it has come up with its own variant of a regulator, advertised as a cure-all.  Libra Association, a non-profit, Geneva-based body is supposedly one step removed in keeping Facebook out of overseeing the currency.  The digital wallet of the new currency, Calibra, is said to share limited data with the mother ship, even if it entails using Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp applications.  (A standalone application is set to follow in 2020.)  Protections such as fraud checks are also built in, including a consensus model described as a “proof of stake” featuring transactions authorised by those with a stake in the currency.

The Libra Association has been gathering the names, having 28 weighty co-founders.  To Facebook can be added such corporate entities as MasterCard, Paypal, Visa, Spotify, Uber, Vodafone Group, Andreessen Horowitz and eBay.  Notable absentees are the banks themselves, deemed the stuff shirts of the modern money market.

States, and their banking arms, are unlikely to have their currency gates stormed by this new cryptocurrency, though some nibbling of market share is anticipated.  The main banking priority remains issuing loans to customers and companies.  While electronic money payments, in their nature, can threaten the money lending function of banks, a point that would also affect interest rates, Facebook will have to do a bit more if it seeks an insurrection that lasts.

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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 question of Peace and Nuclear War is upon us. This is the question of life and death. June 21st was an alarming day that demonstrated the narrow respite between war and peace. The decision to strike Iran by the U.S. President and then the abrupt cancelation, more than anything else alarmed all nations of the inevitability of a global war. We are living in an insane time in which 10 minutes can shake the world according to the whim of one person, the President of United Stated of America. This insanity has to end now and the only people who can bring about this change are the true peace activists and democratic minded working people around the world armed with a comprehensive Peace Program.

The aim of this short essay is to offer a program for peace for immediate debate and discussion, and create A Universal Program of Action for Peace.

The recent G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan which was supposed to “achieve global economic stability” did anything but that. According to The Guardian, the G20 Summit “magnified deep and potentially unbridgeable divides”. The meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, just like the meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit a day before, basically was an attempt to “hit the reset button”. While these “diplomatic” side shows are profitable for the commercial media, in reality they hide the U.S. drive for war.

On the day of G20 Summit, the U.S. deployed F-22 stealth fighters to Qatar for the first time to buildup the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf against Iran. However, this important fact was not an interesting subject for the media “pundits” to discuss and inform their viewers. President Trump right after his DMZ show addressed the American soldiers, sailors and marines at the Osan Air Base near Seoul, South Korea and gloated that

“We are totally revamping and improving and in some cases getting brand new nuclear weapons – never wanna have to use them – but we have the most and the best in the world [the emphasis is added]”.

Of course this bellicosity makes the threat of ‘obliteration’ of Iran seem more real. The aim of Mr. Trump in imposing lethal sanctions on working people of “adversary” nations like Iran and Venezuela is to crush their sovereignty and independence. Terrorizing defenseless working families in different countries to be fearful of the U.S. nuclear bombs and continuous military preparation to implement these threats is the actual U.S. foreign policy of the 21st century. It is vital to understand that this aggressive and violent foreign policy is the policy of the U.S. government today and not just the Trump Administration.

The concept that Foreign Policy is the extension of the Domestic Policy is clear more than ever and proven again to be true and accurate. The concentration camps of the migrant children, the increasing numbers of homeless people, the farmers and workers’ job insecurity, the out-of-control police brutality and constant attack on women, youth, minorities and journalists’ democratic rights and freedom of speech; in short the unprecedented huge gap between the wealthy minority and impoverished majority in the U.S.; undoubtedly would reflect its injustice and cruelty in dealing with the “foreign” people abroad also. Again, this is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. When it comes to dealing the major domestic issues or major conflict and war, both parties act as one. The Democrats have no objection to the absurd and impractical “deal of the century” against Palestinians, nor were they concerned when the Israeli troops fired on the Palestinians who were protesting the so-called “workshop” in Bahrain headed by well-known Zionists like Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and David Friedman (Trump’s ambassador to Israel).

So the facts are perfectly clear. How is it possible that the Democratic Party candidates in their debates for a better future do not talk about the impending war or take a firm stand against it? The answer lies in the fact that Democratic and Republican Parties are the same in their nature. Both parties do not represent the working people, both parties have shown over and over that they are representatives of the 1%, Wall Street and big corporations. The real voices of working people can only be heard on the streets, in the town halls, but not during the Democratic candidates’ debates or during Mr. Trump’s rallies which fascistic ideas are propagated. The working people have no representative in either camp, those phony “Socialists” like a colorful cover of an unhealthy and cancerous product in the market are only to deceive people eyes and give a feeling that with some “reform” America will be great! However, at the end of the day, these “Socialist”, “Progressive” Democrats always disappoint their naive political fans which go on until the next election cycle.

Source: author

While the powerful military armies around the world are digging their heels in; some irresponsible intellectuals and overpaid “pundits” are distorting the actual concern of the warmongers about their agenda of military confrontations. The mission of these “political analysts” is to plant the seeds of false hope that somehow the imperialist war could be averted if the certain “bad actors” behave and respond appropriately to the clear messages from Washington. Simply these “pundits” who pop up unexpectedly on the different News network these days have one goal in common and that is to pacify peace activists. Regardless of the abundant informative articles by the honest investigative journalists and writers which are available on the resourceful sites, still the powerful U.S. deceptive media is trying to distort the facts and confuse American public opinion about the inevitability of a world war in imperceptible ways.

Of course as always, there are many outright pro-war “journalists” also like Bret Stephens of the New York Times who can’t contain their excitement in propagating the need of a new war. As an Opinion Columnist in his article “The Pirates of Tehran”, Mr. Stephens instigates that “we should sink [the Iranian] navy” as “the U.S. Navy destroyed half the Iranian fleet in a matter of hours” in 1988! In the same article to make his argument more creditable, he says that “Trump might be a liar, but the U.S. military isn’t”!

True peace activists should bypass these minefields with utmost political awareness and clarity. To defeat the warmongers, to avoid a WWIII scenario, peace activists must look to create a global peace movement. Today, the focus of the warmongers is on Iran. But for the U.S. the ultimate aim is China as the main obstacle and Russia as the secondary problem in achieving world supremacy. Iran and the war in Persian Gulf will be only the igniting fuse.

True peace activists also must be alert about the damaging effect from the characters whom as peace activists try to consciously or unconsciously portray that China or Russia are pro peace forces! They are not; their concern is not about the Chinese or Russian people or people of any other country who will be the victims of a nuclear war. From the U.S., Japan and European countries to China and Russia, having the hegemony or upper hand over the world market is the ambitious goal of all major capitalist powers. For the same reason, today the old alliances after WWII are shifting, breaking up or at best look temporary. In this uncertain situation, the trade war between US and China will exacerbate the slowdown of global growth. The breakdown of the trading system certainly will raise the threat of war and ultimately will form new alliances for a global military conflict.

If one agrees with the above statements, the vital question now becomes what has to be done to prevent a nuclear war? Hopefully, the following plan of actions for peace could start a productive discussion -at least- among the true peace activists around the world in these crucial times.

A Universal Program of Action for Peace (an initial draft):

1. The inevitably of a war between major powers is highly probable.
2. While major military powers headed by the U.S. are preparing for the final war (a nuclear war), working people around the world seek peace and are not in the mood for the WWIII.
3. The lack of a strong anti-war movement necessitates an immediate and comprehensive Program for Peace.
4. The Program for Peace based on working people’s aspirations and power must be absolutely independent from the influence of the 1% in all countries.
5. Avoiding a global war requires a united global peace movement. There is no place for the “anti-war” groups which propagate chauvinism and nationalism.
6. The experience of the movement against the Vietnam War points out that building a successful and long-lasting peace movement cannot be based on a single demand against war. It has to be based on the working people’s immediate social, economical and political multi-demands in the different countries.
7. The working people of any country in unity with the working people around the world will organize their own peace movement on the national level based on their unique situation, either through struggle against imposed austerity or in opposition to inequality and injustice or by series of strikes against their own capitalist government.
8. A global union for peace will be a united front of all working people from the imperialist aggressor countries to the countries that basically scarify their soldier in the interest of one side of the conflicting military powers. The working people do not benefit from a war between the super powers for the world market hegemony.
9. The progressive and independent peace and justice activists from all walks of life are the main allies of the working people. A Program for Peace will be forceful when the working people hand in hand with the independent activists and organizations build a strong bound in the different communities and coordinate their anti-war actions in one voice.
10. A united working people of the different countries for peace in order to eradicate endless wars and poverty should energetically advocate People to People Diplomacy. Peace activists must travel to the different countries and share their experiences in Peace Seminars and Peace Forums in venues available within that community. People to People Diplomacy must be a constant effort and the main focus of the peace movement.

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Universal healthcare for all Americans is a major cutting-edge issue of our time about a fundamental human right, along with food, shelter, and clothing.

Most patients and doctors support what providing healthcare for everyone is all about. Nothing less is acceptable for citizens and residents of the world’s richest country.

America is the only developed nation without some form of universal coverage. The cost of healthcare in the US is double the annual per capita amount in other developed countries because corporate profits matter more than social justice.

Insurer middlemen cost US households over half a trillion dollars annually. It pays for overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing practices, excessive executive pay, and huge profits.

Yet no one visits their corporate or branch offices for treatment when ill or injured. Polls show over 70% of Americans support universal healthcare. Only 20% oppose it.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation,

“Medicare is a very popular program, so the idea of expanding it to everyone is popular as well,” adding:

“The advantage of Medicare-for-all, which is much closer to how the rest of the world provides health care to their residents, is that you can achieve universal coverage at a lower cost” — by eliminating unneeded insurer middlemen.

Not according to the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest organization representing medical professionals.

Its so-called “vision” is committed to “health insurance coverage,” along with letting Big Pharma and large hospital chains operate unrestrained.

It calls Obamacare, leaving millions uninsured, most others underinsured, and the world’s most expensive healthcare system by far in place, “preferable to pursuing Medicare-for-All.”

Most Americans are dissatisfied with the predatory for-profit healthcare system because of how insurers, drug companies, and large hospital chains exploit it for maximum profits, mattering more than human health and welfare.

By eliminating unneeded insurer middlemen and restraining predatory drug giants from price gouging consumers, hundreds of billions of dollars can be saved annually while delivering world-class healthcare for all Americans.

Most nations operate this way, providing some form of universal coverage. The idea of it coming to America has industry lobbyists in a frenzy to prevent it.

A new Public Citizen report titled “Fever Pitch: Surge in Opposition Lobbying and Advocacy Validates the Credibility of the Medicare for All Movement,” explained the following:

With support from members of Congress, “single-payer health care is at the center of the public debate like never before.”

As a result, industry lobbyists are going all-out to prevent a fundamental human right from becoming reality.

From Q I 2018 to Q I 2019, “lobbying on Medicare for All increased dramatically, almost entirely due to a surge in lobbying activity by organizations that oppose it. This indicates that opponents of Medicare for All are newly scared about its rising prospects,” adding:

“The diverse and powerful array of trade groups, conservative activist organizations, GOP-linked establishment groups and health care industry interests launching an all-out advertising blitz against Medicare for All further reinforces this reality.”

In the year-over-year period to Q I 2019, the number of lobbying organizations against Medicare for All increased from nine to 61.

In the same period, the number of individual lobbyists rose from 29 to 270.

The newly formed “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHF)” is a key industry supported group for preventing universal healthcare in America — funded by insurers, drug giants, and large hospital chains, prioritizing profits above all else.

Its mission propaganda falsely claims it aims “to build and improve upon what’s working in health care (sic) and fix what’s not (sic),” adding:

“We want to work together to lower costs (sic), expand patient choice (sic), improve access (sic), enhance quality (sic) and foster innovation.”

“And whether it’s called Medicare for all, buy-in, or a public option, one-size-fits-all health care will never allow us to achieve those goals” — a bald-faced Big Lie about what’s vital for all Americans, everyone in, no one left out of the US healthcare system the way it is now.

Public Citizen (PC):

“Some of the most visible opposition to Medicare for All comes from major players in American conservatism, including the US Chamber of Commerce, the Koch (Brothers) network, and GOP strategist and money-wrangler Karl Rove.”

According to PC’s Craig Sandler,

“the increase in lobbying against Medicare for All serves as validation from our opposition that this movement has arrived.”

Intense lobbying and advertising propaganda further verifies it. PC tweeted the following:

“Groups hiring the most lobbyists against #MedicareForAll:

Pharma Research & Manufacturers of America,

Chamber of Commerce,

American Medical Association,

Biotech Innovation Organization,

Federation of American Hospitals, (and) Blue Cross.

Here’s the best part – they’re still going to lose.”

Groups hiring the most lobbyists against #MedicareForAll:

Pharma Research & Manufacturers of America
Chamber of Commerce
American Medical Association
Biotech Innovation Organization
Federation of American Hospitals
Blue Cross

Here's the best part – they're still going to lose. https://t.co/08fXEt7Dgc

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) June 28, 2019

PC’s Eagan Kemp said industry officials “are running scared. They know the public is lining up behind Medicare for All—which would improve coverage for every American.”

“Now big money opponents are trying to leverage their political power to beat back Medicare for All, not on the merits, but through insider lobbying and front groups” conducting a propaganda blitzkrieg against a fundamental human right.

The vast majority of registered Dem voters and most Republican ones want Congress to prioritize enacting Medicare for All. Dozens of Dem congressional members back it.

Key leadership members of both parties oppose changing the system to something far more equitable. So does Trump, certain to veto universal healthcare legislation if crosses his desk.

The struggle for all Americans to have affordable healthcare has miles to go to become reality — a super-congressional majority needed to override a presidential veto.

Clearly it’s an idea whose time has come, focusing on healing the sick and injured, benefitting doctors and patients alike, prioritizing health over corporate profits.

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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.

Mainstream reporting on Syria has relied heavily on the work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a Western government-funded regime change group whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda and its extremist allies to drum up prosecutions of Syrian officials.

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Western corporate media reporting on the war in Syria has relied extensively on partisan and dubious research produced by a cottage industry of opposition-linked groups posing as neutral monitors.

In part one of this investigation, we explored one the key cogs in this disinformation machine: the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a foreign government-funded, pro-military intervention opposition front group.

In this installment, we will probe a group that has not only helped shape Western media reporting on Syria, but which is at the forefront of an emerging strategy to bleed the Syrian government even as the war comes to a close. It is called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA.

CIJA is often presented as an “independent” legal group committed to dispensing justice for war crimes. Its work has been the subject of glowing profiles in The New York Times, NBC News, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.

A shocking report in May on “Syria’s secret torture prisons,” by the New York Times’ former Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard, was based heavily on documents and research provided by CIJA. Barnard described the organization simply as a “nonprofit,” with no further information.

In reality, CIJA is bankrolled by the very same Western governments that have fueled the proxy war against Syria, and was founded to supplement the regime-change operation that those states initiated in 2011.

CIJA’s investigators in Syria collaborated with and even paid foreign-backed Salafi-jihadist militias – including members of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra – to steal files from Syrian government buildings in areas that had been taken over by armed militants. These stolen documents are what lawyers hope to use in prosecutions of Syrian officials.

Indeed, top corporate media outlets like The New York Times have published major reports based on leaked Syrian government documents without disclosing the fact that these files were first stolen by Syrian al-Qaeda militants, and then handed over to a Western government-funded group committed to regime change.

Were this chain of custody publicized more widely, it would immediately call into question the reliability and veracity of the news reports that have relied on this group, and might even set off an international scandal.

But leading outlets have ignored CIJA’s methods of acquisition, depicting the group almost without exception as an impartial NGO whose leadership consists of noble humanitarians. A closer look shows the seamy side this organization.

CIJA’s executive director operates a for-profit consulting firm that has raked in lucrative contracts in conflict zones, including through CIJA’s work in Syria, while advising mining companies in Africa. And the commission’s deputy director openly touts their work with the US Department of Homeland Security and FBI on border security.

CIJA is also closely advised by a former State Department lawyer who has helped oversee the so-called “Caesar file,” a deceptive operation aimed at proving the Syrian government guilty of mass extermination, but which involved further collaboration with extremist militias in Syria as well as extensive funding from Qatar.

As the following investigation by The Grayzone will show, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability is anything but an independent group committed to human rights above all else.

‘Transitional justice,’ the latest tool in the regime-change toolbox

The Syrian opposition and its supporters abroad have spent the past eight years doing everything in their power to lobby the United States to launch a direct military intervention to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad. They have deployed red lines, White Helmets, and a constant stream of white lies to argue that the US military has a “responsibility to protect” Syrians from their government.

Despite billions of dollars poured into a cataclysmic proxy war, this monumental effort failed: Syria has largely been stabilized, and refugees are slowly trickling back in. In frustration, a motley crew of veteran regime-change warriors and lawyers are resorting to a new and largely untested strategy.

Their efforts amount to legal warfare, or lawfare, and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability is a key player in the new campaign.

To read the complete report by GrayZone click here

 

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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

The current U.S. president’s bullying of Canada over trade issues is causing some Canadians to question just how close our relationship is with our neighbour to the south. Peter Bailey tells the tale of a time not so long ago when hawkish voices in the U.S. were plotting the ultimate hostile act – a full-scale invasion of Canada.

This is probably the damnedest story you’ll read all week. If you think our trade wars with the U.S. are bad, keep in mind that at one time things could have got a lot worse.

As the Great Depression started in late 1929, the American military drew up a top-secret project titled “War Plan Red,” a scheme to wage war with Great Britain. Under Joint Army and Navy Board codes, America was known as “Blue,” Britain was “Red” and Canada was called “Crimson.”

Oddly enough, the Americans also made plans for war against Japan, designated “War Plan Orange,” and Germany, “War Plan Black.” But once rumours got out about another possible war against a German regime, isolationists in the U.S. made clear their opposition to conflict in Europe and the military lost its enthusiasm. Indeed, later on, the “Plan Dog” memo came out with its analysis of a two-front war with Britain and Japan (War Plan Red-Orange), which the U.S. realized it couldn’t sustain. So by 1930 it decided to concentrate on one front, Britain.

Except almost all of America’s destructive power would be directed against Canada.

What led up to it?

When the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917, it fought as an associated power, not a British ally. At war’s end, the other allies reneged on paying their debts to Britain. The British owed America £9 billion. The U.S. demanded repayment, which tarnished the image of the U.S. in Britain. The American image of the British, in turn, was of an ungrateful nation that wanted their war debts cancelled.

Image on the right: Lockheed Martin B-10 bomber: Secret plans to build three air bases along the Canadian border were leaked.

Tensions between the two nations remained on edge for more than a decade. By 1927, talks at the Geneva Naval Conference went badly, actually increasing the possibility of war between the two great powers. America was determined to throw its weight around; it just wasn’t sure how.

According to Dr. Christopher Bell of Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., Winston Churchill considered that war was certainly a possibility “if we get ourselves into a position where the Americans can feel that they can push us around whenever they want to.”

Although on the American East Coast sentiments were with the British, in the Midwest and the West Coast, the feeling was decidedly anti-British. Some American strategists saw an opportunity to strike a decisive blow against war-weary Britain and to wrest control of some of her vast empire – including Canada – before she could revive her military strength. America’s flyboy hero Charles Lindbergh went so far as sympathizing with the growing Nazi movement and joined the America First movement.

Adolf Hitler, for his part, also thought a war between America and Britain was inevitable and he wanted the British to win. Bizarrely, he thought he could work with the British against the U.S.

The outline for War Plan Red shows the U.S. considered chemical warfare against Canadian and British troops. A memo signed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur approved the possibility, provided there was no treaty to prevent it. By 1935, authorization was granted for the use of poison gas.

The onset of the Depression only added to the feeling that war with Britain was almost inevitable. The depressed markets, mass unemployment, the Dust Bowl and political unrest made the possibility of a war a useful way to unite the people and get the economy working again.

How would the war be fought?

