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As UK Prime Minister Theresa May has just five days to try to rally support for her Brexit deal, a Tory MP has suggested using the possibility of food shortages to Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit to encourage the EU to drop the backstop.

A government report, leaked to the Times of London, has indicated that there could be food shortages in Ireland in a no-deal Brexit scenario, and the economic impact on Ireland would be worse than in the UK.

This is based on the large number of food exports from the UK to Ireland (more than half of the total food imported to Ireland comes from the UK). In the event of a no-deal, trade rules would revert to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, but the UK would have to apply to become a member of the WTO to implement these rules.

At a Brexit event for local authorities held in Dublin this week, economist Dan O’Brien echoed those sentiments, adding that the threat of food shortages and supplies in a no-deal scenario shouldn’t be underestimated.

According to today’s article, the UK government report have indicated that there would be a 7% drop in GDP for Ireland, while the equivalent drop would be 5% for the UK.

Tory MP Priti Patel has told the paper that these warnings should have been used as leverage against Ireland to encourage them to drop the backstop.

“This paper appears to show the government were well aware Ireland will face significant issues in a no-deal scenario. Why hasn’t this point been pressed home during negotiations? There is still time to go back to Brussels and get a better deal.”

Patel resigned as International Development Secretary last November after holding 12 meetings with Israeli groups and officials outside the proper protocol.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon reacted to the story, saying that

“The sheer moral bankruptcy of the Tory Brexiteers is on full display today.”

Threatening Ireland’s food supply 🧐🤦🏻‍♂️…as a descendent of people fleeing county Mayo, it amazes me that these expensively educated brexiteers have literally learned nowt about the history of these very isles.

— Tom Blenkinsop (@TomBlenkinsop) December 7, 2018

Ex-Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop, who is of Irish heritage, also reacted to the story, saying:

“…It amazes me that these expensively educated Brexiteers have literally learned nowt about the history of these very isles”.

The backstop, a guarantee that there will be no hard border on the island of Ireland, is seen as being unnecessary and restrictive by Brexiteers, as it could lock the UK into an indefinite customs arrangement that would stop them striking new trade deals with other countries.

This would mean Northern Ireland would stay “aligned” to the regulations of the customs union if there is no other solution that would avoid infrastructure along the Irish border.

If there are different regulations or tariffs between the two jurisdictions, which would have to occur if the UK want to become more competitive than they are currently in the EU, then that would suggest products need to be checked as they go across the border.

Prominent British politicians, including the former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg, have indicated that they would scrap the backstop if it were up to them (important to note if there is a Tory party leadership challenge).

DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds also indicated that the provision to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland should be scrapped, chanting “bin the backstop” to applause at his party’s conference.

Meanwhile, as May’s deal looks set to be rejected by the House of Commons in next week, there are reports in the UK media that she is looking at the possibility of a second referendum if the deal does fail.

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Featured image: Priti Patel speaking at a fringe event organized by Brexit Central, during the Conservative Party annual conference. (Source: Empics Entertainment)

The French Government announced in October that the National Assembly and Army Ministry would no longer be relying on American digital companies for Internet search.  They are in future going to be using the French and German developed Quant search system which doesn’t track its users’ personal data and doesn’t therefore expose users to the misuse of personal data for advertising or propaganda purposes.

This announcement has made no waves here, but it could be the start of an Internet revolution. For the first time, an attempt is being made at a Government level, to wrest back some of the control that private American companies now have over our lives.  As Florian Bachelier, chair of the Assembly’s Cybersecurity and Digital Sovereignty task-force put it: “Security and digital sovereignty are at stake here”. This is only a small step but, alongside a much fiercer attitude towards regulation, France has demonstrated that it is taking the need to reclaim “digital sovereignty” seriously.  According to an article in Wired magazine the search for a European wide solution to American dominance of data is now well underway.

It is useful to see these moves in the context of previous European interventions in the development of media technologies. In 19^th Century France the telegraph was developed with Government funding and nationalisation of the British telegraph was organised because the French system was much more efficient and provided equal access to all news organisations and customers. The development of radio as a consumer medium in Britain was dependent on money provided for ship to shore communication in the First World War.  Public broadcasting was then established to ensure that these monopolistic services could not be used to provide a propaganda platform for any one individual or organisation – including the Government.

This history can be compared to the rather different way in which media has developed in the US where the rights to private ownership have always taken precedence over public rights, even when (as in the case of the Internet and World Wide Web), the basic technical infrastructure is built using public funds.  As a result, a handful of oligopolies have controlled each generation of media technologies and used them to amass private fortunes.  The speed of development of the FANGS (Facebook, Amazon, Netfix and Google) as Global businesses is now injecting American laissez faire attitudes to ownership into European markets and over-riding the preference for public ownership, regulation of media technologies and control of monopolies.

There will be those who see the French intervention as a state-run move to control data and information as China has done. The use of an independent search engine that specifically rules-out the collection of personal data will partly allay that fear but, as I proposed at a discussion at The World Transformed during the Labour Party conference this year, a more useful strategy would be to nationalise, or develop, a search engine on specifically public service terms, run by an independent organisation, to ensure transparency and accountability in the way in which algorithms are built.  This would provide for a system that has more in common with Public Service Broadcasting but built for the 21 Century with a high degree of public accountability and transparency.

A search engine does not need to be organised around the delivery of personal data to advertisers.  The current system has been demonstrably negative for society in almost every way. It has encouraged the growth of click bait, fake news factories and social and political polarisation and it has stripped journalism of its major source of income. Returning to the old arrangements, in which advertisers choose where to place their ads, rather than depending on an algorithmic system of exchange organised around private data would put much of the control of advertising back into the hands of publishers rather than platforms. The cost of placing advertisements would rise again but this is not a matter that much troubles individual consumers and it could have the considerable upside of at least partly reversing the decline in funding for journalism.

If Europe is to move more firmly in the direction of improving cyber independence and, to coin a phrase, taking back control of the digital realm, it is important that the UK is not left behind because of Brexit.  Guillaume Poupard, director of ANSSI, the organisation set up to deal with cybersecurity issues in France told WIRED:

“The good scale, for technological and economic purposes is the European scale,” he says. “We clearly need a strong Europe, and not solely a strong France, or Germany or England.”

Any moves in this direction need public input. A search engine that is established by the security services would be less useful to ordinary people than the current arrangements.  A public service search engine could be a reality but it needs to be established on our terms.

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Featured image is from Media Reform Coalition

In 2018, Syrian government troops got rid of 23,000 militants and liberated 387 settlements in Syria, Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov said during a briefing for foreign military attaches on December 5. He recalled the successful operations in Eastern Ghouta, Homs and southern Syria and added that more than 40,000 members of “moderate” opposition armed groups had surrendered and joined government forces. These fighters reportedly surrendered 650 units of weapons and military equipment to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

The chief of the general staff also praised the role of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the warring parties, which carries out humanitarian operations across the country. According to General Gerasimov, over 230,000 people were evacuated via humanitarian corridors during the aforementioned operations.

He also addressed the situation in the US-controlled zone in northeastern Syria by saying that the situation there is getting worse.

“The situation on the eastern border of the Euphrates is deteriorating. The United States, falling back on Syrian Kurds, is trying to create a quasi-state formation there independent of the central government. They are already forming the government of the so-called Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. Americans support Kurds’ separatist aspirations by delivering weapons and military equipment to them, and they are thus allowing the opression of Arabic tribes by the Kurds”, he said adding that ISIS terrorists are now mostly concentrated on the eastern bank of the Euphrates.

“The United States is always telling us about some fight against Daesh [ISIS] in the east of Syria. But we are seeing the opposite. ‘Sleeping’ terrorist cells have become active and as a result, Daesh has begun expanding its zone of influence in the east of the country,“ the general stressed.

He added that Russian intelligence services “regularly register convoys of trucks carrying oil tankers, which move from Syria’s eastern regions, which are controlled by [the] coalition, to the territories of Turkey and Iraq … the funds from the sale of oil products are also being spent on financing terrorists belonging to ISIS.”

It should be noted that the US-led coalition has repeatedly denied and continues to deny that its actions are contributing to any kind of destabilization in Syria. The coalition also denies that the SDF consists of Kurdish armed groups more or less linked to the PKK as well as that ISIS cells are actively operating within its self-declared zone of responsibility. Over the past month, the coalition reports were mostly focused on covering its “fierce battle” against ISIS in the area of Hajin.

Most recently, the SDF media wing came up with a fresh report saying that 228 ISIS members were eliminated there during the last 3 days alone.

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To dramatically slow the flow of illegal immigration and even end it does not rest on building walls or sending troops to the border, or by heartlessly snatching children from their mothers’ arms, or by incarceration, deportation, or prosecution. A big part of the answer lies in economic development, mainly sustainable development projects, in the migrant’s country of origin. Indeed, instead of building walls, we need to build the kind of bridges that can change the lives of other people for the better and give them hope. After all, the political destabilization in Central American countries was in part, if not to a great extent, precipitated by the United States, which makes America even more morally responsible to do something about it.

Beyond that, abject poverty and hopelessness breeds resentment and despondency and leads to gang violence and extremism, which is only the natural outcome of these subhuman conditions. Little will change unless the people, especially the youth, are given an opportunity to live a normal and productive life, develop a sense of belonging, and have vested interests in their work and self-worth.

The plight of three Central American countries tells the story behind the influx of immigrants flocking to our country from these and other countries.

Honduras is Central America’s second-poorest country. More than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, and it has one of the highest levels of economic inequality in Latin America. Poverty in Honduras is chiefly due to rampant crime, violence, political instability, corruption, and a significant susceptibility to hurricanes and droughts.

Guatemala has the largest economy in Central America, but despite recent growth, economic inequality and poverty have increased, particularly among the rural indigenous population. Malnutrition and maternal mortality rates are among the worst in Latin America, especially in indigenous areas. More than half of the population lives below the poverty line.

El Salvador has one of the lowest economic growth rates in Central America. Since the end of the civil war in 1992, the country has made progress in terms of political and social development, but high rates of crime and violence continue to threaten these gains. El Salvador is also vulnerable to adverse natural events, which is only made worse by extreme climate change.

In these countries, rural poverty places great stress on cities and ultimately propels immigration, and as long as it does, the enormous economic and political instability that it creates will continue.

Trump’s demand of $20 billion to build a wall along the Mexican border is misguided, impractical, and a waste of precious resources that can change the lives of millions of people if invested wisely in these poverty-stricken countries. Does Trump know how cost effective it is to promote people’s projects within the country of origin?

A fraction of $20 billion would change the socio-economic conditions in these countries. One billion dollars invested in economic development projects can provide food, drinking water, jobs, self-empowerment, and hope for better life for a million poor, displaced, and despairing people.

According to Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir, President of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco and a 20-year veteran in sustainable development, a $100,000 investment can establish a women’s co-operative of approximately 50 members benefitting approximately 300-350 people.

“The outstanding investment needed ends up being a relatively small proportion of the cost the nations that receive or repel migrants incur.”

In Guatemala, for example, an organization working on family planning in 2017 alone prevented over 14,000 unwanted pregnancies, 95 child deaths, and 6 maternal deaths, all with only $880,000.

It has unequivocally been shown that would-be immigrants strongly prefer to stay in their home communities if only their basic needs are met and there exist opportunities for growth. They will work hard to ensure the sustainability of projects they choose and develop vested interests in their implementation and outcomes.

It should be noted that the principle of economic development is the same, be that in countries in South America or Africa; only the nature and the type of project differs from one country or community to another, depending on their special needs. Here is where we must invest, to give people a chance not only for their sake but ours as well, because America flourishes when other people in far lands flourish too.

Economic investments and the implementation of sustainable development projects doesn’t mean that all illegal immigration will stop. We still need a comprehensive immigration policy consistent with our tradition of receiving migrants with open arms—a sensible and companionate policy that governs all aspects of migration to America.

We should end the painful instability for DREAMers by offering a path to citizenship to the nearly one million individuals who came to the US when they were children. They are Americans in their hearts and souls; they are here to stay, and we have a solemn obligation to remove any cloud of uncertainty about their future.

We must resolve once and for all the problem of the over 12 million undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for years and have become an integral part of America’s social fabric. They should be assured that they will not be deported if they voluntarily register and will too be offered a path to citizenship – a one-time amnesty program.

We must enforce established procedures to deal with refugees and asylum seekers, not ignore or completely violate them as the Trump administration has cruelly done—a decent process that allows safety for those who are escaping the horror of violence and would face certain death if turned back.

And finally, existing programs for legal immigration, including the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, family reunification, and employment-based immigration, should be fully implemented. The Trump administration should be prevented from undermining these processes that have been in place for many years.

America has and must continue to welcome immigrants of all colors, denominations, and countries. Each and every new migrant, regardless of his or her background, brings with them the riches of their culture, talents, and skills, and ultimately is economically beneficial to the United States, not a drain.

There is something magical about America. It is a country that has opened its doors to immigrants from the world over, and the wider the door has been open, the better and greater America has become. But sadly, Trump’s racist, Islamophobic, and white supremacist DNA has made an even greater mess of the already unsavory, incoherent, and partisan policy and methods in addressing the problem of immigration.

The solution to illegal immigration must be based on a two-pronged policy: first, investing in economic development projects through private entities to alleviate poverty and substantially reduce violence, which would also encourage other countries to invest. Second, developing a comprehensive immigration policy consistent with our tradition and moral obligation to extend our hands to those whose only sin is escaping the horrors of war, violence, and starvation.

The simultaneous implementation of this two-tiered policy would, within a relatively short period of time, significantly reduce the influx of migrants to our borders while developing the socio-economic conditions to give substance and reason for the inhabitants of these countries to stay put and build a hopeful future in their homeland.

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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com

Featured image: Migrant carrying the Honduran flag makes their way over the Guatemalan-Mexican border fence. (Source: Peoples Dispatch)

The New York Times unveiled a new slogan early in 2017 titled, “The truth is more important now than ever.” It has acquired a seemingly noble motto but a perhaps contentious one if we examine the Times’ recent history. Two international law specialists, Howard Friel and Richard Falk, published a book after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq called The Record of the Paper, which has scarcely been reviewed.

Friel and Falk focused on the Times due to the newspaper’s importance. The authors point out that in 70 Times editorials on Iraq – from September 11, 2001 to March 20, 2003 – the words “international law” and “UN Charter” were never mentioned. The “truth” did not seem terribly “important” as the Times stood idly by in the destruction of Iraq.

Such was the barrage of propaganda directed at the American public that 69% believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the September 11 attacks. That is a significant achievement in manipulation. The poll results must have been news to the Iraqi dictator himself, a forgotten one-time American ally.

Why Hussein would take it upon himself to orchestrate a surprise attack on the United States, of all nations, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps if he had a death wish but as later events proved he was not the suicidal type.

The Times was not alone in its position of selling the Iraq war to the American people, as television networks from Fox News to CBS and CNN were overwhelmingly pro-war. Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch – who strongly backed the illegal conflict – placed a permanent US flag in the corner of the screen. Fox employees were compelled to describe the invasion as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis later being killed.

The pattern continues into other illegitimate interventions as the liberal Guardian newspaper championed the demolition of Libya in 2011, with editorials imploring, “The quicker Muammar Gaddafi falls, the better.” The Guardian encouraged NATO “to tip the military balance further against Gaddafi”, while later that year summarising that “it has turned out, so far, reasonably well” – by that point thousands had been killed.

In 2015 Ian Birrell, then deputy editor of the Independent, still assured his readers, “I would argue that Britain and France were right to step in [in Libya]. The failures came later on.” Apparently it was fine for two old imperial powers to “step in” to shatter a sovereign nation, then afterwards absolve the invaders of blame with “the failures” only coming “later on”.

Sceengrab from The Independent

It’s a rare thing indeed to hear a prominent commentator question the balance of Western mainstream coverage. The same voices can be heard piping up when alternative news sources take a different line not so palatable to their tastes.

Nick Cohen, writing in the Guardian, accused the network Russia Today (RT) of being a “propaganda channel” and that Russia was “prostituting journalism”. In the following sentence, Cohen describes the BBC and New York Times as being “reputable news organisations”.

Cohen firmly supported the Iraq war, writing at the time that “the Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war”, and “an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation”. He was deemed not to be “prostituting journalism” in backing this violation of international law, nor when later supporting other interventions in Libya and Syria.

The BBC’s reputation, which Cohen previously claimed to be “reputable”, was dealt a blow when it was revealed by Cardiff University that the network “displayed the most ‘pro-war’ agenda of any broadcaster” with its coverage on the Iraq invasion.

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times described RT as “an agent of Kremlin policy” used to “undermine Western democracies” and to “destabilise the West” – failing to back up the claims with any evidence. To gain perspective on these attacks, it may be worth pointing out a key excerpt from the First Amendment of the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law… abridging [curtailing] the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

This law does not exist in Western democracies but attempts at limiting freedom of expression continue apace, while attacks on alternative media outlets by institutions of power grow. It has reached a point whereby the French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after assuming office, publicly attacked legitimate news sources of “behaving like deceitful propaganda”.

Perhaps the hidden concern about RT, for example, is its continued increase in both popularity and scope – with the channel enjoying a total weekly viewership of 70 million people and rising. RT is available to viewers in Western heartlands such as Britain and the US, with eight million Americans watching the station each week. It represents quite an achievement that a channel with the word “Russia”, featured in its title, can attract viewers in their millions, despite the growing anti-Russian sentiment espoused by the powers-that-be.

It is revealing that elite figures like Hillary Clinton have lamented in the past, “We are in an information war and we are losing that war.” For the first time in history, populations have broad access to alternative news angles – points of view that they likely find of a more balanced nature. Gone is the unchallenged monopoly on the public mind.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Australia is being seen as a test case. How does a liberal democracy affirm the destruction of private, encrypted communications? In 2015, China demonstrated what could be done to technology companies, equipping other states with an inspiration: encryption keys, when required, could be surrendered to the authorities.   

It is worth remembering the feeble justification then, as now.  As Li Shouwei, deputy head of the Chinese parliament’s criminal law division explained to the press at the time, “This rule accords with the actual work need of fighting terrorism and is basically the same as what other major countries in the world do”.  Birds of a feather, indeed. 

An Weixing, head of the Public Security Ministry’s Counter-Terrorism division, furnishes us with the striking example of a generic state official who sees malefactors coming out of the woodwork of the nation. “Terrorism,” he sombrely stated, reflecting on Islamic separatists from East Turkestan, “is the public enemy of mankind, and the Chinese government will oppose all forms of terrorism.”  Given that such elastic definitions are in the eye of the paranoid beholder, the scope for indefinite spread is ever present. 

The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, must be consulting the same oracles as those earning their keep in the PRC.  The first rule of modern governance: frighten the public in order to protect them.  Look behind deceptive facades to find the devil lurking in his trench coat.  Morrison’s rationale is childishly simple: the security derangement complex must, at all times, win over.  The world is a dark place, a jungle rife with, as Morrisons insists upon with an advertiser’s amorality, paedophile rings, terrorist cells, and naysayers.

One of his solutions?  The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018, otherwise known by its more accurate title of the Anti-Encryption Bill. This poorly conceived and insufferably vague Bill, soon to escape its chrysalis to become law, shows the government playbook in action: tamper with society’s sanity; draft a ponderous bit of text; and treat, importantly, the voter as a creature mushrooming in self-loathing insecurity in the dark.

The Bill, in dreary but dangerous terms, establishes “voluntary and mandatory industry assistance to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in relation to encryption technologies via the issuing of technical assistance requests, technical assistance notices and technical capability notices”.  Technology companies are to become the bullied handmaidens, or “assistants”, of the Australian police state. 

The Pentecostal Prime Minister has been able to count on supporters who see privacy as dispensable and security needs as unimpeachable.  Those who get giddy from security derangement syndrome don the academic gown of scorn, lecturing privacy advocates as ignorant idealists in a terrible world.  “I know it is a sensitive issue,” claims Rodger Shananan of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, “but the people arguing privacy just don’t have a handle on how widespread it’s used by the bad people.”  The problem with such ill-considered dross is that such technology is also used by “good” or “indifferent” people. 

Precisely in being universal, inserting such anti-encryption backdoors insists on a mutual presumption of guilt, that no one can, or should be trusted.  It is in such environments that well versed cyber criminals thrive, sniffing out vulnerabilities and exploiting them.  Computing security academic Ahmed Ibrahim states the point unreservedly. “If we leave an intentional backdoor they will find it.  Once it is discovered it is usually not easy to fix.”

The extent of such government invasiveness was such as to trouble certain traditional conservative voices.  Alan Jones, who rules from the shock jock roost of radio station 2GB, asked Morrison about whether this obsession with back door access to communications might be going too far.  Quoting Angelo M. Codevilla of Boston University, a veteran critic of government incursions into private, encrypted communications, Jones suggested that the anti-encryption bill “allows police and intelligence agencies access to everyone’s messages, demanding that we believe that any amongst us is as likely or not to be a terrorist.”  Morrison, unmoved, mounted the high horse of necessity.  Like Shanahan, he was only interested in the “bad” people.

To that end, public consultation has been kept to a minimum.  In the words of human rights lawyer, Lizzie O’Shea, it was “a terrible truncation of the process”, one evidently designed to make Australia a shining light for others within the Five Eyes Alliance to follow.  “Once you’ve built the tools, it becomes very hard to argue that you can’t hand them over to the US government, the UK – it becomes something they can all use.”  

There had been some hope that the opposition parties would stymy the process and postpone consideration of the bill till next year.  It could thereby be tied up, bound and sunk by various amendments.  But in the last, sagging sessions of Australia’s parliament, a compliant opposition party was keen to remain in the elector’s good books ahead of Christmas.  Bill Shorten’s Labor Party took of the root of unreason, calculating that saying yes to the contents of the bill might also secure the transfer of desperate and mentally ailing refugees on Nauru and Manus Island to the Australian mainland. 

Instead, in what became a farcical bungle of miscalculating indulgence, the government got what it wanted.  The medical transfer bill on Nauru and Manus Island failed to pass in the lower house after a filibuster in the Senate by the Coalition and Senators Cory Bernardi and Pauline Hanson.  The Anti-Encryption Bill, having made is way to the lower house, did.

Shorten’s deputy, Tanya Plibersek, was keen to lay the ground for Thursday’s capitulation to the government earlier in the week.  A range of “protections” had been inserted into the legislation at the behest of the Labor Party. (Such brimming pride!)  The Attorney-General Christian Porter was praised – unbelievably – for having accepted their sagacious suggestions.  The point was elementary: Labor, not wanting to be seen as weak on law enforcement, had to be seen as accommodating.

Porter found himself crowing. “This ensures that our national security and law enforcement agencies have the modern tools they need, the appropriate authority and oversight, to access the encrypted conversations of those who seek to do us harm.”

International authorities versed in the area are looking at the Australian example with jaw dropping concern.  EU officials will find the measure repugnant on various levels, given the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in place.  Australian technology companies are set to be designated appropriate pariahs, as are other technology companies willing to conduct transactions in Australia.  All consumers are being treated as potential criminals, an attitude that does not sit well with entities attempting to make a buck or two.

SwiftOnSecurity, an often canonical source on cyber security matters, is baffled. “Over in Australia they’re shooting themselves in the face with a shockingly technical nonsensical encryption backdoor law.”  Not only does the law fail to serve any useful protections; it “poison-pills their entire domestic tech industry, breaks imports.”

Li’s point, again something which the Australian government insists upon, was that the Chinese law did not constitute a “backdoor” through encryption protections.  Every state official merely wanted to get those “bad people” while sparing the “good”.  The Tor Project is far more enlightening: “There are no safe backdoors.”  An open declaration on the abolition of privacy in Australia has been made; a wonderfully noxious Christmas present for the Australian electorate. 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Softpedia News

When considering Brexit and the current constitutional and political crisis Britain finds itself in, it is interesting to note some of the words in the 2002 Conservative chairwoman’s speech to the party conference in Bournemouth. It included such phrases as;

“We are shaping solutions rather than just playing politics, listening to the people of Britain, who’ve been so badly let down.”

“Everything we do – in parliament, in our constituencies – should be motivated by one goal. Improving the lives of our fellow citizens.”

“Politicians are seen as untrustworthy and hypocritical. We talk a different language. We live in a different world. We seem to be scoring points, playing games and seeking personal advantage.”

“Some Tories have tried to make political capital by demonising minorities instead of showing confidence in all the citizens of our country.”

“Our party is at its best when it takes Conservative principles and applies them to the modern world. It is at its worst when it tries to recreate a bygone age. We cannot bring back the past. We can work together to make today and tomorrow’s world a better place.”

Yes, that was, in parts, the speech made by Theresa May, the current incumbent at No10 Downing Street. “You know what some people call us – the nasty party” was her most famous line – ever.

It has still not occurred to the Conservative party what is going to happen next.

Leaving aside the economic changes that were made, it is now nearly thirty years since Margaret Thatcher was forced from Downing Street and five years since her death. Thatcher is still a hate figure across much of the country, especially in the North. There is no other British political figure who has entrenched a multi-generational hatred such as Thatcher and the Conservative party of those days.

That time, a time that took Thatcher years to achieve is just a week away with even more devastating consequences. We are fast approaching the same time when a Prime Minister was brought down by her own party for the same reason – Europe.

Thatcher was elected in 1979, a time when economic reform was desperately needed. The harsh economic environment created out of ‘Thatcherism’ benefited as many as it did pauperise others. The children of those days are the parents of today and none have forgotten it. Most people cannot even name the previous Prime Minister that Thatcher defeated but no-one has forgotten her. And no-one will forget Theresa May, for she is at the centre of the complete destruction of that same ‘nasty party.’

David Cameron, encouraged by advisors who themselves were being advised by pro-Brexit think tanks has brought a type of political chaos in Britain one could only imagine in some far-off banana republic. Brexit may well be difficult for years to come and that’s fine if you can afford it, but the very policies of this Conservative party have made millions worse off as a result of the ‘austerity’ years – and they can least afford it. The expected gains from Brexit, no matter how positively you think they may be, simply won’t be worth it in the end.

