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The US hybrid war on Venezuela has now entered a hot phase.

On April 30, Juan Guaido, US-declared ‘Interim President’ of the country appeared in a video calling for a military uprising. Guaido, accompanied by heavily armed men, claimed that he had backing from the  military and  that the video was filmed at the Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base in the capital, Caracas.

Opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez, who had been held under house arrest after “inciting violence” during the anti-government riots, appeared alongside Guaido. He claimed that he had been “released by the military”.

The US immediately declared its public support for the coup attempt at the highest level and once again threatened the country’s legitimate government with military action. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the actions of Guaido and his armed supporters a “quest for freedom and democracy”.

The US-backed coup attempt was branded “Operación Libertad” and received at least vocal support from leaders and officials of US Latin American allies. But something went wrong.

Despite the initial claims, Guaido supporters failed to establish control of the Francisco de Miranda Air Base. In the first half of the day, the main clashes between the rebels and the country’s National Guard took place on the highway alongside the military facility and in the Altamira area. Both sides used tear gas and in some cases even opened live fire.

There was at least one incident when an armored vehicle supposedly belonging to the National Guard loyal to the government rammed into a crowd injuring at least one. The incident took place after a group of rioters attacked a National Guard detachment.

Meanwhile, the country’s President Nicolas Maduro called on his supporters to mobilize. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez reaffirmed that the Armed Forces reject the US-proclaimed president. Samuel Moncada, the ambassador to the UN, described the situation as an “attempt by foreign powers to spark a civil war.” The government characterised armed service members supporting Guaido as “a small group of traitors”, reinforced security measures across the capital and warned that the army would resort to force if necessary.

Measures were undertaken to take off air or limit access to local and international media outlets endorsing the coup.

By the evening, rioters and defectors had been expelled from the airbase’s gates, but clashes with the sporadic use of fire arms continued across the capital. Rioters, including armed ones, marched towards the Palacio de Miraflores, the official workplace of the real president, but lacked resources to storm it. Low-scale riots also took place in various provinces.

All this came amid speculations by US officials that “democracy” was about to achieve victory and Maduro was ready to flee the country to Russia. This did not happen. This round of the coup attempt failed because of the lack of support from the local population.

According to reports, the number of soldiers and security officers who defected to Guaido is around 80. Up to 100 people were injured as a result of the April 30 clashes in Caracas. Around 70 people were detained by the authorities.

Guaido announced a new round of protests to overthrow Maduro on May 1. It appears that Guaido and his supporters will be not able to seize power without direct foreign support. Such support may come in the form of an open or a silent US-led invasion under some formal pretext. Just recently, data leaked to the media that Erik Prince had pitched an idea to deploy some 5,000 mercenaries to support the coup against the Venezuelan government.

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Featured image: Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who many nations have recognized as the country’s rightful interim ruler, and fellow opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez address a crowd of supporters in Caracas, Venezuela on April 30, 2019. (REUTERS/Manaure Quintero)

In the early morning hours of 30 April, 2019, the self-declare “Interim President”, Juan Guaidó, launched what at first sight appeared to be a military coup – Guaidó calls it “Operation Freedom” (sounds very much like a Washington-invented title) – against the democratically elected, legitimate government of Nicolas Maduro.

With two dozen of defected armed military from the Carlota “military base” [formerly a private airport] east of Caracas (not hundreds, or even thousands, as reported by the mainstream media), Guaidó went to free Leopoldo Lopez, the opposition leader, who was under house arrest, after his 13-year prison sentence for his role in the deadly 2014 anti-government protests, was commuted. They first called for a full military insurrection – which failed bitterly, as the vast majority of the armed forces are backing President Maduro and his government.

As reported straight from Caracas by geopolitical analyst, Dario Azzelli, Guaidó and López rallied from the Plaza Altamira, for the people of Venezuela to rise up and take to the streets to oust President Maduro. According to them, this was the ‘last phase’ of a peaceful coup to bring freedom and democracy back to Venezuela. The nefarious pair issued a video of their “battle cry” which they broadcast over the social media.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognized by many countries including the United States as the country’s rightful interim ruler, stands on top of a car surrounded by soldiers and civilians at Plaza Altamira in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 30. RAFAEL HERNANDEZ/PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES

They mobilized a few hundred – again not thousands as pers SMS – right-wing middle to upper class protestors and marched towards the Presidential Palace. On the way, they were confronted by the Venezuelan Civil Guard with tear gas – not even the military had to intervene – and only few protestors reached the Palacio Miraflores which was protectively surrounded by thousands of Chavistas. And that was basically the end of yet another failed coup.

Leopoldo López was seeking asylum in the Chilean Embassy which rejected him, and now, it looks like he found his refuge in the Spanish Embassy. This is a huge embarrassment and outright shame for Spain, especially after the Socialist Party, PSOE, just won the elections with 29%, though not enough to form a government by its own, but largely sufficient to call the shots as to whom should be granted asylum on their territory. Looks like fascism is still alive in Spain, if Pedro Sanchez is not able to reject a right-wing fascist opposition and illegal coup leader of Venezuela to gain refuge on Spain’s territory.

As to Guaidó, rumors have it that he found refuge in the Brazilian Embassy, though some reports say he is being protected by his Colombian friends. Both is possible, Bolsonaro and Duque are of same fascist kind, certainly ready to grant criminals – what Guaidó is – asylum.

What is important to know, though, is that throughout the day of the attempted coup, 30 April, the US State Department, in the person of the pompous Pompeo, accompanied by the National Security Advisor, John Bolton, kept threatening President Maduro in a press round. Pompeo directly menaced President Maduro, saying –

“If they ask me if the US is prepared to consider military action [in Venezuela], if this is what is necessary to restore democracy in Venezuela, the President [Donald Trump] has been coherent and clear: The military option is available, if this is what we have to do.”– These threats are repeated throughout May 1 – day after the Venezuelan attempted coup defeat by both Pompeo and warrior Bolton.

Pompeo’s audacity didn’t stop there. He went as far as suggesting to President Maduro to flee to Cuba and leave his country to those that will bring back (sic) freedom and democracy.

Let’s be clear. Although this has been said before – it cannot be repeated enough for the world to understand. These outright war criminals in Washington are in flagrant violation of the UN Charter to which the US is – for good or for bad – a signatory.

UN Charter – Chapter I, Article 2 (4), says:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

We know that the White House, Pentagon and State Department have zero respect for the UN, and, in fact, use the international body for their purposes, manipulating and blackmailing its members into doing the bidding for the US. That is all known and has been documented. What is perhaps newer is that this is now happening, especially in the cases of Venezuela and Iran, openly, in unveiled flagrant disrespect of any international law, against bodies and sovereign countries that do not bend to the whims and will of the United States.

As a result of this open violation of the UN Charter by the world’s only rogue state, some 60 UN member nations, including Russia and China, have formed a solid shield against Washington’s aggressions. The group was created especially in defense of Venezuela, but is also there for Iran and other countries being aggressed and threatened by the US. Hence, the blatant blackmailing and manipulation of weaker UN member countries becomes more difficult.

To be sure, the Russian Foreign Ministry has immediately condemned the coup as illegal and warned the US of any military intervention. This is of course not the first time, but just to be sure – Russia is there, standing by her partner and friend, Venezuela.

This Guaidó–Lopez attempted coup was most certainly following instructions from Washington. Super-puppet Guaidó, US-groomed and trained, then self-declared “presidente interino”, would not dare doing anything on his own initiative which might raise the wrath of his masters. But would the US – with all her secret services capacity – seriously launch a coup so ill-prepared that it is defeated in just a few hours with minimal intervention of Venezuelan forces? – I doubt it.

What is it then, other than a planned failure? – A new propaganda instrument, for the corporate MSM to run amok and tell all kinds of lies, convincing its complacent western public of the atrocities produced by the Maduro regime, the misery Venezuelan people must live, famine, disease without medication, oppression by dictatorship, torture, murder – whatever they can come up with. You meet any mainstream-groomed people in Europe and elsewhere, even well-educated people, people who call themselves ‘socialists’ and are leading figures in European socialist parties, they would tell you these same lies about misery caused by the Maduro regime.

How could that be – if the Maduro Government doesn’t even arrest Juan Guaidó for his multiple crimes committed since January, when he self-proclaimed being the ‘interim president’ of Venezuela. Arresting him, for the coup attempts he initiated or was party to since his auto coronation to president. That’s what a dictator would do. That’s what the United States of America, would have done a long time ago. Washington and its internal security apparatus would certainly not tolerate such illegal acts – and to top it off – foreign manipulated political illegality.

Why for example, would the media not point out the real crimes of the US vassals of South America, like Colombia, where over 6 million people are internal and external refugees, where at least 240,000 peasants and  human rights activists were massacred and many were burned by US-funded paramilitary groups, atrocities that are ongoing as of this day, despite the November 2016 signed  “Peace Agreement” between the then Santos Government and the FARC – for which President Manuel Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize. – Can you imagine!

What world are we living in? A world of everyday deceit and lies and highly paid lie-propaganda, paid with fake money – fake as in indiscriminately printed US-dollars – of which every new dollar is debt that will never be paid back (as openly admitted by former FEDs Chairman, Alan Greenspan); dollars that can be indiscriminately spent to produce the deadliest weapons, as well as for corporate media-propaganda lies – also a deadly weapon – to indoctrinate people around the globe into believing that evil is good, and that war is peace.

I have lost many friends by telling them off, by telling them the truth, the truth about Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria – mostly to no avail. It’s actually no loss; it’s merely a repeated confirmation of how far the western society has been veered off the path of conscience into a comfort zone, where believing the propaganda lies of reputed media like The Guardian, NYT, WashPost, BBC, FAZ, Spiegel, Le Monde, Figaro, el País, ABC — and so on, is edifying. They are so convincing. They are so well-reputed and well-known. How could they lie? – No loss, indeed.

Let’s stay on track, comrades. Venceremos!

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Sunday, May 5th, 2019 from 7:00-9:00pm

Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House—800 E Broadway, Vancouver

Hosted by Vancouver Peace Council

Please join us for this incredible opportunity to hear independent journalist Eva Bartlett speak about her reporting, politics, mainstream media disinformation, and imperialism. She has reported on the ground from Palestine and Syria, where she has also lived, and most recently from Venezuela. She has received numerous awards for her journalism and has received international recognition. Eva’s activism and reporting on imperialism in the Middle East has served as invaluable evidence against some of the most egregious mainstream propaganda in our modern time.

After her speech, there will be a Q&A for further engagement.

Read more of her work here: https://ingaza.wordpress.com/ and https://twitter.com/EvaKBartlett

If you would like to donate to support this event, run purely on volunteer time, please contact us. Thank you!

Eva Bartlett’s articles on Global Research

Online independent analysis of US-led wars, rampant corruption, corporate greed, civil rights and fraudulent monetary transactions is invariably relegated to the bottom rung of search engine results.

As a result we presently do not cover our monthly running costs which could eventually jeopardize our activities.

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Venezuelan Military Putsch Defeated as Leopoldo Lopez Takes Refuge in Spanish Embassy

By Ricardo Vaz, May 01, 2019

The thwarted uprising started in the early morning hours when renegade military and intelligence officers reportedly released Lopez from house arrest. Lopez then joined Guaido and a handful of soldiers on the Altamira overpass in east Caracas, outside the Francisco de Miranda airbase, known as La Carlota.

NATO Demolishes the Libyan State

By Comitato No Nato, May 01, 2019

Multiple factors make Libya important in the eyes of the United States and the European powers. It has the largest oil reserves in Africa, precious for its high quality and low cost of extraction, and large reserves of natural gas.

The Spontaneous “Military Coup” in Caracas was Meant to Fail?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 01, 2019

This spontaneous so-called military putsch was meant to fail. Visibly, it was not a carefully planned operation. And Washington was fully aware from the outset that it would fail.

Sri Lanka: Candidate for a New NATO Base?

By Peter Koenig, May 01, 2019

There was a lot of confusion, and still is, all through Sri Lanka. Nobody claimed credit for the massacres. There were rumors that Sri Lanka’s President received warnings ahead of the attacks from foreign intelligence, but ignored them. The President denies these allegations. And the explosions continue.

Video: “Clinton Foundation and IS Funded from the Same Sources”: Julian Assange interview with John Pilger

By Julian Assange and John Pilger, May 01, 2019

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated that Hillary Clinton’s Clinton Foundation and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL/ISIS) are funded from the same sources.

Predator Cops, Guilty of Sex Crimes Against Women and Children, Are a Menace to Society

By John W. Whitehead, May 01, 2019

Where are the police when these children—some as young as 9 years old—are being raped repeatedly?

For that matter, what is the Trump Administration doing about the fact that adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in suburbs, cities and towns across this nation?

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Towards a Just World?

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, May 01, 2019

Essentially an infrastructure development endeavor it seeks to initiate and support the construction of roads, railways, ports and bridges in at least 65 other countries spanning four continents. With a commitment of over 900 billion US dollars, OBOR is the biggest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in the history of our planet.

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“Interim President” Juan Guaido and right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez spearheaded an unsuccessful coup attempt in Caracas on Tuesday.

The thwarted uprising started in the early morning hours when renegade military and intelligence officers reportedly released Lopez from house arrest. Lopez then joined Guaido and a handful of soldiers on the Altamira overpass in east Caracas, outside the Francisco de Miranda airbase, known as La Carlota.

Lopez and Guaido released videos on social media, calling on the armed forces to back their efforts and urging supporters to take to the streets, in what they termed as the “final phase” of the so-called “Operation Freedom.” Large crowds of anti-government protesters, as well as opposition lawmakers, made their way to the Altamira overpass.

The scene then saw armed confrontations between the soldiers that backed Juan Guaido and those inside La Carlota airbase. According to witnesses in La Carlota, the Venezuelan armed forces fired tear gas towards the Altamira overpass, where civilian protesters began to gather, whereas Guaido’s soldiers returned live fire. Riot police also appeared on the scene to try and disperse the crowds. There are reports of protesters wounded and arrested that are unconfirmed at the time of writing.

At the same time, many of the originally deployed soldiers withdrew from the scene, later revealing that they had been “deceived” by their superiors. Simultaneously, Chavista leaders took to state and social media to denounce what they termed a coup in progress, and large crowds gathered to defend Miraflores Presidential Palace.

Guaido later attempted to lead a march, including some armed soldiers, into western Caracas but was stopped by Venezuelan National Guard forces in Chacaito, some 10 kilometers away from Miraflores.

Leopoldo Lopez was later reported to have joined his family in the Chilean Embassy. However, the Chilean ambassador subsequently explained on Twitter that Lopez and his family had instead moved to the Spanish Embassy, in what he termed a “personal choice.” Lopez was serving a 13 year sentence for his role in the deadly 2014 anti-government protests, which was later commuted to house arrest.

Brazilian authorities also confirmed at the time that 25 soldiers who had taken part in the failed insurrection had taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Caracas.

Opposition protesters burned a public bus in Altamira, east Caracas. (Katrina Kozarek)

For his part, Guaido was absent for several hours before releasing a video on social media in the evening, calling on his supporters to take to the streets on Wednesday to continue the “final phase” of “Operation Freedom.”

The opposition leader went on claim President Maduro “does not have the support of the armed forces,” and vowed that his efforts to oust the Venezuelan government continue “as strong as ever.”

The day saw several localised outbreaks of violence in Caracas and several other cities, with protesters setting up burning barricades and authorities responding with rubber bullets and tear gas. Violent protests were particularly focused in traditional opposition strongholds of eastern Caracas, including outside La Carlota airbase. At the time of writing there are still reports of blocked roads and detonations.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro addressed the country in a televised speech on Tuesday evening, accusing those responsible for the military uprising of trying to provoke a “massacre” and lauding the armed forces for their restraint in avoiding direct confrontations.

“Who benefits from these [confrontations]? Who finances them? Undoubtedly the leadership of the terrorist ultra-right party Popular Will,” Maduro declared, referring to the party of Lopez and Guaido.

He added that today’s actions would not go “unpunished,” explaining that eight military officers and policemen were wounded in the armed confrontations, before going on to blast US leaders for their role in endorsing the coup attempt. Maduro also showed his appreciation for the tens of thousands who mobilized to defend the presidential palace beginning in the early hours of Tuesday.

The Venezuelan president, who was accompanied by high-ranking political and military leaders, ended his speech by calling for a “massive mobilization” on May 1st to celebrate workers’ day and “defend peace.”

Crowds gathered outside Miraflores Palace on Tuesday morning. (@OrlenysOV)

US officials also weighed in during the day, with National Security Advisor John Bolton warning Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Supreme Court President Maikel Moreno that this was their “last chance” to support Guaido. President Donald Trump likewise tweeted that the US “stands with the People of Venezuela and their Freedom!”

The coup attempt was also condemned by world leaders, with Bolivian President Evo Morales “vigorously condemning” the putschand Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel rejecting “an attempt to fill the country with violence.”

The European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini issued a statement in the afternoon, rejecting “any form of violence” and urging “restraint,” in contrast with European Parliament President Antonio Tajani, who tweeted his support for the unfolding coup. For his part, UN Secretary General also called for “maximum restraint” and for “immediate steps” to be taken to restore calm.

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Featured image: The military coup attempt led by Juan Guaido and Leopoldo Lopez was unsuccessful. (@leopoldolopez)

The Following text is Section 6 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

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Contents 

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11.  Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO

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1. Multiple factors make Libya important in the eyes of the United States and the European powers. It has the largest oil reserves in Africa, precious for its high quality and low cost of extraction, and large reserves of natural gas. On these, the Libyan state maintains strong control, leaving limited profit margins to US and European companies. In addition to black gold, Libya has white gold: the immense reserve of fossil water from the Nubian aquifer, which extends under Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad. Relevant are the sovereign funds, the capital that the Libyan state has invested abroad, in particular to provide Africa with its own financial bodies and its own currency.

2. On the eve of the 2011 war, the United States and the European powers “froze”, or seized, the Libyan sovereign funds, delivering a mortal blow to the entire project. The emails of Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State of the Obama administration in 2011), which came to light later, confirmed the real purpose of the war: to block Gaddafi’s plan to use Libyan sovereign funds to create autonomous financial bodies of the African Union and an African currency as an alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc (the currency that 14 African countries, ex-French colonies are forced to use). It was Clinton – the New York Times would later document – who had President Obama sign “a document authorizing a covert operation in Libya and the supply of weapons to the rebels”.

3. Tribal sectors hostile to the government of Tripoli and Islamic groups that had until a few months before been defined as terrorists were financed and armed. At the same time special forces infiltrated Libya, including thousands of easily disguised Qatari commandos. The entire operation was led by the United States, first through the African Command, then through NATO under US command.

4. On 19 March 2011, Libya’s air-sea bombing began. In seven months, US/NATO air forces carried out 30,000 missions, of which 10,000 were attacks involving the use of over 40,000 bombs and missiles. Italy participated in this war using its military bases and forces and tearing up the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between the two countries. For the war on Libya, Italy made seven air bases (Trapani, Gioia del Colle, Sigonella, Decimomannu, Aviano, Amendola and Pantelleria) available to the US/NATO forces, providing technical assistance and supplies. The Italian Air Force participated in the war by carrying out over a thousand missions, and the Italian Navy engaged on several fronts.

5. With the US/NATO war of 2011, the Libyan state was demolished and Gaddafi himself assassinated. That State was demolished which, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean facing Italy, maintained “high levels of economic growth” (as the World Bank itself documented in 2010), recording “high indicators of human development” including universal access to primary and secondary education with 46% of the population at university level. Despite the disparities, the standard of living of the Libyan population was considerably higher than that of other African countries. This was evidenced by the fact that over two million immigrants, mostly Africans, found work in Libya.

6. Sub-Saharan African immigrants were also affected by the war, who, persecuted on charges of collaborating with Gaddafi, were imprisoned or forced to flee. Many, driven by desperation, attempted the crossing of the Mediterranean towards Europe. Those who lost their lives were also victims of the war in which NATO demolished the Libyan state.

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Sections 7-16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research

This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.

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Was it really a military coup? 

Anybody who has lived in Caracas, knows that you cannot wage a spontaneous military coup starting up in Chacaito, an upper middle class residential area, with a view to eventually marching towards the Miraflores presidential palace located in the historical centre of Caracas, without getting caught in dense traffic.  

There are important historical precedents of failed coups caught up in traffic.

Guaido presents the operation as the “Final phase” of “Operation Freedom.” ???

An attempted coup or violent street riots?

Lopez and Guaido released videos on social media, calling on the armed forces to back their efforts and urging supporters to take to the streets, in what they termed as the “final phase” of the so-called “Operation Freedom.” Large crowds of anti-government protesters, as well as opposition lawmakers, made their way to the Altamira overpass. (Venezuela Analysis, May 1, 2019)

The government responded by sending in the riot police, with the Armed Forces using tear gas against the protesters.

This spontaneous so-called military putsch was meant to fail.

Visibly, it was not a carefully planned operation. And Washington was fully aware from the outset that it would fail.  In fact it was carefully staged “not to succeed”:

The scene then saw armed confrontations between the soldiers that backed Juan Guaido and those inside La Carlota airbase.

[Carlota is not a full-fledged military base, it is a former private airport, largely defunct. It is now under the jurisdiction of the State of Miranda, used for both military and civilian emergencies]

According to witnesses in La Carlota [air base], the Venezuelan armed forces fired tear gas towards the Altamira overpass, where civilian protesters began to gather, whereas Guaido’s soldiers returned live fire. Riot police also appeared on the scene to try and disperse the crowds. There are reports of protesters wounded and arrested that are unconfirmed at the time of writing.

At the same time, many of the originally deployed soldiers withdrew from the scene, later revealing that they had been “deceived” by their superiors. Simultaneously, Chavista leaders took to state and social media to denounce what they termed a coup in progress, and large crowds gathered to defend Miraflores Presidential Palace.

Guaido later attempted to lead a march, including some armed soldiers, into western Caracas but was stopped by Venezuelan National Guard forces in Chacaito, some 10 kilometers away from Miraflores.(Venezuela Analysis, May 1, 2019)

From Washington’s standpoint, the ‘putsch” nonetheless served a “useful” purpose. It created a “narrative”, which serves as propaganda and media disinformation.  In turn, the Western media goes into high gear.

The “coup” becomes a talking point for the Bolton -Pompeo national security team. It becomes a pretext and a justification for US military intervention in the name of Democracy at some future date. See Pompeo below

National security Advisor John Bolton calls upon Venezuela’s military to intervene, with US support.

Mild thunder before the storm? It sets the stage? What is the intended timeline?

A failed putsch which may be followed by a “real” US sponsored military coup at some later date? That option is already on the drawing-board of the Pentagon.

The failed coup, a sloppy intelligence operation? Unlikely. US intelligence was fully informed.

Was this event planned to fail from the very outset?

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An Important Historical Precedent, Santiago de Chile. The Failed June 29, 1973 Coup

In Chile in 1973, the September 11 coup d’Etat which led to the assassination of Allende and the installation of a military government was a carefully prepared military-intelligence operation supported by the US. with Henry Kissinger playing a key role.

Of historical significance: The September 11, 1973 coup was preceded by a failed coup on June 29, 1973 , which, in retrospect, was intended to fail.

In 1973, I was visiting professor at the Catholic University of Chile. The following text is an excerpt from an article I wrote in Santiago de Chile in the immediate wake of September 11, 1973 military coup against the democratically elected government of president Salvador Allende.

Bear in mind: The circumstances of  Chile in 1973 as well as the command structure of the (Chilean) Armed Forces were very different to those of Venezuela in 2019.

In the course of the months of July-August 1973, following the June 29, 1973 failed coup, important shifts occurred within Chile’s Armed Forces.In turn, the Christian Democrats were pressuring Allende to bring the military into the government.

Chile: The June 29, 1973 Failed Coup

On June 29, 1973, Coronal Roberto Souper led his tank division in an isolated attack on La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, in the hope that other units of the armed forces would join in. The June coup had initially been planned for the morning of September 27 by Patria y Libertad as well as by several high ranking military officers. The plans were found out by Military Intelligence and the coup was called off at 6pm on the 26th. A warrant for the arrest of Coronal Souper had been issued. Confronted with knowledge of his impending arrest, Colonel Souper in consultation with the officers under his command, decided to act in a most improvised fashion. At 9 am, amidst morning rush hour traffic, Tank Division Number Two drove down Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago’s main down-town avenue towards the Presidential Palace.

While the aborted June Coup had the appearance of an insolated and uncoordinated initiative, there was evidence of considerable support in various sectors of the Navy as well as from Air Force General Gustovo Leigh, now [September 1973] member of the military junta [on 11 September General Leigh integrated the military Junta headed by General Pinochet]. According to well-informed sources, several high ranking officers in the aero-naval base of Quintero near Valparaiso had proposed the bombing of State enterprises controlled by militant left wing groups, as well as the setting up of an air corridor to transport navy troops. The latter were slated to join up with the forces of Colonel Souper in Santiago.

The June trial coup was «useful» indicating to the seditious elements within the Chilean Armed Forces that an isolated and uncoordinated effort would fail. After June 29, the right-wing elements in the Navy and the Air Force were involved in a process of consolidation aimed at gaining political support among officers and sub-officers. The Army, however, was still under the control of Commander in Chief General Carols Prats, who had previously integrated Allende’s cabinet and who was a firm supporter of constitutional government.

Meanwhile in the political arena, the Christian Democrats were pressuring Allende to bring in members of the Military into the Cabinet as well as significantly revise the programme and platform of the Unidad Popular. Party leaders of the government coalition considered this alternative [proposed by the Christian democrats] as a « legalized military coup» (golpe legal) and advised Allende to turn it down. Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Socialist Party had demanded that an endorsement of the programme of the Popular Unity coalition by the military be a sina qua non condition for their entry into the Cabinet. Upon the impossibility of bringing in the Military into the Cabinet on acceptable terms, Allende envisaged the formation of a so-called “Cabinet of Consolidation” composed of well known personalities. Fernando Castillo, rector of the Catholic University and a member of the Christian Democratic Party, Felipe Herrera, President of the Inter-|American Development Bank and other prominent personalities were approached but declined. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Ingredients of a Military Coup, Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, September 1973)

Minor edits to this text on May 1-2, 2019

The Russian leader’s wholehearted defense of China’s Belt & Road Initiative at last week’s yearly forum on this global series of megaprojects stands in stark contrast to the position of India’s Prime Minister, thus reinforcing the notion that Putin and Modi are at serious odds with one another when it comes to BRI irrespective of their Great Powers’ mutually beneficial and highly lucrative transactional relationship with one another.

Indian Intransigence

President Putin’s press conference at last week’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) Forum in Beijing was a well articulated masterclass in defense of this global series of megaprojects that has come under increasingly sharp criticism from China’s geopolitical rivals. One of the most outspoken countries vehemently opposed to BRI is India because of its maximalist approach to the Kashmir Conflict by which it claims the entirety of the global pivot state of Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region through which the Silk Road’s flagship investment of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) traverses. India is also tacitly opposed to BRI in principle because it understands that this is the vehicle for the Chinese-driven Multipolar World Order to spread across the planet, a scenario that decision makers in New Delhi deeply fear because they’re afraid that it’ll relegate their country to becoming “junior partner” of the People’s Republic. This in turn has made them all the more receptive to the US’ manipulatively tantalizing promises that a military-strategic partnership with America is the best way to promote India’s 21st-century interests, an emerging development which is actually destabilizing Eurasia to Washington’s divide-and-rule gain.

Russian Reservations

That explains why Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister called out the US for using India to “contain” China at the end of last year and also why Foreign Minister Lavrov said that his country regards the “Indo-Pacific Region” nomenclature that New Delhi is so fond of as an “artificially imposed” pro-American concept. Furthermore, awareness of these two interconnected policy positions by Russia allows one to better understand the “balancing” modalities of Moscow’s “Return to South Asia“, which is the diversification of this Great Power’s previous regional strategic dependence on India and its recent embrace of Pakistan as described in detail by Valdai Club programme director Oleg Barabanov in his visionary piece earlier this year about “Russia and the Search for Balance Between India and Pakistan“. Despite the dynamics of Russia and India gradually moving closer to one another’s geopolitical adversaries of the US and China & Pakistan respectively, the Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership is still mutually beneficial and highly lucrative for both even if it’s become mostly transactional in recent years as a result of these developments.

BRI Might Break The Russian-Indian Bond

Still, both Great Powers’ polar opposite approaches to BRI are a serious cause for concern since they hold with it the possibility that this growing strategic divergence will inevitably lead to the worsening of their relations in the future, especially in the event that India decides to politicize what might by then be Russia’s de-facto participation in its South Asian component through N-CPEC+. After all, President Putin declared during his keynote speech at last week’s event that Russia will merge its Eurasian Economic Union integration platform with China’s much larger BRI one, with the unstated implication being that Moscow will ultimately cooperate in some capacity or another with BRI’s flagship investment of CPEC, thus leading to a “strategic security dilemma” with its decades-long Indian partner that is obsessively opposed to that project. It might only a matter of time before this fault line provokes problems in the Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership, especially after President Putin’s wholehearted defense of BRI last week put him at serious odds with Modi.

Putin Is A True Believer In BRI

To accentuate that point, the analysis will close with a republication of President Putin’s enthusiastically supportive remarks on BRI that he made in response to a loaded question doubting its benefits for Russia, proving that the Russian President is a true believer in everything that BRI stands for and that he’s therefore bound to clash with the Indian Prime Minister whose views on this issue are the complete opposite of his own even if the two keep their heated disagreements behind closed doors in order to continue milking their countries’ mutually beneficial and highly lucrative transactional relationship with one another:

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(boldened text is the author’s own and done to draw attention to important passages)

“Question: Good afternoon. The Belt and Road is a very ambitious project – to the extent that it raises concerns in some. China is not a country that makes plans only for years ahead – it makes plans for decades proceeding not from billions but from trillions of dollars. This leads to the question, is this China’s project or is it beneficial for other participants? Is it beneficial for Russia?

Vladimir Putin: China is a vast country. I have mentioned that according to open sources and IMF data, China is the world’s top economy as regards purchasing power parity. It is considerably lower per capita than, say, in the United States, but the volume is higher. Therefore, of course, China has plans for its development, and they are immense and ambitious; when China implements anything it uses a highly pragmatic approach to achieve its tasks.

China is our strategic partner; this is obvious from all indicators and parameters. China is Russia’s top trading partner. Our aim in 2018 was to reach the volume of $100 billion, and we exceed that, at $108 billion. And we have good prospects for development.

When the country’s leadership and President Xi Jinping formulate these plans and set development tasks for themselves and for the country – this is a very pragmatic approach. Just like us or any other country, they are governed by their national interests. This is normal.

China implements this in a civilised and delicate way, making sure proposals for common development meet the interests of the vast majority of international participants, if not all. Generally speaking, China has offered nothing new; what it is doing is actually making attempts to reaffirm the principles set out by the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, and many of our colleagues are mentioning this backstage like they did at the last meeting. What is China’s goal? Stability.

What is the reason for this? China’s economy is immense, and the domestic market is growing. But today, what China produces is basically oriented towards foreign markets.

Of course, domestic consumption will gradually increase with the overall growth of people’s incomes. Today China is interested in pushing its products to foreign markets, which is a natural aspiration for any country. For example, the Swedish economy is almost entirely focused on exports, and the same applies to the German economy. China simply has more products to offer. So how should China respond when it faces certain restrictions and attempts by some countries to stop its development? What should China do? It must strengthen the fundamental tenets of global economic relations, and create conditions for promoting its products. How can this be done? By developing transport infrastructure, port facilities, air, rail and motor transport, and building roads. This is exactly what China is doing. This was how it all started, but later it became obvious both in terms of China’s growth and for us as well, that this would not be enough. We needed to strengthen the fundamental tenets of international economic relations.

Is Russia interested in this? Of course, it is. Considering the high volume of trade and the fact that it is growing, we are certainly interested in benefiting from the transit potential of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Baikal-Amur Mainline, and we intend to invest heavily in them, as well as in motor transport and roads. We have earmarked trillions of rubles for infrastructure development. Why are we doing this? In order to make effective use of our country’s transit potential and to be able to engage in mutual import and export operations.

China acts in a highly civilised manner. For many years, we have been raising the issue of the need to increase the share of engineering goods in our trade. This is now beginning to materialise, which is attributable among other things to the position adopted by China’s leadership. I am very grateful to President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang for their consistent efforts to improve China’s trade patterns with Russia.

Does this meet our interests? Absolutely. I think that this initiative has a very bright future ahead of it, since almost all of us are interested in this, as I have already said.No one wants to face any restrictions, no one wants any trade wars, maybe with the exception of those who are behind these processes. In any case, an overwhelming majority, nearly 100 percent strongly believe that these restrictions and wars undermine the global economy and its development. As strange as it may sound, the global economy as a whole needs the liberal values that China currently champions.

It is for this reason that I believe that this initiative will develop further, which can also be explained by Chinese philosophy: they advance with extreme caution and not only seek to take into consideration the interests of their partners, but actually do so in their political and practical activities. The world has a very positive view of these developments.”

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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 Oriental Review

Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019: More than half a dozen bomb blasts shook the country killing from 250 to more than 350 people. Depending on who counts, the death toll varies. The devastation took place in in several catholic churches and luxury hotels. Other explosions, including from – what they say – are suicide bombers, have since killed another several dozens of people. Many are children, women – christen worshippers. Why the luxury hotels? Western (Christian) tourists?

Yesterday, another explosion ripped through a suspicious building, killing 18, including children and women. Again, they, the ‘authorities’, say suicide bombers, who didn’t want their ‘cache’ to be discovered. Conveniently they are all dead – the “suicide bombers”. Nobody can ask them any questions.

There was a lot of confusion, and still is, all through Sri Lanka. Nobody claimed credit for the massacres. There were rumors that Sri Lanka’s President received warnings ahead of the attacks from foreign intelligence, but ignored them. The President denies these allegations. And the explosions continue.

Finally, the verdict is in. The culprits are an Islamic terrorist group, associated with ISIS. What else is new.

Sri Lanka’s population is composed of about 70% Buddhists, 13% Hindus, almost 10% Muslims, mainly Sunni, the Salafi version, and about 7% Christians. The New York times reports that the accused mastermind of the terror attacks was strongly influenced by Wahhabism, the same extreme hardliners that control most of Saudi Arabia.

Hatred between religions seems on the rise. In New Zealand a few weeks ago a white supremacist assaulted a mosque, killing 50. This past weekend, a shooting in a Synagogue near San Diego, California, killed a woman. The murderer said he was inspired by the New Zealand massacre. Are these spontaneous, interreligious mini-wars part of a foreign directed ‘divide to conquer’ effort, a strategy that has been used by empires for centuries, but seems to be alive and well with the current Washington based empire?

MintPress News reports that

“Sri Lanka Easter attacks are the handiwork of terrorists returning from fighting in Syria, practicing the Saudi-backed Wahhabi Salafist ideology,”adding, “though not confirmed yet, they, [the attacks], are in keeping with the modus operandi of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi terrorism worldwide. [The] Saudi sponsorship of Salafi Wahhabi dogma [is found] across the globe. From Boko Haram to ISIS, and from the Taliban to Al Qaeda, a common ideological thread runs through these terror groups. This is the Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi Salafi ideology whose South Asian counterpart is Deobandi.  For abbreviation purposes, it is becoming increasingly common to term this interconnected ideology as WSD (Wahhabi Salafi Deobandi).”

May we expect a wave of Saudi-sponsored WSD terrorism in the east too? – Is the horror Saudi government protected by the US, because it does its bidding? And this bidding leads to making gradually Islam extremism the justification for NATO bases around the globe? – Perhaps in Sri Lanka, tomorrow? So far Sri Lanka is clean from NATO. Sri Lanka has not even an association agreement with NATO.

Just look at the world-geostrategic location of Sri Lanka, linking the Arabian Sea with the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka may also have a direct, open-sea connection with the small British island of Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Archipelago, north-east of Madagascar. Diego Garcia hosts the US’s largest Navy base outside the American Continent. Many of the drone killings in Yemen, Syria and other places in the Middle East originate from Diego Garcia. The “civil war” in Syria was (and still is) largely directed from Diego Garcia, as well as from Djibouti.

Wouldn’t it be logical for NATO to set up base in Sri Lanka to control South East Asia? Saudi guided WSD attacks would create the necessary chaos justifying Western secret services – plus NATO – to descend on Colombo, to create further protests and anarchy – a never-ending internal strife, giving the war industry a new never-ending flow of profit, hence, further justifying the never-ending war on terror – and, thereby, moving yet an inch closer to Full Spectrum Dominance over Mother Earth and her hapless spectators, what western humanity has become – a bunch of complacent consumers, drenched in turbo-capitalist market ideology, too comfortable to go on the barricades.

The key and engine to all of this is NATO, whose modus operandi is killing for a living, for dominance and for profit. If there is ever to be Peace – and that’s what the vast majority of the inhabitants of this globe wants – I’m not exaggerating pretending that 99.99% of world population wants to live in peace – then NATO must go, NATO must be dismantled.

So, Europe which has the largest membership in NATO (27 out of 29 nations) has to put the money where her mouth is: Europe calls for Peace, Europe claims to be Peace-loving – really? Then put your money into creating Peace – pulling out of NATO, refusing at once to fund this killing machine under the pretext of “protecting Europe”. Protecting Europe from what? From whom? – Not from Russia – despite all the highly propagandized and highly corporate-funded Russiagate / Russiaphobia, exacerbated by a new artificially implanted fear – China. These countries have no history of expansion, like the west.

They only seek friendly relations of trade, of transport, cultural and research interconnectivity within the supercontinent, Eurasia, and ultimately, they promote a multi-polar world. The best example is the Chinese President Xi’s ingenuity – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that just finished its highly successful forum in Beijing – where more than 120 nations signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) and cooperation agreements with China for tens of billions of dollars equivalent. – What a way of cooperating, instead of sowing western-style belligerence.

Europe and the rest of the world is not in danger, except in danger of itself for being a vassal of the US and for hosting 30-plus NATO bases which would be first in the line of fire, if the east is forced to defend itself from that permanent Pentagon-NATO driven aggression.

Europe withhold your funding for NATO, get out of NATO, dismantle NATO, – NOW, before NATO sets up yet another base in Asia, before NATO spreads more death around the globe.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

This interview was conducted and published in November 2016.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated that Hillary Clinton’s Clinton Foundation and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL/ISIS) are funded from the same sources.

He was speaking about the organisation’s latest release of Clinton emails, during an interview on the John Pilger Special show that is to be exclusively broadcast by RT, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.