Image below: A quick invasion was planned to avoid giving Canada and Britain a chance to amass troops

The U.S. planned to start the conflict by moving 25,000 troops from Boston to hit Halifax, with a fleet bombardment of the harbour and an invasion. The plan was to prevent the British navy from shipping reinforcements to Canada.

Next, troops would cross from Fort Drum, N.Y., to strike Ottawa. A second army would cross from Buffalo into Niagara to shut down Ontario’s hydroelectric plants, to occupy Hamilton’s steel industries, and to head to Toronto by road.

We can assume the cities would have previously been attacked by the air force’s Martin B-10 bombers and perhaps bombarded by the U.S. Navy operating on Lake Ontario.

More troops would cross from Detroit and a third group would head north to Winnipeg. A fourth group would attack Vancouver.

The Americans assumed there would be a total of three million British and Canadian troops within a year, so they planned a quick invasion.

But Canada had a plan – Defence Scheme No. 1.

The scheme was created in 1921, probably due to murmurings and fears of a U.S. invasion of Canada. It was created by the director of Military Operations and Intelligence, Lt.-Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown. It called for a surprise invasion of the northern U.S. states to buy time so Britain could send reinforcing troops by sea.

Canadian raids would attempt to seize Seattle, Spokane and Portland in the west. In the prairies, troops would attack Fargo, N.D., and move on to Minneapolis, Minn. Soldiers from Quebec would seize Albany, N.Y., and Maritime soldiers would invade Maine. Once American forces grouped, the Canadians would return home, burning bridges along the way to slow the U.S. advance.

Sutherland Brown felt confident because he had scouted New England with a few military pals, spying on the Americans’ weaknesses. He reported that in Vermont the people were “affable” but could become serious soldiers “if aroused.”

However, his plans, which were not co-ordinated with the British, were scrapped in 1928, two years before War Plan Red was introduced. It is just as well, because we now know Canada’s raiders would have been doomed.

What prevented the invasion?

By 1935, the U.S. organized giant troop movements and war games at Fort Drum, N.Y., just east of Kingston, Ont. It was the largest American military movement of its kind, with more than 25,000 troops mobilized and 15,000 held in reserve in Pennsylvania. But top-secret plans became public knowledge when the government printing office mistakenly made the documents public.

Secret plans to build three air bases along the Canadian border were now leaked. Newsreel companies came to film the construction process. On both sides of the border, newspapers argued back and forth. On May 1, 1935, the New York Times broke the story on its front page that America was secretly building military air bases on the border with Canada in preparation for an invasion and aerial bombardment of its closest ally.

Oddly enough, the Times tried to diffuse the seriousness of the claim with its long, vague lead sentence:

“WASHINGTON, April 30 – President Roosevelt censured the House Military Affairs committee today for publishing secret testimony of army officers on the Wilcox Air Base Bill involving the United States’ relations with Canada, repudiated the views of the officers as not in line with administration policies, and gave assurances that this government would observe in letter and spirit its treaties with Canada that have meant unfortified frontiers for a century.”

The story goes on in that vein for nearly 1,000 words and ends on the turn page with an equally vague response from Canada:

“OTTAWA, April 30 – A report from the Canadian Legation in Washington regarding President Roosevelt’s repudiation of the construction of an airbase on the Canadian border was received today by the Department of External Affairs.

“Pending perusal of the report, Sir George Perley, Acting Prime Minister, was disinclined to make a statement. Unofficially, however, pleasure over the President’s prompt intervention was admitted.”

What about Britain?

What Canada and the U.S. hadn’t taken into consideration was that Britain had no intention of rushing troops to Canada’s defence. It planned to surrender its colony to the Americans since there was no immediate threat to Britain’s livelihood. It was still reeling from the devastation of the First World War, the Depression and growing unrest in its colonies.

From this point on, though, Franklin D. Roosevelt determined to keep the military under a tighter rein, and eventually what prevented two neighbouring nations from coming to blows was the combined statesmanship of the U.S. president and Churchill. Both realized the real threat would come from Germany and Japan, and that Britain and the U.S. would be far better off as allies in the coming struggle.

America gradually abandoned plans for an invasion of Canada and the project was finally shelved in 1939. The plan was released to the public in 1974, when it caused a minor political stir but was quickly forgotten.

And that’s for the best. Imagine for a moment that Canada had been invaded by the U.S. Our lives would be dominated by American influences, Canadians would now be inundated with American popular music, watching American films, reading American magazines, following American sports.

Canadian culture would be pushed to the sidelines and American businesses would dominate our … oh, never mind.

To learn more about War Plan Red

The original plans for War Plan Red are available to the public in the American National Archive in Washington, D.C.

Kevin Lippert’s book about the program is titled War Plan Red: The United States’ Secret Plan to Invade Canada and Canada’s Secret Plan to Invade the United States, Princeton Architectural Press (June 2, 2015).

There’s an excellent British documentary on YouTube called America’s Planned War on Britain.

President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Eventually what prevented Canada and the U.S. from coming to blows was the combined statesmanship of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

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Peter Bailey is an award-winning newspaper editor and writer with more than 40 years of experience. He lives in Hamilton, Ont.

Featured image: Troops would cross from Fort Drum, N.Y., to strike Ottawa. A second army would cross from Buffalo into Niagara to shut down Ontario’s hydroelectric plants, to occupy Hamilton’s steel industries, and to head to Toronto by road. More troops would cross from Detroit and a third group would head north to Winnipeg. A fourth group would attack Vancouver. (Source: Troy Media); all images in this article are from Troy Media

Honorable Antonio Guterres, 

Secretary General of the United Nations

New York, New York

Hon. Secretary General,

You are well aware that in 2015 with the support of all permanent members of the UNSC (China, France, Russia, UK, and US) plus Germany and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was drafted, upon which UNSC issued Resolution 2231, replacing all previous UNSC resolutions targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

With the JCPOA nuclear deal in place, not only was the shadow of war and destruction lifted, but after a long time, the people of Iran began to enjoy relative economic stability and security. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) Iran has continued to carry out all its obligations under the JCPOA. But, in May of 2018, the United States government arbitrarily decided to abrogate the Agreement—disregarding the SCR 2231.  Clearly, this action has caused crises for the world, the region and the people of Iran.

After the US recklessly abrogated the UNSC-backed agreement, all previous US sanctions against Iran were re-imposed even more rigorously, harshly affecting Iran’s economy and causing inhumane suffering of the Iranian people.

Because of the dramatic events following the US departure from the SCR-backed Agreement, the Iranian people are wondering as to why the permanent members of the UN and his Excellency have been basically passive on this significant and consequential matter? It is understood that the UN Secretary General works with limited parameters; nevertheless, Iranians expected that the Secretary General would investigate and respond intently to the outcomes of a unilateral action that clearly defies all international norms.

In spite of a profound concern from international agencies, the Trump Administration was never able to provide any convincing rationale as to why it undermined the international consensus. Subsequently, under the pretext of “national security,” the American government deployed military naval ships and personnel to the Persian Gulf—which comprised a naval carrier, B-52 bombers, F35 jets, Patriot missiles and announced dispatching few thousands of new military personnel. Doesn’t all this military build-up and provocations amount to threats of war? All major European countries, plus Russia and China, have strongly argued that JCPOA has adequately addressed the international nuclear proliferation concerns, has deescalated tensions, and were justifiably hoping that a successful implementation of JCPOA would lead to stability in an otherwise volatile region.

Economic sanctions, threats of military aggression and war, are very consequential and impact the lives of the ordinary people, to the extent that public advocates consider this a violation of their human rights. Civil society advocates in Iran see military threats to the country, as direct aggression against its people.

By now, keen observers know that the hawkish conduct of the American government in the past few decades has led to the general unsettling of the region and the weakening of local democratic movements. In the long run, haven’t these hawkish policies derailed the natural pace of democratic development in these countries?

Iranian people have struggled for the development of civil society and democratic institutions for a considerable time.  In the past century alone, Iran witnessed three major historical events– the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, the democratic movement of Oil Nationalization of 1951, and the Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Western backed dictator. The progress of an indigenous democratic movement requires a crisis-free environment to nurture. American-backed sanctions and threats of military aggression would undermine such a democratic movement, and create the grounds for increased domestic repression by the authorities.

In the past few weeks there have been some mediation efforts to stabilize the dangerous situation facing the Iranian people. We, the undersigned, appeal to you to use your position as Secretary General of the UN to request the US returns to its obligations under JCPOA, lift the economic sanctions, halt the military threats against the people and the country of Iran, and stop fictitious provocations that clearly could lead to military hostilities and expose the entire region to detrimental violence.

Regards,

cc:  Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission

Mrs. Michelle Bachelet Jeria, High Commissioner for Human Rights

Mrs. Dunja Mijatović, Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe

Signatories

• Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, Baruch College
• Houshang Ardavan, Emeritus Fellow, the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK
• Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London
• Mohammad H. Ahmadi, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin
• Tim Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Sociology (Sydney University), author, civil rights campaigner and peace activist
• Bahar Bastani, MD, Professor of Medicine, St. Louis Univ. Medical Center
• Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, MIT
• Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Ottawa, Director, Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal
• Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
• Reza Delghavi, Retired Brooklyn borough City Planner
• Abbas Edalat – Professor of Computer Science and Math, Imperial College of London
• Nuredin Gharavi, Former Governor of East Azerbaijan, freelance researcher
• Hossein Hamedani, Professor of Mathematics, Marquette University
• Tim Hayward, Professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh and director of the university’s Just World Institute
• Fareed Marjaee – City Planner, Writer, Civil Society Advocate
• Jamshid Marvasti MD, Asst Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of New England, School of Medicine.
• Mahmood Monshipouri, Chair/Professor, Dept. of International Relations, San Francisco State Un (Univ.)
• Behrad Nakhaee, Nuclear Engineer, NPT Group member, (American Nuclear Society)
• Janan Najeeb, President of Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition
• Azam Niroomand-Rad, Emeritus Prof. of Radiation Medicine, Georgetown Un Medical Center
• Ali Jafarian, Emeritus Professor, University of New Haven
• Farid Razi – Civil Society Activist
• Piers Robinson, Co-Director, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK
• Asghar Rastegar, professor of Medicine, Director, Global Health Program,Co-Director, Yale-Stanford J&J Global Health Scholar Program
• Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Professor in Comparative Political Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Muhammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, and the NIOCChair in Petroleum Engineering, University of Southern California
• Mehrnaz Shahabi, Psycho-Social Researcher
• Ali Shakibai, MD, Cardiologist, Avon, CT
• Majid Tavallaei, Sr. Agricultural Manager at California, Freelance Researcher, Former Editor-in-Chief of “NAMEH”magazine
• Ashkebous Talebi, Educator at University of Maryland

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Well, it’s happened. It’s real. Mr. Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and Senior Advisor of President Trump has delivered 136 pages of lies, suppositions and conjuring tricks to seduce or compel us Palestinians to accept our fate and surrender our rights. What rights? As far as this document is concerned, Palestinians have no rights whatsoever, and, as for a Palestinian perspective, what is that?

The Palestinians were not even invited to Manama, let alone considered. What about the Israelis? Were they there? Were they invited? On the face of it, no. But, in reality, they were amply represented. What is Jared Kushner if not the team captain for the Greater Israel Project? After all, he is Jewish, an ardent Zionist, an investor in the illegal settlements in Palestine and an advocate, par excellence, for Israeli survival and supremacy.

The Lie Of The Century, as I call it, is just that. A lie. From beginning to end, every word, every supposition of this long-winded deception is to ensure that the Greater Israel Project will advance unhindered, and we, the Palestinians, are to accept the crumbs off the table of our land-lords. Or perish.

But, hang on a minute. How could an occupier who seized our land by brute force be made a legitimate land-lord over us? The answer is simple. In the Trumpian universe, all that matters are power and Mammon. Isn’t this what the ‘Deal of The Century’ is all about? American/Israeli power exercised over us Palestinians without mercy? And, what about the money? Oh, yes. There is money, but it is not American nor Israeli money. It’s Arab money — to be extorted from despotic, Arabic regimes in the Gulf, as per usual. Trump demands and the Arab Regimes of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia oblige. If they don’t, as Mr. Trump intimated, their shaky thrones wouldn’t last a week without US protection.

Mr. Kushner promised $50 billion in Arab money to be divided between Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. Nowhere in the document was there any mention of Palestinian political rights, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees or even the Israeli occupation of Palestine. All was conveniently kicked into touch because it doesn’t matter, you see. What matters is Israeli survival and supremacy and the continued, rapid march of the Greater Israel Project.

I say ‘rapid march’ because who is to stop it? The Palestinians do not have an army, an air force, a navy or even a coalition to stop this march. Jordan has already succumbed to American threats and promises of prosperity. The same goes for Egypt, especially under the hand-picked President Abdul Fatah Alsisi, whose sole purpose is to neuter Egypt and serve as a facilitator for American and Israeli hegemony in our area.

Syria? Western powers, Israel and despotic Arab/Muslim states have made sure that Syria is taken out of the equation by embroiling it in a 7-year long devastating war.

The Gulf States? Saudi Arabia? Instead of stopping this advance of Greater Israel they are facilitating it by making a frantic rush towards normalization with Israel and to form a coalition of the willing to combat a perceived threat from another Muslim country, Iran. The honorable exception is the State of Kuwait, who refused to attend this farce and reaffirmed their total support of Palestinian rights and aspirations.

Let’s look closely at the word, ‘surrender’. Many of you might remember an article I wrote recently, entitled, ‘Surrender Or Die’. It didn’t take too long for the Israelis to prove me right. There it is. From the Grand weasel’s mouth, none other than Danny Danon, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. In an article entitled, ‘What’s Wrong With Palestinian Surrender”, published in the New York Times on June 24th, one day before the Manama ‘Workshop’. “Surrender”, he wrote,” is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission.”

There you have it. To the victor the spoils.

And, then, comes the other Grand Weasel, Mr. Jared Kushner, to deliver the message of surrender to a room full of weasels. All of these aforementioned weasels, who have been gnawing at our heels for over a century, omitted to consider one vital point: The Palestinian character and pride.

Surrender is not in our character. We’d rather die standing up, defending our rights than exist, kneeling at the feet of our self-appointed land-lords and benefactors.

Just in case any of those weasels calling for our surrender might have any interest in what we Palestinians want, here is how Executive Member of the PLO, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, put it:

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Featured image is from IMEMC News

Washington’s recent attempt to use the tragic downing of Malaysian flight MH-17 over the Donbass region of Ukraine, which occurred on July 17, 2014 is nothing short of pathetic. Instead of making an attempt to bring to justice those responsible for this crime it tries instead to unleash yet another wave of anti-Russian hysteria. In this situation, it’s only logical that this latest attempt has gone down in flames yet again.

It would seem that everything was done in accordance with a carefully drafted script. We’ve had a major media show with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) coming forward to announce that the investigation was nearing closure. It’s curious that among those countries that have sent their representatives to JIT one can find Ukraine, a possible perpetrator of the attack on MH-17, alongside the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, and Belgium. Then we had the typical bad guy – Russia, that in the opinion of the JIT was most certainly responsible for the downing of MH-17 and the untimely demise of 298 people. Western puppets would even go as far as to release the names of four people allegedly responsible for the attack.

As for the puppeteers, they would use the head of the US Department of State, Michael Pompeo for making appeals to Russia to immediately put in jail those people the JIT described as perpetrators.

However, this entire propaganda push would only work on day-to-day consumers of American media, who still believe that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi “got what they deserved” and that Iran and North Korea somehow represent some sort of threat to the international community. However, there’s an ever growing number of people in the world who wouldn’t fall for such lies anymore, as they’ve seen them all too often before.

There’s little doubt that the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is among such people, as he made it pretty clear that there’s no proof whatsoever of Russia’s involvement in the downing of MH-17. In fact, he would claim that:

“We are very unhappy because from the very beginning it became a political issue on how to accuse Russia of the wrongdoing… So far there is no proof. Only hearsay.”

In turn, the founder of the conservative Dutch party Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet would announce that he has no confidence whatsoever in the JIT and its impartiality, while pointing out that Ukraine must be responsible for this attack.

According to Heise, there’s no doubt that Kiev is fully responsible for this tragedy, as it had failed to close the airspace over the contested territories of Donbass and withheld evidence from the investigation. It would add that the Dutch Safety Board was conducting its own investigation of the downing and at some point was convinced that Kiev was behind this attack, however it left a legal loophole for Kiev for it to escape any consequences. As for Russia, Heise argues, it was decided to name it responsible for this tragedy, since Ukraine was acting on Washington’s behalf in this downing and it will continue enjoying its protection.

It’s curious that the JIT final report has left a lot of questions unanswered, most of them emerge due to the absence of any actual evidence that could allow this body to allocate responsibility for the catastrophe to some party and could be used in court. Yet, the Netherlands and Australia were quick to announce that they had no doubt whatsoever, even though JIT would cite pictures and messages taken from social media as their sources of information. It didn’t bother those behind the so-called final report that they had no access to the Pentagon’s satellite images and any sort of data from Ukrainian radars, even though those could serve as actual evidence along with similar data Russia provided to shed light on the actual perpetrators of the attack.

The claims that certain Western media sources would make, about the downing of MH17 “rallying the West against Russia” can only be described as laughable, even though it’s clear that this was Washington’s initial intention which led to the release of the “final report”

Yet another attempt to present Russia as a bogeyman has garnered no sympathy in Europe, especially against the backdrop of revelations London has recently made about the role of its intelligence agencies in the downing of PA 103 three decades ago. Back then a bomb that exploded on board Pan American Flight 103, en route from London to New York was used to undermine Libya and warrant the overthrow of its leader – Muammar Qaddafi. What this false-flag essentially required was the falsification of evidence and the conviction in a rigged court proceeding of the wrong man. The extent of that operation has recently been exposed in a partial release of British Government documents from the UK’s National Archives.

It’s been noted that those archive disclosures also show that the same modus operandi has been under way since 2014 to fabricate blame for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine, and justify global sanctions against Russia, plus operations to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

That is why Malaysia must take the investigation into its own hands and receive all the necessary assistance from the international community to establish who was responsible for the MH17 downing. It’s clear that the JIT was more concerned with pleasing Washington than establishing the truth. 

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Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”  

Featured image is from NEO

Traditional diplomacy is being given a makeover – at least where it is not being abolished altogether and being replaced by a replica of The Apprentice.  US President Donald Trump’s seizure of the art has been violent and molesting.  Had Roman emperors had access to Twitter and the twenty-four hour news cycle, they might have had such moments, bothering the empire’s citizenry with their latest self-absorbed act. Imagine Caligula making his horse Incitatus consul and the hyperventilating postings of enthusiasm that would have followed.

In the summations of the G20 leaders’ summit in Osaka, scribes scrounged for meaning, hoping to bring magnifying glasses to insignificant detail; press attendees did their usual act, simulating interest or showing wonder at the spectacle.  Caitlin Byrne of the Griffith Asia Institute pushed herself to find gains.  “Significant breakthroughs including a pause in the escalating China-US trade war and the resumption of dialogue between US and North Korea”.

The conservative National Review yearned for a new Euro-American bloc against the Yellow Peril, which did not quite eventuate.  “In reality, the United States needs Europe to confront China.  Americans and Europeans would be able to hold China to account through existing multilateral trade structures and coordinated responses, rather than one-off bilateral ‘deals’.”

The communiqué was suitably imprecise.  The G20 leaders met “to make united efforts to address major global economic challenges.”  There was a promise to “work together to foster global economic growth, while harnessing the power of technological innovation, in particular digitilization, and its application for the benefit of all.”

There are acknowledgments of problems, albeit cushioned by assurances.  Trade and geopolitical issues, or “tensions” had “intensified” but these would be addressed.  The World Trade Organisation would be reformed; the “Osaka Tract” framework regulating the cross-border flow of data was endorsed, one described as “Data Free Flow with Trust”.

Peering through this glass darkly, and we see cracks of varying degrees.

“The digital economy is a crucial driver of economic growth,” Trump said, along with every other leader, but he was clear that “we must also ensure the resilience and security of our 5G networks”.  (Huawei representatives, raise your hands.)