Those gains, as we are rapidly learning will be very small indeed and even if they do appear as gains, they will accumulate slowly over a period of years, maybe decades. The losses, we are told will be felt quickly and like Thatcher’s seminal economic policies that reduced the North to an industrial wasteland, will be felt deeply at home, in the community and the wider country.

The nasty party has morphed. They are now as destructive and as corrupt as any that Britain has ever encountered.

The ConservativeHome website itself demonstrates the existential danger the Tories are now in. Each month, ConservativeHome publishes its Cabinet League Table, based on the net approval/disapproval rating of each Cabinet Minister. Over time, those ratings tell the story of any given individual or department’s good or bad fortune.

This is the result of their own findings. The average approval rating of a member of the Cabinet has fallen from +36.2 in April to -4.8 in November. That is a pretty devastating verdict from grassroots members on the Government’s direction of travel.

Paul Goodman of ConservativeHome said –

“It is a measure of how shocking our latest monthly results are that those members would be justified in tumbling to their knees – and begging for those post-Chequers results to be resurrected. And never mind the ratings – look at the falls.  Liam Fox was at 35, but is now in negative territory.  Andrea Leadsom’s score follows a similar pattern.  Penny Mordaunt hasn’t publicly defended the deal. Maybe that’s why she’s still in the black. Just about.”

The truth is, nothing has ever been this bad for Tory politicians before.

Remarkably, the Tories have not just divided the country, they have placed the country into a no-win position and quite possibly done so for a very long time to come.

Let’s say a new referendum was one of the options parliament decided to go with. What would the question be? Would the Tory party or parliament even be able to agree this question without continued political conflict?

Would the second referendum question be: Remain or Leave, Deal versus No-Deal, Remain Versus Deal, Remain versus No-Deal. Could it be the option of two questions like Remain versus Deal – but what deal?

The Remain camp lost first time around, they could lose again and by a similar margin, where would that put the nation other than straight back to where it was. And if Leave won, which they did the first time around with a smaller margin, where does that put the nation. It all depends on the question you ask in a referendum. Nothing is certain, especially as one-third of those who voted last time had not made up their minds which way to vote just a week before.

If, for instance, Remain supporters were pinning their hopes on the public concluding that Leave is not delivering on the prospectus at the last referendum – does that mean some Remain voters would vote democratically and vote Leave? This time around it is very questionable quite where the floating voters are.

Talking of floating voters. The EU referendum was poisoned with illegal funding from outside the country. There were the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandals. There were charities now in the dock for illegal political campaigning where countless millions was funded from American corporations. Think tanks are facing the same scrutiny. The National Crime Agency is now involved in investigating illegal campaigning, as are the Police and the Electoral Commission.

There’s another problem too.

In the last referendum campaign, Vote Leave played to a growing anti-Muslim sentiment. This had serious negative repercussions in society itself but since then anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment has risen sharply. And so, if you, like most of the electorate were appalled by the atrocious lies of the anti-immigration crusade last time around, then you can expect the next one to be so much worse. The far-right have been emboldened by the Brexit experience, they aren’t going anywhere.

Abstentions could dramatically increase on the basis that voters on both sides of the debate have now become completely disorientated and bewildered by the chaos and instability. They might abstain so as to not end up being blamed for the consequential outcome. They might not want the conflict at home or in their own social circles. There could be heavy voter losses through political fatigue about the confusion and lies that surround the debate.

The under 25s mourned endlessly about their future prospects being reduced by Brexit. And yet 64 per cent of them did not bother to turn up and vote. Many more will likely do so given a second chance. In fact, whichever way you look at the prospect of a second referendum – it will likely be a disaster, much as the first. So what’s the point.

Much like the political leader’s debate that was to be televised, the very people watching it were not being given a vote on it anyway – so what’s the point?

The issue for the Tories is that they have offended just about everyone one way or the other. And no matter what they do now it will stay that way. Remainers, Leavers, the young and old, they all have reason to despise the Tories.

Voting for failure

Irrespective of which camp you belong to, Tory politicians have failed to deliver the will of the people and the mandate that was given to them. The consequence is that voting to Remain in a second referendum would now be seen as voting for their failure.

And let’s not forget the outright anger and frustration the Leave voters will harbour deep inside for years to come if a second vote went against them. The fact that Brexit has been substantially watered down and then possibly shelved will be despised but not as much as they will be furious that the question was even asked again.

Does it even matter if Remain or Leave win a second referendum – who is going to unite not just the party, but parliament, the upper house and the country as a whole? Who is going to repair all this damage?

The Conservative party have demonstrated one thing and one thing only in this ordeal of their own making. They have comprehensively failed to unite behind a democratic vote and therefore not just failed Brexit and the electorate but have created a toxic political environment leading to the economic detriment to all those except those that can afford it. They have principally done little but to divide society and make everyone poorer, whilst making a mockery of democracy.

The Union

Much of the Brexit debate has been about borders on the island of Ireland. But what about the independence movement in Scotland. They have been told no IndyRef2 by Westminister on the basis of stability – whilst Westminster considers a chaotic second referendum of independence from Europe.

The chances of an emboldened and more confident Scotland to aim for its own independence has drastically increased, not least because A) they voted to Remain B) that Westminster has shown that they cannot manage the country. Why would the Scots want to be dominated by a failing political environment 400 miles away who have totally different values to their own?

Scotland only needs to show to its own people that it can stand on its own two feet economically – and independence is guaranteed. That moment is not too far away either. The EU only has to show a helping hand.

The Westminster Tories, already despised in Scotland could well be the party that destroys the Union. And who could blame the Scots?

Defeat

Today’s Conservative party was founded in 1834. Some historians can trace its origins back to the 1780s and William Pitt The Younger with others going further to King Charles I in the 1620s. For nearly 400 years the Tories can trace their DNA. The Tories of today are the ancestors of Conservatism. It is Sir Robert Peel who is acknowledged as the founder of the Conservative Party as we know it today.

Its domination of British politics throughout the twentieth century has led to them being referred to as one of the most successful political parties in the Western world. And like the Liberal party who found out to their cost in the early stages of the First World War, mismanaging the country can cast you aside to be little more than a placard in a memorial park or a picture hanging on the wall in an ancient building in Westminster.

This century, the Conservative party is all but finished bar a miracle of some sort. There is no going back now. They will soon be damned and then doomed forever. But this time, it will be so much worse than the hate figure created in the image of Thatcher.

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Addressing the German Marshall Fund (GMF) think tank on Tuesday, Mike Pompeo sought to reinvigorate GHW Bush’s new world order extremism – endless wars of aggression its defining feature, world peace, stability, and mutual cooperation among all nations considered abhorrent notions.

US belligerence following Soviet Russia’s 1991 dissolution speaks for itself, notably post-9/11. Endless wars rage in multiple theaters against nations threatening no one.

Others are likely planned, Iran a prime target, maybe “fire and fury” against North Korea if denuclearization talks fail as expected over unacceptable US demands and empty promises made to be broken.

US hardliners oppose ending post-WW II hostility toward Pyongyang. Advancing America’s imperium depends on replacing all sovereign independent governments with US vassal ones.

It’s a prescription for endless wars, instability and chaos, serving the nation’s military, industrial, security, media complex.

Russia and China represent the final frontier of resistance against Washington’s imperial aims – why unthinkable nuclear war is ominously possible, a doomsday scenario if ever launched.

Neocon extremists John Bolton and Mike Pompeo run the Trump regime’s geopolitical agenda. DLT abdicated authority to them. Straightaway in office he was co-opted to continue dirty US business as usual, including hostility toward Russia exceeding the worst of Cold War bilateral relations.

In his Tuesday address, Pompeo called for reasserting new world order leadership by whatever it takes to achieve US aims, turning reality on its head, saying:

“We are acting to preserve, protect, and advance an open, just, transparent and free world of sovereign states” – polar opposite what US imperialism is all about, Pompeo adding:

“This project will require actual, not pretend, restoration of the liberal order among nations. It will require an assertive America and leadership from not only my country but of democracies around the world.”

“New liberal order” is code language for US sought unchallenged global dominance, demanding all nations bend to its will, outliers targeted for regime change – forcefully by war if color revolutions, violent coups, political assassinations, and other methods fail.

“(A)ssertive America(n) leadership” is all about pressuring, bullying, bribing, and/or pummeling other nations to subordinate their sovereignty to US interests.

“(D)emocracies” he mentioned are fantasy ones. Real ones serve their people, not a foreign power.

There’s nothing liberal or democratic about the notions Pompeo discussed, just the opposite, a world unsafe and unfit to live it, raping and destroying nations, wanting the resources controled, their people exploited as serfs.

Peace and stability are anathema notions. “(P)rosperity” is for the privileged few alone – at the expense of most others.

Post-WW II, the US transformed Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations into virtual US colonies. NATO is all about advancing America’s imperium, notably after Soviet Russia dissolved.

So-called “Western values” are harmful to planet earth and its people. “(F)reedom…human rights…peace and cooperation among states” are abhorrent notions for hardliners like Pompeo and likeminded Trump regime officials.

“(L)eadership…Trump is boldly reasserting” risks unthinkable nuclear war – “American leadership” humanity’s greatest threat.

“Bad actors” refer to Russia, China, Iran, and other nations independent of US control. “…Trump is determined to reverse that,” Pompeo roared, bashing “China’s economic development” because the country is heading toward becoming the world’s dominant economy ahead, surpassing the US, an unthinkable notion for America first adherents like Pompeo, Bolton and Trump.

Iran bashing by Pompeo may be prelude to greater toughness against the country, war a disturbing possibility, a reckless act if initiated, more likely by the Trump regime than any time since its 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US/UK-imposed fascist tyranny – Trump hardliners want reinstituted in the country.

Russia bashing is longstanding US policy – for its sovereign independence, opposition to US imperial wars, and advocacy for multi-world polarity. Pompeo repeated the litany of long ago discredited Big Lies about the country.

Trump is a businessman out of his element on the world stage, a geopolitical know-nothing, a front man for dark forces, repeatedly asserting might over right.

He’s “returning the United States to its traditional, central leadership role in the world,” Pompeo roared.

He escalated US militarism and belligerence since taking office, a reckless agenda risking direct confrontation with Russia and China – likely nuclear war if clashes with these nations are initiated.

Pompeo saying “America intends to lead, now and always,” is a prescription for endless wars of aggression – all sovereign independent states on Washington’s target list.

Abandoning international treaties, conventions and bilateral deals is part of the Trump regime’s agenda – reflecting its hostility toward world peace and stability.

US rage for unchallenged global dominance threatens humanity’s survival. Illusory American exceptionalism, the indispensable state, and moral superiority may doom us all.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The suicide bombing that just took place in Iran’s southeastern port of Chabahar was more than likely caused by blowback from the joint US-Indian Hybrid War on CPEC, in which case Tehran would do well to reconsider its strategic partnership with New Delhi and ask itself whether it’s worth facilitating the country’s entrance into Central Asia if India’s recklessness is responsible for endangering the Islamic Republic’s security at this very sensitive time of sustained international pressure against it.

Blowback…

The southeastern Iranian port of Chabahar, the terminal point of the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) that India’s investing in to connect with Central Asia and Russia, was just hit by a suicide bombing that has yet to be claimed by any terrorist group as of the time of this article’s publication. Given what’s known about the regional security situation and its overall strategic dynamics, however, it’s conceivable that this attack is blowback from the joint US-Indian Hybrid War on CPEC that both allied Great Powers are waging against Pakistan via their terrorist proxies of the so-called “Balochistan Liberation Army” (BLA) and Daesh. For background into this asymmetrical warfare campaign, please reference the author’s previous pieces written over the past two and a half years:

• “The US-Saudi Plan To Prompt An Iranian Pullback From Syria”
• “India’s Geopolitical Hate For Pakistan Is Sabotaging The North-South Corridor”
• “RAW + Daesh = Jundallah 2.0”
• “The Hybrid War On CPEC Hits Karachi”
• “Britain Has Blood On Its Hands For The BLA’s Latest Terrorist Attack In Pakistan”

The general concept put forth and vindicated in hindsight after the latest events is that US-Indian support for BLA and Daesh terrorism against Pakistan will inevitably spread across the border into the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan that hosts the strategic Chabahar port, which could in turn hamper the efficacy of this project for connecting India to Central Asia and ultimately “balancing” Russian and Chinese influence there. More importantly, however, it could derail India’s long-term ambitionsto make itself a key player in the Afghan peace process through the patronage networks that the NSTC’s eastern branch could create with time. While there’s a chance that this blowback was, per the very definition of the word itself, unintentional, another possibility also exists.

…Or “Deep State” False Flag?

Per the author’s forecast two and a half years ago about the US-Saudi plan to prompt an Iranian pullback from Syria, some “deep state” factions in Washington might be willing to sacrifice their rivals’ scheme to have Iran facilitate India’s entrance into Central Asia via Chabahar and might actually believe that their country’s grand strategic interests would best be served by severing this de-facto anti-sanctions “pressure valve” instead of granting New Delhi a waiver to continue using it to Tehran’s residual benefit. Whether directly involved in this plot or not, that outcome would also advance Saudi Arabia’s interests vis-à-vis Iran by stoking more instability in its adversary’s borders and therefore making it more likely that Tehran will redirect its military focus away from Syria.

In fact, Saudi Arabia already blatantly bribed Indian Prime Minister Modi by committing to invest in India’s technological, agricultural, infrastructure, and energy industries as a means of guaranteeing his partner’s tacit quid pro quo to gradually decrease purchases of Iranian energy, which could severely impact on the Islamic Republic’s economy considering that India is the second-largest consumer of its resources. It follows that Saudi Arabia would naturally be in favor of India abandoning its NSTC plans, which is why Riyadh must be silently celebrating the blowback that Tehran’s experiencing from the Hybrid War on CPEC because it makes it less likely that New Delhi will continue using the Chabahar Corridor, thus in effect cutting off one of Iran’s most important anti-sanctions “pressure valves”.

Expanding upon this scenario, it would imply that the US might have actually had more of a direct hand in this latest terrorist attack than it initially seems, with one of its “deep state” factions wanting to deliberately sabotage Trump’s foreign policy by compelling India to pull out of Chabahar despite the President’s administration granting it a waiver to continue its economic activities there. Seeing as how Saudi Arabia is now a crucial strategic partner in CPEC, it’s extremely unlikely that it would endanger this privileged position by aiding BLA and/or Daesh terrorism against Iran in a transnational region where it’s bound to blow back against Gwadar, so the Kingdom is probably innocent of any suspicions about its complicity despite its previous reputation in this respect.

The Way Forward

India is now in a double dilemma after its Iranian partner fell victim to blowback from the Hybrid War on CPEC that New Delhi’s jointly waging together with Washington. The first conundrum that the South Asian state has to confront is that it can’t exactly be sure whether this was a “natural” development per se or if an anti-Trump “deep state” faction was behind it in order to undermine the President’s ambitious vision of facilitating India’s Chabahar Corridor to Central Asia by means of his recently granted anti-sanction waiver for this strategic port. The other uncertainty has to do with whether India will continue investing in this project or not after its security is now in doubt and risk bearing the manifold costs that this might entail.

Iran also has to ask itself whether it’s even worth hosting the Chabahar Corridor anymore in the first place after India’s recklessness in contributing to the Hybrid War on CPEC in one way or another was responsible for endangering the Islamic Republic’s security at this very sensitive time of sustained international pressure against it. Responsible decision makers in Tehran should be troubled by the fact that they’re taking on extra security risks by supporting an as-yet-unprofitable project that’s being inadvertently subverted by their own Indian partner, all while getting nothing in return at this moment other than a grandiose Bollywood-assurances that this “master plan” will eventually work out. At the very least, Iran should make its continued cooperation on this project conditional on India curtailing its Hybrid War on CPEC.

Going further, Iran would do well to deepen its incipient multidimensional strategic partnership with Pakistan, particularly in the field of hard and “soft” security and with a specific focus on countering Hybrid War threats through joint “Democratic Security” measures. One tangible step that it could take in this direction is to explore the possibility of creating an Iranian version of the “Overseas Pakistani Baloch Unity” (OPBU) initiative spearheaded by Dr. Jumma for reintegrating wayward Baloch into mainstream society, as well as carrying out joint border exercises with Pakistan and raising international awareness about the BLA and other relevant terrorist groups at international fora. Ideally, their joint Russian and Chinese strategic partners could aid with these initiatives and also provide consultative support because of their shared interests in defeating terrorism.

Concluding Thoughts

As of this analysis’ publication, no group has taken responsibility for the suicide bombing in Chabahar, but regardless of who did it, the overall dynamics at play are such that this is proof that the joint US-Indian Hybrid War on CPEC is finally blowing back into Iran and undermining the NSTC. Two main theories can be postulated about whether an anti-Trump “deep state” faction had a guiding hand in this attack in order to sabotage the President’s ambitious Chabahar Corridor plans for connecting India to Central Asia or if this was just an inevitable “happenstance” event, but irrespective of that, the fact of the matter is that India and Iran are now thrown onto the horns of several interlocked dilemmas.

India isn’t quite sure whether its American ally played a part in orchestrating this attack, nor is it certain whether New Delhi will continue with the Chabahar Corridor after its security and other related costs just dramatically spiked following the latest suicide bombing. As for Iran, some of its decision makers must naturally be questioning the wisdom of allowing a proud American and “Israeli” ally like India to play a leading role this sensitive border region, especially after its irresponsible Hybrid War on CPEC is veritably blowing back into Chabahar. Independent of the Chabahar Corridor’s uncertain future, Iran will probably enhance its full-spectrum ties with Pakistan in response to this terrorist attack, thereby strengthening the Golden Ring of Great Powers in the emerging Multipolar World Order.

Ironically, the most far-reaching blowback from the Hybrid War on CPEC therefore might not be that the Chabahar Corridor could be discontinued or that this latest event contributes to Iran pulling back from Syria per the US-Saudi plan in this respect and Russia’s initiative that it’s reportedly commencing independently thereof, but that the grand strategic positions of the US and its Indian ally are greatly weakened if the ultimate outcome is that the Golden Ring becomes more unified than ever before in the face of this terrorist threat. Russia, China, and the Central Asian CPEC stakeholders’ support of any joint Pakistani-Iranian anti-terrorist measures, especially worldwide information campaigns at international fora, would go a long way towards showing the world that Eurasia won’t be divided by such Hybrid War schemes.

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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 DAWN.com

The insanity runs deep in Washington but it has also briefly surfaced at Simi Valley in California at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which ran through last weekend. United States Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis was the keynote speaker on Saturday. He had a few interesting things to say, the most remarkable of which was the assertion that Russia had again sought to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, which were completed last month.

Mattis, a Marine general who is sometimes considered to be the only adult in the room when the White House national security team meets, claimed that the bilateral relationship between Washington and Moscow had “no doubt” deteriorated still further due to the Russian activity, which he described as the Kremlin “try[ing] again to muck around around in our elections last month, and we are seeing a continued effort along those lines” with Russian President Vladimir Putin making “continued efforts to try to subvert democratic processes that must be defended. We’ll do whatever is necessary to defend them.”

Mattis did not address President Donald Trump’s cancellation of a meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a move which he reportedly supported. The cancellation was reportedly based on what has been described as an act of aggression committed by the Russian military against three Ukrainian naval vessels seeking to transit the Kerch Strait, which is since the annexation of Crimea been completely controlled by Moscow. The Ukrainians were aware of the Russian protocols for transiting through the area and chose to ignore them to create an incident, possibly as part of a plan to disrupt the Trump-Putin discussions. If that is so, they were successful.

Mattis was somewhat taciturn relating to his accusation regarding Moscow’s meddling. He provided absolutely no evidence that Russia had been interfering in the latest election and there have been no suggestions from either federal or state authorities that there were any irregularities involving foreigners. There was, however, considerable concern over possible ballot and voting manipulation at state levels carried out by the major political parties themselves, suggesting that if Mattis is looking for subversion of democratic processes he might start looking a lot closer to home.

The U.S. government has issued a general warning that “Americans should be aware that foreign actors — and Russia in particular — continue to try to influence public sentiment and voter perceptions through actions intended to sow discord.” Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have reportedly been working with private sector internet social networking companies, to include Twitter and Facebook, to shut down Russian and Iranian accounts in attempt to forestall any interference in either the campaigning or voting processes. Some Russians have even been indicted in absentia based on flimsy evidence but as they are in Russia they cannot be tried. One Russian student, Maria Butina, is still in jail in Virginia based on conflicting and flimsy evidence and it is not clear when she will be able to defend herself in court.

Beyond the general anti-Russia hysteria being encouraged by the media and congress, there are a number of problems with the Mattis assertion. First of all, beyond the fact that no actual evidence has been presented, it is irrational to assume that Russian intelligence services would waste their effort and burn their resources to attempt to accomplish absolutely nothing. Russia was not on the ballot last month and no candidates were running on any platform that would benefit Moscow in the slightest. To get caught “mucking around” would invite more sanctions and justify an increasingly hostile response from Washington, hardly a price that Putin would be willing to pay for little or nothing tangible.

Second, the intense investigations being carried out by the Robert Mueller Special Counsel’s office have to this point developed no information suggesting that Russia did anything in 2016 beyond the low-level probing and manipulating that every major intelligence agency does routinely to get a window into what an adversary is up to. To be sure, several Team Trump associates will likely be going to jail, but their crimes so far have consisted of perjury or tax fraud. Some, like former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen are seeking desperately to find a way to implicate the president in some grander scheme, but if there is anything actually there it has yet to be identified to the public.

Third, based on the evidence produced so far, the only two countries that may have cooperated with either Trump or the Deep State to influence the results of the 2016 election are Israel, which sought Trump intercession at the United Nations, and Britain, which may have engaged in a plot by the British intelligence and security services to conspire with CIA Director John Brennan to elect Hillary Clinton.

So, there we go again. Another vague accusation against Russia to convince the American public that there is a powerful enemy out to get us. And lest there be any shortage of enemies Mattis also mentioned always dangerous Iran, saying “…we cannot deny the threat that Iran poses to all civilized nations.” And, by the way, Mattis in his speech strongly supported an increased “defense” budget to deal with all the threats, saying somewhat obscurely that “Fiscal solvency and strategic solvency can co-exist.” Sure. In the wonderful world of Washington, more money can fix anything.

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

Featured image is from SCF

On December 4, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announced that they had launched Operation Northern Shield in order to “expose and neutralize” alleged Hezbollah cross-border attack tunnels heading from Lebanon to Israel.

According to the Israeli side, the IDF eliminated at least one Hezbollah tunnel – a 200m-long construction, which reportedly penetrated 40 meters into Israel near the northern town of Metulla. Currently, the IDF operation is ongoing on the Israeli side of the contact line. However, the IDF openly stated that the military effort might be expanded into Lebanese territory.

On the evening of December 4, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Operation Northern Shield is aimed at targeting an alleged broader push by Hezbollah the Israeli leader is being accused of corruption to capture parts of Galilee from Israel.

He described the IDF actions as a part of “a wide ongoing operation”, which will not end until all its goals are achieved.

He described the IDF actions as a part of “a wide ongoing operation”, which will not end until all its goals are achieved.

On December 3, Israel’s Defense Minister, Health Minister, Foreign Minister and Prime Minister travelled to Brussels to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Fortunately, for Israeli taxpayers, all four of the officials are, in fact, Netanyahu. So, the government saved lots of money on the delegation’s hotel and airline spending. Netanyahu was accompanied to the meeting by Mossad head Yossi Cohen; National Security Council head Meir Ben-Shabbat; and his military secretary Avi Blot.

Netanyahu said that he spoke to the US diplomat about imposing additional sanctions on Hezbollah in light of what he described as “this new aggression.” The US, according to Netanyahu, has given Israel its full backing.

It is interesting to note that the Prime Minister’s “short victorious war” on “Hezbollah tunnels” followed a recommendation by Israeli police to indict Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife on allegations of corruption. This is the third occasion when the Israeli leader is being accused of corruption in 2018 alone. The accusations are of bribery and fraud in various forms.

It’s possible that Netanyahu sees the operation against alleged Hezbollah infiltration infrastructure is a way to ensure a quick win that would show the Israeli people that their Prime Minister is, a top class leader and his government brings stability and security. Thus, he would be able to ease pressure caused by the corruption accusations and to remain in power for another period.

However, if Netanyahu orders the IDF to expand its operation into the Lebanese side of the contact line, this will immediately lead to an escalation with Hezbollah and in the worst-case scenario – to war, a scenario in which no Israeli or Lebanese citizen is in fact interested.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights!

By Ajamu Baraka, December 06, 2018

The UDHR was the first major instrument produced by the United Nations (UN), an institution itself created at the end of the Second World War. Its creation was hailed as a breakthrough that would give institutional substance to the pledge by member states to promote international cooperation, commit to peaceful relations among states and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

HuffPost’s Attack on Academic Integrity, Truth and Justice

By Elias Davidsson, December 06, 2018

The attack on Prof. Robinson was no personal vendetta. It rather represents an attack on all scholars who dare question the official account on 9/11, including myself.

US Senate Resolution Potentially Changes Middle East Dynamics

By James M. Dorsey, December 06, 2018

A draft US Senate resolution describing Saudi policy in the Middle East as a “wrecking ball” and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “complicit” in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if adopted and implemented, potentially could change the dynamics of the region’s politics and create an initial exit from almost a decade of mayhem, conflict and bloodshed.

“Persian Gulf of Tonkin” Ingredients All in Place for US War on Iran?

By Whitney Webb, December 06, 2018

With the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident as historical precedent, there’s a real possibility that the U.S. government could stage an incident in the Persian Gulf that would allow the Trump administration to push for military intervention in the Persian Gulf targeting Iran.

Video: The Spider’s Web. Britain’s Second Empire. Corrupting the Global Economy. The British Elites’ Network of Tax Havens

By True Publica, December 05, 2018

“The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire” documents how British elites created a network of tax havens after World War II and the lengths they take today to preserve it – exemplified in a chilling scene where a Jersey police officer harasses and interrupts the filmmakers’ interview with a tax haven whistleblower.

“Global Order” Equals the “New Fascism”

By Mark Taliano, December 05, 2018

The current “neoliberal” bailed-out “free market” diseconomy, imposed globally by military war crimes, erases nation-state sovereignty and self-determination in favour of supranational totalitarian predation.