The interview took place in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange has been residing since August 2012. The footage was released in November 2016

Mandatory Credit: Dartmouth Films

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Earlier last month I was interviewed by the FNA international news agency on the income inequality trend in the US and asked whether Trump policies have been contributing to it. The following is the verbatim transcript of the interview published April 6, now in English translation.

Below is the full text of the interview conducted by FNA:

FNA: The US has been experiencing higher GDP under President Trump in the last 2 years. Is this economic growth shared with average or low-paid Americans?

Jack Rasmus: The Trump tax cuts passed in early 2018 amounted to more than $4.5 trillion over the decade to wealthy households, businesses, investors and corporations, which have been ‘front-loaded’ in 2018. Offsetting this are $1.5 trillion in tax hikes for wage earners, that begins to hit this year and accelerates after 2022. Assumptions about 3% GDP growth for another decade, with no recession, produces a further offsetting of $1 or more. The result is the $1.5 trillion reported by the press. The $4.5 trillion cuts for business and investors have not gone into real investment and generated the Trump 2017-18 GDP growth rates.

Real investment in structures and equipment declined steadily over 2018 as the Trump tax cuts took effect: measured in percent terms compared to the preceding quarter, residential construction was negative every quarter in 2018. Commercial construction, with a lag, turned negative in the second half of 2018. And equipment spending fell from 8.5% in the first quarter to 3.4% by October 2018.

So if the Trump tax cuts did not go into real investment, creating real employment or real GDP, where did it go? It went into stock buybacks, dividend payouts, and M&A activity. Several US banks’ research departments estimate buybacks plus dividends for just the Fortune 500 largest companies in the US will reach a record $1.3 trillion in 2018. Add the largest 2000 or 5000 companies and its close to $2 trillion. Hundreds of billions more for M&A. This diversion of the Trump tax cuts to financial markets is the main determinant driving stock markets (even after corrections) and other financial asset markets.

The government grossly over-reports wage gains for the average and low paid workers in the US. An independent source reports show that more than half of US workers received no wage gain at all in 2018. The official reported wage gains of 3% are skewed to the top 10% of the labor force and, moreover, the data is for full time employed only. So average workers at best stagnated, with most experiencing a decline in real wages. The rate of inflation in the US is under-estimated for median worker family households, and inflation is rising for rents, medical, education, and other major items in household budgets. So the immediate future will mean even less real wage gains for the majority of US workers. If they were doing so well, as Trump and even the press report, why is it that 7 million of them have defaulted on their auto loans? And why is credit card, auto loans, and education loan debt now all over $1 trillion each?

FNA: The US has a population of over 325 million people with undocumented immigrants estimated to be somewhere around 10 to 12 million people who are mainly the lowest paid workers. Do you believe in President Trump’s claim of immigrants’ invading American economy?

JR: Immigrants are certainly not invading. The 10-12 million number has been stable for several years. And for immigrants for some countries, like Mexico, the numbers are in sharp decline. It is true that more immigrants are coming from Central American countries like Honduras, Salvador and Guatemala. But that is due to the economic crises and violent breakdown of the social order in those countries, which is due largely to US support for the corrupt elites of those countries who encourage the gang violence in their countries and do nothing about the economic crises. If there is a problem with immigration in the US, it is a problem of highly educated tech workers being brought in on H1-B and L-1 visas, and rich Asians who can buy themselves a ‘green card’ residency by promising to spend $50,000 when they come. These groups are taking the real jobs, the high paying tech and other professional jobs and have been since the 1990s. But Trump is agreeing with the US tech companies to keep bringing them in, taking jobs US workers should and could get. Trump’s immigration policy and draconian action against immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere is about his re-election plans in 2020. By creating ‘enemies’ within and outside the US, he diverts his political base from the real problems of America. Blame the foreigner in our midst has always been a useful fascist argument. And Trump is marching down that road, as witnessed in his latest Constitutional power grab by declaring national emergencies to build his Wall and invoking phony national security to justify his trade wars.

FNA: Donald Trump represents the capitalist economy, which has not worked well for the majority of Americans. Do you believe the widening gap between the rich and the poor in his era can boost Americans’ interest in socialism?

JR: The income and wealth gaps in the US are not only widening but doing so at an accelerating pace. US neoliberal policy under Obama was to subsidize capital incomes through Federal Reserve cheap money and by extending and expanding his predecessor, George W. Bush, tax cuts for business and investors. Trump policy has accelerated the tax cuts and now stopped the Fed from raising interest rates. The direct consequence is booming stock and corporate bond markets, fed by $1 trillion annual stock buybacks and dividend payouts every year since 2011 (now at record $1.3 trillion in 2018). As wage incomes for the 90% of Americans remain stagnant, barely rise, or decline, the direct consequence is accelerating income inequality and wealth gaps.

Will this boost interest in socialism? It already has. A clear majority, well over 60%, of people aged 34 and younger in the work force, have indicated in various recent polls that they prefer socialism over capitalism. It’s not by accident, therefore, that Trump and the US business press has been launching an offensive to attack the idea of socialism once again. This shift in public opinion will continue as the Trump policies continue to create a growing gap in income, wealth and opportunity in America.

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“Sexual predation by police officers happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit.”—Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper

How could this be happening right under our noses?

That’s what readers wanted to know after my column went viral about the extent to which young children are being bought and sold for sex in America.

Where are the police when these children—some as young as 9 years old—are being raped repeatedly?

For that matter, what is the Trump Administration doing about the fact that adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in suburbs, cities and towns across this nation?

I’ll tell you what the government is doing: little to nothing.

While America’s children are being menaced by sexual predators, the Trump Administration and its congressional cohorts continue to wage endless wars, run up the national debt, and distract the populace with vitriol and kabuki political theater.

The police are not much better.

In too many instances, the cops are worse.

Indeed, while there are certainly many good cops in this country—and I’ve had the honor of working with a number of them—the bad cops have become symptomatic of a criminal justice system that is deeply rotten through and through.

We can no longer count on police to save us from the worst in our society.

In many cases, rather than being part of the solution, America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—have largely become part of the problem. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”

Let’s start with sex trafficking.

In a number of cases, victims of sex trafficking report that police are among those “buying” young girls and women for sex.

In other words, as a recent study by the State Commission on the Status of Women and Arizona State University makes clear, “victims are being exploited by the very people who are supposed to protect them: police officers.”

In New York, seven NYPD cops—three sergeants, two detectives and two officers—were accused of running brothels that sold 15-minute sexual encounters, raking in more than $2 million over the course of 13 months. Two of the cops, brothers, were charged with holding a bachelor party at one of the brothels where “they got the place for nothing and they used the prostitutes.”

In California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.

A week-long sting in Florida ended with 277 arrests of individuals accused of sex trafficking, including doctors, pharmacists and police officers.

Sex trafficking victims in Hawaii described “cops asking for sexual favors to more coercive situations like I’ll let you go if you do X, Y, or Z for me.”

One study found that “over 14 percent of sex workers said that they had been threatened with arrest unless they had sex with a police officer.” In many states, it’s actually legal for police to have sex with prostitutes during the course of sting operations.

While the problem of cops engaged in sex trafficking is part of the American police state’s seedy underbelly that doesn’t get addressed enough, equally alarming is the number of cops who commit sex crimes against those they encounter as part of their job duties, a largely underreported number given the “blue wall of silence” that shields police misconduct.

Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper describes cases in which cops fondled prisoners, made false traffic stops of attractive women, traded sexual favors for freedom, had sex with teenagers and raped children.

Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.

Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen.

According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens. One young woman was assaulted during a “ride along” with an officer, who said in a taped confession: “The badge gets you the p—y and the p—y gets your badge, you know?”

For example, a Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.

In 2017, two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.

The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”

One young girl, J.E., was kidnapped by a Border Patrol agent when she was 14 years old, taken to his apartment and raped.

“In the apartment, there were two beds on top of the other, children’s bunk beds, and ropes there, too. They were shoelaces. For my wrists and my feet. My mind was blank,” recalls J.E. “I was trying to understand everything. I didn’t know what to do. My feet were tied up. I would look at him and he had a gun. And that frightened me. I asked him why, and he answered me that he was doing this to me because I was the prettiest one of the three.”

Two teenage girls accused a Customs and Border Protection officer of forcing them to strip, fondling them, then trying to get them to stop crying by offering chocolates, potato chips and a blanket. The government settled the case for $125,000.

Mind you, this is the same government that has been separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them up in detention centers, where they are easy prey for sexual predators. So far, the government has received more than 4500 complaints about sexual abuse at those child detention facilities.

This is also the same government that “lost” almost 1500 migrant children. Who knows how many of those children ended up in the hands of traffickers?

The police state’s sexual assaults of children are sickening enough, but when you add sex crimes against grown women into the mix, the picture becomes even more sordid.

According to The Washington Post, “research on ‘police sexual misconduct’—a term used to describe actions from sexual harassment and extortion to forcible rape by officers—overwhelmingly concludes that it is a systemic problem.”

Investigative journalist Andrea Ritchie has tracked national patterns of sexual violence by police officers during traffic stops, in addition to heightened risk from minor offenses, drug arrests and police interactions with teenagers.

Victims of domestic abuse, women of color, transgender women, women who use drugs or alcohol, and women involved in the sex trade are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by police.

One Oklahoma City police officer allegedly sexually assaulted at least seven women while on duty over the course of four months, including a 57-year-old grandmother who says she was forced to give the cop oral sex after he pulled her over.

A Philadelphia state trooper, eventually convicted of assaulting six women and teenagers, once visited the hospital bedside of a pregnant woman who had attempted suicide, and groped her breasts and masturbated.

These aren’t isolated incidents.

According to research from Bowling Green State University, police officers in the U.S. were charged with more than 400 rapes over a 9-year period. During that same time period, 600 police officers were arrested for forcible fondling; 219 were charged with forcible sodomy; 186 were arrested for statutory rape; 58 for sexual assault with an object; and 98 with indecent exposure.

Sexual assault is believed to be the second-most reported form of misconduct against police officers after the use of excessive force, making up more than 9% of all complaints.

Even so, these crimes are believed to be largely underreported so much so that sex crimes may in fact be the number one form of misconduct among police officers.

So why are the numbers underreported?

“The women are terrified. Who are they going to call? It’s the police who are abusing them,” said Penny Harrington, the former police chief of Portland, Ore.

One Philadelphia cop threatened to arrest a teenager for carjacking unless she had sex with him.

“He had all the power. I had no choice,” testified the girl. “Who was I? He had his badge.”

This is the danger of a police state that invests its henchmen with so much power that they don’t even need to use handcuffs or a gun to get what they want.

Making matters worse, most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them.

“Unlike other types of police misconduct, the abuse of police power to coerce sex is little addressed in training, and rarely tracked by police disciplinary systems,” conclude Nancy Phillips and Craig R. McCoy writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “This official neglect makes it easier for predators to escape punishment and find new victims.”

Unfortunately, this is a problem that is hiding in plain sight, covered up by government agencies that are failing in their constitutional duties to serve and protect “we the people.”

That thin blue line of knee-jerk adulation and absolute loyalty to police above and beyond what the law requires—a line frequently pushed by President Trump—is creating a menace to society that cannot be ignored.

An investigative report into police misconduct illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem when police go rogue. According to USA Today:

At least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the USA have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade… Officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women. They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk and abused their spouses. Despite their role as public servants, the men and women who swear an oath to keep communities safe can generally avoid public scrutiny for their misdeeds. The records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring some records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed. Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported… They include 22,924 investigations of officers using excessive force, 3,145 allegations of rape, child molestation and other sexual misconduct and 2,307 cases of domestic violence by officers.

As researcher Jonathan Blanks notes,

“The system is rigged to protect police officers from outside accountability. The worst cops are going to get the most protection.”

Hyped up on the power of the badge and their weaponry, protected from charges of wrongdoing by police unions and government agencies, and empowered by rapidly advancing tools—technological and otherwise—that make it all too easy to identify, track and take advantage of vulnerable members of society, predators on the nation’s police forces are growing in number.

“It can start with a police officer punching a woman’s license plate into a police computer – not to see whether a car is stolen, but to check out her picture,” warns investigative journalists Nancy Phillips and Craig R. McCoy. “If they are not caught, or left unpunished, the abusers tend to keep going, and get worse, experts say.”

So where does this leave us?

The courts, by allowing the government’s desire for unregulated, unaccountable, expansive power to trump justice and the rule of law, have turned away from this menace. Politicians, eager for the support of the powerful police unions, have turned away from this menace. Religious leaders who should know better but instead have silenced their moral conscience in order to cozy up to political power have turned away from this menace.

Distracted by political theater, divided by politics, disenfranchised by a legislative and judicial system that renders us powerless in the face of the police state’s many abuses, “we the people” have also turned a blind eye to this menace.

We must stop turning away from this menace in our midst.

For starters, police should not be expected—or allowed—to police themselves.

Misconduct by local police has become a national problem. Therefore, the response to this national problem must start at the local level.

This is no longer a matter of a few bad apples.

The entire system has become corrupted and must be reformed.

Greater oversight is needed, yes, but also greater accountability and more significant consequences for assaults.

Andrea Ritchie’s piece in The Washington Post provides some practical suggestions for reform ranging from small steps to structural changes (greater surveillance of police movements, heightened scrutiny of police interactions and traffic stops, and more civilian oversight boards), but as she acknowledges, these efforts still don’t strike at the root of the problem: a criminal justice system that protects abusers and encourages abuse.

It’s difficult to say whether modern-day policing with its deep-seated corruption, immunity from accountability, and authoritarian approach to law enforcement attracts this kind of deviant behavior or cultivates it, but empowering police to view themselves as the best, or even the only, solution to the public’s problems, while failing to hold them accountable for misconduct, will only deepen the policing crisis that grows deadlier and more menacing by the day.

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This article was originally published on the author’s website: The Rutherford Institute.

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

Featured image is from Good Times Santa Cruz

A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19–4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.

Of the 76 total articles, opinion videos or TV commentator segments that centered on or gave more than passing attention to Venezuela, 54 (72 percent) expressed explicit support for the Maduro administration’s ouster. Eleven (14 percent) were ambiguous, but were only classified as such for lack of explicit language. Reading between the lines, most of these were clearly also pro–regime change. Another 11 (14 percent) took no position, but many similarly offered ideological ammo for those in support.

The Times published 22 pro–regime change commentaries, three ambiguous and five without a position. The Post also spared no space for the pro-Chavista camp: 22 of its articles expressed support for the end to Maduro’s administration, eight were ambiguous and four took no position. Of the 12 TV opinions surveyed, 10 were pro-regime change and two took no position.

(The Times and Post pieces were found through a Nexis search for “Venezuela” between 1/15/19–4/15/19 using each paper as a source, narrowed to opinion articles and editorials. The search was supplemented with an examination of each outlet’s opinion/blog pages. The TV commentary segments were found through Nexis searches for “Venezuela” and the name of the talkshow during the same time period, in the folders of the corresponding television network: NBC News/CBS Newstranscripts, ABC News transcripts, and PBS NewsHour. Non-opinion TV news segments were omitted. The full list of items included can be found here.)

Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change. If you’ve been reading FAIR recently (1/25/19, 2/9/19, 3/16/19)—or, indeed, since the early 2000s (4/18/02; Extra!, 11–12/05)—the anti-Maduro unanimity espoused in the most influential US media should come as no surprise.

This comes despite the existence of millions of Venezuelans who support Maduro—who was democratically elected twice by the same electoral system that won Juan Guaidó his seat in the National Assembly—and oppose US/foreign intervention. FAIR (2/20/19) has pointed out corporate media’s willful erasure of vast improvements to Venezuelan life under Chavismo, particularly for the oppressed poor, black, indigenous and mestizo populations. FAIR has also noted the lack of discussion of US-imposed sanctions, which have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 alone, and continue to devastate the Venezuelan economy.

Many authors in the sample eagerly championed the idea of the US ousting Maduro, including coup leader Juan Guiadó himself, in the Times (1/30/19) and Post (1/15/19), and on the NewsHour (2/18/19).

The Times made its official editorial opinion on the matter crystal clear at the outset of the attempted coup (1/24/19): “The Trump administration is right to support Mr. Guaidó.” Followed by FAIR’s favorite Times columnist, Bret Stephens (1/25/19):

The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president.

It’s generally a nation’s supreme court that has the final say on who is constitutionally legitimate, but in this case they can apparently be overruled by a foreign government—or a foreign newspaper columnist.

The Post editorial board also joined Team Unelected President (1/24/19):

The [Trump] administration’s best approach would be to join with its allies in initiatives that would help Venezuelans while bolstering Mr. Guaidó.

The Times even produced an opinion video (4/1/19) with Joanna Hausmann, “a Venezuelan American writer and comedian,” as she is described in her Times bio. Between sarcastic stabs at Venezuela’s “tyrannical dictator” and cute animations of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg in workout clothes”—Hausmann’s self-described “spirit animal”—come more serious declarations about the nation’s political situation:

Juan Guiadó is not an American right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically elected institution left in Venezuela…. Let’s provide humanitarian aid and support efforts to restore democracy.

The New York Times (4/1/19) neglected to mention that, unlike most of her “fellow liberals,” Joanna Hausmann is the child of an official in the Venezuelan coup government.

Odd that the Times didn’t find it necessary to note a blaring conflict of interest: Hausmann’s father is Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó’s appointed Inter-American Development Bank representative. Mint Press News (3/19/19) bluntly described him as the “neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaidó’s neoliberal agenda.”

It would be ludicrous to think the Times would withhold as blatant a connection to Maduro if one of his aides’ daughters made a snarky opinion video calling Juan Guaidó a would-be “brutal dictator”—even if our theoretical commentator was “an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own,” as Times opinion video producer Adam Ellick said in defense of the omission. Such a crucial relationship to a powerful Chavista politician would never go undisclosed—in the unlikely event that such a perspective would be tolerated in the opinion pages of an establishment paper.

These are just a few of many media pundits’ endorsements of Guaidó—someone whose name most of the Venezuelan population did not even recognize before he declared himself interim president. Put more accurately, they are endorsements of a US-backed coup attempt.

One of the more muddled regime change endorsements came from Rep. Ro Khanna’s Post op-ed (1/30/19), in which he says no! to military intervention, no! to sanctions, yet yes! to… “diplomatic efforts”:

The United States should lend its support to diplomatic efforts to find some form of power-sharing agreement between opposition parties, and only until fair elections can take place, so that there is an orderly transition of power.

“Diplomatic” is a reassuring term, until you realize that US diplomacy, as FAIR’s Janine Jackson explained on Citations Needed podcast (3/20/19), is “diplomacy where we try to get other countries to do what we want them to do”—in this case, effecting a “transition of power” in another country’s government.

Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York Times, 2/2/19) envision similar efforts for a “peaceful and negotiated transition of power,” and Khanna made sure to characterize Maduro as “an authoritarian leader who has presided over unfair elections, failed economic policies, extrajudicial killings by police, food shortages and cronyism with military leaders.”

By viewing Venezuela through the lens of Russiagate, Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post, 3/28/19) was able to present backing an attempted coup as a pro-Resistance™ position.

In other words, Maduro the Dictator must be overthrown—but don’t worry, the US would be diplomatic about it.

Those that didn’t take explicit positions nonetheless wrote articles blaming all or most of Venezuela’s woes on Maduro and Chávez. Economics wiz Paul Krugman (New York Times, 1/29/19) gave his spiel:

Hugo Chávez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.

Note that Krugman failed to mention the 57 percent reduction in extreme poverty that followed Chávez’s replacement of management of the state-owned oil industry (which has been nationalized since 1976, long before Chavismo). Nor does he acknowledge the impact of US sanctions, or any other sort of US culpability for Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Caroline Kennedy and Sarah K. Smith (Washington Post, 2/5/19) did not explicitly blame Maduro and Chávez for Venezuela’s “spiral downward,” but similarly ignored evidenced US involvement in that spiral. There are only so many places where you can point fingers without naming names.

Dictatorship-talk—writers lamenting the horrific and helpless situation under an alleged “dictator”—characterized many of the ambiguous and no-position articles. In the Post (1/24/19), Megan McArdle asked:

You have to look at Venezuela today and wonder: Is this what we’re seeing, the abrupt end of Venezuela’s years-long economic nightmare? Has President Nicolás Maduro’s ever-more-autocratic and incompetent regime finally completed its long pilgrimage toward disaster?

By simply describing the declining situation of a country (Times, 2/12/19, 4/1/19) and using words like “regime” (Times, 2/14/19), “authoritarian” (Post, 1/29/19) and, of course, “dictatorship” (Post, 1/23/19; Times, 2/27/19) in reference to government officials, commentators create the pretext for regime change without explicitly endorsing it.

The Sunday talkshows and NewsHour also couldn’t find a single person to challenge the anti-Maduro narrative. They did find room, however, for three of the most passionate advocates of regime change in Venezuela: Sen. Marco Rubio (Meet the Press, 1/27/19), Donald Trump (Face the Nation, 2/3/19) and Guaidó himself (NewsHour, 2/18/19).

Other TV regime change proponents included Florida Sen. Rick Scott (Meet the Press, 2/3/19), 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls Peter Buttigieg (This Week, 2/3/19) and Amy Klobuchar (Meet the Press, 3/17/19), Sen. Tim Kaine (Face the Nation, 3/17/19), and Guaidó-appointed, Mike Pence-approved “chargé d’affaires” Carlos Vecchio (NewsHour, 3/4/19).

But leave it to Nick Schifrin of the NewsHour (1/30/19) to bring on “two views” of the US intervention question that are both pro-regime change and pro-US intervention. View No. 1 came from Isaias Medina, a former Venezuelan diplomat who resigned from his post in protest against Maduro. Medina made the unlikely claim that 94 percent of the Venezuelan population—or 129 percent of the population over the age of 14—support US intervention to overthrow the Maduro government:

Not only I, but 30 million people, support not only the US circumstance, but also the Latin American initiative to restore the rule of law, democracy and freedom in Venezuela.

View No. 2, the ostensibly anti-regime change take, came from Benjamin Gedan, who served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council as director for Venezuela and the Southern Cone. When asked if he supported Trump’s moves to sanction Maduro and possibly use US troops to oust him, Gedan responded:

I think both of those steps are problematic. I think the sense of urgency that the United States administration has shown is absolutely correct…. The question is, how can we assist the Venezuelan people [to] promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela, without harming the people themselves, or fracturing the coalition that we have built over two administrations?

The PBS NewsHour (1/30/19) had a debate over intervention in Venezuela where the “anti” side saw the US’s goal as “assist[ing] the Venezuelan people [to] promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela.”

In other words, how can we overthrow the Venezuelan government without destroying the country—or “fracturing the coalition we have built”? The US has many options on the table, but none of them involve not pursuing the overthrow of Maduro.

In the “no position” camp for TV news, New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger (Face the Nation, 1/27/19) noted that the problem with US support for Guaidó is one of  “both history and inconsistency”:

Our history in Latin America of intervening is a pretty ugly one, and the inconsistency of not applying the same standards to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the president has embraced strong men, I think may come back to make the United States look pretty hypocritical, not for the first time.

Sanger indulged in the popular “hypocrisy takedown”: The problem, as presented, isn’t that the US disrupts democracies, destroys economies and kills people, but rather that it does so inconsistently. While vaguely acknowledging the US’s horrific track record of Latin American interventions, and Trump’s cherry-picking of governments worthy of regime change, Sanger didn’t take the logical next step of calling for the US to keep its hands off Venezuela. Instead, he called Maduro’s supporters—defined as “China, Russia and Cuba”—“not a great collection,” and failed to push back against the claim that Maduro “fixed the last” election. Without a formal declaration, Sanger did all the ideological preparation for foreign-backed regime change.

That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, and that almost all the opinions explicitly or implicitly expressed support for the ouster of Venezuela’s elected president, demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the US government’s regime change policy.

This isn’t the first time that FAIR (e.g., 3/18/03, 4/18/18) has found a one-sided debate in corporate media on US intervention. When it comes to advocating the overthrow of the US government’s foreign undesirables, you can always count on opinion pages to represent all sides of why it’s a good thing. And the millions of people who beg to differ? Well, they’re just out of the question.

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Despite the positive approach by Iran Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif proposing a humanitarian exchange of prisoners between Washington and Tehran (in an attempt to break the stalemate and ease the current tension), Iranian Speaker Ali Larijani and ‘Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Brigade’ (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani both rejected any rapprochement. It is the radical general mood in Iran and its tendency towards firmness rather than flexibility that is prevailing, as a response to the severe US sanctions on Tehran. In fact, Iran is showing signs of strength, less concerned about the US “strangulation policy”, confident it can face the US establishment decision to impose “zero oil exports” and confident also that it will survive, as it has the last four decades whilst under sanctions imposed by all US Presidents since 1979.

The policy of the US establishment under President Donald Trump is to impose its hegemony and flex its muscles, adopting political and financial sanctions on countries rather than sending troops to submit opponents through a military act of war. All countries opposing the US hegemony are under the US’s spotter microscope and have been listed on the sanction’s agenda. These are Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba Nicaragua, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, Syria- and many other countries.

These US sanctions aim to burden above all the population, destroy the local economy and, in consequence, trigger a domestic uprising to reach the ultimate goal: changing the regime. The US is not aiming to intervene militarily unless the situation is ripe enough at the minimum possible cost of military effort and expense. George Bush’s previous policy of direct military interventionist era now seems out of fashion. Iran is aware of this and, in consequence, is comfortable about its domestic control of the situation. Tehran seems prepared for an economic siege for as long as President Trump is in power (until 2020) and, according to Iranian official sources, until the end of his next term if re-elected.

The White House believes Middle Eastern countries can top-up the difference needed to compensate the ‘lost’ two million Iranian barrels of oil exported on a daily basis. In a few words, the US objectives are two: preventing Iran’s oil exports and compensating for the overall loss of quantity, so as to avoid any market panic and an uncontrolled oil price. In fact, both of these US targets are unachievable.

Tehran controls not only a considerable fleet of oil tankers but also hundreds of trucks capable of transporting oil to neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq. According to well-informed sources, “Iran has expressed to its neighbours the intention to sell oil at a price much lower than the market price”, rendering any tight siege impossible. Indeed, even when the “Islamic State” (ISIS) was in control of parts of Syria and Iraq, all neighbouring countries were buying the oil from ISIS due to its low price.

Foreign Minister Zarif said

“Iran had made an offer six months ago to the Trump administration to discuss the status of the prisoners but it went unanswered”.

Iran is retaliating to US sanctions with a total rejection of any negotiation process with the US establishment- unlike what Trump was hoping for.

“There is no point in negotiating with this man (Trump). He is dangerous. Let us not make mistakes proposing to negotiate with him (alluding to Minister Zarif)”, the Iranian Speaker Ali Larijani said.

General Soleimani said

“the enemy wants to drag us to the negotiation table through economic pressure and this type of negotiation is an example of submission… Negotiation with the enemy under current conditions is pure surrender and certainly we will not give in to this humiliation”.

According to Iranian sources,

Sayyed Ali Khaminei “has always been sceptical about US intentions, even during Obama mandate, and refused to negotiate any other issues than the nuclear deal which successfully took place following President’s Hassan Rohani’s insistence on giving him and his diplomats a chance to try. Sayyed Khaminei will certainly not accept to talk to Trump whose approach towards his Middle Eastern partners is blatantly arrogant and who has no respect for any future deal by virtue of the ease with which he revokes and denies the very words he has pronounced himself!”.

Washington is hoping to force Iran to the negotiation table, while Tehran aims to disrupt the US plans. According to US officials, Iran has lost $10bn due to sanctions. Nevertheless, according to the sources,

“in the last four decades, Iran lost hundreds of billions of dollars- but without giving in- when its autonomy was at its lowest level on many industrial and basic needs fronts. Iran today is not the Iran of 1979 when the revolution took power, nor like the Iran of 1989, when it agreed to halt the war imposed by Saddam Hussein”.

It is clear that both sides, the US and Iran, are setting out red lines for one another, and both seem unwilling to move from the position they have adopted for now.

Soleimani and Larijani brought to light differences within the leadership. Zarif could not have proposed a swap of prisoners without the agreement of his direct superior, President Rouhani. Soleimani and Larijani are both of the same “house”, and both very close to Sayyed Ali Khamenei who is clearly, from the very beginning, against any rapprochement with the US.

Some analysts believe the different stands of the Iranian officials is nothing more than a distribution of roles, a theory dismissed by the same Iranian official source.

“On the contrary, it is a firm position that Iran shall not negotiate unless the US fulfils its previous commitments”.

Sayyed Ali Khaminei rejected the engagement of the country in re-negotiations with the US over any other issues, except the re-establishment of the nuclear deal, the release of Iranian assets held by the US, and the lifting of all sanctions.

Trump’s attitude in disregarding international law, ignoring the role of the United Nations, his indiscriminate imposition of sanctions on various countries, his revoking of previous deals signed by the US and his total lack of consideration for his own Middle Eastern and European partners and allies- all this will help Iran become more radical than ever. Trump is certainly pushing Iranian radicals and pragmatists towards a future unification of positions, fighting back against total US world hegemony.

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All Great Powers, including most recently even Russia and India, are increasingly expanding their influence in Africa as they seek to take part in the continent’s expected growth across this century, and CPEC provides the perfect opportunity for Pakistan to pivot there too so long as the country’s decision makers are aware of its many opportunities and successfully craft a comprehensive strategy for building mutually beneficial partnerships with those states.

Conceptual Basis

African countries don’t normally come to mind when discussing Pakistan’s future partners, but they should because CPEC is providing it with the opportunity to finally build mutually beneficial partnerships there. The flagship project of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity will eventually serve to facilitate Chinese-African trade across Pakistani territory, which has in turn made Pakistan and China’s African partners interested in expanding relations with one another. Islamabad already took the step to commence Regional Maritime Security Patrols throughout the Red Sea-Gulf of Aden region across which CPEC-transiting African-Chinese trade will traverse, so the next step is to leverage the military relationships that Pakistan’s building in this strategic maritime space to create economic opportunities for its businesses.

Most Likely Partners

In the Horn of Africa, Pakistan should follow what Russia’s doing in Eritrea by building a logistics centre in that country, Sudan, Djibouti, or Somalia as a stepping stone for eventually linking up with regional giant Ethiopia, which is the continent’s second-most-populous state and its fastest-growing economy. Moreover, the fast-moving political changes there under its new Prime Minister make it a promising country for any Great Power to deepen its engagement with, which might even be slightly easier for Pakistan than others because of Addis Ababa’s very close working relations with their mutual partners in Beijing. Moving southward, other potential countries that Pakistan should endeavour to form strategic partnerships with are Kenya and South Africa, which are the best-performing ones in their given regions and also on excellent terms with China.

Economic Opportunities

Signing deals and announcing partnerships are only symbolic actions unless they’re backed up by substance, which is why Pakistan should promote its domestic agricultural (including fertilizer) and textile products, among others, as suitable for the growing African marketplaces. The whole point of pivoting to Africa through CPEC isn’t just for the sake of Great Power prestige, but to deliver something tangible to Pakistanis at home by showing them that CPEC is more than just a “highway” across their country for China’s international trade with West Asian, European, and African countries. The rapidly growing economies in Africa provide limitless opportunities for commercial engagement with Pakistan so long as decision makers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders are motivated to pursue them, which is why a change in thinking is urgently needed.

Military Dimensions

Expanding upon the concept of CPEC facilitating Pakistan’s “Pivot to Africa”, the military component of its partnership “scouting” via the Regional Maritime Security Patrols could also spread to the realm of bilateral training deals such as the sort that Russia and Pakistan recently reached with one another, albeit with Pakistan providing the training to its African partners under this arrangement. The Pakistani Armed Forces have proven their world-class capabilities in defeating terrorism, and sharing their experiences with African colleagues could be very useful to many of them as they try to thwart the threat that terrorists in their own countries pose. In addition, Pakistanis have decades of experience participating in African peacekeeping missions, which can help them create custom security solutions for the African partners that they train.

Cross-Continental Engagement

These possible partnerships don’t have to be limited to the coastal states of the Afro-Bengal Ocean (referred to as the “Indian Ocean” in conventional parlance) most immediately connected to CPEC’s Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC), but should also include states along Africa’s Atlantic coast such as its most populous country of Nigeria. Even with the Silk Roads not yet linking them together, Pakistan could pioneer partnerships with Nigeria and the other Muslim-majority countries of the West Africa region by approaching them first and foremost from the security perspective and then eventually developing those incipient ties into an economic relationship. In other words, Pakistan’s strategy towards West Africa is the reverse of what it should attempt in East Africa, where economic relations are prioritized, and military ones follow.

Integrational Trends

Pakistan should also bear in mind that Africa is increasingly integrating its economic and security potential, the first-mentioned through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTFA) and the latter via the African Union’s peacekeeping missions, but that some individual countries will still fulfill leading functions in each of these two categories. That’s why Islamabad needs to plan its strategy in advance as opposed to “winging it” in order to make the best of its efforts. As a suggestion, the economic-military model that was previously described could be applied to several pairs of regional leaders and their neighbors in order to lay the basis for a comprehensive continental policy that eventually encompasses most of Africa and opens up a multitude of opportunities.

The Paired Approach

In any given order and in the framework of the regional leaders that should be focused on followed by their most attractive neighbours for Pakistan, these African countries are:

Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan

Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia

South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Botswana, Zimbabwe

Angola

Nigeria

Algeria

Egypt, Libya

As can be seen from the above, Pakistan’s “Pivot to Africa” truly has the potential build a multitude of partnerships all across the continent, each of which could be facilitated in their own way by CPEC.

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This article was originally published on The Nation.

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 Belt Road Initiative (BRI) also known as the One Belt One Road (OBOR) project could well emerge as the obor (the flame in Indonesian or Malay) that will blaze the trail in the evolution of a new epoch in history.

Chinese President Xi Jinping must have sensed its historical significance when he announced OBOR in 2013. Essentially an infrastructure development endeavor it seeks to initiate and support the construction of roads, railways, ports and bridges in at least 65 other countries spanning four continents. With a commitment of over 900 billion US dollars, OBOR is the biggest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in the history of our planet.

It is more than infrastructure in the conventional sense. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for instance which connects China’s Xinjiang province with Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Balochistan province will strengthen Pakistan’s energy sector, contribute to economic growth and reduce its severe trade deficit. The CPEC will also enhance cooperation between the two countries in agriculture.  There are other projects in other countries that will impact positively upon education and health care.

There is no doubt at all that OBOR will also facilitate the interaction of cultures and communities across national boundaries. This may lead to better understanding and appreciation of cultural and religious diversity. Greater respect for the differences and similarities that distinguish religions and cultures could help create an atmosphere that conduces towards social harmony.

If OBOR paves the way for positive interaction between different ethnicities and nationalities it would be replicating one of the outstanding achievements of the ancient Silk Route which was the inspiration for OBOR. Ideas and beliefs flowed along the Silk Route which connected East Asia and Southeast Asia with West Asia and East Africa to Southern Europe from about 130 BC until perhaps the middle of the 15^th century.  It is significant that it was through the Silk Route that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam spread at different times in history. It was “the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian.” Places of worship and libraries dotted the region “connecting Constantinople to Damascus, Isfahan, Samarkand, Kabul and Kashgar.”

These fabulous cities were not only centres of culture and learning but also hubs of thriving commercial enterprise. Silk was an important element in the trade that connected the sprawling network of links which was why a German geologist in the 19^th century gave it the name the “Silk Roads”. Precious stones and metals, paper and artwork, leather and hides, grains and spices, fruits and vegetables were all part of the trade and commerce that brought China and India close to Persia and Rome and vice versa.  The variety of goods and commodities available and the lands and nations that produced them endowed the Silk Route with an unprecedented global character. It was truly humankind’s first wave of globalization.

A variety of factors brought the wave to an end, among them Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the Americas and Vasco da Gama’s journey around the southern tip of Africa and on to India at the end of the 15^th century, both of which opened up new sea routes for Europe’s ascending maritime powers. Columbus in relation to the Americas and da Gama in relation to India and Asia heralded the rise of European colonialism which over the next four centuries embarked upon the conquest of land, the subjugation of people and the usurpation of natural resources that ushered in a pattern of power, control and dominance centering around Europe and later, the United States of America.

Indeed, western colonialism as it expressed itself in almost every sphere of life laid the basis for a new form of globalization which has perpetuated itself beyond the end of formal colonial rule. It is what one would call ‘hegemonic globalization’.  Hegemonic globalization has resulted in the dissemination of ideas and methods in economics and finance, politics and administration, education and science which by and large emanate from the centers of power in the West. It has shaped a world in which the interests and agendas of the dominant West supersede everything else. This is why the second wave of globalization is perceived as unjust and inimical to the well-being of the majority of the world’s citizens.

As globalization’s third wave, OBOR is opposed to hegemony. The Chinese leadership sees relationships among OBOR states as a partnership. It has no intention of imposing its will upon any other state. This was put to the test in the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) issue which saw Malaysia objecting to various terms of the agreement forged between a Chinese company and the previous Malaysian government  that were clearly detrimental to the nation’s interests. After strenuous negotiations, the agreement was revised extensively for the good of both parties.

It is not just China’s willingness to consider the interests of a partner state that facilitated a solution to the ECRL issue. The partner state should also be free of those vested interests that impede a just solution. It is important to observe that even in other collaborative efforts in which China has played a leading role such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) network and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), China has adopted a collegial approach.

Given its record, China should now elevate the principle of partnership in OBOR to a higher level by establishing an international panel consisting of seven to ten OBOR states that would be given the task of monitoring and evaluating the implementation of OBOR projects and activities. The proposed panel would of course work closely with the Chinese authorities.

It could also help ensure that OBOR is corruption- free which is the wish that Xi expressed at the recently concluded Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. There will be other challenges facing OBOR in the years ahead. But the governments that are committed to the project should remain steadfast in their determination to achieve its goals.

For apart from the economic and cultural benefits that OBOR will bring to the human family which we have noted, OBOR is the best hope we have for evolving a just and equitable world which is not dominated by a few. Only in such a world will human dignity flourish. This is perhaps the most compelling reason why the citizens of the world should strive with all their energy to keep the flame alive.

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Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from American Security Project

The Environmental Protection Agency said today the active ingredient in Bayer-Monsanto’s carcinogenic weedkiller Roundup is safe, ignoring a growing body of independent research showing a strong connection between glyphosate and cancer in humans.

“Today’s decision by Administrator Wheeler, like virtually every one he and the Trump administration make, completely ignores science in favor of polluters like Bayer,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “This move by EPA should not come as a surprise. Under the control of Trump and Wheeler, the agency is virtually incapable of taking steps to protect people from dangerous chemicals like glyphosate.”