The enthusiasm for climate change action was lukewarm, lacking the sting of urgency that has found feet on the streets across countries, often led by young activists.  In the leaders’ summit rooms, the adults had decided that the environment could be lessened in its immediate importance.  This, it was suggested, was due to Japan’s efforts to placate the United States at a time both are negotiating a trade deal.  The earth might as well go and fry: the powers shall have their trade pacts.

Global disruption is staple for the US president, and the rest of the G20 delegates in their Osaka meet had to mill about hoping for some letup in the recent push and shove between Washington and Beijing.  A temporary suspension of hostilities was suggested: Trump would not be adding tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports.  US companies would still be permitted to sell to Huawei – for the moment.  Trump remains convinced that US hegemony is the knobkerrie and staff to wield, the top chieftain in the international relations show.  Best make use of such implements before they lose force and shine.

No such summit could quite pass without the injection of slight farce.  One of Trump’s brood, Ivanka Trump, found herself in the media lenses, an intrusive reminder of this administration’s keenness to push family into any conspicuous, and akward position.  The White House was a trophy in a game from the start; egged on and mocked, Trump dedicated himself to seizing it for himself and his interests. The impedimenta followed.  (His promise to clean Washington’s swamp was done with the selectively cleansing detergent of his inner circle.)

While not quite being in the big league of absurdity as Caligula’s consul stead, Ivanka still qualifies as an envoy in a role more akin to the despotisms of old than a modern diplomatic outfit.  Trump’s nepotism tends to be filled with a distinct bravado.  It rejects formality and embraces the politics of the malnourished playground.  Given various Freudian flavourings that have attended his descriptions of his daughter, he was happy to flaunt the candy and seek compliments.  Instead, an icy politeness, best expressed by IMF chief Christine Lagarde, was shown.

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) dealt with the matter witheringly, attempting to draw Trump back from the world of the disruptive make believe.  The subtext to her scolding: We are an empire, so behave properly as its big chief.

“It may be shocking to some,” she lamented, “but being someone’s daughter actually isn’t a career qualification.  It hurts our diplomatic standing when the President phones it in & the world moves on.  The US needs our president working the G20. Bringing a qualified diplomat couldn’t hurt either.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif) demanded an explanation from Ivanka Trump herself, showing the general consternation that continues to preoccupy the Democrats at Trumpist twist and turns.  Additionally, he wondered “why Jared Kushner still has a security clearance.”

Other leaders were also scolded for their ineffectual contribution.  Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was taken to task by his opponents for being meek when having a chance to discuss disagreements with China’s Xi Jinping.  (The chance was, admittedly, a brief one.) Conservative Party MP Erin O’Toole obsessed about the Prime Minister’s body language with an amateur’s enthusiastic glare.  “Some will note the later handshake and others the early hesitancy.  My concern stems from foreign policy missteps that have left us isolated.”

Such complaints have a keeping-up-appearances relish to them.  Trump, and some of his fellow leaders, have to be found wanting.  But the G20 is hardly a gladiatorial stage of heavy breathing and chest beating, despite unconvincing endorsements that it is “the culmination of months of intense negotiations” that reinforce “the underlying habits of cooperation so desperately needed for ongoing global economic stability.”  At the best of times, it remains a forum of little traction and achievement, leaving a degree of frivolousness to creep in.

In that way, Trump thrives.  Shallowness is depth.  The camera gives him life; social media pumps the blood and propels.  Besides, he had North Korea on his mind and duly showed that shaking hands with others is something he enjoys almost as much as, well, other, more self-focused things.

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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 Shutterstock

Early on July 1, Israeli warplanes carried out a series of airstrike on several military targets in the Syrian capital of Damascus and in the central governorate of Homs.

The Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces (SyAAF) intercepted several Israeli missiles over Damascus and south of Homs. However, most of the missiles hit their targets.

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According to pro-government sources, military positions in the districts of al-Mazzeh, al-Dimass and Jomrayah north and northwest of Damascus, as well as three bases in the outskirt of the city of Homs were hit.

One of the Israeli missiles hit a civilian area in the district of Sahnaya west of Damascus. The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said that 4 civilians, including a 3-month old baby, were killed as a result. 22 other civilians, mostly women and children, were injured.

This was the first time an Israeli strike on Syria led to civilian casualties. This is a dangerous development that may force Damascus to rethink its strategy towards Israel.

The Israeli strike was one of the biggest this year, which confirms that Tel Aviv is not only determined to go on with its attacks on Syria, but also to step-up their scale and intensity.

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Featured image: Syria’s Defense Ministry claims Assad forces have shot down Israeli missiles (Twitter)

Documents disclosed under freedom of information law reveal that 184 Scottish fish farms are permitted to use formaldehyde in a solution called formalin, which is used as a disinfectant to guard against parasites and diseases.

Formaldehyde has been famously used by artist Damien Hirst to preserve dead animals such as cows, lambs and sharks. Formalin is a water solution containing formaldehyde which is legal to use, but there are concerns over its safety.

In India last year, for example, there was a scare over preserved fish laced with the chemical, prompting a ban on fish imports in Goa state.

The UK government classified formaldehyde as a carcinogen in 2016 which means there are restrictions on its use, but it is permitted for use by the caged salmon industry.

The campaign group, Scottish Salmon Watch (SSW), which obtained the documents, wants formaldehyde banned. Concerns have been expressed over the potential of formalin leaks into river, lochs and seas.

The documents were released by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa). They reveal that a company called Mowi, formerly known as Marine Harvest, used 50.7 tonnes of formalin between May 2017 and September 2018 on salmon farms at Loch Shiel, Loch Arkaig, Loch Lochy and Loch Garry.

One document revealed there was an “accidental overdose” of formalin at Mowi’s Glenfinnan salmon farm at Loch Shiel in October 2017. This was “due to human error” leading to 1,343 dead fish.

As part of its investigation, SSW filmed vats of formaldehyde labelled “corrosive” and “toxic” this month outside The Scottish Salmon Company‘s Russel Burn Hatchery on the shore of Loch Kishorn.

Don Staniford, director of Scottish Salmon Watch, said: “The salmon farming industry uses formaldehyde, via a formalin solution, as a disinfectant to guard against parasites and diseases although there are fish welfare and environmental concerns as well as human health impacts due to its carcinogenicity.

“The use of carcinogenic chemicals such as formaldehyde on salmon farms should be banned immediately. A public register of all chemicals used by salmon farms in Scotland is urgently required. The public surely have a right to know which toxic chemicals – including formaldehyde – are being used at which salmon farms.”

Certain restrictions apply to the use of formalin because it is deemed a “substance presumed to have carcinogenic potential for humans”.

Guidance from the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs says: “Fish, poultry, sheep and cattle farmers – as professionals – will be able to continue to use products containing formaldehyde for dis-infection, fumigation and foot bathing purposes.

“Whoever is physically using the product must be competent enough to meet the restrictions and precautions detailed by the labelling. There is no requirement to prove competency before purchase and use.

“However if a health and safety issue arose through its use and be (sic) investigated, and the person using it found not to have been suitably trained and competent, then there could be grounds for prosecution.”

John Aitchison, of Coastal Communities Network, Scotland, said any discharge of toxic chemicals from salmon farms and hatcheries into Scotland’s rivers and sea “is a real cause for concern”.

He added: “That an overdose of formaldehyde/formalin killed 1,343 fish shows that this is a potent chemical. It has no place being dumped into rivers or the sea, where it can harm wild animal and where people from coastal communities live or make their living,” he added.

Aquaculture chemicals used to treat farmed fish can also kill or harm crustaceans that many fishermen depend on catching, Aitchison argued.

He added: “Sepa allows fish farms and well boats to discharge of another toxic compound, hydrogen peroxide, without any licence being required. This chemical is used in huge quantities, then dumped straight into the sea, despite research in Norway showing that it can kill commercially-fished crustacean species days later.”

Ian Roberts, spokesman for Mowi said: “We can confirm that human error during application of formalin in 2017 resulted in the unfortunate loss of about 1,300 juvenile salmon. When realised, we quickly rectified the situation and have since ensured it hasn’t occurred again.

“Formalin is used to protect small salmon in our freshwater farms from water-borne bacteria. Safe use of the product is licensed by Sepa under the Controlled Activities Regulations, following Sepa’s established environmental risk assessment that ensures product application meets environmental quality standards. Formaldehyde biodegrades quickly in water after contact with bacteria and/or sunlight.”

The Scottish Salmon Company was asked for a comment but referred us to the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation (SSPO) which represents Scotland’s farmed salmon industry.

SSPO pointed out that formalin was a full licensed medicine approved by Sepa for use in freshwater to protect fish health. “It is a dilute form of formaldehyde, which is a naturally occurring compound,” said an SSPO spokesperson.

“After use it swiftly breaks down and is, therefore, safe to use for both fish and the environment.  Fish farmers are fully trained in the correct usage of any medicinal product used to protect fish health and welfare.”

The Soil Association, which grants organic status to fish farms, said formalin may be used twice per year maximum under the direction of a farm’s contracted vet.

The association’s spokesman added: “However, if the production cycle is less than 18 months you may use parasite treatments once per year. This is highly regulated. Fish farmers must obtain prior approval from their certification officer for all parasite treatments on each occasion, and must give preference to the use of cleaner fish for biological control of ectoparasites or freshwater, marine water and sodium chloride solutions.

“The use of this treatment must also be within their Sepa license and is at very low concentrations.”

According to Sepa, uncontrolled releases of formaldehyde had “the potential to cause significant harm” to the environment. “It is therefore important to ensure that formaldehyde is stored, handled and used appropriately to minimise the risk of any uncontrolled releases,” said a Sepa spokesperson.

“The use of formaldehyde is authorised at the Russel Burn hatchery by Sepa and the operators are required to record each individual use of formaldehyde. These records are audited as part of Sepa’s routine compliance inspections.”

The spokesperson added: “We take any allegations of environmental breaches very seriously and as an evidenced based organisation we would always take action to investigate where information comes to light. We would therefore encourage anyone with information of non-compliance to contact Sepa, in confidence, via the pollution hotline 0800 80 70 60.”

Earlier this month The Ferret revealed that the salmon farming industry was pushing behind the scenes for environmental limits on a toxic pesticide to be 100 times weaker than government regulators recommend.

The pesticide’s US manufacturer, Merck, and SSPO, funded a study arguing that wildlife in sea lochs could withstand high concentrations of the pesticide.

The industry’s move to relax the limits was condemned as “beyond belief” by community groups, while environmentalists urged fish farmers to protect wildlife by ceasing to use the pesticide. The industry, however, insisted that it had confidence in its science.

Check the documents released by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency here.

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Featured image is from The Ferret

When is a war not a war? Apparently in the minds of some folks in Washington if it is a “single strike” or a “limited attack” it is really okay, with or without the consent of Congress as required by Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States.

The Founders had wanted to take away from the chief executive the ability to go to war, a power which the kings in Europe had abused, but the current rulers of America have chosen to ignore the wisdom of the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They have done so by wordsmithing what they are doing and somehow attacking another country has become generally regarded as not really war at all, just a reminder to bad guys of what Washington might be capable of if it really gets angry.

Even accepting that under the War Powers Act the president has the authority to respond to an imminent threat, the U.S. was hardly threatened by the Syrians on the two occasions when Trump has ordered drone strikes. Nor was Iran a threat two weeks ago when an attack on Iranian military installations was called off within minutes of being launched.

Laws or rules of war are, in reality, pretty much a fiction. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War includes the observation that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The recent Iranian shoot-down of a U.S. navy reconnaissance drone brought out the worst in all-American chest thumping chauvinism. The New York Times’ leading Zionist columnist Bret Stephens called for an attack by U.S. forces to sink the Iranian navy. Senator Tom Cotton, a Trump ally, urged a “retaliatory military strike,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that any killing of an American soldier or sailor in Syria or Iraq will be blamed on Iran and a U.S. military response will follow.

Bernie Sanders, in an interview with Margaret Brennan of CBS’s Face the Nation, had an interesting confrontation with Brennan over the language used to describe the aborted Iran attack. When Sanders correctly described the planned action as “war” Brennan objected, leading to the following exchange:

Haha get ready to like @BernieSanders pic.twitter.com/CjrKYsOWKT

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) June 23, 2019

MARGARET BRENNAN: He was just doing a limited strike.

SEN. SANDERS: Oh, just a limited strike – well, I’m sor-ry. I just didn’t know that it’s okay to simply attack another country with bombs with just a limited strike – that’s an act of warfare.

On the day after the attack was called off, Eliot Engel, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke with Jake Tapper of CNN saying:

JAKE TAPPER: “You think the President needs to come to Congress to get the authority to strike Iran if he wants to?”

ELIOT ENGEL: “Oh, absolutely. I think the President needs to come to Congress if … going to war with Iran. I mean, individual strike, we don’t want to tie the President’s hands. But in terms of going to war, we’re a co-equal branch of government, it’s very important that Congress have a say in it.”

Engel’s ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the War Powers Act is profound. He is saying that an “individual strike” using the military is not war while also conceding that the president can start an armed conflict just because he got up on the wrong side of bed one morning. Eliot would not want to tie the president’s hands, perhaps recalling the heroic exploits of his own president Barack Obama, who destroyed Libya just because he felt it was the right thing to do.

Engel is, perhaps not coincidentally, a hard-core Zionist who tends to look at the Middle East through an Israeli prism. In opposition to most other Democratic congressmen, he voted for the Iraq war and against Obama’s Iran deal, both of which votes were in line with the Israeli government’s lobbying of Congress. For Engel, the first question is always “Is it good for Israel?”

And when it comes to going to war against the Muslim world, there is no one more up front than former Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Joe was interviewed by Israeli Army radio on the day after Trump canceled the Iran attack. He was troubled by Trump’s backing off from hitting Iran and advocated striking targets in the country that are both “visible and public.” He also expressed his hope that Donald Trump would quickly return to his policy of maintaining a hard line with Iran. Joe was not at all troubled about a retaliatory attack killing an estimated 150 people on the ground because “in war unfortunately people are killed, that’s just the way of the world.” Joe would, of course, prefer that non-Jews do the dying.

Perhaps the most bizarre summation of the case for America’s right to initiate what amounts to perpetual warfare came from James Jeffrey, the  U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition. Viewing with disdain some of the Democratic presidential candidates’ calls for moving away from “endless wars,” he pounded the table while declaring “I get terribly worried. Because this shows total ignorance of what’s going on in the world today.”

He went on to opine in an interview with Defense One:

“All of those candidates, in fact to a degree even more than most presidential candidates, embrace American values such as democracy, rule of law, divided government, free press, all of these great things. But let me tell you what I’ve learned in 50 years of experience. All those democratic values that we have done a great deal as a country to promote and to support around the world – and that’s a good thing, was a good thing – rest on a foundation. That foundation is an American-led global collective security system to fend off the predators that want to tear the system apart. Not just the military coalition, but the values that stand behind it.”

Jeffrey is perhaps a student of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is uniquely convinced that the U.S. has been a force for good over the past twenty years. By that logic, the United States must accept the burden of being the global policeman to maintain wonderful democratic values. Interestingly, Jeffrey cites “rule of law” and “democracy” which are, of course, the first victims in any nation that believes itself to have a right to start a war whenever it sees fit.

What is more disturbing than Jeffrey, however, is the casualness displayed by media stars and politicians alike regarding what constitutes war by virtue of the broad acceptance of euphemisms like “limited attack” or “individual strike.” One recalls the euphemism frequently cited by the Pentagon during the Vietnam War when American bombers were blowing up villages, that the U.S. was invariably “exercising the inherent right of self-defense.” Rather than citing self-defense, it would be far better seeing Washington exercising some self-restraint for a change.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

There’s no more convincing proof that last week’s historic National Security Summit in Jerusalem between Russia, “Israel”, and the US was a success than the self-professed “Jewish State’s” latest anti-Iranian strikes in Syria, which were more than likely approved  by Moscow in advance as part of its regional “balancing” strategy in pursuit of a “New Detente”.

“Israel” carried out several strikes against what media reports allege were IRGC bases in Syria around midnight on 1 July, defying popular expectations that this wouldn’t happen ever again after Russia gave some very high-profile but nevertheless misleading statements about its supposedly “allied” commitment to Iran the week prior. The historic National Security Advisor Summit in Jerusalem between Russia, “Israel”, and the US was widely described as a failure after Moscow defended Tehran’s military presence in the Arab Republic and reaffirmed that the two are “allies”, but that doesn’t tell the full story because Russian Security Council Secretary Patrushev was only talking about their anti-terrorist cooperation in Syria and didn’t mean anything more broadly than that.

The same goes for the Russian Foreign Ministry’s envoy to Asian countries and in particular the presidential advisor on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov’s promise a few days later that Iran “won’t be alone” if the US attacks it. Alt-Media interpreted this through its members’ typical wishful thinking perspective to mean that Russia was implying a direct military intervention against the US in support of Iran if a conflict were to break out, when in reality he was most likely talking about the political and moral support that the rest of the world would extend to the Islamic Republic in that scenario. Shortly after, a Russian official told Sputnik that “we are open to discussions” with Iran about selling it the S-400s, which was also wrongly reported in the outlet’s own headline as “Russia ready to deliver S-400 to Iran” when it literally only signaled its interest in starting talks about this.

The combination of Patrushev, Kabulov, and the military-technical official’s statements created the false perception that Russia would militarily defend its Iranian “ally”, which is why many people were so surprised when “Israel” just carried out several strikes against its forces in Syria. Not only that, but the S-300s once again failed to respond, confirming that they’re just status symbols worshiped by those who suffer from a “savior complex”. The latest attacks were particularly painful for those who sincerely thought that Russia would prevent this from happening since some of them targeted the Homs Governorate close to where the S-300s are reportedly located in neighboring Hama Governorate’s nearby city of Masyaf, sending the clear-cut message that Moscow won’t let them be used against “Putinyahu’s Rusrael“.

As the shock of what happened begins to set in, the Alt-Media Community would do well to remember that none other than Bibi himself spilled the beans about what was about to happen just days before the strikes took place when he said that “all of us (Russia, “Israel”, and the US) agree on the end goal of getting Iran out of Syria” when briefing his compatriots on the outcome of the National Security Advisor Summit. Many people mocked him at the time and dismissed his comment as nothing more than Zionist boasting, but he was actually telling the truth in hindsight as proven by the fact that Russia once again  “passively facilitated” “Israel’s” anti-Iranian strikes in Syria, shattering the worldview of those who fell for Moscow’s messaging in the days prior. In fact, one can’t help but wonder whether that said messaging was designed to cover up a deal that it struck.

To elaborate, the three quoted Russian officials were uncharacteristically enthusiastic about their support of Iran, which should have immediately been a dead-giveaway to keen observers that something was up. Furthermore, the fact that Alt-Media didn’t report on the entirety of Patrushev’s comments from that event, especially about how “Russia puts special attention on ensuring Israel’s security“, should have been another sign that a perception management operation was in progress. More than likely, Russia wanted to capitalize on the outpouring of global support for Iran after it downed an American drone earlier that week and misportray itself as the Islamic Republic’s loyal “ally” in order to redirect some of the sympathy towards its Mideast policy as well, all of which would make “Israel’s” forthcoming strikes all the more unexpected.

It’s doubtful that Iranian decision makers fell for this perception management operation that was probably mostly targeting the general audience at large and not the strategic one in the Islamic Republic, but then again, Tehran still can’t seem to accept that India has turned against it so it’s theoretically possible that it also didn’t see this coming either. That said, many Iranians have reportedly been killed over nearly the past four years since Russia militarily intervened in Syria and began to “passively facilitate” “Israel’s” strikes there, so it would be strange for them to think that this would change after what Patrushev said at the historic Jerusalem Summit about ensuring “Israel’s” security, which is nothing more than a euphemism for continuing to allow it to bomb the IRGC in Syria.