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The post-WW II promise of human rights was a compact meant for white people only, but a People-Centered Human Rights framework seeks global liberation and transformation.

“If human rights are to have any incredibility, any “universal” applicability, any value, they must be seized from the barbaric grip of European and de-colonized.”

“…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”

These are the words in the preamble the of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) promulgated 70 years ago on December 10, 1948. They were supposed to reflect a new understanding of the causes of war and a commitment to the highest values of the “international community.”

The UDHR was the first major instrument produced by the United Nations (UN), an institution itself created at the end of the Second World War. Its creation was hailed as a breakthrough that would give institutional substance to the pledge by member states to promote international cooperation, commit to peaceful relations among states and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

According to Eleanore Roosevelt, wife of President Roosevelt and U.S. representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, the structure responsible for producing the UDHR, the declaration reflected those natural and eternal rights that, nevertheless, were not always seen but under the right circumstances could be revealed and nurtured.

“Instead of recognizing the inherent dignity and worth of individuals and collectives, the post-war period has been an era of human depravity.”

It was thought by many that the UDHR with its commitments to freedom of thought and speech, assembly, education, life-long social security, health care, food, the right to culture etc., represented the hope of an international community that had learned from the carnage of the Second World War, grew up as a result and were ready to collectively center the dignity of everyone.

70 years later, the historic record is clear. Instead of recognizing the inherent dignity and worth of individuals and collectives, the post-war period has been an era of human depravity.It is estimated that direct and indirect state and non-state violence has resulted in over 30 million dead, whole nations destroyed, the normalization of torture, rape as a weapon of war, millions displaced and once again the rise of neo-fascist movements across Europe and in the United States.

What happened?

What happened was the continuation of the Pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy. The historic project temporarily diverted by the war as a result of the Germans bringing the horrors that European colonial domination unleashed on the “Americas” in 1492 back to Europe and applied to other Europeans. But once Hitler was dispensed with, the systematic brutality that created “Europe” continued.

Source: BAR

“The stratification of human beings into those with rights and those who were killable, enslavable, and rapable, condemned the non-European colonized to what Fanon referred to as, ‘the zone of non-being.’”

The doctrine of discover, slavery, manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, the responsibility to protect, all of the ideological and policy expressions representing what Enrique Dussell called the underside of what is referred to as Western modernity. That underside that rationalized the stratification of human beings into those with rights and those who were killable, enslavable, and rapable, condemned the non-European colonized to what Fanon referred to as, “the zone of non-being.”

The Pan-European project represented a logic and rationale at the core of the European identity and its material foundation. It created an imperative that could not be easily dispensed of, without negating the very idea and materiality of Europe and what was understood as modernity.

Therefore, there was always an internal contradiction in European thought, captured and reinforced during the so-called Enlightenment, that produced an analytical and conceptual malady that can only be explained as a kind of psychopathology.

In August 1941, with the Nazi march across Europe in full execution, the rhetorical force of collective human rights found expression in the Atlantic Charter produced by the United States and Great Britain. The Charter stated among other tenets that “all people have the right to choose the form of government under which they live.”

It boldly declared that for those people who had been denied this fundamental right, the goal of the war was for to see “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcefully deprived of them.”

“The Charter stated among other tenets that ‘all people have the right to choose the form of government under which they live.”

For the 750 million colonial subjects and the tens of thousands conscripted to fight in the war, this was music to their ears.

The Atlantic Charter served as the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations, in January 1942 by twenty-six nations then at war and subsequently by twenty-one other nations. The Declaration endorsed the Atlantic Charter and expressed the conviction that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.

Finally, many of the colonial subjects believed the principles of the war and the fight against racism and white dominance in Europe would allow all that were still colonized and denied national democratic rights to assume a new status as full human beings and exercise national rights just like white Europeans.

However, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the British and U.S. leaders made it clear that the principles in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to colonial subjects in colonial territories but only to those nations in Europe under the “Nazi yoke.”.

What happened to the human rights idea?

Samuel Huntington was clear in Clash of Civilizations:

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

So, when the interests of maintaining the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project, which is fundamentally grounded in systematic violence, clashed with respect for the “inherent dignity of all members of the human family” and their human rights and fundamental freedoms, those high-sounding liberal principles were sacrificed at the altar of realpolitik. In fact, they were not actually sacrificed. Because as we have witnessed, those liberal principles were never meant to apply to non-Europeans colonial subjects.

“The British and U.S. leaders made it clear that the principles in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to colonial subjects in colonial territories.”

The European empires of the late 19thand early 20thcenturies, exhausted from two devastating wars found themselves as wounded vassals to a newly emergent hegemon — the United States, which was now the unchallenged leader of the Western capitalist world, or what imperialist propagandists would call the “free world.”

British, French and the Portuguese still dependent on their colonial empires but weakened by the war, nevertheless were compelled to attempt to reimpose themselves on their colonial subjects after the war. These efforts were supported by the United States in what Kwame Nkrumah called the post-war process of “collective imperialism. ”

Therefore, despite the promulgation of the UDHR, individual and collective human rights were violated from Algeria and Vietnam, to Kenya, India and eventually Angola and Mozambique and many nations in between. The commitment to maintain European colonial/capitalist dominance resulted in a veritable bloodbath in which literally millions died and whole nations and cultures destroyed.

But what is incredible about this orgy of death and destruction imposed on so many over the decades and centuries, is that simultaneous to committing genocides and enslaving and perfecting new and more effective weapons of mass destruction, the Western world claimed to be the champion of human rights, and they largely got away with it.

Western commitments to human rights and fundamental freedoms were once again exposed for the lie that they have always been for the world’s colonized peoples. And with the cynicism and psychopathology generated by the cognitive dysfunctionality of white supremacy, the U.S. and the Western world proclaimed themselves the creators and champions of human rights as the blood flowed across the planet.

“The commitment to maintain European colonial/capitalist dominance resulted in a veritable bloodbath in which literally millions died.”

That is why I argue that if human rights are to have any incredibility, any “universal” applicability, any value, they must be seized from the barbaric grip of European and de-colonized.

The cognitive dysfunctionality of the white supremacist consciousness renders Europeans infected with this malady unable to “see” the contradictory history of liberal thought from the Enlightenment to the contemporary period that continues to stratify human beings and human civilizations and cultures. The assumed superiority of Western cultures and peoples are not even a point of contention. Its material development, the wonders of its science, the variety of its consumer goods are all testimonies to its innate superiority.

The problem is that all of this is based on lies. As Franz Fanon reminded us, Europe is a creation of Colonialism.

This has been the terrible contradiction at the heart of the European colonial project. The bifurcation of human beings into those with rights and those without is and has always been a racialized distinction. How else can one explain how a Benjamin Netanyahu, a criminal whose hands drip with the blood of Palestinians can be honored by the U.S. Congress but Marc Lamont Hill can be fired by CNN for advocating for Palestinian rights?

“The bifurcation of human beings into those with rights and those without is and has always been a racialized distinction.”

Therefore, it is not a coincidence that the same year the UDHR was promulgated, Israel was born as a nation after it terrorized over 750,000 Palestinians into leaving their homes and territories, and Dutch white nationalists assumed power in South Africa, commencing the formalization of their system of racial apartheid, and is the same year both nations were welcome into the community of nations without much controversy.

The only ones who were pointing out the contradiction inherent in recognizing a regime like the South Africans and questioning the stripping of the rights of Palestinians, were African Americans who were engaged in serious advocacy efforts at the U.N. demanding an end to colonialism and racial oppression in the U.S. and throughout the colonial world.

The creation of white supremacist thought, represented by classical liberalism converging with the material necessity of domination in order to exploit, represents a certain kind of colonialist dialectic that ensured the failure of the state-centric, legalistic, liberal human rights project of the last 70 years, while unleashing a continuing epoch of parasitic capitalism.

The human rights idea today primarily serves as an ideological prop for aggressive imperialism. The 21stcentury version of the “white man’s burden” is reflected in the concept of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect.

“The human rights idea today primarily serves as an ideological prop for aggressive imperialism.”

Humanitarian intervention and the right to protect evoke the unacknowledged white supremacist assumption that the “international community” — read as the governments of the capitalist/colonialist West — has a duty and a right to arrest, bomb, invade, prosecute, sanction, murder and violate international law anywhere on the planet to “save” people based on its own determinations and values.

As I have said on many occasions:

“De-contextualized from the reality of globalized Euro-American domination, the idea that there is a collective responsibility on the part of states to protect people from gross and systemic human rights violations associated with war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing could be viewed as a progressive development for international relations and global morality — even if that protection is offered selectively. But in the hands of an arrogant minority that still dominates the international system and sees its civilizational project as representing the apex of human development, the right to protect has become a convenient cover for rationalizing and justifying continued Euro-American global hegemony through the use of armed interventions to refashion local realities in line with Western geopolitical interests.”

However, the human rights idea does not have to be jettisoned, but it must be de-colonized if it is to have any value for oppressed people and classes.

We must embrace and exercise the black radical human rights tradition and its subsequent expression in what I call “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs).

People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) are those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.

This is the Black Radical Tradition’s approach to human rights. It is an approach that views human rights as an arena of struggle that, when grounded and informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed, becomes part of a unified comprehensive strategy for de-colonization and radical social change.

The feature that distinguishes the people-centered framework from all of the prevailing schools of human rights theory and practice is that it is based on an explicit understanding that to realize the full range of the still developing human rights idea requires: 1) an epistemological break with a human rights orthodoxy grounded in Euro-centric liberalism; 2) a reconceptualization of human rights from the standpoint of oppressed groups; 3) a restructuring of prevailing social relationships that perpetuate oppression; and 4) the acquiring of power on the part of the oppressed to bring about that restructuring.

“PCHRs provides that alternative ethical framework to inform a politics of transformation.”

We agree with sister Bell Hooks who reminds us that “to be committed to justice we must believe that ethics matter, that it is vital to have a system of shared morality.” PCHRs provides that alternative ethical framework to inform a politics of transformation, no matter one’s ultimate ideological orientation.

PCHRs is grounded in the experiences of the people, the source of its legitimacy. It is, therefore, a historical product born out of oppression, “intersectional” and committed to global societal transformation. It is an attempt to develop a politics of integrity when it comes to human rights. A politics of being whole that, in the words of Puerto Rica activist Aurora Levins Morales, suggests:

Sacrifices neither the global nor the local, ignores neither the institutional power structures nor their most personal impact on the lives of individual people. That integrates what oppression keeps fracturing. That restores connections, not only in the future we dream of, but right here in the glory, tumultuous, hopeful, messy, and inconsistent present.

We don’t have 70 more years to de-colonize. The ecological, social, economic, political and spiritual contradictions of modernity, still driven by Western coloniality, reveals the terms of struggle. Either we (the people as a historical project still in formation) overthrow the global bourgeois oligarchy and build a new world, or we experience what some say will be the sixth extinction. It is still in our hands, but we don’t have long.

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This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. His latest publications include contributions to “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi. He can be reached at: Ajamubaraka.com

On 4 December 2018, HuffPost published an article by senior editor Chris York, whose single purpose was to discredit Professor Piers Robinson of the University of Sheffield (UK).  Prof. Robinson is Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism and researches communication, media and world politics, focusing on conflict and war.  His current teaching includes research methods, introduction to political communication as well as propaganda, media and conflict. The University of Sheffield’s Department of Journalism Studies is considered one of the most prestigious in the U.K.  

While mass media are certainly entitled to criticize whomever they wish, it is quite rare that they devote an entire article to destroy the reputation of an academic. One can, therefore, assume that the attack on Prof. Robinson’s reputation was ordered by higher-ups for reasons that will become evident in this essay. 

Screengrab from HuffPost

HuffPost’s unconscionable attack on Prof. Robinson’s personal integrity

The introductory paragraph of the article reveals its slanderous intent.  

“An academic teaching journalism students at one of the UK’s top universities has publicly supported long-discredited conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terror attack, HuffPost UK can reveal.”  

The journalist left no stone unturned in his efforts to discover controversial statements by Prof. Robinson. He found three academics willing to berate Prof. Robinson: Lydia Wilson, an Oxford and Cambridge research fellow and editor of the Cambridge Literary Review, Yasser Munif, a Lebanese expert on middle eastern politics and society at Emerson College, Boston and  Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. They offered nothing more than their personal opinions. Disregarding the rule of neutrality, HuffPost did not talk with academics who support Prof. Robinson or with any of the thousands of academics and experts who share his conclusions.

It is not, however, bad journalism that prompted me to write the present essay, but HuffPost’s deliberate attack on people of integrity who dare question the official account of 9/11.  In order to discredit Prof. Robinson, the author cited Lydia Wilson to express her personal opinion about the book “9/11 Unmasked”, to which Prof. Robinson had given good marks:

″It’s ridiculous that Piers Robinson is teaching propaganda. The most troubling thing for me is how did he get this job? It’s not hard to uncover this man. [The review of ‘9/11 Unmasked’ by Prof. Robinson] is conspiracy-theory driven. There’s no academic who should write a post like – there’s no argument and there’s no evidence. It’s dangerous to students – he’s working in a journalism department and he can’t analyse journalism sources.” 

Prof. Robinson is entitled, like any other person, to the presumption of good faith. To insinuate that his research is “conspiracy-theory driven” is unconscionable.  

HuffPost’s attack on the quest for truth and justice

The attack on Prof. Robinson was no personal vendetta. It rather represents an attack on all scholars who dare question the official account on 9/11, including myself.

In the present article, I intend to expose one particularly grievous lie promoted by the U.S. government with regard to 9/11, namely the legend that 19 fanatic Muslims boarded and hijacked four aircraft, in order to crash these aircraft on known landmarks.  A comprehensive study of this particular question is found in my book “Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11” (Algora Publishers, New York, 2013).

(1) The purpose of a murder investigation

One basic goal of a murder investigation is to identify the perpetrators. In order to prove that particular individuals could have hijacked an aircraft, it must be first demonstrated that they boarded that particular aircraft. In order to demonstrate this fact, the following four classes of evidence should have been produced by the US authorities in September 2001 or shortly thereafter: 

1. Authenticated passenger lists (or flight manifests), listing the names of all the passengers and crew members, including those suspected of hijacking;
2. Authenticated security videos from the airports, which depict the passengers (and the alleged hijackers);
3. Sworn testimonies of personnel who attended the boarding of the aircraft;
4. Formal identification of the bodily remains from the crash sites, accompanied by chain–of–custody reports.

Did the US government produce the above four classes of minimal evidence and if so, is that evidence admissible, relevant and compelling? If such evidence does not exist or is deemed to lack credibility, it is likely that these individuals did not board the aircraft and that, consequently, no “Islamic hijackings” had taken place.

(2) The living dead hijackers

Shortly after the FBI released names and photographs of the alleged hijackers, questions about their identities began to emerge. The family of Hamza al-Ghamdi, one of the alleged hijackers, said the photo released by the FBI “has no resemblance to him at all”. CNN publicized a picture of another alleged hijacker, identified as Saeed al-Ghamdi. That man, a pilot, hailed from Tunisia alive.  The photograph of a Saudi pilot by the name of Waleed al-Shehri was released by the FBI as one of the alleged hijackers: he protested his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. Two people with the name of Abdulaziz Alomari presented themselves, surprised to see their names on the FBI list of suspected hijackers. One of them, a Saudi engineer, said he lost his passport while studying in Denver, Colorado, in 1995. Of the FBI list, he said:

“The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine. But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Center in New York.”

Another Abdulaziz Alomari was found working as a pilot with Saudi Airlines.  Salem al-Hazmi, also listed by the FBI as an alleged hijacker, was indignant at being named as a suspect for a mass murder.  He said he works in petrochemical plant in Yanbu (Saudi Arabia). Abdul Rahman al–Haznawi, brother of another suspect, said

“There is no similarity between the photo published [on Thursday] and my brother.”

He said he does not believe his brother was involved in the crime: “He never had any such intention.”  Gaafar al-Lagany, the Saudi government’s chief spokesman in the United States, said that the hijackers probably stole the identities of legitimate Saudi pilots. The above findings have been corroborated independently by Jay Kolar.

The FBI disregarded these stories and maintained the names and photographs it originally posted on its website as those “believed to be the hijackers” of 9/11,  including those of living individuals. The 9/11 Commission of Inquiry did not even mention these conflicting identifications.

(3) No authenticated passenger lists

The primary source used by airlines to identify the victims of aircraft crashes is the passenger list (sometimes designated as the flight manifest). A passenger list is a legal document proving – also for insurance purposes – that particular individuals boarded an aircraft. In order to serve as legal documents, passenger lists must be duly authenticated by those responsible for their issuance. 

With regard to the four 9/11 flights, American and United Airlines have consistently refused to demonstrate that they possess authenticated passenger lists of these flights.  Surprisingly, neither corporate media nor the 9/11 Commission demanded to see these authenticated documents.

Between September 11 and 14 September 2001, mainstream media published names of alleged hijackers and passengers. Some of these names were deleted and replaced by other names. Some of these irregularities are examined below.

Adding and deleting passengers’ names after the crashes 

On 14 September 2001, the name of Mosear Caned (phon.) was released by CNN as one of the suspected hijackers on “a list of names (…) that is supposed to be officially released by [the Justice Department] sometime later today”. His name disappeared a few hours later from the list of suspects and replaced with that of Hani Hanjour when CNN posted a new list of suspects released by the FBI.  It was never revealed where Caned’s name came from in the first place, who this person was supposed to be and why the name was later replaced by Hani Hanjour. No other passenger (or “hijacker”) bore a name resembling Mosear Caned.

The Washington Post reported, however, that the original passenger lists did not include the name of Hani Hanjour, later named as the pilot of flight AA77. In its final edition of 16 September 2001 the Post explained that Hanjour’s name “was not on the American Airlines manifest for [flight 77] because he may not have had a ticket.”  For its information, the Washington Post relied almost exclusively on the FBI. This report fits with the declaration by Attorney General Ashcroft of 13 September 2001 that only four “hijackers” had been on flight AA77. Counsel for American Airlines, in a letter to the 9/11 Commission of March 15, 2004, appears to confirm the absence of Hanjour from that flight, writing, “We have not been able to determine if Hani Hanjour checked in at the main ticket counter.“ Yet Hanjour’s name appears later on unauthenticated passenger lists of flight AA77.  

According to CNN of 14 September 2001,

“[f]ederal sources initially identified [Adnan] Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari as possible hijackers who boarded one of the planes that originated in Boston.” (emphasis added).

Yet, a few hours later, CNN issued the following correction:

“Based on information from multiple law enforcement sources, CNN reported that Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari of Vero Beach Florida, were suspected to be two of the pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center. CNN later learned that Adnan Bukhari is still in Florida, where he was questioned by the FBI…Ameer Bukhari died in a small plane crash” on 11 September 2000. These names disappeared from unauthenticated passenger lists published later and replaced by new names. CNN attributed this information to “federal sources.”  

On the very day of 9/11, the FBI was already focused on [Amer] Kamfar” as a suspected hijacker. On the morning of 12 September eight FBI agents stood in front of the door of Henry Habora, Kamfar’s neighbor in Vero Beach, Florida, waiving a photograph of Kamfar, and asked Habora if he knew him.  If the FBI suspected Kamfar to have been one of the hijackers and informed the media that he was a suspect, it could only have done so if his name was found on the original passenger list. Yet that name also disappeared from unauthenticated passenger lists publicized later. 

On 12 September 2001, various newspapers published partial passenger lists of the crashed flights. These reports included the names of Jude Larson, 31, and his wife, Natalie, 24, referred to as passengers aboard flight AA11.  As example thereof, here is an excerpt from a news report published by the Honolulu Star Bulletin on 12 September 2001:

Also among the confirmed dead was Jude Larson, the 31-year old son of Maui artist Curtis Larson, who was aboard American’s hijacked Flight 11. Jude Larson and his wife Natalie were en route to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was attending college…Larson’s wife Natalie, whose family lives in Boston, was a rising fashion model and had been to Italy four times in the last 18 months to work for Gucci.

A person who claimed to be a friend of Jude’s father, a certain Steve Jocelyn of Lahaina on Hawaii, told the Honolulu Advertiser that Jude “was an amazing guy, a cool kid. He was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy with a good heart.” He said that Jude had visited Maui often, was working as a horticulturist in Washington State but decided to enter medical school a few years ago. A week later, the same newspaper reported that it had been “unable to confirm the identity of (…) Steve Jocelyn,” and unable to locate him. 

On 18 September 2001, the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported that the newspaper had received an email from Jude, giving notice that he and his wife were alive. According to the paper, “a person claiming to be with the airlines” had called Jude’s father and told him that his son and daughter-in-law had been passengers on flight AA11. The Honolulu Advertiser of 20 September 2001, which published a detailed report on this apparent hoax, wrote that Jude’s father Curtis Larson, a “sculptor and jewelry maker” now claimed he had been duped. Yet it was Curtis Larson who initially told reporters, that “his son was in medical school at UCLA, that his daughter-in-law was pregnant and that the couple had visited her family in Boston.” According to Jude, the report continued, his real name is not Larson but Olsen. He also said he is 30, not 31, years old, that he does not study in Los Angeles but works as a landscaper in Olympia, Washington State, and that his wife is not pregnant. The names of Jude and Natalie Larson then disappeared from unauthenticated passenger lists. Assuming that a prestigious news agency, such as Associated Press, would check with American Airlines and the FBI whether the Larsons were passengers on flight AA11 before releasing its story, it would follow that the Larsons were listed on the original passenger list of flight AA11 but later removed from the official list of dead passengers, or their names changed.

The aforementioned fluctuations in the number and names of the alleged hijackers could not have occurred if the names had been based on authentic passenger lists. 

FBI and airlines’ refusal to release authentic passenger lists

I attempted in 2004 to obtain from American Airlines copies of authenticated passenger manifests for the two American Airlines flights of 9/11. Karen Temmerman, Customer Relations, American Airlines, responded to me on 9 September 2004:

At the time of the incidents we released the actual passenger manifests to the appropriate government agencies who in turn released certain information to the media. These lists were published in many major periodicals and are now considered public record. At this time we are not in a position to release further information or to republish what the government agencies provided to the media.

The airline did not explain why it was not in a position, at this time, to confirm what had already been for a long time in the public domain.

On November 29, 2005, I tried again to obtain the passenger list of flight AA77 from American Airlines. Sean Bentel of American Airlines first sent me a typed list that consisted of nothing more than the first and last names of 53 passengers from that flight. The list did not include Arab names. Asking again for “something more authentic”, Sean Bentel responded that ”the names I sent you are accurate…There may have been a formatting problem.” In turn I responded that the problem was not the formatting of the data. Here is what I wrote:

What I am asking is a replica of the original passenger list (either a scan of the original, or at least a document faithfully reflecting the contents of that list)…[namely] the list of the paying passengers who boarded AA77. Can I take it that the list you sent me faithfully reflects the names of the paying passengers who boarded AA77?

Within hours Sean Bentel answered in the most laconic manner: “Mr. Davidsson, Names of terrorists were redacted. Sean Bentel.” Asked in return “[w]hy can’t you sent me a facsimile copy of the passenger lists, including the names of the terrorists”, Sean Bentel answered, “This is the information we have for public release.” This was the end of this exchange.

I also turned to United Airlines. On October 21, 2004, I asked per email why the original flight manifests have not yet been publicized and whether United Airlines had provided some media with a copy of the original flight manifests. The airline answered that “[a]ll matters pertaining to the September 11th terrorist attacks are under the investigation of the US Federal Authorities. Please contact the FBI.” That was it.

I did not give up. In February 2012, I requested on the base of the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) from the FBI the release of Document 302, serial 7134, which contains “flight manifests for hijacked flights” and “information related to manifests.” The request was denied.

(4)  No one saw the hijackers at the security checkpoints

According to the 9/11 Commission, ten of the 19 suspected hijackers were selected on 9/11 at the airports by the automated Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) for “additional security scrutiny.”  Yet none of those who handled the selected passengers, or any of the numerous airline or airport security employees interviewed by the FBI or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on or after 9/11 is known to have been aware of these suspects. As for flights AA11 and UA175, which reportedly left from Logan Airport, Boston, the 9/11 Commission found that “[n]one of the [security] checkpoint supervisors recalled the hijackers or reported anything suspicious regarding their screening.”   

(5)  No one saw the hijackers at the boarding gates

The 9/11 Commission does not mention the existence of any deposition or testimony by airline personnel who witnessed the boarding of the aircraft. As a response to my request to interview American Airlines gate agents of flight AA77, the airline responded that their identities cannot be revealed for privacy reasons. Among the documents from 9/11 released in 2009, I found interviews with Liset Frometa (conducted on 11 September 2001) and Maria Jackson (conducted on 22 September 2001), who testified to have worked at gate 32 for flight AA11, and one FBI 302-form summarizing an interview with an unidentified female employee of American Airlines who testified on 11 September 2001 to have “worked the gate for AA flight 11”, but did not mention the gate number. Neither of these ladies recalled any of the alleged hijackers. Maria Jackson was shown a “photo spread of subjects” but did not recognize anyone from the photo spread.  According to the FBI she “took the tickets for [Flight 11] from AA Flight Attendant Karen Martin and brought them to ticket lift and deposited them in the safe.”

(6) No authenticated CCTV of the hijackers

Apparently none of the three airports from where the 9/11 aircraft reportedly departed (Boston Logan, Newark International and Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C.) possessed security cameras at the boarding gates. There exists thus neither eyewitness testimony nor a visual documentation of the boarding process. 

Yet many people are convinced that they saw on television footage of the suspected hijackers passing through security checks. What was shown appears to have been footage from the Portland (Maine) Jetport and from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C.  

The footage from Portland Jetport purports to show two men, captioned “Atta” and “Alomari” passing the security checkpoint before they board a connecting flight to Boston on the morning of 11 September 2001. Even if the video recording from Portland was authentic, in the sense of depicting two persons resembling “Atta” and “Alomari”, it does not prove that these two look-alike persons boarded any aircraft in Boston. 

“Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari” at Portland Jetport on 11 September 2001  

The other footage shown on TV and found on internet sites, purports to depict the alleged hijackers of flight AA77 as they pass through the security checkpoint at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. This recording was only released in 2004, not by the authorities, but by the Motley Rice law firm representing some survivors’ families. According to the 9/11 Commission, the video “recorded all passengers, including the hijackers, as they were screened.”  Yet none of the publicly available versions of this recording shows any of the over 50 passengers from flight AA77, some of whom were well known nationally.

Jay Kolar, who published a critical analysis of this footage, pointed out that the recording lacks a camera identification number and a time stamp (date:time clock). Joe Vialls, who also analyzed this video recording, wrote, “Just this single terminal at Dulles Airport has well over 100 such cameras, everyone of them with an individual camera identification number and date-time clock of its own.” He elaborated the point: “On-film data [such as camera number and date-time stamp] is essential of course, because it would be extremely difficult to track a target around the airport without these basic tools, and absolutely impossible to sort out the precise time and date of an event that occurred more than two years before, which is exactly what the 9-11 Commission now claims to have done.”

An extraordinary story about this footage was told by Dulles airport security manager Ed Nelson to authors Susan and Joseph Trento. Nelson said that shortly after arriving at Dulles airport on the morning of 9/11, FBI agents confiscated a security tape from a checkpoint through which they said the alleged hijackers had passed on the way to their boarding. He then described the scene and expressed his surprise that the FBI agents could so fast pick out “the hijackers” from hundreds of other passengers on the security tape:

They pulled the tape right away…. They brought me to look at it. They went right to the first hijacker on the tape and identified him. They knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints. They would go ‘roll and stop it’ and showed me each of the hijackers…. It boggles my mind that they had already had the hijackers identified…. Both metal detectors were open at that time, and lots of traffic was moving through. So picking people out is hard…. I wanted to know how they had that kind of information. So fast. It didn’t make sense to me.” 

Aside from the dubious origin of this recording and the lack of a date and time stamp, it does not show who boarded an aircraft but provides only blurred images of individuals who pass a security checkpoint at an unknown time and location.

(7)  No positive identification of the hijackers’ bodily remains

According to the official account, the 19 alleged hijackers died in the crashes at the WTC, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 

Chris Kelly, spokesman of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), where the identification of victims’ remains from flights AA77 and UA93 took place, said that the authorities were reluctant to consider releasing the hijackers’ bodies: “We are not quite sure what will happen to them, we doubt very much we are going to be making an effort to reach family members over there.” According to Dr. Jerry Spencer, a former chief medical examiner for AFIP, cited by CBS News, “the terrorists are usually not in our possession in the United States like this”, implying that no DNA comparison samples were available to identify their remains. According to Jeff Killeen, spokesman for the FBI field office in Pittsburgh, “there haven’t been any friends or family members to try to claim the remains of [the hijackers].”

In mid-August 2002, a news report on the victims’ remains noted that the DNA of the alleged hijackers still had not been checked, because “little attention has been paid to the terrorists’ remains.” While the AFIP announced it had positively identified the human remains of all “innocent” passengers and crew from the flights, they did not yet identify the remains of any of the alleged hijackers. Kelly said later: “The remains that didn’t match any of the samples were ruled [by default] to be the terrorists”. Tom Gibb, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that “air pirates [of flight UA93] have been identified as Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed Al Haznawi, Saeed Al Ghamdi and Ahmed Al Nami – but not so positively identified that officials will list the names in official records.” Wallace Miller of Somerset County said that the “death certificates [for the suspected hijackers] will list each as ‘John Doe'”. Under a ruling issued on October 11, 2001 by a Somerset County judge, everyone who died aboard flight UA93 “except the terrorists” will get death certificates. At the “insistence of the FBI, the terrorists won’t be getting them because investigators aren’t sure of their identities.”

As for the remains of the suspects who allegedly hijacked flights AA11 and UA175, a spokeswoman for the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, where the identification of the victims from the WTC took place, said she had received from the FBI in February 2003 profiles of all ten hijackers who allegedly died at the WTC, so “their remains could be separated from those of victims.” She added, however: “No names were attached to these profiles. We matched them, and we have matched two of those profiles to remains that we have.”

The lack of positive identification of the alleged hijackers’ bodily remains, compounded by the absence of chain-of-custody reports regarding these remains, means that the US authorities have not proved that the alleged hijackers died on 11 September 2001, let alone at the reported crash sites.

Conclusions

A government not implicated in a mass-murder committed within its jurisdiction would be expected not only to seek the truth about the crime, but show particular zeal in doing so. It would present the most incriminating evidence it possesses against the suspects. It would do so both to satisfy a legitimate expectation of its own population (and in the case of 9/11 of the world community) and to dispel any existing suspicions of a cover-up or of complicity in the crime. In short, such a government would do its utmost to show its good faith in seeking the truth and ensuring that justice is fulfilled. The U.S. government has, on the contrary, demonstrated bad faith regarding the investigation of 9/11. It has endeavored to thwart investigations, condoned the destruction of criminal evidence, bribed witnesses and families of victims to ask no questions regarding the events, failed to prosecute and convict even one person for complicity in the mass-murder, and as shown above, failed to produce a shred of evidence in support of its allegation that 19 fanatic Muslims perpetrated the mass-murder. 

I am a rather old-fashioned due to my belief in the rule of law, namely in the duty of civilized governments to prove beyond reasonable doubt their accusations against murder suspects. This obligation is derived from human rights norms, particularly the obligation of states to properly investigate cases of mass-murder (a gross violation of the right to life).  The government of the United States has failed to prove the participation of Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi, Ziad Jarrah and Hani Hanjour, alleged suicide-pilots, in the mass-murder of 9/11. Their presumption of innocence must be upheld. 

For all practical purposes, the official tale of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 shall be henceforth considered as a crude fabrication by the U.S. government, intended to justify wars of aggression, the militarization of society, mass surveillance and the erosion of the rule of law. Academics, human rights defenders and peace activists are called upon to draw the political implications entailed by this finding.  

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Elias Davidsson lives in Reykjavik, Iceland.  He is a composer, human rights activist and a member of the Icelandic chapter of the 911-Truth Movement. 

A draft US Senate resolution describing Saudi policy in the Middle East as a “wrecking ball” and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “complicit” in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if adopted and implemented, potentially could change the dynamics of the region’s politics and create an initial exit from almost a decade of mayhem, conflict and bloodshed.

The six-page draft also holds Prince Mohammed accountable for the devastating war in Yemen that has sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the failure to end the 17-month-old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar, and the jailing and torture of Saudi dissidents and activists.

In doing so, the resolution confronts not only Prince Mohammed’s policies but also by implication those of his closest ally, UAE crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed. The UAE was the first country that Saudi leader visited after the Khashoggi killing.

By in effect challenging the position of king-in-waiting Prince Mohammed, the resolution raises the question whether some of his closest allies, including the UAE crown prince, will in future want to be identified that closely with him.

Moreover, by demanding the release of activist Raif bin Muhammad Badawi, better known as Raif Badawi, and women’s rights activists, the resolution further the challenges fundamentals of Prince Mohammed’s iron-fisted repression of his critics, the extent of his proposed social reforms as part of his drive to diversify and streamline the Saudi economy, and the kingdom’s human rights record.

A 34-year-old blogger who named his website Free Saudi Liberals, Mr. Badawi was barred from travel and had his assets frozen in 2009, arrested in 2012, and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam. His sister, Samar Badawi, a women’s rights activist, was detained earlier this year. Mr. Badawi’s wife and children were granted asylum and citizenship in Canada.

A diplomatic row that stunned many erupted in August when Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian ambassador after the foreign ministry in Ottawa demanded in a tweet the release of Ms. Badawi and other activists.

Prince Mohammed and Saudi Arabia, even prior to introduction of the Senate resolution, were discovering that the Khashoggi killing had weakened the kingdom internationally and had made it more vulnerable to pressure.

Talks in Sweden between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and Houthi rebels to end the war is the most immediate consequence of the kingdom’s changing position.

So is the resolution that is unprecedented in the scope and harshness of the criticism of a long-standing ally.

While the resolution is likely to spark initial anger among some of Prince’s Mohammed’s allies, it nevertheless, if adopted and/or implemented, could persuade some like UAE crown prince Mohammed to rethink their fundamental strategies.

The relationship between the two Mohammeds constituted a cornerstone of the UAE leader’s strategy to achieve his political, foreign policy and defense goals.

These include projecting the Emirates as a guiding light of cutting-edge Arab and Muslim modernity; ensuring that the Middle East fits the crown prince’s autocratic, anti-Islamist mould; and enabling the UAE, described by US defense secretary Jim Mattis as ‘Little Sparta,‘ to punch above its weight politically, diplomatically and militarily.

To compensate for the Emirates’ small size, Prince Mohammed opted to pursue his goals in part by working through the Saudi royal court. In leaked emails, UAE ambassador to Washington Yousef al-Otaiba, a close associate of Prince Mohammed, said of the Saudi crown prince that

“I don’t think we’ll ever see a more pragmatic leader in that country.”

Mr. Al-Otaiba went on to say:

“I think in the long term we might be a good influence on KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), at least with certain people there. Our relationship with them is based on strategic depth, shared interests, and most importantly the hope that we could influence them. Not the other way around.”

The impact of the Senate resolution and what it means for the US policy will to a large extent depend on the politics of the differences between the Congress and President Donald J. Trump who has so far sought to shield the Saudi crown prince.

To further do so, Mr. Trump, with or without the resolution, would likely have to pressure Saudi Arabia to give him something tangible to work with such as an immediate release of imprisoned activists followed by a resolution of the Qatar crisis as well as some indication that the Yemen peace negotiations are progressing.

Whichever way, the fallout of the Khashoggi killing, culminating in unprecedented Congressional anger against Prince Mohammed and the kingdom, is likely to have significant consequences not only for the Saudi crown prince but potentially also for the strategy of his UAE counterpart.

That in turn could create light at the end of the Middle East’s tunnel of almost a decade of volatility and violent and bloody conflict that has been driven by Saudi and UAE assertiveness in countering dissent at home and abroad in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as Iran that has played its part in countries like Syria and Yemen in fuelling destruction and bloodshed.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

Especially at state funerals, media and politicians pretend that US presidents are honorable men, instead of the mass murderers that all of them become in office.

“The US has caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler.”

The daily whitewashing of imperial crimes that masquerades as “news” on corporate media becomes high ceremony when a Genocider-in-Chief dies. Now it is George Herbert Walker Bush’s turn to be canonized for bringing “’a ‘thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world,” in the words of the current CEO of Empire, Donald Trump. Former White House denizens Obama, Clinton and Carter also lauded the life and works of their accomplice in global predation, as did the son-of-a-Bush, George W., the under-achiever who wound up out-doing his daddy in mass murder.

As high priests of American Exceptionalism, corporate news anchors absolve the dead leader of culpability for the mega-deaths inflicted on those countries targeted for invasion, drone strikes, regime change, proxy wars, or crippling economic sanctions under his watch — an easy task for the media glib-makers, since their colleagues sanitized those crimes while they were in progress, decades ago. But the whitewasher’s job is never done; the bodies keep piling up, “regimes” go “rogue,” meaning they disobey American dictat or otherwise get in the way of the imperial project, or run afoul of vital U.S. allies, as with the unfortunate Yemenis and Palestinians.

“The whitewasher’s job is never done.”

Whatever the human cost, it is “worth it,” as Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said of the half a million Iraqi children that died as a result of U.S. sanctions and the bombing of Iraqi infrastructure – carnage begun by Daddy Bush and continued by Bill Clinton, and then begun again with Bush Junior’s “Shock and Awe” demonstration of U.S. military might. Obama got hundreds of thousands more Iraqis killed when he armed and trained head-chopping legions of Islamist jihadists to swarm the region in an attempted imperial comeback that has killed half a million Syrians, to date.

Presidential funerals are venues of absolution, mainly for crimes that are unacknowledged.

Most Americans would be shocked – or feign surprise — if told that their country had caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler. But they do know the U.S. leaves dead bodies in its wake all around the planet — Americans are not clueless, and that which they don’t know is due as much to deliberate, determined ignorance as it is to the failings of the news media. A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution, and the United States has not experienced such a transformation. At least half the population sees the death of millions of non-whites as “collateral damage” from America’s civilizing mission in the world: it’s “worth it.”

“A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution.”

In such a country, eight million murdered Congolese can be vanished from national consciousness without a trace of guilt. The Rwandans and Ugandans that carried out this holocaust under U.S. protection, with U.S. arms, and in service to U.S. imperial objectives, are also absolved, lest their crimes taint the reputations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, or besmirch the U.S. national character.

The oldest of the living former presidents, Jimmy Carter, has spent decades building houses for the poor to atone for his crimes in the Oval Office. In addition to contributing to the carnage in Angola and backing fascist military regimes that slaughtered or disappeared hundreds of thousands in Latin America, the peanut-farming bible-thumper set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida. The creation of the first international network of Islamist jihadists, initially to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan, was the brainchild of Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Tens of thousands of heads have rolled since then, thanks to the honorable and righteous Jimmy Carter.

“Jimmy Carter set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida.”

Barack Obama is a methodical man who claimed to be completing Dr. Martin Luther King’s work but instead added his own wars to the continuum of the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Obama told the U.S. Congress that his unprovoked attack on Libya was not a war, at all, because no Americans died, thus establishing a new doctrine and definition of warfare in which only U.S. deaths count. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, established new lows in diplomacy when she greeted news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, cackling, “We came, we saw, he died” – which could be the said of all the tens of millions of deaths at the hands of U.S. presidents.

International law has no place in U.S. foreign policy, or U.S. corporate media broadcasts, or in the U.S. political discourse. Bernie Sanders, the Great Gray Hope of leftish Democrats, prefers not to speak of foreign policy at all, and can thus ignore the millions of corpses left behind as a result of U.S. policy. And he is also considered to be an upright and moral man.

The current occupant of the White House has so far committed less carnage in the world than his peers, although the so-called “Resisters” that seek his ouster from office behave as if Trump is a greater criminal and threat than any of his predecessors. They applaud Trump only when he launches military attacks. Since he loves applause, it is certain that Trump will increase his body count before the election season begins in earnest.

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BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

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Democrat Ben Cardin, a senator from Maryland and a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is determined to sneak through anti-BDS legislation during the lame duck session of Congress. 

Most Americans are either ignorant or vaguely aware of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions aimed at Israel for its criminal treatment of the Palestinians. This is because the movement is scantily covered by the corporate propaganda media, but also because millions of Americans couldn’t care less what happens to the Palestinians, even though the Israeli military and its ethnic cleansing program are funded in large part by their tax dollars.

Liberty is dead in America. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies boycotted British goods. In 1774, the First Continental Congress called for a boycott and this was enforced by new committees authorized by the Congress.

Boycotts are legend—from Gandhi organizing a boycott of British goods to the bus boycotts in Montgomery and Tallahassee during the Civil Rights movement. The predecessors of today’s Zionists used a boycott to stop the importation of German products in the US, Britain, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine. Additionally, Jews imposed a boycott on Henry Ford in the 1920s. 

All of that is largely forgotten, mostly because Americans don’t do history and their political understanding is sculpted and curtailed by the state and its propaganda media. The corporate media has managed to portray BDS as rabid antisemitism. 

But then, in America and especially Europe, any criticism of the Israeli apartheid state is considered a form of hatred—more egregious than all other hatred—that leads ultimately to the gates of Auschwitz. 

The anti-BDS push has thus far infected 25 states. In 2017, this mania and support for the international renegade state of Israel resulted in a city in Texas requiring businesses to certify that they would not boycott Israel before receiving hurricane aid.

Ryan Grim and Alex Emmons write that the

“Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which was introduced last year by Cardin and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, would amend the 1979 Export Administration Act to allow penalties for companies who join boycotts of Israel called for by international institutions—like the United Nations or the European Union. The new version clarifies that people cannot face jail time for participating in a boycott, but the ACLU has argued that it still leaves the door open for criminal financial penalties. Defenders of the bill say that it is strictly aimed at preventing companies from facing pressure to boycott Israel and that it is not meant to restrict an individual’s free speech.”

Eradicating the First Amendment comes in second to protecting Israel and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. If you criticize Israel for its repeated violations of international law, you will face harassment—as I discovered back in the late 2000s. I received death threats and harassing phone calls at my place of employment at that time for the crime of taking the little apartheid state to task on my blog.  

At one point, an email arrived with an image attachment—my face photoshopped on the body of Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer, a Nazi newspaper. Streicher was one of the most virulent antisemites of the Nazi party. He was executed at Nuremberg. This sort of nasty and hysterical behavior is what critics of Israel face on a regular basis. 

If Cardin manages to attach his anti-liberty amendment to S. 720, an end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill, this will further embolden supporters of Israel to not only criminalize free speech, but physically go after critics. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from 2018 Sail to Gaza

The State of Israel has conducted an operation to destroy tunnels on the Israeli side of the what is internationally known as the Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tweeted “We have just launched Operation Northern Shield to expose and neutralize cross-border attack tunnels dug by Hezbollah from #Lebanon to #Israel. #NorthernShield.” According to a report by The Times of Israel ‘IDF says 200-meter attack tunnel from Lebanon uncovered as operation launches’:

The Israeli military on Tuesday said it uncovered the “first of sure to be many” cross-border attack tunnels dug by the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group, this one from under a house in the Lebanese village of Kafr Kila, across from the Israeli town of Metulla.

This was the first tunnel that the Israel Defense Forces has said it discovered as part of a newly launched operation — Northern Shield — to find and destroy the offensive subterranean passages from Lebanon, which the army said are not yet operational and do not present an immediate threat to Israelis.

“At this time, having exposed the tunnel, IDF soldiers are conducting engineering and operational efforts before neutralizing it,” the army said in a statement.

The report quoted what IDF Spokesperson Ronen Manelis had said in regards to the operation and how far it can go,

“IDF Spokesperson Ronen Manelis indicated that other tunnels may be destroyed within Lebanon as well. “We are prepared for all options, and the operation is only in its first day. The neutralizing of the tunnels will not necessarily take place within our territory,” he said.”

What Manelis is stating that the Israeli operation will continue into Lebanese territory as a precursor to war between Israel and Hezbollah.

“The IDF said the “terror tunnel” originated under a Lebanese home in Kafr Kila and extended some 40 meters (130 feet) into Israeli territory. The army said the tunnel was approximately 200 meters (650 feet) long, some 25 meters (80 feet) deep, and was two meters (six feet) tall by two meters (six feet) wide” according to the report. 

Arutz Sheva (also known as the Israel National News) interviewed Professor Moshe Maoz of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who claimed that

“The operation will not improve relations because the two sides are on the verge of war,” Maoz said, “Since 2006 there has been a cease-fire and mutual deterrence.”

Professor Maoz also spoke about Hezbollah’s ties with Iran and that Israel has the potential to use its undeclared nuclear weapons against Iran:

“They are connected to Iran. They work in cooperation with Iran, and a single incident can have repercussions for the entire region. Therefore, I think that the sides will be more cautious,” Maoz said. He recalled Hezbollah’s decision to respond to Israeli actions in the past, a decision that they repeat over and over again in order to be considered as defenders of Lebanon.

“They will have to respond. The question of how they will respond, whether with gunfire or not. No one wants to get a response from mutual missile fire because there will be mutual destruction. We will be able to destroy large parts of Lebanon and they will be able to hit the Galilee and further south. I assume that even Nasrallah, who is a religious fanatic, is neither crazy nor stupid, and therefore he is also careful.

“Iran also knows that according to foreign sources, Israel has atomic bombs and we can inflict tremendous damage on them, so they will consider twice whether to attack Israel, unless it is a very extreme case.”

Israeli politicians and military officials including Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu can possibly use its nuclear weapons against Iran in what would be called a catastrophic mistake against Iran. It would create a backlash of extreme proportions of the Muslim majority in the region. Neocon extremist and warmonger in the Trump administration, John Bolton has also expressed “strong” support for Israel’s operation when he tweeted

“The US strongly supports Israel’s efforts to defend its sovereignty, and we call on Hizballah to stop its tunneling into Israel and to refrain from escalation and violence. More broadly, we call on Iran and all of its agents to stop their regional aggression and provocation, which pose an unacceptable threat to Israeli and regional security.” 

In the 2006 Lebanon War, according to a 2007 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, there were at least 1,109 Lebanese civilians deaths whom the majority were civilians with 4,399 injured adding an estimated 1 million people displaced. According to the HRW report, there were 43 Israeli civilian and 12 IDF soldiers dead and hundreds of civilians were wounded. There were also 300,000 Israelis displaced during the course of the war. Hezbollah has been a thorn on the side of Israel since its creation to fend off Israeli expansion into Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah understands that Israel wants a destabilized Middle East so that they can rule over the Muslim people. It is clearly stated in Oded Yinon’s ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’ where he stated the following:

The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation 

Israel wants to be the Imperial power in the Middle East controlling the Muslim people and it’s the natural resources including oil, gas and water which would benefit both Israeli and U.S. business interests. With the Trump Administration’s full support of Israeli actions against its neighbors, war is inevitable. Israel knows that it cannot move forward on its attack on Iran without neutralizing Hezbollah. Israel also knows that without the help of the U.S. military forces in the region, an attack on Iran is not possible. However, It is important to know that Iran has the backing of Russia, China and most of the Muslim world if Israel were to attack Iran, therefore it would guarantee a defeat for both Israel and the U.S.

It is clear that Israel’s time is running out in regards to the declining superpower of the U.S. Empire.  With the U.S. suffering from its recent military failures against Iraq and Afghanistan with an added $21 Trillion to its national debt and a collapsing U.S. dollar, Israeli officials know the time is now to start a new war because the U.S. will not be capable of fighting for the “Jewish State” especially when it’s experiencing its rapid decline.

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This article was originally published on Silent Crow News.

So much for a trade war truce between China and the US, or a stock market Christmas rally for that matter.

Shortly after the news hit that Huawei CFO Wanzhou Meng — also deputy chairwoman and the daughter of Huawei’s founder — was arrested on December 1, or right around the time Trump and Xi were having dinner in Buenos Aires last Saturday, and faces extradition to the U.S. as a result of a DOJ investigation into whether the Chinese telecom giant sold gear to Iran despite sanctions on exports to the region, China immediately lodged a formal protest publishing a statement at its embassy in Canada, and demanding the U.S. and its neighbor “rectify wrongdoings” and free Meng, warning it would “closely follow the development of the issue” and will “take all measures” to protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens.

Full statement below:

Remarks of the Spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Canada on the issue of a Chinese citizen arrested by the Canadian side

At the request of the US side, the Canadian side arrested a Chinese citizen not violating any American or Canadian law. The Chinese side firmly opposes and strongly protests over such kind of actions which seriously harmed the human rights of the victim. The Chinese side has lodged stern representations with the US and Canadian side, and urged them to immediately correct the wrongdoing and restore the personal freedom of Ms. Meng Wanzhou.

We will closely follow the development of the issue and take all measures to resolutely protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens.

Meng’s arrest will immediately heighten tensions between Washington and Beijing just days after the world’s two largest economies agreed on a truce in their growing trade conflict. It will, or at least should, also prompt any US execs currently in China to think long and hard if that’s where they want to be, say, tomorrow when Xi decides to retaliate in kind.

Meng’s father Ren Zhengfei, a former army engineer who’s regularly named among China’s top business executives, has won acclaim at home for turning an electronics reseller into the world’s second-largest smartphone maker and a major producer of networking gear.

As Bloomberg notes, the CFO’s arrest will be regarded back home as an attack on China’s foremost corporate champions. While Alibaba and Tencent dominate headlines thanks to flashy growth and high-profile billionaire founders, Ren’s company is by far China’s most global technology company, with operations spanning Africa, Europe and Asia.

“Tencent and Alibaba may be domestic champions and huge platforms in of their own rights, but Huawei has become a global powerhouse,” said Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities Ltd. It is “5G standards that are at the heart of the wider IP debate and why the U.S. and her allies are now doing everything they can to cut to the heart of the Chinese technology IP revolution.”

At the same time, Huawei’s technological ambitions have also gotten the company in hot water with the US: its massive push into future mobile communications has raised hackles in the U.S. and become a focal point for American attempts to contain China’s ascendance.

Going back to the arrest, the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment about the circumstances involving the CFO, although the biggest question on everyone’s mind right now is whether Trump was aware of the pending arrest at the time of his dinner with the Chinese president, and why exactly he had greenlighted the move which would certainly result in another diplomatic scandal, promptly crushing and goodwill that was generated at the G-20 dinner.

Meanwhile, in a statement, Huawei said the arrest was made on behalf of the U.S. so Meng could be extradited to “face unspecified charges” in the Eastern District of New York.

“The company has been provided very little information regarding the charges and is not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng,” Huawei said. “The company believes the Canadian and U.S. legal systems will ultimately reach a just conclusion. Huawei complies with all applicable laws and regulations where it operates, including applicable export control and sanction laws and regulations of the UN, U.S. and EU.”

Tensions between the Chinese telecom giant and U.S. authorities escalated in 2016, when the US voiced concerns for the first time that Huawei and others could install back doors in their equipment that would let them monitor users in the U.S. Huawei has denied those allegations. The Pentagon stopped offering Huawei’s devices on U.S. military bases citing security concerns. Best Buy Co., one of the largest electronics retailers in the U.S., also recently stopped selling Huawei products.

In August, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill banning the government’s use of Huawei technology based on the security concerns. The same month, Australia banned the use of Huawei’s equipment for new faster 5G wireless networks in the country and New Zealand last week did the same, citing national security concerns. Similar moves are under consideration in the U.K. The U.S., which believes Huawei’s equipment can be used for spying, is contacting key allies including Germany, Italy and Japan, to get them to persuade companies in their countries to avoid using equipment from Huawei, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

In 2016, the Commerce Department sought information regarding whether Huawei was possibly sending U.S. technology to Syria and North Korea as well as Iran.

The U.S. previously banned ZTE Corp., a Huawei competitor, for violating a sanctions settlement over transactions with Iran and North Korea.