A report published in January in the Environmental Sciences Europe documented how the EPA ignored a large number of independent, peer-reviewed studies that link glyphosate to cancer in humans. Instead, the report found, the EPA used research paid for by Monsanto to support the agency’s position that glyphosate is not carcinogenic.

In 2015, after reviewing extensive U.S., Canadian and Swedish epidemiological studies on glyphosate’s human health effects, as well as research on laboratory animals, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Genotoxicity is the damaging effect a chemical can have on DNA, triggering mutations that can lead to cancer. IARC scientists reviewed 118 different assays and found strong evidence that glyphosate may cause genotoxicity. But the EPA’s assessment included fewer than half of these studies.

In the past year, two separate juries found glyphosate caused cancer in two California men who were exposed to the herbicide while handling Roundup. There are now more than 13,400 similar cases against Bayer.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released an analysis that gave weight to studies connecting glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and recommended monitoring children’s exposure to this toxic weedkiller.

Last year, two separate rounds of laboratory tests commissioned by EWG found glyphosate in nearly every sample of popular oat-based cereals and other oat-based foods marketed to children. The EPA’s decision to allow continued glyphosate uses fails to protect children’s health from glyphosate, and puts polluters’ profits first.

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The US Department of State (DOS) offered a grant opportunity for “Promoting Accountability in Iraq and Syria For Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and War Crimes,” on April 16^th.

The grant has a funding floor of $500,000 and an upper limit of $4,500,000. It expects to award the grant to 3 companies or organizations.

US and Foreign non-profit organizations, as well as for-profit organizations can take part. Private and state institutions of higher education, and public international organizations are also allowed to take part.

Meaning that, for example, the British Institute for Statecraft or the Integrity Initiative are eligible for funding, if they decide to take part. The Atlantic Council is also eligible.

The grant opportunity was released by the DOS’ Office of Global Criminal Justice (J/GCJ) and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC).

“J/GCJ promotes criminal accountability for abuses and violations in Iraq and Syria, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”

The aim is to track such criminal acts and establish a framework, under which such “pervasive abuses” will face justice.

“The investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes is a crucial part of holistic transitional justice strategies in which countries must address legacies of pervasive abuses. Criminal trials – whether they occur in the context of an international or regional tribunal, or domestic systems that have jurisdiction – can build adherence to the rule of law, reinforce the unacceptability of the crimes committed, demonstrate that impunity will not be tolerated, and deter future harm by punishing perpetrators. Trials can also help transitional societies come to terms with their own histories and rebuild stable, democratic institutions. Evidence presented in court can help to establish a historical record of atrocities, give victims an opportunity to be heard, and rebut denials by victimizers and their political allies that such atrocities ever occurred. Finally, criminal trials can also help to restore the dignity of victims and their families by providing a public acknowledgment of the gravity of the wrongs done to them.”

Those eligible for funding will have to do on-site investigations and present the facts, so that the justice part of the program can be carried out.

“The Department of State will consider funding programs that include components to develop local investigative and judicial skills; to collect and preserve evidence and maintain the chain of custody of evidence; provide information to national authorities with jurisdiction over crimes, and to conduct other activities that directly support investigations and prosecutions of perpetrators of atrocities in Iraq and Syria. Applicants should be able to demonstrate an awareness of existing work in the field.”

It’s especillay interesting, since the side in both the conflicts in Syria and Iraq that is blamed for the most civilian casualties is the US, there is also evidence to substantiate it. Regardless, Washington has maintained that it does everything necessary to protect innocent lives.

“Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, more than 500 thousand people have been killed. Despite the fact that the Assad regime is responsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths and destruction, many other participants in the conflict committed murder, torture, sexual and gender-based violence and other offenses,” the State Department noted. Thus, the funding will primarily be used to blame the civilian casualties on other parties in an attempt to build a narrative in which Washington is not simply the innocent side, but is also sanctioning others for its forces’ misconduct.

Recently, in February, Syrian state news outlet SANA reported that a coalition led by the United States had committed a crime against humanity by inflicting air strikes on the Al-Baghouz settlement. As a result of the bombing, 16 civilians were killed, another 70 people were injured. Reports of the sort are the norm.

On April 24^th, Syrian Defense Minister Mahmoud Shawa called on the dissolution of the US-led coalition in Syria and their departure from the country.

“We demand to stop the illegal presence in our land of foreign troops of the United States, France, Britain, Turkey and disband the so-called international alliance,” the official was cited as saying.

A separate grant offers between $3 and $4 million to public International Organizations; overseas non-governmental non-profit organizations, who would take part in the Iraq-Syria Land Border Security Program.

“The overall aim is to build the capacity of civilian security forces belonging to the Government of Iraq, including the Kurdish Regional Government, and conduct border security management, including enhanced border screening and interagency coordination, in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 2396. This funding opportunity seeks to address the porous and weakened state of the Iraq-Syria border in order to deny ISIS remnants cross-border freedom of movement and detect and interdict terrorists, terrorist networks and illicit trade.”

This is further evidence that the US plans on perpetuating its presence in both Syria and Iraq, whether by actual US troops remaining there or through their Kurdish proxies in the region.

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When a CIA-backed military coup is attempted by a long term CIA puppet, roared on by John Bolton and backed with the offer of Blackwater mercenaries, in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, I have no difficulty whatsoever in knowing which side I am on.

Juan Guaido has been groomed for 15 years as a long-term CIA project. His coup attempt yesterday, which so far appears to have stalled, was the culmination of these efforts to return Venezuela’s oil reserves to US hegemony.

It is strange how the urgent installation of liberal democracy by force correlates so often with oil reserves not aligned to the USA, as in Libya, Iraq or Venezuela, while countries with massive oil reserves which permit US military domination and align with the West and Israel can be as undemocratic as they wish, eg Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is an imperfect democracy but it is far, far more of a democracy than Saudi Arabia and with a much better human rights record. The hypocrisy of Western media and politicians is breathtaking.

Hypocrisy and irony are soulmates, and there are multiple levels of irony in seeing the “liberal” commentators who were cheering on an undisguised military coup, then complaining loudly that people are being injured or killed now their side is losing. Yesterday the MSM had no difficulty in calling the attempted coup what anybody with eyes and ears could see it plainly was, an attempted military coup.

Today, miraculously, the MSM line is no coup attempt happened at all, it was just a spontaneous unarmed protest, and it is the evil government of Venezuela which attempts to portray it as a coup. BBC Breakfast this morning had the headline “President Maduro has accused the opposition of mounting a coup attempt”… Yet there is no doubt at all that, as a matter of plain fact, that is what happened.

The MSM today is full of video of water cannons against “protestors” and a horrible video of a military vehicle ramming a group. But it has all been very carefully edited to exclude hours of footage of the same military vehicles being pelted and set alight with molotov cocktails, and shot at. The presentation has been truly shocking.

In any civilised country, attempting to mount a military coup would lead to incarceration for life, and that is what should now happen to Juan Guaido. The attempt by the West to protect their puppet by pretending the failed military coup never happened, must be resisted, if only in the cause of intellectual honesty.

The resort to violence forces binary choice. I have been and am a critic of Maduro in many respects. I believe the constitutional changes to bypass Parliament were wrong, and the indirectly elected Constituent Assembly is not a good form of democracy. Venezuela does have a rampant corruption problem. US sanctions exacerbate but are not the root cause of economic mismanagement. There are human rights failings. But Chavez made revolutionary changes in educating and empowering the poor, and it is a far better governed country for the mass of its population than it would ever be under a US installed CIA puppet regime. Maduro was legitimately elected. The attempt at violence forces a binary choice.

I know which side I am on. It is not Guaido and the CIA.

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Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019.

Not satisfied with the orgy of violence successive U.S. administrations have imposed on the world over the last two decades in the Middle East and North Africa, the Trump administration—with the full support of a majority of Democrats and the liberal establishment—gave the green light to a coup action in Venezuela that promises to cause untold suffering to the Venezuelan people in the Americas.

In response to the news that a military coup was unfolding in Venezuela, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani welcomed the move as “a historic moment for the return to democracy and freedom in Venezuela.” Liberal defenders of democracy and human rights across Europe have given enthusiastic support to U.S. counterrevolutionary efforts, affirming why the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has identified the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination as the principal enemy of collective global humanity.

The real possibility of more death and destruction at the hands of the United States in Venezuela, and that significant sectors of the U.S. population supports it, reflects once again the moral hypocrisy of a society that pretends to be concerned about gun violence in the United States while giving full support to the ultimate expression of gun violence in the form of war. The hypocrisy continues with the bipartisan support for increasing the U.S. military budget by an astronomical $750 billion.

The people of the world want peace. But peace and global social cooperation to tackle and defeat the collective challenges of climate change, poverty, economic exploitation and oppression will be impossible as long as some nation-states have the ability to impose their destructive will on everyone else.

We are confident the Venezuelan people will prevail because after 20 years of dignity, of attempting to build a new society based on equality, cooperation, and empowerment of the oppressed, they will never allow themselves to be returned to the days when a rapacious oligarchy was able to deny them a democratic voice and steal the fruits of their labor and national resources.

In the spirit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture and Fannie Lou Hamer, BAP opposes the axis of domination and spreads the demand—Hands Off Venezuela!

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Featured image is from teleSUR

UPDATE: May 1st, 2019. Failed Military Coup. Lopez Seek Refuge at Spanish Embassy

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro addressed the country in a televised speech on Tuesday evening, accusing those responsible for the military uprising of trying to provoke a “massacre” and lauding the armed forces for their restraint in avoiding direct confrontations.

“Who benefits from these [confrontations]? Who finances them? Undoubtedly the leadership of the terrorist ultra-right party Popular Will,” Maduro declared, referring to the party of Lopez and Guaido.

He added that today’s actions would not go “unpunished,” explaining that eight military officers and policemen were wounded in the armed confrontations, before going on to blast US leaders for their role in endorsing the coup attempt. Maduro also showed his appreciation for the tens of thousands who mobilized to defend the presidential palace beginning in the early hours of Tuesday.

The Venezuelan president, who was accompanied by high-ranking political and military leaders, ended his speech by calling for a “massive mobilization” on May 1st to celebrate workers’ day and “defend peace.”

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A military coup attempt is underway in Venezuela on Tuesday, April 30, with imprisoned right wing leader Leopoldo Lopez, and self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido and some members of the armed forces blocking a highway in Caracas and calling on the military to rise up.

According to reports, a group from Venezuela’s Sebin intelligence service freed Leopoldo Lopez from house arrest early Tuesday morning. Lopez then joined Guaido and a handful of members from different branches of the armed forces in the Altamira highway in eastern Caracas close to La Carlota airbase. Lopez and Guaido published videos on social media calling on other elements of the armed forces to join the uprising and on their supporters to take to the streets. Guaido vowed that this was the “final phase” in ousting the Maduro government.

The Venezuelan government promptly reacted, condemning the coup attempt and vowing that it would be defeated.

“We inform the Venezuelan people that right now we are facing and deactivating a small group of traitor soldiers who have positioned themselves on the Altamira overpass to attempt a coup against the state and the constitution,” Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez tweeted.

The President of the National Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, spoke on state television, vowing that the uprising would be defeated and that those responsible would have to “assume their responsibilities.” He also called on the people and the Bolivarian militia to go out on the streets and defend Miraflores Palace.

For his part, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López reported that military units throughout the country reported total normalcy, and that the military remain loyal to President Maduro.

At the time of writing, Guaido’s followers are taking to the streets both in Caracas and other parts of the country, blocking roads in support of his new call for a coup. Minor confrontations with tear gas have been reported outside La Carlota air base in Caracas.

Guaido had previously called for the “largest march in Venezuela’s history” scheduled for Wednesday May 1, while a Chavista march celebrating workers’ day was also expected to take place.

(We will be updating this space with more developments.)

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Featured image is from France 24

The Canadian political analyst and Research Associate at Global Research, Mark Taliano, has affirmed that the West does not have a free press and all of the information to which most western people are exposed is delivered by about six media monopolies, which are servants to the oligarch classes, not the public interest.

He indicated that these monopolies largely control how Westerners perceive the world.

“Corporate-controlled governments and their media appendages control what Westerners perceive to be the truth in matters of foreign policy, but the messaging is totally corrupt and criminal,” Mr. Taliano said, giving as example that North Americans believe that Canada and its allies are fighting a war on terror.

“They think that we are fighting al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria.  The opposite is true of course.  Canada and its allies are supporting al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria with a view to destroying the pluralist, secular, democratic country and its government,” the analyst asserted.

He underscored that the government’s foreign policy consists of destroying freedom and democracy but Canadians are indoctrinated to believe the opposite. “Every time Empire and NATO member states seek to destroy another country – which is all the time — the prey country’s president or leader instantly becomes a “brutal dictator”, someone who “gasses own people”. It’s a complete inversion of the truth. But North Americans are trained to accept the war lies. Critical thinking is taboo.”

The analyst made it clear that the empire, to which Canada is a servile vassal, is imploding as war and poverty are being globalized.

“The economic model is not sustainable.  It serves transnational corporate monopoly profits as it neglects domestic economies.  Priorities are utterly inverted.  The public should be spending its money on equal access to quality healthcare, to infrastructure, education, the public good.  Instead the money serves the same warmongering, predatory classes that are destroying the world,” he emphasized.

“Neoliberalism”

Mr. Taliano pointed out that the current diseconomy that is hollowing out the middle class and concentrating the wealth into the hands of a parasitical oligarch class has a name, but few people are aware of it.

“If you can’t name something, you cannot address it.  The name itself is (intentionally) confusing: “neoliberalism”.  It is a predatory economic model that destroys the public domain, privatizes everything, cuts social spending, and deregulates corporate monopoly activities when the deregulation aligns with Big Monopoly “interests”. It’s a diseconomy that serves perceived corporate monopoly interests while at the same time excluding public interests,” he stressed.

The analyst went on to say:

“During the 1998 economic crash the deregulated corporate sector was responsible for the crash, but the public domain provided the bailouts. “Austerity” amounts to further corporate bailouts. Political parties associate the word with self-sufficiency but in reality, it simply gives the oligarchs a free pass to divert “their” wealth to tax avoidance shelters, tax havens and so on. The notion that the market is “free” is ridiculous. How does the oligarch class get away with it?  Simple, it’s the same bailed-out, parasitical oligarchy that owns the media, so they own the messaging, they own how we think, and what we say.”

He believes that if the truth about the West’s criminal wars abroad and its political diseconomy were to trickle down, then productive change might be seen.

“Unfortunately, in the absence of truth, all we have are the mechanisms of democracy but not the reality of democracy. Western politicians will say almost anything to get elected, within the framework of a political script, but they avoid dealing with the realities and the truths about Western imperialism and the drivers behind it. Once elected, the dictatorship of the warmongers and “neoliberalism” invariably resumes.  Hence, nothing changes, and the public interests – concealed and distorted by media lies – are not served,” Mr. Taliano said.

As for what the Western public should do to help itself and the world, the analyst said that Canadians should reject the war lies and the military industrial complex messaging that creates unreasonable fear as a tactic to divert even more money from the people.

“Canada should exit from U.S-led NATO… Media monopolies and in fact all big monopolies should be broken up, including the Banking sector.  No industry should be too big to fail,” Mr. Taliano concluded.

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This interview was originally published on Syria Times.

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.

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 

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Author: Mark Taliano

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This incisive article by Professor Henry Espiritu was first published by Global Research in November 2017

“And thou wilt find the nearest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, ‘We are Christians’. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are not proud.” (Al-Qur-an, Surah Maidah: 82)

Introduction: Context and Commitment

The current expansion in mass media and communications reveal more evidently that our world contains variety of cultures, races, religions, and ideologies. Despite globalization and its attendant efforts towards homogeneity, ours is still a pluralist world. As such, tolerance is a foundational notion and a very relevant conceptual and practical prerequisite in establishing a pluralistic society. In pluralism’s point of view, people living in a society with varied religious, cultural, and ideological commitments should enjoy equal rights and should not sacrifice their beliefs at the mercy of the hegemonic ideology of a particular State or of the dominant religion of the majority community.

In our highly globalized world, tolerance and amity are all the more needed for the survival, cohesion, and progress of its citizens.

The contemporary mass media portray Islamic societies to be intolerant of other’s religious and ideological persuasions. The purpose of this paper is not to examine whether the contemporary media is right or wrong in perceiving Islamic societies as intolerant. My aim in this essay is to show that authentic Islam—as contained in the pristine revelation of the Qur-an—promotes tolerance, harmony, and goodwill of all peoples despite their differences.

Professor Henry Espiritu (right)

In this paper, I want to reflect straight from the original source of Islamic tenets (i.e., the Qur-an) the tolerant attitude of Islam vis-à-vis religious, cultural, and ideological diversities found in human societies. Likewise, I will endeavor to show various thematic perspectives found in selected passages of the Qur-an that encourage tolerance and societal concord. Side by side with my exposition of authentic Islam’s framework of tolerance, I will likewise provide several historical instantiations of this “spirituality of tolerance” in the lives of selected Muslim savants and revered Islamic personalities of various epochs in their encounter with Christians.

I sincerely hope that by showing the tolerant and pluralistic pronouncements of the Qur-an, and the historical instantiations of tolerance manifested in the exemplary lives of these prominent Muslims as they relate with Christians, I will be able to encourage Muslims to fully practice and live-out the Islamic mandates of amity and inter-religious understanding in their daily lives. Moreover, I further hope that in this essay, I will be able to inform non-Muslims that genuine Islam—as contained in the Qur-anic revelation, in the model conduct of the Prophet, and in the exemplary lives of pious Muslim personages—is a very tolerant religion that acknowledges and respects the divergent beliefs and ideological views of others.

The Dynamics of Tolerance: Philosophical, Metaphysical, and Mystical Presuppositions

Firstly, let me briefly explicate my own conceptual framework and philosophical presuppositions in understanding tolerance. Tolerance presupposes plurality and diversity of identities. Pluralism further presupposes alterity or otherness, since diversity entails variety of identities and plurality of existing values. The opposite of pluralism is hegemony where one particular value is imposed and where there is an enforced totalization of expressions of life to make human values comply to a uniformed worldview and a set praxis. Now, tolerance can only exist in a pluralistic framework since pluralism celebrates in the difference of the “other”. Tolerance is a very important ethical value in the face of the alterity of the “other”. Tolerance therefore presupposes an “other” since without an “other”, there is nothing to tolerate at all. In hegemony, however, the “other” is swallowed and annihilated by the sheer imposition of uniformity and forcible totalization. Thus with the absence of the “other” in a hegemony, tolerance will also be non-existent—this is why all totalitarian and hegemonic societies are most intolerant of differences and dissenting views.

Secondly, I consider tolerance as spirituality. A person who can tolerate the “other” is able to see the unitive Source Who permits and wills these various differences and diversities as found in the world. This unitive Bond that permeates all diverse phenomena of creation and transcends multiplicities—the mystics termed, “the One God”. In the words of the Holy Qur-an:

“And your God and our God is One God. There is no god but He, the Beneficent, the Merciful… There is no contention between us and you. Allah will gather us together, and to Him is our eventual coming.” (Surah Baqara:163 and Surah Shuraa:15)

Therefore—for the Qur-an—God is both the Ultimate Source of these diversities and the Essential End of all varied cosmic entities. Spirituality or mysticism acknowledges God as the unifying Connectivity that deeply binds the whole of creation to Himself despite their apparent differences and multiplicities. Muslim and Christian mystics are well able to tolerate religious differences because in their inner beings, these mystics see the vision of the One, and this unitive vision enabled them to go beyond creedal and dogmatic differences. It is by this divine grace of an all-inclusive vision of the One that enables saints and mystics to tolerate the “otherness” of the other (See Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam. London: Mandala Books, 1964; pp. 13-18.).

Tolerance in dealing with others, particularly the religious “other” is spirituality because by tolerating differences, one acknowledges the divine Wisdom of God who wills that these differences be made manifest. By reflecting on this ineffable theological tension regarding the plurality or diversity of God’s creation and the essential oneness of creation in the Being of God, mystics of all religious traditions appreciate the mystery and spirituality of tolerance; an unfathomable and sympathetic understanding that is holistically related to a consciousness of divine unity manifesting in and through diversity. Tolerance permits us to experience the sympathetic feeling of divine inter-connectedness among diverse creatures in the divine immanence of the Creator who permits these differences.

My own prayerful reflections evidently reveal to me that authentic Islam, i.e., the Islam as expressed in the pristine pages of the Qur-an and in the exemplary conduct set forth by Prophet Muhammad—in contrast with the rigid and hegemonic “Islam” as interpreted by “extremist” exegeses or “fundamentalist” hermeneutics—clearly advocates pluralism and encourages tolerance in its relationship with the religious “other”. In the next subsections, we will examine how the Qur-anic understanding of pluralism is intimately connected to the spirituality of tolerance. We will also see how the Qur-anic discourse of tolerance is practically exemplified in the lives of selected Muslim saints in their encounter and dialogue with Christians.

The Qur-anic View of Pluralism and Its Relevance to an Islamic Understanding of Tolerance

The Qur-an is fully conscious of the pluralistic nature of human societies. Many Qur-anic passages describe the diverse expressions of life as found in human communities. Pluralism is therefore a fact, which the Qur-an accepts as the basic reality of our human existence. The Qur-an says:

“For every one of you We appointed a law and a way. And if Allah had pleased, He would have made you a single people, but that He might try you in what He gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous deeds. To Allah will all return, so He will inform you of that wherein you differed.” (Surah Maida:48; The Holy Qur-an: Maulana Muhammad Ali Translation)

The above passage is a very decisive proclamation supporting tolerance. The verse fully points out the pluralistic condition of humankind. The passage admits to the existence of societal and religious diversity characterizing human communities when it declares; “for everyone of you, We appointed a law and a way”. Notice that this verse says that our pluralistic situation is willed and permitted by God so as to test human communities so that each community will vie with each other in doing good deeds. It further says:

“And if Allah had pleased, He would have made you a single people, but that He might try you in what He gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous deeds”.

Surah Maida:48 is likewise a very relevant verse in understanding the nature of the Islamic understanding of tolerance. If God willed that this world contains socio-cultural and religious diversities (when He could have made the world a “single people”), and if God himself has a divine reason for allowing these diversities (so that each society will “vie with one another in virtuous deeds”); then humankind should strive to accept, tolerate, and appreciate the fact of our pluralistic world.

Good Will, Courtesy, and Mutual Respect: The Basic Ethical Pillars of Qur-anic Tolerance

Maulana Muhammad Ali Lahori (circa 1879-1951), was an eminent Pakistani scholar of Qur-anic and Hadith exegesis. He authored exhaustive and authoritative books of Qur-anicexegesis, collectively known in Urdu as Bayan-e Qur-an (Qur-anic Lectures) and a comprehensive commentary of the Prophetic Traditions, entitled The Manual of Hadith. Maulana Muhammad Ali Lahori strove to present Islam as a rational, tolerant, and forward-looking religion during the era of the British rule of then undivided India.

In this period of the British Raj, various Christian missionary groups representing different denominations compete for the conversion of Indians to Christianity. Seeing the zeal of these missionaries, Maulana Muhammad Ali began to reflect on the state of the Muslims in India. He re-evaluated the Indian appropriation of Islamic tenets and found out that the Muslims in India were enveloped with customs which were thought to be Islamic, but in reality, were products of obscurantism, and therefore devoid of Islamic significance.

Maulana Muhammad Ali likewise engaged the Christian missionaries in friendly dialogues to clarify common misconceptions of Islam. His scholarly book, The Religion of Islam, which was the result of these dialogic exchanges, show a very rational explication of Islam; at the same time fully cognizant of the Christian missionaries’ objections against Islam by responding to these objections using the Qur-an and Sunnah as bases of clarification. In all his writings, one can admire the profound respect that Maulana Muhammad Ali accorded to his interlocutors, both Christians and Muslims.

I will quote from his Urdu commentary of the Holy Qur-an on the necessity of courtesy (adab), good will (ahsan), and respect or honor (izzat) in dialoguing with others. Commenting on the Qur-anicayah (verse): “Call to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and goodly exhortation, and argue with them in the best manner” (Surah Nahl:125), Maulana Muhammad Ali had this to say:

“If we desire to establish communication with other religions and their followers, the first pre-requisite is good will (ahsan). We need good will because we have to be reminded that followers of other religions desire for our own good when they want to convert us. And we too, desire for their own good when we invite them to Islam. Everyone sincerely believes that his or her respective tenet is the truth. Thus, keeping in mind that every religion desires salvation, the Holy Book requires us to conduct our concourse with others in the best manner of etiquette (adab). In his inner heart, the other person who communicates to us his religion thinks that he is doing an act of piety.

Similarly, in Surah Ankabut:46, the Word of Allah reiterates its exhortation to concourse with the People of the Book, in the attitude of respect and courtesy, when it says: ‘And argue not with the People of the Book except by what is best… And say: We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you and our God and your God is One, and to Him we submit’. It is therefore with this innate intention of good will that our Holy Book requires us to establish friendly concourse with the followers of other faiths, in the spirit of courtesy and profound respect.” (See Mawlana Muhammad Ali’s subsequent commentary of Surah Nahl 125 and Surah Ankabut 46.)

Maulana Muhammad Ali, in his encounters with Christian missionaries, was able to articulate and apply the ethical principles of dialogue and tolerance, which were already laid down by the Holy Qur-an (namely in Surah Nahl:125 and in Surah Ankabut:46). Maulana Muhammad Ali understood tolerance as something inherent in our being persons of good will; and that this divine awareness of good intention leads us to respect the viewpoint of the other person even if we do not subscribe to his creedal tenets. The verse in Surah Nahl:125 encourages Muslims to dialogue with the religious “other” in the spirit of sincere courtesy, profound sensitivity, and deep respect for each other’s differences, by granting a concordant presumption that the other’s intention in striving to convert another person is due to good will (i.e., for the “other’s” spiritual salvation).

Surah Maida: 48 as Potent Islamic Manifesto Supporting Tolerance

Maulana Muhammad Ali asserts that Surah Maida:48 is an explicit endorsement of pluralism and its attendant duty of tolerating the various diversities of humankind. I quote from Maulana Muhammad Ali’s exhaustive Qur-anic commentary to this particular passage:

“The appointment of a law and a way for everyone refers to the giving of different laws to different nations… Thus, the Holy Qur’an here recognizes the principle to which it refers frequently, that prophets were raised among every people (see Holy Qur’an 10:47; 13:7; and 35:24)… Man [sic] is placed above the whole of creation in that he has been granted discretionary powers so that he can choose to follow one path or another, as against the rest of creation, which must necessarily follow the laws to which it is subject. Hence led by that [God-given] discretion, men follow different ways, adopting different sects, whereas if man’s very nature had been so made as to make him unable to use his discretionary powers, all men [sic] would have been a single people, but then man’s better qualities, would not have been manifested.” (Maulana Muhammad Ali Commentary of the Holy Qur-an.Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam Lahore, 1998; pp.256.)

As commented by Maulana Muhammad Ali, Surah Maida:48 explicitly declares that Almighty God sent his messengers to diverse groups of people and gave these communities their respective commandments in keeping with the different circumstances of each community. The laws prescribed by God to the different communities ensure the holistic development of their respective people. The verse continues, “And if Allah had pleased, He would have made you a single people, but that He might try you in what He gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous deeds”. This verse clearly pointed out that if God so willed it, He can create a single community out of varied groups of people. Nevertheless, God planned that humankind be varied in its communitarian expressions.

God’s endowment of a pluralistic world is His grace to humanity. Our differences provide venues for existential celebration of life and of living: variety and diversity being the potent antidote to our humdrum existence. Each community has its own unique way of life, its own customs and traditions, its own laws. Nevertheless, no matter how diverse these ways of life are, it should be understood in the light of the Almighty’s life-affirming purpose in allowing such diversities, i.e., human flourishing. It is therefore clear from Surah Maidah:48 that although God can produce a uniformed world of totalities by imposing a single law for all communities, yet He prefers to create pluralistic communities so that humankind will learn the values of tolerance, amity, harmony, and fraternity.

Another aim of God in creating varied communities is to test human beings in the conduct of virtuous deeds. He tests the various societies if they can live amicably and cordially with each other despite their differences. The divergence in each society’s ways of life should not be a cause of disharmony and differences; instead, societal divergences should prod each community to vie with one another in the performance of virtuous conduct (Cf., Reza Shah Kazemi, The Metaphysics of Interreligious Dialogue. London: Institute of Isma’ili Studies, 2001; pp.5-7.).

The Qur-an insists that the best way of putting an end to religious, cultural, and ideological conflicts is to tolerate differences with openness and good faith. Each religious community should do righteous deeds according to their tenets; leaving to God the judgment as to which community is the best. The final section of the passage states:

“To Allah will all return, so He will inform you of that wherein you differed”.

The verse is very precise in stating that it should be left to God (and to God alone) in deciding the truth of the matters that peoples dispute. It is not for humans to pontificate which view is true and which is wrong. Vain and fruitless arguments as to which religious, ethical, and ideological point of view is right or wrong will only lead to communal fracas and infringement of societal concord. Likewise, the verse firmly admonishes human beings to contend with one another in good deeds by utilizing their own respective laws as bases of their righteous conduct.

God as the Ultimate Source of Divine Revelation: A Central Tenet in the Qur-anic Understanding of Tolerance

The prologue of Surah Maida:48 states, “And We have revealed to thee the Book [i.e., the Qur-an] with the truth verifying that which is before it [i.e., the previous scriptures]…and a guardian over it”. This verse is a strong proclamation in favor of tolerance and pluralism. The Qur-an is referred to as “guardian” of the truths revealed by earlier scriptures. Likewise, one of the roles of the Qur-an is “a verifier” of previous scriptures. According to Ustaz Abu Ya’qub Sijistani, a Fatimid theologian and philosopher of the tenth century AD, this verse implies that the scriptures of various religions may be different, but the Ultimate Source of all revealed scriptures is the One and Only God. Thus, scriptures of different faiths are based on Divine revelation.

The tolerant nature of Islam as a religion can be seen in this verse in that, the Qur-an takes it upon itself to be the confirmer, verifier, and guardian of truths revealed in earlier scriptures (Paul Walker, Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996; pp. 26-32, 58.).

Before elaborating further on Ustaz Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani’s view of the Qur-an as the guardian and verifier of previous divinely revealed books and the implications of this Qur-anic guardianship to an Islamic framework of tolerance, a brief historical background of Ustaz Sijistani’s life is in order. Ustaz Abu Ya’qub Sijistani—although himself an Isma’ili Shi’a—maintained amicable relations with the orthodox Sunni majority during the period of the Fatimid Caliphate (i.e., 10th-11th century A.D.). To the dismay of the rabid Shi’as, Ustaz Sijistani forbade his disciples to curse the first three Caliphs of Islam (Khulafa-ar-Rashidin); warning them, that Prophet Muhammad lavished praise on these three Caliphs, and therefore, it is never right and against Islamic prudence to curse whom the Prophet had abundantly praised.

His endeavor to establish Sunni-Shi’a rapprochement was also matched by his spiritual and intellectual relationship with the Coptic Christians of Egypt, the Arab Orthodox Christians of Iraq, the Byzantine Christians of Anatolia, and the Jews. He studied the Torah in Hebrew and the New Testament in the Syro-Aramaic text. He often consulted Jewish rabbis and Orthodox Christian hermits and enquired from them regarding their interpretation of some obscure passages of the Bible. His encounters with Christianity and Judaism were indeed intellectually stimulating since Ustaz Sijistani wrote six (6) religio-philosophical treatises reflecting on his relations with Christianity and Judaism, not to mention the orthodox Sunni Islam. Sijistani’s main books, The Wellspring of Wisdom (Yanbu-al-Hikmat) and Proofs of Prophecy (Ithbat-un-Nubuwwat) were written to show that God is the ultimate Source of Revelation and that this divine Revelation is progressive, i.e., it is sent according to the measure of the spiritual preparedness of humankind to receive divine guidance. Ustaz Sijistani was therefore a perfect example of an “ecumenical Muslim”—if I may be permitted to coin such a term.

Let us now explicate on Sijistani’s understanding of progressive revelation and its implication to an Islamic perspective of tolerance. As per Ustaz Sijistani, the inclusive nature of the Islamic faith can be clearly observed in the Qur-an’s numerous narrations regarding the ministries of Jewish, Christians, and other pre-Islamic prophets. The Qur-an’s inclusion of the prophets of other religions preceding Islam is meant to illustrate the pluralistic and tolerant dimension of the Qur-anic Revelation. The list of prophets as found in the Qur-an was never meant to be exhaustive; it was meant to illustrate the extent of the universal chain of prophethood. Thus, we can safely assume that other religious communities that were not mentioned in the Qur-an are likewise included in the all-inclusive Qur-anic guardianship (Walker, Ibid, pp. 45-58, 110-112.).

Furthermore, Sijistani opined that the Qur-an fully acknowledges the different expressions of worship undertaken by different religions, while at the same time firmly holding to the Islamic expressions of worship (i.e., the five-times-a-day liturgical prayers, prescribed pilgrimage, Ramadhan fasting, etc.). In Surah Baqara:148 it is stated: “And everyone has a goal to which he turns (himself), so vie with one another in good works”. Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani, interpreted the phrase, “everyone has a goal to which he turns” to signify the diverse spiritual communities and their different approaches of worship (Ibid, pp. 49-51.). Ustaz Sijistani, also pointed out that Surah Baqara:148 is very much related to the phrase in Surah Maida:48, viz; “For everyone of you We appointed a law and a way”.

The Qur-an on the Oneness of Humankind and Diverse Expressions of Human Cultures

The Qur-an, in many numerous passages explicitly proclaims the oneness of humankind. Humanity was “created from a single being” (Surah Nisah:1). All humans came from a single ancestry and living in the same homeland, earth (Surah Hujurat:13). Furthermore, Surah Baqara:213 says that the whole of humankind is essentially one in origin—from God, humankind’s Creator. God sent various messengers with their respective scriptures to guide the peoples of the world to righteous living. These prophets were sent to different places of the world and their revelations were suited to the varying milieus, mentalities, contextualities, situations, and circumstances of the peoples and societies in which they were being sent. However, instead of respecting other societies’ contextualities, people began to be divided and incessantly fight against each other. Surah Baqara:213 further states that God in giving His revelation to different communities did not intend that they fight each other; but that each communities respect each other’s differences.

The Qur-an balances its affirmation of the ontological oneness of humankind by equally highlighting on the divergent racial, linguistic, ideological, religious, and national identities of each society. God wills these identities; as the Qur-an plainly states, “And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors. Surely, there are signs in these for the learned” (Surah Rum:2). This passage acknowledges cultural differences as “signs” of God and must be duly appreciated as these “signs” serve as venues for each society’s expression of identity. Cultural differences are essential for establishing a community’s identity and these divergences should prompt peoples to celebrate each other’s cultural and national identities (See, Maulana Muhammad Ali’s commentary of Surah Baqara:213, Hujurat:13 and Maida:48; op.cit.). Therefore, the Qur-an undoubtedly recognizes cultural, religious, and societal diversities as being willed by Divine Providence; even as it equally affirms the essential unity and oneness of humankind.

Tolerance and the Diverse Liturgical Expressions of Worship Found in Other Faiths

As of this juncture, it is noteworthy to quote some Qur-anic passages that illustrate the practical dimensions of Islamic tolerance with respect to the different worship expressions of other faith-traditions. The Qur-an says:

“It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards East or West; but righteous is the one who believes in Allah and the Last Day, and the angels, and the Book, and the prophets, and gives away wealth out of love for Him, to the near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and to those who ask, and to set the slaves free; and keeps up prayer, and pays the poor-rate [i.e., charity]: and the performers of their promise when they make a promise, and the patient in distress and affliction and in the time of conflict [adversities]. These are they who are truthful; and these are they who keep their duty.” (Surah Baqara:177; Maulana Muhammad Ali Translation.)

The great master of Islamic mysticism, Hazrat Shaykh-al-Akbar Muhaiyuddin Ibn Arabi (circa 1164-1240 AD), in his Sufi treatise, Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) provided a very universal and inclusive interpretation of the above passage, showing the tolerant nature of Islamic Sufism that Ibn Arabi espoused. Before discussing Ibn Arabi’s explanation of the above-mentioned passage, I feel that it is beneficial for our understanding to describe briefly his historical contextuality. Ibn Arabi’s tolerant and pluralistic approach to Islamic spirituality can best be gleaned in his oft-quoted pronouncement:

“My heart is open to every form: it is a pasture for ecstatics, and a cloister for Christian monks, a temple for idols, the Mecca for the monotheists, the tablet for the Torah and the bookstand of the Qur-an. I embrace the religion called ‘Love’; I go where my Beloved’s caravan asks me to go. My religion is the creed of Love.” (Shahabuddin Maliki, Light from the Sayings of Shaykh Ibn Arabi. Decca, Bangladesh: Markaz Towheedi, 1977; p.63.)

Arabi’s frequent discussions and meetings with Jewish and Christian philosophers and mystics may have influenced his all-inclusive and panentheistic approach to understanding Ultimate Reality (wahdat-ul-wujud). Ibn Arabi’s homeland, Andalusia, a cosmopolitan region in Spain was ruled during Ibn Arabi’s time by the extremely tolerant Umayyad sultans. The emirs of Andalusia encouraged learning and supported all educational institutions, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish. It was during this period that Christians all over Europe flocked to Muslim Spain to study Greek philosophy as mediated by the Arabic textual sources. Likewise, it was in Muslim Spain where Jews from all parts of Europe and the Mediterranean took refuge from pogroms that greatly diminished their ranks. Ibn Arabi’s Islamic Andalusia ruled by the enlightened Umayyads offered an atmosphere of intellectual freedom—an atmosphere that was so different from the rest of Europe where inquisitions and religious persecutions were the order of the day (See Oliver Leaman, A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999; pp. 158-164.). This historical context contributed to Ibn Arabi’s universal and all embracing approach to Islamic mysticism.