Given what just took place, there’s no doubt that the National Security Advisor Summit in Jerusalem was a success in more ways than one. Not only did Russia apparently approve — if not coordinate — “Israel’s” latest strikes (and likely the many more that will occur in the coming future) as part of its regional “balancing” strategy aimed at “passively facilitating” Iran’s dignified but “phased withdrawal” from Syria as a quid pro quo for clinching a “New Detente” with the US, but Moscow’s messaging strategy also succeeded in managing international perceptions and obscuring its behind-the-scenes role in the latest attacks. Altogether, all of this works out very well for Netanyahu’s upcoming re-election campaign and it’s predicted that he’ll continue striking the IRGC in Syria with Putin’s tacit approval in the run-up to September’s vote.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from @Ibra_Joudeh/Twitter

Yemen’s Customs Department and Consumer Protection has seized over 24,000 tons of infested, rotten, or expired food and medicines sent as “aid” to starving Yemenis since 2015. Yemen currently faces the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in the world due to four years of intense blockade.

Since 2015, Yemen’s Customs and Consumer Protection has had to either send back or seize over 24,000 tons of aid determined unfit for consumption sent from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Among the “aid” included 15,000 tons of supplementary food for pregnant women and medicine.

On November 6, Yemen’s Port Authority rejected and sent back a vessel from the World Food Program containing 10,000 tons of white wheat. After inspection, authorities noticed the wheat was infested with live insects. A similar incident occurred in February when authorities inspected a WFP shipment containing 96,000 bags wheat that lacked an expiration or production date stamp.

Another particularly notable incident took place in May of 2019. At this time, Yemeni authorities found dead insects inside 8 million kilograms of wheat. Throughout June, authorities were forced to reject nearly 130,000 bags of white beans that were either wet, rotten, or infested with dead insects.

Blaming Ansarullah Despite Four Years of Blockade

Meanwhile, the United Nations has attempted to shift blame for their unfit shipments onto the Sana’a government, led by Ansarullah aka. the “Houthis.”

On June 20, the UN announced it would begin suspending aid shipments to Yemen, citing accusations of Ansarullah “diverting food” shipments. The UN claimed it had no problem with the Saudi-backed government in Aden, which likely has no issue distributing rotten food to its citizens.

The WFP expects the suspension of aid to impact 850,000 people.

Yemen isn’t the only crisis impacted by the UN’s carelessness in regards to sending disgusting aid shipments. In 2016, the UN was caught sending expired food to Somalia intended for victims of a devastating drought.

Yemen currently faces the world’s worst manmade humanitarian disaster on the planet and the United Nations has done nothing to stop it. According to the latest report from ReliefWeb, 80% of Yemen’s population — 22 million — require urgent humanitarian aid to survive including food, water, and medical supplies.

To Help Starving Yemenis, Lift the Blockade Immediately

If the United Nations is serious about helping starving Yemenis, it could start by lifting the devastating blockade which has turned Yemen into an open-air prison akin to Gaza.

The Saudi-led, US-enforced, and UN-condoned land, sea, and air blockade severely restricts all imports, exports, and the flow of movement. All aid shipments destined for Yemen are forced to dock in neighboring countries like Djibouti to await inspection from Saudi-backed authorities while food rots for weeks or months in the hot sun.

10 million Yemenis currently face famine due to the blockade. Meanwhile, pregnant women, the elderly, children, and patients with chronic diseases also bear the brunt of the blockade’s effects. According to Save the Children, over 85,000 children have died of starvation while countless others await a similar fate.

This also says nothing about the shortage of lifesaving medications for children, cancer patients, dialysis patients, diabetics, and pregnant women. At least 1.1 million pregnant women are reportedly malnourished, at risk for miscarriage and stillbirth.

The blockade is all part of the Saudi-led coalition’s strategy to use starvation and disease as a weapon of war to beat Yemenis into submission.

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There are two very different types of measures of this, one being polling that was done both immediately before and immediately after the debates, and the other being Google searches of the names both immediately before and immediately after the debates. This report will cover both measures, as of June 30th.

Regarding the polling-data, there is, as of this moment, only one poll that was taken both immediately before and immediately after the debates, and it was issued at 11:18 AM on June 28th, the morning after the second of the two debates. It’s from 538 dot com and Morning Consult. It was a very scientifically sampled poll throughout, and therefore is virtually definitive on the question regarding who actually won and lost from the debates.

Presumably the big winner from the debates, who is unquestionably Kamal Harris, will now be collecting enormous infusions of money, and not only from the voters who will donate small amounts to her campaign, but especially from the billionaires whom she has especially been seeking to flood her campaign with money.

This — the most reliable of all measures of the winners and losers — can be found at the two web-pages: this and this.

UPDATED JUN. 28, 2019, AT 11:18 AM

Here its bottom lines are summarized, in numbers:

• Biden before debates 41.5%, after 1st debate 35.4%, after second debate 31.5%
• Sanders before debates 14.4%, after 1st debate 16.4%, after second debate 17.3%
• Warren before debates 12.6%, after 1st debate 18.0%, after second debate 14.4%
• Harris before debates 7.9%, after 1st debate 6.3%, after second debate 16.6%
• Buttigieg before debates 6.7%, after 1st debate 4.4%, after second debate 4.8% 
• Biden’s new supporters come mainly at the expense of the few undecideds.
• Sanders’s new supporters come mainly at the expense of Warren.
• Warren’s new supporters come mainly at the expense of Biden.
• Harris’s new supporters come mainly at the expense of Sanders, and secondarily of Biden.
• Biden lost 10.0% from his pre-existing 41.5%, or -24% from his prior support.
• Sanders gained 2.9% onto his pre-existing 14.4%, or +20% onto his prior support.
• Warren gained 1.8% onto her pre-existing 12.6%, or +14% onto her prior support.
• Harris gained 8.7% onto her pre-existing 7.9%, or +110% onto her prior support.
• Buttigieg lost 1.9% from his pre-existing 6.7%, or -28% from his prior support.

Those are the main results, because those are the main four candidates, as of the present time, and because these numbers are the best indicators of the debate-performance.

Harris’s more than doubling her support is an overwhelming indication that she will probably, as of the present moment, become the Democratic nominee, unless Sanders goes after her record ferociously and at least tries to end the big-money dominance of the Democratic Party (which she and almost all of the other candidates are courting).

If he does that, then Sanders, who himself rejects the support from the big-money donors, including from PACs, will need to greatly boost his collections from the Democratic Party electorate and thereby cause that Party to go ferociously against the billionaires who have been controlling that Party (other billionaires control the Republican Party) and for a reformed Democratic Party that represents instead the public.

This would crush Trump in the general election if it succeeds in taking control over the Democratic Party, away from its billionaires, which itself is highly unlikely to be able to be done. Consequently, as of now, the likeliest winner of the Democratic nomination is Kamala Harris, who would then become a second Barack Obama, not merely in the sense that he is a light-skinned Black, but that she is an enormously gifted politician who is in the pockets of that Party’s billionaires. Pete Buttigieg had been trying to be that, but his style isn’t even nearly as effective as hers is.

Another, and very different, quantitative measure of debate-performance is google-searches, which is the best single indicator of the Democratic Party electorate’s, and of of independents’, and even of dissatisfied Republicans’, interest in learning more about the given candidate. This is NOT at all similar to those polled numbers that were just summarized, because it indicates the responses of the entire American interested electorate, all of the potential general-election voters, the people who will be making the final choice on Election Day (assuming that the vote-counts on that day will be honestly tabulated).

Therefore, this measure is NOT an indicator of the sentiments of pre-existing Democratic Party voters — the people who are generally polled such as in the numbers just indicated here. These numbers can be wildly different from those numbers, because:

“Among the public overall, 38% describe themselves as independents, while 31% are Democrats and 26% call themselves Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2018.” (An additional 5% are either “Other party” or “Don’t Know.”)

Consequently: If one of the Democratic Party candidates is drawing support mainly from outside the Party, then that candidate is drawing mainly from the 38% of independents and from the 26% of Republicans (i.e., from Republicans who disapprove of Trump) and from the 5% who are “Other Party” or “Don’t know.”).

That would be drawing support mainly from the 69% of Americans who are NOT Democrats, instead of from the 31% who ARE Democrats. Consequently, the most-googled candidate might possibly represent the strongest general-election candidate, but is not nearly as likely to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, unless and until the candidate rises in the Democratic Party primary polls to become the most-supported candidate among Democratic Party primary voters.

Here are those figures, directly from Google itself, which is the only original source of the numbers:

https://trends.google.com/trends/story/US_cu_o_FMW2oBAACFKM_en

First night June 27-30

• #1 Tulsi Gabbard
• #2 Elizabeth Warren
• #3 Beto O’Rourke
• #4 Cory Booker
• #5 Julian Castro

Second night June 27-30

• #1 Kamala Harris
• #2 Joe Biden
• #3 Marianne Williamson
• #4 Bernie Sanders
• #5 Pete Buttigieg

What is particularly striking there is that in these results, one candiate, Harris, is also the likeliest to win the Party’s nomination, but the other, Tulsi Gabbard, scores dismally low in the polled figures:

Gabbard before debates 0.7%, after 1st debate 0.6%, after second debate 0.7%

What all this suggests is that, whereas possibly the strongest general-election candidate against Trump would be Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, who is one of the billionaires’ candidates, also might be. A voter in the Democratic Party primaries who is mainly concerned about beating Trump should be supporting either of those two candidates to become that Party’s nominee. As regards what criteria that person would be applying, no intelligent voter any longer trusts a candidate’s mere words, but instead votes on the basis of that person’s existing record of actual actions as a public official. And, of course, a part of that record is the politician’s current policy regarding acceptance of PAC money, and the politician’s record of largest donors, especially in the latest campaign. 

Here are Kamala Harris’s top donors. 

34.87% come from donations smaller than $200. 57.78% come from donations larger than $200. 

Here are Tulsi Gabbard’s top donors.

38.8% come from donations smaller than $200. 59.31% come from donations larger than $200.

Here are Bernie Sanders’s top donors.

75.55% come from donations smaller than $200. 22.81% come from donations larger than $200.

Here are Joe Biden’s top donors.

0.95% come from donations smaller than $200. 95.28% come from donations larger than $200.

Here are Elizabeth Warren’s top donors.

55.88% come from donations smaller than $200. 31.08% come from donations larger than $200.

Here are Pete Buttigieg’s top donors.

“Alphabet” is Google. Amazon is Amazon. Almost all of them represent billionaires.

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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.

This public speech on April 18th by Gina Haspel is one of the first occasions since her appointment as CIA Director a year ago to see and hear Haspel dance around the issues. Her questioner Lieutenant-General Ronald L. Burgess declares himself pretty much throughout the hour as a close friend and fellow member of what they both called “the intelligence business” of Gina Haspel.

Please don’t miss what happens at 9:17-9:59 when a questioner confronts Ms. Haspel over her torture record during her 34 years at the CIA and while she was at the Black Site in Thailand supervising and narrating the waterboarding of a detainee there, and stating that she should be behind bars. Her blithe smirking and dismissive discomfort during the brief intercession is quite revealing.

Though much of it is rather boring and unsensational, this speech is still worth listening to and watching as it offers a very partial opening to see Haspel’s and more widely the CIA’s current stance and structure are today.

Comment by Louis Wolf, June 30, 2019

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Source: Auburn University

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In a few days July 4th will be upon us.  We will hear endless nonsense from insouciant speakers and editorialists about what a great democracy we are, having won our freedom from being a British colony.  

One thing the United States most certainly is not is a democracy.  A democracy requires an informed electorate, and the United States most certainly does not have an informed electorate. The American media, indeed, the entirety of the Western print and TV media, functions as a Propaganda Ministry for Washington and the ruling oligarchies.  The explanations are controlled to serve the agendas of the ruling elites.  The persecution and torture of Julian Assange proves conclusively that the First Amendment is a dead-letter Amendment.  

The vaunted rule of law in the Great American Democracy is a dead-letter rule of law.  Since the Clinton regime America has had four criminal regimes in a row, the presidents and high officials of which are more guilty of war crimes than the German National Socialists who were tried at Nuremberg on ex post facto grounds in order to distract from the war crimes of the victorious allies. 

Without an honest Fourth Estate it is impossible to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny.  In America tyranny is far advanced.  Suppose that Americans somehow became aware of the truth about Julian Assange’s total innocence that has been disclosed by Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.  What could they do about it short of violent revolution and complete elimination of the ruling elites? 

Formerly, the US Constitution was revered, but today even law faculties and judges see the Constitution as something to find a way around.  The vast majority of Americans themselves have no idea that the Constitution is the bulwark of their independence and liberty.  

Americans have also lost a sense of unity.  Massive immigration has produced a diversity that cannot be united.  In the place of unity, we have the disunity of Identity Politics. There are advantages to being preferred minorities and genders that the core population of the country does not have.  None of these serious issues will be mentioned in July 4th speeches.

Nils Melzer describes  how his investigation of Assange’s treatment liberated him from the totally false picture that has been created in order to establish the legal precedent that government crimes against humanity cannot be revealed. In the “American Democracy,” the people are not permitted to know.

“In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed.  Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

“Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.

“This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek.

None responded positively.”  (Nils Melzer is a Swiss academic, author and practitioner in the field of international law. Since 1 November 2016, Melzer has been serving as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.)

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Trump escalated Obama’s war in Syria. Endless conflict rages in its ninth year with no prospect for resolution because bipartisan US hardliners reject restoring peace and stability to the country.

US-led aggression is all about wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing Syrian sovereign independence, eliminating an Israeli rival, isolating Iran, while pushing to return the country to US client state status — along with gaining control over its vast oil and gas resources.

The US, NATO, and Israel are waging war on Syria without declaring it, their warplanes aiding ISIS and other terrorists, proxy forces serving their interests — heavily armed, funded, trained and directed by the US and its imperial partners.

According to a Syrian military source on Monday,

“(o)ur air defenses intercepted hostile missiles fired by Israeli warplanes from the Lebanese airspace towards some of our military positions in Homs and the surroundings of Damascus.”

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said

“four civilians, including a baby, were martyred and 21 others, including children, were injured in Sahnaya town in Damascus Countryside due to the aggression,” adding:

“(M)aterial damage was inflicted on a number of civilians’ houses in Sahnaya,” injuries sustained by occupants.

Other reports indicated that powerful blasts struck Homs and the Damascus countryside, causing “material damage.”

AMN News reported that Israeli warplanes struck “a number of sites near the capital city and Lebanese border.”

Southfront reported that “most (IDF) missiles (fired from Lebanese airspace) were able to hit their targets,” adding:

“(M)ilitary positions in the districts of al-Mazzeh, al-Dimass and Jomrayah north and northwest of Damascus, as well as three bases in the outskirt of the city of Homs were hit.”

The large-scale attack suggests more of the same coming, the Pentagon and IDF likely coordinating their aggression at designated targets.

Along with the US and NATO, Israel has been waging war on Syria for years without declaring it.

Last September, an IDF statement said it conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian targets in the last 18 months alone, some near Russia’s Khmeimim airbase, Lebanese airspace most often used to launch attacks.

A Lebanese source said “10 or more Israeli military aircraft entered the (country’s) airspace” ahead of the latest attack, flying at low altitude to minimize detection.

Israeli military intelligence-connected DEBKAfile (DF) called the pre-dawn Monday attacks by IDF warplanes “(o)ne of the largest” against Syrian targets, saying Israeli naval vessels were involved.

DF disinformation falsely claimed the “operation became urgent (sic) when Iran and Hizballah were discovered to be preparing to embark on an operation against Israel (sic), as part of Tehran’s campaign against US Middle East allies in retaliation for the Trump administration’s sanctions (sic).”

The Islamic Republic never attacked another country preemptively, responding only to aggression against its territory, its fundamental right under international law.

The US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners attack other nations aggressively time and again, a flagrant UN Charter and other international law violation, accountability never forthcoming.

Separately, a Russian statement said

“(w)e are open for discussions on delivering S-400 Triumph air defense systems, including to Iran,” adding:

“Especially given that this equipment is not subject to restrictions outlined in UN Security Council’s resolution, issued on June 20, 2015. We have not received an official request from our partners on this matter yet.”

Iran and Syria have Russian S-300 air defense systems. S-400s are more technologically advanced.

They’re able to down ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as other aerial targets up to 400 km away at low and high altitudes up to 90,000 feet, including fifth generation warplanes.

S-400s are protected against electronic warfare, able to hit targets beyond the horizon. No other country has anything matching them, including the US.

They can distinguish between airborne and ground-based targets. Its sophisticated radar spots everything within its range, including tiny aircraft and stealth ones at low or high altitudes.

It can simultaneously engage up to 36 targets with up to 72 missiles, fitted with homing devices able to lock onto and destroy targets. They’re deployed at Khmeimim airbase in Syria to protect Russian aircraft and ground personnel.

Russia hasn’t supplied Syria’s military with its most advanced air defense missiles (S-500s going into production but not yet available).

Perhaps it’ll reconsider this issue following overnight Israeli aggression on multiple Syrian targets, including a residential area.

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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.

This article was first published in December 2013

Resource-rich Honduras, once considered the “bread basket of Central America”, is now a failed state.

Bertha Isabel Caceres Flores Ienca, an indigenous leader in Honduras is Number One on the presiding government’s ‘kill list’. (Update: Assassins murdered Caceres, March 3, 2016)

More than half of the population lives in poverty, and the country boasts the world’s highest murder rate.  The title “Murder Capital of the World” is well earned, especially since impunity for murder is the rule rather than the exception.

In 1989, local farmers supplied 90 per cent of its food requirements, with 20,000 farmers making their living through the production of rice. Now, there are 1,300 rice farmers,  and the best land is inaccessible.

Thanks to the World Bank and IMF loans —- bundled with destructive neoliberal economic policies — the best farmland now supports lucrative monoculture plantations of African Palm, harvested to serve global demand for its oil.  The local economy, however, is asymmetrical, so most Hondurans do not benefit from agri-business profits. Instead, sustainable farming operations, unable to compete, are destroyed, the economy suffers, and poverty rates skyrocket.

Image below: Berta Isabel Caceres, Assassinated, March 3, 2016. Photo by Mark Taliano

Of all the Central American countries, Honduras is most open to free trade; it is also one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. And the current plight of Honduras is for the most part by design.

Prior to the 2009 coup against the democratically-elected government of Manuel Zelaya,  Honduras joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA by its Spanish acronym) Under the ALBA trade bloc, interest rates were seven per cent.  In post-coup Honduras, interest rates are 28 per cent.  Low interest rates would benefit the economy and the people, but not Big Finance.  (Banks in Honduras resemble Taj Mahal’s relative to the surrounding poverty.)

Prior to the coup, Zelaya raised the minimum wage by 60 per cent.  Post-coup, the minimum wages rates returned to amongst the lowest in Central America.

Under the ALBA trade agreement, 25 per cent of oil revenues are diverted to public development projects.  Post-coup Honduras, infrastructure (roads, sewage, water treatment facilities) are abysmal and deteriorating

ALBA promotes a Keynesian economic model and regional food security.  Honduras’ current economy is a market-driven model which creates food insecurity.

ALBA pushes for localized, independent media.  Today, 95 per cent of the Honduran media is owned by corporate conglomerates.

All of the ALBA initiatives reduce poverty, improve local economies, reduce crime, and enable democracy.  In Honduras, reckless (and murderous) corporate interests killed each of these progressive policies.

Author John Perkins, argues convincingly in  “Honduras Military Coup Engineered By Two U.S Companies?” that Chiquita Brands  (United Fruits) and Dole Foods, allied with (sweatshop) textile manufactures (such as Montreal-based Gildan Activeware Inc. ) were the corporate drivers behind the destructive 2009 coup.

Two glaring facts: the existence of 6 military bases in Honduras, and the CIA’s history of orchestrating illegal coups, including one in neighbouring Guatemala in 1954, support this theory.