The cynics out there may claim that the US response is merely in place to delay the development of the company which in the third quarter overtook Apple as the No. 2 global smartphone maker, shipping more than 52.2 million units according to Gartner Inc.

“This is what you call playing hard ball,” said Michael Every, head of Asia financial markets research at Rabobank in Hong Kong. “China is already asking for her release, as can be expected, but if the charges are serious, don’t expect the US to blink.”

The biggest question is what will China do next. One look at futures, which flash crashed earlier when the news of the CFO’s arrest first hit, suggests that whatever it is, Beijing will probably not be happy.

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The next move for the French working people is to organize INDEPENDENTLY against a system that President Macron represents; a system that puts profit over people. This is possible only through unity with the closest allies, as well as the working people in Belgium, Bulgaria and the Netherlands who have already joined the “yellow vest” protests in France.

Those organizations that in the name of French workers suggest reconciliation or dialogue between the French government and working people should be rejected wholeheartedly. Between the reactionary Capitalists and revolutionary workers, there is no middle “progressive” ideology.

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

Featured image is from the author.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth sued the Environmental Protection Agency today for refusing to release public records concerning meetings and communications with the lobbying firm Faegre Baker Daniels, the former employer of EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

“Wheeler is crippling environmental protections that inconvenience his old clients,” said Bill Snape, the Center’s senior counsel. “The public needs to know what happened between Wheeler’s former employer and the environmental agency he’s now running into the ground. We seem to have another fox guarding the henhouse.”

Today’s lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Before joining the EPA, Wheeler worked for almost a decade at Faegre Baker Daniels, where he lobbied for the fossil fuel industry against environmental protections. Wheeler promised to avoid conflicts of interests with his former clients during his Senate confirmation.

“Andrew Wheeler is continuing Scott Pruitt’s toxic, polluter-friendly agenda at the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst at Friends of the Earth. “The public has a right to know just how much power Wheeler’s lobbyist friends have over the EPA. This lawsuit will help expose the dangerous influence of corporate polluters and root out corruption at the EPA.”

Under Wheeler the EPA has moved to weaken a wide range of environmental protections, including a proposal last month to gut a 2016 rule curbing methane pollution from oil and gas facilities.

The Center and FOE filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the EPA about meetings and communications with the oil industry in Spring 2018. In October 2018 the groups notified the agency that it’s in violation of the Act. Seven months have passed, and the agency has failed to release detailed records.

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“This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the ‘Hitler Diaries.’” — WikiLeaks, Twitter, Nov 27, 2018

Those at The Guardian certainly felt they were onto something.  It would be a scoop that would have consequences on a range of fronts featuring President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Julian Assange and the eponymous Russian connection with the 2016 US elections. 

If they could tie the ribbon of Manafort over the Assage package, one linked to the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails in the summer of 2016, they could strike journalistic gold.  At one stroke, they could achieve a trifecta: an exposé on WikiLeaks, Russian involvement, and the tie-in with the Trump campaign. 

The virally charged story, when run towards the leg end of November, claimed that Manafort had visited Assange in the embassy “in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016.”  Speculation happily followed in an account untroubled by heavy documentation.

“It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.  But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

It was a strikingly shoddy effort.  An “internal document” supposedly garnered from the Ecuadorean intelligence agency named a certain “Paul Manaford [sic]” as a guest while also noting the presence of “Russians”.  No document or individual names were supplied.

The enterprise was supposedly to come with an added satisfaction: getting one over the prickly Assange, a person with whom the paper has yet a frosty association with since things went pear shaped after Cablegate in 2010. Luke Harding, the lead behind this latest packaging effort, has received his fair share of pasting in the past, with Assange accusing him of “minimal additional research” and mere reiteration in the shabby cobbling The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man(2014). “The Guardian,” Assange observed in reviewing the work, “is a curiously inward-looking beast.”  Harding, for his part, is whistling the promotional tune of his unmistakably titled book Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House.  The feud persists with much fuel.

Unfortunately for those coup seekers attempting a framed symmetry, the bomb has yet to detonate, an inert creature finding its ways into placid waters. WikiLeaks was, understandably, the first out of the stables with an irate tweet. 

“Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation.  @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” 

Manafort himself denied ever meeting Assange.

“I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.  I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly.  I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.”

WikiLeaks has also pointed to a certain busy bee fabricator as a possible source for Harding et al, an Ecuadorean journalist by the name of Fernando Villavicencio.  Villavicencio cut his milk teeth digging into the record of Moreno’s predecessor and somewhat Assange friendly, Rafael Correa.

Glenn Greenwald, himself having had a stint – and a fruitful one covering the Snowden revelations on the National Security Agency – had also been relentless on the inconsistencies. If Manafort did visit Assange, why the vagueness and absence of evidence? London, he points out, “is one of the world’s most surveilled, if not the most surveilled, cities.”  The Ecuadorean embassy is, in turn, “one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.” Yet no photographic or video evidence has been found linking Manafort to Assange.

The grey-haired establishment types are also wondering about the lack of fizz and bubble.  Paul Farhi at The Washington Post furnishes an example:

“No other news organization has been able to corroborate the Guardian’s reporting to substantiate its central claim of a meeting.  News organizations typically do such independent reporting to confirm important stories.”

Another distorting aspect to this squalid matter is the Manafort-Ecuadorean link, which does little to help Harding’s account.  A debt ridden Manafort, according to the New York Times, ventured his way to Ecuador in mid-May last year to proffer his services to the newly elected president, Lenín Moreno.  Moreno could not have been flattered: this was a man’s swansong and rescue bid, desperate to ingratiate himself with governments as varied as Iraqi Kurdistan and Puerto Rico.   

In two meetings (the number might be more) between Manafort and his Ecuadorean interlocutor, various issues were canvassed.  Eyes remained on China but there was also interest in finding some workable solution to debt relief from the United States.  Then came that issue of a certain Australian, and now also Ecuadorean national, holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, London.

Moreno has been courting several options, none of which seem to have grown wings.  A possibility of getting a diplomatic post for Assange in Russia did not take off. (British authorities still threatened the prospect of arrest.)  The issue of removing the thorniest dissident publisher in modern memory remains furiously alive.  

As ever, accounts of the Moreno-Manafort tête-à-tête vary.  A spokesman for Manafort, one Jason Maloni, suggests a different account.  Manafort was not the instigator, but merely the recipient, of a query from Moreno about “his desire to remove Julian Assange from Ecuador’s embassy.”  Manafort listened impassively, “but made no promises as this was ancillary to the purpose of the meeting.”  Russia, he sought to clarify, did not crop up. 

Fraud might run through Manafort’s blood (convictions on eight counts of bank-and tax-fraud is fairly convincing proof of that), but the case assembled against Assange seems very much one of enthusiastic botch-up masquerading as a stitch-up.  So far, the paper has batten down the hatches, and Harding has referred any queries through The Guardian’s spokesman, Brendan O’Grady.  Zeal can be punishing.  O’Grady will have to earn his keep. 

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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]

Extreme weather events are occurring more and more frequently, in line with scientists’ prognostications about the increasingly-dire effects of global warming. Yet polls show that most Americans still do not take global warming seriously. What accounts for such a disconnect? In part, it’s due to how the mass media “stage” their news coverage.

Recent wildfires have wreaked absolute havoc in California, covering more than 242,000 acres, destroying more than 13,000 structures including an entire town of 26,000, and killing 85 people with others still unaccounted for. Driven by unprecedented drought conditions, this is the worst wildfire season in recorded state history and it’s far from over.

Less than two months ago, Hurricane Michael roared through the Florida panhandle and into Georgia, killing at least 60 and causing $15 billion in damage. It was described as “the worst hurricane to ever hit that part of Florida.” Last year there was Hurricane Maria that devastated Puerto Rico, with a death toll of almost 3,000 and $91 billion in damage.

If climate science is taken seriously, none of these events should have come as any great surprise. Indeed, climatologists have been warning about such calamities for decades, saying that global warming is an existential threat to all mankind. Virtually every national academy of science in the world has joined them.

Despite record-breaking natural catastrophes, many Americans don’t take global warming seriously

Yet a large percentage of Americans continue to believe that global warming either (a) does not exist or (b) if it does exist, is not caused by human activity and therefore is not something we can do anything about. A recent (Oct 29-Nov 1, 2018) ABC News/Washington Post poll of 1,029 registered voters nationwide, for example, found that global warming ranked only seventh in importance among respondents’ concerns, well below topics such as immigration, “reducing divisions,” and border security. Only 48% agreed it was even a “very important” issue!

National news coverage is partly to blame

If indeed global warming is the existential threat that scientists claim it to be, what explains such relative unconcern about it by the US public? Why the disconnect? Although there are of course many possible reasons, certainly one of them is the shortage of attention given to global climate change by the mainstream media. In particular, many natural disasters such as the wildfires and hurricanes cited above are covered extensively by the national news media but with little or no mention of global warming. Thus, many viewers no doubt fail to connect the dots.

Some examples

For example, in a long Associated Press report the day after Hurricane Michael hit the Florida panhandle, global warming was not even mentioned until 21 paragraphs into the article. (How many readers go that deep into any article?) And even then it was quickly dismissed: “The storm is likely to fire up the debate over global warming. Scientists say global warming is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme weather, such as storms, droughts, floods and fires, and Michael was fueled by abnormal water temperatures in the Gulf — 4-to-5 degrees above the historic norm for this time of year. But without extensive study, they cannot directly link a single weather event to the changing climate.” [my emphasis]

Far more often there’s no mention of global warming at all. For example, the CBS Nightly News devoted the first 13 minutes of its national broadcast (10.11.18) to Hurricane Michael, yet failed to mention global warming/climate change even once. With regard to the recent California wildfires, a study by Media Matters found that, on average, three main national networks (CBS, ABC, NBC) mentioned “climate change” in only 3.7% of their broadcasts about those fires.

“Staging”

To describe these sorts of textual manipulations, discourse analysts use a concept borrowed from the theater world: “staging.” Staging refers to the degree of prominence given to a certain concept in a text or body of texts. Concepts that receive significant attention are said to be foregrounded, those that do not are backgrounded. Backgrounding reaches an extreme when relevant information is entirely omitted.

The cases cited above all illustrate such staging at work. In national mainstream news reports about natural disasters, global warming is systematically backgrounded, most often not even mentioned at all. Headline stories capture the attention of countless citizens and could have educational value. When they conceal the linkage between global warming and natural disasters, golden opportunities are lost.

Why do they do this? Follow the money!

Why do the mainstream news media do this? Although a number of possible reasons come to mind, the cui bono principle leads us to two in particular. First, the United States today is extremely polarized politically, with one entire party notably in denial about anthropogenic climate change. Thus, if a national network devoted much attention to it, it would risk alienating a very large bloc of voters, thereby cutting heavily into corporate profits.

Another reason, I would suggest, is the corporate ownership and commercial sponsorship of these same national networks. ABC, CBS, and NBC (and CNN, FoxNews, etc.) are all heavily dependent on a consumerist economic system that does not protect but rather exploits our natural environment. It’s a system that stands to gain, at least in the short term, by suppressing public awareness of global climate change and its increasingly destructive consequences. Systematically downplaying or ignoring altogether the linkage between global warming and natural disasters serves that purpose.

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This article first appeared in The Daily Doublespeak (dailydoublespeak.com).

Tom Huckin is a professor emeritus of English and Writing at the University of Utah, specializing in the study of modern propaganda. He has co-authored five books on academic subjects and written some 90 scholarly papers, including a chapter in Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy (2016). He is a co-founder of the Salt Lake City chapter of Move to Amend, which aspires to get big money out of our elections. He can be reached at [email protected].

Source

Associated Press (2018) “Hurricane Michael is leaving a path of destruction, but it isn’t done yet.” 10.11.18

Featured image is from SocialistWorker.org

The contrived outrage regarding Putin’s high five with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman obscures the fact that Russia-Saudi and the Saudi-US relations are completely different.

The US relationship with Saudi Arabia, a longstanding outrage among those who take US foreign policy rhetoric about “human rights” seriously, is widely in question. The slaughter of Jamal Khoshoggi, a journalist associated with the Washington Post, carried out in a particularly brutal manner, was hard to overlook. The fact that the USA sells huge amounts of weapons and purchases huge amounts of oil from a despotic monarchy that still practices public beheadings, while normally overlooked, has suddenly become a widespread topic of debate. The atrocities in Yemen, currently committed by the Kingdom in effort to restore puppet leader Mansour Hadi, are suddenly now up for debate as well, with liberals suddenly being outraged by crimes they previously ignored.

However, those forces that seek to change the conversation, have latched on to clever conversational diversion. Yes, while the US government’s relationship with the Saudi monarchy is one of billions of dollars in weapons sales and contracts with Wall Street’s four supermajor oil monopolists, Russian President Vladimir Putin is being blasted for giving a “high five” to the Saudi Crown Prince at the G20 in Argentina.

The clip has been widely circulated by Russia’s detractors as “proof” that Russia’s relationship is somehow the moral equivalent of the US relationship with the Saudi autocrats. Not only has the short video clip circulated the web, but a confused sketch on the popular US comedy sketch took it to even further, confused levels.

The reality is that Russia’s foreign policy and Saudi foreign policy simply do not coincide. Russia is supporting the Syrian Arab Republic, Saudi Arabia supports those working to violently overthrow it. Russia is friendly with the Islamic Republic of Iran and closely financially tied to it, while Saudi Arabia seeks to isolate Iran and pushes anti-Shia sectarianism among the Muslims of the world.

Yes, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been intensely negotiating in recent months, for very clear reasons. Russia, like Saudi Arabia, is a major oil exporting country. During the years of the Bush administration, the oil prices skyrocketed to some of the highest prices in history, reaching over $110 per barrel. Then, starting in 2014, the oil prices dropped to historic lows, at one point reaching a mere $27 per barrel.

These erratic shifts in the oil markets caused huge problems, not just for Saudi Arabia and Russia, but for the global economy. Brazil saw big problems with Petrobas, its state run oil company. Venezuela suffered the most, with a food crisis and political turmoil. Nigeria faced hardship, as did other oil producing state. Fracking colonies in the barren regions of America such as North Dakota dried up and collapsed. Fracking companies went bust, with the big four supermajors restoring their monopoly significantly.

Saudi Arabia seemed to be working against its own interest, churning oil onto the markets, driving the price down, and bankrupting itself. Regardless, oil prices now seem to be much more stable, not astronomically high and not catastrophically low.

This is mainly due to the huge efforts of Vladimir Putin in negotiating with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Putin and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia have negotiated to keep the prices in a safe, predictable place.

The fact that Putin has been able to maintain a relationship with the Saudis and negotiated with them to keep oil production in order, and work with other OPEC countries to do the same, is not a moral outrage whatsoever.

To equate this with the US propping up, arming, and bankrolling of Saudi Arabia, as a calculated social media campaign has aimed to do, is simply outrageous.

The human lives lost in Yemen, killed with US made weapons, cannot be equated with a friendly hand gesture. Russia has negotiated with Saudi Arabia to keep oil markets secure, while the USA and Britain have propped up a brutal autocracy with links to terrorism.

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Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from Business Recorder

Depois de ter imposto pesadas tarifas aduaneiras ​​sobre as mercadorias chinesas atingindo 250 biliões de dólares, o Presidente Trump no G-20, aceitou uma “trégua”, adiando outras medidas imediatas, sobretudo, porque a economia USA está a ser atingida pela retaliação chinesa. Mas, para além dos pretextos comerciais, existem as razões estratégicas.

Sob a pressão do Pentágono e das agências de serviços secretos, os USA proibiram os smartphones e as infraestruturas de telecomunicações da empresa chinesa Huawei, sob a acusação de que podem ser usadas ​​para espionagem e pressionam os aliados para que façam o mesmo. Advertem, sobretudo, a Itália, a Alemanha e o Japão, países com as bases  militares USA mais importantes, e sob perigo de espionagem chinesa estão as mesmas agências de serviços secretos USA que devassaram, durante anos, as comunicações dos aliados – em particular, a Alemanha e a Itália. A Apple americana, em tempos, líder absoluta do sector, foi superada nas vendas pela Huawei (a propriedade desta empresa pertence aos funcionários, na qualidade de accionistas), elevada ao segundo lugar na classificação mundial, atrás da Samsung sulcoreana, o que representa uma tendência geral.

Os Estados Unidos – cuja supremacia económica se baseia artificialmente sobre o dólar, até agora, a principal moeda das reservas monetárias do comércio mundial – estão, cada vez mais, a ser ultrapassados pela China, quer na capacidade, quer na qualidade produtiva. “O Ocidente – escreve o ‘New York Times’ – estava confiante de que a aproximação chinesa não funcionaria. Tiveram só de esperar e ainda estão a aguardar. A China projecta uma vasta rede global de comércio, investimentos e infraestruturas que remodelarão os vínculos financeiros e geopolíticos”. Isto verifica-se, especialmente, mas não só, ao longo da Nova Estrada da Seda, que a China está a concretizar em 70 países da Ásia, Europa e África.

O ‘New York Times’ examinou 600 projectos efectuados pela China em 112 países, entre os quais:

Ø  41 oleodutos e gasodutos;

Ø  199 centrais, sobretudo, hidreléctricas (entre as quais, sete barragens no Camboja que fornecem a metade das necessidades de eletricidade do país);

Ø  203 pontes, estradas e ferrovias, além de vários portos importantes no Paquistão, no Sri Lanka, na Malásia e noutros países.

Tudo isto é considerado em Washington, como uma “agressão aos nossos interesses vitais”, como sublinha o Pentágono na “Estratégia Nacional de Defesa dos Estados Unidos da América, em 2018”. O Pentágono define a China como “competidor estratégico que usa uma economia predatória para intimidar os seus vizinhos”, esquecendo-se da série de guerras conduzidas pelos Estados Unidos e, também contra a China, até 1949, para saquear os países dos seus recursos. Enquanto a China constrói barragens, ferrovias e pontes úteis não só à sua rede comercial, mas também ao desenvolvimento dos países em que são produzidos, nas guerras USA, as barragens, as ferrovias e as pontes, são os primeiros alvos a ser destruídos.

A China é acusada pelo Pentágono de “querer impor a curto prazo, a sua hegemonia na Região do Índico-Pacífico e de querer apanhar de surpresa os Estados Unidos para, no futuro, alcançar a predominânciaglobal”,  em conjunto com a Rússia, acusada de querer “fragmentar a NATO” e “sublevar os processos democráticos, na Crimeia e na Ucrânia Oriental”. Daí o “incidente” no Estreito de Kerch, causado por Kiev sob a direcção do Pentágono, para interromper a reunião Trump-Putin na Cimeira do G-20 (como aconteceu) e fazer entrar a Ucrânia na NATO, da qual já é um membro de facto. A “competição estratégica a longo prazo com a China e com a Rússia” é considerada, pelo Pentágono, como sendo a “ principal prioridade”. Para este fim, “modernizaremos as forças nucleares e reforçaremos a Aliança transatlântica da NATO”.

Por trás da guerra comercial, prepara-se a guerra nuclear.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 04 de Dezembro de 2018

VIDEO (PandoraTV) :

Dopo aver imposto pesanti dazi su merci cinesi per 250 miliardi di dollari, il presidente Trump al G-20 ha accettato una «tregua» posticipando ulteriori misure, soprattutto perché l’economia USA è colpita dalla ritorsione cinese. Ma oltre alle ragioni commerciali ci sono quelle strategiche.

Sotto pressione del Pentagono e delle agenzie di intelligence, gli USA hanno bandito gli smartphone e le infrastrutture di telecomunicazioni della società cinese Huawei, con l’accusa che possono essere usati per spionaggio, e premono sugli alleati perché facciano altrettanto. Ad avvertire soprattutto Italia, Germania e Giappone, paesi con le più importanti basi militari USA, sul pericolo di spionaggio cinese sono le stesse agenzie USA di intelligence che hanno spiato per anni le comunicazioni degli alleati, in particolare Germania e Italia. La statunitense Apple, un tempo leader assoluta del settore, è stata scavalcata come vendite  dalla Huawei (società di proprietà degli impiegati quali azionisti), piazzatasi al secondo posto mondiale dietro la sudcoreana Samsung.  Ciò è emblematico di  una tendenza generale.

Gli Stati uniti – la cui supremazia economica si basa artificiosamente sul dollaro, principale moneta finora delle riserve valutarie e dei commerci mondiali – vengono sempre più scavalcati dalla Cina sia come capacità che come qualità produttiva. «L’Occidente – scrive il New York Times – era sicuro che l’approccio cinese non avrebbe funzionato. Doveva solo aspettare. Sta ancora aspettando. La Cina progetta una vasta rete globale di commerci, investimenti e infrastrutture che rimodelleranno i legami finanziari e geopolitici». Ciò avviene soprattutto, ma non solo,  lungo la Nuova Via della Seta che la Cina sta realizzando attraverso 70 paesi di Asia, Europa e Africa.

Il New York Times ha esaminato 600 progetti realizzati dalla Cina in 112 paesi, tra cui 41 oleodotti e gasdotti; 199 centrali soprattutto idroelettriche (tra cui sette dighe in Cambogia che forniscono la metà del fabbisogno elettrico del paese); 203 ponti, strade e ferrovie, più diversi grandi porti in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia e altri paesi. Tutto questo viene considerato a Washington una «aggressione ai nostri interessi vitali», come sottolinea il Pentagono nella «Strategia di difesa nazionale degli Stati Uniti d’America 2018». Il Pentagono definisce la Cina «competitore strategico che usa una economia predatoria per intimidire i suoi vicini», dimenticando la serie di guerre condotte dagli Stati uniti, anche contro la Cina fino al 1949, per depredare i paesi delle loro risorse. Mentre la Cina costruisce dighe, ferrovie e ponti utili non solo alla sua rete commerciale ma anche allo sviluppo dei paesi in cui vengono realizzati, nelle guerre Usa dighe, ferrovie e ponti sono i primi obiettivi ad essere distrutti.

La Cina viene accusata dal Pentagono di «voler imporre a breve termine la sua egemonia nella Regione Indo-Pacifica e di voler spiazzare gli Stati uniti per conseguire in futuro la preminenza globale», di concerto con la Russia accusata di voler «frantumare la NATO» e «sovvertire i processi democratici in Crimea e Ucraina orientale». Da qui l’«incidente» nello stretto di Kerch, provocato da Kiev sotto regia del Pentagono per far saltare l’incontro Trump-Putin al G-20 (come è avvenuto)  e far entrare l’Ucraina nella NATO, di cui è già membro di fatto. La «competizione strategica a lungo termine con Cina e Russia» è considerata dal Pentagono «principale priorità». A tal fine «modernizzerà le forze nucleari e rafforzerà l’Alleanza trans-atlantica della NATO».

Dietro la guerra commerciale si prepara la guerra nucleare.
il manifesto, 04 dicembre 2018

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Another meeting on the Libyan settlement was held in Palermo, southern Italy, November 12-13. The leaders of the warring factions, EU and UN representatives, as well as the parties concerned, took part in the summit.

After two days of intense talks, the participants agreed to arrange a new conference in Libya by the beginning of the next year. It’s expected the date of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections would be announced there.

On the one hand, the result of the current meeting on Libya is conditional as the talks in Palermo haven’t brought something specific for the Libyans. Since the politicians meet and seek for the ways of resolving the crisis, the nation continues to suffer from the consequence of foreign intervention and Gaddafi overthrow in 2011.

On the other hand, Libyan National Army (LNA) commander Khalifa Haftar who was in Italy as a private person, met the conference participants on the sidelines. Haftar and Sarraj held an extensive private discussion during the informal talks of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Tunisian President Beji Qaid Al Sebsi, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and European Council President Donald Tusk. Although the result of the closed meeting is still unknown the very fact speaks volumes.

First, the negotiations on the sidelines of the summit were aimed at searching for the best ways of resolving the Libyan crisis. By participating in the sides demonstrated their desire and commitment to the fast ending of the civil war.

Second, the isolation of Turkey from political accommodation has become one of the most important outcomes of the summit. This step could be inferred from the fact that Turkish Vice-President Fuat Oktay was not invited. Perhaps, this is due to the Haftar’s position, who has repeatedly criticized both Ankara and Doha for supporting the Islamists in Tripoli.

Commenting on the results of the conference United Nations Special Envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame declared the success as all the sides agreed to follow the UN roadmap. The document envisages the amendment to the political arrangement signed in Skhirat, Morocco in 2015, holding a conference bringing together main political forces and civil society organizations, the revision of the Libyan constitution, and the preparation for the presidential and parliamentary elections.

Ways to resolve the conflict

By the way, holding the meeting in Palermo is not enough for the settlement of the Libyan conflict. The leader of the Eastern Libya Haftar and pro-Western politician Sarraj will face many challenges like the disarmament of numerous militias, initiation of the national reconciliation process, and economic recovery.

The first goal for two politicians in coordination is soluble. It is vital for the end of the civil war and the nationwide reconciliation.

Reconciliation is the most challenging component within the Libyan settlement. No one would assist the politicians in this matter. To resolve this issue Haftar and Sarraj will have to make a lot of efforts and spend time as the situation requires establishing a dialogue with various social, ethnic, and tribal groups. Such an approach will accelerate the creation of favourable conditions for holding presidential and parliamentary elections. The formation of new political power in the country will be the key to the economic recovery. There are a lot of opportunities to stabilize the situation in the state. According to media, the size of Gaddafi’s [government] and family assets frozen by Western banks rises to one hundred billion dollars. The leading economists believe these funds will be enough to restore the national economy ruined during the war. No doubt, the United Nations will unfreeze the Libyan assets after the establishment of a strong centralized power in the country.

Thus, despite all the contradictions between the parties to the conflict, the summit in Palermo could give the new impetus to the Libyan settlement. And the meeting of the political opponents represented by Haftar and Sarraj could become the first step towards consolidation and restoration of Libyan society.

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Want another thing to keep you up at night?