Now let us come to Ibn Arabi’s inclusivist exegesis of Surah Baqara:177 and how this exegesis conduces to an Islamic spirituality of tolerance. Commenting on the above-mentioned verse, Ibn Arabi says:

“Beware of being bound up by a particular creed and rejecting others as unbelief. Try to make yourself a prime matter for all forms of religious beliefs. God is greater and wider than to be confined to one particular creed to the exclusion of others. For He Himself says: ‘To whichever direction you turn, there is the Face of God’. God is much greater, wider and deeper than our religious conceptions.” (See Oliver Leaman, A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999; pp. 158-164. )

Ibn Arabi admits that although in Islam, there exists a specific direction and prescribed liturgical postures by which a Muslim faces when praying, yet for him, the Qur-an equally acknowledges with respect the various directions and gestures of prayer adopted by other religions in their worship. More importantly, for Ibn Arabi, Surah Baqara:177 encourages religious pluralism and tolerance by going beyond (i.e., transcending) the ritual demands of different ceremonial expressions of worship and focusing instead on the importance of humane character, viz, compassion towards others and persevering faith in the midst of trials and difficulties (See, Henry Bayman, The Station of No Station: Open Secrets of the Sufis. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2001; pp. 166, 206.). Ibn Arabi explained that the divine purpose of the various prescribed acts of worship is for the spiritual education of humankind, aside from the avowed aim of glorifying God. For him, more than the outward manifestations of piety, the crucial intention of the Qur-an is for the Islamic Ummah(community) to produce proper human beings who are sensitive to the needs of others. The Qur-an endeavors to create compassionate and “humane” persons who act with benevolence and equanimity to everybody with no regard whatsoever to racial, cultural, religious, or ideological differences (Ibid, pp. 97-98, 103.).

Instantiations of Tolerance from the Life of the Prophet of Islam and His Companions

The Qur-an clearly reveals that, “all the children of Adam are equally honored” by God (See, Surah Bani-Israil:70). The Qur-an also takes an all-inclusive humanistic view in its understanding of justice and equality among all peoples. When it comes to judging actions that either benefit or harm humanity, the Qur-an does not distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. As pointed out in Surah Nisah:123-124,

“It will not be in accordance with your vain desires [i.e., Muslims], nor the vain desires of the People of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians] that can prevail. Whoever does evil will be requited for it… And whoever does good deeds, whether male or female—these will enter the Garden and they will not be dealt with a whit unjustly.” (Maulana Muhammad Ali Translation.)

The Qur-an further affirms; “so he who does an atom’s weight of good will see it. And he who does an atom’s weight of evil will see it” (Surah Zilzal:7-8.). According to the Qur-an, God does not consider a person’s dogmatic or creedal commitment when rendering judgment of an action. Everyone will be given their just recompense based on one’s deeds and not because of one’s religious adherence.

Furthermore, the Qur-an exhorts Muslims to respect places of worship of other faith-traditions and to ensure that these will be protected and safe from acts of vandalism and destruction. Surah al-Hajj:40 says; “And if Allah did not repel some people by others, cloisters, and churches, and synagogues, and mosques in which the name of Allah is much remembered would have been pulled down” (Maulana Muhammad Ali Translation.).

The abovementioned verse is very explicit in enjoining Muslims to sacrifice even their very own lives to defend the sanctity of churches and synagogues, and not just mosques. Interestingly, this particular passage avers that whether in church, synagogue or mosque, God’s name is “commemorated in abundant measure” in all these places of worship (Cf., Muhammad Hamidullah, Islam: An Introduction. Lahore: Kitab Islami Wakf, 1979; pp.34-35. See also Kazemi, op.cit., p.12.). Here, we can find that the Qur-an did not make any distinction between shrines of worship—it acknowledges the sacredness of places of worship where God’s name is celebrated with reverence; no matter what faith-tradition these shrines belong.

The Qur-an solemnly affirms, “there is no compulsion in religion” (Surah Baqara:256). The Qur-an is very keen in preserving freedom of conscience and freedom of belief—two crucial elements which are at the heart of tolerance. In this connection, a narration of two episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad is very pertinent in order to show that Islam fully respects the freedom of peoples to practice their own faith. When the people of Medina accepted the Prophet as their lawmaker and chief governmental executive, the Prophet himself immediately asked his scribes to write a declaration assuring the freedom of Jews and Christian residents of Medina and Najran to practice their faith. Likewise, when Christian monks and priests from Abyssinia came to Medina to see the Prophet, they inquired where they can hold their Eucharistic service (since they were still in Medina on a Sunday), the Prophet Muhammad gladly offered half of the space of his masjid (i.e., the first masjid built by the Prophet’s own hands) to the Christian priests for their liturgy. The priests tearfully thanked the Prophet for his hospitality, munificence, and cordial act of tolerance by offering and allowing them to hold their Divine Liturgy in his masjid (See, Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Religion of Islam. Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, 1990; pp.281-291. For numerous instances showing the Prophet Muhammad’s tolerance and concordant treatment to non-Muslims particularly Christians and Jews, see also, Mumtaz Ahmad Faruqui, Anecdotes from the Life of Prophet Muhammad. Columbus Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam Lahore, 1997; pp.18-19, 35-37, 40-43.).

In keeping with the example of the Prophet Muhammad, the second Caliph of Islam, Hazrat Umar al-Farooq, assured the delegation of Coptic and Orthodox Christians that their churches, convents, and monasteries were to be protected and to be held inviolable by the Islamic State. The same Caliph Umar climbed by foot to Mount Sinai, Egypt to sign a treaty guaranteeing the safety of the monks and nuns of St. Catherine’s monastery. During this visit, the Caliph gave five thousand dirhams for the repair of the monks’ convent and chapel. The trustworthy Arab historian, At-Tabari narrated that the call for the noon prayer once overtook Caliph Umar while he was having consultations with the Orthodox Christian patriarch of Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The kind patriarch offered Caliph Umar to pray inside the church premises. The Caliph gently declined the patriarch’s offer saying that he was afraid that future Muslims might claim the church for themselves on account of the fact that the second Caliph of Islam prayed his noon prayer inside it. Caliph Umar then went out of the church and prayed at a vacant yard nearby (Cf., Hafsah Dawud Zikri, The Exemplary Precedents of our Righteous Sunni Ancestors. Pakpattan, Pakistan: Daawat-e Irshad, 1963; pp.68-85.). These historical instances and many others show the extent of amity, tolerance, and concordance that the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad afford to Christians. The continued existence of Arab, Coptic, Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish Christian communities in the Middle East and the marked presence of churches and convents in these Islamic realms give witness to the tolerant attitude of authentic Islam to the religious “other”.

Epilogue: Acceptance of “the Other” as Foundational Basis of an Islamic Spirituality of Tolerance

The Qur-an is very explicit in its pronouncement that non-Muslims should be given the right to worship based on the prescriptions of their own scriptures. As already mentioned in this paper, non-Muslims were given their civil, political, and religious rights during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. After the Prophet’s demise, the Holy Companions and the immediate Caliphs of the Prophet made numerous provisions so that the rights of Jews and Christians will be acknowledged and respected. Tolerance towards non-Muslims were also implemented by various Islamic monarchs like the pious Umayyad Caliph, Umar ibn Abdul Aziz; the Abbasid Caliph, Harun-al-Rashid; the just Sultan of Palestine, Saladdin Ayyubi; the Mughal Sultan Akbar; the Ottoman emperors, Fatih Mehmet and Kanooni Suleyman; and the emirs of the Moorish courts of Cordova and Grenada. These Islamic monarchs not only tolerated non-Muslims, much more, they employed Jews, Christians, and even Hindus in their administration, supported their respective places of worship, clergies, and educational institutions. These non-Muslims were accepted with dignity and treated with respect and at par with the Muslim citizens.

Authentic Islam based on the Qur-an and as practiced by the Prophet and his companions are not against the promotion of a pluralist egalitarian society that guarantees tolerance and respect to all religious communities within the society. The Qur-an recognizes religious diversity not only as a basic reality of human existence but also as a venue for humanity’s spiritual development (Cf., Surah Maida:48.). It is indeed very regrettable that in our contemporary times, most of the so-called Muslim nations are perceived as lagging behind in fulfilling the spirit of tolerance as plainly expressed in the Qur-an and the Tradition (Sunnah) of the Prophet. It is equally lamentable that political and religious extremism failed to see the pluralistic, concordant, and tolerant dimension of Islam as found in the Qur-anictexts and in the conduct of the Prophet.

As amply shown in history, it cannot be denied that there were many instances of bloody conflicts between Christians and Muslims and that atrocities and violence can be equally attributed to both sides. The era of the Crusades during the Middle Ages and the more recent phenomenon of Western colonization of Muslim lands painted a different picture of Christianity in the perceptions of Muslims—a grim and greedy “Christianity” which is far from the peace-loving Christianity of Christ and of the Gospels. Similarly, basing their perceptions on the Western media’s skewed descriptions of Muslims and the intolerance of some Islamic movements, Christians perceived a rigid and inflexible Islam—an “Islam” very different from the tolerant and inclusive Islam of the Holy Qur-an. It is high-time now for both Muslims and Christians to move past these historical contingencies—contingencies that were political, economic, and pragmatic in nature; which had little or even nothing to do with the essential spiritual and religious contents of both faiths as expressed in their respective Scriptures (Jean Rene Milot, Muslims and Christians: Enemies or Brothers? New York: Alba House, 1997; pp. 31.). Indeed, it is high time now for both Muslims and Christians to go back to their respective Scriptures and be nourished by the precepts of tolerance, understanding, and amity enjoined by both the Bible and the Qur-an. In so doing, both the largest and the second largest religions of the world will be able to contribute actively towards achieving world peace.

It is likewise imperative for academicians engaged in Muslim-Christian dialogue and researchers of Islamic political philosophy to work out theoretic and praxis in pursuance to the Qur-anic vision of tolerance and amity, by taking into consideration present realities of our pluralistic world. There is no contradiction in accepting the truth of ones’ own religious and ideological perspective and in tolerating or respecting the beliefs of others. Similarly, the Qur-anic belief in the ontological oneness of humanity does not contradict the pragmatic reality that humankind’s expressions of culture, spirituality, and political ideology are varied and diverse. Authentic Islam as found in the Qur-an respects the freedom of conscience of every individual; which includes the right to practice one’s own religious, cultural, ethnic, and ideological commitments. By paying careful and prayerful reflection to what the Qur-an says regarding tolerance, coupled with the faithful adherence to the Qur-anic values of amity and harmony amidst differences, Muslims and non-Muslims will be able to live a tranquil, serene, and secure life—a life of dignity and justice by accepting with openness and good faith each other’s differences. May this hope become a Reality for all Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Insha-Allah (God willing)!

References 

Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Holy Qur-an: Text, Translation and Commentary (3rd ed.). Kashmiri Bazar, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1978.

Ali, Maulana Muhammad. The Holy Qur-an: Translation and Commentary. Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Ishaat Islam Lahore, 1998.

_______. The Religion of Islam. Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Ishaat Islam Lahore, 1990.

Bayman, Henry. The Station of No Station: Open Secrets of the Sufis. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2001.

Ghulam-Ahmad, Hazrat Mirza. Paigham-e-Sulh: Letters of Peace. Suva, Fiji: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore-Fiji, 1972.

Hamidullah, Muhammad. Islam: An Introduction. Lahore: Kitab Islami Wakf, 1979.

Kazemi, Reza Shah. The Metaphysics of Interreligious Dialogue. London: Institute of Isma’ili Studies, 2001.

Leaman, Oliver. A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999.

Maliki, Shahabuddin. Light from the Sayings of Shaykh Ibn Arabi. Decca, Bangladesh: Markaz Towheedi, 1977.

Milot, Jean Rene. Muslims and Christians: Enemies or Brothers? New York: Alba House, 1997.

Schuon, Frithjof. Understanding Islam. London: Mandala Books, 1964.

Walker, Paul. Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary. London: I. B.Tauris Publishers, 1996.

Zikri, Hafsah Dawood. The Exemplary Precedents of our Righteous Sunni Ancestors. Pakpattan, Pakistan: Daawat-e Irshad, 1963.

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Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu is Associate Professor-VI of Philosophy and Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines (UP), Cebu City. He was former Academic Coordinator of the Political Science Program at UP Cebu from 2011-2014. He was also the former Coordinator of Gender and Development (GAD) Office at UP Cebu. His research interests include Islamic Studies particularly Sunni jurisprudence, Islamic feminist discourses, Islam in interfaith dialogue initiatives, Islamic environmentalism, Classical Sunni Islamic pedagogy, the writings of Imam Al-Ghazali on pluralism and tolerance, Turkish Sufism, Muslim-Christian dialogue, Middle Eastern affairs, Peace Studies and Public Theology.

La conferenza internazionale di membri di organizzazioni senza scopo di lucro (non governative) tenutasi nell’aprile di quest’anno a Firenze, in Italia, potrebbe rimanere al di fuori dal orizzonte di personalità politiche e governative, nonché dei rappresentanti dei media, se non fosse per una serie di circostanze molto significative ad essa connesse.

La prima e più importante caratteristica distintiva del presente forum si è manifestata attraverso il motto non standard “No alla guerra, no alla NATO” sotto cui si è tenuta. I suoi partecipanti hanno sollevato in modo estremamente deciso la questione della prevenzione di qualsiasi scontro militare nel continente europeo e nel mondo nel suo complesso, sia con l’uso di armi nucleari che convenzionali.

Al forum è stato lanciato un appello: creare un movimento di forze sociali e politiche in Europa, che, come l’ampio movimento civile antinucleare negli anni ’80 del secolo scorso, contribuisca ad eliminare la minaccia missilistica nucleare, poiché il suo livello è diventato chiaramente alto negli ultimi anni, anche in questa questa parte del globo terrestre.

In particolare nel continente europeo, in aggiunta alle armi nucleari statunitensi ivi schierate sin dagli anni ’50 del secolo scorso, il Pentagono ha iniziato negli ultimi anni ad inviare nel suo spazio aereo aerei strategici pesanti, in grado di trasportare sia missili di crociera che bombe con testate nucleari.

La seconda particolarità dell’evento è stata quella di avere un carattere molto rappresentativo: oltre 500 persone vi hanno preso parte, il che ha portato gli organizzatori a noleggiare l’Odeon, uno dei cinema centrali della città, per otto ore. L’interesse è stato ovviamente grande.

Alla conferenza hanno preso parte persone da quasi tutti i paesi europei, compresi i paesi membri dell’Alleanza del Nord Atlantico. Al fine di informare i partecipanti all’incontro riguardo alla situazione relativa all’ulteriore complicazione del processo di controllo degli armamenti, in particolare di quelli nucleari, sono stati invitati in qualità di relatori principali dell’evento noti esperti che si occupano di tali questioni. Tra i relatori c’erano anche specialisti che studiano le conseguenze negative dell’allocazione da parte dei paesi leader nella NATO di spese militari chiaramente eccessive che impediscono l’attuazione di programmi per lo sviluppo socio-economico dei suoi stati membri e della comunità europea nel suo insieme.

In occasione del 70 ° anniversario della creazione della NATO, gli organizzatori della conferenza hanno preparato e mostrato un film documentario “70 anni della NATO: guerra alla guerra”, che critica la politica militare ed i preparativi militari dell’alleanza della “solidarietà transatlantica”, le sue enormi spese militari ed i tentativi di interferenze politiche e di altro genere negli affari di Stati sovrani al fine di rovesciarne i legittimi organi di potere ed amministrazione.

Il film mostra gli interventi degli Stati Uniti e di altri stati, membri di questo blocco militare, negli affari della Serbia, della Siria e di altri paesi, e vengono presentate le prove dell’interferenza di Washington negli affari interni dell’Ucraina attraverso l’organizzazione di colpo di stato nel 2014. Sono criticate il dispiegamento di armi nucleari e sistemi anti-missilistici statunitensi in Europa. Viene sollevata la questione della chiusura di tutte le basi militari statunitensi non solo in Italia, ma anche in altri paesi europei. Nel film è stato pronunciato lo slogan: “Per uscire dalle guerre, bisonga uscire dalla NATO”.

All’evento, la parte russa ha presentato una nuova monografia intitolata “L’evoluzione delle armi nucleari strategiche e tattiche statunitensi e le caratteristiche del loro uso nel XXI secolo” (Mosca 2019, pp. 1086). Inoltre ha analizzato la situazione allarmante nel campo del controllo degli armamenti dovuta agli Stati Uniti, che hanno mostrato e continuano a tenere atteggiamenti negativi nei confronti dei 12 trattati internazionali vigenti in questo settore. Ciò è provato dal fatto che gli USA hanno unilateralmente ripudiato alcuni di essi (in particolare il Trattato ABM), o hanno rifiutato di ratificarne altri (ad esempio, il Trattato di divieto totale per i test nucleari), o hanno violato le loro disposizioni (ad esempio il Trattato DSSMD sull’eliminazione dei missili a medio e breve raggio), o addirittura si sono rifiutati di discutere nel merito alcuni di essi nelle sedi di negoziazione internazionale (ad esempio, il progetto di Trattato sulla sicurezza europea).

E’ stato notato con particolare attenzione che metà di tali trattati e accordi sono direttamente collegati alle armi nucleari, vale a dire: il Trattato sulla riduzione delle armi strategiche offensive (Trattato START-3), il Trattato sull’eliminazione dei missili a raggio intermedio e corto, il Trattato di non proliferazione delle armi nucleari, l’Accordo sul nucleare iraniano, il Trattato sulla messa al bando totale degli esperimenti nucleari e l’Accordo sul plutonio di grado militare.

Particolare attenzione da parte russa è stata rivolta alle ripetute violazioni da parte di Washington del DSSMD, quando per verificare l’efficacia del sistema di difesa anti-missilistica sono stati utilizzati missili bersaglio vietati da questo trattato.

Dai documenti ufficiali del Congresso e dal Dipartimento della Difesa degli Stati Uniti segue che negli ultimi due decenni, prendendo in considerazione l’uso dei predetti missili bersaglio nel corso di prove, il Pentagono ha violato questo trattato 117 volte. La comunicazione di questo dato ad un pubblico così vasto alla Conferenza fiorentina non è stato né sarà senza impatto ed attenzione, soprattutto in considerazione del fatto che la Russia non ha mai violato questo trattato e non è stata la prima ad annunciarne il ripudio.

Nella “Dichiarazione di Firenze”, documento conclusivo ed approvato, è stato rilevato che la NATO è un’organizzazione sotto il comando del Pentagono e che il suo obiettivo è quello di assicurare il controllo dell’Europa occidentale e orientale, che le basi militari statunitensi negli Stati membri di questa unione militare servono ad occupare questi paesi. Mantenere una presenza militare americana permanente consente a Washington di influenzare e controllare le politiche dei paesi europei e di altri paesi.

Il documento finale, che è stato poi tradotto in 15 lingue, viene notato che l’Alleanza è una macchina militare che lavora per gli interessi degli Stati Uniti con la complicità dei principali gruppi di potere europei e che si è macchiata di crimini contro l’umanità. In questo contesto sono stati menzionati la guerra aggressiva scatenata dalla NATO nel 1999 contro la Jugoslavia, così come gli interventi militari del blocco, compiuti in piena violazione della legge internazionale, contro l’Afghanistan, la Libia, la Siria ed alcuni altri stati.

Nella dichiarazione si constata che, in violazione del Trattato di non proliferazione delle armi nucleari, gli Stati Uniti stanno schierando armi nucleari in cinque stati NATO non nucleari con il falso pretesto dell’esistenza di una “minaccia russa”, e che ciò mette a rischio la sicurezza nel continente europeo.

Naturalmente, per passare dalla dichiarazione adottata a Firenze circa la necessità di sciogliere un’alleanza militare come la NATO e rafforzare il regime di controllo degli armamenti, all’ottenimento di risultati concreti in queste aree, saranno necessari molti sforzi organizzativi, politici, informativi e di altro genere da parte dei sostenitori della stabilità globale complessiva e della politica al di fuori di alleanze. Sembra che il processo di creazione di un movimento specifico contro la guerra e allo stesso tempo con orientamento anti-NATO sia iniziato e che possa essere promosso.

Vladimir Kozin

Traduzione: D. M.

Vladimir Kozin è uno dei massimi esperti del Centro per gli studi politico-militari del MGIMO del Ministero degli Esteri russo

A Conferência Internacional dos membros de organizações sem fins lucrativos (não-governamentais), realizada em Abril deste ano, em Florença, Itália, poderia permanecer fora do horizonte das personalidades políticas e governamentais, bem como dos representantes da comunicação mediática, se não fosse uma série de circunstâncias muito significativas ligadas a ela.

A primeira e mais importante característica distintiva deste fórum, manifestou-se através do lema não habitual “NÃO à guerra, NÃO à NATO”, sob o qual foi realizada. Os participantes levantaram a questão de prevenir qualquer confronto militar no continente europeu e no mundo como um todo, tanto através do uso de armas nucleares como convencionais.

Foi lançado no fórum o seguinte apelo: criar um movimento de forças sociais e políticas na Europa que, à semelhança do grande movimento civil anti nuclear da década de 80, contribua para a eliminação da ameaça dos mísseis nucleares, pois que, nos últimos anos, o seu nível se tornou nitidamente elevado também nesta parte do globo terrestre.

Em particular, no continente europeu, juntamente com as armas nucleares dos EUA instaladas ali desde os anos 50, o Pentágono começou a enviar para o seu espaço aéreo, nos anos mais recentes, aviões estratégicos pesados capazes de transportar tanto mísseis de cruzeiro como bombas com ogivas nucleares.

A segunda particularidade do evento foi ter um caráter muito representativo: mais de 500 pessoas participaram nele, o que levou os organizadores a alugar o Odeon, um dos cinemas centrais da cidade, durante oito horas. Obviamente, o interesse foi elevado.

Participaram na conferência pessoas de quase todos os países europeus, incluindo cidadãos dos países membros da Aliança do Atlântico Norte. A fim de informar os participantes da reunião sobre a situação relativa à complicação adicional do processo de controlo de armas, em particular de armas nucleares, foram convidados na qualidade de oradores principais do evento, especialistas que lidam com essas questões. Entre os oradores também houve especialistas que estudam as consequências negativas da atribuição de despesas militares claramente excessivas aos países líderes da NATO, as quais impedem a elaboração de programas de desenvolvimento social e económico dos seus Estados membros e da comunidade europeia, no seu conjunto.

Por ocasião do 70º aniversário da criação da NATO, os organizadores da conferência prepararam e mostraram um documentário “Os 70 anos da NATO: de guerra em guerra”, que critica a política militar e os preparativos militares da aliança de “solidariedade transatlântica”, as suas enormes despesas militares e as tentativas de interferências políticas e de outro género, nos assuntos dos Estados soberanos, a fim de derrubar os órgãos legítimos do poder e da administração.

O filme mostra as intervenções dos Estados Unidos e de outros Estados, membros desse bloco militar, nos assuntos da Sérvia, da Síria e de outros países, e são apresentadas provas da interferência de Washington nos assuntos internos da Ucrânia através da organização de um golpe de Estado, em 2014. É criticada a instalação, na Europa, de armas nucleares e sistemas antimíssil dos EUA. É levantada a questão do encerramento de todas as bases militares dos EUA não só em Itália, mas também noutros países europeus. No filme, foi pronunciado o slogan: “Para sair das guerras, é necessário sair da NATO”.

No evento, o representante russo apresentou uma nova monografia intitulada ***”A evolução das armas nucleares estratégicas e táticas dos EUA e as características do seu uso no século XXI” (Moscovo, 2019, p. 1086). Também analisou a situação alarmante no campo do controlo de armas devido aos Estados Unidos, que mostraram e continuam a manter atitudes negativas em relação aos 12 tratados internacionais em vigor neste sector. Este caso é evidenciado pelo facto dos EUA terem repudiado unilateralmente alguns deles (em particular o Tratado ABM), ou recusado ratificar outros (por exemplo, o Tratado de Proibição Total de Ensaios Nucleares), ou violado as suas disposições (por exemplo, o Tratado INF sobre a eliminação de mísseis de médio e curto alcance), ou até mesmo se recusarem a discutir alguns deles em espaços de negociação internacional (por exemplo, o projecto do Tratado sobre Segurança Europeia).

Observou, com particular atenção, que metade desses tratados e acordos estão directamente ligados às armas nucleares, a saber: o Tratado sobre a Redução de Armas Ofensivas Estratégicas (Tratado START), o Tratado sobre a Eliminação de Mísseis de Alcance Intermédio e Curto, o Tratadode Não-Proliferação de Armas Nucleares, o Acordo Nuclear Iraniano, o Tratado sobre a Proibição Total de Ensaios Nucleares e o Acordo do Plutónio de Uso Militar .

Foi dada atenção especial da parte russa às repetidas violações do Tratado INF por parte de Washington quando, para verificar a eficácia do sistema de defesa antimíssil, foram utilizados mísseis alvo que são proibidos por este tratado.

A partir dos documentos oficiais do Congresso e do Departamento de Defesa dos Estados Unidos, segue-se que, nas últimas duas décadas, tomando em consideração o uso dos mísseis alvo supracitados durante os ensaios, o Pentágono violou este tratado 117 vezes. A comunicação deste dado a um público tão vasto na Conferência de Florença não ficou nem ficará sem impacto e atenção, sobretudo, tendo em consideração o facto de que a Rússia nunca violou este Tratado INF e não foi a primeira a anunciar o seu repúdio.

Na “Declaração de Florença”, um documento conclusivo e aprovado, foi salientado que a NATO é uma organização sob o comando do Pentágono e que seu objectivo é garantir o controlo da Europa Ocidental e Oriental, que as bases militares dos EUA nos Estados membros dessa união militar, servem para ocupar esses países. A manutenção de uma presença militar permanente dos EUA permite que Washington influencie e controle as políticas dos países europeus e de outros países.

O documento final, que mais tarde foi traduzido em **15 idiomas, indica que a Aliança é uma máquina militar que trabalha para os interesses dos Estados Unidos com a cumplicidade dos principais grupos de poder europeus e é culpada de crimes contra a Humanidade. Neste contexto, foi mencionada a guerra agressiva desencadeada pela NATO, em 1999, contra a Jugoslávia, bem como as intervenções militares do bloco, realizadas em total violação do Direito Internacional, contra o Afeganistão, a Líbia, a Síria e mais alguns Estados.

Na declaração constata-se que, violando o Tratado de Não-Proliferação de Armas Nucleares, os Estados Unidos estão a instalar armas nucleares em cinco países não-nucleares da NATO, sob o falso pretexto da existência de uma “ameaça russa”, o que coloca em risco a segurança no continente europeu.

Naturalmente, da declaração adoptada em Florença sobre a necessidade de dissolver uma aliança militar como a NATO e fortalecer o regime de controlo de armamentos, até serem alcançados resultados específicos nessas áreas, muitos esforços organizacionais, políticos, informativos e outros serão exigidos dos defensores da política de não-bloco e de saída da aliança. Afigura-se que o processo de criação de um movimento específico contra a guerra e, ao mesmo tempo, com orientação anti NATO começou e pode ser activado.

Vladimir Kozin

Vladimir Kozin é um dos principais especialistas do Centro de Estudos Político-Militares do MGIMO do Ministério das Relações Exteriores da Rússia

** De momento, disponível em 17 línguas.

*** A evolução das armas nucleares estratégicas e tácticas dos EUA e as características do seu uso no século XXI: 
Monografia/V. Kozin. –  Editora Sabashnikovs. 2019. – 1086 p., Com ilustrações

(ISBN 975 −5-82420-163-5).

A monografia  explora de maneira abrangente a perspectiva da evolução das armas nucleares estratégicas e táticas dos EUA no séc. XXI em estreita conexão com as suas estratégias nucleares modernas e outras estratégias (segurança nacional, defesa nacional e antimísseis) adoptadas durante o período do Presidente Donald Trump. Uma ênfase considerável é colocada na identificação de características da modernização das armas ofensivas estratégicas americanas e das armas nucleares tácticas, incluindo a tríade nuclear estratégica qualitativamente nova, que existirá em quase todo o século. Nesse sentido, o ensaio histórico relacionado a questões seleccionadas é mínimo. Os problemas que as futuras negociações para reduzir as armas ofensivas estratégicas e as armas nucleares táticas podem enfrentar no contexto do fortalecimento do sistema de defesa antimíssil global e as forças de propósitos gerais dos EUA estão sendo consideradas. As características da violação pelo lado americano do Tratado START-3 e da eliminação do Tratado do INF. São analisadas diversas propostas sobre a limitação de armas ofensivas estratégicas e armas nucleares tácticas apresentadas por especialistas estrangeiros. É investigada a posição de Washington sobre a possibilidade de construir um mundo livre de armas nucleares em escala global.

A monografia destina-se a profissionais envolvidos no desenvolvimento de armas nucleares ofensivas e tácticas estratégicas dos EUA, no contexto da segurança global e da estabilidade estratégica, bem como àqueles que estudam as questões de controlo de armas e as relações russo-americanas em geral.

Die Gefahr eines gewaltigen Krieges, der durch den Einsatz von Atomwaffen das Ende der Menschheit bedeuten könnte, ist real und wächst, auch wenn sie von der Öffentlichkeit, die in Unkenntnis über diese unmittelbare Gefahr gehalten wird, nicht wahrgenommen wird.

Ein starkes Engagement, um einen Weg aus dem Kriegssystem zu finden, ist von entscheidender Bedeutung. Dies wirft die Frage nach der Zugehörigkeit Italiens und anderer europäischer Länder zur NATO auf.

Die NATO ist kein Bündnis. Sie ist eine Organisation unter dem Kommando des Pentagons, und ihr Ziel ist die militärische Kontrolle West- und Osteuropas.

US-Basen in den Mitgliedsländern der NATO dienen der Besetzung dieser Länder, indem sie eine ständige militärische Präsenz unterhalten, die es Washington ermöglicht, ihre Politik zu beeinflussen und zu kontrollieren und echte demokratische Entscheidungen zu verhindern.

Die NATO ist eine Kriegsmaschine, die im Interesse der Vereinigten Staaten operiert, unter Mitwirkung der großen europäischen Machtgruppen, die sie der Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit schuldig gemacht haben.

Der Angriffskrieg der NATO im Jahr 1999 gegen Jugoslawien ebnete den Weg für die Globalisierung militärischer Interventionen, wobei Kriege gegen Afghanistan, Libyen, Syrien und andere Länder unter vollkommener Verletzung des Völkerrechts geführt wurden.

Diese Kriege werden von den Mitgliedstaaten finanziert, deren Militärhaushalte auf Kosten der Sozialausgaben ständig steigen, um kolossale Militärprogramme, wie das US-Atomprogramm, zu unterstützen, das 1,2 Billionen US-Dollar kostet.

Unter Verstoß gegen den Atomwaffensperrvertrag stationieren die USA unter dem falschen Vorwand der “russischen Bedrohung” Atomwaffen in fünf nicht-nuklearen NATO-Staaten. Auf diese Weise riskieren sie die Sicherheit Europas.

Um das Kriegssystem zu verlassen, das immer mehr Schaden anrichtet und uns immer größeren Gefahren aussetzt, müssen wir die NATO verlassen und unsere Rechte als souveräne und neutrale Staaten bekräftigen.

Auf diese Weise wird es möglich, zum Abbau der NATO und aller anderen militärischen Bündnisse, zur Neugestaltung der Strukturen der gesamten europäischen Region und zur Schaffung einer multipolaren Welt beizutragen, in der die Wünsche des Volkes nach Freiheit und sozialer Gerechtigkeit verwirklicht werden können.

Wir schlagen die Schaffung einer INTERNATIONALEN NATO-AUSTRITTS-FRONT in allen europäischen Mitgliedsländern der NATO vor, indem wir ein Organisationsnetzwerk aufbauen, das auf der fundamentalen Ebene stark genug ist, um die sehr schwierigen Bemühungen zu unterstützen, denen wir uns gegenübersehen, um dieses für unsere Zukunft lebenswichtige Ziel zu erreichen.

COMITATO NO GUERRA NO NATO/GLOBAL RESEARCH,

Firenze (Italia), 07:04:2019

Cerca de 5.000 crianças e 212 adolescentes participaram, ontem em Pisa, no “Dia da Solidariedade” em memória do Major Nicola Ciardelli, da Brigada Folgore, que foi morto em 27 de Abril de 2006, num “terrível atentado” em Nassirya, durante a “missão de paz” Antiga Babilónia.

O Dia, promovido todos os anos pela Associação Nicola Ciardelli Onlus criada pela família, tornou-se, graças ao apoio decisivo do Município (primeiro liderado pelo PD, hoje pela Liga) o laboratório de uma grande operação – na qual colabora um vasto conjunto de autoridades e associações – “sensibilizar os jovens estudantes para a importância do compromisso de cada um em construir um futuro de Paz e Solidariedade”. O exemplo a seguir é “o compromisso generoso de Nicola a favor das populações dilaceradas pelo conflito, encontradas na ocasião das numerosas missões em que participou”, durante as quais “experimentou, em primeira mão, a devastação das guerras e o sofrimento daqueles que eles são forçados a suportá-las, sobretudo, as crianças”.

Ø  No entanto, ninguém  contou às 5.000 crianças e adolescentes a verdadeira história da guerra devastadora, desencadeada em 2003, pelos Estados Unidos contra o Iraque, um país já sujeito a um embargo que causou um milhão e meio de mortes em dez anos, das quais cerca de meio milhão eram crianças.

Ø  Ninguém lhes explicou que, para justificar a guerra, acusando o Iraque de possuir armas de destruição em massa, foram fabricadas “provas”, que, mais tarde, se demonstraram ser falsas.

Ø  Ninguém lhes disse que, para esmagar a resistência, o Iraque foi sujeito a ferro e fogo, usando todos os meios: desde bombas de fósforo contra o povo de Falluja, até à tortura na prisão de Abu Ghraib.

Nesta guerra – definida hoje pelo Ministério da Defesa italiano –  “Operação Iraqi Freedom, conduzida pelos USA, para derrubar o regime de Saddam Hussein, no âmbito da luta internacional contra o terrorismo” – participou o contingente italiano Antica Babilonia. A Conselheira política dos seus comandantes, entre 2005 e 2006, era a actual Ministra da Defesa, Elisabetta Trenta (Cinco Estrelas). Fazia parte dessa mesma Operação, o185°Reggimento paracadutisti Folgore ricognizione acquisizione obiettivi, Departamento de Forças Especiais em que era oficial, Nicola Ciardelli.

O Regimento – documenta o Ministério da Defesa – “opera, infiltrando destacamentos operacionais para além das linhas inimigas, em acções directas que envolvem o recrutamento de alvos à distância, utilizando o armamento fornecido e todas as plataformas de fogo terrestres, aéreas e navais”. Por outras palavras, uma vez identificado o “alvo humano”, ele é eliminado directamente por atiradores seleccionados ou, indirectamente, por um ponteiro a laser que guia a bomba lançada por um caça. Isto não foi dito às 5.000 crianças e adolescentes que, no auge do Dia, aplaudiram os Paraquedistas do Folgore que desciam do céu na Ponte di Mezzo, parecendo aos seus olhos, heróis de banda desenhada que defendem os bons dos maus.

O sucedido em Pisa não é um caso isolado. Os militares americanos da base de Sigonella – relata Antonio Mazzeo – estão cada vez mais presentes nas escolas sicilianas, onde ensinam inglês, ginástica e algo mais. Em Sigonella, onde um padre levou as crianças para uma “visita de estudo, e nas bases em Puglia, são realizados para os alunos do ensino médio “estágios escola e trabalho”. Casos semelhantes são registados noutras regiões.

Está em curso uma verdadeira operação de aliciação militar das mentes das gerações mais jovens (e não apenas destas). Será que há professores, estudantes e pais dispostos a opor-se a ela, organizando-se afim de, contra a cultura da guerra, promover a cultura da paz?

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo em italiano :

Operazione conquista delle menti

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Circa 5.000 bambini e ragazzi di 212 classi hanno partecipato, ieri a Pisa, alla «Giornata della Solidarietà» in ricordo del maggiore Nicola Ciardelli della Brigata Folgore, rimasto ucciso il 27 aprile 2006 in un «terribile attentato» a Nassirya, durante la «missione di pace» Antica Babilonia.

La Giornata, promossa ogni anno dalla Associazione Nicola Ciardelli Onlus creata dalla famiglia, è divenuta, grazie al determinante sostegno del Comune (prima guidato dal PD, oggi dalla Lega) il laboratorio di una grande operazione – cui collabora un vasto arco di enti e associazioni  – per «sensibilizzare i giovani studenti sull’importanza dell’impegno di ognuno verso la costruzione di un futuro di Pace e Solidarietà». L’esempio da seguire è «l’impegno profuso da Nicola a favore delle popolazioni dilaniate dai conflitti, incontrate in occasione delle numerose missioni cui aveva partecipato», durante le quali aveva «toccato con mano la devastazione delle guerre e le sofferenze di coloro che sono costretti a subirle, primi tra tutti i bambini».

Ø  Nessuno però ha raccontato ai 5.000 bambini e ragazzi  la vera storia della devastante guerra scatenata nel 2003 dagli Stati uniti contro l’Iraq, paese già sottoposto a un embargo che aveva provocato in dieci anni un milione e mezzo di morti, di cui circa mezzo milione tra i bambini.

Ø  Nessuno gli ha spiegato che, per giustificare la guerra accusando l’Iraq di possedere armi di distruzione di massa, vennero fabbricate «prove», risultate poi false.

Ø  Nessuno gli ha detto che, per stroncare la resistenza, l’Iraq venne messo a ferro e fuoco, usando ogni mezzo: dalle bombe al fosforo contro la popolazione di Falluja alle torture nella prigione di Abu Ghraib.

A questa guerra – definita oggi dal ministero italiano della Difesa «Operazione Iraqi Freedom guidata dagli USA per il rovesciamento del regime di Saddam Hussein, nel quadro della lotta internazionale al terrorismo» – partecipò il contingente italiano Antica Babilonia. Consigliere politico dei suoi comandanti, tra il 2005 e il 2006, era l’attuale ministra dela Difesa Elisabetta Trenta (Cinque Stelle). Ne faceva parte il 185° Reggimento paracadutisti Folgore ricognizione acquisizione obiettivi, reparto di forze speciali in cui era ufficiale Nicola Ciardelli.

Il Reggimento – documenta il ministero della Difesa  – «opera infiltrando distaccamenti operativi oltre le linee nemiche, in azioni dirette che prevedono l’ingaggio di obiettivi a distanza sfruttando l’armamento in dotazione e tutte le piattaforme di fuoco terrestri, aeree e navali». In altre parole, una volta individuato il «bersaglio» umano, esso viene eliminato direttamente da tiratori scelti o, indirettamente, con un puntatore laser che guida la bomba lanciata da un caccia. Questo non è stato raccontato ai 5.000 bambini e ragazzi che, al culmine della Giornata, hanno applaudito i parà della Folgore che scendevano dal cielo sul Ponte di mezzo, apparendo ai loro occhi come eroi dei fumetti che difendono i buoni dai cattivi.