A Jan. 23, 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times, “The high-powered hidden support for Honduras’ coup: The country’s rightful president was ousted by a military leadership that takes many of its cues from Washington Insiders”lends further credence to this theory.  The article describes a number of incriminating factors, including links between the coup’s ostensible leader, General Romeo Vasquez, and the U.S:

“What happened in Honduras is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: Gen. Romeo Vasquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States’ School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups. ”

Honduras is a microcosm of the evils of neo-colonialism, and its close ally, corporate globalisation’s neoliberal economic model. Many of Honduras’ champions of freedom and democracy have already been murdered, and many remain on an infamous “Kill List.”

Instead of occupying Honduras (with six U.S military bases) to ensure freedom and democracy, the U.S (with Canada firmly in tow) occupies Honduras to ensure the exact opposite.

As Canadians, with the Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement, we are complicit, but we can still make a difference by raising awareness, and by continuing the struggle against the global corporatocracy.

Freedom-loving Hondurans, on the front-lines against corporate globalism, are counting on it.

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This article was originally published in December 2013 on the author’s blog site: Mark Taliano.

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

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Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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With the suppression by the military of the popular movement for democracy in the Republic of Sudan the current situation inside the country remains indecisive.

On June 3 the Rapid Security Forces (RSF) backed by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) violently disrupted an occupation being staged in Khartoum over the previous two months.

Demonstrations have taken place in this oil-rich nation since December when a sharp increase in bread and other commodities prices prompted mass protest. After commencement of the sit-in on April 6, just five days later the military leadership overthrew the government of President Omer Hassan al-Bashir who had ruled Sudan for three decades.

Sudan demonstrations led to the ouster of President al-Bashir

Negotiations between the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), an alliance of professional groups and various opposition political organizations, have broken down. FFC leaders are refusing hold direct talks with the TMC due to the actions carried out by the army and militias which resulted in the deaths of over 100 people.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed visited Khartoum in an effort to mediate a settlement aimed moving the country towards civilian rule. Nonetheless, differing interpretations of the process for restarting talks have resulted in a social quagmire where neither the opposition groupings, which have not achieve total uniformity, along the military leadership, both appear to be unsure over which immediate directions are appropriate for the present circumstances.

Outside international interests including the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking measures which bolster the TMC. Through Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the TMC is being subsidizes providing the basis for non-compliance with the demands of the FFC.

Egypt, which is the current chair of the continental African Union (AU), has supported the military in Khartoum. The approach of the AU as represented by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is designed to maintain stability while at the same time follow the stated mandate of the AU of not recognizing regimes which come to power through military force.

Consequently, the Republic of Sudan has been suspended from AU membership while at the same time the TMC is hosting Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy as well as an appointed mediator from Addis Ababa, the seat of the continental organization. Although the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump condemned the crackdown on protesters in early June, a very limited role within the diplomatic arena is evident from Washington.

The U.S. had for many years maintained a hostile stance towards Sudan. The National Congress Party (NCP) government of ousted President al-Bashir over an extended period refused to abide by the foreign policy imperatives set down by successive administrations in Washington.

Two of the primary factors in the strained relations were the role of the People’s Republic of China in the burgeoning oil industry during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21^stcentury, where Beijing has been enhancing its relations with the emerging petroleum producing state. In addition, support for the Palestinians and close diplomatic relations with Iran was strongly objected to by the U.S.

However, over the last several years there has been a dramatic foreign policy shift by the NCP administration. The participation by the Sudanese military in the western-backed war against the Ansurallah in Yemen marked a departure in regard to its relations with Tehran.

Overtures to the U.S. have become more pronounced while greater dependence upon Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Cairo increased. Despite these efforts by Khartoum, Washington and Wall Street is committed to bringing about the total subservience to an imperialist agenda for Sudan.

Political Composition of the FFC and Implications for Domestic and Foreign Policy

The most prominent of the opposition groups in Sudan which had demanded the resignation of the NCP government of ousted President al-Bashir is the Forces for Freedom and Change. This alliance issued a statement on January 1, 2019 with a program calling for various reforms to be enacted immediately.

According to the Declaration for Freedom and Change Forces (FFC):

“We, the people of Sudan across cities and villages, in the north, the south, the east, and the west; join our political and social movements, trade unions and community groups in affirming through this declaration that we will continue the course of peaceful struggle until the totalitarian regime is removed and the following goals are achieved: First, the immediate and unconditional end of General Omer al-Bashir’s presidency and the conclusion of his administration. Secondly: The formation of a National Transitional Government. This transitional government will be composed of qualified people based on merits of competency and good reputation, representing various Sudanese groups and receiving the consensus of the majority. Their role is to govern for a term of four years, until a sound democratic structure is established, and elections held.” (See this)

This same document continues by demanding an end to civil wars still raging inside the Republic of Sudan; the creation of a united front made up of various political interests; that special attention should be paid to improving the economic status and social welfare of the people inside the country; an effort to what is described as the rehabilitation of the image of the Republic of Sudan; the building of relations with neighboring governments and foreign states, with specific focus upon the newly-founded Republic of South Sudan which broke away from Khartoum with the full support of the U.S., Britain and Israel during 2011; and a respect for freedom of speech and the right to gather in order to address grievances.

The Declaration was signed by 22 different organizations including the SPA, which is listed first, and other academic, youth, women’s and civil society groupings. Interestingly enough, various opposition parties which have long been at odds with the NCP were not listed as signatories to the document.

Sudan protests chants led by women opposition forces

Another political force involved in the mass efforts to overthrow the military and bring into existence civilian rule is the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP). The party has expressed its solidarity with the FFC and the SPA. Nevertheless, the SCP in its statements emphatically emphasizes the critical role of trade unions in the struggle to replace the TMC.

In a statement issued on June 17, the SCP also urges elements within the military which are disgruntled with TMC rule to join the popular movement. This line says specifically that:

“Attempts must be made to win the soldiers of the armed forces into the revolution, and there are already references to the possibility of doing so. A TV channel had a dialogue with a member of the intelligence agency who had split to join the revolution, saying that the uniformed soldiers were stripped of their weapons and moved from their positions near the picket (sit-in) before the massacre and replaced by elements of the support forces (RSF). In other words, the generals were not fully confident of the loyalty of sectors of soldiers, who might have been following orders to kill the demonstrators.” (See this)

Prospects for Change and the Role of Divergent Political Interests

Other armed groups including the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (North) and various organizations in Darfur where a full blown conflict had taken place several years ago against the central government in Khartoum, have been engaged in the discussions centering on establishing a new dispensation. However, it appears these efforts have not been successful in destabilizing the TMC during the period since the crushing of the mass demonstrations in early June.

The question becomes how long can the TMC hold out for its ultimate aim which is the acceptance of its “legitimate” role in the post-Bashir era? TMC spokespersons continue to articulate their willingness for the transition to a civilian government despite the repressive measures utilized against protesters.

At the same time the FFC and its allies must reset the character of popular resistance while maintaining a semblance of unity. Further repression against the FFC can only be transcended by the utilization of tactics which subvert the capacity of the TMC to maintain state power.

Washington is covertly attempting to influence the developments in Sudan since its objective is to ensure the maintenance of the state within imperialist sphere of influence. Only the sustainable resistance and revolutionary fervor of the people organized can supersede the forces of reaction leading to a people’s government and revolutionary transformation process.

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

All images in this article are from the author

Canada Day 2019

“O Canada our home and native land … 

The sovereignty of Canada is precarious.  Our government has been coopted by Washington. 

Among the millions of Canadians celebrating the 152nd anniversary of the signing of the British North American Act (July 1st 1867) how many are actually aware that our Southern neighbour, the United States of America had formulated in 1924 a carefully designed plan to invade Canada and bomb Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax and Vancouver.

War Plan Red was officially approved by the US War Department in May 1930.

The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”.

And guess who was in charge of planning the bombing raids against Canadian cities:  General Douglas MacArthur who during World War was put in charge of waging the Pacific War and coordinating the extensive bombing of Japanese cities (1941-1945). 

The war plan was explicitly geared towards the conquest of Canada. “The U.S. Army’s mission, written in capital letters, was “ULTIMATELY, TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL OF CRIMSON [Canada].”

Canada’s Global and Mail has twisted realities upside down. The Red War Plan to Attack CRIMSON was casually presented as a peacemaking endeavor. It was a plan to rightfully defend the US:

First approved in 1930, Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan – Red was drawn up to defend the United States in the event of war with Britain.

It was one of a series of such contingency plans produced in the late 1920s. Canada, identified as Crimson, would be invaded to prevent the Britons from using it as a staging ground to attack the United States. (Globe and Mail, December 31, 2005, emphasis added)

We bring to the attention of our readers this carefully documented article by Prof. Floyd Rudmin, first published in 2006. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 1st, 2019

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Between the First and Second World Wars–that is, between 1918 and 1939–the United States developed and approved as official national policy three major war plans: a War Plan ORANGE against Japan; a War Plan GREEN against Mexico, and a War Plan RED against the UK. (The most useful source here is R.A. Preston’s 1977 book, The Defence of the Undefended Border: Planning for War in North America, 1867-1939.) But there were other war plans as well. Special Plan VIOLET was approved by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy in 1925 for interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean “to forestall action by other countries including the League of Nations.” There was a War Plan WHITE initiated in 1920 for suppressing internal insurrection by U.S. citizens, but it was not developed or approved.

These war plans were all declassified in 1974 and (can be purchased from the U.S. National Archives. Germany was color-coded black, but there never was a War Plan BLACK. War Plan RED was the largest of the war plans, the most detailed, the most amended, and the most acted upon. The Plan presumed that a war with the UK would begin by U.S. interference in British Commonwealth commercial trade, “although other proximate causes to war may be alleged”. The Plan presumed that the British navy would take the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and the Panama Canal. In exchange for these losses, the U.S.A. would invade and conquer Canada.

Though ostensibly for war against Britain Plan RED is almost devoid of plans to fight the British. The Plan is focused on the conquest of Canada, which was color-coded CRIMSON. The U.S. Army’s mission, written in capital letters, was “ULTIMATELY, TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL OF CRIMSON.” The 1924 draft declared that U.S. “intentions are to hold in perpetuity all CRIMSON and RED territory gained… The Dominion government [of Canada] will be abolished.” War Plan RED was approved in May 1930 at the Cabinet level by the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy. It was not a plan of defense. The U.S.A. would start the war, and even should Canada declare neutrality, it was still to be invaded and occupied.

In December 1930, the US Naval Attaché in Ottawa made an espionage report to the Joint Board on Canada’s lack of readiness for war: “In as much as Canada had no idea of trouble with any other country it was not considered necessary to maintain a proper air force.” The U.S. focus on invading Canada accelerated during the 1930s. Even as late as 1939, when World War II was beginning and the free world was mobilizing to fight fascism, Preston describes how the U.S. Army War College and the Naval War College had set as their planning priority the task of coordinating land and sea forces for a project entitled, “Overseas Expeditionary Force to Capture Halifax from Red-Crimson Coalition.”

For some unexplained reason, The Washington Post and Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, recently decided to report on War Plan RED. Peter Carlson’s Dec. 30, 2005, article in The Washington Post was entitled, “Raiding the Ice Box.” Shawn McCarthy’s Dec. 31, 2005, article in The Globe and Mail was entitled, “They’d take Halifax (then we’d kill Kenny).” Both articles are written with doses of disbelief, derision, and sometimes giggling or guffaws.

Source: The Globe and Mail

But War Plan RED is certainly not news, nor is the re-re-reporting of re-re-discoveries of War Plan RED. The first news report of the Plan was in 1935, when secret Congressional budgeting for three camouflaged air bases for surprise attacks on Canada, at $19,000,000 each, was mistakenly made public by the government printing office, which published “Air Defense Bases: Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, Seventy-Fourth Congress”. This was reported by the New York Times on its front page and re-reported by the Toronto Globe under the headline, “U.S. Disavows Airport Yarn”. War Plan RED was re-discovered and re-reported in 1975 by the Reuters wire service, and the Globe and Mail re-reported it. It was again re- discovered and re-reported as news in 1991 and again in 2005. History has lessons, but they cannot be learned by re-re-repeated disbelief or by giggling.

If U.S. war plans for the conquest of Canada provoke laughter, that is a comment on those who are laughing, not a comment on the war plans. In its day, War Plan RED was not meant to be funny. The 1928 draft stated that “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously”. The 1930 draft stated that “large parts of CRIMSON territory will become theaters of military operations with consequent suffering to the population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country…” In October 1934, the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy approved an amendment authorizing the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal and Quebec City by “immediate air operations on as large a scale as practicable.” A second amendment, also approved at the Cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army, in capital letters,

“TO MAKE ALL NECESSARY PREPARATIONS FOR THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE FROM THE OUTBREAK OF WAR. THE USE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE, INCLUDING THE USE OF TOXIC AGENTS, FROM THE INCEPTION OF HOSTILITIES, IS AUTHORIZED…”

The use of poison gas was conceived as a humanitarian action that would cause Canada to quickly surrender and thus save American lives. (Commander Carpender, A. S., & Colonel Krueger, W. (1934), memo to the Joint Board, Oct. 17, 1934, available in U.S. National Archive in documents appended to War Plan RED.)

In March 1935, General Douglas MacArthur proposed an amendment making Vancouver a priority target comparable to Halifax and Montreal. This was approved in May 1935, and in October 1935, his son Douglas MacArthur Jr. began his espionage career as vice-consul in Vancouver. In August 1935, the U.S.A. held its then largest ever peace time military maneuvers, with more than 50,000 troops practicing a motorized invasion of Canada, duly reported in the New York Times by its star military reporter, Hanson Baldwin.

What is the mentality and line of logic that leads ranking military professionals, executive cabinet officers, and congressmen to plan and prepare war on an ally and good neighbor?

Secret border bases? Surprise attacks? Strategic bombing of populated cities? Immediate first use of poison gas? And at the same time they were planning this for Canada, they failed to plan for war against German fascism, a very great threat to America. Clearly, something was wrong in the thinking of many high-level civilian and military decision makers. These war plans warrant proper study, not dismissive derision, if America is ever to understand and control its military impulses.

For example, War Plan GREEN, for the invasion of Mexico, looks like a mirror image of America’s current invasion plan for Iraq. Here are some direct quotations from the Mexican War Plan approved by Secretary of War in August 1919.

“The oil fields of Tampico and Tuxpan are important not only to the commerce of the United States and of the world, but to that of Mexico… The fields are largely owned by American and British interests and are susceptible to great damage by the Mexicans. It is therefore important to seize these fields at once…”.

“The first rule for conquering a nation is to defeat its army. The Mexican army if it accepts battle at all, will certainly do so in defense of the heart of its country. And the heart of the country is the Mexico City locality… An attack on Mexico City will not only bring the Mexican army to a decisive battle, but will, if successful, afford to the United States the facilities it will need to reorganize and reestablish the government” .

“The period of active operations will be short, as compared to the period of guerilla operations. The early disbandment of temporary [U.S.] troops is highly desirable. It is the testimony of all well acquainted with Mexican character that any number of Mexicans can be hired to fight against anyone and for any one who will regularly pay and feed them. The Mexican soldier will be cheaper and more efficient against banditry than the American and the cost can be more easily charged against the Mexican government”.

“In addition, an Army can be established that will not be anti-American and which may, for many years in the future, exercise on the Mexican government an influence favorable to the United States”.

Some further direct quotes from the 1927 draft of War Plan GREEN:

“The military purpose of this Plan is the use of the armed forces of the United States to overthrow the present existing Federal Government of Mexico and to control Mexico City until a government satisfactory to the United States has been set up”.

“…the foregoing purpose can best be initiated by depriving the existing Federal Government of munitions of war from outside sources, interrupting the receipt of its revenues as far as practicable , driving it from Mexico City and accomplishing its overthrow. Wide publicity as to the object of the military operations may reduce Mexican resistance by influencing the Mexican people to give allegiance to a new Federal Government”.

“The United States should declare a state of war against Mexico and establish a blockade, in order to interrupt the entrance of munitions of war and receipt of revenues. In the event that a state of war is not declared to exist, blockade operations are limited to such ‘peaceful blockade’ as is authorized by the President”.

Replace the word “Mexico” with “Iraq” and change the corresponding city names, and this war plan will read like America’s current military strategy in Iraq:

In both plans, the goal is to seize control of another nation’s oil.

In both plans, there is a priority on protecting the oil production facilities from damage by the defending national forces.

In both plans, economic sanctions and blockade will weaken the nation prior to the U.S. invasion.

In both plans, Congressional authorization for war can be circumvented by presidential command and by twisting of words.

In both plans, propaganda will claim that the invasion is benevolent, intended to free the population from a bad government.

In both plans, the war is seen to be quick and easy to win, against a weakened national army defending an overly centralized government in the national capital.

In both plans, there is contempt for the military abilities and valor of the defending national forces.

In both plans, the U.S.A. imagines that it can make a new government in the conquered country that will serve U.S. interests.

In both plans, a national militia army will be hired in order to cheaply save American soldiers from being bogged down in a protracted guerrilla war.

In both plans, the conquered nation will pay the costs of this national militia.

In both plans, this militia army is expected to be used by the U.S.A. to control the national government for years into the future.

The current U.S. plan for the invasion, occupation, and continuing control of Iraq is not new.

It is almost 100 years old.

Thus, the core of the militarism that is endangering America and driving us into bankruptcy, disdain, and dishonor is not new. The fundamental causes of the Iraq war cannot be found in contemporary geopolitics nor in the personalities of the Bush administration, as so many critics of the war think. There is something wrong at a much deeper level in American political culture. The American malady of militarism extends across decades, across generations, and is so deeply rooted in the American mind that attacking another nation seems to be the natural, spontaneous reaction of choice.

In fact, the U.S.A. is the least threatened nation on the planet. Its geographic, demographic, and economic size, and its location, give it far greater security than Russia, or Holland, or Hungary, or France, or Finland, or Iraq, or Iran. These nations are easily attacked from several sides, and in modern history have been thus attacked. These nations have reason to be fearful, but in fact are less fearful than is America. Certainly it is impossible for foreign forces to invade and occupy the U.S.A. even should the U.S. have the most minimal defenses.

But Americans feel more threatened than most other people on the planet. The U.S. military budget now exceeds that of all other nations combined. The U.S.A. is now the only nation with two defense departments; one to defend the homeland and one to….to do what? To project “defense” of America outside of our borders into other nations? That is normally called “aggression”.

Projection may be the key to marketing military projects in America. These may begin as “realpolitik” projects: schemes to take economic resources, for example, to increase trade or to control oil. Then we imagine that others are planning to do to us what we know we are planning to do to them, like the “Golden Rule” in reverse. It is classic psychopathic projection. And we feel fear. We believe we are realistic and rational because our plans and our actions fit the fear we have imagined. That is normally called “neurosis” or “insanity”. We get into a feed-forward loop of our own belligerent plans projected into others, imagined to have similar belligerent plans against us, causing fear which further justifies our original belligerence. Thus we enter an accelerating cycle of belligerence and fear; each feeding the other and turning “aggression” into “defense”. We imagined that Nicaragua’s Sandinistas would invade Texas. We imagined that a socialist government in Grenada would destabilize the Western Hemisphere. We imagined that Iraq would put nuclear bombs into New York subways. These are all comic claims, but many in America did not laugh. Instead, we attacked these nations.

In the mistakenly published 1935 testimony to Congress about the need for new air bases to attack Canada, a military expert explained that Canada has thousands of lakes, and each of these is a potential floatplane base. He asked the congressmen to imagine the fearful vision of the sky filled with bush-pilot float planes flying down from Canadian forests to bomb Boston and Baltimore:

“…the Creator has given countless operating bases within a radius of action of this country in the vast number of sheltered water areas that are available deep in Canada… from which pontoon-equipped aircraft could operate at will… There is no necessity for starting with an observation in order to know what they are going to bomb. They know now what they are going to bomb. They know where every railroad crosses every river. They know where every refinery lies. They know where every power plant is located. They know all about our water supply systems… Now they are dispersed widely out over this area. Their location is most difficult for us to learn, for our own air force to learn. We have to hunt them up. We have to find out where they are before we can attack them.”