Consider a conversation between long-time Middle East reporter Reese Erlich and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, Jr. on the people currently directing the Trump administration’s policy toward Iran. Commenting on National Security Advisor John Bolton’s defense of the invasion of Iraq, Freeman says

“The neoconservative group think their good ideas were poorly implemented in Iraq,” and that the lesson of the 2003 invasion that killed upwards of 500,000 people and destabilized an entire region is, “If at first you don’t succeed, do the same thing again somewhere else.”

That “somewhere else” is Iran, and Bolton is one of the leading voices calling for confronting the Teheran regime and squeezing Iran through draconian sanctions “until the pips squeak.” Since sanctions are unlikely to have much effect—they didn’t work on North Korea, have had little effect on Russia and failed to produce regime change in Cuba—the next logical step, Erlich suggests, is a military attack on Iran.

Such an attack would be a leap into darkness, since most Americans—and their government in particular—are virtually clueless about the country we seem bound to go to war with. Throwing a little light on that darkness is a major reason Erlich wrote the book. For over 18 years he has reported on Iran, talking with important government figures and everyday people and writing articles on the country that increasingly looks to be our next little war. Except it will be anything but “little.”

History matters when it comes to life and death decisions like war, but unfortunately, one of the mainstream media’s glaring deficiencies is its lack of interest in the subject. If newspapers like the New York Times had bothered to read Rudyard Kipling on Afghanistan or T.E. Lawrence on the British occupation of Iraq, the editors might have had second thoughts about supporting the Bush administration’s invasions of those countries. Of course, this was not just the result of wearing historical blinders. As Erlich points out, the mainstream media almost always follows in the wake of American foreign policy, more cheerleader than watchdog.

But if that media learned anything from the disasters in Central Asia and the Middle East, it is not apparent when it comes to its reporting on Iran. Most Americans think that country is run by mad mullahs who hate the U.S. and is—in the words of President Donald Trump— a “terrorist nation.” Americans don’t hold that image of Iran by accident, but because that is the way the country is represented in the media.

The fact that the U.S. government (along with some help from the British) overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, and backed Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980 that resulted in over a million casualties has vanished down the memory hole.

One of the book’s strong points is its careful unraveling of US-Iranian relations, setting the record straight on things like the development of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. While the Shah was in power, Washington pushed nuclear power plants on Iran, including nuclear fuel enrichment technology, even though the Americans were aware that it could lead to weapon development. Indeed, that is exactly how India produced its first nuclear weapon back in 1974.

Erlich also analyzes everything from class structure to Iran’s complex ethnicities and explains how the Islamic Republic functions politically and economically. While he is a long-time critic of US foreign policy, Erlich is no admirer of Iran’s political institutions. Iran is far more democratic than the absolute monarchies of the Persian Gulf—with which the Washington is closely allied—but it is hardly a democracy.

“Iran is ruled by a reactionary, dictatorial clique that oppresses its own people,” he writes, “however, that does not make Iran a threat to Americans.” What Teheran does threaten “are the interests of the political, military and corporate elite who run the United States.” On a number of occasions Iran has made peace overtures to the U.S., all of which have been rejected.

Iran is a country with a very long history, and its people have a strong sense of nationalism, even if much of the population is not overly fond of Iran’s top-down political system and clerical interference in everyday life. The idea that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow their government because of sanctions or in the event of a military attack on the government is, according to Erlich, pure illusion.

The Iran Agenda Today covers a lot of ground without bogging down in a overly detailed accounts of several millennia of history. It certainly provides enough historical context to conclude that an attack on Iran—which would likely also involve Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and possibly Israel—would unleash regional chaos with international repercussions.

Such a war would be mainly an air war—not even the Trump administration is crazy enough to contemplate a ground invasion of a vast country filled with 80 million people—and would certainly inflict enormous damage. But to what end? Iran will never surrender and its people would rally to the defense of their country. Teheran is also perfectly capable of striking back using unconventional means. Oil prices would spike, and countries that continue to do business with Iran—China, Russia, Turkey and India for starters—would see their growth rates take a hit. No European country would support such a war.

Of course creating chaos is what the Trump administration excels at, and in the short run Iran would suffer a grievous wound. But Teheran would weather the blow and Americans would be in yet another forever war, this time with a far more formidable foe than Pushtin tribes in Afghanistan or jihadists in Iraq.

Mr. Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may get their war, but war is a deeply uncertain business. As Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, one of the founders of modern warfare, once noted,

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Erlich, a Peabody Award winner and the author of five books, has written a timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran and why, if our country continues on its current path, we—and the world—are headed into a long, dark tunnel.

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Isn’t Amerika great? I mean, look at the world of (so called) television journalism. The more these characters ‘lay down’ for the masters of empire, the more they get compensated.

Let’s look at what transpired in March 2003 via our infamous ‘boob tube’. Before we get to that motley crew, we did  have one of the unique and authentic (for those times) television news talk journalists, Phil Donahue and his daily show. His producer at the time, Jeff Cohen (of Fairness and Accuracy in Media), told this interviewer (on my internet radio show) that NBC, owned at the time by General Electric (a war industry corporation), gave him his ‘marching orders’ as to the show’s lineup of guests.

“We were covering, that winter, the run-up to a possible invasion of Iraq. I was told to make sure that for every guest on Phil’s show that was against the invasion etc, I needed to have two guests on in favor of the Bush/Cheney agenda.”

What finally happened was that before the ‘day of infamy’, the March 19th attack on Iraq, the Donahue show was cancelled… due to what they said were ‘low ratings’. Cohen contests that as being false (duh, like ‘False News’ folks?).

Flashback to the actual invasion of Iraq on March 19th 2003.

This writer was actively following the events leading up to it each and every evening. I actually was able to get a Canadian news channel on C-Span to get a more ‘level headed’ account of it all. Well, on that fateful morning, when I turned on the boob tube to either CNN or MSNBC, I saw the infamous ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign going on.

I cried! And then I could see some of the ‘War Whores’ come to life before my very eyes.

You had Aaron Brown and Lester Holt giving out the government line about the merits of what our nation was doing… which in reality was nothing short of a premeditated attack on a sovereign nation.

They, along with most of their compatriots, wore those flag pins on their lapels as they cheerlead the assault on Iraq’s infrastructure and people. Little Katie Couric of NBC actually walked through the halls of her network exclaiming “Marines Rock!” You had Geraldo Rivera, whoring himself for Fox News, being embedded with our troops and reporting as if he was in France right after D-Day. All whores, every single one of them!

What happened to these fine and professional journalists after all the smoke cleared?

Well, as the years went by good old ‘Lester the Lapdog’ became a top NBC news anchor, so revered that he actually moderated a 2016 presidential debate.

Little Katie Couric went from NBC to CBS to ABC from 2003 through 2014… earning millions! She even got her own daytime talk show.. produced by that great ‘progressive corporation’ Disney.

Geraldo Rivera, who this writer used to enjoy on 1970s ABC local news in NYC doing great investigative pieces, stayed with FOX for years after, and then became a talk show host on both radio and the boob tube. Oh, and Aaron Brown, another cheerleader for the (both illegal and immoral) invasion and occupation of Iraq, actually became Professor Aaron Brown of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State U (2007- 2014).

So much for integrity. One wonders if any of the ‘War Whores’ ever actually faced those same cameras years later to say ‘Mea Culpa’ for being a whore for the empire?

Methinks not. Oh, the only rationale that most of our media and political whores who backed the lies and disinformation have done is to say ‘Well, the info was incorrect about WMDs in Iraq and we were misled by those with good intentions.’ Yeah, and I have this bridge in Brooklyn…..

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].

Since it was uploaded to YouTube just ten weeks ago, Michael Oswald’s seminal documentary film on Britain and its tax haven empire has gained over 1,000,000 views. “The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire” documents how British elites created a network of tax havens after World War II and the lengths they take today to preserve it – exemplified in a chilling scene where a Jersey police officer harasses and interrupts the filmmakers’ interview with a tax haven whistleblower. Based on Nick Shaxson’s best-selling book Treasure Islands: The Men Who Stole the World, the film delivers a sobering account of Britain’s role in corrupting the global economy.

The documentary is available for free on YouTube in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Subtitles are available in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Hungarian, English, Turkish and Portuguese.

Director Michael Oswald said about his inspiration for the film: 

I realized that there was an interesting, coherent and self-contained story that had not been told, the story of Britain’s transformation from a colonial power to a financial power, and the myriad and obscure financial structures created by City of London financial interests that lie at the heart of this transformation.”  (read more here.)

Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen, who co-produced The Spider’s Web, traces his interest in the subject back to the late-1970s when he and various colleagues started to look at London’s role as a global tax haven:

We had no doubt that the City of London was a major player in the process of looting poorer countries of their wealth and in protecting Britain’s secrecy jurisdiction satellites from political attempts – at the United Nations, for example – to rectify the policy and regulatory flaws that enabled capital flight and tax dodging on such an immense scale.” (read more here)

Made on an astonishingly small budget, The Spider’s Web has been acclaimed by reviewers.  Here is a sample of what they’ve said:

Forget anything by John Le Carre, this is a real political drama which is more thrilling than anything seen in Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.”
– Filmotomy

Framed with strong images of the City of London, tax havens and set to a haunting original soundtrack, The Spider’s Web is a film all ordinary, tax-paying citizens should watch.”
– Modern Times Review

The Spider’s Web gives an excellent overview of the scale of the global tax dodging problem and its corrosive effects on democracy.”

–Open Democracy

This film is not a thriller. There are no crimes, murders, war or rape. But it deals with the consequences of such acts, metaphorical or real, and you need a strong constitution to watch it, if you care about the state of capital. It is calm, professional and accurate, like a hitman should be. I can’t recommend it enough.”
– Mr Ethical, whistleblower

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On November 16^th, the Washington Post headlined that “CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination” and reported that “The CIA’s assessment, in which officials have said they have high confidence, is the most definitive to date linking [Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] to the [murder] operation.”

Then, after almost a full week of silence on that, US President Trump, on November 22^nd, denied that the CIA had come to any conclusion, at all, about whether Saudi Crown Prince Salman had ordered the murder of Khashoggi: Trump said

“They did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways. I have the report… They have not concluded. I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.”

Congressional Democrats promptly responded to the President’s statement, by repeating what the Washington Post had said, and telling CNN,

“The CIA concluded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi. They did it with high confidence, which is the highest level of accuracy that they will vouch for.”

America’s voting public believe whomever they want to believe, which is almost always the politicians and newsmedia that the given individual votes for and obtains news from. In such a country, objective reality is hard to find, because the crucial evidence is hidden from the public. For example, the CIA’s report on the Khashoggi murder is hidden from the public. Neither the Government nor the press trust the public enough to allow the public to see anything of the actual report itself. So, voters can only go by whatever prejudices they have. Therefore, in America, prejudices reign, and it happens because the Government and the press don’t trust the public enough to present the actual evidence to them. Either a person trusts the Government, or the person doesn’t.

But what is “the Government,” in such a case as this? Is it the WP-alleged assertion of what “the CIA” supposedly said, or is it instead the US President, who says that the CIA didn’t assert any such thing? And, if you don’t trust what one side, in such a case, calls “the Government,” then it’s easy for that side to label you “unpatriotic,” even if you happen to be a patriot asserting the truth, and “the Government” happens to be the actual traitor against its own public, such as the US Government itself has been proven to be (and not only about such matters as 2003’s “WMD in Iraq”, in which the US Government was clearly traitorous).

When the Washington Post, on November 22^nd, reported Trump’s comments about the CIA’s report, the newspaper didn’t even include Trump’s denial, which was quoted here, but instead gave only fluff from Trump, such as “I hate the crime, I hate the coverup. I will tell you this: The crown prince hates it more than I do, and they have vehemently denied it.” That newspaper merely paraphrased Trump, didn’t actually quote him, about the important parts of the President’s statement there. The newspaper opened its ‘news’-report with “President Trump on Thursday contradicted the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”

But there was only that one-word paraphrase (“contradicted”). That’s all there was, in the entire thousand-word ‘news’-report, none of his actual statements about the CIA’s report on the killing of Khashoggi.

Reporters like this should be fired, but they won’t be if the purpose of hiring and retaining them is to hide the actual evidence from the public, by providing only paraphrases (in this case, a mere one-word paraphrase) for the crucial parts, instead of presenting the actual evidence itself (by quoting it directly).

The WP excluded anything like Trump’s statement that “They did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways. I have the report … They have not concluded. I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.” Instead, their mere paraphrase of that, alleging that Trump “contradicted the CIA’s assessment” didn’t present either a quotation from the CIA’s report, or a quotation from the President, much less (as would have been required in an authentic news-report on an alleged contradiction, such as this) both, so as to allow subscribers to judge for themselves whether or not the President had ‘contradicted’ what the CIA’s report had actually said. In other words: that was a fake ‘news’-report in the Washington Post; it presented no credible news, but only evidence-less fluff, about this important matter.

‘News’-media such as that are part of a political culture that’s based not on science — a society in which individuals make public-affairs judgments on their own, on the basis of the actual evidence being presented to them — but that’s based instead purely on faith. It’s a religious (or faith-based) political culture, not a scientific one. That’s to say: judgments are based on whatever the individual’s prejudice happens to be. Judgments by the public are not based on the evidence, because the evidence is actually being hidden from the public. Obviously, there is no accountability — it’s not even possible to have accountability in such a political culture, because the evidence is being hidden from voters.

On the night of Friday, November 23^rd, Trump — his Administation — released the long-awaited “Fourth National Climate Assessment” from a panel of 300 climatologists, and it calculated, for example, that Phoenix, Arizona, during 1976-2005, averaged around 80 days per year above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and that if we do everything possible to minimize fossil-fuels-usage, that average will be around 125 such days annually between 2070 and 2100, but otherwise it will be around 150 days annually, which is almost twice as many sizzling days per year as compared with the period 1976-2005.

Screengrab from CNN

On Monday, November 26^th, CNN headlined “Donald Trump buried a climate change report because ‘I don’t believe it’” and reported that,

“‘I don’t believe it,’ Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read ‘some’ of the report. It’s a report which had been “produced by 13 agencies within the Trump administration — the result of Congress, in the 1980s, mandating that this sort of report be submitted every four years as a sort of reference point for lawmakers and legislators.”

This news-report from CNN was real, not fake like the Washington Post’s was on the Khashoggi matter, and it linked to the evidence, including to the actual study itself, and to Trump’s statement that he doesn’t believe it.

Here, then, is an actual example of authentic news-reporting, which is credit-worthy and not simply to be taken on mere trust (like the Washington Post’s ‘news’ about Trump’s ‘contradicting’ his own CIA’s report).

But will Trump’s voters still have faith in him, despite his clear divergence from the professionals on climatology, the scientists who are experts in these types of matters? Obviously, such a President (one who rejects the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion on a scientific topic) is an actual crackpot; but will his voters believe him simply because they want to believe him — because they’re people of faith and he here happens to be peddling their particular belief — because they’re not people of science? Then how can democracy even function, with such a public? Only authoritarianism (a faith-based regime) can function, in such a country as this.

On November 26^th, the most Trumpian ‘news’-medium of all, Breitbart, didn’t even report Trump’s “I don’t believe it,” but did include, on November 26th, a November 25th ‘news’-article bannered “Experts on Climate Change Assessment: ‘Every Conclusion of This Latest Government Report Is False’”, which opened:

The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, has gained praise from leftists and left-wing environmental groups as a dire warning of the coming death and destruction in the United States if we don’t stop global warming.

But critics of the report, including scientists, have slammed it as “exaggeration,” bad science and even said its conclusions are “false.”

“This latest climate report is just more of the same – except for even greater exaggeration, worse science, and added interference in the political process by unelected, self-serving bureaucrats,” Tim Huelskamp, president of the Heartland Institute said in statements released by the free-market think tank following the report’s release…

Nothing was said there about the Heartland Institute’s being funded by far-right billionaires including many who own or are heavily invested in oil and gas corporations. These people have a financial stake in downplaying the environmental threat that’s posed by their products. Very few climatologists are members of that particular propaganda-operation. It’s fake, as an ‘authority’ about anything. Clearly, Trump represents those fossil-fuels corporate owners, not the public — not even the voters who had voted for him. All Americans have a real stake in the truth about the global-warming issue. All people everywhere do.

Is an authentic democracy possible in such a country as this, where it’s so easy for liars to win and keep public offices?

All that the liars have to do is to pump to the public the deceits that the billionaires they serve want them to pump. The politicians who do that will be the ones who are in serious contention to become winners, because their political campaigns will receive all the funding that’s needed in order for them to be in serious contention. The politicians who are honest won’t be among the ones who are in serious contention — it’ll be like America’s Government actually is.

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

Featured image is from SCF

In 1979, Canada’s postal union (CUPW) bargained and bargained with the employer. Eventually, having exhausted all possibilities, it made the decision, supported by a huge majority of its voting members, that its members would no longer provide their services on the basis of the existing terms and conditions of the now expired collective agreement. Workers had determined, democratically, not to sell their labour power on those terms. In a liberal democracy, they had every right to take such a decision. Only a slave society would deny them this right.

The government of Canada decided otherwise. Unlike the union it did not consult its constituency. It enacted legislation to order the postal union and its workers to call off the strike, to sort and deliver the mail. They would be paid the amounts they were entitled to under the old agreement until an arbitrator would impose some other ones on them. The leadership of the union was legislatively instructed to tell its members that the strike was no longer legal, no longer legitimate. They were told what to say; they were told to say that they had not led their members properly and that their democratic practices were not worth a tinker’s cuss.

Jean-Claude Parrot, a union leader with principles, said he could not do that. He was prosecuted for this act of defiance, for this insistence on his right of belief, of his right to think and speak as he chose. The prosecution opened its case as follows: “The sole question for this court is: Who runs this country – the government or the unions?” Parrot was convicted and spent three months in jail. The workers were forced to go back to work on properly rejected terms and conditions. While the jailing of a trade union leader is rare today, forcing workers to work on terms and conditions they do not want to accept is a norm in this freedom-loving country.

The justification for such oppression is based on a big lie. This lie is that Canada is a liberal democracy.

Forced Back-to-Work

A properly elected government has plenary powers to act on its free, and freely-participating citizens, to act on their behalf to ensure the welfare of the polity. In doing so it may take away some of the rights of the people, such as freedom to speak, assemble, associate, as long as the government can persuade a court that it is curtailing these rights by introducing measures that are reasonably compatible with the tenets of a free and democratic society. Forcing workers to accept terms of employment they were legally entitled to reject is considered to be compatible with our basic democratic principles as long as the government is reasonable in its belief that it is coercing workers to serve the public good. Over and over, back-to-work legislation is justified on the basis that the otherwise legal goals of workers may harm the public good. A government charged with looking after the general welfare of the nation is entitled to say that it has no option but to act to save the public from harm.

This November, we heard this bombastic, worker-hurting, claim again. Photos of allegedly mail-laden trucks in depots (shades of Colin Powell and his visuals of Saddam Hussein’s weapon-laden trucks) are said to be evidence of how selfish workers are creating chaos and intolerable hardship. This cannot be tolerated. After all, workers merely want a better deal for themselves, heedless of society’s needs. It is true that, abiding by the legal rules which allow workers to use collective economic action to pursue their claims, postal workers conducted some rotating strikes to pressure the employer to be more pliable. This is what free collectivebargaining is designed to permit. But, once again, our government felt that it just had to override the workers’ rights, rights that had been won after long political struggles. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his flunkies and the mainstream media repeatedly told us that the workers’ self-serving rotating strikes were anti-social and could not be allowed to inconvenience the innocent, particularly small businesses whose selfish needs required protection. So, our liberal democratic government said: “Back to work, you greedy, intransigent, anti-public welfare unionists!”

Then General Motors (GM) announced that it was no longer satisfied with its market conditions. It exercised its right to take its property and run. It is going to close four North American plants. Oshawa is one of those. Now this will do the public a lot of harm. I know this because the same people who attack postal workers are telling me this. Trudeau, his flunkies and the mainstream media are in agreement. Stories about how expectations will not be met, how sad loyal workers are to lose jobs of which they had been proud, how many families would be pushed into poverty, how much incidental harm would be inflicted, filled our television screens and newspapers. Everyone expressed anxiety and indignation at the anti-social, self-serving, behaviour, by General Motors. Premier Doug Ford said he was distressed. Prime Minister Trudeau said he was very distressed. Andrea Horwath was seen hugging upset workers at the stricken plant. All said they would do their best to help the hurt people. No one said they would order the anti-social, public harm-doing General Motors back to work.

The big lie is in the open.

Liberal Capitalist Democracy

We are not a liberal democracy but a liberal capitalist democracy and the most important part of that phrase is ‘capitalist’. It is the capitalists who set the limits of liberalism’s and democracy’s scope.

In a capitalist society, the owners of the means of production are only technically subject to governmental power. More often than not, government acts as the inferior party in the relationship between private power and elected government. Hence the chasm between the caterwauling and lamentations about the GM Oshawa decision and the lack of any decisive response to the flexing of General Motors’ muscles. The sacrosanct nature of private property gives capitalists enormous political sway over governments that depend for their legitimacy and survival on the deployment of private capital to generate overall welfare. It is conventional wisdom that, even to suggest that the owners of wealth owe any of us an obligation to invest, and keep invested, some of that wealth, offends the basic sense of justice embedded in our liberal democracy. ‘Sensible’ people, political parties, and most unions recite a catechism. It would lead – understandably and rightly – to instant withdrawal of all capitalists from our economy and then where would we be? There it is.

Self-seeking activities by workers who produce all the wealth may be fettered, especially when it suits capital to have this done. It makes sense to lower a minimum wage, dilute a health and safety regulation, make unemployment benefits more difficult to get, smash unions and their capacities to collectivize workers’ bargaining powers, but it makes no sense to inhibit capital if it can be avoided. Indeed, we are to be grateful to capitalists for even thinking about investing their wealth. We should entice them to do so; we should cajole them; we should subsidize them. They are to be treated differently, specially, they are to be privileged. This does not jibe with a liberal democracy, but it fits a political liberal capitalist democracy in which ‘capitalist’ imbues the phrase with its real meaning.

We all know these things and still do nothing. The proof is in the eating of the pudding.

Government Generosity

In 2009, General Motors had fallen on hard times. It suspended the payment of all its debts. Its creditors were about to be left empty-handed; its workers faced a bleak future. The Barack Obama administration stepped-in. It bought 60.8 million shares for around $50-billion. In other words, it gave GM the sort of bail-out it had given those pernicious banksters who brought us the subprime mortgage and other frauds. Obama, however, asked that everybody at GM help out. By everybody, he meant workers. Concessions were imposed on the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and workers as healthcare and pension obligations were downloaded and newly hired workers would not be offered the deals automobile workers had won after many quite heroic struggles. Canada, of course, obliged GM as well, purchasing some of its shares, filling GM’s coffers. In due course, by 2015, the governments of Canada and Ontario sold their shares back for circa $4-billion, through banks like Goldman Sachs who made a handy profit on those transactions (and, to digress, when Obama bailed out the banks, Goldman Sachs was given a slice of those monies by being declared an eligible bank literally hours before the bail-out was announced).

For a moment, governments had a realistic capacity to direct a huge automobile company to serve the workers and consumers better than a for-profit corporation would ever do. This was never perceived to be a realistic notion. In a liberal capitalist democracy we are in the business to serve capital, not the working class.

The bail-out worked and GM enjoyed 15 quarters of profits, realizing $20-billion in net income. This made some people very happy. It was not the tax-payers. The guesstimate is that the Obama administration sold its equity in GM at a loss approximating $10-billion. But investors were very happy. Dividends to shareholders were increased. In March of this year, the financial papers reported that a hedge fund manager with a large stake in GM was urging it to buy back its shares on the market. Once shares are bought back, share prices rise as there are now less claims on the corporation’s assets and profits. Incumbent shareholders such as the hedge fund in question and, usually, the executives who make the decision to buy back shares, make out like bandits.

All this government generosity should have made GM grateful to government. But no.

In 2016 they were back at the beggars’ table (or, more accurately, the blackmailers’ table). They told the Canadian and Ontario governments that things were tough and the Oshawa plant needed help to stay modern and viable. More money was dumped into the bottomless GM pot. And now, barely two years later, having made promises to governments and workers that they would share in the expected bounty, they tell us that, “sorry, we can get a better deal elsewhere.” And we are dismayed. But surely not surprised?

We do this all the time. On the same day that the Oshawa debacle hit our media, it was announced that the government of Ontario was providing Maple Leaf Foods with $34.5-million to help it to set up a plant in London, Ontario, to off-set the shutting of plants elsewhere. The federal government will add to this largesse by promising to help poor Maple Leaf Foods out with $29-million of our monies. And, recently, we went through the unseemly exercise of trying to bribe Amazon, a noted exploiter of workers and of our porous tax raising systems, to put their headquarters here rather than in some other misguided and begging city (luckily we lost). And the Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2018 that the most subsidized corporations pay their executives far more than do other less successful mendicant corporations. Thus, in 2017, there was a fuss when it was revealed that Bombardier’s executives had improved their remuneration by $32.6-million just when the federal government had given it a loan of $372.5-million and Quebec had chipped-in with $1-billion of its tax-payers’ money.

They take. We give. They promise. They do not honour their promises. They threaten and menace to legally withhold their wealth. They hold us to ransom. We give in. All too often, we save capitalists the trouble of putting us to the sword. We anticipate their demands and just make them offers. Workers seek to legally withhold their only wealth, their labour power. We (and who precisely is this ‘we’?) do not give in. We force them to accept terms that they have already legally refused. We will not allow them to hold society to ransom. We will not allow them to be anti-social. This happens to suit the capitalist agenda – a coincidence, no doubt. To clarify: if the undelivered mail was such a crisis, why did the government of Canada not tell Canada Post to give workers what they were demanding? I am sure workers would have taken those trucks out of the depots. But that would have set a bad example: employers might be forced to do things for the general good and then where would a capitalist society be?! We rather beg the owners of the means of production (who hide behind corporations) to think about acting as if they were socially responsible.

It Takes Two Classes to Wage War

We practise the politics of compromise and indignation. We accept that there is no alternative to capitalist domination. They wage class war on us. They insist in passing on the costs of making profits onto workers and their communities. We talk about retraining dispossessed workers, to sustain them enough to let them survive while things are done to change the economic base of their communities, and the like. They just take the money and run.