Quello di Pisa non è un caso isolato. I militari USA della base di Sigonella – riporta Antonio Mazzeo  – sono sempre più presenti nelle scuole siciliane dove tengono corsi di inglese, di ginnastica e altri. A Sigonella, dove un parroco ha portato i bambini in «visita di istruzione», e nelle basi in Puglia si svolgono per gli studenti delle superiori stage di «alternanza scuola-lavoro». Casi analoghi si registrano in altre regioni.

È in corso una vera e propria operazione di conquista militare delle menti delle giovani generazioni (e non solo di queste). Ci sono insegnanti, studenti e genitori disponibii a contrastarla, organizzandosi per far avanzare, contro quella della guerra, la cultura della pace?

My corner of New York’s Catskill Mountains is shortly due to explode in green. Today however, it’s brown, beige, russet and auburn: a wrapping of spindly trunks with naked branches cascading uphill draws my eyes to the horizon. I wait. My neighbors wait. Landscapers and gardeners wait. We wait to plant even a few pansies; we wait before replacing our glass doors with screening. Big Tim waits before detaching his truck plow so we too keep our snow shovels handy.

Impatiently, in search of soft loam, I strike into a plot in front of the house. Not far beneath dry white grass and pallid corn stubble, the steel of the spade meets resistance—not rock but still frozen earth not far below the surface.

Other warnings of change are undeniable however. First there’s the smell of the air itself – not fragrant yet still inviting; new sounds floating through the atmosphere invite me to ease open a window early in the morning.

Male merganser ducks arrive and stake out their territory along the riverbank. Small creatures lodged under bark or found other moist crevices during their metamorphosing months stir. I slap at two insects as they fly past me eager to flee the stale winter air of the house. Though they’ll soon encounter predators gathered in nearby branches.

With snow and ice finally gone, we really don’t want more precipitation, even if it’s spring rain. Sun is enough, we feel. But it’s not up to us, is it? We should not forget how millions of living things evolved to this point, their descendants surviving this winter, to awaken only if saturated by tomorrows’ downpours. Indeed, rains are forecast to arrive on schedule. They’ll soften the dark loam and soak into it to loosen that ice underground.

In the cities, rain may be welcomed to wash off their smelly, gritty streets. Here, while it may nourish the soil, rain creates acres and miles of mud: heavy slosh that spatters cars, ruts driveways, sticks to shoes and reaches across hallway floors.

A few days ago when I ventured northward deeper into Delaware County, I was surprised—somewhat envious too – to survey fields of bright green grass already sprouting across treeless meadows and still unplowed garden farms. Covetousness gives way to the reassurance of winter’s end. Our valley on the south side of the watershed will soon have its turn.

On this drive through the hills my very first recognition of spring is not in green but in red; hillsides covered by naked trees are tinged in burgundy. Hmmm, these are not fruit trees but green-leaf trees, I remark to my companion. Then I’m reminded how those red buds are just protective sleeves; soon all will give way to tender green pushing from within.

Be patient. Nothing is definitive at this point; but it’s there, inside that burgundy mist. In days, if not hours, the green will strike out. If we miss the burgundy signal of spring we may detect it in a new morning light. I fantasize that this change of light is actually the rising energy of photosynthesis, of green creeping out of those billions of buds high on the hillside, across the meadows, lining the riverbank, through a sparse orchard, around corn-stubbled fields.

It doesn’t matter if we fail to notice the shift from burgundy to tender green. That green will thoroughly capture us and hold us for many months.

In Iraq, spring, always brief, has lingered this year because of good rains. “Merciful rain” is how Iraqis greet whatever precipitation blesses their land. This, after two hard and worrisome years of drought. My friend in Kerbala reports that his garden remains in bloom today, long past what he’d expected. Iraq’s northern wheat fields are high and dense too, thanks to heavy winter rains; we’ll have a normal harvest before summer’s pitiless heat descends. Across the border, after a long and painful arid period, Syria’s northern wheat basket is once more readying to feed its parched and forlorn inhabitants. Colleagues in both nations talk with pleasure and gratitude of extended and abundant rains this winter.

It’s hard not to be mollified by the return of spring here, and by good rains across the Levant. How could these cycles possibly be so distorted by massive global shifts threatening our entire planet? Well, they can. And the sight of the changeover of seasons can impress on us just how vulnerable everything is. Trained people are systematically measuring water temperatures on which so many creatures and plants depend. How populations are decreasing and shifting and how habitations are disrupted at alarming rates are unarguable.

Better accept spring not as a familiar visitor but as a newborn in need of very special care. Take nothing for granted—neither spring’s green nor political liberties.

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Barbara Nimri Aziz is a New York based anthropologist and journalist. She is the author of “Tibetan Frontier Families” and numerous articles on Tibet and Nepal, has been working in Nepal in recent weeks. Find her work at www.RadioTahrir.org. She was a longtime producer at Pacifica-WBAI Radio in NY.

Featured image is from the author

The new battle for Tripoli entered its fourth week. Since April 4, when Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar officially announced its Operation Flood of Dignity, the Libyan National Army (LNA) has reached Ayn Zara, but has not been able to capture it and reach the city itself.

At the same time, the LNA has gained control of Tripoli International Airport and several nearby areas thus creating a foothold for further advances there.

Forces loyal to the Government of National Accord (GNA) have prevented the LNA from entering the Tripoli and launches several counter-attacks in the airport area and other parts of the frontline. However, they appear to have not enough resources to push the LNA back from the Tripoli countryside.

In this situation, the LNA leadership decided to re-shape its efforts and focused its military activities in the area southeast of Tripoli. LNA units have captured the village of Zatarnah and advanced on the villages of Laftah and Khallet al-Kahili. The goal of this effort is to cut off the road linking GNA forces in Tripoli with their allies in Misrata.

Both sides claim that they conduct successful operations inflicting large casualties to their enemies. However, in fact, the intensity of clashes at the most of the frontline as well as airstrikes by GNA and LNA warplanes remains relatively small. The main reason is the lack of resources, which had been drawn by years of chaos erupted in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi’s government.

In recent series of clashes, the LNA captured two battle tanks and a self-propelled artillery gun. Pro-GNA sources claimed that GNA forces had killed up to a dozen of LNA fighters.

Local sources continue speculating that the LNA may launch an offensive on the city of Sirte. In the first days of Operation Flood of Dignity, LNA units made several advances in the nearby area, but no large offensive actions were undertaken.

Over the past week, there have been reports that the LNA has been deploying reinforcements to the Sirte frontline in an attempt to exploit the GNA focus on the battle for Tripoli. Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that the LNA itself is able to deploy enough forces to carry out two major offensive operations in northern Libya simultaneously.

In the coming week, the LNA will likely continue its slow push south and southeast of Tripoli aiming to shorten the frontline where it’s possible to cut off logistical lines of GNA forces. In the event of success, it will gain real chances to capture Tripoli.

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While the crazed and corrupt people who comprise the Democratic Party and US print and TV media continue to insist that Russiagate is real, a very real threat is emerging in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The threat arises from the fact that Washington has taught each country to have no trust in America’s veracity. The governments of the four countries have learned that everything Washington says is a lie.

Moreover, the countries have learned that Washington does not accept their sovereignty and objects to their existence. Each of the four countries has experienced sanctions designed to overthrow their governments or cause them to submit to Washington’s will.

Russia long ago saw through Washington’s disingenuous claim that the missile ring that Washington has arrayed around Russia is defensive and directed against (non-existent) Iranian missiles. Putin has said many times that the “defensive” missiles can easily and quickly be converted into nuclear armed offensive missiles that leave Russia no response time. I have always been amazed at the utter stupidity of the Polish and Romanian governments for accepting these American missiles. No doubt the Polish and Romanian officials were paid handsome bribes, but money is no good to a dead person. You can bet your life that the Russians are not going to permit such operable weapons to be on Russian borders during a time of high tensions that exists today between the West and Russia.

Not content with this reckless provocation of Russia, the dumbshxxts that comprise the US government have announced a program to put weapons in space that can neutralize Russia and China’s nuclear deterrent. This reckless and irresponsible plan did not go unnoticed in Russia. Lieutenant General Viktor Poznikhir, Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Operative Command, declared last week that Washington’s “on-start interception” program reveals that Washington is preparing a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia and China. You can bet your life that Russia and China are not going to sit there and wait for Washington’s attack, expecially as Russia has coming into deployment hypersonic missiles incapable of interception by any known or deployed means.

What Washington and its corrupt European vassals are doing is preparing the grave for the Western world.

In the US self-interested political propaganda has succeeded in crowding out all attention to real issues, such as mass displacement of jobs by robotics, global warming whatever the cause, and the rising risk of nuclear war. When the rest of the world looks at the West, it sees an insane asylum in which the two greatest threats to American national security are said to be Venezuela and a Russian agent in the Oval Office.

It is impossible for anyone to take a country this silly seriously. Consequently, American power is collapsing, to everyone else’s relief. Even Washington’s well paid puppets in Germany, Britain, and France are showing signs of independence that have not been seen since the days of Charles DeGaulle.

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans know that they are dealing with fools, and they are not going to take any chances. They know that no agreement with America means anything and that Washington speaks only with a forked tongue.

Washington is going to be increasingly frustrated abroad as willingness to cooperate with the insane asylum vanishes. The consequence will be increasing tyranny at home.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Vox

Professor Claudia von Werlhof wrote to Greta Thunberg. In this letter Von Werlhof tells that the disruption of the global climate is not due to CO2.

Following questions arose from this letter for Silvia Terribili, who asked von Werlhof to give an interview for her radio show Onda Italiana on salto.nl, April 9th.

Here you find the Radio Interview:

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1. Where can we find scientific evidence for this, since the mainstream information tells us every day that the climate disruption is due to CO2?
2. Some 30 years ago concerned environmentalists already asked for a drastic reduction of air pollutants, especially transboundary air pollutants like SOx, NOx, and toxic aerosols. The narrative today has changed completely. We only seem to be concerned about global warming. What does this mean? That air pollutants are not dangerous anymore?
3. Some 30 years ago we already warned that the protective ozone layer had been reduced. Nowadays we do not seem to care anymore for ozone depletion in the stratosphere. How could this be explained?
4. It seems that computer models predicting catastrophic global warming in the coming years are parameterized. The risks of framing the outcome of these mathematic models is high. What can you say about this?
5. Two thirds of the Earth are covered by oceans, why do not we measure the temperature of oceans in order to understand the so called global warming? Is the temperature of the Pacific Ocean really much warmer today than before the industrial Revolution? We know that all climate on Earth depends on the behavior of oceans, especially the Pacific. How can we prove with scientific evidence that the pollution caused by industrialized countries is much more effective on a global scale than the behavior of oceans?
6. You have been studying the works of Rosalie Bertell. What are the most important findings and statements of her?
7. Climate engineering is a potential climate weapon that can be used on a global scale. Why is Europe not concerned at all about this risk? Why is public debate on this issue practically not existent?
8. What are ionospheric heaters ? What do we know about the experiments that are been conducted and directing a huge bundle of energy in the ionosphere at 60 km altitude? Why is public debate on this issue completely absent? What is Europe doing in order to monitor these kinds of dangerous experiments being carried out on our continent?
9. May 23 to 26th The European Elections are coming. What can we do, as concerned Europeans, to put climate engineering and all related risks on the electoral agenda, because we expect European institutions to protect 300 million citizens from the risks of these extremely dangerous technologies.

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This interview was originally published on Onda Italiana. This is republished from PBME.

Claudia von Werlhof is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Last week’s US GDP for the 1st quarter 2019 preliminary report (2 more revisions coming) registered a surprising 3.2% annual growth rate. It was forecast by all the major US bank research departments and independent macroeconomic forecasters to come in well below 2%. Some banks forecast as low as 1.1%. So why the big difference?

One reason may be the problems with government data collection in the first quarter with the government shutdown that threw data collection into a turmoil. First preliminary issue of GDP stats are typically adjusted significantly in the second revision, coming in future weeks. (The third revision, months later, often is little changed).

There are many problems with GDP accuracy reflecting the real trends and real GDP that many economists have discussed at length elsewhere. My major critique is the redefinition in 2013 that added at least 0.3% (and $500b a year) to GDP totals by simply redefining what constituted investment. Another chronic problem is how the price index, the GDP Deflator as it’s called, grossly underestimates inflation and thus the price adjustment to get the 3.2% ‘real’ GDP figure reported. In this latest report, the Deflator estimated inflation of only 1.9%. If actual inflation were higher, which it is, the 3.2% would be much lower, which it should. There are many other problems with GDP, such as the government including in their calculation totals the ‘rent’ that 50 million homeowners with mortgages reputedly ‘pay to themselves’.

Apart from these definitional issues and data collection problems in the first quarter, underlying the 3.2% are some red flags revealing that the 3.2% is the consequence of temporary factors, like Trump’s trade war, which is about to come to an end next month with the conclusion of the US-China trade negotiations. How does the trade war boost GDP temporarily?

Source: US Bureau of Economic Analysis

Two ways at least. First, it pushes corporations to build up inventories artificially to get the cost of materials and semi-finished goods before the tariffs begin to hit. Second, trade disputes initially result in lower imports while negotiations are underway. In the latest US GDP analysis reported last week, lower imports resulted in what’s called higher ‘net exports’ (i.e. the difference between imports and exports). Net exports contribute to GDP. The US economy could be slowing in terms of output and exports, but if imports decline faster it appears that ‘net exports’ are rising and therefore so too is GDP from trade.

Looking behind the 1st quarter numbers it is clear that the 3.2% is largely due to excessive rising business inventories and rising net exports contributions to GDP.

Net exports contributed 1.03% to the 3.2% and inventories another 0.65% to the 3.2%. That is, over half.  Even the Wall St. Journal reported that without these temporary contributions (both will abate in future months sharply), US GDP in the quarter would have been only 1.3%. (And less if adjusted more accurately for inflation and if the 2013 phony redefinitions were also ‘backed out’).

US GDP in reality probably grew around the 1.1% forecasted by the research departments of the big US banks.

This analysis is supported by the fact that around 75% of the US economy and GDP is due to business investment and household consumption typically. And both consumption and investment are by far the primary sources of GDP. (The rest is from government spending and ‘net exports).

Consumer spending (68% of GDP) rose only by 1.2% last quarter and thereby contributed only 0.82% of the 3.2%. That’s only one fourth of the 3.2%, when consumption, given its size in the economy, should contribute 68%!

Durable manufactured goods collapsed by -5.3% and autos sales are in freefall. And all this during tax refund season which otherwise boosts spending. (Thus confirming middle class refunds due to Trump tax cuts have been sharply reduced due to Trump’s 2018 tax act).

Similarly private business investment contributed only a tepid 0.27% of the 3.2%, well below its average for GDP share.

Business investment is composed of building structures (including housing), private equipment, software and the nebulously defined ‘intellectual property’, and of course the business inventories previously mentioned. The structures and equipment categories are by far the largest categories of business investment. However, in the first quarter 2019, structures declined by -0.8%, housing by -2.8% and equipment investment rose only a statistically insignificant 0.2%.

This poor contribution of business investment contributing only 2.7% to GDP, when the long term historical average is about 8-10% normally, is all the more interesting given that Trump projected a 30% boost to GDP is his business-investor-multinational corporate heavy 2018 tax cuts were passed. 2.7% is a long way off 30%! The tax cuts for business didn’t flow into real investment, in other words. (They went instead into stock buybacks, dividend payments, and mergers and acquisitions of competitors). And they compressed household consumer spending to boot.

Since Trump’s tax cuts, there’s been virtually no increase in the rate of Gross private domestic investment in the US. It’s held steady at around 5% of GDP on average since mid-2017. Within that 5%, housing and business equipment contributions have been falling, while IP (hard to estimate) and inventories have been rising.

In short, both Consumer spending and core business investment contributions to US GDP have been slowing, and that’s true within the recent 1^st quarter US 3.2% GDP.

In other words, 1st quarter GDP rose  due to the short term, and temporary contributions to inventories and net exports–both driven artificially by Trump’s trade wars.

The only other major contribution to first quarter GDP is, of course, Trump war spending which rose by 4.1% in 1st quarter GDP. (Conversely, nondefense spending was reduced -5.9% in the first quarter GDP).

Going forward in 2019, no doubt war spending will continue to increase, but business inventories and household consumption will continue to weaken. Meanwhile, business investment on structures, housing, and equipment and household consumption will continue to remain weak at best.

Trump is betting on his 2020 re-election and preventing the next recession now knocking at the US and global economy door. He will keep defense spending growing by hundreds of billions of dollars. He’ll hope that concluding his trade wars will give the economy a temporary boost. And he’ll up the pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates before year end.

Summing up, beneath the surface of the US economy the major categories of US GDP–business structures, housing, business equipment, and household consumer spending (especially on durables and autos)–will continue to weaken. Whether war spending, the Fed, and trade deals can offset these more fundamental weakening forces remains to be seen.

Bottom line, therefore, the 3.2% GDP is no harbinger of a growing economy. Quite the contrary. It is artificial and due to temporary forces that are likely about to change. It all depends on further war spending, browbeating the Fed into further submission to lower rates, and what happens with the trade negotiations.

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Jack is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, Summer 2019, and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, March 2019. He blogs at jackrasmus.com, tweets at @drjackrasmus, and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays, 2pm eastern time.

President Putin’s proposal to make it easier for all Ukrainians to receive Russian citizenship represents a bold effort to court his country’s civilizationally similar neighbors as “replacement migrants” and will lead to a competition with Russia’s historical rival Poland for this valuable “human resource”.

Population Trends

It’s no secret that Russia has had serious problems maintaining its population levels ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and last year actually saw its first drop in a decade. This process is occurring concurrently with a surge in birthrates among the country’s Muslim minority and leading to the likelihood that approximately one-third of its inhabitants will follow Islam within the next 15 years, according to Russia’s grand mufti.

Moscow is well aware of the socio-political challenges that this profound demographic shift might entail, especially if its controversial Article 282 proves insufficient for preemptively dealing with the dangerous rise of far-right ultra-nationalist ideas that might eventually inspire Christchurch-like terrorist attacks that seek to provoke a destabilizing so-called “Clash of Civilizations” within its borders. No matter how visionary President Putin’s 2012 manifesto on ethnicity and immigration is, it’s impossible for it to be perfectly applied in practice so it should therefore be taken for granted that some security incidents will eventually happen.

Trouble Looming?

The UN predicted last year that Russia’s population will shrink by 11 million before 2050, which is one of the reasons why Prime Minister Medvedev warned earlier this month about the need to prevent a demographic collapse similar to the one that happened in the 1990s. The other implied one might also have to do with the fact that this expected population loss that will presumably be led by the country’s ageing titular nationality of Orthodox Russian Slavs will result in an even larger percentage of its citizens being Muslim by that point, which could possibly accentuate the socio-political challenges that are usually associated with this sort of demographic transition in majority-Christian countries. Although President Putin implemented a policy to give generous subsidies to women who give birth to two or more children, he probably realizes that it won’t be as successful as needed to maintain both the country’s population levels and its existing religious balance, hence why he’s now proactively trying to court Ukrainians as “replacement migrants”.

“Civilizationally Similar Replacement Migrants”

These neighboring people are “civilizationally similar” to Russians in that they’re mostly Orthodox Slavs who speak a related language, and their possible large-scale migration to the country could theoretically balance the surging birthrates of Russia’s Muslim population and offset its predicted overall population decline. This was probably one of the reasons why President Putin just passed a decree making it much easier for the people of Donbass to obtain Russian citizenship and then soon thereafter declared that this policy might be extended to include all of Ukraine’s over 40 million people. There were slightly less than 2 million Ukrainians living in Russia nearly a decade ago as recorded by the country’s census at the time, which is roughly equal to how many have moved to Poland since the 2014 EuroMaidan coup in search of work, where most of them presently have no path to citizenship and many are now reportedly considering moving to Germany or other Western European countries.

Poland vs. Russia

Nevertheless, Poland’s population is also afflicted with similar problems as Russia’s own in the sense that it also suffers from the natural decline that many developed economies do, so Ukrainians could conceivably also function as “civilizationally similar” “replacement migrants” for Warsaw just as they could for Moscow, meaning that these two historic rivals might end up competing with one another for this valuable “human resource”. Unlike in times past, this competition won’t be waged by military means and take place in the geopolitical realm, but will be a battle of soft power with an outcome that will ultimately be determined by which of the two countries provides more appealing economic prospects for the “new arrivals”. While Russia has the geographically expansive Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union, Poland has the promising Warsaw-led “Three Seas Initiative” that comes with the added benefit of EU membership.

Concluding Thoughts

It’s difficult to predict whether the Ukrainians that are living in Poland would relocate to Russia in response to President Putin’s citizenship proposal or if a new batch of their countrymen that are still living in their homeland will move there instead, but what’s clear is that Moscow is now competing with Warsaw to woo Ukrainians as “civilizationally similar” “replacement migrants” to offset its natural population decline and maintain its existing religious balance that’s poised to dramatically change in the coming years following a surge in Muslim birthrates. Unlike Merkel and her implicit policy of “replacement migration” from the “Global South”, President Putin would prefer to court Ukrainians from the former Soviet Union, but in both cases each leader seems to have resigned themselves to the fact that their country’s demographic problems won’t be solved without a large-scale influx of immigrants.

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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.

Earlier this year, Luke Murry, national security adviser for Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, revealed that the National Security Agency had been averse over the last six months to using the phone surveillance program that hoovers information from millions of US phone calls and text messages.  This was hardly a comforting point; the issue spoke as much to competence as it did to any broader issue of warrantless surveillance of the good people in Freedom’s land.  Vast, cumbersome, and generally self-defeating, the essence of such programs is paranoid inefficiency.  Put it down to “technical issues”, suggested Murry.

The Call Details Records (CDR) program, hostile to liberties in its warrantless nature, has been a fixture of the US security landscape since 2001, when that nasty piece of legislation known as the USA PATRIOT ACT found its way onto the statue books.  The program was given legal approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pursuant to Section 215 of that dastardly piece of penmanship.

The extent of its operation was unveiled in dramatic fashion by Edward Snowden to media outlets in 2013, the surveillance system specific to gathering the metadata of domestic phone calls, a mosaic of caller, recipient and time of contact, has been the subject of scrutiny.  There are numerous others, but this one came in for special attention.

As Elliot Harmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains,

“While these records don’t contain the actual contents of telephone calls, they do include phone numbers and call times and length – more than enough information to prove the NSA with a clear picture of our social relationships, interests and affiliations.”

Murry was by no means the first to take issue with its effect and effectiveness.  There is a growing library of stocked criticism against such bulk storage systems both from the perspective of feasibility and effect, and the broader ethical and legal issues of surveillance and civil liberties.  The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, published in December 2013, recommended,

“that Congress should end such storage and transition to a system in which such metadata is held privately for the government to query when necessary for national security purposes.”

Hardly a sentiment sympathetic to privacy, but one that went some way in questioning the bulk storage of telephony metadata.  Besides, according to members of the Review Group, the whole appearance of it seemed an affront to defenders of privacy.  “In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.”  Leave it, instead, to “private providers or by a private third party” to deal with such matters.  The abuse might continue, but at least, in a good American tradition, it would be privatised.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) also considered the scope of such a system in its 2014 report, deeming it unduly “broad” and incompatible with broader issues of proportionality.  “If Section 215’s relevance requirement is to serve any meaningful function, however, relevance cannot be premised on the government’s desire to use a tool whose very operation depends on collecting information without limit.  We believe that a tool designed to capture all records of a particular type is simply incompatible with a statue requiring reasonable grounds to believe that ‘the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation’.”

In 2015, Congress had a minor change of heart with the USA Freedom Act, which mandated phone companies to keep collected telephony data that might be relevant for law enforcement authorities in terrorism investigations.  This had the effect of reducing the records kept – from billions per day to a few hundred million in a year.  Even then, the process proved erratic.  In 2016, the NSA accessed 151 million call logs, though the returns were miserly: court orders for a mere 42 targets.  The following year was even less impressive from the standpoint of efficient prosecution: 534 million records for a pittance of 40 suspects.

Even then, the NSA remained cagey about the extent of the CDR program, giving it room for fanciful prevarications.  It has refused to, for instance, supply unique identifiers in an annual transparency report required by the Office of the Inspector General over the course of three years.  Its reasons for that are charming.

“As of the date of this report [2017], the government does not have the technical ability to isolate the number of unique identifiers within records received from providers.”

In May 2018, the Agency gave the game away by admitting that it has overstretched itself in its surveillance remit.  Section 215 of the Patriot Act as amended by the USA Freedom Act of 2015 was effectively misused to collect records the NSA had no authority to gather.  The following month, the Agency revealed that hundreds of millions of collected call records would vanish into the ether due to “technical irregularities”.  These deletions were considered reprehensible enough for Senators Ron Wyden (D-Or) and Rand Paul (R-Ky) to request an investigation from the Inspector General of the NSA, Robert P. Storch.

While the NSA is using its own singular and constipated way of reconsidering a program more conducive to causing headaches than granting relief, its fate lies with the White House.  Till then, opinion amongst US lawmakers remains mixed.  The NSA remains, for some, a jewel in the national security crown, one which must shine, however dully.  Let them be, however competent.

  “If we have technical problems or challenges that the NSA has to take into account, that’s okay,” claims Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It’s not something we easily shelve.”

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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 Following text is Section 5 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

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Contents 

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11.  Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO

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1. The United States attacked and invaded Afghanistan in 2001 with the official motivation being to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who was targeted as the instigator of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. (The official version of what took place on 9/11 does not stand up to the technical-scientific investigations carried out by independent experts.) Osama bin Laden was a well-known figure in Washington. He belonged to a wealthy Saudi family and actively collaborated with the CIA from 1979 to 1989 when it trained and armed through the ISI (the Pakistani secret service) over 100,000 mujahidin for the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet troops fell into the “Afghan trap” (as Zbigniew Brzezinski later defined it, stating that the training and arming of the mujahidin began in July 1979, five months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).

2. This opened a new phase in the international situation. The President of the United States was authorized to conduct a “Global War on Terrorism”, in which there were no geographical borders, conducted against an enemy who could be identified from time to time not only in as a terrorist or a presumed terrorist, but in anyone who opposed US policy and interests. President Bush described the perfect image of an enemy, interchangeable and lasting. as “an obscure enemy, hiding in the dark corners of the Earth”.

3. The real purpose of US military intervention in Afghanistan was the occupation of this area of primary strategic importance. Afghanistan is at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, South and East. In this area (in the Gulf and in the Caspian), there are large oil reserves. There are three major powers – China, Russia and India – whose strength is growing and influencing global assets. As the Pentagon had warned in the report of 30 September 2001, “there is the possibility that a military rival with a formidable resource base will emerge in Asia”.

4. In the period before 11 September 2001, there were strong signs of a rapprochement between China and Russia in Asia. Washington viewed this as a challenge to US interests at the critical moment when the United States sought to fill the void that the disintegration of the USSR had left in Central Asia. Afghanistan is in a key geostrategic position for the control of this area.

5. The war began in October 2001 with the bombing carried out by the US and British air forces. At this point, the UN Security Council authorized the establishment of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), whose command was entrusted in succession to Great Britain, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands. But suddenly, in August 2003, NATO announced that it had “assumed the role of ISAF leadership force with a UN mandate”. It was a real coup. No resolution passed by the Security Council authorizes NATO to assume the leadership or command of the ISAF. Only in Resolution 1659 of February 2006 did the Security Council state that it “recognizes NATO’s continued engagement in directing the ISAF”. The ISAF mission was thus inserted into the Pentagon chain of command. The Italian military assigned to the ISAF was included in the same chain of command.

6. After Afghanistan, Iraq is the country that has been subjected to a strict embargo since 1991, which caused a million and a half deaths in ten years, of which about half a million were children. In 2002, President Bush listed Iraq in first place among the countries that belong to the “axis of evil”. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council “evidence” gathered by the CIA, which subsequently turned out to be false, on the alleged existence of a large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons in possession of Iraq, and on its alleged ability to build nuclear weapons in a short time. Because the Security Council refused to authorize the war, the Bush administration simply bypassed it.

7. The war began in March 2003 with the aerial bombing of Baghdad and other centers by the US and British air forces and with a land attack carried out by the Marines entering Iraq from Kuwait. In April, US troops occupied Baghdad. The operation, called “Iraqi Freedom”, was presented as “a preventive war” and “an export of democracy”. The US and allied occupation forces – including the Italian forces involved in the “Ancient Babylon” operation – encountered resistance they did not expect to find. In order to cut it off, Iraq was put on fire by over a million and a half soldiers that the Pentagon supplemented with hundreds of thousands of military contractors, using every means from phosphorus bombs to the people of Fallujah to torture in Abu Ghraib prison.

8. NATO actually participated in the war with its own structures and forces. In 2004, the “NATO Training Mission” was established in order to “help Iraq to create efficient armed forces”. In 2000, special courses were held in Alliance countries and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and policemen were trained. At the same time, NATO sent instructors and advisers, including Italians, to “help Iraq to create its own democratic and durable security sector” and “establish a long-term NATO partnership with Iraq”.

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Sections 6-16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research

This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.

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The infamous Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq was revealed to be the centre of an extensive network run by the US military after the coalition’s invasion of the country in 2003. Abuse and torture of largely innocent civilian Iraqi detainees at the hands of American soldiers were common. The full extent of what went on there was leaked to a shocked world on 28 April 2004, a year after the invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

What: The torture of detainees at the US-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq

Where: Abu Ghraib, Iraq

When: 28th April, 2004

What happened?

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, America set about implementing its administration across the defeated nation, which included the running of a vast network of prison complexes housing civilians and those suspected of participating in the Iraqi insurgency. One of those prisons was in Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of the capital Baghdad, which had been notorious for torture and poor living conditions in the Saddam Hussein era. It was demolished during the invasion and then renovated by the US coalition forces in 2003.

Janis Karpinski, a US Army Reserve Brigadier General, was put in charge of military prisons across Iraq including Abu Ghraib, in her position as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade. Despite being a seasoned operations and intelligence officer who had served in the 1991 Gulf War and in the Special Forces, Karpinski had no experience in running a prison system or in handling prisoners; importantly, nor did most of the soldiers under her command.

Over the course of the following year, the US administration of Abu Ghraib used a number of brutal torture and interrogation techniques, particularly in October and November 2003. The situation began to change, however, on 31 January 2004, when Major General Antonio M Taguba was appointed to conduct a formal investigation into the mishandling of the prison and the atrocities committed against the detainees. On 3 March, the Taguba Report was completed, and charges were subsequently filed against six soldiers found to be complicit in the crimes.

Abu Ghraib torture victim [file photo]

The actual facts and details of the torture, however, were not made public until 28 April 2004, when US Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld briefed congress on the report, and CBS broadcast photographs of the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees on its “60 Minutes 2” show. What was revealed was the extent to which torture and abuse had been perpetrated by American soldiers. Even more shocking was the fact that the vast majority – 70 to 90 per cent – of those held in Abu Ghraib were innocent civilians who were detained mistakenly, according to the International Red Cross.

Examples of the interrogation techniques used by soldiers on detainees included “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

All of the abuse and torture that was documented – which was found to be systematic, intentional, and illegal – was perpetrated by the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, which was attached to a battalion which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.

The legacy of Abu Ghraib

Over the course of the next few months, during which investigations continued to discover further atrocities and their perpetrators in Abu Ghraib, more soldiers and high-ranking officers were charged. There were some vestiges of justice following the revelations, such as the release of over five hundred detainees in the last ten days of May 2004; the sentencing of some of those complicit in the abuses; and the 75 per cent decline in reported cases of prisoner abuse and deaths after it came to light.

US soldiers during the 2003 invasion in Baghdad, Iraq [DVIDSHUB/Flickr]

The legacy of Abu Ghraib, however, did not fade. There were those within the Bush administration who still found ways to use international law to justify the atrocities and the interrogation methods used. On 11 May 2004, for example, Rumsfeld told members of the Senate Appropriations defence subcommittee that the methods had been authorised and confirmed by Pentagon lawyers as being in accordance with the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of detainees. Moreover, on 8 June, the Washington Post obtained a memo written in 2002 showing that the US Justice Department advised the White House that torturing suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists detained abroad “may be justified” as international laws against torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations” conducted for the war on terror.

This war on terror, which was the primary cause or casus belli of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent atrocities that followed, is ongoing with regional and worldwide reverberations. The revelation of the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib showed the world the injustice perpetuated by the apparently unending war on terror; that will forever be the tragic legacy of the Iraqi prison complex.

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Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Chris Walls on Fox News Sunday that he believes President Trump’s own advisers as well as Middle East allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel are “dragging the United States into a conflict” with Iran.

It comes just days after Zarif made similar statements about the possibility of US and Iranian ships clashing in the Persian Gulf, warning that a false flag “accident” scenario could “lure” Trump into war — something which he thinks Trump himself doesn’t want to see happen. It appears Tehran’s new strategy as it reels from the sanctions squeeze on oil and Trump ending the crude export waiver program is to try and delicately peel Trump away from the American ‘deep state’.

Zarif specifically named National Security Advisor John Bolton, Israel, Saudi Arabia, along with close Saudi ally the United Arab Emirates, all as seeking to escalate tensions leading toward a regime change war on Iran.

Wallace asked if they’re “all trying to exercise regime change?” according to Fox, and Zarif responded, “at least, at least.” Iran’s top diplomat explained:

“They have all shown an interest in dragging the United States into a conflict. I do not believe that President Trump wants to do that, I believe President Trump ran on a campaign promise of not bringing the United States into another war. But I believe President Trump’s intention to put pressure, the policy of maximum pressure on Iran in order to bring Iran to its knees so that we would succumb to pressure, is doomed to failure.”

Iranian Foreign Minister says 4 key leaders are trying to drag Trump into a conflict with Iran pic.twitter.com/lIAWviy88z

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 28, 2019

Interestingly, it appears Zarif is attempting a direct appeal to Trump and the generally non-interventionist “bring the troops home” stance he campaigned on in 2016.

Tehran’s leaders could be hoping for a Kim Jong Un style approach to Trump. Trump’s North Korea opening over the past year was marked by a series of off the cuff personal appeals and communications that led to one-on-one dialogue and thawing of tensions.

Middle East historian and analyst Asad Abukhalil noted “the media blitz by Zarif is clear in its intention: the Iranian regime has decided to negotiate with Trump – with Trump and not with his team. They think that they can split the administration.” Professor Abukhalil concluded, however, that “The calculation is not irrational but Trump does not see Iran like he sees North Korea.”

.@AmbJohnBolton responds to Chris' interview with the Foreign Minister of Iran #FNS #SundayMorning pic.twitter.com/EqNp2e6B5T

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 28, 2019

Soon after the Zarif interviewed aired Sunday morning, John Bolton appeared on Fox to dismiss what he called Iran’s “carefully prepared propaganda script”.

He slammed Zarif for attempting to “sow disinformation in the American body politic” — in an acknowledgement of Iran’s apparent new strategy to try and split Trump from the “deep state” agenda on Iran.

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Featured image is from FOX

The year 2019 has seen a significant increase in the number of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who have had to demolish their own home, or part of it, after having built it without a permit. The residents elect this path in order to avoid paying the city thousands of dollars they would have been billed, had municipal authorities carried out the demolition. Fifteen residential homes were demolished by their owners in East Jerusalem from the beginning of the year until 31 March 2019, along with parts of two other homes, a store, and a car repair shop. The demolitions left 69 people, 40 of them minors, homeless.

The prevalence of construction without permits in East Jerusalem is a direct result of the policies pursued by all Israeli authorities, which have deliberately created an acute construction crisis for the city’s Palestinian population, while Jewish neighborhoods enjoy massive development and substantial funding. As part of this policy, Israel has expropriated more than a third of the land it annexed from the West Bank and has built 11 neighborhoods exclusively for Jews (under international law, the status of these neighborhoods is the same as the Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank).

When it comes to the Palestinian population, Israel has done the opposite – canceling all Jordanian master plans for the annexed area. It was not until the 1980s that the Jerusalem Municipality drew up master plans for all Palestinian neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, plans that were chiefly designed to limit construction in these neighborhoods. The most striking feature of these plans was the designation of huge swathes of land as “open scenic areas” where development is forbidden. In 2014, these “scenic areas” made up about 30% of the land in Palestinian neighborhoods. Only some 15% of the land area in East Jerusalem (about 8.5% of Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction) is zoned for residential use by Palestinians under these plans, although they currently account for some 40% of the city’s population. Another measure Israel has employed to limit the amount of land available to Palestinians is declaring national parks where construction and urban development are almost entirely forbidden.

Given this reality, Palestinians have no choice but to build without permits. The Jerusalem Municipality estimates that 15,000 to 20,000 homes have been built without a permit in East Jerusalem in the past few years. Thousands of Palestinians in the city are living under constant threat to their homes and businesses; in many cases, the authorities follow through on this threat or force residents to demolish the structures themselves. From 2004 through March 2019, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished 830 residential units, and 120 more were demolished by their owners on the municipality’s orders. As a result, the municipality deliberately left 2,927 people homeless, 1,574 of them minors.

Israel does not see the residents of East Jerusalem as human beings with equal rights, but as people it strives to remove from their homes, as they are an obstacle to Judaizing the city. To that end, Israel employs various measures, all illegal: deliberately denying Palestinians construction for residential and other purposes, issuing demolition orders for structures built without a permit for lack of choice, and demolishing dozens of such structures a year. Israel has implemented this policy, designed to clear parts of the city of Palestinians, since occupying the West Bank and annexing East Jerusalem and the surrounding villages.

From January to March this year, B’Tselem field researcher ‘Amer ‘Aruri collected testimonies from Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who had to demolish their own homes. Their stories, along with excerpts from their testimonies, follow:

The apartment of Jamil Masalhah’s son, after he began the demolition. Photo by Amer Aruri, B’Tselem, 16 February 2019

The Masalmeh family, Silwan, 22 January 2019

The Masalmeh family has lived in the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood of Silwan since 1936. Jamil Masalmeh, 58, a husband and father of 13, married his wife in 1985 and has been living with her in his now deceased parents’ home ever since. In 1999, he added a porch to the house, but the municipality demolished it in 2005 on the grounds that it was built without a permit.

About five years ago, Masalmeh built a small unit on top of the house for his son, Adam, who got married soon after. Adam is now 28 and has a four-year-old son. Shortly after construction was completed, the family were issued a demolition order for the one-bedroom unit. They ignored it and never appealed to the authorities. On 15 January 2019, the family received another demolition order issued by the municipality, requiring them to demolish the unit themselves or pay the city for the cost of having it demolished – about 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD). On 22 January 2019, Jamil Masalmeh and his son set to work on the demolition, which they have not yet completed.