No one in the hearings laughed at this. Instead, Congressman Wilcox complemented the speaker, Captain H. L. George, as “a mighty good teacher” and Congressman Hill said, “Captain, you made what to my mind is a very interesting, clear, and lucid statement.” No one asked Captain George how he knew with such certainty that Canada or Britain had located and targeted U.S. railroad bridges, oil refineries, power plants and water systems. In fact, the U.S.A. had located and targeted such facilities in Canada as part of War Plan RED. We imagine that others are planning to do to us what we know we are planning to do to them. Projected military imagination causes paranoia.

Just weeks before this testimony, the Joint Board had dispatched a secret reconnaissance team to the wilds of Hudsons Bay and Labrador to hunt for hidden Canadian float-plane facilities. Congressman Kvale commented, “All we are interested in is defense. Predicate your building of your bases on defense and not on offense”; and Captain George responded that “the best defense against air attack is offense against the places from which the air attack originates.” Thus, even pre-emptive attack is not a new idea. The committee was persuaded, and on June 6, the House approved appropriations for the new air bases. On August 10, the bill was signed into law by President Roosevelt.

Perhaps the malady of American militarism can be understood, diagnosed, and eventually curbed or cured. Perhaps an international coalition of social scientists willing to focus their full attention on the history and the social and mental processes of American militarism can begin to understand how it is rooted in our psyche and political culture. Such a coalition should include historians, psychologists, psychiatrists, military strategists, and cultural anthropologists. Considering the large numbers of innocent people we Americans kill when we act on our militarized imagination, considering the immense amount of money we waste building weapons and attacking other nations because our own imagination frightens us, it should be a national priority to understand what is happening, why we act as we do, and how we might stop doing it.

Collective neurosis is hard to notice in contemporary contexts. There are few reference points for normality by which to see that our fears are unfounded. But in historical retrospect, it is easy to see how neurotic we were in our projected paranoia, and how wrong. America’s historical war plans offer a rare opportunity for insight into the militarization of the American mind. We should take a look inside and try to learn.

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Floyd Rudmin teaches in the Psychology Dept. University of Troms, Norway. He can be reached at [email protected]

Africa’s second most populace state was the scene of an attempted putsch on June 22 when the head of the military was assassinated in the capital of Addis Ababa.

There were initial reports of four people killed in the attacks on the police headquarters, the ruling party offices and the regional presidential headquarters in the Amhara regional capital of Bahir Dar.

Other details which have emerged suggest that a militia connected with the Amhara police forces were behind the failed coup. Efforts were made to seize control of the local state-run media. In the fighting, the Amhara state President Ambachew Mekonnen was killed along with a high-ranking advisor to the local administration.

Ethiopia General Seare Mekonnen was killed in coup attempt on June 22, 2019

Additional reports have stated that the mastermind behind the coup attempt was the Amhara state security chief Brigadier General Asaminew Tsige. The dissident military official was said to have been killed on June 24 attempting to flee his hideout in Bahir Dar. Asaminew was released from prison in 2018 having been incarcerated for nine years after an earlier coup attempt.

State-controlled press agency sources in Amhara claim that a total of 13 people died in the fighting when elements loyal to the national federal government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took measures which thwarted the efforts to seize power. Questions remain whether the failed coup was only aimed at taking power in Amhara or whether the assassination of the Chief of Staff of the Ethiopian Defense Forces General Seare Mekonnen and another retired general was part of a countrywide plan to unseat Abiy.

A state funeral was held in the capital of Addis Ababa on June 25 where over a thousand soldiers and the families of the slain military leaders gathered to pay their last respects to the deceased whose coffins were draped in the Ethiopian national flag. The following day on June 26, thousands lined the streets in Bahir Dar to mourn the five officials killed there.

Ethiopia women soldiers mourn the lost of slain army chief of staff General Seare Mekonnen at state funeral on June 25, 2019

General Seare was buried in his home region of Tigray on June 26. The nation of 112 million people have been reminded of the ongoing instability within the country where a tenuous balance of federal regional states and the national government can be torn asunder by a series of conflicts over political control.

The Significance of Ethiopia as a Nation-State

Ethiopia is the headquarters for the African Union (AU), the 55-member continental organization founded as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in May 1963.

Since 2002, the reformed institution has placed greater emphasis on the ideas of the visionaries who established the OAU as a direct outcome of the ideological and political developments of the Pan-African Movement since the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The 2063 AU blueprint calls for further economic, political, cultural and telecommunications integration.

In Ethiopia specifically, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been lauded over the previous 15 months for his rapid ascendancy to power and the implementation of domestic and foreign policy reforms which have been responsible for groundbreaking developments. There has been the release of political prisoners and the return of exiles from outside the country. The appointment of women to key positions in government has raised their profile within Ethiopia, Africa as a whole, as well as internationally.

Nearly one year ago, Abiy signed two peace treaties with neighboring Eritrea, a nation born in a three decades-long secessionist armed struggle against the Addis Ababa government. Other plans were announced involving economic cooperation between the two states and the enhancement of mutual cooperation and friendship among its people.

Ethnic and micro-nationality conflicts have surfaced as well since Abiy took power where violent clashes among the Oromo and Amharic groups have resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries along with the displacement of hundreds of thousands. The much trumpeted easing of tensions with Eritrea, where two wars were waged in 1998 and 2000, many years after the declaration of independence by Asmara in 1991 in the wake of the collapse of the previous socialist-oriented administration of Mengistu Haile Mariam, has been dampened when the closing of border crossings made news earlier in the year.

United Nations reports indicate that 2.4 million people are dislocated within Ethiopia. This is said to be largest of such displacement on the African continent.

During the period of monarchical rule of His Imperial Majesty (HIM) Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia, the Amhara were dominant within state and economic institutions. The war with Eritrea, which began in 1961, was followed by similar armed conflicts against the central government within the regions of Tigray, Oromo and Ogaden. The government which came to power in 1991 had also waged an armed struggle against the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE) administration. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was formed and led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), based in the north of the country.

A federalized system of government since the early 1990s has served as a mechanism for obfuscating the underlying ethnic and micro-nationality tensions which are by-product of contemporary Africa under neo-colonialism. Overcoming these contradictions remains the major challenge of the AU member-states notwithstanding the masses of workers, farmers and youth.

Implications of the Coup Attempt on June 22 for Ethiopia and Other AU Member-states

Details of the actual events are still being uncovered in the subsequent days since the apparent attempt to seize power by a section of the security forces based in the Amhara region. There are strong sentiments against the Abiy government based upon the reforms he has initiated and the normalization of relations with Eritrea.

The resentment against Abiy’s government and policies has simmered since his taking of power after mass demonstrations, violent unrest and strikes during the early months of 2018. The previous administration of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn had lost legitimacy among large sections of the impoverished and marginalized population.

Despite its phenomenal economic growth in recent years due to the attraction of investments from both the Western capitalist states and the People’s Republic of China, discontent over the distribution of wealth and services has created a volatile social situation. Abiy who is from the Oromo region sought immediately after taking office to normalize relations between the southern areas and the central and northern territories of Ethiopia.

Genuine development could not take place without some rapprochement with neighboring Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti. However, the role of the Gulf Monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) through their military usage of Eritrean ports will inevitably place major obstacles in regard to relations with other African and Middle Eastern regional states.

These developments in Ethiopia are by no means isolated incidents confined to any one particular country on the continent. The vastness and diversity of Ethiopia cannot fully explain the regional and micro-nationality conflicts.

Although Ethiopia was never formally colonized, the country was occupied by Italian fascism from 1935-1941. After the restoration of the Monarchy, Ethiopia remained closely allied with the West until the Revolution of 1974 which saw lower-ranking military officers taking power riding the waves of social change and the demands for non-capitalist development. During the period from the late 1970s to 1991, Ethiopia worked in close partnership with the Soviet Union, the socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Republic of Cuba, drawing therefore the ire of Washington.

The establishment of 55 independent sovereign states in Africa since the emergence of independence movements from the 1950s to the 21^st century poses profound challenges to the AU project of integration and unity. In neighboring Republic of Sudan, the instability inherited from the colonial system has led to the partitioning of the oil-rich nation compounded by contradictions between the regional, military and civilian interests.

Ethiopia has been involved in mediation efforts aimed at resolving the conflict between the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) and the Transitional Military Council (TMC) since the overthrow of former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on April 11. Prime Minister Abiy has traveled to Khartoum for talks with both the TMC and the main opposition parties and alliances.

Yet within Ethiopia itself these issues related to the role of regional interests, the military and security forces are still not resolved. It appears for now that the Abiy administration has been able to halt further destabilization and political fracturing. However, these problems must be confronted on a strategic level since they will arise again due to the inability to forge a national and Pan-African policy of reconciliation and an equitable distribution of the country’s wealth.

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

All images in this article are from the author

This past weekend, June 29, Trump and China president, Xi, met again at the G20 in Japan in the midst of a pending escalating trade war. But the outcome looks eerily similar to that of the prior G20 meeting in Buenos Aires on December 2, 2018, when Trump and Xi also met.

Once more, the same post-G20 ‘spin is in’: i.e. Trump declares publicly he has such a great relationship with Xi. There’s a great trade deal soon forthcoming between the two countries. US and China trade teams will now begin to thrash out the details on the remaining 10% or so of US-China trade differences. In the interim, once again, Trump announced he will withhold imposing more tariffs (this time on an additional $325 billion of China imports to the US). In other words, coming out of the latest G20 it’s almost an exact déjà vu all over again to the outcome which occurred at last December 2, 2018’s G20 meeting between Trump and Xi in Buenos Aires.

Will it be different this time? Will there by an agreement? Or will Trump once again just be buying time—i.e. until just before the 2020 elections? Until he sees China’s economy softening further and he raises US demands further again? Or maybe Trump and his neocon trade advisers—Lighthizer, Navarro, Bolton who are now driving US trade (and most of US foreign) policy—don’t want to compromise and will accept nothing less than China’s capitulation on the nextgen technology issue that was at the core of the blow up of negotiations in May 2019?

It’s probably becoming increasingly clear to the Chinese that the US did not just launch a ‘tariff war’ back in March 2018. US policy is driving toward a bonafide economic war between the US and China longer term.

In the nearer term, the current differences may well transform the ‘tariff’ war into a ‘currency war’ that will spread contagion and reverberate globally across other economies—at a time at which the global capitalist economy is slowing fast and approaching as well a new financial instability. All China has to do is allow its currency, the Yuan-Renminbi, to devalue naturally in response to US policy and the slowing global economy. That devaluation would more than offset US tariffs. Thus far, China has intervened in global money exchange markets to prevent this. But all it needs to do is allow it to occur according to prevailing economic and market forces and just not intervene in global money markets further to prop up the Yuan. That will become inevitable as the China, US, and global economy weaken further in coming months. China doesn’t have to manipulate its currency. It only has to allow global market forces, unleased in large part by Trump policies, to naturally devalue the Yuan.

Then there’s China’s $1.3 trillion of US assets, mostly US Treasuries. It could slow its purchase of new US government debt, which it appears it may now be doing. Should the tariff-currency war intensify, if necessary it could stop or even sell off its dollar hoard of US Treasuries. It’s been moving toward that since September 2018, as its purchases of US securities first slowed and then declined in March 2019. That reduction of purchases, if not offset by other economies buying more, would drive up long term interest rates in the US and in turn the value of the US dollar still more—all of which further slows global growth.

Rising US rates and the dollar will likely precipitate another US stock and junk bond sell-off, similar to that which occurred late 2018. And we know Trump doesn’t like stock market declines.

There are numerous other ‘actions’ the Chinese could take in response to US neocons intensifying or prolonging the US-China tariff-trade war, further driving the differences into a broader economic war. Various bureaucratic obstacles to US corporations’ majority ownership of operations in China, ‘buy China’ not America in China movements, restrictions on the sale of what’s called ‘rare earths’ minerals key to technology and military production would likely be imposed. Even if US neocons don’t understand this, or don’t care, widespread business and banking interests do and could intervene more forcefully should Trump’s drift toward economic war continue.

Economic Slowdown & Recession ‘Wild Card’

And there’s a wild card in the trade war deck that may check the neocons influence perhaps. That’s the current softening of the US and China economies. That could force both sides to an agreement. Trump may grab the major concessions on China purchases and US majority ownership rights in China and announce a big victory—just before the 2020 US elections.

China’s economy is clearly slowing, growing likely no more than 4%-5%, not the official 6.5%. But so too is the US economy as well, which will start to become more obvious once the data for the 2nd quarter US GDP start to come in by late July.

The US 1st Quarter GDP numbers were propped up by temporary factors associated with inventory over-investment and net exports, both of which are fading rapidly this quarter. Moreover, US household consumer spending is barely growing, most recently at less than 1%. The housing sector has slowed for the past 17 months. Manufacturing orders and production is now stagnant and business investment has turned negative. Lagging indicators, like jobs, are now beginning to turn down as well. The US Central bank’s lowering of interest rates in the second half of 2019, which is helping to drive the massive $1.5 trillion in stock buybacks and dividend payouts scheduled for this year, may succeed in putting a temporary floor under stock markets. But the real side of the US economy is being driven to slowdown, or even worse by year end. More bank research departments, big finance capitalists, and even some economists, a notorious conservative and timid forecasting lot, have begun to predict recession by year end 2019.

A more rapidly slowing US economy, now clearly beginning, may thus change the trade negotiations dynamic, forcing both sides to some kind of a deal. And if the US slips into recession by winter 2019-20, which this writer has also been predicting the past year, the pressure to cut a deal will grow.

Trump may yet be convinced to take the China concessions already on the table—and temporarily suspend the US demand for China’s capitulation on the technology issue. Trump could yet take what’s been offered by China—i.e. to buy $1 trillion more US farm goods and allow US corporations majority ownership of operations in China—and declare a major victory in the trade negotiations in 2020 just before the elections. The nextgen tech-military confrontation—the real core of the US-China dispute—could be re-raised and revisited thereafter later. That’s one possible scenario. Because for Trump a ‘deal is never a deal’, it’s never concluded, but subject to reopening whenever he so chooses.

Breaking an agreement is standard practice for Trump. Just ask the Mexicans, where Trump recently threatened to levy 25% more tariffs even after US concluding a new NAFTA 2.0 deal last year. Or ask the Iranians, who thought they had an agreement with the US. Or the Europeans who thought they had a Climate deal. For Trump, negotiations are a continuing process, punctuated by happy talk events stroking foreign leaders, followed by more threats of sanctions, and personal insults and intimidations, to force a reopening of deals once thought concluded by trading partners—allied and challengers alike.

In other words, even if a China-US trade deal is done, perhaps next year, the trade war with China will not be over. It will have just begun, as it evolves toward a broader ‘economic’ war after the 2020 elections, perhaps even before.

The key to a China trade deal occurring sooner. rather than later, is whether Trump and US big bankers and multinational capitalists can convince the neocons and the military industrial complex to agree to a short term deal with China now that provides only token nextgen technology concessions—backed by the Trump-Neocon assurance that the US will reopen and resume the technology offensive after the 2020 elections once again.

For the US economic and political elites are in basic agreement with the neocons behind the Trump daily circus on the nextgen technology issue. Neither will allow China to challenge US global hegemony next decade by leveraging nextgen technologies that are the key to both economic and military hegemony. It’s just a question of timing by the US—elites, Trump, neocons. Take two bites of the bargaining apple from the Chinese, and come back later for the big bite: i.e. the fight over nextgen technology. Either that or Trump and the Neocons will continue to insist on three bites all at once.

This writer’s guess and prediction is that the now slowing US and global economy will result in the former, and the US will reopen any deal reached and renew its technology demands after the 2020 elections. For the current tariff-trade war is just the opening salvo in an epic struggle between the US and China. The technology war has already begun, albeit in early stages. The Trump trade war today is just the opening move today to a more fundamental technology war tomorrow.

Historical Precedents

Just as European and American imperialists jockeyed and maneuvered in the years leading up to 1914 and the first world war, with their focus on disputes over markets and global natural resource control, in the 21st century the jockeying and maneuvering has similarly begun—albeit this time with a different focus on nextgen technologies, over who controls global money flows, whose currency will continue to dominant, over who calls the shots in global institutions like the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and so on.

The 2020s decade ahead will prove a highly dangerous period. The global capitalist economy is slowing, as has always done periodically. A new restructuring of global capitalism is on the agenda, as it was in the late 1970s, in the mid-1940s, and during the years immediately leading up to 1914.

Trump’s trade wars and other policies should be understood as part of a broad reordering of US economic and political policies, and relations with other nation States allied and adversary alike, to ensure the continuation of US global economic and military hegemony for the coming decade. Nextgen technology development is at the core of that restructuring and restoration of US hegemony. Trump is just the appearance, the historic vehicle, behind the deeper global capitalist transformation in progress.

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Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, September 2019; and the recently published ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington books, March 2019. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and his website is http://www.kyklosproductions.com . Dr. Rasmus tweets at @drjackrasmus and hosts the Alternative Visions radio show on the Progressive Radio Network. 

Featured image is from Susan Walsh/AP

A senior author and analyst based in Sweden said Palestinians are regarded “as a people without a country” in the economic plan raised by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a recent conference in Bahrain.

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“I have examined carefully the Jared Kushner/White House document Peace to Prosperity – The Economic Plan: A New Vision for the Palestinian People,” Hussein Askary said in an interview with Tasnim.

“The document refers to the ‘Palestinian people’, but there is no mention even once to the term ‘state’, nor ‘Palestinian Authority’. There is no mention of ‘Palestine’ (although this is easy to understand given who wrote it). So, the ‘Palestinian people’ here are regarded as a people without a country,” he stated.

Askary is an Iraqi-born Swedish citizen. He is the Southwest Asia Coordinator of the International Schiller Institute. Askary has worked as an economic and strategic analyst on Southwest Asia and North and East Africa for the Washington-based weekly magazine Executive Intelligence Review since 1996. He is the co-author of several books on the New Silk Road strategy and its impact on the world economy. His latest book-length special report “Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa” was published in November 2017. He has spoken on these matters in international conferences and seminars in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Japan, and China. In 2018, he wrote an 80-page study on the reconstruction of Yemen and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: Bahrain hosted the so-called “Peace to Prosperity” conference to discuss what the US has described as the economic part of President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century”, a plan which aims to consign the Palestinian cause to oblivion. The Palestinian leadership boycotted the meeting in Manama on June 25 and 26, leading critics to question the credibility of the event. In your opinion, what goals are the US and Israel pursuing by holding the conference? Would they reach their goals?

Askary:  I have examined carefully the Jared Kushner/White House document “Peace to Prosperity – The Economic Plan: A New Vision for the Palestinian People.” If the reader of this proposal is an alien who has just landed from Mars and has no idea what has happened on this planet in the past 75 years, he or she might find some of the ideas useful; infrastructure, education, healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. But that is not the reality. The document refers to the “Palestinian people”, but there is no mention even once to the term “state”, nor “Palestinian Authority”. There is no mention of “Palestine” (although this is easy to understand given who wrote it). So, the “Palestinian people” here are regarded as a people without a country. They just happen to inhabit an area called the West Bank and Gaza. The “Palestinian people”, whose pictures in this document are glowing with happiness and optimism, will be enjoying their lives under the benevolent shadow of the Israeli army’s guns. The term “occupation” is mentioned only to mean vocational practice, not military occupation. So, the whole thing is an unserious attempt to dilute and eliminate the Palestinian issue. The danger is that President Donald Trump and many Americans and Europeans might think this is a great offer.

If you look at the “financing” part of this proposal, it shows clearly that the authors never have in mind a Palestinian government or state. “Capital raised through this international effort will be placed into a new fund administered by an established multilateral development bank,” the document says. It is a “fund” which will be created through donations by mainly the US and the (Persian) Gulf countries, like all other failed donation operations in Bosnia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, etc. And, it will be administered not by the representatives of the “Palestinian people” but by a foreign agency (most probably the World Bank). This means no sovereignty and no independence for the “Palestinian people”.