We do not say: “People have profitted from our generosity and are now using those profits to make more profits elsewhere while not sharing any of it with us. It is thievery.” We do not say: “This kind of economy is a fraud and is run for rapacious thieves and they should be made to pay.” No, that would involve us in engaging in class warfare and everyone knows that this goes against the very assumptions of a liberal democracy. We have internalized the big lie, namely that we have a liberal democracy, rather than a liberal democracy subjugated to the capitalist project. Oshawa provides an opportunity to re-consider.

Freeze all the profits made by shareholders in General Motors who have been enjoying the fruits of hand-outs given on the basis of promises that have been deliberately dishonoured, again and again. Note here that it may be technically difficult but note that it is a logical demand. We do it when it suits the government’s and the dominant class’ political agendas. We freeze the assets of Iranians, Venezuelans, Russians, etc., when we want to protect foreigners who have allegedly been victimized by these supposed wrongdoers. Some capitalists (not ours) will not be protected. Why not go after those GM folk who have profitted at Canadians’ expense? When General Motors made its long-planned announcement of the impending closures (one of the many lies told included the suggestion that these closures were not long in the planning!), the value of General Motors went up by a giddy 4.8%. The costs were going to go down and the accumulated assets that included the many hand-out monies would be worth even more than before. Investors saw a golden chance to make money. Our workers’ deliberately engineered misery is the source of new riches for the already rich.

Demand that General Motors’ Canadian assets become ours. Not only have we contributed to their accumulation, General Motors has acted anti-socially and no longer deserve to have its property protected, no more so than a blackmailer or one who obtains property by false pretences is allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains.

Public or worker ownership of the plant should be the way to go, using the considerable technology, equipment and honed skills of the workers to be put to the production of socially necessary goods, for instance, public transit infrastructure.

These and more elaborated and detailed like demands should be fashioned. It is the nature of the demands, not their immediate feasibility, that will matter. They will be an announcement that business as usual is not to be tolerated. It is harmful to our health and well-being. It privileges power and fraud. Such demands, demands for regime change, may help raise consciousness about the lies we tell each other, lies that serve capitalists rather than the working class. The demands should be articulated by workers, their unions, progressive allies and wannabe leftist political parties and actors. Oshawa has provided an opportunity to ask: “Whose side are you on?”

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Israel’s occupation authorities expropriated almost 70 acres of Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley and West Bank on Tuesday, Shehab news agency has reported. The land is owned by the Roman Catholic Church — the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem — in the villages of Bardala and Tayaseer near the West Bank city of Tubas and in the Jordan Valley respectively.

Palestinians residents living on the property fear that this expropriation is the forerunner to their expulsion for “security reasons”, a euphemism used by Israel to ethnically cleanse the land prior to the expansion of illegal settlements.

The expansion of Israeli settlements always starts with such measures. It is one way that Israel uses to empty the land of the indigenous Palestinian population. [including both Muslims and Christians]

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Featured image: An Orthodox Church in Jerusalem’s old city on 16 September 2013 [Saeed Qaq//Apaimages]

While Ecuador is expected to extradite Assange to the US, John Kiriakou, a “reluctant whistleblower” considered the first US intelligence officer to reveal information about the American intelligence community’s use of torture techniques, comments the WikiLeaks’ founder case in the following talk with renowned journalist Edu Montesanti. 

“The only thing that can save Julian Assange is jury nullification,” says whistleblower John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee based in Virginia, in an exclusive talk to this reporter.

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U.S. Justice Department is acting behind the scenes to have Assange extradited from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and prosecuted in the U.S. Criminal charges against WikiLeaks’ founder were accidentally revealed in early November, when Assange’s name was found on the court filing of an unrelated case, suggesting that prosecutors had copied a boilerplate text and forgotten to change the defendant’s name.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote that

“due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”

Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

It is much likely that the Australian journalist, who in March 2017 released an archive of documents detailing the C.I.A.’s hacking operations known as the Vault 7 leak, is being accused by American prosecutors of violating the 1917 Espionage Act.

The Engineer Joshua A. Schulte, 29, of New York, had been the main suspect of providing WikiLeaks the documents revealing the sensitive CIA cybertools, has been accused by prosecutors of repeatedly violating the Espionage Act.

“Technically, jury nullification is illegal. That’s when a jury acquits, not because the defendant is innocent, but because the law itself is wrong. The Espionage Act is wrong. Julian Assange is a journalist. He should never have been charged with a crime, in the first place,” says Kiriakou, the first U.S. official who dered to speak out, in December of 2007, against George Bush’s torture program and remained 30 months in prison for that, from 2013 to 2015.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also calls the Espionage Act “a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional law.” Kiriakou says he has argued over the years that “the Espionage Act is so overly broad as to be unconstitutional, although it has not been challenged to the Supreme Court.”

‘Investigating ME!?’: Mockery of Democracy

“A senior [C.I.A.] officer in the Counterterrorism Center asked me if I wanted to be ‘trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.’ (…) I declined. I said that I had a moral and ethical problem with torture and that — the judgment of the Justice Department notwithstanding — I thought it was illegal”, reported Kiriakou last March to The Washington Post.

Author of three books and one of the protagonists of James Spione’s documentary Silenced, in which John Kiriakou said that after his denouncements, “I realized they are investigating ME!?”.  John’s and Assange’s case have deep similarities not only for causing a reaction in their favor from people who represent a moral reserve, all over the world. “U.S. deeply flawed democracy”, as Kiriakou told this reporter in October 2016, is once again acting against free speech and justice, pillars of a real democracy.

While Kiriakou’s revelations – not sufficiently echoed by the mainstream media – have not changed anything in U.S. “policy”, inside the country and abroad as the Washington regime continue committing heinous war crimes, crimes against humanity and against the U.S. Constitution itself – under the mainstream media’s deafening silence -, the State criminals denounced by Assange intend to prosecute him: in the name of democracy and justice.

In his first public speech as C.I.A. director early last year, Mike Pompeo slammed WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” adding that “we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. Use free speech values against us”? So the First Amendment of the American Constitution is only valid while not contradicting the local establishment interests. In the U.S., there is clearly a historical limit to “democracy”.

Not an Espionage Act

Kiriakou predicts that the U.S. government will argue that Assange did exactly what the 1917 Espionage Act describes as espionage, that is, “[P]roviding national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.”

The American whistleblower observes that “the issue here is that it is highly unusual, unprecedented even for a foreign national – Assange is Australian – to be charged with espionage when he did not steal the information. Assange was simply provided the information, which he then made public.” Kiriakou points out that Assange says that he was just a journalist doing his job: “No administration has ever charged a journalist with espionage for doing his job.”

Jesselyn Radack, Director of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program and one of Kiriakou’s attorneys, wrote in a 2014 op-ed entitled Why Edward Snowden Wouldn’t Get a Fair Trial: “First Amendment arguments have failed, largely because they would criminalize the journalism made possible by the ‘leaks.’ The motive and intent of the whistleblower are irrelevant. And there is no whistleblower defense, meaning the public value of the material disclosed does not matter at all.”

Despotism in U.S. Judiciary

Another serious obstacle that Assange would face is Judge Leonie Brinkema, according to the former C.I.A. agent. Brinkema handled his case, as well as C.I.A. whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s, and has also reserved the Edward Snowden case for herself. “Brinkema is a hanging judge,” regrets Kiriakou.

“Brinkema gave me literally no chance to defend myself. At one point, while approaching trial, my attorneys filed 70 motions, asking that 70 classified documents be declassified so that I could use them to defend myself. I had no defense without them. We blocked off three days for the hearings. When we got to the courtroom, Brinkema said, ‘Let me save everybody a lot of time. I’m going to deny all 70 of these motions. You don’t need any of this information to be declassified.’ The entire process took a minute. On the way out of the courtroom, I asked my lead attorney what had just happened. ‘We just lost the case. That’s what happened. Now we talk about a plea.’

He describes the sad end of that court, when Judge Brinkema told him to rise pointing her finger at him, and saying, “Mr. Kiriakou, I hate this plea. If I could, I would give you ten years.” John Kiriakou labels her comments as “inappropriate, but that’s Brinkema. That’s who she is.”

Declared War against Humanity

Barry J. Pollack, one of Assange’s attorneys, said when the name of WikiLeaks’ founder was found on the court filing of an unrelated case:

“The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take. The only thing more irresponsible than charging a person for publishing truthful information would be to put in a public filing information that clearly was not intended for the public and without any notice to Mr. Assange. Obviously, I have no idea if he has actually been charged or for what, but the notion that the federal criminal charges could be brought based on the publication of truthful information is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set.”

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said prosecuting Assange is a “priority” for him. There are some in the West fully convinced that Assange deserves to be tried, and thrown in jail for “threatening” US national security and “undermining” its so-called democratic processes – the system Assange himself, in a bitter irony, has proven to be a total lie. Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Joe Biden have called him a “terrorist”, as Assange’s job, delivering information of a high public interest, is a revolutionary antidote against fake news and dark politics, which is served by the people rather than serving the people.

All this, while more and more bitter truth Julian Assange brings to light are a clear message that the so-called West democracy must be submitted to a radical transparency process. WikiLeaks lets no doubt, Vault 7 is the last example, that intelligence services all over the world, starting by the terrorist C.I.A., must be stopped as demanded by President John Kennedy, as a non-democratic tool just to preserve the power of a minority though coercion.

According to US lawyer and civil liberties advocate Ben Wizner at the American Civil Liberties Union:

“Any prosecution of Mr. Assange for WikiLeaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations”.

The mainstream media must be blamed by an Assange condemnation and by this total distortion of scenarios as it not only has never pressured these criminals of the Washington regime to break into smartphones, computers and internet-connected televisions anywhere in the world, and even to make it look like those hacks were done by another intelligence service. Also, the mainstream media never deeply covered Assange’s information in general, never gave WikiLeaks the seriousness it is worthy. On the contrary, has little by little forgotten the organization.

So who judges the CIA?

Who protects people from being hacked?

Another bitter irony is that a likely Assange condemnation will endanger the very foundations of the free press, the press, especially the Western media which claims to be free but never gave Assange the attention his job deserves – as the media inaction speaks about itself, he also has proved through documents all these years, that the corporate media is not free, at all.

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The announcement that the UAE and India signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly invest in Africa will see Dubai greatly assisting New Delhi in its grand strategy of “multi-aligning” against China there, though Russia could play a stabilizing role by “balancing” many of the various actors engaged in this modern-day “Scramble for Africa”.

“Scramble For Africa”

The modern-day “Scramble for Africa” has been ongoing for quite a while, but it had hitherto mostly been between the US and China until the past year or so, with these two Great Powers encroaching in their own ways in the continental-wide “sphere of influence” that France has historically staked out as its own. Since then, America’s GCC allies – chief among them the UAE – have established themselves as the diplomatic kingpins in the strategic Horn of Africa region, coming on the heels of their Turkish competitor’s comprehensive strategic push all throughout the landmass. Concurrent with this, Russia surreptitiously returned to the continent via the unlikely route of its UN-approved military assistance mission in the Central African Republic, while the US’ Indian and Japanese allies have attempted to expand their reach in this part of the world through the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC).

Consolidating The American “Camp”

While this many independently moving parts might make it seem like the “scramble” for Africa’s resources, markets, and strategic location is utterly chaotic and at risk of causing a kinetic conflict between the various player s involved, the fact of the matter is that a stabilizing convergence of sorts is presently ongoing whereby a vague system of “bipolarity” is poised to set in across the continent, albeit one where Russia could play a crucial role in “balancing” between both “camps”. This “consolidation process” was indirectly set into motion once the GCC and the Indo-Japanese members of the anti-China “Quad” began to actively probe opportunities in Africa, which aligned with the tacit strategic desire of the US to involve as many of its allies as possible there as it seeks to eventually assemble an economic coalition to challenge China’s dominant presence.

The announcement that the UAE and India just signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly invest in Africa is the first tangible step to formally linking together the US’ disparate allies, with the possibility now emerging of the UAE – and by extension, the entire GCC – becoming part of the AAGC. It would be natural for the US to endorse this union at a convenient time in the future and ‘bless’ it with support through the so-called “BUILD Act”, as well as encourage France to jump on board this emerging multilateral “containment” platform by providing investment and security services given its historic hegemony in the continent. The reasons why the UAE is siding with India’s AAGC and not China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) in Africa are manifold, but they basically boil down to three main ones.

Building The Two “Blocs”

The first is that the UAE is a solid American ally that’s positioning itself to replace its “big brother” Saudi Arabia as the GCC hegemon, so it has an interest in cooperating with the US’ grand strategic schemes anywhere in the world. Secondly, there are concerns – whether legitimate or not – that CPEC’s Gwadar terminal port might one day overshadow Dubai and make it economically redundant, hence the most immediate self-interested motivation that the Emirates has to “multi-align” against BRI in Africa. And thirdly, as an added incentive (not that it actually needed one), the UAE will never forget how Pakistan refused to become militarily involved in the War on Yemen, which deprived the coalition of the country’s world-class anti-insurgency experience that could have been a game-changer and averted the current quagmire that’s draining the GCC’s blood, treasure, and international reputation.

Bearing all of these considerations in mind, it’s a no-brainer why the UAE wanted to partner with India instead of China in Africa and therefore catalyze the US’ envisaged “consolidation process” there, which could have far-reaching long-term ramifications as the New Cold War heats up and this continental theater becomes all the more important. The natural response would be for China to facilitate its Pakistani partner’s entrance into this competition by helping it transform its Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC) between Gwadar and several BRI-built (or -linked) East African ports into multilateral economic partnerships, with Islamabad then reaching out to its Ankara ally to include Turkey into this developing win-win framework. Only through such a means can China stand any chance at sustainably competing with its American-aligned rivals given the intensifying infowar being waged against its investments in Africa.

Russia’s “Balancing” Role In Midwifing A “Renaissance 2.0”

Accepting that the American-backed “bloc” is much further along to fruition than the Chinese one, but that these two “camps” are nevertheless in the midst of forming in Africa, it’s relevant to discuss the role that Russia could play in all of this. As it stands, Russia is endeavoring to become the 21^st-century’s supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, to which end it’s clinching a variety of strategic partnerships with competing pairs of countries, which pertinently includes the GCC & Turkey, India & Pakistan, and Japan & China. Russia’s uniquely neutral position enables it to conceivably serve as a bridge for bringing together these rival states, seeing as how it’s the common denominator between them. In principle, Russia could join both the AAGC and BRI”s African initiatives as an equal strategic partner, though provided that certain criteria are first met in order to allow this to happen.

For example, Russia needs to sign a peace treaty with Japan before formally joining the AAGC in the future, though this could greatly be facilitated by courting Japanese investments in the Far East and then advancing the proposal for a so-called “Northern Islands Socio-Economic Condominium” over the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido. Concerning the Chinese angle, Russia is proving its worth as a no-nonsense security provider in Africa capable of exporting its “mercenary”-driven “Democratic Security” model all throughout the continent and especially in BRI partner states, thereby fulfilling the demand that Beijing has for ensuring that Washington’s Hybrid Warschemes don’t offset its investment projects there.  If Russia can succeed in simultaneously joining the AAGC and BRI through these means, then it could encourage the “China-India-Plus-One” model to be applied all across Africa in linking these two global initiatives, sidelining the US and France, and midwifing a “Renaissance 2.0”.

Concluding Thoughts

The UAE’s decision to team up with India and develop third-party African states is a major move that’s bound to have an enormous impact on the course of the New Cold War in the continent, especially in regards to catalyzing the consolidation of a larger American-aligned anti-Chinese “containment” “camp” there. This might actually be more of a stabilizing development than a destabilizing one, however, so long as China seizes the moment to assemble its own economic coalition with Pakistan and Turkey, therefore creating a bipolar system of sorts for managing African affairs. Russia’s role in all of this is to “balance” between the two “blocs” in order to broker the ultimate convergence between them, one that would take advantage of its strategic partnerships with each party apart from the US and France in order to create a sustainable win-win platform for incorporating Africa into the emerging Multipolar World Order.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.

“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”

Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.

Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.

Episode 1

The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.

“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”

The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.

“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”

He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”

“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”

“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”

“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”

Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.

The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”

“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”

The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.

“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”

“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”

“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”

“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”

“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.

“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”

Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.

“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”

Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.

“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”

“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.

She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.

The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.

“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”

Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.

“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”

Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.

The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.

Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”

UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”

Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”

Episode 2

Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”

“StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Projecthelped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”

“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”

The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says,

“There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”

“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”

Kenneth Marcus, founding president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, confirms this stance in the film and is shown saying:

“You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”

But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.

“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”

And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.

“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”

But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.

“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”

“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.

Mearsheimer says,

“What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”

“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”

“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”

“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”

“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”

There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”

Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.

“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”

“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”

“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”

Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.

“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”

Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.

The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”

“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”

Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.

“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”

“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.

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Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Featured image is from Mr. Fish/Truthdig

Government forces have eliminated more than 270 ISIS members as well as seized a large amount of weapons and munition, including 12 TOW anti-tank guided missiles, in the province of al-Suwayda since middle November, Oleg Makarevich, a spokesman for the command of the Russian task force in Syria, announced on December 3.

“The terrorists had been there for a long time, flocking to the area for several months. Among them were militants who were able to leave Yarmouk and Damascus in advance and also arrived from al-Tanf. Another difficulty was that tanks and heavy artillery have very limited maneuverability there, while the militants had many grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and 82mm mortars,” the spokesman stated.

380km2 in eastern al-Suwayda was declared fully liberated from ISIS by the Syrian state media on November 17. Despite this, according to local sources, some number of ISIS cells still hide in the desert area south of al-Safa. Furthermore, a large presence of ISIS can observed in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Therefore, claims of some pro-government sources that the terrorist group was fully eliminated on the western bank of the Euphrates are premature.

The US-controlled zone of al-Tanf is being actively used by ISIS terrorists as a safe haven to hide from Syrian Army attacks and to re-locate its forces in eastern Syria. While it exists, it’s not likely that ISIS cells could be fully wiped out in this part of the country.

From its side, the US-led coalition is contributing every possible effort to prevent any security operations of the Syrian Army near the al-Tanf zone. On December 2, the coalition shelled Syrian Army positions near the al-Ghurab mount at the border with Iraq. The US-led force reportedly employed M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) deployed at the al-Tanaf base.

The formal reason of the attack is unknown but US forces had repeatedly attacked Syrian Army units pursuing terrorists in the area on the edge of the so-called security zone near al-Tanf.

On December 3, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) released a statement claiming that 11 Turkish-backed militants had been killed by the group in two fresh attacks in the Syrian area of Afrin.

On December 2, a YPG unit attacked a Jaysh al-Islam patrol in the village of Dermishmishe, near Afrin city. 5 Jaysh al-Islam members were reportedly killed and 3 others were wounded in the attack. Their vehicle was also destroyed.

On the same day, YPG fighters destroyed a military vehicle stationed at the headquarters of Ahrar al-Sham in the town of Jinderese. 6 Turkish-backed militants were killed and 8 others were wounded, according to the YPG report.

YPG attacks in Afrin will likely continue until the Turkish military and its proxies establish an effective security network in this part of Turkish-occupied Syria. However, a widely known incompetence and corruption within Turkish-backed militant groups delay and in some case even sabotage these Ankara-led efforts.

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I was involved in pro-peace, anti-war, anti-US Imperialism efforts during the most hideous years of the Reagan/Bush administrations (from 1980 – 1992) that resulted in the deaths and sufferings of millions of innocent people in virtually every South and Central American nation you can think of.

As I remember the many innocent – often “disappeared” – war-refugees who suffered, starved and died at the hands of my war-profiteering national leaders, I am unable to shed any tears for the guilty ones, even if they are now dead or dying, for they were war-mongers that never apologized for their misdeeds. They were members beholden to Wall Street and War Street whose intentions made them responsible for brutal massacres, assassinations, torturing, mass killings, starvation and the impoverishment of millions of innocents that wanted to live in peace  in their homeland that had been targeted for exploitation by my once-beloved homeland.

When our past history of US-inflicted economic and military cruelty is forgotten (or never learned in the first place, as is the case of our current president), our people and politicians can’t make the connections between

• 1) America’s Wall Street and War Street exploitation of the rest of the world and
• 2) the current global crises of Big Business-induced global warming, Wall Street-induced economic disparities/oppression/refugees and War Street’s perpetual wars that have been going all over the planet since the Reagan/Bush administrations went into deep debt by lavishing trillions of dollars on America’s military, nuclear weapons and its conventional arsenals.

I know that many of my readers also grew tired of the endless accolades for ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush (US President # 41) who died last Friday. Having to endure listening to the repetitive accounts of the small handful of good and decent things that he was given credit for made me turn off the radio and TV for most of the last 5 days. One such accolade that was particularly undeserved was his signing – not authoring or proposing or even politicking for – the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

There are many points that need to be made when powerful US leaders die, especially presidents. But the accolades need to be balanced with what are often unwelcome truths. And, in my opinion, that balance needs to be applied particularly to those leaders that have been legitimately accused of being guilty of crimes against the peace, international war crimes or war-profiteering.

Therefore, presidents and other national leaders that have been war-mongers, serial liars, sociopaths, narcissists, megalomaniacs, greed-heads or simply traitors to democratic ideals are particularly deserving of scorn – not accolades – even if they are recently deceased.

I recall cringing as I listened to the endless accolades given to pro-war presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the lead-up to their funerals. And I know that I will have to think twice before I mourn the inevitable deaths of our living but unrepentant, war-mongering presidents and their advisors (everyone since Carter?).

If I had been aware years ago, I also wouldn’t have mourned the deaths of the many evil-doers that were behind the fascist “Business Plot” to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934 (see details in the two articles at the end of this piece).

One of the “Business Plot” coup-plotters was banker Prescott Bush, the father of George H W Bush and grandfather of George W Bush. None of Prescott Bush’s progeny have been willing to talk about Prescott’s traitorous deeds.

At the time of the plot, Prescott Bush was deeply involved in the business of the Hamburg-America Lines (co-owned by industrialists from both pro-Hitler Germany and pro-Hitler America). Bush was also involved in the ascendance of Adolf Hitler to his becoming dictator in 1933. Prescott Bush was slated to be the liaison between the coup-plotting group and Hitler’s new regime. The defeat of the Democrat FDR in his runs for re-election were important goals. The attempt to defeat FDR in the 1940 re-election campaign was actually heavily-funded by Nazi Germany. (A reminder of the alleged Russian involvement in defeating Hillary Clinton.)

Prescott Bush became an FDR-hating Republican US Senator from Connecticut who must have been privately ambivalent about going to war against his old allies in Germany. Another irony is that Prescott’s son George H W Bush became a World War II war hero – albeit in the Pacific war against Japan.

For a good source of information on the Bush family, including the “Business Plot” against FDR, read Russ Baker’s book: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America

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Some of the Unmentionables in George H W Bush’s Legacy

I’m certain that many of us aware of the many omissions concerning the legacy of George H W Bush. I list some of them below:

1) Bush 41’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990;

2) his nefarious actions while he was CIA chief in Gerald Ford’s administration;

3) his role in the US support of the uncountable South and Central American dictatorships during the Reagan administration;

4) the illegal invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause!);

5) starting the un-provoked Persian Gulf War;

6) his Christmas Eve pardoning of former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, Elliot Abrams and four other government officials that were involved in the Iran-Contra affair;

7) his complicity in the thousands of corpses that rotted on the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991; 8) his playing the “race card” in the use of Willie Horton in the Dukakis campaign;

9) Bush 41 and the CIA’s role in the Contra War-era’s flooding of the US with crack cocaine that facilitated the epidemic that has persisted to this day;

10) his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court;

11) the intentional targeting of the air-raid shelter in Baghdad that killed over 400 Iraqi civilians; and

12) a host of other items. Just google Bush plus:

1. a) Operation Black Eagle;
2. b) Oliver North;
3. c) El Salvador;
4. d) Nicaragua;
5. e) Honduras;
6. f) Felix Rodriguez;
7. g) etc, etc,

Oh, and there was also no mention of 13) his admitted groping of at least 8 young women – acts that brought down in disgrace many of his contemporaries.

(NOTE: The Iran-Contra affair, referred to above, was an illegal action that Bush was involved in when he was VP under Reagan. It was likewise never mentioned by any mainstream media outlet that I heard this week. Because of US congressional laws prohibiting the continued use of US taxpayer dollars to fund the right-wing Contra “rebels” that were fighting against various left-leaning nations in Central America, the Reagan/Bush administration secretly and illegally raised the money to keep the Contra’s terrorist operations going by selling missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. They then used the illicit money from those weapons sales to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua, Honduras and surrounding areas, an action which was forbidden by Congress. Oliver North was one of the point men in the illegal operation.)

In the 101^stCongress (during the first 2 years of Bush 41’s presidency), Democrats had sizable majorities of 55/45 in the Senate and 251/183 in the House of Representatives. It was during that time that the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill occurred.  The Big Oilman Bush surely collaborated in the mishandling, the cover-up and the failure to punish Exxon justly.

The capture, imprisonment (in a US prison!) and silencing of one of Bush 41’s many military dictator buddies, Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Military strongman Noriega was a CIA intelligence asset and paid informant during the time when Bush 41 was CIA Director (1976 – 1977), which was just one more motivating factor in the deceptively labeled “Operation Just Cause”.

Another major motivation for the Panama invasion – during which uncounted numbers of innocent Panamanian civilians were killed by the US troops – was the fact that both Wall Street and War Street had been upset with President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 treaty with Panama. That treaty promised to gradually relinquish US control over the Canal Zone and gradually eliminate US military bases by the year 2000. The Bush invasion ultimately didn’t reverse the treaty as probably intended, and all US military installations were eventually handed over to Panama in late 1999 – much to the dissatisfaction of powerful economic and military elites.

Operation Just Cause was not authorized by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress. But there was a lot of progressive legislation that came to Bush’s Oval Office desk for his signature during his term, and he had little choice but to sign most of it. (See a partial list of the legislation here).