Settlement point next to the Masalhah family’s home. Photo by ‘Amer’ Aruri, B’Tselem, 16 February 2019

In a testimony he gave on 16 February 2019, Jamil Masalmeh (image below right) described being forced to demolish his son’s home:

A few years ago, I built a small, 55-square-meter apartment with cinder blocks and wood, for my son Adam to live in after marriage. He’s now married and they had a boy, four years ago.

Of course, the municipality issued a demolition order for the unit. That was about four years ago. On 15 January 2019, we got a new order saying we had to demolish the unit or they would do it, in which case we’d have to pay for the cost, about 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD).

On 22 January 2019, I demolished the roof of the unit and Adam and his wife moved in with us. I haven’t finished the demolition yet. I have to take down the walls, too, before the municipality comes and does it itself. Otherwise I’ll have to pay them back for it. I’m waiting for my sons to have time to help me, so I don’t have to hire help and spend more money. I’ve suffered enough financial damage and mental harm from this affair.

Adam works in construction and doesn’t make a lot of money. He now lives with us in the house, but we only have three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. I gave the living room to him, his wife and their son, and the house has become small. There are currently ten of us living in the house, including three minors. I don’t know how long we can endure this and how long Adam and his family can handle living in one room and sharing the bathroom and the kitchen with us. I try to help him as much as I can, but there’s only so much anyone can take.

A relative of ‘Amer Abu Hussein’s helps demolish the rooms. Photo by the family

The Abu Hussein family, Jabal al-Mukabber, 2 February 2019:

In 1996, three brothers – Mahmoud, Naser and Najib Abu Hussein – built three houses on a plot of land they had inherited from their father. The military installed the a-Sawahrah a-Sharqiyah checkpoint about three kilometers away. That year, after construction was finished, the brothers received a demolition order issued by the Ministry of Interior. They contacted a lawyer, who was able to have the order stayed if they paid a 35,000 NIS fine (roughly 9,750 USD) for each home and launched proceedings to have the construction legalized. After a year-long legal battle, the case was handed over to the Jerusalem Municipality, which announced that the land was a designated green space and not zoned for construction. The three homes are still under threat of demolition.

Between 2016 and 2018, ‘Ammar (33) and Khaled (23) Abu Hussein, Mahmoud’s married sons, built two homes next to their parents’ house. When construction was finished, in 2018, they received demolition orders. The demolition was suspended due to legal action taken by the family, but in January 2019, the municipality issued a new demolition order for the two homes. On 2 February 2019, the sons had to demolish their own homes to avoid paying the city 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD) for the cost of the demolition.

In a testimony he gave on 14 February 2019, ‘Ammar Abu Hussein described how he and his brothers had to demolish their own homes:

In 2013, I got married and rented an apartment in Jabal al-Mukabber. I couldn’t build on top of my parents’ house because it’s under a demolition order and I didn’t want to take the risk. For six months, I paid 1,600 NIS (around 440 USD) a month in rent, and then I decided that it was better to build a small apartment on the roof of my parents’ home after all, which I did.

In 2016, my brother Khaled and I started building two units near our parents’ home. It took us two years to build them. We worked day and night and saved money, until we finished building in 2018.

It was very sad when that year, 2018, we got stop-work orders for both units from the Jerusalem Municipality. We contacted a lawyer who started a legal proceeding and managed to delay the demolition a few times, until, in January 2019, we got a new demolition order for our two units. They gave us a week to carry out the demolition ourselves. Since the threat of demolition was looming over us, I left the unit with my family and we moved into a rented place in Jabal al-Mukabber.

The bulldozer that the family rented demolishing the rooms. Photo by the family

On Monday, 2 February 2019, my brothers and I started demolishing the two apartments. We started with hand tools, and then switched to a bulldozer. The demolition cost us 12,000 NIS (roughly 3,350 USD). If the city had done it, we would have paid 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD), so we preferred to do it ourselves and save the money.

I know I wasted 150,000 NIS (almost 42,000 USD) taking a chance and building on land defined as a green zone. I’m still paying back the debt for building costs. But the problem isn’t with me, it’s the city’s policy, which offers no housing solutions for young couples. Why don’t they make master plans for Palestinian neighborhoods? Why do they force residents to build without permits?

The ruins of the Edkedek family’s home. Photo by Amer Aruri, B’Tselem, 16 Geb 2019

The Edkedek family, Ras al-‘Amud, 4 February 2019

The six members of the Edkedek family have been living in a rented home in the neighborhood of Ras al-‘Amud for about twenty years. In the 1990s, the family purchased building rights on the roof of another family’s home, also in Ras al-‘Amud, as well as a patch of land in that family’s yard. In December 2018, they built two apartments on the roof – one for the parents and children and the other for one son, Maamun, 27, who is about to get married. The family also built a storage room on the land it purchased in the yard. But before they were able to move into their new apartments, they received a demolition order from the municipality.

Maamun Edkedek hired laborers and began the demolition on 4 February 2019. He demolished the apartment intended for his parents first, and was planning to continue the work, but on 12 February 2019, city bulldozers came and demolished his intended apartment and the storage room.

In a testimony he gave on 16 February 2019, Maamun Edkedek, 27, an unmarried bakery employee, described what happened:

Image below: The apartments after Maamum Edkedek started demolishing them.

On 4 February 2019, I started demolishing the apartments with laborers. We used hand tools because the units were built on top of the neighbors’ house. We worked carefully to avoid damaging their house, and it took us about eight days just to demolish my parents’ apartment. Then, on 12 February 2019, city workers suddenly came with bulldozers and wanted to demolish my apartment and the storage room.

I told them I’d finished demolishing one apartment and that I was going to demolish the other one and the storage room. I explained that I was worried about using a bulldozer because the apartment is on the second floor and I didn’t want to cause damage to the neighbors on the first floor. They didn’t listen, and the city bulldozer started demolishing my apartment and the storage room.

All that’s left of the two apartments and the storage room is a pile of rubble. Each apartment was 80 square meters in size, and the storage room was about 60 square meters. We lost about 250,000 NIS (nearly 70,000 USD).

I’m getting married soon. Even though I’m not doing well emotionally, I won’t put the wedding off. I’ve started looking for a rental and it’s not easy, because apartments in Jerusalem are expensive. I’m a laborer and my income is limited. I’m worried that I’ll have to pay the city for the cost of the demolition, because I didn’t demolish everything in time.

The Subuh family, a-Shayah (Ras al-‘Amud), 5 February 2019

Mustafa Subuh, 55, a married father of five, purchased a 500-square-meter plot of land in the neighborhood of a-Shayah in the 1990s. He built a house on it covering 80 square meters. Soon after, he built a one-bedroom apartment on the plot. The apartment is home to his daughter Zeinab and her three children, aged 1 to 7. Her husband, a resident of Hebron, stays with them on the weekends. Over the years, Mustafa added two rooms and a bathroom to his own house.

Eight years ago, the family received their first demolition order, for Zeinab’s apartment and for the additions to the main house. Subuh hired a lawyer and submitted an application for a building permit along with plans, but the application was rejected. Several court hearings were held over the years regarding the demolition order. In the last hearing, the court issued a stay to the demolition until 13 March 2019. Nevertheless, in early February, a city official came to the family’s home and told them that if they did not demolish the house immediately themselves, the city would do it, and they would have to pay for the cost – 150,00 NIS (nearly 42,000 USD).

On 5 February 2019, Mustafa Subuh demolished the additions to his house and his daughter’s one-bedroom apartment. On 12 February, a city official came to make sure the demolition had been carried out. He gave Mustafa Subuh a new demolition order for the original house and the garage underneath it.

Mustafa Subuh standing on the ruins of the apartment he built for his daughter and her children. Photo by Amer Aruri, B’Tselem

In a testimony he gave on 13 February 2019, Mustafa Subuh talked about his family is now facing homelessness:

Seven years ago, my daughter Zeinab moved into a new apartment I built for her behind our house. Since then, she and her husband have had three children. Her husband, a resident of Hebron, visits on the weekends.

The first demolition order came eight years ago, citing construction without a permit. I hired a lawyer and he managed to delay the demolition. I also contacted an engineer who drew up a plan, in order to apply for a building permit. The plan was rejected.

My lawyer told me he’d managed to delay the demolition until 13 March 2019, but suddenly, at the beginning of February, a city official came and demanded that I demolish my own home. He said that otherwise, city bulldozers would come to demolish it and I’d have to pay the cost.

On 5 February 2019, I started demolishing the addition by hand. I demolished the other apartment, where my daughter Zeinab lives, with a bulldozer.

Now I’ve received another demolition order, and I’m going through the worst time of my life. I already demolished the addition and my daughter’s home on my own. Now, I have to demolish what’s left of my house, too. For eight years, I paid the city totaling 68,000 NIS (nearly 19,000 USD) worth of fines, and that’s on top of the money I paid the lawyer and the engineer, which amounted to tens of thousands of shekels. The demolition I did myself cost me 35,000 NIS (around 9,800 USD), because I had to rent a bulldozer and hire laborers. Where exactly does the city want us to live?

In a testimony she gave on 26 February 2019, Zeinab Subuh described having to watch her house be demolished:

One day, the difficult moment I’ve been dreading all these years arrived. My father told me we had no choice but to demolish the two apartments ourselves. I felt deep pain and despair. I looked at my children and felt very sad. I thought to myself, what does the future hold for them? I felt like a failure, because I wasn’t able to give my family shelter and security.

On the day of the demolition, I stood with the children watching it. My mother asked me to go into their house so the children wouldn’t see their home being demolished. But I stayed there, to watch and to mourn for the house. I hugged my children and wept.

Now we live with my parents in the old house. Rent in Jerusalem is at least 2,500 NIS (around 700 USD), which is what I make every month at my job delivering papers. My husband also has a low income. There are five people living in my parents’ home already. With us, that makes nine people in a very small house. It’s very crowded.

The concrete slabs remaining after Husam Al-Abasi had to demolish part of his home. Photo by Amer Aruri, B’Tselem, 9 march 2019

The al-‘Abasi family, Ras al-‘Amud, 2 March 2019

Husam al-‘Abasi, 31, is a married father of one and a construction worker. In 2013, before he got married, he began building an apartment for himself on top of his father’s home, but had to stop the construction for financial reasons. He got married in 2015, but because of the high cost of housing, he and his wife moved in with his parents.

In 2016, after Husam’s wife became pregnant, the couple decided to finish the apartment Husam had started on his parents’ rooftop and expand it. They moved into the new home that year. In January 2019, a city official came and told the family they would have to demolish the apartment, otherwise the city would demolish it and charge them the cost – 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD). On 2 March 2019, Husam demolished his home.

In 2016, after Husam’s wife became pregnant, the couple decided to finish the apartment Husam had started on his parents’ rooftop and expand it. They moved into the new home that year. In January 2019, a city official came and told the family they would have to demolish the apartment, otherwise the city would demolish it and charge them the cost – 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD). On 2 March 2019, Husam demolished his home.

In a testimony he gave on 9 March 2019, Husam al-‘Abasi described demolishing his own home:

A month ago, an official from the Jerusalem Municipality came and gave me a demolition order for the addition I’d built. I’d built the original part of the house without a permit, too, because the city doesn’t give building permits in Palestinian neighborhoods.

On 2 March 2019, I had to demolish the house myself. If the city had done it, I’d have had to pay 80,000 NIS (roughly 22,300 USD) for the cost of the demolition.

I demolished my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Rafif’s room, the living room, the bathroom and the balcony. Now I’m living in the old part of the house that I started building in 2013. It has one room, a kitchen and a bathroom.

I did lose about 150,000 NIS (almost 42,000 USD), but the emotional damage is worse. This experience will always haunt me, every time I look at the destroyed part of my home.

The Ja’abis (Shafita) family, Jabal al-Mukabber, 9 March 2019

Ilham and S’adeh, 35 and 38 respectively, have seven children between the ages of four and 18. For 18 years, they lived in various rental homes in East Jerusalem. In late 2017, Ilham’s brothers bought a plot of land in Jabal al-Mukabber so she and her family could build a home there.

The family moved into its new home in March 2018, but soon received an order from the Jerusalem Municipality to demolish it by 10 March 2019. A month before the deadline, a city official came to the house and told the family that if they did not demolish the house by the deadline, the city would carry out the demolition and they would have to pay the cost – 50,000 NIS (around 14,000 USD). On 9 March 2019, Ilham’s brothers came with a bulldozer and demolished the house.

Husam AL-abasi with his daughter, rafif the ruin of the Ja’abis family’s home. Photo by Amer Aruri, B’Tselem, 9 March 2019

In a testimony she gave on 9 March 2019, Ilham Ja’abis described losing her home:

This morning, 9 March 2019, my brothers came with a bulldozer and demolished the house. In the meantime, my husband, children and I have moved into a 70-square-meter rented house. It’s a temporary solution until we find a bigger place.

We lost more than 200,000 NIS (around 5,600 USD), on top of what we paid for the land. The city says it’s a green space and we’re not allowed to build there. My children don’t understand why our house was demolished and we had to move. They keep insisting we go back to the old house.

The house was destroyed along with my dream – to live in a house that of I own, not a rental. We’re all in despair. Tonight will be my first night away from our home, in a rented house. It pains me and makes me sad.

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If you have read a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “Care about Gaza? Blame Hamas” written by none other than the White House “special representative for international negotiations” Jason Greenblatt you would understand that the misery being experienced by Palestinians in Gaza is all their own fault. Greenblatt, who is Jewish of the Orthodox persuasion, just happens to be a strong supporter of Israel’s settlements, which he claims are “not an obstacle to peace.” He is very upset because some naysayers are actually putting some of the blame for the human catastrophe in Gaza on Israel, which we Americans all know is our best friend in the whole world and our most loyal ally. If that were not so, the New York Times and those fine people in Congress and the White House would surely inform us otherwise. And anyway, what are a few lies and war crimes between friends?

Greenblatt, who knows nothing about foreign policy and diplomacy apart from advising Donald Trump on Israel while serving as the Trump Organization chief legal officer, is supposed to be working hard with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner negotiating “deal of the century” peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Betting is that the arrangement on offer in June will consist of American acquiescence in Israel declaring sovereignty over nearly all of land that the Arabs still hold on the West Bank with the remaining local population being bribed heavily to either move to Jordan or stay in designated non-Jewish sectors and stop complaining.

Jason Greenblatt is a perfect example of the type of “dual” loyalist who cannot appreciate that his overriding religious and ethnic allegiances are incompatible with genuine loyalty to the United States. Willingness to subordinate actual American interests to a those of a foreign nation means that he and others like him are contributing to the decline and fall of the country he was born in and which has made him wealthy. If he had any real integrity, when presented by Trump with the opportunity to benefit Israel at the expense of the United States he should have declined the offer knowing that he would inevitably be biased, making it impossible for him to fairly consider either American interests or those of the Palestinians.

Greenblatt knows that whatever lies he tells it will not matter in the least because no one will ever hold him accountable and it is all done for a great cause, which is Israel, to include anything that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants. And what could be better than to hold down a job that pays in the neighborhood of $200,000 a year plus a full benefits package for doing nothing but “creating facts on the ground” for the country that one loves best?

Palestinian take cover as Israeli forces fire at protesters at the Gaza border on 14 December 2018 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]

The Greenblatt op-ed includes some really choice “analysis” that does not correspond with the reality of what is going on in what remains of Palestine. He begins immediately with a heavy dose of Israeli propaganda, asserting that “Hamas has left Gaza in shambles,” before providing a partially accurate but morally neutral assessment of the sorry state of the enclave: “Life there is difficult, sad and abnormal. Only buildings with generators actually maintain steady power. The lack of power affects everything from preserving fresh food to treating sewage. If a person in Gaza falls ill, he is likely to find trained medical professionals unable to help because of the lack of equipment and medicines. The people there — even the talented and educated — can’t find jobs. The store shelves are empty. The shoreline, which in many other places in the Mediterranean would be filled with beach resorts, is covered in the raw sewage and debris from successive wars. The cost of conflict is seen in all aspects of life in Gaza.”

The dismal picture of conditions in Gaza, largely true, does not admit to any Israeli role in the suffering, or, at least, Greenblatt is blind to it. Israel controls both the land border and the seafront. It manages the enclave as if it were an outdoor concentration camp and military free-fire zone for its 2 million Arab inhabitants. Lack of electricity is caused by Israeli bombing of power plants, which also make it impossible to treat sewage. Proliferating sewage appears to be a preferred weapon for Israelis as settlers on the West Bank are also fond of letting it flow onto Palestinians farms and villages.

Food in Gaza is limited only to what can be grown locally or to what the Israelis allow in. Likewise medicines are only available when Israel permits. Gazans cannot leave without Israeli permission and on the seafront, fisherman who are brave enough to go out are frequently shot dead by Israeli gunboats if they go too far.

Israel bombs hospitals, schools and places of worship indiscriminately, always claiming that they are being used by terrorists even when United Nations observers are on site and declare that the allegations are palpably untrue. And then there are isolated incidents, to include the deliberate murder by naval gunfire of four young boys innocently playing soccer on a beach and the killing by missiles of nine other children who were watching television. An American military attache stationed in Israel once observer soldiers on the Israel side engaging in target practice by shooting at women hanging out their laundry on the Gaza side of the fence and Israeli snipers have proudly worn t-shirts showing a graphic of a pregnant Arab woman in a gunsight with the text “two for one” underneath.

Currently, protests by unarmed Gazans along the Israel-Gaza fence have resulted in 260 Palestinian deaths, mostly by Israeli sniper fire. Nearly 7,000 others have been shot and wounded. Those killed include 32 medical workers and 50 children. Twenty-one children have had their limbs amputated and many more have been permanently disabled.

Thousands more Palestinians have died from Israeli bombs, rockets and artillery shelling since 2009. In 2014 alone, more than 2,000 Gazans were killed and more than 10,000 were wounded, including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled. More than 7,000 homes were destroyed. The grossly disproportionate carnage in Gaza initiated by Israel was so outrageous that even many Americans began to wake up to what their tax dollars were buying. After 2014’s death toll, support for Israel began to wane. Currently 51% of Americans view the Israeli government unfavorably in spite of relentless pro-Israel propaganda by the U.S. media.

Jason Greenblatt goes on to claim that

“The Arabs in Israel generally live normal lives and, in many cases, thrive. In fact, Arab citizens of Israel live freely compared with Arabs in many other countries in the region… Why are others moving forward while Gaza sinks further into despair and disrepair? Because Hamas, the de facto ruler of the Gaza Strip, has made choices… Hamas is to blame for Gaza’s situation.”

Greenblatt is wrong about the claimed happy lot of Palestinians living in Israel. Israel has recently declared itself a Jewish State. In practice, there are more than fifty laws and regulations that make Christians and Muslims second class citizens. Churches and Mosques are regularly vandalized and Christian and Muslim holy sites are regularly destroyed by the authorities while a prominent Rabbi has recently declared in the wake of Sri Lanka that proposals that all churches should be destroyed inside Israel should be considered but are “complicated.” Arab Israelis cannot get building permits, their schools are underfunded and they are discriminated against or ignored in nearly all their interactions with the government. Local communities can declare themselves Arab-free zones and they can refuse to sell houses to Palestinians.

The fundamental problem with Greenblatt and others like him is that they have a very selective moral compass and choose not to recognize apartheid even when it is right in front of them. Israel is a fundamentally racist occupying power with a colonial-settler mindset, which sees the Arabs as ignorant savages that have to be ideally removed, but if not, restrained by forced or even killed if necessary. And, like all purveyors of war crimes, the Israelis and their diaspora cheerleaders blame the victims for their plight. Greenblatt will have an excuse for any atrocity committed by Israel. The Israel Defense Force is shooting Palestinians individually now but if it starts doing them in groups he would no doubt come up with a good rationalization justifying the practice.

Israel is a Middle Eastern superpower, heavily armed and unconcerned over the consequences for starting wars and killing Arabs. To argue as Greenblatt does that there is some kind of “fighting” going on with Hamas “instigating” wars against Israel is ludicrous given the disparity in power between the two sides. It is largely retaliatory Hamas homemade bottle rockets, which kill or injure very few, against fighter jets, snipers and artillery barrages that kill thousands. And the really sad part for Americans is that the United States is deeply complicit in what goes on, sending “special representatives” like Greenblatt into the region on the taxpayer’s dime to argue Israel’s case.

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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 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

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”

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Sri Lanka: US-Saudi Terror Targets China’s Allies

By Tony Cartalucci, April 29, 2019

As predicted, the Sri Lankan Easter Day blasts which killed hundreds and injured hundreds more – have been connected to the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).  At face value – devastating and disruptive terrorist attacks visited upon Sri Lanka – a nation that has recently and decisively pivoted from West to East and is now a major partner of Beijing’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative – is suspiciously coincidental.

NATO Expands Eastward to Russia

By Comitato No Nato, April 29, 2019

In 1990, on the eve of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, US Secretary of State James Bakerassured USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO will not extend by a single inch to the east”. But in twenty years, after having demolished the Yugoslavian Federation, NATO extended from 16 to 30 countries, expanding more and more eastwards to Russia.

Decadent “Western Community of Values”. Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, April 29, 2019

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. But the average means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-old. Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger. Every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

Foreign Intrusion: Easter Sunday attack in Sri Lanka by ISIS and Who Else?

By Shenali D Waduge, April 29, 2019

Whatever foreign involvement it is without a doubt the fault of the Sri Lankan Govt who not only had intel warnings but had appeals and requests for action against Islamic extremists by the Sri Lankan Muslim community itself. All of which had been ignored or not taken seriously.

Where the Silk Roads Meet the Mighty Mekong

By Pepe Escobar, April 29, 2019

The new naga will take the form of Made in China high-speed trains – for passengers of course, but mostly for cargo – crossing the Mekong back and forth and crucially bypassing the Maritime Silk Road along the South China Sea.     

The Otto Warmbier Scandal Is All About Challenging Trump’s Credibility

By Andrew Korybko, April 29, 2019

The Washington Post’s surprise revelation that Trump agreed to pay North Korea $2 million in exchange for releasing imprisoned student Otto Warmbier is intended to challenge his credibility by drawing “politically uncomfortable” comparisons between him and his predecessor.

The Malignant Nature of the Mueller Report and 2020 Election

By Massoud Nayeri, April 29, 2019

The publication of the Mueller report more than anything else confirmed that the working people in America are facing deeply divided and antagonistic “leadership” in Washington.

US Navy SEAL Officers Attempted to Cover Up Evidence of War Crimes

By Josh Varlin, April 29, 2019

Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a US Navy SEAL awaiting a court-martial for war crimes charges, was systematically protected by his SEAL superiors for a year, a Navy investigation report covered by the New York Times reveals. Gallagher’s trial begins May 28 for premeditated murder, attempted murder, obstruction of justice and other crimes related to war crimes in Iraq, and there is an ongoing investigation into similar actions in Afghanistan.

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Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a US Navy SEAL awaiting a court-martial for war crimes charges, was systematically protected by his SEAL superiors for a year, a Navy investigation report covered by the New York Times reveals. Gallagher’s trial begins May 28 for premeditated murder, attempted murder, obstruction of justice and other crimes related to war crimes in Iraq, and there is an ongoing investigation into similar actions in Afghanistan.

The war crimes described in the 439-page report and the subsequent cover-up by Gallagher’s superiors highlight the toleration and promotion of deranged and fascistic elements within the military. The SEALs, which stands for Sea, Air and Land Teams, are the US Navy’s special operations force. They are closely tied to the Central Intelligence Agency, going back to SEAL-CIA operations during the Vietnam War and CIA recruitment from the SEALs today.

The central allegation against Gallagher, who also goes by the nickname “Blade,” is that he murdered a captive Iraqi teenager while deployed to Mosul. SEALs told investigators that on May 4, 2017, Gallagher heard that an Islamic State fighter had been wounded and was in custody. According to the Times, “Chief Gallagher responded over the radio with words to the effect of ‘he’s mine.’”

“A medic was treating the youth on the ground when Chief Gallagher walked up without a word and stabbed the wounded teenager several times in the neck and once in the chest with his hunting knife, killing him, two SEAL witnesses said.”

Gallagher then gathered SEALs for a gruesome reenlistment ceremony over the teenager’s body, complete with an American flag and photos.

That night or the next day, SEALs reported the incident to Gallagher’s immediate superior, a troop chief, as well as Lieutenant Jacob Portier, the platoon commander. Portier has been charged separately for allegedly covering up the stabbing because he lied to his own superior, Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch, who asked if there was “anything criminal” associated with the reenlistment ceremony.

SEALs also describe Gallagher shooting his sniper rifle “about ten times as often as other snipers,” including shooting a young girl and an unarmed old man (both incidents have two witnesses). A message in a Mosul sniper nest read,

“Eddie G puts the laughter in Manslaughter.”

The Times describes how “one senior SEAL” alleged that Gallagher “routinely parked an armored truck on a Tigris River bridge and emptied the truck’s heavy machine gun into neighborhoods on the other side with no discernible targets.”

One SEAL told investigators that other snipers “began shooting warning shots at any civilians they saw on the battlefield so that the civilians would run away and [Gallagher] could not kill them.”

A separate investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is looking into Gallagher allegedly killing a goat herder in Afghanistan in 2010.

Gallagher’s alleged crimes—with most of those publicly cited in the press backed up by multiple witnesses and photo or video documentation—are an indictment of the American military. The SEALs have such a reputation for brutality, including against their own members, that Rear Admiral Collin Green, the SEAL’s top commander, “ordered a 90-day review of the force’s culture and training,” according to the Times.

Despite beginning in January, any findings or conclusions of the review have not been made public.

However, there is much more involved here than one war criminal. When SEALs attempted to report Gallagher’s actions, they were warned against it. Breisch and Master Chief Petty Officer Brian Alazzawi met with seven SEALs in March 2018, during which Breisch told SEALs

“that while the SEALs were free to report the killings, the Navy might not look kindly on rank-and-file team members making allegations against a chief. Their careers could be sidetracked, he said,” according to the Times.

Alazzawi, perhaps saying more than he intended, warned SEALs that their allegations would have a wide “frag [fragmentation] radius” and could implicate many other SEALs.

One of the seven rank-and-file SEALs who attended the meeting described the message from Breisch and Alazzawi as “Stop talking about it.”

A few days after this meeting, Gallagher was awarded a medal for his conduct in Iraq.

It took another month for the SEALs to force their commanding officers to report Gallagher’s war crimes, including the stabbing of the teenager and the shooting of two unarmed civilians, to NCIS. The SEALs had threatened to go up the chain of command or directly to the press.

Either through being told by Breisch or Alazzawi or through some other means, Gallagher himself found out about the March 2018 meeting and set about turning other SEALs against those who had told officers about his crimes. He texted another SEAL chief, “I just got word these guys went crying to the wrong person.”

To a different SEAL, he texted:

“The only thing we can do as good team guys is pass the word on those traitors. They are not brothers at all.”

After the internal cover-up failed, various reactionaries have lined up to defend Gallagher. Fox News has given extensive air time to Gallagher’s wife and brother. A letter calling for Gallagher to be freed pending trial was signed by 40 Republican members of Congress.

President Donald Trump, clearly seeking to mobilize fascistic elements in his base, tweeted,

“In honor of his past service to our Country, Navy Seal #EddieGallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly!”

The individual crimes committed as part of the wars and occupations of American imperialism are the product of the more fundamental crime, the launching of the wars themselves. The architects of these crimes, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have gone unpunished after ordering aggressive military action in contravention of international law and the Nuremberg principles. The only person who faced charges related to the CIA’s torture program has been whistleblower John Kiriakou.

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The publication of the Mueller report more than anything else confirmed that the working people in America are facing deeply divided and antagonistic “leadership” in Washington. The consequence of the 1% family feud over the Mueller report will be disastrous. The Malignant Nature of the Mueller report has inflamed the enmity among Republican and Democrats to a new level. In this fight if President Trump is impeached or if Democrats are defeated, no matter the outcome, the country as a whole will suffer. No one should expect a period of reconciliation between these two hostile camps. Each side is preparing to “lawfully” purge each other to be the dominant ruling power. The hardworking people in the U.S. have no interest in this fight.

Mr. Mueller was appointed to serve as a Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice to investigate the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. But the investigation was based on a false narrative aimed at undermining the “unexpected” result of 2016 Presidential election.

The Democratic Party establishment to this day has been successful in selling this fictitious story that Russia (by meddling in the last election) has already impacted the “democratic” process of election in America! The truth is that the U.S. government has a long history of election meddling in the different sovereign countries.

It is ironic that Russia was one of these countries that U.S. intervened in their domestic political affair in 1990’s. It was the money and expertise of the American advisors that guaranteed the presidency of Boris Yeltsin – who was despised by Russian people and had no chance to win the 1996 presidential election in Russia. President Bill Clinton the grantor of Mr. Yeltsin presidency in Russia, on many occasions with affection praised him as the “father of Russian democracy”!

Now the same people, who were behind the meddling in Russian election, are “shocked” about the foreign power meddling in the U.S. election! They cry that the “Russian operatives” have already “corrupted our election”.

Nobody can describe this fabricated story better than Mrs. Hillary Clinton. Like an old general standing on the hill, Mrs. Clinton in her article in the Washington Post on April 24th proclaimed a winning strategy and drew a road map to defeat Russia and Mr. Trump. She writes, rather than making a “false choice” of “immediate impeachment or nothing”, “there’s a better way … to respond to Russia’s ‘sweeping and systematic’ attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law…”.

Mrs. Clinton assures us as “a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974, as well as first lady” she knows what she is talking about. Mrs. Clinton’s message to the Congress is to “hold substantive hearings that build on the Mueller report and fill in its gaps, not jump straight to an up-or-down vote on impeachment.” She ends her article by “warning” us “about the future”, that “the Russians will interfere again in 2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well. This is an urgent threat.” Of course according to Mrs. Clinton, this threat is urgent because “He [President Trump] will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda.”

But fascistic minded President Trump is far more dangerous for his hurtful policies against working people and immigrants than unsubstantiated Mrs. Clinton’s claim against him. It is like charging a bank robber not for his crime of stealing money but for smoking cigarette in the “No Smoking Area” of the lobby while robbing the bank! Democrats don’t challenge Mr. Trump on many issues such as the tax cut for the rich and top wealthiest companies, increasing the military budget without any rationale or justification, deregulation and anti-environmental policies or barbaric treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants.

The Democratic Party, in most cases is a partner in crime. Even when President Trump vetoes the resolution calling to end U.S. support in Yemen war, no one talks about this veto which in fact is a war crime in itself, considering that today Yemen is a country that is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

History matters; Nixon’s obstruction of justice, abuse of power happened in an era that the anti-war movement was the main headache for the 1%. Today, in the absence of mass anti-war movement, the majority of people don’t see any benefit to getting involved in the 1% infighting.

For the working people, the fundamental lesson of the Mueller report is to find their own independent path to solve the issues of healthcare, education, immigration and job security. The news in America, day in day out revolves around the “pundits” personal interpretation of Mueller report. Basically, the “journalists” pro and anti Trump, resuscitate and recycle their boring narratives about the Mueller report over and over, meanwhile behaving as entertainers wasting time on spreading gossips but never have time to cover the teachers, students and workers demonstrations who are either on strike or on the street demanding for decent living wages and better working conditions.

The politicians and their media want us to believe in their alternative reality. In their fake world everything they say is true and possible. The DNC establishment overnight makes former Vice President Joe Biden the sole hero who can defeat President Trump.

The new star among other 19 nominees suddenly becomes the frontrunner and wins 6.3 million dollars as soon as he steps in the Democratic nomination casino! Naturally the news of Mr. Biden’s entry in the 2020 presidential race made the RNC establishment a little nervous. They immediately issue a statement and dismiss Mr. “sleepy” Biden as a loser and reluctantly had to embrace their unpredictable President even tighter. The 2020 presidential race spins around the Mueller report axis, but what is needed is a comprehensive program to improve people’s living conditions and a peaceful course in foreign affairs.

In the absence of a conscious leadership of working people, the far-right politicians and fascists in the different countries are securing their position in their governments.

In Europe, the British are defining the “boundaries of the law” by arresting over a 1000 peaceful environmental activists while keeping Julian Assange in the infamous GITMO like prison on fabricated charges without any right of visitation. President Macron of France sees the solutions against the protestors in bullets aimed at the eyes of the resilient French “yellow vest” activists.

In the Middle East, Mr. Netanyahu prefers that his brutal soldiers aim at the legs of the Palestinian protesters. In Saudi Arabia, instead of injuring the demonstrators, they behead them. In the U.S. the out of control ICE agents are competing with the out-law militia groups in terrorizing the immigrants in the South.

The “leaders” of the powerful military countries in the West, while facing internal problems do not hesitate to create chaos in other countries for their benefits. These days they are excited in igniting a new bloody civil war in Libya. They are discussing how to suffocate sovereign nations like Iran and Venezuela with imposing more sanctions in order to “change regimes” in these countries. The working people around the world are isolated without any true ally. It is needless to say that Russia and China – like good unprincipled business people (sharks) – are maneuvering through the troubled territories around the world to gain a little more capital.

However, regardless of these depressing facts, the working people around the world are rising up against the inequality and injustice with an extraordinary energy. People of Sudan and Algeria are pioneering the second unofficial “Arab Spring”. The global force of working people is seeking meaningful changes and can no longer tolerate being threatened and marginalized by the right-wing and fascist minorities in the powerful military countries.

These facts indicate that in today’s political environment, there are no “national” crisis that could be resolved by “national” solutions. Working people are facing an International crisis. Their problems from Bangkok to Boston or London to Lahore are intertwined. The capitalist system has already universalized the injury to the environment and people’s lives beyond geographical boundaries. Considering the world economy is showing signs of recession – with the warning of new unforeseen Economic shocks; the 1% incompetency and insecurity is taking all countries to the edge of a nuclear war. Only a universal unity for peace beyond the national borders can save our planet, consequently our families and the future of our children.

Toward a Global Union for Peace!

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Featured image is from the author

If the Swedish allegations against Julian Assange were genuine and not simply a ruse to arrest him for extradition to the United States, where is the arrest warrant now from Sweden and what are the charges?

Only the more minor allegation has passed the statute of limitations deadline. The major allegation, equivalent to rape, is still well within limits. Sweden has had seven years to complete the investigation and prepare the case. It is over two years since they interviewed Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy. They have had years and years to collect all the evidence and prepare the charges.

So where, Swedish prosecutors, are your charges? Where is your arrest warrant?

Julian Assange has never been charged with anything in Sweden. He was merely “wanted for questioning”, a fact the MSM repeatedly failed to make clear. It is now undeniably plain that there was never the slightest intention of charging him with anything in Sweden. All those Blairite MPs who seek to dodge the glaring issue of freedom of the media to publish whistleblower material revealing government crimes, by hiding behind trumped-up sexual allegations, are left looking pretty stupid.

What is the point of demanding Assange be extradited to Sweden when there is no extradition request from Sweden? What is the point in demanding he face justice in Sweden when there are no charges? Where are the charges from Sweden?

The answer to that is silence.

Sweden was always a fit-up designed to get Assange to the USA. And now they don’t need it, so Sweden has quietly gone away. All the false left who were taken in by the security services playing upon a feminist mantra should take a very hard look at themselves. They should also consider this.

If you seriously put forward that in allegations of sexual assault, the accuser must always be believed and the accused must automatically be presumed guilty, you are handing an awesome power to the state to lock people up without proper defence. The state will abuse that awesome power and fit people up. The Assange case shows us just that. And it is not the only case, currently, as everyone in Scotland should realise.

But there is more. If you believe that any sexual accusation against a person should be believed and automatically and immediately end their societal respectability, you are giving power to state and society to exclude dissidents and critics from political discourse by a simple act of accusation. That power will be used and abused by the security services.

In the case of the allegation in Sweden that did fall through the statute of limitation, the accusation was that during the act of consensual sex Julian Assange deliberately split the condom with his fingers, without consent. I quite agree that if true, it would amount to sexual assault. But the split condom given to Swedish police as evidence had none of Assange’s DNA on it – a physical impossibility if he had worn it during sex. And the person making the accusation had previously been expelled from Cuba as working for the CIA. So tell me again – we must always believe the accuser?

For once, I agree with the Blairites that should a warrant arrive from Sweden that Swedish request should be prioritised for extradition over the US request, not least because rape is much the more serious crime. As the only reason Julian Assange ever claimed asylum was that he saw the Swedish allegations as a ruse to get him into custody for extradition to the US, I would also say that should a warrant from Sweden arrive he should now voluntarily go without further legal resistance, the US extradition point being overtaken.

But do not hold your breath. No warrant is going to come. The states that coordinated so carefully his arrest and detention, timed with the Muellergate release and the demented Ecuadorean government lies about faeces on walls, don’t need the Swedish angle now.

I ask again. Where is the warrant from Sweden? Are there still people who cannot see the Swedish allegations for the CIA ruse that they always were?

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The Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Republic of Ireland Leo Varadkar and Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom both showed up on Wednesday in Belfast in Northern Ireland for the funeral of a young woman called Lyra McKee. So did the president of the Republic of Ireland, Michael Higgins, and UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. It is quite possible that none of them had even heard of her a week ago.

She was a promising young journalist, already well known in the small world of Northern Ireland for her political journalism and her LGBT activism. She was killed a week ago by a New IRA terrorist while covering a riot in Derry, the British province’s second city. It was a mistake, of course: The terrorist was probably trying to kill one of the police officers who were standing nearby.

The funeral was held in Belfast’s main Protestant cathedral, St. Anne’s, although McKee had grown up Catholic. Both Catholic and Protestant clergy conducted the funeral service, in a joint rejection of the sectarian violence that is creeping out into the open again in Northern Ireland. That is why the prime ministers and other high dignitaries were there too, but it may be too late.

Lyra McKee described herself as a “ceasefire baby”. She was only eight years old when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, ending 30 years of “The Troubles”, a terrorist civil war between Protestant and Catholic extremists that killed over 3,000 people in a province whose population is less than 2 million. But the war was not actually about religion.

The Protestants were loyal to Britain, and resentful about losing the absolute dominance they once enjoyed in Northern Ireland. The Catholics were “nationalists” who looked forward to the day when they would be the majority in Northern Ireland, thanks to a higher birth rate, and then to the great day when all of Ireland will be united and the “Prods” of the North are reduced to a tiny and helpless minority.

They fought each other to a standstill, and in 1998 they signed the Good Friday Agreement, which created a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and put an end to the killing. Most people realised it was a truce, not a final peace settlement, but many hoped that given enough time, it could grow into something more. Generational turnover has solved a lot of the world’s problems.