Tasnim: Some analysts say that the Trump administration’s focus on an economic plan, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, is a strategic mistake that could stymie the peace negotiations even before they begin. What is your assessment of the US approach to the conflict and the future of the plan? Is it practical at all?

Askary: I am a strong believer in the concept promoted by the late American political prisoner and economist Lyndon LaRouche that there could be no peace without economic development. But what is being presented here is intended to fail not to succeed. Remember that these are the same ideas proposed during the Oslo Peace process two decades ago. Kushner is presenting this plan in Bahrain in a conference downgraded to workshop because it was already boycotted by the Palestinian Authority and denounced by all Palestinian political groups. Kushner himself says that he is presenting this economic part of the “Deal of the Century” because the political part is so disputed. The Palestinians, and I agree with them, say this economic plan is blackmail to force them to accept the political part. But Kushner already knows what the Palestinian answer will be. If they refuse, then they will look like bigots who are biting the hand which is trying to feed their people. And if everything collapses and more violence is practiced against the Palestinian people by Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government, then the US could say that the Palestinians should blame no one but themselves. The British (the instigators of this whole problem from start) and the right-wing Israelis will stretch this conflict as far as it goes to keep the region unstable and prone to conflicts. Besides, the Likud extremists’ philosophy is that “Jordan is Palestine”, which means all Palestinians will probably wake up one morning to find themselves in Jordan. So, there is no intention, at least from the Israeli right wing, to reach peace.

According to my sources in the US, Trump personally might not harbor similar ideology like the Likud or Zionist lobby, but he has accepted the Likud regime uncritically and listens to people like billionaire Sheldon Adelson on how to deal with the Middle East.  For the moment, he is focused on Iran where he is surrounded by war hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who preach the whole Netanyahu’s line that ‘Iran is the source of terrorism in the region’.

I am optimistic, though, that if a genuine dialog between Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping takes place soon (on the sidelines of the coming G-20 Summit), it can bring some rationality to the situation, because the whole world can be affected by a large military conflict in the Persian Gulf. This will affect the Palestinian issue too.

Tasnim: Last Friday, Israeli forces once again opened fire on Palestinians taking part in the peaceful “Great March of Return” protests, along the separation fence between the besieged Gaza Strip and occupied territories, injuring at least 79 peaceful protesters. According to media reports, more than 270 people, including 52 children, have been killed since the demonstrations began in March 2018. Most of the dead and the thousands wounded were unarmed civilians against whom Israel was using excessive force. Why has the international community, particularly the Western mainstream media, made a muted response to the Tel Aviv regime’s crimes against Palestinians so far?

Askary: There are two reasons for this indifference in the Western mainstream media to the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli army: 1. They are busy, upon orders of the political and economic forces that own them, demonizing Russia, China and their allies, like Iran and Syria, and whoever in the West would dare to show friendliness or promote closer and friendly relations with Russia and China. The Transatlantic imperial forces are upset because their system of control over the world economy is collapsing, and that of Russia, China, and their allies and friends is thriving along the New Silk Road. 2. Many of the large media outlets are owned or controlled by powerful economic interests that are friendly to or are part of the so-called Zionist lobby, who attempt to suppress any information about the suffering of the Palestinian people or Yemen for example.

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 Featured image is from TNA

The most important trilateral at the G20 in Osaka was confined to a shoddy environment unworthy of Japan’s unrivaled aesthetic minimalism.

Japan excels in perfect planning and execution. So it’s hard to take this setup as an unfortunate “accident.” At least the – unofficial – Russia-India-China summit at the sidelines of the G20 transcended the fate of an interior decorator deserving to commit seppuku.

Leaders of these three countries met in virtual secrecy. The very few media representatives present in the shabby room were soon invited to leave. Presidents Putin, Xi and Modi were flanked by streamlined teams who barely found enough space to sit down. There were no leaks. Cynics would rather joke that the room may have been bugged anyway. After all, Xi is able to call Putin and Modi to Beijing anytime he wants to discuss serious business.

New Delhi is spinning that Modi took the initiative to meet in Osaka. That’s not exactly the case. Osaka is a culmination of a long process led by Xi and Putin to seduce Modi into a serious Eurasia integration triangular road map, consolidated at their previous meeting last month at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek.

Now Russia-India-China (RIC) is fully back in business; the next meeting is set for the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September.

In their introductory remarks, Putin, Xi and Modi made it clear that RIC is all about configuring, in Putin’s words, an “indivisible security architecture” for Eurasia.

Modi – very much in a Macron vein – stressed the multilateral effort to fight climate change, and complained that the global economy is being ruled by a “one-sided” dictate, emphasizing the necessity of a reform of the World Trade Organization.

Putin went a step ahead, insisting, “our countries are in favor of preserving the system of international relations, whose core is the UN Charter and the rule of law. We uphold such important principles of interstate relations as respect for sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs.”

Putin clearly underlined the geopolitical interconnection of the UN, BRICS, SCO and G20, plus “strengthening the authority of the WTO” and the International Monetary Fund as the “paragon of a modern and just multipolar world that denies sanctions as legitimate actions.”

The Russia-India-China contrast with the Trump administration could not be starker.

Those ‘tremendous assets’

BRICS, as it stands, is dead. There was an “official,” pro-forma BRICS meeting before the RIC. But it’s no secret both Putin and Xi completely distrust Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, regarded as a Trump neocolonial asset.

Ahead of his bilateral with Trump, Bolsonaro peddled Brazil’s mineral wealth, claiming the country may now export “niobium trinkets.”

Well, that’s certainly less controversial than the Brazilian military sherpa arrested in Spain for carrying industrial quantities of cocaine (36kg) in the presidential plane, definitely ruining the after-hours party time in Osaka.

Later on, Trump eagerly praised Brazil’s “tremendous assets,” now being fully privatized to the benefit of US companies.

Xi, as he addressed the BRICS meeting, denounced protectionism and called for a stronger WTO. BRICS nations, he said, should “increase our resilience and capability to cope with external risks.”

Putin went one up. Apart from denouncing “protectionist” tendencies in global trade, he called for bilateral trade in national currencies bypassing the US dollar – mirroring a commitment by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia-China, via Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and head of the People’s Bank of China, Yi Gang, have signed an agreement to switch to rubles and yuan in bilateral trade, starting with energy and agriculture, and increase cross-currency settlements by 50% in the next few years.

There will be a concerted effort to increasingly bypass SWIFT, using the Russian System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) and the Chinese Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System (CIPS).

Sooner or later Russia-China will entice India to join. Moscow has excellent bilateral relations with both Beijing and New Delhi, and is decisively playing the role of privileged messenger.

The mini-trade war against New Delhi launched by the Trump administration – including the loss of India’s special trade status and punishment for buying Russian S-400 missile systems – is quickening the pace of the process. India, by the way, will pay for the S-400s in euros.

Image below from Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik

There were no leaks whatsoever from Russia-India-China about Iran. But diplomats say that was a key theme of the discussion. Russia is already – covertly – helping Iran on myriad levels. India has an existential choice to make: keep buying Iranian oil or say goodbye to Iran’s strategic help, via the Chabahar port, to facilitate India’s mini-Silk Road to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

China sees Iran as a key node of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative. Russia sees Iran as essential for strategic stability in Southwest Asia – a key theme of the Putin-Trump bilateral, which also discussed Syria and Ukraine.

RIC or Belt and Road?

Whatever the psyops tactics employed by Trump, Russia-India-China is also directly implicated in the massive short and long-term ramifications of the Trump-Xi bilateral in Osaka. The Big Picture is not going to change; the Trump administration is betting on re-routing global supply chains out of China, while Beijing advances full speed ahead with its Belt and Road Initiative.

Trump is heavily distrusted across Europe – as Brussels knows the EU is the target of another imminent trade war. Meanwhile, with over 60 nations committed to myriad Belt and Road projects, and with the Eurasia Economic Union also interlinked with Belt and Road, Beijing knows it’s just a matter of time before the whole of the EU hits the BRI highway.

There’s no evidence that India may suddenly join Belt and Road projects. The geopolitical lure of “Indo-Pacific” – essentially just another strategy for containment of China – looms large. That’s good old imperial Divide and Rule – and all the major players know it.

Yet India, now on the record, is starting to spin that Indo-Pacific is not “against somebody.” India getting deeper into RIC does not imply getting closer to Belt and Road.

It’s time for Modi to rise to the occasion; ultimately, he will decide which way the geoeconomic pendulum swings.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

A comprehensive analysis of nearly 1,500 scientific studies, government reports, and media stories on the consequences of fracking released Wednesday found that the evidence overwhelmingly shows the drilling method poses a profound threat to public health and the climate.

The sixth edition of the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking (the Compendium), published by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York, found that “90.3 percent of all original research studies published from 2016-2018 on the health impacts of fracking found a positive association with harm or potential harm.”

The analysis (pdf) also found that:

• 69 percent of original research studies on water quality found potential for, or actual evidence of, fracking-associated water contamination;
• 87 percent of original research studies on air quality found significant air pollutant emissions; and
• 84 percent of original research studies on human health risks found signs of harm or indication of potential harm.

“There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly and without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends,” the Compendium states.

Sandra Steingraber, PhD, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said in a statement that “the case against fracking becomes more damning” with the publication of each edition of the Compendium.

“As the science continues to come in, early inklings of harm have converged into a wide river of corroborating evidence,” said Steingraber. “All together, the data show that fracking impairs the health of people who live nearby, especially pregnant women, and swings a wrecking ball at the climate. We urgently call on political leaders to act on the knowledge we’ve compiled.”

MUST READ: @PSRenvironment⁩ and Concerned Health Professionals of New York @ssteingraber1 have released the 6th edition of the #fracking science #Compendium! Compiling and analyzing ~1500 studies, this critical resource shows how #FrackingHarmsHealth! https://t.co/QW8ioIYKUU pic.twitter.com/jztVLQgBoI

— PSR Environment (@PSRenvironment) June 19, 2019

According to the Compendium, the first edition of which was published in 2014, the “feverish pace” of U.S. fossil fuel extraction—which has accelerated under President Donald Trump—”has spurred a massive build-out of fracking infrastructure,” putting air quality and water sources at risk in communities across the United States.

In addition to the harmful effects of fracking on those who live near oil and gas development projects, the Compendium found, the drilling practice is “also at odds with the emerging scientific consensus on the scale and tempo of necessary climate change mitigation and with rising public alarm about the impending climate crisis that this consensus has amplified.”

“Despite efforts by the gas industry to suppress all health data on fracking, the Compendium documents the serious harm fracking holds for pregnant women, children, and those with respiratory disease,” Walter Tsou, MD, MPH, interim executive director of Philadelphia Physicians for Social Responsibility, said in a statement. “We need to ban fracking.”

The sixth edition of the Compendium comes just days after more than 100 environmental groups sent a letter urging Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to investigate the link between fracking and the emergence of rare childhood cancers in rural Pennsylvania counties.

As Steingraber—one of the letter’s signatories—told online environmental outlet The Daily Climate on Wednesday, much of the data in the Compendium comes from Pennsylvania, which is home to over 100,000 active oil and gas wells.

“What makes fracking different from any other industry I’ve studied in public health is that there’s no industrial zone,” Steingraber said. “It’s taking place literally in our backyards, and unfortunately some of the best evidence for both polluting emissions and emerging health crises is coming out of southwestern Pennsylvania.”

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The US oil cartel has given Florida’s Rick Scott 500 million reasons to be one of the Senate’s most fanatical cheerleaders for toppling Venezuela’s leftist government.

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While National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio have helped drive the Trump administration’s maximum pressure-style campaign against Venezuela, Rubio’s counterpart, Senator Rick Scott, has been every bit as fanatical about regime change in Caracas.

Speaking to a packed house of former government officials, oil executives, and lobbyists at a June 20th Atlantic Council event entitled “Russian Influence in Venezuela: What Should the United States Do?,” Scott launched into a tirade against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Watch @SenRickScott rail against Venezuela and call for a possible US military strike at the NATO-funded Atlantic Council. Scott's hundreds of millions of dollars are largely tied to oil, and his campaign was financed by oil corporations seeking regime change in Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/TZf0dzMYPO

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) June 25, 2019

“There is clearly genocide happening in Venezuela right now,” Scott declared. “Tens of thousands are dead, and it’s clearly genocide and it’s in our hemisphere.”

Scott wasn’t referring to the tens of thousands of Venezuelans that have died as a result of the crippling US sanctions regime since 2017. He was pointing instead at Venezuela’s president.

“We are watching little children like my grandson Eli starve to death, intentionally!” Scott bellowed. “And there is one person that’s primarily responsible for it, and his name is Nicolás Maduro… I think we have to be very clear, whether it’s President Putin, President Xi or the Castro regime or Iran, they are part of killing little children.”

In August 2017, as the United States launched the opening salvo of its economic assault on Venezuela, American oil and gas corporations who poured huge sums into Scott’s electoral campaign colluded in an attempt to suffocate the country’s energy sector.

At the same time, Scott – whose oil-heavy investment portfolio stood to grow as a result of the prospective coup – led the way in the halls of power in Washington.

Scott’s donors in big oil have a clear interest in toppling Venezuela’s government. Since 2007, when President Hugo Chávez nationalized the assets of Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA), companies like ExxonMobil have been cut out of the country’s market.

“They will never rob us again, those bandits of ExxonMobil; they are imperialist bandits, white collar criminals, corruptors of governments, over-throwers of governments, who supported the invasion and bombing of Iraq and continue supporting the genocide in Iraq,” Chávez thundered that year on his weekly TV show Alo Presidente.

Rex Tillerson, who was CEO of ExxonMobil at the time, sued Venezuela in international arbitration court, demanding the full $10 billion in lost assets. Tillerson was initially awarded $1.6 billion, but the compensation was reduced to approximately $188 million before a US appeals court blocked the award altogether.

In 2017, Tillerson became Trump’s first secretary of state and initiated the administration’s push for regime change in an apparent attempt at revenge.

When Rick Scott launched his first campaign for Florida governor, he relied on heavy donations from the same US-based oil titans seeking to retake Venezuela’s oil wealth. As the wealthiest person to serve as Florida’s governor, Scott also dipped into his $500 million family fortune to fund his campaign. But those assets were also heavily tied up in oil industry investments.

Big oil fills Scott’s stock portfolio and stuffs his campaign coffers

During his 2018 campaign for the Senate, Scott raked in tens of thousands of dollars from oil and gas industry political action committees, many of which had previously been customers of Venezuela’s national PDVSA oil company.

FEC records show Scott received $7,500 from Marathon Oil Corporation in 2018 through its PAC. Marathon had long anticipated the rounds of sanctions against Venezuela and had weaned itself off of the country’s crude in preparation.

Prior to the January 2019 sanctions that made importing fuel from PDVSA illegal, Marathon slashed its imports by 90 percent.

“We saw this coming a long time ago,” Marathon CEO Gary Heminger said. “Five years ago [sanctions] would have had impact.”

As president of Sunshine Gasoline Distributors, Cuba-born Maximo Alvarez contributed $38,500 to political action committees (PACs) supporting Scott’s run for Senate, while funneling a joint total of $66,200 in individual contributions with Sunshine Vice President Sandra Reuss.

Alvarez currently owns more than 300 gas stations in south Florida, maintaining gasoline contracts with Marathon, CITGO, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, and Texaco.

Valero Energy Corporation was the top purchaser of Venezuelan oil until the US embargo choked off the country’s exports. When Scott ran for Senate, this oil titan’s PAC contributed $5,000.

Scott’s campaign bragged that companies supported Scott because of his hard-line stance against Venezuela’s leftist government.

“Those who contribute to the campaign do so to support his candidacy, which includes calling for an end to the Maduro regime,” a spokesperson told Politico.

Chevron’s PAC gave Rick Scott $10,000 in 2018 after it had cut Venezuelan oil imports by 27 percent, and Exxon’s PAC had contributed $5,000 to the campaign as well.

Scott and his wife owned as much as $30,000 in Chevron stocks and $65,000 in ExxonMobil stocks at the time the companies were funding his campaign, putting the couple in prime position to reap profits from regime change.

By 2014, Scott had a stake of $528,032 in Phillips 66. This oil giant was the fourth-largest importer of Venezuelan crude oil until 2017, and stopped importing Venezuelan oil altogether when the country was placed under embargo the following year.

As governor of Florida, Scott was the driving force behind his state’s decision to prohibit investment in Venezuela in 2017. A year later, he led the charge to enshrine that measure into state law.

Begging for an invasion

From the Atlantic Council podium, Scott opened up the floor for new ideas on attacking Venezuela’s economy.

“I tell people every day, ‘If you have an idea, I will see if I can make it happen,” the senator remarked, gazing out at the audience.

As the event transitioned into Q&A, a fresh-faced young Venezuelan emigre named Daniel DiMartino rose nervously from the crowd to deliver a plea for the US to wage a military assault on Venezuela.

During Q&A, Indiana-based Venezuelan high school graduate @DanielDiMartino read a prepared question asking what it would take for the US to attack Venezuela. He's an underling of @MariaCorinaYA, the US-govt funded oppo figure who was implicated in an alleged plot to murder Maduro pic.twitter.com/uFqGdyuk0L

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) June 25, 2019

“I think this is just what every Venezuelan is asking right now,” DiMartino declared insistently, “and I think the most important question here is what will it take from the United States to give a real threat of military action to free Venezuela and actually follow through on that threat?”

While DiMartino sought to portray himself as an average Venezuelan, he was, in fact, a member of the hard-line Vente Venezuela (Come On Venezuela), an opposition party founded in 2012 by María Corina Machado.

One of Venezuela’s most extreme right-wing rabble rousers, Machado was implicated in an alleged plot to assassinate President Maduro in 2010. This January, when the US-backed coup was put into motion, Machado’s party introduced a call for the US military to enact the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, a thinly veiled call for invasion.

DiMartino is also an intern for Republican Indiana Sen. Todd Young, and a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, where he implores the US to invade Venezuela, just as he did at the Atlantic Council.

But his call fell on deaf ears.

“We in the United States don’t have a lot of public support for a military intervention in Venezuela, or anywhere else for that matter, at the moment,” former Pentagon official Evelyn Farkas lamented.

Farkas might have been as hawkish as anyone on the stage. She oversaw the Obama administration’s Russia policy until 2015 and proposed sending offensive weapons to far-right militias in Ukraine, a plan that was shelved until the Trump administration approved it in 2017. But even a hardliner like her understood that an invasion of Venezuela was a recipe for political and military disaster.

With Maduro still entrenched in the Miraflores presidential palace and firmly in control of PDVSA, Rick Scott may have to wait a while for his Exxon stocks to skyrocket.

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Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Killing Gaza. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine, Latin America, the US-Mexico border and Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCohen3000.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

In a surprise decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the four liberal members of the Supreme Court — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — halted the Trump administration’s plans, at least temporarily, to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The Court thought the stated motive for adding the question seemed “contrived,” and sent the case, Department of Commerce v. New York, back to the federal district court to review whether the government can come up with a legally acceptable rationale for adding the citizenship question.

After oral arguments in April, it appeared the justices were poised to allow the Trump administration to add this question to the census: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” That question would deter households with undocumented residents from responding to the census.

The Census Department estimated that 6.5 million people could be uncounted if the question was added. This is significant because the census is used to determine the number of seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, the number of Electoral College votes each state will have in the presidential elections starting in 2024, and how $900 billion in annual federal funds will be distributed to the states for health care, hospitals, schools and infrastructure for the next decade.
The plaintiffs in this case — a coalition of states, counties and cities — are claiming that the addition of the question is unconstitutional.

On May 30, the high court received newly discovered evidence of a cover-up of an illegal racist motive for adding the citizenship question. Thomas Hofeller was a Republican strategist and architect of the citizenship question strategy. After he died in 2018, Hofeller’s daughter found documents revealing that he urged the question be added to the census because it would “be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting.

Roberts and the four liberal justices found that the reason Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross gave for adding the question to the census “seems to have been contrived.” Ross testified before Congress that the sole reason he and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sought to add the question was to better enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

“[W]e share the District Court’s conviction that the decision to reinstate a citizenship question cannot be adequately explained in terms of DOJ’s request for improved citizenship data to better enforce the VRA,” Roberts wrote. “Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.”

Breyer noted in his concurrence,

“[T]he consequences of mistakes in the census count, of even a few hundred thousand, are grave. Differences of a few thousand people, as between one State and another, can mean a loss or gain of a congressional seat—a matter of great consequence to a State…. And similar small differences can make a large difference to the allocation of federal funds among competing state programs.”

Trump called the Court’s decision “totally ridiculous,” tweeting that he asked his lawyers to “delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”

…..United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter. Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen. Only in America!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2019

Although it is theoretically possible the question could still be added in time for the 2020 census, it is highly unlikely, given the July 1 printing deadline.

Last week, the Justice Department told the Court that the deadline could be extended to October 31. But The New York Times quoted experts as saying,

“the printing work is so vast — more than a billion pieces of paper — and such a logistical tangle that the bureau’s ability to put off its start is measured in weeks, not months.”

A former senior bureau official told the Times,

“You’d really be putting the operational plan at great risk if this stretches into mid-August. You may not have a census at all in 2020.”

Meanwhile, a different case pending before U.S. District Judge George Hazel in Maryland could block the inclusion of the citizenship question in the census. On June 25, in light of the new Hofeller evidence, a panel of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sent a case back to Hazel to decide if there was discriminatory intent behind the citizenship question and thus a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. One of the panel judges suggested that Hazel issue an injunction to stop the question from being included in the census until the case was resolved. This is a different issue than the one in Department of Commerce v. New York.

The opinion by Roberts and the liberal justices is significant as it confronts the Trump administration’s false justification for adding the citizenship question. As Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted,

“Trump lied about his motivations, and five justices called him on it. His proposal to add a citizenship question to the census was nothing but a racist attempt to disenfranchise communities of color.”

Trump lied about his motivations, and five justices called him on it. His proposal to add a citizenship question to the census was nothing but a racist attempt to disenfranchise communities of color. https://t.co/OPZfQbpgNK

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 27, 2019

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

The United Arab Emirates appeared to part ways with the Trump administration Wednesday on the question of whether Iran is responsible for the recent attacks on merchant tankers in the Gulf of Oman. 

The White House maintains that Iran or Iran-backed forces carried out the attacks, which damaged six vessels in two separate incidents in May and June. U.S. Central Command has released video and imagery showing what appear to be Iranian servicemembers removing a limpet mine from the hull of the tanker Kokuka Courageous after the second attack, and it has allowed media to view and photograph debris collected from the vessel.

However, the UAE said Wednesday that it would like more concrete proof before reaching a definitive conclusion that Iran was behind the attacks. Iran has so far denied involvement, though it claimed responsibility for shooting down an American surveillance drone on June 20.

“Honestly we can’t point the blame [for the tanker attacks] at any country because we don’t have evidence,” said UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, speaking alongside his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, at a joint press conference in Moscow. “If there is a country that has the evidence, then I’m convinced that the international community will listen to it. But we need to make sure the evidence is precise and convincing.”

In a joint investigation conducted with officials from Saudi Arabia and Norway, the UAE determined that the first attacks on tankers off Fujairah “were most probably carried out by actors with a considerable amount of intelligence and technical expertise,” but did not accuse any specific entity. Sheikh Bin Zayed said that that assessment has already been submitted to the UN Security Council and that “we will continue our commitment to professionalism on this issue.”

Lavrov’s presence provided subtext for the announcement: the Russian government has criticized U.S. policy towards Tehran, and a top official recently hinted that it might provide Iran with support if the U.S. should launch a retaliatory attack.

“Many other countries sympathize and empathize with Iran,” said Zamir Kabulov, a Russian special envoy, speaking to Kommersant Wednesday. “Tehran won’t be alone if the U.S., God forbid, takes insane and irresponsible actions against it.”

The UAE is an ally of the United States and of Saudi Arabia, which both accuse Iran of orchestrating the attacks. Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the UAE, met Monday with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; in a statement after the meeting, the sheikh’s office “reiterated that both countries are standing side by side toward the challenges besetting the region.”

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US relations with other countries, especially sovereign independent ones it doesn’t control, are long on unacceptable demands, woefully short on seeking cooperative relations.

Two summits between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un failed to improve bilateral relations.

They featured one-sided unacceptable US demands in return for empty promises — how Washington always deals with nations it wants transformed into vassal states.

The Trump regime wants a North Korean client state bordering China. Its hardliners want the DPRK rendered defenseless by eliminating its nuclear deterrent and ballistic missiles.

According to John Bolton earlier,

“(w)e have very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004. There are obviously differences. The Libyan program was much smaller, but that was basically the agreement that we made.”

In 2011, US-led aggression raped and destroyed the country, Gaddafi sodomized to death, a fate Kim understands, wanting a similar outcome for himself from future US aggression avoided.

On Friday in Osaka, Trump said he’d like to meet Kim at the DMZ, separating North and South Korea — “just to shake his hand and sell HELLO,” he tweeted, adding:

“After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (to meet with President Moon).”

“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border…”

Both leaders last met in Hanoi, Vietnam last February. Two Kim/Trump summits achieved virtually nothing toward stepping back from the brink on the Korean peninsula toward regional peace, stability, and normalized bilateral relations.

North Korea maintains a nuclear and ballistic missile deterrent because of the genuine fear of possible US aggression.

Bilateral relations are dismal, pockmarked by multiple rounds of oppressive sanctions, showing extreme US hostility toward the country and its people.

Kim showed good faith during summit talks with Trump — in June 2018, again in February, accomplishing nothing, showing the futility of negotiating with a partner bent on dominating North Korea, unwilling to deal with its ruling authorities cooperatively.

Nothing suggests a change of US tactics ahead. Talks in Hanoi broke down because Trump regime officials refused to offer any concessions, nothing as a show of good faith, something not in the US imperial vocabulary.

Kim asked DJT for partial sanctions relief alone, wanting only ones affecting North Korea’s economy lifted.

Trump refused, insisting on full compliance with his regime’s unacceptable one-sided demands, refusing even a modest gesture of good faith in return.

Bilateral talks were suspended following the failed summit. At the time, DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed Trump regime officials for the breakdown, saying:

“We have no intention to yield to the (one-sided) US demands in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind,” adding:

Pompeo and Bolton “created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States.”

Choe quoted Kim saying:

“For what reason do we have to make this (65-hour) train trip again? Choe added: “I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the US will eventually put the situation in danger.”

“We have neither the intention to compromise with the US in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.”

On June 20 and 21, days before the Osaka G20 summit, China’s Xi Jinping visited Pyongyang, his first state visit as head of state following Kim’s invitation, part of efforts by both countries to work cooperatively.

Both leaders said they reached consensus on “important issues,” agreeing to further cooperative relations, especially given US hostility toward North Korea.

There’s virtually no prospect for normalizing US relations with the country.

An uneasy armistice has persisted between them since US aggression in the early 1950s ended.

It continued endlessly by other means from then to the present day. It won’t end as long as the DPRK defends its independence, its sovereign right.

It rejects the acceptable US demand to subordinate its sovereignty to its interests — as it should. The same goes for all nations.

Note: On Sunday, Trump and Kim met in the DMZ, DJT saying talks between both nations will begin “over the next two or three weeks.” He also stepped over the demilitarized zone border into North Korea, the first sitting US president to do it.

Talks are better than conflict even if there’s no prospect that the Trump regime will take steps toward normalizing bilateral relations.

This is a developing story, more on it as further information becomes available.

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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 Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un shake hands in summit room, June 12, 2018. (Office of the President of the United States/Public Domain)

Iran’s decision to increase its stock of low enriched uranium from 174.1 kilograms on 20 May to beyond the JCPOA’s agreed limit of 300 kilograms on 27 June 2019, is not a “violation” or “breach” of the nuclear deal, as has been described.  Neither is Iran’s suspending the implementation of some of its commitments under the JCPOA, on 7 July, that is, at the end of its 60 day ultimatum to the European troika to observe their part of the deal and produce practical measures to counter the calamitous effects of US sanctions on the lives of Iranians.  It is Iran’s legitimate and necessary response to a contract already left by the US and breached by its European allies. 

Despite continued promises, the Europeans signatories have lacked both willingness and sovereignty to secure mechanisms for trade with Iran.  To expect Iran to continue adhering to its commitments unilaterally with the population strangulated under sanctions and tortured by threats of war, is the product of a colonial mindset; disingenuous, cruel, outrageous and delusional.  This legitimate stance is clearly acknowledged by Nathalie Tocci, advisor to the EU’s Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, Federica Mogherini:

“if I were Iran I would probably not stick with the JCPOA because indeed, as I said, the social contract can only hold if both sides live up to the bargain”.

Spurred by Iran’s decision, on 27 June the Europeans announced that their mechanism for trade labelled Instex which had been promised in February after months of empty talks since US’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, will now become operational in a matter of days.  However, INSTEX is limited in scope and tied to the Financial Action Task Force (FTAF), the accession to which requires Iran adopting the Terrorist Financing Convention (CFT) and Palermo Convention.  These would seriously compromise Iran’s sovereignty and rather than combatting sanctions, become an instrument of pressure on Iran.  It is important to see the preconditions for Instex and how it would work in practice.

After years of unsubstantiated accusations and fabrications against Iran’s peaceful civilian nuclear programme, the imposition of inhumane sanctions and the chronic shadow of war over the Iranian population, on 14th July 2015, two years of intense negotiations resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or the Nuclear Deal, between the Security Council members plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran.  The nuclear deal which was adopted unanimously in the Security Council Resolution 2231 on 20th July 2015, severely curbed Iran’s nuclear programme and placed it under strict monitoring within an agreed time frame.  In return, the Security Council Resolutions and sanctions on Iran – secured through US manipulation and threats of military action – were removed and Iran’s file was normalised and returned to the jurisdiction of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  Iran’s right to uranium enrichment was recognised, and US/EU comprehensive sanctions on Iran were to be removed.

The nuclear deal lifted the shadow of war, and raised hopes for economic, social and democratic progress for Iranian people.  However, despite all the IAEA verification and monitoring reports of the past 4 years, consistently confirming Iran’s faithful adherence to its obligations under the nuclear deal, from the beginning the US refused to adhere to its part of the deal in the removal of all the sanctions, and directly or indirectly through whipping up a climate of uncertainty and fear of punitive measures dissuaded its European allies from fully meeting their commitments, particularly in the removal of the banking sanctions and the operation of SWIFT for international banking transactions.

Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal on 8th May 2018 and the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions intending “to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero” depriving the country of “its principal source of revenue” has been an explicit declaration of war on a population of 80 million, inflicting intense suffering, pauperising and wiping out the middle class, destroying the country’s infrastructure, civil society and democratic aspirations.  On the occasion of the recent unprecedented floods in Iran in April of this year which left thousands homeless, without access to food and clean water, the US sanctions blocked the accounts of Iran’s Red Crescent preventing humanitarian aid being sent to Iran, an egregious crime against humanity, to which the Europeans helplessly bowed down.  Where does the violation of Iranians’ human rights to jobs, homes, medicine, affordable food, and to live without the terror of war fit in with Europe’s deafening advocacy of “human rights” for which it wages wars of aggression, as in Libya and Syria?

Sanctions rather than military intervention is the option of choice for President Trump and Pentagon analysts.  The idea being that given enough time and assisted by propaganda, sanctions would create large scale discontent, would weaken Iran’s defensive capabilities and human resources, and ripen it for regime change or make it an easier target for future military attack.

Iran’s planned suspension of part of its commitment under the JCPOA, such as increasing the level of enrichment and increasing its stock of heavy water, are not violations of its NPT obligations and a path to nuclear weaponisation.  Possession and stockpile of nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction have been forbidden by repeated religious FATWAs for decades including the Fatwa from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.  The US and Israel’s fabricated accusations of weaponization against Iran come in the context of Israel’s possession of hundreds of nuclear warheads targeting Iran.  The US has continued its refusal to ratify the nuclear Test Ban Treaty and its recent announcement that limited wars fought with “low yield nuclear weapons”, are winnable, is a clear threat against Iran, described by Moscow as “blackmailing the countries, who oppose American dictates”.

Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and sabre rattling against Iran are led and fuelled by hawks in his cabinet, his National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the invasion of Iraq, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, powerful Christian Zionists,  and the military industrial complex.

Arms manufacturers  play a crucial role in creating climates of threat and igniting wars.  This was exemplified on 21 June, the day after Iran downed the US spy drone over Iranian territory.  James Winnefeld, a Raytheon board member and retired Navy admiral, masquerading as CBS’s news analyst heavily criticised President Trump for calling off retaliatory strikes against Iran, insisting that the US will “lose a lot of credibility”.

US’s demand to “drag” Iran into ‘talks’ with a gun to its head and under the pressure of sanctions is clearly an aggressive non-starter.  US’s demands, outlined in Pompeo’s “twelve pre-conditions” for talks, are nothing short of Iran signing its own death warrant, that is, signing the conditions for its surrender and invitation for military attack.  Indeed,  US’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA and its demands and behaviour have helped unify Iranians and cemented a deep mistrust towards the US.

The Trump administration tore up an international agreement, supported by the UN Security Council, with impunity, holding a nation of 80 million at gunpoint.  Europeans have proven compliant and cooperative with the US’s lawlessness. What is there to guarantee the US’s adherence to any other agreement that could conceivably be reached?  International law and treaties do not operate in a vacuum and outside of the context of the balance of power. The JCPOA, negotiated over two years, which involves domestically contentious concessions from Iran, addresses all concerns about any potential weaponisation risks by Iran.  It is not open to re-negotiation.

The US’s real concern however is Iran’s conventional missile programme which is proving increasingly vital for Iran’s defence and a powerful deterrent against regional adventurism.  Iran’s leading role in the Axis of Resistance,  its success in defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria and foiling the US/Israeli/Saudi regime change agenda in Syria, with Iran as the next target, is the focus of the US concerns and demands.  Iran’s regional links, and the respect and loyalty it commands at popular level, has provided it with strategic depth and influence and a powerful defence for Iran.

This is viewed as a serious obstacle to US/Israeli hegemonic agenda in the region and a challenge to Saudi/Emirati sectarian regional ambitions. This is the context in which the accusations of “Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism” needs to be viewed.  Not ISIS or many thousands of  Saudi/NATO recruited and sponsored, head-chopping, heart-eating, rapist sectarian ‘jihadists’ from 80 countries around the world, who unleashed a bloodbath in Syria and Iraq, who routinely kill and maim citizens not only across the Middle East but also in Western heartlands.  No, many of these are the West’s “freedom fighters”, just as the Neo-Nazi thugs who were supported to take power in Ukraine’s “Maidan Revolution”. The bothersome “terrorists” are the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah and the popular forces of the Axis of Resistance pushing against US-led agenda and its hand-reared terrorists.  Remarkably, a confidential report to the US Congress on 18th June refuted Pompeo’s public claim that Iran “had hosted al Qaeda, they have permitted al Qaeda to transit their country … There is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Al Qaea. Period, full stop”.  The report confirmed that there is no evidence of Al-Qaeda cooperation with Iranian government.

Trump might be reluctant to engage in a costly military confrontation.  The assessment of Pentagon, military analysts and economists might be that such a war would seriously damage world economy and could escalate into a global war.   However pressure from war lobbies and the hawks in Trump’s cabinet and the huge US military build-up in the Persian Gulf make igniting war through false flag operations and miscalculation a real possibility.  The designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation has closed vital channels of communication between the US and Iran and increased the risk of miscalculations.

The tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf which were immediately blamed on Iran without any credible evidence, and the trigger happy reaction of the US to attack Iran over the shooting down of the US spy done over Iranian territory  (an attack which was allegedly called off by Trump 10 minutes before the operation, and to the huge dismay of the hawks), are clear indications of the incendiary circumstances ripe for false flag operations and which could very quickly slide into military confrontation.  The idea put forward by Trump that war with Iran would be short-lived is another dangerously erroneous assumption which could lead to miscalculation and a catastrophic war.

Whatever, the evidence and counter evidence, with Trump’s policy of “Maximum Pressure on Iran’, all responsibility for any attack or confrontation squarely falls on the US.  As Daniel Larison says very clearly in American Conservative (June 18, 2019),

“It is the U.S. that has been ramping up pressure and inflicting collective punishment on all Iranians. It is the U.S. that reneged on the JCPOA, and it is the U.S. that has issued unrealistic ultimatums effectively demanding Iranian capitulation. After strangling and kicking Iran for more than a year, the administration tries to pretend that Iran is engaged in “aggression” when it pushes back against relentless economic warfare and escalating threats. “Maximum pressure” is what has brought us to the verge of war, and Trump is the proud owner of that policy. If we want to avoid further escalation, the U.S. needs to back off on its pressure campaign at a minimum.”

The possibility for an unstoppable regional and potentially global war, is real, and it is only a matter of time for a spark to ignite a military confrontation. It is crucial for the Europeans, if they have any concern for the security of their own populations, to, instead of pressuring Iran to effectively ‘lie down and die’ under sanctions, actively pressure the US to remove the sanctions on Iran and return to the JCPOA.

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “has hidden behind protocol” rather than push for an investigation into the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the UN special rapporteur who probed the killing has told Middle East Eye.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 41st UN Human Rights Council, which she will address on Wednesday, Agnes Callamard said Khashoggi could be “a model case” for the UN to show that it takes targeted killings seriously.

It could have acted as a mediator, allowing better coordination during the investigation of the brutal killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October, and between the parties involved, she said.

Instead, the inaction of Gutteres and various UN bodies has “poisoned” what was already a terrible crime.

“In my view, the secretary-general could have set a more proactive process for himself and the UN and he chose otherwise,” Callamard said.

“I think by now they must understand that inaction and silence and hoping that it is going to disappear is just not going to work with this particular killing.”

Last week, Callamard, a human rights expert who serves as the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, released a nearly 100-page report into the murder of the US resident who wrote for the Washington Post and Middle East Eye.

The inquiry, based on more than 120 interviews, concluded that there was credible evidence that the killing was premeditated and that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other high-level officials were liable.

‘Sacrificial animal’

It also gave the fullest public account so far of the 59-year-old’s final moments inside the consulate where a team of Saudis were recorded discussing dismembering him and referring to him as a “sacrificial animal” in the minutes before he arrived, according to Callamard’s inquiry.

The Saudi Human Rights Commission rejected the report’s findings, saying it was biased and that Callamard breached UN principles of impartiality, objectivity and professionalism.

The crime, she told MEE on Tuesday, was exceptional in its brutality, yet unexceptional because it represents a pattern of other killings that have been the focus of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

“So it was little bit paradoxical that there was no more commitment to find a meaningful role for the UN when confronted with a crime that was, by November or December, becoming an international crisis,” she said.

It was the inaction, she said, that drove her to pursue her inquiry.

“I could not understand why the UN – the secretary-general, the Security Council, the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly – have not moved forward with more resolve.”

Now, she said, she hopes the UN will hear her call, and push for an international investigation.

“I’m not suggesting they intervene in all [killings], but they should intervene in a killing that is demonstrated to be an international killing touching on many aspects of international law,” she said.

Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee who spoke with Callamard on a panel hosted by the Canadian government at the UN on Tuesday, said it was “scandalous” that high-level officials may be implicated.

“I don’t want this significance to remain on a piece of paper, or to remain on the shelves of the UN,” she told a packed room of diplomats, NGO representatives and reporters. “If the UN will not do the follow up on such murders, who will do it?”

MEE contacted Guterres’ office for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.

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