In the meantime, the deal allowed a generation of young people, like McKee, to grow up in a relatively peaceful place. It might still be a place with a hopeful future today if the English had not voted to leave the European Union three years ago in the “Brexit” referendum. I say “English” deliberately, because both the Scots and the Northern Irish voted for the United Kingdom to stay in the EU.

The problem with Brexit is that the Good Friday Deal depends on a completely open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. In fact, an invisible border: no police, no checkpoints and little visual evidence that it even exists. That, plus the right to have an Irish passport instead of a British one if they chose, was what persuaded the North’s Catholic nationalists to settle for a draw in the war.

Everybody in Ireland saw the problem with Brexit: If the UK withdraws fully from the EU, no customs union, no “single market”, then the “hard” border will have to reappear in Ireland. The more extreme nationalists will see that as a betrayal, and the guns will come out again. But the insular idiots promoting Brexit in England were not even aware of the problem.

They are aware of it now. The Republic of Ireland remains a member of the EU, and it got the other members to insist that protecting the “soft” border must be part of the British withdrawal agreement.

Last November, Theresa May signed that agreement, which says that all of the United Kingdom must stay in the customs union until some UK-EU trade agreement is signed that still allows free movement of goods, and people, across an invisible border.

That could be a long time from now, or even never, in which case the UK never really leaves the EU. It just loses any say in the EU’s policies. So the outraged British parliament has spent the last two months rejecting not only the withdrawal agreement May signed, but every other proposal for leaving, or staying, that has been put before it. Pathetic, really.

Meanwhile, the first terrorist attacks are getting started again in Northern Ireland. The “dissidents” who formed the Real IRA in 2012 are nationalists who never accepted the truce. They have been waiting for an opportunity to reopen the revolutionary liberation war that they imagine was betrayed by the Good Friday Agreement, and Brexit is giving it to them.

There was a car bomb outside the courthouse in Derry in January, and last week the New IRA tried to kill a police officer and shot Lyra McKee instead. As Will Francis, her literary agent, said (quoting William Faulkner): “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”

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Featured image is from RTE

It was a bad enough look for Boeing when reporters uncovered the company’s decision to make some safety features optional on its 737 MAX 8s. Worse still that this decision was only made public after the deadly crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 just minutes after takeoff on March 10 – the second deadly crash involving the plane in six months, which spurred regulators around the world to ground the planes, erasing billions of dollars of Boeing market cap.

But a report in the Wall Street Journal published on Sunday that neither Southwest Airlines nor the FAA (Boeing’s primary federal regulator) were aware that a safety feature intended to alert pilots to a potentially malfunctioning ‘angle of attack’ sensor – in other words, a feature that might have prevented both the crash of ET302 and the Oct. 29 crash of a 737 owned by Lion Air – had been disabled on the new 737s is simply staggering.

Not only did Boeing disable the alerts, which would notify pilots when the two sensors on the new 737 MAX 8s were reporting dramatically different data, and make them part of a new ‘premium’ package of safety features, but the manufacturer somehow neglected to tell the airline and its regulator that the alerts had been disabled. The result was that Southwest never updated its safety manuals for pilots to reflect the fact that the alerts had been disabled.

This is particularly egregious because the 737 MAX 8s featured the new MCAS anti-stall software which could be inadvertently triggered by erroneous data being reported by a malfunctioning sensor. Indeed, the preliminary findings from the investigation of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 found that the misfire of the MCAS system effectively doomed all 157 people on board that day.

Pilots at Southwest and regulators at the FAA didn’t learn that the alerts had been disabled until after the crash of the Lion Air flight, more than a year after the new jets had gone into service.

Plane maker Boeing Co. didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co. when the carrier began flying 737 MAX jets in 2017 that a standard safety feature, found on earlier models and designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors, had been deactivated.

Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and supervisors responsible for monitoring Southwest, the largest MAX customer, were also unaware of the change, according to government and industry officials.

Boeing had turned off the alerts which, in previous versions of the 737, informed pilots if a sensor known as an “angle-of-attack vane” was transmitting errant data about the pitch of a plane’s nose. In the MAX, which featured a new automated stall-prevention system called MCAS, Boeing made those alerts optional; they would be operative only if carriers bought additional safety features.

Southwest’s cockpit crews and management didn’t know about the change for more than a year after the planes went into service. They and most other airlines operating the MAX globally learned about it only after the fatal Lion Air crash last year led to scrutiny of the plane’s revised design. The FAA office’s lack of knowledge about Boeing’s move hasn’t been previously reported.

“Southwest’s own manuals were wrong” about the status of the alerts, said Southwest pilots union president, Jon Weaks. Since Boeing hadn’t communicated the modification to the carrier, the manuals still reflected incorrect information.

Perhaps most stunning of all, once the FAA and Southwest learned that the feature had been disabled, it set off a furor at the FAA that nearly pushed it to recommend that all 737 MAX 8s be grounded until the alerts had been turned back on. If the regulator had followed through, it’s possible that the crash of ET302 might have been averted.

As predicted, the Sri Lankan Easter Day blasts which killed hundreds and injured hundreds more – have been connected to the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).

US Ambassador to Sri Lanka – Alaina Teplitz – would openly claim foreign groups were most likely behind the attacks. Reuters in an article titled, “Foreign groups likely behind Sri Lanka attacks, U.S. ambassador says,” would report:

The scale and sophistication of the Easter Sunday attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka suggested the involvement of an external group such as Islamic State, the U.S. ambassador said on Wednesday as the death toll jumped to 359.

ISIS itself would also later claim responsibility for the attacks. The Washington Post in an article titled, “Sri Lankan Easter bombings, claimed by ISIS, show the group maintains influence even though its caliphate is gone,” would claim:

On Tuesday, video emerged of the suspected ringleader of the attacks and seven followers, their faces obscured by scarves, swearing allegiance to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Islamic State also issued a formal communique asserting responsibility for the attacks, which it said targeted Christians and “coalition countries.”

Absent from US diplomatic statements and Western media reports is any mention of ISIS’ inception, its state sponsors, and even admissions by Western intelligence agencies themselves of Washington and its allies’ role in the terrorist organization’s rise.

At face value – devastating and disruptive terrorist attacks visited upon Sri Lanka – a nation that has recently and decisively pivoted from West to East and is now a major partner of Beijing’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative – is suspiciously coincidental.

Examining the West’s decades of using terrorism – particularly terrorism fuelled by Saudi Wahhabism – and the inception of ISIS itself – leaves Washington and its partners as the prime suspects behind Sri Lanka’s tragic terrorist attack – with its motivation strikingly similar to what prompted the US-Saudi aided rise and use of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda throughout the Cold War.

DIA Admitted West Sought “Salafist Principality” in Eastern Syria 

When US-engineered regime change stalled in Syria between 2011-2012, it became clear more drastic and open measures would be required. This included not only the Western media mobilizing a massive propaganda campaign to account for the increasingly overt role terrorist organizations were playing among supposed “moderate rebel” formations – but also in the sudden appearance, rise, and overwhelming force of the “Islamic State.”

Source: NEO

It was in a leaked 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memo (PDF) – however – that revealed it was the US and its allies’ deliberate intent to create what it called a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria. The memo would explicitly state that (emphasis added):

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

On clarifying who these supporting powers were, the DIA memo would state:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

The “Salafist” (Islamic) “principality” (State) would indeed be created precisely in eastern Syria as US policymakers and their allies had set out to do. It would be branded as the “Islamic State” and be used first to wage a more muscular proxy war against Damascus, and when that failed, to invite US military forces to intervene in the conflict directly.

Since then, ISIS has been used as a convenient and even predictable element amid Washington’s various gambits as it struggles globally to maintain its unipolar world order.

Washington’s “Salafist Principality” vs China 

In Asia where Washington’s self-proclaimed primacy has waned in recent years as China rises, traditional “allies” like the Philippines have begun to seek bilateral ties with Beijing negating Washington’s supposed role in underwriting what it calls its “free, open, and rules-based“ order in the Indo-Pacific region.

In 2016, Manila sought to have US troops removed from its territory.

An October 2016 article by the Independent titled, “Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte orders US forces out of country, cutting 65 years of military ties,” would report:

The president of the Philippines has promised to dismantle the nation’s 65-year military alliance with the United States, warning Washington not to treat the nation “like a doormat”. 

Rodrigo Duterte has ordered 28 annual military exercises with US forces to be halted and an ongoing US-Philippines amphibious beach landing exercise to be the last in his six-year presidency. 

“This year would be the last,” said Mr Duterte, referring to military exercises involving the US in a speech on Friday in southern Davao city.

The Independent would also report (emphasis added):

“For as long as I am there, do not treat us like a doormat because you’ll be sorry for it. I will not speak with you. I can always go to China.”

The following year, beginning in May 2017, ISIS terrorists suddenly appeared, overrunning the city of Marawi. The US used the “serendipitous” development to not only insert US military forces into the fighting – the NYT reported, but has since used the threat of ISIS’ resurgence in the Philippines as a pretext to pressure Manila in maintaining a permanent US military presence in the Southeast Asian state.

US government-funded propaganda outlet “Rappler” would report in a 2019 article titled, “[ANALYSIS] Despite Duterte rhetoric, US military gains forward base in PH,” that:

The United States has gained a forward base for its Pacific Air Force in the Philippines despite President Rodrigo Duterte’s rhetoric against the country’s oldest security ally and former colonial master and his pivot to China.

And despite the “terror” pretext Washington has used to cling to its military holdings in the Philippines, Rappler itself admits that the true goal is confronting China:

The forward deployment of US air assets in the Philippines is important in light of the increasing tension between Washington and Beijing in the disputed South China Sea, a strategic waterway where about $3 trillion of seaborne goods pass every year and where China has constructed man-made islands and begun installing military structures, including possible missile sites.

US-Saudi backed extremism in another Southeast Asian state – Myanmar – has created a growing conflict in Rakhine state where China is attempting to build another major leg of its OBOR initiative.

In neighboring Thailand – another pivotal OBOR partner – similar US-Saudi led efforts to sow ethnoreligious tensions and create a vector for ISIS-style terrorism are underway.

Even in China itself – the threat of ISIS militants returning from Syria and expanding an already looming US-Saudi backed extremist threat in Xinjiang – plays into Washington’s wider efforts to sabotage OBOR and contain China’s regional and global rise.

The recent blasts in Sri Lanka and ISIS’ now supposed “interest” in the South Asian state follows massive inroads made by China in including the nation in its OBOR initiative. Highways, railways, and ports developed with China’s assistance have transformed Sri Lanka into a strategically valuable partner for Beijing, and yet another example to the world of Washington’s waning influence not only in Indo-Pacific – but globally.

The US went as far as creating ISIS in the first place in a desperate bid to rescue its failed regime change campaign in Syria. It and its partners in Riyadh are now the prime suspects behind ISIS’ coincidental arrival on the shores of a newly established and major OBOR partner.

ISIS is the New Al Qaeda

If the US using extremism to fight its major power rivals sounds familiar – that’s because the US and its Saudi partners used Al Qaeda in precisely the same way throughout the Cold War vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

Al Qaeda’s precursor – the Muslim Brotherhood – took part in a failed attempt to overthrow Syria – then a Soviet ally – in the early 1980s. Many of the fighters that took part in the failed uprising fled to Afghanistan and participated in the US-Saudi backed war against the Soviet Union there.

The virulent perversion of the Islamic faith that serves as the ideological bedrock of groups like Al Qaeda and now ISIS – Wahhabism – is admittedly a political tool used by Riyadh in the aid of Washington’s decades-spanning geopolitical ambitions.

In a 2018 Washington Post article titled, “Saudi prince denies Kushner is ‘in his pocket’,” it was admitted (emphasis added):

Asked about the Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism, the austere faith that is dominant in the kingdom and that some have accused of being a source of global terrorism, Mohammed said that investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union.

Thus it is all but admitted that the US and Saudi Arabia used extremism as a geopolitical tool to hinder the Soviet Union and both protect and expand Western hegemony globally.

It is admitted that the US and its partners sought the creation of ISIS – its sudden appearance everywhere China is attempting to do business fits the now documented and admitted pattern of Washington’s use of extremism to fight and coerce wherever its standing armies cannot afford to intervene and a degree of “plausible deniability” is desired.

When terrorism strikes – as in any sort of criminal investigation – the first question that must be asked is “cui bono?” To whose benefit? The US played a central role in deliberately creating ISIS. If ISIS is indeed behind the attack on Sri Lanka, then it is by extension an act of terror carried out by Washington.

Destabilizing Sri Lanka – a critical South Asian partner of Beijing and its OBOR initiative – with terrorism and ethnoreligious conflict, serves only the interests of China’s overt global opponent – Washington – as well as elements within India’s ruling elite and intelligence agencies.

The US is both arsonist and self-appointed fireman. And until this racket is fully and repeatedly exposed – until after each terrorist attack the US is put forth as the primary suspect and made to pay a high political price for its use of global terrorism – this game of arson-firefighting will continue at the cost of innocent lives, national development, and global peace and stability.

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Tony Cartalucci is Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from the author

5G From Space

In November of 2018, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorised the rocket company SpaceX, owned by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, to launch a fleet of 7,518 satellites to complete SpaceX’s ambitious scheme to provide global satellite broadband services to every corner of the Earth.

The satellites will operate at a height of approximately 210 miles, and irradiate the Earth with extremely high frequencies between 37.5 GHz and 42 GHz. This fleet will be in addition to a smaller SpaceX fleet of 4,425 satellites, already authorised earlier in the year by the FCC, which will orbit the Earth at a height of approximately 750 miles and is set to bathe us in frequencies between 12 GHz and 30 GHz. The grand total of SpaceX satellites is thus projected to reach just under 12,000.

There are at present approximately two thousand fully functioning satellites orbiting the Earth. Some beam down commercial GPS (or “SatNav”), some provide TV, some provide mobile phone services, and some bounce radar back and forth to produce images for meteorologists and military surveillance. The Earth is thus already comprehensively irradiated from outer space.

But the new SpaceX fleets will constitute a massive increase in the number of satellites in the skies above us, and a correspondingly massive increase in the radiation reaching the Earth from them. The SpaceX satellite fleet is, however, just one of several that are due to be launched in the next few years, all serving the same purpose of providing global broadband services. Other companies, including Boeing, One Web and Spire Global are each launching their own smaller fleets, bringing the total number of projected new broadband satellites to around 20,000 – every one of them dedicated to irradiating the Earth at similar frequencies (fig. 1). ¹

Why is there this sudden flurry of activity? The new satellite fleets are contributing to a concerted global effort to “upgrade” the electromagnetic environment of the Earth. The upgrade is commonly referred to as 5G, or fifth generation wireless network. It has become customary in tech circles to talk about the introduction of 5G as involving the creation of a new global “electronic ecosystem”. It amounts to geo-engineering on a scale never before attempted. While this is being sold to the public as an enhancement of the quality of video streaming for media and entertainment, what is really driving it is the creation of the conditions within which electronic or “artificial” intelligence will be able to assume an ever greater presence in our lives.

In a previous article for New View, (“Radiation, Robot Bees and 5G”, New View, 85, Autumn 2017), I described how the introduction of 5G will require hundreds of thousands of new mini mobile phone masts (also referred to as “base stations”) in urban centres throughout the UK, and literally millions of new masts in cities throughout the rest of the world, all emitting radiation at frequencies and at power levels far higher than those to which we are presently subjected.

These new masts are much smaller than the masts we currently see beside our motorways and on top of buildings. They will be discreetly attached to the side of shops and offices or secured to lampposts. The 20,000 satellites are a necessary supplement to this land-based effort, for they will guarantee that rural areas, lakes, mountains, forests, oceans and wildernesses, where there are neither buildings nor lampposts, will all be incorporated into the new electronic infrastructure. Not one inch of the globe will be free of radiation.

Given the scale of the project, it is surprising how few people are aware of the enormity of what is now just beginning to unfold all around us. Very few people have even heard about the 20,000 new satellites that are due to transform the planet into a so-called “smart planet”, irradiating us night and day. In the national media, we do not hear voices questioning the wisdom, let alone the ethics, of geo-engineering a new global electromagnetic environment.

Instead, there is a blithe acceptance that technology must continue to progress, and the presence in our lives of increasingly “smart” machines and gadgets that each year become cleverer and more capable is an inevitable part of this progress. And who doesn’t want progress? Almost everyone loves their sleek and seductively designed phones, pads and virtual assistants, and regards them as an indispensible part of their lives.

But the question we should ask is whether we also want increasingly intense exposure of the natural environment and all living creatures, including ourselves, to more and more electromagnetic radiation. Is it likely that this does not entail any adverse health consequences, as both government and industry claim? If the electromagnetic waves that connect our smartphones to the Internet travel through brick, stone and cement, then what happens when these same waves encounter our bodies?

Be assured that they do not just bounce off us! They travel into the human body. The degree to which they are absorbed can be precisely measured in what is called the Specific Absorption Rate, expressed in Watts per kilogram of biological tissue. When we fill our houses with Wi Fi, we are irradiating our bodies continuously. When we hold a smartphone to our ear, electromagnetic waves irradiate our brains (fig.2). Do we really believe this could be completely harmless?

Waves and Frequencies

At present, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, most Wi Fi and so on all operate at under 3 GHz in what is called the “microwave” region of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you could see and measure their wavelengths, you would find that they are many centimetres (or inches) long. A smartphone operating at 800 MHz, for example, sends and receives signals with wavelengths of 37.5 centimetres (just under 15 inches). Operating at 1.9 GHz, the wavelengths are 16 centimetres (just over 6 inches). Wi Fi uses the 2.4 GHz frequency band with 12 centimetre wavelengths (just under 5 inches long).

The introduction of 5G will entail the use of considerably higher frequencies than these, with correspondingly shorter wavelengths. Above 30 GHz, wavelengths are just millimetres rather than centimetres long. The millimetre waveband (from 30 GHz to 300 GHz) is referred to as Extremely High Frequency, and its wavelengths are between 10 millimetres and 1 millimetre in length.³ Up to the present time, Extremely High Frequency electromagnetic radiation has not been widely propagated, and its introduction marks a significant step change in the kind of electromagnetic energy that will become present in the natural environment (fig.3).

The reason why millimetre waves are to be used for 5G is that much larger bands of spectrum are available in the Extremely High Frequencies than at lower frequencies. This means that there can be much broader “bandwidth”. Broader bandwidth means that larger quantities of data can be transferred and the speed of transfer of the data will be significantly faster.

One of the effects of this is that it reduces what is called “latency”, or time-lag, in the system, so it improves the quality of video streaming. But in so doing, it also enables a greater seamlessness between the data accessible from virtual sources and our perceptions of objects in the real world, as is required, for example, in Augmented Reality applications. Greater seamlessness means that we more effortlessly inhabit the natural and the electronic worlds as if they were a single reality.

One of the technical problems of using frequencies in the millimetre region of the spectrum is that, because the waves carrying the data are so tiny, being only millimetres long, they are less able to pass through physical barriers, like walls and trees, than are the longer waves of lower frequencies. This is why it is necessary to have so many more new phone masts or “base stations”. They will need to be spaced at 100 metres apart in cities because beyond this distance their signals weaken and are therefore less able to penetrate buildings, and connect with the devices inside. As well as being more closely spaced, the 5G base stations will operate at much higher power than current phone masts, in order to ensure that the signals are sufficiently strong.

Because the wavelengths are so much smaller, the antennas transmitting and receiving them will also be much smaller than those of current phone masts and electronic devices. A single 5G transmitter/receiver will have a large number of tiny antennas, grouped together in one unit. An array of just over a thousand such antennas measures only four square inches, so will easily fit into a small base station on a lamppost, while the smartphone in your pocket will probably have sixteen (fig.4).

Both 5G satellites and 5G land-based masts will use a system called the “phased array”. In the phased array, groups of antennas are co-ordinated to radiate pulses in a specific direction and in a specified time sequence. This allows a concentrated beam of radio waves to be exactly aimed at designated targets, to enable signals to be sent or received. Because the beams are concentrated in this way, this adds to their power, which means they are able more easily to penetrate buildings.

But it also means that any living creature that gets in the way of such a concentrated beam will be subjected to a powerful dose of extremely high frequency radiant electricity. A study published earlier this year demonstrated that certain insects, because of their small body-size, are particularly vulnerable to the millimetre waves of the higher frequencies to be utilised by 5G (fig. 5).⁵ Other studies have shown that bacteria and plants are also vulnerable, and so also (as one might expect) are the skin and the eyes of animals including, of course, human beings.⁶

As well as its ability to concentrate power in focused beams, phased array technology has a further complicating factor. Either side of the main beam, the time intervals between the pulses are different from the time intervals between those of the main beam, but they may overlap each other in such a way as to produce extremely rapid changes in the electromagnetic field. This can have a particularly detrimental effect on living organisms, because instead of the radiation decaying when it is absorbed into living tissue, it can be re-radiated within the body.

The moving charges streaming into the body effectively become antennas that re-radiate the electromagnetic field and send it deeper into the organism. These re-radiated waves are known as Brillouin precursors, named after the French physicist Leon Brillouin, who first described them in 1914. Research suggests that they can have a significant and highly detrimental impact on living cells.⁸

The Un-reassuring Assurances of Government and Industry

The Government body charged with protecting public health, Public Health England, advises us that there is no convincing evidence that Radio Frequency radiation (which radio, television, mobile phones, smartphones and 5G all use) has any adverse health effects on either adults or children.

This advice is based on the recommendations of a supposedly independent body called AGNIR (Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation), which produced a report in 2012 on the safety of Radio Frequency radiation. The report stated that there was a lack of “convincing” and “conclusive” evidence for any adverse health effects.⁹ It was like giving a blank cheque to the telecommunications industry to move on into the higher frequencies, without any heed for the consequences.

It turns out that far from being independent, AGNIR has a high proportion of members with blatant conflicts of interests, and their report distorted or simply left out of account evidence that should have compelled them to reach the opposite conclusion to the one they arrived at. In a forensic analysis of the report, the environmental health researcher, Sarah Starkey, makes it clear that only a wilful disregard of the available scientific evidence could explain its internal contradictions and apparent incompetence.¹⁰

And yet it is the basis of current UK Government policy, allowing government to roll out 5G without so much as even a nod towards the need for prior health and safety assessment.¹¹Health and safety simply do not feature in Government thinking, despite a veritable mountain of literally thousands of research papers demonstrating adverse health effects, which continues to grow at the rate of roughly 350 per year, on average practically one every day.¹²

One of the reasons for ignoring this evidence in the hell-for-leather dash to create the 5G electronic ecosystem is the conviction in government circles that, unless we introduce it immediately, we will be “left behind” and our economic growth and competitiveness will be put at risk. There is simply no time to consider the possible health consequences.

The National Infrastructure Commission, whose 2016 report, Connected Future, forms the basis of current Government policy, pushed this panicky vision of the UK falling behind other nations and urged the government to ensure that the new digital infrastructure is fully in place by 2025.¹³ The NIC report repeatedly points out that the rewards of the “connected future” are to be measured in billions of pounds worth of revenue.

The mind-boggling amounts involved are well exemplified in a recent estimate that the global media industry alone stands to gain $1.3 trillion from 5G by 2025, not least because 5G will “unlock the potential of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)”.¹⁴ The irony that the “connected” future is one in which dizzying profits stand to be made from technologies that disconnect us more and more from the real world is entirely missed.

The sums involved are sufficient to explain why the telecoms industry has for the last twenty-five years done its utmost to ensure that research into the health effects of wireless technologies produce negative or inconclusive results. Since 1993, the industry has financed a large number of studies, saving governments a great deal of expense and at the same time preserving the convenient illusion that the jury is still out on whether exposure to Radio Frequency radiation causes harm.

Earlier this year, The Guardian published an article citing research which showed that while 67% of independently funded studies found a biological effect of exposure to Radio Frequency radiation, only 28% of industry-funded studies did. Industry-funded studies are almost two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find health effects.¹⁵ The authors of the Guardian article explain that the telecoms industry doesn’t need to win the scientific argument about safety, but simply keep the argument running indefinitely by producing studies with results that fail to verify, or even better contradict, the research that does find adverse health effects.

One of the most notorious is the mammoth, industry-funded “Interphone Study”, which managed to conclude that holding a mobile phone to the head actually protects the user from brain tumours! This study, which is full of contradictions and suffers from grievous design flaws, is often quoted as the most authoritative to date, while it has in fact been thoroughly discredited.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the impression is maintained that there is no scientific consensus, and so there are not sufficient grounds for action to be taken. Needless to say, this suits Government just as much as it suits industry.

Beyond the health effects there is another level altogether of what the roll out of 5G actually entails. Read Dr. Naydler’s full article.

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Originally posted in New View, 90 (January – March 2019), pp.33-40 as “5G: The Final Assault”.

Notes

1 One of the best sources for this information is the website of the Global Union Against Radiation Deployment from Space (GUARDS) at www.stopglobalwifi.org, and the related Cellular Phone Task Force website at www.cellphonetaskforce.org. Both organisations are informed and inspired by the tireless research and campaigning of Arthur Firstenberg, to whom this article is greatly indebted.

2 Source: ISEE/ISEA Conference: Environmental Epidemiology and Exposure. Paris, 5/9/2006.

3 The rule is: the higher the frequency at which the wave oscillates, the shorter the wavelength will be.

4 Source: Qualcomm. July, 2018.

5 Arno Thielens et al., “Exposure of Insects to Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields from 2 to 120 GHz”, Nature, 8: 3924 (2018):
“The insects show a maximum in absorbed radio frequency power at wavelengths that are comparable to their body size… The studied insects that are smaller than 1cm show a peak in absorption at frequencies (above 6 GHz), which are currently not often used for telecommunication, but are planned to be used in the next generation of wireless communication systems.”

6 Cindy Russell, “A 5G Wireless Future”, The Bulletin (January/February, 2017, pp.20-23 reviews the research, and lists a large number of adverse health effects of millimetre wave electromagnetic radiation including arrythmia, antibiotic resistance, cataracts, compromised immune system, etc.

7 Source: Arno Thielens et al., “Exposure of Insects to Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields from 2 to 120 GHz”, Nature, 8: 3924 (2018), fig.4.

8 Kurt Oughstun, interview on “Brillouin Precursors”, Microwave News, 22, 2 (2002), p.10. According to Oughstun, a professor of electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Vermont,
“A single Brillouin precursor can open small channels through the cell membrane because, as it passes through the membrane, it can induce a significant change in electrostatic potential across that membrane.”
See also Arthur Firstenberg “5G – From Blankets to Bullets” January 17th, 2018), at www.cellphonetaskforce.org.

9 Report of the Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation, Health Effects from Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields (2012).

10 Sarah J. Starkey, “Inaccurate official assessment of radiofrequency safety by the Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation”, Review of Environmental Health, 31:4 (2016), pp.493-503.

11 The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and H. M. Treasury, Next Generation Mobile Technologies: A 5G Strategy for the UK, March, 2017, which sets out the government’s strategy for the roll out of 5G, does not mention health and safety precautions.

12 One of the best sources for this mountain of research is The BioInitiative Report (2012), which helpfully gathers it into manageable sections, and is regularly updated. It can be accessed online at http://www.bioinitiative.org. According to the Report, between 2007 and 2012, approximately 1800 new studies demonstrated adverse health effects, i.e. on average 350 per year.

13 National Infrastructure Report, Connected Future (December, 2016), p.11. The authors argue that only by so doing could the UK “take full advantage of technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality.” The report is available at www. nic.org.

14 Ovum, “5G Economics of Entertainment Report” (October, 2018). The report was commissioned by Intel, and a summary is available at www.newsroom.intel.com.

15 Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie, “The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones”, TheGuardian, 14th July, 2018. The blatant funding bias was first exposed in 2006 by Louis Slesin, “’Radiation Research’ and the Cult of Negative Results”, Microwave News, 26.4 (July, 2006), pp.1-5. A good summary of the problem is given in “Bias and Confounding in EMF Science”, on the Powerwatch website: www.powerwatch.org.uk/science/bias.asp.

16 The Interphone Study is devastatingly critiqued in L. Lloyd Morgan et al., Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern (2009), available online at www. electromagnetichealth.org.

Back in July 2011, David Cameron made a speech about transparency. He told the electorate of Britain that a new dawn of government transparency had arrived and the release of official data would change the way government delivered public services.

“In so many ways, information is a national asset, and it’s time it was shared,” he said. “So today, we are making new commitments to transparency. What we’re proposing is something entirely different. Our aim is to provide similar information on performance right across the public services”

Cameron spoke eloquently about this “revolution in transparency” and the ‘profound impact” it would have. What he didn’t say was that the government were also using an architecture of illegal surveillance tools as well. He didn’t say that the security services were taking images of you and your family (16 per cent of which were naked images or compromising in nature). He forgot to mention that every website you visited, every message you sent, every person you made contact with was logged and stored. His convenient amnesia included forgetting to mention operations Tempora, Echelon, Optic Nerve and other illegal mass surveillance systems. Or that the government was recording what news or other information subscriptions you paid, how and who you spent your money with, what sexual orientation you may be and any other personal information the state has no business knowing about.

Two years later the Edward Snowden revelations blew the lies of his government wide open. Now we had some real transparency. David Cameron then demonstrated his real passion for transparency by warning and threatening journalists that “if they don’t demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act.” The state then forced their way into the offices of The Guardian and its henchmen from the security services destroyed the Snowden files and evidence it brought to light.

This state intervention into our lives has now extended to creating a biometric database, linked to a health database. To all intents, this represents nothing less than a national digital ID card system. National ID cards have been roundly rejected by the electorate and by parliament in the past – but that has not stopped this most secretive of governments.

All manner of government agencies, the people employed by them and the third party companies that design these systems – have access to your most private data. Tens of thousands of largely unknown people, many from foreign states have access (as the software is often designed by foreign companies).

After the unearthing of Theresa May’s racist project of illegally and immorally ejecting black people from Britain in the Windrush Scandal – is it any surprise the government is secretly building a new surveillance architecture to sniff out any possibility of an immigrant not being quite good enough for Britain. Other than national security, and immigration is not an issue of national security, the only reason why the state does things in secret is that the electorate would not endorse their actions – or that they are illegal in the first place.

Secret establishment of new database

In January this year, an inspection report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) revealed Home Office ambitions to:

“establish a system that obtains and shares an individual’s immigration status in real time with authorised users, providing proof of entitlement to a range of public and private services, such as work, rented accommodation, healthcare and benefits.”

It took this report to confirm that the Home Office is indeed building a massive hostile environment database, known internally as the “Status Checking Project”.

When, in autumn 2018, the Data Protection Bill included a sweeping immigration control exemption that would allow more or less any controller to set aside a person’s data protection rights for immigration control purposes, Liberty, the human rights organisation were keen to find out exactly what the Government intended it to be used for. As Liberty briefed at the time, referencing a draft policy document leaked to the Guardian:

“this exemption could ostensibly be used to facilitate the sharing of personal data of any individual interacting with public services … amounting in effect to a digital ID card.”

So there you have it. But Ministers remained curiously silent about the Status Checking Project. They insisted that the exemption would be used for tracking children of undocumented parents through their school records, or concealing the source of tip-offs to immigration enforcement (both things that can be done through existing crime-related exemptions to data protection law). The closest we had come before the ICIBI report to a public reference is a euphemistic mention of “new digital checking services” in the Immigration White Paper.

The report also suggests that the system will be available to police in the future, despite ongoing concerns that overlap between policing and immigration enforcement is undermining public safety.

Quietly entrenching the hostile environment

Liberty writes –

“The secrecy surrounding the so-called Status Checking Project is astonishing given that it has potentially huge human rights implications, both if it works, and if it doesn’t.

It’s one thing to send a text to someone telling them to leave the country, as happened in 2012, when the Home Office contracted Capita to send 39,000 texts to apparently undocumented migrants, some of whom were not, leading to a deluge of complaints. It’s another thing entirely to communicate a person’s status to landlords, employers, NHS providers, banks, police, and who knows who else, locking them out of the goods and services essential to a dignified life and the exercise of their fundamental rights.

That’s what happens when the Home Office gets it ‘right’. And that in itself is a serious problem. But the Home Office is also very likely to get things wrong. Its hostile environment data-sharing schemes already run with an alarming error rate. Ten per cent of bank account refusals sampled during one inspection were found to have been made in error. In 2015, the DVLA was forced to reinstate more than 250 wrongly-revoked licences. And the Home Office has repeatedly refused to clean up its database on undocumented migrants, despite the National Audit Office and the ICIBI recommending that it does so.”

The Windrush scandal exposed the devastating human impact of the hostile environment, as well as the Kafkaesque nightmare faced by people wrongly accused of being in the UK unlawfully. But it was not produced by a mere lack of documentation on the part of Commonwealth citizens. It was the product of a series of policy and legislative decisions that progressively stripped rights from a group of people who came to the UK as citizens and implemented a hostile environment despite warnings that those people might be locked out of essential services. In some cases, evidence that would have been useful to Windrush citizens was destroyed, and extensive evidence that they provided was ignored on the grounds that it did not cover a few years out of decades.

Windrush proves the credentials of this government when it comes to discrimination. Illegal state surveillance proves the credentials of this government when it comes to the mass invasion of the state into our privacy. Now add both into the architecture of state control. What you start to see is a government willing to break all the rules, laws, ethics and all morality to pinpoint people, groups, communities, dissidents, protestors, organisations – in fact, anything it doesn’t like and then deal with it in its own mendacious way.

This is all leading to one place and one place only. Behave according to the state (not necessarily by the laws of the land), or be punished by it.

Who gave the state the mandate to build a £multi-billion system to surveil our lives down to the tiniest detail? No-one did. The state did that all on its own. The building of this new database is yet another instalment of a state out of control. You might want to ask yourself if you’re happy with where this is all going.

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Unless action is taken swiftly — and Israel with its anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies is forced to stop — the world risks losing the most iconic symbol of Jerusalem, and one of the oldest and most beautiful religious structures ever created.

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There is a story about the Khalifa Umar bin al-Khattab, the Muslim leader who conquered Jerusalem in 637 C.E. It is said that upon entering the city he asked to see the site of the temple built by King Solomon, but could find no one who knew where it was. According to the story, he then came across a poor Jewish beggar sitting in the street. The beggar told the Kalifa that he could take him to the site where the temple once stood. When they arrived at the site Umar realized that the site had been used as the city trash dump. He then went down on his knees and, together with the Jewish beggar, cleaned the site and vowed to build a sanctuary that would for all eternity protect the holy site.

This sanctuary is the Dome of the Rock and with its golden dome it has become the most iconic symbol of Jerusalem. Today, Zionists in Israel plan to destroy it and replace it with what amounts to no more than a slaughterhouse where Jewish fanatics will sacrifice animals in rituals whose time has long past.

The Zionist system of takeovers

If we observe what is happening at the Haram Al-Sharif — the Holy Sanctuary in Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock are situated — and compare it to the history of Zionist takeovers of land, towns, neighborhoods and homes elsewhere in Palestine, the only possible conclusion that can be reached is that Israel is intending to push Palestinians and Muslims out and allow more Zionist zealots in. In case it is not abundantly clear at the outset, all people should treat this issue with the gravest concern.

From the earliest days of the Zionist takeover of Palestine, the method employed to take over land has been to send young zealots to confront the Arab population, while the establishment maintains a pretense that this is just a prank by youthful enthusiasts. Then the Zionist establishment allows these young zealots to create what they call “facts on the ground;” and then, gradually, services like water, electricity, roads, and of course security are provided, until this “youthful prank” becomes a Zionist settlement.

This was true in the pre-1948 years; then, after 1967, this system was revived, initially with settlements like the ones in Hebron and Sebastia. Today the system is used to take over areas that are slightly more controversial and in which the state officially does not want to get involved. These are what Israel calls “illegal outposts” — which eventually become “legal,” and then full-fledged settlements.

According to Peace Now: “Under Netanyahu’s government, we have seen intensive activity to restore the widespread phenomenon of illegal outposts deep inside the West Bank.”

Peace Now goes on to say:

The history of the settlements shows that many times an agricultural farm is actually the basis of the establishment of a whole new settlement. At the beginning, the settlers receive an approval to farm the land, then to build a house, and then, with or without an approval, they establish a neighborhood.”

Haram Al-Sharif

Knesset member Yehuda Glick is an Israeli politician who made the building of a Jewish temple in place of the Islamic monuments that have existed in Jerusalem for over a thousand years his life’s mission. According to Glick, 30 years ago when zealots like himself began to enter the compound — which they call “Har Habayit,” or the Temple Mount — there were about a hundred who went. In 2018 there were some 30,000 and this year they expect 50,000 Jewish zealots to enter the compound.

In an interview with an Israeli television program about the Temple Mount faithful, “Rabbi” Yoel Elitzur, another zealot leader of this group, states: “We will advance one step at a time, we will do what they allow us and we will advance. This has proven itself.”

“You mean a slow confiscation?” the reporter asked him. “Yes.”

The Israeli provocations into the Haram Al-Sharif are very well organized and documented. They are done in coordination with the Israeli security forces and are more like a march of force than an innocent tour. From time to time the boys who give the tours and who go to the sanctuary to create a provocation will drop to the ground and prostrate themselves and get arrested. In a tweet by “Hozrim La’Har” (Returning to the Mount), one can see young men doing this on video.

יהודים צדיקים שהשתחוו בהר לכבוד הרגל.
מוזמנים לעלות לרגל למקום הקדוש ביותר לעם היהודי! pic.twitter.com/rpeXzYhYCR

— חוזרים להר (@CozrimLahar) April 22, 2019

It is not only about access

Over the years there has been a growing movement of messianic Jewish fanatics who have been holding seminars and practice sessions on how to build the temple and how to conduct animal sacrifices. Priests dressed in costume and all the paraphernalia required are present and hundreds of participants attend the events, which are growing in popularity. Classes and camps for children are also held so as to educate a new generation of Israelis who will want to eliminate all signs of Muslims from Jerusalem, a city that has been Muslim and tolerant of other religions for over a thousand years. Having listened to interviews with members of the Temple Mount Faithful, it seems they have an obsession with burning a red cow and slaughtering young goats and then covering the place with blood pouring from the ritual slaughter. A practice hardly compatible with the quiet spirituality one finds at the Holy Sanctuary today.

A still from the documentary, Roni Kuban and the Temple Mount Faithful

Ne’emani Har Ha’bait, or the Temple Mount Faithful, have been financing these events and for the past eight years have been financing an architect in order to make this maniacal, destructive hallucination into a reality. The architect, Yoram Ginzburg, is an Israeli secular Jew who seems to be as enthusiastic about this vision as are all the others. His plan includes creation of a “Greater Jerusalem” that includes the cities of Ramallah and Al-Bire in the north and Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala in the south. “As for the Arabs” who live in these areas, he offers what he calls “two interesting options:” one is expulsion, or, as he calls it, “Evacuation-Compensation;” and the other mass conversion — that all the Palestinians will convert to Judaism. Non-Jews may remain as long as they are loyal to this “Jewish project.”

Yoram Ginzburg with heads of “Temple Mount Faithful” discussing plans for the third Jewish temple

A serious threat

Jared Kushner’s Deal of the Century is one in which Israel takes all and Palestinians are denied any rights. The Neo-Nazi thugs like Betsalel Smutritch and Michael Ben-Ari, with whom Netanyahu made a pact prior to the April 2019 elections, seem likely to be his coalition partners. Under these circumstances, the dream that the “Temple Mount” loyalists hope to see materialize no longer seems far-fetched.

The history of the past seven decades shows that the masters of the land — the most vicious, violent and racist elements within Israel — always get their way. Unless action is taken swiftly — and Israel with its anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies is forced to stop — the world risks losing the most iconic symbol of Jerusalem, and one of the oldest and most beautiful religious structures ever created.

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Miko Peled is an author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. He is the author of “The General’s Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine,” and “Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.”

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The Washington Post’s surprise revelation that Trump agreed to pay North Korea $2 million in exchange for releasing imprisoned student Otto Warmbier is intended to challenge his credibility by drawing “politically uncomfortable” comparisons between him and his predecessor.

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The Washington Post published a surprise revelation late last week alleging that Trump agreed to a North Korean demand that the US pay $2 million in “hospital bills” in exchange for releasing imprisoned student Otto Warmbier, a claim that the American leader promptly denied. In his tweet, Trump wrote that

“No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else. This is not the Obama Administration that paid 1.8 Billion Dollars for four hostages, or gave five terroist hostages plus, who soon went back to battle, for traitor Sgt. Bergdahl!”

His rebuke was obviously meant to preemptively contradict any comparisons between him and his predecessor that his political foes might attempt to draw in an effort to challenge his credibility by exposing his attacks against the Obama Administration for those two aforementioned events as the height of hypocrisy.

This is relevant in the current domestic political context because former Vice President Joe Biden just announced that he’ll be running as the Democrats’ candidate for president so it’s predictable that Trump will try to tie him to all of the many Obama-era scandals such as the two that he touched upon in his tweet. That might be more difficult to do nowadays after the Washington Post’s revelation in spite of Trump and National security Advisor Bolton‘s insistence that no money was ever paid even though Special Representative for North Korea Joseph Yun signed a document promising to do so after receiving authorization from the American leader himself. It’s therefore unclear exactly what transpired during that time nearly two years ago, but another question that naturally arises is about the timing of this very report. It’s unlikely that the Washington Post knew about this from the get-go but held onto the story until now, so it must have just been tipped off about it fairly recently.

Trump’s many “deep state” enemies are actively working to undermine his foreign policy, but it’s strange that not one of them leaked this scandalous detail to the media earlier when the revelation could have ruined his two summits with Chairman Kim. It could very well be that the sources didn’t come across this information until now, but that still doesn’t answer the question of why the original holder(s) of this knowledge didn’t share it with those individuals until now. One possible explanation could be that it it was carelessly revealed during casual conversation while another might be that the individual(s) was triggered to do so for one reason or another, perhaps pertaining to the Hanoi Summit’s failure or some other matter. Either way, the political consequences of this report are that it casts doubt on Trump’s much-touted negotiating prowess and also makes Kim lose “face” after he met with his American counterpart despite supposedly not having received any money for Warmbier’s release.

Altogether, the combined effect is that Trump might have more difficulty discrediting Biden for the Obama era’s many scandals just like he might also have difficulty restarting the North Korean nuclear talks. The Mainstream Media also has another scandal to harp on about after Russiagate was exposed as a hoax driven by a shadowy cabal of coup plotters inside the country’s permanent bureaucracy, therefore giving Trump’s enemies an opportunity to distract Americans with this the juicy narrative that he might have swallowed his principles and cut a deal with a “dictator” despite accusing Obama of doing the same thing vis-a-vis Iran. Only time will tell whether this scandal has the same staying power as Russiagate or if it’ll just fizzle out like practically every other one surrounding the Trump Administration, but it’s nevertheless interesting to think about its timing and possible overall political implications.

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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.

The Following text is Section 4 of

The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,

by the Italian Committee No War No NATO

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Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 2019

In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this important document, which will also be available as an E-book.

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Contents 

1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11.  Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO

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1. In 1990, on the eve of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, US Secretary of State James Baker assured USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev that “NATO will not extend by a single inch to the east”. But in twenty years, after having demolished the Yugoslavian Federation, NATO extended from 16 to 30 countries, expanding more and more eastwards to Russia.

2. In 1999, it incorporated the first three countries of the former Warsaw Pact: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In 2004, it extended to other countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (formerly part of the USSR); Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia (formerly part of the Warsaw Pact); Slovenia (formerly part of the Yugoslavian Federation). In 2009, it incorporated Albania (formerly a member of the Warsaw Pact) and Croatia (formerly part of the Yugoslavian Federation) and, in 2017, Montenegro; in 2019, it signed the protocol of accession of Northern Macedonia as the 30th member. Three other countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina (formerly part of the Yugoslavian Federation), Georgia and Ukraine (formerly part of the USSR) – are currently candidates for entry into NATO.

3. So Washington ties these countries not so much to the Alliance as directly to the US, strengthening its influence within the European Union. Of the ten Central and Eastern European countries entering NATO between 1999 and 2004, seven entered the European Union between 2004 and 2007. As the European Union expands to the East, the United States is effectively extending its control over Europe through NATO. Clearly, Washington’s strategic plan is revealed: to use the expansion of NATO to the East as a means of establishing relations of force even more favorable to the United States and, thus, further isolate the “old Europe” that could one day become autonomous.

4. Besides these, the expansion of NATO to the East has other implications. Incorporating not only the countries of the former Warsaw Pact but also the three Baltic republics that were once part of the USSR, NATO has reached the borders of the Russian Federation. Despite Washington’s assurances of its peaceful intentions, this constitutes a threat, even nuclear, to Russia.

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Sections 5-16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research

This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.

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Birds are, quite literally, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” How birds fare in the world indicates how all wildlife and habitat, and by extension human populations, will fare. It is not just poetry that led Rachel Carson to title her seminal work, Silent Spring. All the past administrations for which we have worked have struck a balance and worked diligently and in good faith with industries that had significant impacts on birds, such as oil and gas, coal, electric utilities, commercial fishing, communications, transportation, national defense, and others to reasonably address unintended take. It can be done. In fact, it has been done. Successes in applying this law to minimize the incidental killing of birds are numerous. – Letter of January 10, 2018, from 17 former government conservation professionals objecting to Department of Interior memorandum unilaterally voiding century-old law

One of the ways American politics works these days is to ignore the rule of law while putting on a great fake show of legal probity. The example here is the Trump administration’s secret reversal of migratory bird protection law, later imposed on the nation by its own authoritarian fiat, making law without the participation of Congress or any other government agency. The administration’s procedure effectively reduces due process of law to the arbitrary ruling of one person. This seems patently unconstitutional on its face, since the Constitution (Article II, section 3) requires that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

The bilateral 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty was signed by the United States and Canada, then still part of Great Britain. The Bird Treaty was one of the earliest environmental protection laws, incorporated by Congress into US law in 1918 as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (16 USC 703ff). For a hundred years, administrations of both parties have faithfully executed the act to protect migratory birds from a host of evolving threats from industries to whom the life or death of birds was inconsequential. These industries became increasingly resentful toward government intrusion on their profits for the sake of wild birds, of all things.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) enforced migratory bird law on behalf of the Interior Department in bipartisan fashion across all administrations since the 1970s, from Nixon through Obama.

Image on the right: Shortly after leaving the Port of Valdez, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef. The picture below was taken 3 days after the vessel grounded, just before a storm arrived.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker wreck in Alaska killed some 300,000 birds. The Exxon oil company settled criminal misdemeanor charges brought by the US under the migratory bird act, paying $125 million in fines and restitution (part of Exxon’s overall liability of about $1 billion in other legal actions). At the time, Exxon’s fine was the largest ever imposed for an environmental crime. As of July 2013, Exxon still had not paid $92 million of the settlement. In October 2015, the US abandoned its claim against Exxon. The Alaskan coast remains polluted by Exxon oil.

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and 87-day oil gusher killed 11 people and hundreds of thousands of birds in the Gulf of Mexico. BP (British Petroleum) settled criminal misdemeanor charges brought by the US under the migratory bird act, paying $100 million in fines (part of BP’s overall liability of more than $20 billion in other legal actions). In 2012, BP pleaded guilty to manslaughter (among 14 felony counts) and paid $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties. The BP oil spill (over 3 million gallons) was 20 times larger than Exxon’s.

The penalties generated by these two events, Exxon and BP, represent 97 percent of the total revenue generated by the migratory bird law for the Fish and Wildlife Service, according to the Washington Post. As of March 2017, the US Fish and Wildlife Service  website stated misleadingly:

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it illegal for anyone to take, possess, import, export, transport, sell, purchase, barter, or offer for sale, purchase, or barter, any migratory bird, or the parts, nests, or eggs of such a bird except under the terms of a valid permit issued pursuant to Federal regulations.

The FSW misstated the law, which includes the word “kill” among its illegalities. The law (16 US Code 703) is titled: “Taking, killing, or possessing migratory birds unlawful.” The law states in relevant, unambiguous part:

Unless and except as permitted by regulations made as hereinafter provided in this subchapter, it shall be unlawful at any time, by any means or in any manner, to … kill … any migratory bird….

Until 2017, administrations of both parties understood the law to apply equally to any migratory bird killing without a permit, regardless of whether the killing was intentional or unintentional. The Exxon and BP mass bird kills were presumably unintentional. Neither Exxon nor BP challenged that long-established understanding of the law under which they were charged and accepted guilt.

Before 2017, efforts to weaken or repeal the migratory bird law had been ineffective. Congress made changes in migratory bird law on numerous occasions, including in 1960, 1986, 1998, 2002, and 2003, without once changing the law’s clear prohibition against killing migratory birds, intentionally or not.

In 1986, in response to a Sixth Circuit federal court ruling, Congress required that any felony charged under the law required an element of intent by the wrongdoer. Congress, as it had before, left misdemeanors to be prosecuted without intent, under strict liability. In other words, if you kill migratory birds then you’re liable, whether you intended to or not.

In 2002, Congress explicitly carved out an exception to migratory bird law, allowing the US military to kill birds unintentionally, but only during military readiness activities.” Other military activities that killed migratory birds, intentionally or not, were still prohibited. The legislation directed Fish and Wildlife to issue regulations under the authority of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which FWS did in 2007. In 2015, Republicans in the House introduced bills to reduce the scope and the financial penalties of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Neither bill became law.

In December 2011, the American Bird Conservancy petitioned Fish and Wildlife to undertake the rulemaking process to create regulations under the authority of the migratory bird act that would regulate the impacts of industrial wind power projects on migratory birds. In March 2012, FWS responded, agreeing with the conservancy’s analysis of its authority under the law to regulate unintentional bird kills by windmills. But FWS denied the conservancy’s request for regulation on the basis that FWS was still working with the wind industry on voluntary guidelines.

The American Bird Conservancy renewed its call for regulation in 2015. On May 26, FWS issued a notice of intent to undertake an Environmental Impact Statement (consistent with the National Environmental Policy Act) in support of regulating unintentional bird kills by windmills, and invited public input in the process.

On January 10, 2017, in the waning days of the Obama administration, the Interior Department’s solicitor (agency lawyer) issued a memorandum now deleted from the department’s website. The memorandum, Opinion M-37041, was titled “Incidental Take Prohibited Under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” referring to unintentional bird kills by industrial and commercial operations, specifically including windmills. This memorandum of 30 pages confirmed the department’s policy over preceding decades. Solicitor Hilary Tompkins pointed out that, regarding some disputed words in the law:

… even if the traditional common-law meaning of “take” introduces some ambiguity as to whether that term applies to incidental take, “kill” is unambiguous.

In other words, the government’s consistent reading of the law is that killing migratory birds, regardless of intent, is nevertheless illegal. It is incumbent on industrial and commercial actors to anticipate obvious dangers and take actions to mitigate them. Otherwise, they risk prosecution by the government.

The incoming Trump administration didn’t see it that way. Trump and many of his supporters were generally anti-regulation, almost any regulation. One billionaire Trump supporter, Harold Hamm (image on the left), founder and CEO of the oil company Continental Resources, had characterized regulation as “death by a thousand cuts.” In 2015, Hamm leaned on the University of Oklahoma to dismiss scientists studying the connection between oil fracking and more frequent earthquakes.

In 2011, Hamm had his own unpleasant encounter with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Continental and several other oil companies operating in North Dakota were charged with killing birds by failing to put protective netting over oil waste pools. That allowed birds to fly in, get oil-soaked, and die. Continental was charged with killing one phoebe.  Hamm was outraged and challenged the charges in US District Court in North Dakota. In January 2012, Judge Daniel Hovland granted the oil companies’ motion and dismissed the charges, ruling that the migratory bird law of 1918 was too vague to justify the indictments, even though the law had been enforced this way for decades.  The judge wrote, in part, ultimately relying on mind-reading the intent of the 1918 Congress:

All parties involved in this dispute have acted in good faith, and there is case law which supports the legal arguments both sides have presented. Nevertheless, the criminalization of lawful, commercial activity which may indirectly injure or kill migratory birds is not warranted under the Migratory Bird Treat Act as it is currently written.

This Court believes that it is highly unlikely that Congress ever intended to impose criminal liability on the acts or omissions of persons involved in lawful commercial activity which may indirectly cause the death of birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

This is an apt expression of the mindset of many members of the incoming Trump administration, especially the political appointees at the Interior Department. It’s not as though there’s no reasonable argument to be had here. Indicting a company on the basis of a single dead phoebe seems ludicrous, but the danger of unprotected waste oil pits is real. The rule of law provides numerous avenues for addressing such competing interests. The Trump administration demonstrated no interest in following anything like the rule of law in any substantive way.

On February 6, 2017, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration suspended the Interior Department’s January memorandum supporting decades of precedent in enforcing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. What happened next was ugly, as described in a lawsuit filed by the National Audubon Society in May 2018:

Representatives of the oil and gas industry, among others, then lobbied DOI [Interior Dept.]  to issue a new directive that would eviscerate any obligation to take migratory bird impacts into consideration when engaging in various industrial activities. For example, on August 31, 2017, the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and natural gas companies, sent Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke a letter complaining that the “implementation and enforcement of incidental take of migratory birds (including nests and their habitat) … is inhibiting oil and natural gas development.” The letter urged Secretary Zinke to issue “guidance that [the] MBTA [Migratory Bird Treaty Act] does not give FWS the authority to regulate incidental take for [sic] migratory birds.”

On November 3, 2017, the Director of Government Relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America wrote to the Deputy Director of DOI’s Office of External Affairs with the subject line “MBTA” asking, “Any word on the solicitor’s opinion yet?”

Within the Interior Department, the review of the migratory bird law was proceeding in private.

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 relating to rule making (5 USC 553) requires the rule making agency to make public announcement of and provide for public comment on any rule before adopting it: “the agency shall give interested persons an opportunity to participate in the rule making through submission of written data, views, or arguments….” Without explaining why, the Trump administration ignored this federal law. The only interested persons known to be involved in the process were lobbyists for oil, gas, and other industries.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 contemplates public knowledge of and participation in environmental policy decisions. A November 2017 federal court decision in Montana addressed the failure of the Obama administration to conduct a proper environmental impact statement before approving the TransCanada pipeline:

No agency possesses discretion whether to comply with procedural requirements such as NEPA. The relevant information provided by a NEPA analysis needs to be available to the public and the people who play a role in the decision-making process. This process includes the President.

The environmental policy act requires that for all “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” the federal agency taking the action must prepare an environmental impact statement that analyzes the “impact of the proposed action,” and “alternatives to the proposed action.” (42 U.S.C. § 4332(C)) The Trump Interior Department did not undertake an environmental impact statement relating to migratory bird law and it did not explain its inaction.

The environmental policy act also allows an agency to prepare an environmental assessment to determine the need for an environmental impact statement. The Trump Interior Department did not undertake an environmental assessment relating to migratory bird law and it did not explain its inaction.

On December 22, 2017, without prior notice, the Interior Department’s solicitor Daniel Jorjani issued a memorandum, M-37050, holding that “the Migrant Bird Treaty Act does not prohibit incidental take,” meaning that oil companies and others can kill migratory birds without limit as long as they didn’t intend to do so. Jorjani’s memo took effect immediately, with force of law, permanently replacing the January memo that had restated settled law regarding migratory birds. Smithsonian.com had a December 27 story with a ho-hum attitude, although it did include oil industry lies about lax enforcement against windmills that kill birds.

Effectively, Jorjani determined that black is white. He did it in secret with industry and bureaucratic co-conspirators. There is no evidence that he acted in good faith and there is no further review possible of his memo within the executive branch. He reversed a hundred years of evolving environmental policy protecting migratory birds. He did it with one fell fascist swipe of the pen.

This blatantly undemocratic manner of law-making was largely ignored at the time and has been ever since, with occasional quiet and polite demurrers. There were limited, minor media reports, but no objection from Congress over its usurped authority.

On January 10, 2018, less than three weeks after the decision was made public, 17 former government conservation professionals wrote the letter quoted at the top of this piece. They are “very concerned” by Jorjani’s memo and beseech Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to modify the memo. They write:

This is a new, contrived legal standard that creates a huge loophole in the MBTA [Migratory Bird Treaty Act], allowing companies to engage in activities that routinely kill migratory birds so long as they were not intending that their operations would “render an animal subject to human control.” Indeed, as your solicitor’s opinion necessarily acknowledged, several district and circuit courts have soundly rejected the narrow reading of the law that your Department is now embracing….

The MBTA can and has been successfully used to reduce gross negligence by companies that simply do not recognize the value of birds to society or the practical means to minimize harm. Your new interpretation needlessly undermines a history of great progress, undermines the effectiveness of the migratory bird treaties, and diminishes U.S. leadership.

There is no record that the ethically-challenged Zinke responded before he left office under a cloud. But there is no record of anyone else at the Interior Department responding either. After a few months of stonewalling silence, the department issued a memo on April 11, 2018, offering “Guidance on the recent M-Opinion [37050] affecting the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” addressing “what changes to prior practice should be made” to conform to the 180-degree reversal of department policy. The Washington Post covered this superficially, as if it were both recent and unimportant. The memo asserts, without apparent irony, that:

The mission of the Service is to work with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. Migratory bird conservation remains an integral part of our mission.

This dishonest assertion seems designed to blur reality. It states that the National Environmental Policy Act should be followed, even though it was ignored in creating the memo it purports to explain. In the real world, the changes that the Interior Department has made amount to an abdication of any significant responsibility for migratory birds. The Fish and Wildlife Service is no longer enforcing any law against industrial bird kills. The Fish and Wildlife Service is no longer investigating or even keeping records on industrial bird kills. Elizabeth Shogren reports that FWS “saved about $2.5 million by not filling ten positions primarily related to investigating violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.” After a century of some protection by the US government, migratory birds are on their own.

Canada has indicated that it will continue to enforce the Migratory Bird Treaty as best it can. It’s not clear what Mexico, Japan, and Russia are doing about American treaty violations. It’s not clear whether the Trump administration has bothered to inform any other governments of its reversal of the treaty’s lawful requirements.

On May 24, 2018, four plaintiffs – the National  Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Defenders of Wildlife – filed suit against the Interior Department, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and solicitor Jorjani. The plaintiffs’ 35-page filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York challenges Jorjani’s 2017 memo as “unlawful and arbitrary and capricious.” The complaint argues that:

For decades Defendants [US government agencies] have construed the MBTA [Migratory Bird Treaty Act], consistent with its plain language, as protecting migratory bird populations from foreseeable “incidental” killing or “take” caused by major industrial activities that are not specifically directed at migratory birds but nevertheless kill them in large numbers. This interpretation has helped to conserve migratory birds for decades in keeping with the purpose of the MBTA and the international treaties the Act implements.

The plaintiffs ask the court to reinstate the January 2017 solicitor’s opinion that restated the settled law of the past century. They also ask the court to vacate Jorjani’s December 2017 memo as well as the April 2018 memo issuing “guidelines.” The government has moved to dismiss the case. Federal judge Valerie Caproni has not yet ruled on the government’s motion. The judge was appointed by President Obama in 2013, before which she was General Counsel of the FBI under Robert Mueller.  There have been no hearings on the merits of the case.

On September 5, 2018, the attorneys general for eight states filed suit against the same Defendants – Interior Department, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Jorjani. Led by Barbara Underwood of New York, the other states were California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Oregon. The states’ 26-page complaint asks the court to declare “that the Jorjani opinion is arbitrary, capricious, or not in accordance with law” and to vacate the opinion, which would restore the Solicitor’s memo of January 2017 restating a century of settled law. The states argue in part that:

The Jorjani opinion is inconsistent with the Act’s text and purposes, is contrary to defendants’ previous longstanding interpretation of the Act and decades of consistent application of that interpretation, drastically limits the scope of the Act, subjects migratory birds to increased likelihood of death or injury from industrial and other human activities that immediately take or kill or are foreseeably likely to take or kill migratory birds, and harms the States’ sovereign, ecological, and economic interests in robust federal protections of migratory birds.

This case is also before Judge Valerie Caproni. There have been no hearings and none are scheduled. The only pending motion is for Dianna Shin of New Jersey to appear pro hac vice.

On April 11, the Senate voted 56-41 to confirm David Bernhardt, a career lawyer/lobbyist for the oil industry and their ilk, as Secretary of the Interior. While he served as deputy secretary, Bernhardt was deeply involved in gutting the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, as reported by Elizabeth Shogren of Reveal (and not much of anyone else). Solicitor Jorjani’s email October 27, 2017, confirms that Bernhardt “has been plugged in since Day 1” in gutting the migratory bird law. Bernhardt was unanimously confirmed by Republican senators with their longstanding antipathy to environmental laws. They were joined by three other corrupt senators, Democrats-in-name-only Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

On April 15, the inspector general of the Interior Department opened an investigation into ethics complaints against Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. The investigation was requested by eight Senate Democrats and four government watchdog groups.

This is about more than just corrupt Democratic senators, this is about more than notoriously corrupt Republican senators, this is about more than just a US cabinet agency engaging in a secret process that reverses a hundred years of legal precedent, this is about more than the failure of mainstream media to cover blatantly unlawful government, this is about more than the failure of the court system to respond in timely fashion to contempt for law, this is about more than the failure of Democrats generally and Democratic presidential candidates in particular to notice the raw success of the Trump administration carrying off the impeachable offense of failing to take care that the law be faithfully executed.

This is about the institutional triumph of American fascism.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Reader Supported News.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Featured image is from Sierra Club

Actually I thought I was sufficiently informed by the books of my friend Manfred Paulus about the shameful excesses of human trafficking and sex slavery. But his meritorious lifelong research is mainly related to Germany and Europe. An article by the American constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead in “Global Research” of 24 April 2019 “The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Bussiness in America” shows that the sex trade – especially the purchase and sale of young girls  – has become “Big Business” in America. This buying and selling has become the fastest growing organized crime business and the second most important good after drugs and weapons. This is America’s dirty little secret. This decadent “Western Value Society” will one day perish like the decadent Roman Empire.

“Battlefield America. The war against the American people”

I recommend to every reader of these lines – especially parents and educators – to read the shocking state report of American society here in order to form their own opinion. In the following I quote from the report. Whitehead portrays a frighteningly decadent nation. Already in 2015 he published a book entitled “Battlefield America. The War on the American People”. It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. But the average means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-old. Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger. Every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry. According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States. They are ordinary people from all walks of life, including men in socially respected professions such as doctors and pastors. On average, a child might be raped by 6.000 men during a five-year period of servitude. It’s happening everywhere, right under our nose, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to the end.

These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. Some of these children are forcefully abducted or lured by force. Many are runaways or throwaways, others are sold to the system by relatives and acquaintances. In most cases, they have no choice. Social media makes it all too easy for pimps to find girls. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers. It is a “trading of flesh”.

For the victims of human trafficking, it’s a nightmare from beginning to the end. A living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed. They were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Every night they would have to meet a certain quota. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. In a so-called “damage group”, the clients can hit them or do anything they want to.

The Result of a Decadent Western Civilization

“The Essence of Evil“ is what Whitehead calls his article. In the text he asks the question: “Where did this appetite for young girls come from?” And he answers:

“Look around you. Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children”.

Whitehead then quotes from a report in the U.S. magazine “Newsweek”. There, a certain Jessica Bennett writes:

“Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school. (…) It’s the ‘pornification of a generation’, (…) sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives.”

Whitehead says:

“Culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predator. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?“

Because of the growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women eligible for abduction, this problem will not go away in the near future, Whitehead thinks.

So what can you do?

Whitehead answers the self-imposed question: “So what can you do? with a series of detailed practical recommendations. I quote some that I have translated:

“Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo. Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement. (…) 

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a psychologist and educationalist.

The small wooden boats slowly make their way down the brown waters of the Mekong at sunset. Flowing meditation – just enjoying the silence, watching the river flow. Then, suddenly, in the distance, an apparition – a row of cement Ts.

Like a high-tech divinity, the 21^st century irrupts across the immemorial Mekong, which in Laos is appropriately named Mae Nam Khong or the Mother of Waters.

Welcome to the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, one of the key planks of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).     

The apparition on the Mekong is an under-construction bridge, part of the 420 km-long, US$6 billion worth high-speed railway connecting Kunming, in Yunnan province, to the Lao capital Vientiane and then, further on down the road, bound to unite mainland Southeast Asia all the way to Singapore.

Spiritual beginnings

It’s tempting to regard the bridge as a post-modern naga. In the inestimable The Enduring Sacred Landscape of the Naga, published by Mekong Press, Lao scholars Mayoury and Pheuiphanh Ngaosrivathana track the literally fantastic world of animated beings in the Mekong basin – totemized reptiles such as the serpent, or ngu, the salt-water crocodile (ngeuak) and supernatural beings such as the naga.

These tutelary spirits, controllers of water and rainfall, local proprietors of the soil and guardians of its fertility, wealth and welfare – these are the autochthonous spirits tamed by Buddhism collectively known as naga. Worship of the naga – in rituals, festivals, daily life – has shaped the lives and life cycles of Mekong populations for millennia.

The new naga will take the form of Made in China high-speed trains – for passengers of course, but mostly for cargo – crossing the Mekong back and forth and crucially bypassing the Maritime Silk Road along the South China Sea.     

The numbers by the Lao Ministry of Public Works and Transport are impressive – the Kunming-Vientiane high-speed railway, started in 2016 and to be completed in 2021, features 72 tunnels, 170 bridges and will have trains speeding along at 160 km an hour.

The China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor is one of the six main BRI corridors identified back in March 2015. These are BRI’s land arteries – the backbone of an intricate, integrated continental landmass featuring multiple layers of transportation, telecom, energy infrastructure, financial, trade, political and economic projects and agreements. 

The Lao mini-boom

Northern Laos, a maze of mountains, jungles and a few rivers, for a long time was virtually isolated until the opening of borders with Vietnam and China led to immense economic and demographic transformations – with traditional rice-based agriculture giving way to speculative commercial agriculture.

Laos is landlocked between powerful neighbors China and Thailand.

A North-South economic corridor has been the favored strategy by both China and Thailand to develop commerce, tourism and investments in Laos. Mountain people minorities linked to Chinese culture such as the Chin Haw, Akha, Yao and Hmong, who speak Lao and know Lao culture, were cast as the perfect intermediaries and partners.

Especially in the BRI era, connections with China, both in the formal and informal economy, are now overtaking connections with Thailand. Vientiane – not exactly a transparent government – has encouraged Chinese investments of extremely dubious value in luxury hotels, malls and casinos in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) along the Chinese border.   

At the same time, Chinese companies have been pouring billions of dollars into the productive development of these SEZs, as well as in dams, mines and rubber plantations.

Railway on track

There’s a sort of mini-boom now in the three northern Lao provinces of Luang Namtha, Oudomxay and Luang Prabang. More than 7,000 Lao people are working on the Kunming-Vientiane railway, most of them residents who live nearby.

But that still pales compared to the more than 40,000 Chinese working for six Chinese contractors, in six different segments, duly supervised by Huang Difu, chairman of the Laos-China Railway Company and general manager of China Railway International.

The railway will be 70% financed by Beijing, the remaining 30% for Vientiane – roughly $840 million – are supported by a low-interest Chinese loan of $500 million. A Lao bauxite mine plus three potash mines secure the Chinese loan.

Kunming-Vientiane is a stark example of how BRI projects usually face a maze of political and financial hurdles. The original design, from 2011, predates the New Silk Roads, which were launched in 2013. Much of the problems have to do with the toxic land for development equation – a situation not much different in Cambodia and Myanmar.   

In Luang Prabang, I was told of countless cases of villagers forced to leave their homes and who are still waiting for fair compensation from Vientiane. In Laos there are a dizzying 242 different categories of compensation – spanning everything from mango trees five years of age or older, to hardwood and teak trees less than one year old, not to mention crucial land in main transportation hubs.

In fact, the former royal capital – a fragile jewel that must be preserved from the mass tourism hordes at all costs – receives more attention from the EU and Asean, not to mention Unesco, than from the bureaucrats in Vientiane.

 An aerial view of the Unesco heritage town of Luang Prabang in Laos. Photo: iStock

All these worries at least disappear every single morning at the binthabat, or rice-collecting ritual, when rows of Buddhist monks are offered rice in their earthen bowls by rows of women on their knees. 

The Silk (jungle) road

In Global South terms, Laos is booming. In mainland Southeast Asia, the Chinese strategy is mostly focused on Laos and Thailand. Beijing expects that the lure of those cross-border SEZs is able to convince skeptical Vietnam and Myanmar of Chinese “flexibility.”

Much more than interest rates on Chinese loans – which in fact are small – the red alert on BRI-related projects in Laos concerns the environmental impact, and the fact that Laos is a poor, landlocked transit nation, it may be paying in the future a disproportionate social and environmental cost for projects that mainly benefit the Chinese economy. 

A sharp contrast is offered by Ock Pop Tok, or East meets West in Lao, an indigenous model of fair trade, sustainable business, socially conscious enterprise founded by a Lao and an Englishwoman in 2000, managed by women, and for the benefit of Lao women.

Ock Pop Tok started with five weavers and now links to more than 500 in villages across Laos. Textile production in Laos carries an immensely significant cultural value. Technical and esoteric knowledge has been transmitted from generation to generation in each village specific to a subgroup, a powerful sign of strong cultural identity. 

Silk has been cultivated in Laos for more than 1,000 years. Ock Pop Tok managed to assemble master weavers using techniques practiced by the Tai Kadai ethnic group since 800 BC, when they left Yunnan.

Everything, of course, is bio – natural dyes, handmade. I could not resist an absolutely stunning silk prayer flag weaved by Meng. Support for this added-value artisan knowledge translates into rural populations staying in their communities instead of betting on a usually troublesome urban exodus.

Ock Pop Tok also promotes Hmong artisans. Hmongs are animists who came from Tibet and Mongolia by the early 19^th century. There are more than 49 ethnic groups in Laos. Westerners classify them by language – Mon, Khmer, Sino-Tibetan, Tai, Kadai – while in Laos they are recognized by where they live – on the plains, in plateaus or high in the mountains. 

It’s this extremely complex, fragile, social and environmental system that from 2021 will have to learn to coexist with the era of the high-speed naga. 

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Millions of tonnes of sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, krill and other species are caught and ground into fishmeal and fish oil, known as FMFO. This is fed to salmon caged in hundreds of farms along the west coast.

Now an 80-page report by campaign groups, Changing Markets Foundation and Compassion in World Farming, warns that growing dependence on FMFO is threatening human food security, putting marine wildlife at risk and harming animal welfare.

The report, however, has been attacked by the international FMFO industry as “unbalanced”, “biased” and “inaccurate”. The industry insists that the majority of FMFO is “responsibly sourced”.

The new report says that almost a fifth of the world’s total catch of wild fish is currently processed into FMFO, most of which is used to feed farmed fish. The global fishmeal market was worth approximately £4.6 billion in 2017.

Pressures to catch more are likely to increase as the fish farm industry expands. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has predicted that global production of farmed fish will reach 109 million tonnes by 2030, and provide 60 per cent of the world’s fish consumption.

The fish farming industry argues that it has the potential to deliver affordable, healthy protein. This can be done, it says, with little carbon pollution while reducing the overexploitation of wild fish for human consumption.

But the industry is failing to deliver on these promises, the report claims.

“Grinding wild fish into FMFO to feed a growing aquaculture industry raises concerns of overfishing, poor animal welfare and disruption of aquatic food webs,” it concludes.

“It also undermines food security, as less fish is available for direct human consumption. Given the rapid growth of the sector, it is clear that the aquaculture industry’s business-as-usual approach is pushing marine resources beyond planetary boundaries and disregarding the welfare of hundreds of billions of sentient animals.”

Campaigners are calling for salmon companies working in Scotland to mend their ways.

“The farming of carnivorous fish such as salmon is putting huge pressure on wild fish stocks and poses a threat to food security in some of the world’s poorest countries,” Natasha Hurley from the Changing Markets Foundation told The Ferret.

“As one of the biggest global producers of farmed salmon, the Scottish aquaculture sector is playing a big part in this. We urge Scottish companies to do the responsible thing and take swift action to phase out the use of wild-caught fish in feed.”

This was possible, she insisted.

“We are calling on aquafeed producers to switch to sustainable alternatives that do not give rise to other ecological problems.”

According to the report, up to 45 mostly Chinese-owned fishmeal factories have been built along the West African coast from Senegal to Mauritania in recent years. This has led to more than half the fish in the region being over-exploited, it says.

Compassion in World Farming argued that there had been a “huge impact” on animal welfare.

“As industrial aquaculture grows, the number of animals suffering in these intensive farming systems multiplies and brings in another hidden layer,” said the group’s head of fish policy, Dr Krzysztof Wojtas.

“Most people are not aware of the additional suffering of hundreds of billions of small fish that die horribly on huge industrial fishing vessels in order to fuel these underwater factory farms. The industry must urgently address this crisis.”

The Scottish salmon farmed industry accepted that it needed more alternatives to wild-caught fish.

“Scottish salmon farming produces a nutritious food and a valuable source of essential Omega 3 fatty acids,” said the chief executive of the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation, Julie Hesketh-Laird.

“As a sector, we are committed to the use of fish feed made from responsibly sourced ingredients from strictly managed or certified fisheries to support healthy salmon growth and provide human health benefits.”

She added:

“We agree with the authors of the report that the search for fish-free aquafeed products needs to be scaled up and reinforced across the sector.

“We wish to work with those with an interest in the sustainability of feeds, alongside the sector’s feed producers, to bolster the ongoing work into the use of novel and other sustainable raw materials like seafood trimmings and certified soy as replacements for marine-sourced ingredients.”

IFFO, the international trade organisation that represents the fishmeal and fish oil industry, issued a detailed statement criticising the new report. It pointed out that a study by the independent Sustainable Fisheries Partnership in 2018 had concluded that 91 per cent of FMFO stocks studied were “reasonably-well managed, or better”.

“IFFO is disappointed to read an inaccurate document which ignores the facts and realities of the fishmeal and fish oil sector,” said IFFO director general, Petter Martin Johannessen.

“The majority of wild-caught fish is responsibly sourced and is an essential resource in support of global protein production. Moreover the use of trimmings and byproduct from seafood processing represents at least 33 per cent of total world fishmeal production, that would otherwise predominantly go to landfill.”

He added:

“IFFO rebuts the allegations contained in this report and provides a full analysis on its website.”

IFFO technical director, Neil Auchterlonie, described the new report as “unbalanced”. The authors had “sided with some of the most uninformed players” in the community of non-governmental organisations, he said.

“Changing Markets Foundation appear to be well resourced, producing a glossy document and running a campaign via social media. Given the weakness of their arguments, they perhaps should have spent more of that resource on determining the facts and realities of the fishmeal and fish oil sector, rather than developing their own biased narrative.”

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Demonstrating solidarity with the embattled Bolivarian republic of Venezuela is today’s litmus test of anti-imperialism.

As African/Black internationalists, we stand in the tradition of our people’s historic anti-war and anti-imperialist positions. We understand that when our folks are clear, they don’t accept the smoke-and-mirrors stunts that call themselves the “interim president” or the “most trusted name in news.”

Some of our folks based in the Washington, D.C., area have stepped up to support the Embassy Protection Collective over the past few days. Though the threat of arrest looms, the collective has been able to remain in the building. Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations stipulates the U.S. government is prohibited from entering, searching and seizing items from another country’s building. That, as well as protection provided by city tenancy laws, have been communicated to the U.S. Department of State.

BAP member Vanessa Beck held it down at a rally Thursday in front of the Venezuelan embassy, representing Black, working-class internationalists who oppose U.S. gangsterism abroad.

Yesterday, we showed up again—this time for a spontaneous rally. BAP member Jacqueline Luqman spoke about the solidarity our people have for an oppressed country struggling for self-determination. Watch her talk.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in his imperial arrogance, gloated recently that while he was CIA Director, agency members lied, cheated and stole. If that wasn’t revealing enough, he added the CIA represented “the glory of the American experiment.” The Resistance and the Democratic Party have aligned themselves with the national security state, for they view it as opposition to Trump. But in this regard, they are just as dangerous. We’re not fooled. U.S. security agencies, just like the military, regularly subvert and overthrow Black and Brown countries targeted for regime change.

“The Secretary of State’s candid remarks remind us that U.S. foreign policy is intended to punish those targeted as enemies, keep friends as vassal states, and disregard international law,” writes BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley in Black Agenda Report.

The U.S. military, in addition to killing innocent Black and Brown people, is the world’s largest polluter, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined. The military is accelerating climate change and has left a toxic legacy across the world and on sovereign nations inside the United States. For a U.S. state committed to upholding white supremacy, Black and Brown lives are disposable, as is our very environment. This is why we say the war on African/Black people domestically is connected to the war on Black and Brown people abroad.

BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) has been in Cuba over the past week with the 14th May Day International Brigade to commemorate International Workers’ Day alongside internationalist delegations from 32 countries.

BAP is proud to endorse the May Day on Wall Street rally and march happening in New York City.

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