The Plot to Seize the White House

For much more on the attempted “Business Plot”, see Jules Archer’s 2015 book entitled The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

Here is a brief synopsis of the book provided by the publisher, Skyhorse Publishing:

“Many people might not know that in 1933, a group of wealthy industrialists—working closely with groups like the KKK and the American Liberty League—planned to overthrow the U.S. government and run FDR out of office in a fascist coup. Readers will learn of their plan to turn unhappy war veterans into American “brown shirts,” depose FDR, and stop the New Deal. They asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to work with them and become the “first American Caesar.” Fortunately, Butler was a true patriot. Instead of working for the fascist coup, he revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress.

“Archer writes a compelling account of a plot that would have turned FDR into a fascist puppet, threatened American democracy and changed the course of history. This book not only reveals the truth behind this shocking episode in history, but also tells the story of the man whose courage and bravery prevented it from happening.”

The remainder of this article supports the arguments above.

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Corporate America’s Love Affair with Fascism

Posted March 6, 2010 here

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” — Mayer Amschel Rothschild

“What we have in America and Europe today are Fascist Bankocracies. Big Business and Big Banks have made slaves of us all and they know exactly what they are doing. The love affair between the big business elite and fascism has a long and storied history. Many people in high places have financed and supported fascist regimes. They’ve even tried to implement one in America via Coup. It is my belief as well as the belief of many others on ATS that a backdoor has already taken place and is in power right now.

“Big Business and big bankers believe Fascism to be the perfect example of government. People are nothing more than labor, sheeple to feed their machine of war and greed. Don’t believe me? Below I will link to several articles on the subject that are historical FACT. The point of this thread is to show people that the business elite and wall st banking elite of this nation and many other western nations are FASCISTS.” – From www.abovetopsecret.com

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Wall Street Millionaires Plotted to Overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

When FDR messed with their money, they began engineering a coup

By Matt Reimann – Aug 11, 2017

Posted here

President Franklin Roosevelt made an enemy of the richest Americans with remarkable haste. By his first term, his heavily progressive New Deal taxes and the suspension of the gold standard inspired vocal opponents within the highest echelons of industry. Among them was an irate William Randolph Hearst,who filmed a message decrying the “impudent” and “despotic” new tax code. Yet of all of Roosevelt’s powerful enemies, perhaps none were more formidable, or incensed, than those who considered throwing him out of office by way of a fascist military coup.

It is impossible to say exactly how close the Business Plot — also called the White House Coup and Wall Street Putsch — came to over-throwing the president. Nearly all we know about the plot is the result of an investigation conducted by the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee in November, 1934. Its chief whistleblower was one Major General Smedley Butler, a respected and tenured military leader with a talent for rallying support to his side. His part in the story began on July 1, 1933, the day he met with two members of the American Legion who had ties to Wall Street heavies.

At the time, Butler was enjoying the boost of a positive public profile, as a result of his enthusiastic advocacy for veterans. American Legionmembers Bill Doyle and Gerald MacGuire wanted to harness this when they asked Butler to appear at the Legion convention in Chicago, as part of a campaign to undermine the body’s leadership. Butler was sympathetic: He had long known of the Legion’s capacity for ignoring its members.

In a second meeting, MacGuire, a $150-a-week bond salesman for the financier Grayson M. P. Murphy, proposed Butler bring along a few hundred veterans for support, and showed him bank statements amounting to $106,000, to pay for their travel expenses. A skeptical Butler surmised that no coalition of veterans could have gathered those funds. Adding to his bemusement was the speech they wanted him to deliver. It lacked populist, pro-veteran rhetoric, and read heavily as a screed in favor of the gold standard, a policy which President Roosevelt had suspended about a month earlier.

The gold standard, as Butler’s subsequent research would uncover, was a major concern for the country’s wealthiest citizens. Bankers especially did not want to be paid back on their gold-backed loans with cheaper, ever-inflating paper. Keynesian economics be damned: To the capital interests of the country, a break from gold meant ravaging the nation’s wealth and savings.

Atthis point, Butler knew MacGuire was taking orders from someone, and requested to speak up the chain of command. It was then he met with Robert Sterling Clark, whose net worth of $30 million owed much to a recent inheritance from the Singer sewing machine fortune. Butler remembered Clark as a “millionaire lieutenant,” from when they served together during the Boxer Rebellion. Clark was blunt about his concerns. He and his associates hoped Butler would encourage support within the Legion and perhaps the country for the reinstatement of the gold standard. “I am willing to spend half of the 30 million to save the other half,” Clark confessed. As Butler suspected, this appeared less and less to be about veterans’ interests.

Clark also bankrolled MacGuire’s seven-month trip abroad in December of 1933, in which the bond salesman was to survey the transforming political tides of Europe. He observed the ascending Nazis. He appreciated the Italian Fascists and their symbiotic relationship with the country’s powerful business interests. But MacGuire’s ultimate model ended up being a right-wing nationalist league in France called the Croix-de-Feu, which had managed to summon 150,000 supporters, many of whom were veterans.

Gerald MacGuire was a portly, sweaty man, and made a habit of talking to Butler about his concerns with frustrating vagueness and equivocation. But after his trip, he brought Butler up to speed and came forward with an even larger proposal. Yes, MacGuire admitted, it was true that the money came from a coalition of concerned captains of industry. At the moment, they had invested $3 million in the project, and MacGuire estimated he could raise $300 million need be. What he wanted, he told Butler, was for the major general to assemble a paramilitary force of some 500,000 veterans, and to use them to throw President Roosevelt out of office.

MacGuire informed Butler that the press would soon make an announcement about the league of businessmen fatigued by the president’s reckless economic reforms. They planned to plant stories about Roosevelt’s ill health and expected the president to comply with orders from his fellow patricians to hand over the highest seat of government. He would be permitted a ceremonial position while Butler and his allies steered the country in the proper direction.

An astounded Butler debated where to turn first and decided to enlist a liberal Philadelphia paper to verify the details of his outlandish story. The paper sent their star reporter Paul Comly French who feigned anti-Roosevelt sympathies to interview MacGuire, who was candid about his views and details of the plot. He mentioned that the Remington arms manufacturerswould supply the army, thanks to a working relationship with the DuPonts. “We need a Fascist government in this country,” he told the reporter, “to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

Now that he had a second witness, Butler brought his story to the Feds. The committee began hearings on November 20, 1934. “To be perfectly fair to Mr. MacGuire,” Butler said, “He didn’t seem bloodthirsty. He felt that such a show of force in Washington would probably result in a peaceful overthrow of government.” French corroborated Butler’s testimony. Gerald MacGuire, however, denied everything but that the Legion solicited Butler’s support for the gold standard.

Ina few days, the story hit the news cycle. “$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared,” read one headline. Much of the press found the story risible. “Details are lacking to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” wrote the New York Times. “The whole story sounds like a gigantic hoax … It does not merit serious discussion.”

Those implicated agreed. Banker Grayson M.P. Murphy called it a “damned lie” and said he wasn’t “able to stop laughing” at the thought he, a prominent citizen and veteran of the Spanish-American War would attempt such treason. Thomas Lamont, a Wall Street banker implicated, called it “perfect moonshine. Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon.”

Shortly before the committee hearings, in September of 1934, the newly formed American Liberty League—made up of leaders and captains of industry opposed to the president “fomenting class hatred” and his handling of the Depression—released a statement. Among its members were the DuPonts, S.B. Colgate,Sewell Avery, John Raskob, Alfred P. Sloan, and former secretary of State Elihu Root. Butler noticed Robert Sterling Clark’s name on the list, as well as Grayson M. P. Murphy, Gerald MacGuire’s boss.

Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith,former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush, a banker, future Connecticut senator, and father to George H. W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush.

Of these wealthy and prominent people, none was called for testimony, and none was punished.

Butler went on to rise in public profile, championing populism and pacifism with his 1935 book, War Is a Racket, but for the beneficial publicity, the committee as well as French agree that he was telling truth. And only recently has the public learned of a letter to
Congress sent from an official at the company building the Hoover Dam, in which the writer warned of a plot by the “American Fascist Veterans Association” to overthrow the president.

What remains for many historians to debate is how wide the gap was in this scheme between contemplation and fruition. Butler’s whistleblowing certainly stopped it short, but one wonders if nothing else would have brought down such a complicated and inauspicious plan. Still, as historian Sally Denton points out, “The Fascist plot which General Butler exposed did not get very far, but that plot had in it three elements which make successful wars and revolutions: men, guns, and money.”

In the 1930s, Germany and Italy proved that no form of government should be taken for granted. At this exigent time in America — brought forth by the Depression, a destabilized world, and a transformative president — the rich doubled down on what they always do: protecting their own.

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Dr. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth.  Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

“Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.  The desolation lies there, not in the facts.” – John Berger, “A Man with Tousled Hair” in The Shape of a Pocket

A few days ago, as I stepped into my pants to start the day as is my habit, I happened to notice the label at the waist band.  It read “Gap,” and the sight of this word sent my mind spinning into a whirling contemplation of this void that lies at the center of life today, a subject that has disturbed me for a long time.

I had earlier that morning made the mistake of checking the news headlines on the computer.  This too is a habit that I no doubt share with millions of other people. It is a dastardly habit no sane person should inflict on oneself.  To rise from one’s night dreams and step into a litany of hyperbolic headlines shouting doom and gloom at every turn is to inject oneself with a poisonous drug before the sap of life has a chance to rise in one’s veins and one’s imagination might give birth to new possibilities.

Standing in my pants, I felt as though I were hovering over Berger’s enormous empty space, and if I didn’t wake up, I would tumble endlessly away.  Thoreau’s words floated up:

“To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

So I stepped over the hole at my feet and tried to shake the monotonous clatter of the monstrous media’s messages from my mind. In my vertiginous state I dared not look in a mirror.  So many of the media’s lying words that I had already ingested with coffee seemed to float around and within me in an unreality disconnected from the actual world, even the world they were ostensibly reporting on.

I too had written many words about the drastic condition of our world today, thinking somehow my words, different from the corporate media’s, could move the world by pulling back the curtain that the powerful have created through clichés to conceal the sordid reality they have made of this beautiful earth.  Yet the presentation of facts seemed to make no difference.  Very little, if anything, made a difference.  Most of those who read my words more or less already agreed with me. And many, even friends and family, just ignored them, anticipating that they would disturb them.  And the mainstream publications shunned them like the plague.

Between my desire for a changed world and the world that seemed to change only for the worse lay the desolation Berger identified.

Many people feel it, I know, especially dissidents who fight in various ways against the powerful.  But we prefer not to go there, to see what it consists of and how we may transmute it into acts and words that might make a difference. We prefer to make believe we are making a difference by repeating ad nauseum the same prefabricated responses, usually directly political, to the atrocities committed daily. We are caught in what Czeslaw Milosz, writing in a different context, called “ontological anemia” – “among this illness’s symptoms is the nothingness sucking from the center in.”  We try and try but seem to devour ourselves by repeating the same approaches, as if all the slaves know is what their masters have taught them.  Milosz knew this because he was an artist and a spiritual seeker, not just a political analyst, and also had personal experience with the totalitarian mindset that is descending on the West.

The twists of history can make one’s head spin.

In writing about Vincent Van Gogh, whose hunger for reality drove him to produce works of achingly loving beauty, John Berger, the quixotic Marxist, writes:

Reality, however one interprets it, lies behind a screen of clichés.  Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.  Reality is inimical to those with power.

Yet while Van Gogh sought reality by breaking the mold, the rich and powerful have devoured the results of his efforts and have transposed them into commodities.  Last year, his painting, Laboureur Dans Un Champ, painted from an asylum where he had committed himself, sold for $ 81.3 million at Christie’s after a frenetic auction.

A humble peasant working in a field becomes a trophy for the rich, who keep the working man slaving away.  Words and deeds are turned upside down on desolation row where

Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row (Dylan)

We need to think again. Imagine!  Today we are caught in a void of clichés and in the clutches of rapacious elites.  Only acts of creative imagination will free us from their clutches.

I look to my right and on a shelf I see a vividly painted Matryoshka doll.  It startles me into the thought that like Matryoshka dolls, so many of our personal habits that deaden us to imagining a way across the gap to a better world are nestled within social habits of thought, speech, and action. We are so often encased like tiny cloned dolls in the social clichés that make us smaller versions of the powers that we say we oppose but which we mimic.  We are carved and painted in their likeness, and caught in the habit of reacting to them in ways that reinforce their control.

We must disrupt our routines.  We must find new ways, not to just respond, but to take the initiative.  When we react according to habits, although we may not realize it, we are being controlled and not in control.  Habits, like the word’s etymology reveals, may reassure us that we have, hold or possess a position of strength from which we can move the world in our direction, but the only Archimedean lever and fulcrum capable of that is inspiration.

That involves a new way of seeing, not vertiginous but visionary.

I think I’ll change my pants.

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Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

To cut and push up prices or not to cut and preserve market share, this is the question that Saudi Arabia is facing ahead of this year’s December OPEC meeting. It seems like just yesterday when OPEC met in 2016 and decided to cut production by 1.8 million barrels daily, including from Russia, to reverse the free fall of oil prices. At the time, it worked because everyone was desperate. Now, many OPEC members are both desperate while not yet recovered from the 2014 blow. Saudi Arabia is not an exception.

A recent report from Capital Economics said Saudi Arabia has its problems but it could withstand lower oil prices without feeling too much of a pinch.

“Even if [Brent] prices fall further to $40-$50 a barrel, immediate balance of payments strains are unlikely to emerge,” the report said, with its authors adding the Kingdom would be able to finance its trade deficit from its foreign exchange reserves “for at least a decade.”

This suggestion is not universally accepted. Reuters’ John Kemp this week offered a different perspective in his regular column on oil, noting Saudi Arabia’s foreign exchange reserves currently stand at US$500 billion, down from nearly US$750 billion in 2014 when the oil prices slumped under the weight of U.S. shale oil. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is in a major push to diversify its revenue streams and has committed a lot of money to it.

Also, Kemp wrote,

“The kingdom probably needs to keep several hundred billion dollars’ worth of reserve assets on hand to maintain confidence in its fixed exchange-rate peg to the U.S. dollar and prevent a run on the currency.”

It’s a classic rock and a hard place situation for the Saudis. On the one hand, they could continue pumping at the current record rate or close to it, pressuring prices further, which is what they did in 2014. That strategy hurt U.S. shale substantially, but the attempted assault did not go quite as planned. Now, it will once again hurt U.S. shale, but again, it won’t beat the resilience of the US shale patch.  That much should have become clear in the past three years.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia could start cutting, but it will need to convince all other OPEC members to join the cuts and, more importantly, Russia. Reuters earlier today reported, quoting unnamed sources, that Russia had “accepted the need to cut production” and prices immediately jumped, once again highlighting how important the Russia-Saudi Arabia cooperation has become for oil markets, if it even needs highlighting.

For now, it seems like a cut is the more likely outcome. In spite of reservations expressed by Nigeria and Libya, if Saudi Arabia managed to convince everyone to cut amid the major tensions with Iran ahead of the U.S. sanctions, then it could probably convince them again, if only on the grounds that if they don’t start cutting all will suffer.

Kemp agrees.

“Saudi Arabia cannot afford another slump in oil prices,” he warns. “It needs to keep revenues high to help its economy climb out of recession and finance ambitious social and economic transformation programs.”

Yet the Kingdom is preparing. Kpler reported this week loadings of Saudi crude since the start of November had reached new highs of 8.14 million bpd, which was 770,000 bpd more than the average daily loadings rate for October and much higher than the last 2018 high of 7.766 million bpd booked for June. The bulk of the increase comes from China, with shipments in that direction up by more than half a million barrels daily in November from October. Production is also at record highs, like Russia’s was ahead of the first cuts in 2016. Perhaps we are seeing a lesson learned there or perhaps the Kingdom is out of options besides cutting.

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Irina is a writer for the U.S.-based Divergente LLC consulting firm with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

Regularly presidents, prime ministers, congresspersons and parliamentarians worldwide negate the democratic will of their nation’s voters by refusing to support legitimate election results. Strangely, their treasonous actions continue without serious reprisal or punishment by the voter. This emboldens them. The reality of votes cast and “democracy”past does not does bode well for the people of the United Kingdom, their future as a nation or their hopeful return to sovereignty once called, “Brexit.”

While the name has not changed; the definition certainly has.

It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.

One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May’s negotiations- the “deal”- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit may soon lay in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June 27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in their own “Grexit” referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain.

The Fleeting Illusion of Election Night Victory.

Similar to Greece, the current state of Brexit leaves it now before the parliament – not the voters- as a poor Hobson’s choice. In a week, this faux- Brexit as it is currently- the spawn of an utter, and possibly deliberate, failure in the negotiations- will be decided. Here in the UK blame can be laid at the feet of just one national politician, who, like Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, first appeared to their desperate country dressed in the mantle of “Hope”and “Change.” Too quickly Tsipras was stripped bare, following  Syriza’s staggering 2015 national election victory and his subsequent tepid and inept attempt to renegotiate with Brussels about its destructive debt structure and leave the EU. His public disrobing then- like that of UK Prime Minister Theresa May via her “deal”– would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels.

On Dec. 11, 2018, the most historic vote in modern UK history will take place. At stake is Britain. Like Greece, the whispered coercions to UK Parliament members by the arrogant likes of European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker and President of the European Council Donald Tusk and their EU members have begun. These are the men who have already beaten back the democratic attempts of Greece and Catalonia while affecting recent populist socialist movements in national elections in Italy and in Spain.

The farcical justifications from UK politicians have begun anew, trying desperately to convince Britons that this failure of negotiations and political will is actually good for them, their futures and for the UK. These de rigueur protestations are growing louder day-by-day as the public is told again and again, “This is the best we can do.”

Is it?

As must be remembered, David Cameron, a Tory, called for the national Brexit vote in order, not to free the UK from the clutches of EU unelected dominance, but instead to further certify and strengthen the Conservative Party’s ongoing destruction of the UK’s social services, privatization of national assets, privatization of Britain’s healthcare system (the NHS), and increased austerity for UK families. All this, while an increasingly impoverished Britain saw their parliament approve tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, benefit reductions for workers, increased retirement age, and more funding for US/Israeli inspired wars under diktat from Brussels via Washington.

Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron’s Brexit vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU by the Cons and “new”labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK voter.

So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron… the Cons… New Labour…The Lib- Dems… and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen. Brexit had passed by popular vote!

David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.

After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to read Article 50– the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an article published four days after the night Brexit passed, “ A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors,” provided anyone thus reading  Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit. Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along with the other twenty-seven member nationsand that effectively Ms May and her Tories would be playing this game using the EU’s ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven during the negotiations.

In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than ever.

Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest to sleep in Cameron’s now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner.

So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on, that “Brexit means Brexit!” A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of “old” Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her “soft” Brexit negotiations for the litany of failures that ultimately equaled the “deal” that was strangely still called “Brexit.”

Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.

What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel, the quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British press began their work as well.

The Kingdom’s New Waterloo?

Two weeks ago, Ms May announced the details of her very much anticipated “deal.” This was the culmination of her “tough” negotiating style with the European Union negotiators on Brexit.

The definition of pro-Brexit supporters in Ms May’s Conservative Party has amounted to two possible choices in result: the “hard Brexit” which completely severs ties with the EU. This would separate British law from European law on topics ranging from trade to migration to product regulation. The other strategy, a “soft Brexit,” would maintain some of these ties without a complete separation from the EU’s common market.

The details that Ms May released on Wednesday are without a doubt a very soft Brexit- one that pays no homage to the original vote. This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate.

Worse, this deal would have the UK parliament forfeit its current direct rights to EU law and courts in the advent of problems within the Customs Union after the deal. However, Britains are supposed to believe the protestations, now, that the EU will promise to provide smooth sailing from now on.

The issue of the “Back-stop” has Ireland furious as well. This is designed to avoid a crisis over Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but wants to retain an open border with neighboring EU member Ireland. Imposing border controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland could threaten the Good Friday Agreement, the deal that ended serious violence in Northern Ireland in 1999. Unlike, Ms May, Ireland does not trust the EU. Due to the Back Stop and the Customs Union, the EU will be able to force its will on the UK, as France has already said it will do over fishing rights, but the UK will not be able to cry foul, because Ms May will have given up the nation’s EU commercial rights of any kind over grievances.

Ms May’s failure was so obvious that cabinet defections– new ones- began immediately including Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, who said, he cannot in good conscience” support the deal. His was followedbyWork and Pensions secretary, Esther McVey, who added,

“We have gone from no deal is better than a bad deal, to any deal is better than no deal.”

When, on Thursday, PM May went to Parliament to defend her deal, she was met by howls of laughter as she attempted to show confidence before the whole House of Commons when defending her indefensible deal. Next, Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has grandstanded throughout as  an MP from the hard Brexit camp, submitted a letter of no confidence in May’s leadership — which may see her soon join David Cameron in hiding.

As it stands before parliament next Tues., the choice is a Hard Brexit “No” vote or “Yes” to Ms May’s excuses for this deal. This choice also amounts to whether she will see her hand the keys to No. 10 over to the nightmare of Brussels, Jeremy Corby.

Yes or no, both, at this minute, are being sold as the only two choices, with EU President Junker helping this coercion by insisting that there will be no new negotiations and “this deal is the ‘best deal for Britain,” and that,

“This is the only deal possible. So, if the House (of Commons) says no, we would have no deal.”

Both sides predict gloom and doom for Britain, and here, they may both be correct. This all the more highlights the failure and the treason of Ms May’s deal.

The last option is a new Brexit referendum. After a successful “No” vote. “The prospects of a second referendum have advanced considerably,” wrote the ultra-conservative Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley, who added.

“Parliament will not stomach a no-deal exit. So the hardliners risk provoking the crisis that kills their dream, by smoothing the path to a second referendum.” 

This, of course, ignores Junker’s threats against further negotiations and the very questionable outcome from the voters who are tired of elections and this Brexit but will likely, then, have a new leader in the Commons.

As it stands, only one possible outcome, the “Hard Brexit,” is in keeping with the spirit of the Brexit that was voted for long ago. But if the fate of Greece is followed by EU vengeance on the UK in retribution, the Brits will be hit hard, fast and often. Considering the Tories, not surprisingly, have no plan for this, the pound will likely dive and prices soar in Venezuela style fashion. The deal, however, is a clear victory for the EUP and a new referendum as no guaranteed result except to continue to fracture Britain with yet another vote.  All choices, if these are choices, are very bad for Britain.

The question that should be most important to all British citizens, the one that must draw their attention to this Brexit finale, is no longer: “Brexit: ‘Yes?’or ‘No?’” The question must now be:

           “How many UK politicians will, a week from Wednesday, sell their vote, their soul and their country to EU?”

Their vote will answer this. The British people are in the hands of their politicians; the same collective UK cadre that has, for the past two decades, routinely beholden the UK to an unelected EU central body of monetary, military and sovereign control.

What could go wrong? 

The Eight Hundred Pound Corbyn in the Room.

Throughout the negotiations, there has at all times been a specter looming in the back of the minds of the Brexit negotiators and particularly in the black souls of Junker and Tusk. Arguably there is a much bigger reason for the failed Brexit negotiations and the final desperate measures of Ms May and her ilk to pass their “deal.” This reason, a voice of reason long discounted like the UK people themselves, now stands larger than ever. One diminutive little man. He stands for what they do not. This politician is pro-UK, pro-worker, pro-Labour, pro- NHS, pro-union, and pro- Palestine. He is also anti-privatization, anti- EU, anti-war, anti-nuclear war, anti-global warming. Worse, he is a devote socialist and a Jew…  a Jew who publicly holds Israel accountable for its crimes!

Yes. Behind all that has gone on with destroying Brexit, there is another nightmare, one that is the Kryptonite that Brussels is terrified of to its marrow. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

However, Brussels is not scared of just the man himself nor his ideals and sincerity to his cause. No. What EU and EUP politicians, those that support all things Zionist, fear the most is his leadership: Unapologetic, populist, socialist, leadership. That is rising.

Corbyn is what the United Kingdom once was fifty years ago. During that too-long forgotten time, the workers and their vote forced political will in favour of their country and their families. Politicians feared their vote and Britain slowly reversed the social degradation that was the legacy of the industrial revolution and the engines of capitalism and capitalists run amuck. Corbyn is, and always has been, Old Labour; not the bastardized form that slowly infected parliament under the moniker of “New”Labour over the past twenty years. What hucksters like Tony Blair and the Labour Party elite were, in fact, offering as “new” was really just a quasi Conservative Party light platform that slowly morphed over the years into what the Conservative Party had once been itself under Thatcher and John Major. This left the British voter with the choices of only the Tories or the Conservative Party subsets such as the ineffective Lib-Dems, plus a few non-influential nationalist parties like DUP in Ireland and Plaid Cymru in Wales.

Hence, election-after-election, voters continued to see their country gutted by virtue of their own vote due to a lack of true choice or opposition candidates. The ongoing results were privatization, social service cuts, and imposed austerity on the UK majority that saw UK poverty levels skyrocket, as shown by last week’ scathing UN report. Instead, Britain became a haven for the wealthy and their massive tax dodging schemes- as shown by the Panama Papers- as poverty increased under more and more White Hall approved austerity. All pro- EU factions of all UK parties within the Parliament, however, were universal in their excuses and false justifications for their ongoing gutting of what remained of British socialism… election-after-election.

Except one.

Corbyn is real Labour. He is an unabashed supporter of, and a throwback to, a time when the UK was an economic powerhouse, but also had enough for everyone- by law! By all accounts and his consistent thirty-five-year track record as an MP, he is genuine. Minimized by his Labour colleagues and the UK press during decades of Labour Party decline, he has now emerged as the voice of reason, a champion of the worker, formidable in debate with his Tory adversaries and unflappable under the torrent of daily media and cross-bench White Hall criticism.

Few remember, as they should, that Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party, has already survived a very contentious attempt by his own party members and the Friends of Israel to oust him as the leader. His success against this coup strongly shows that he has very powerful and connected political interests behind him: those which have spearheaded his ascent and believe in socialist reforms. They and Corbyn understand the true state and direction of current Britain; about this Brexit deal and about Ms May’s faux negotiations and her treason. They don’t like any of it.

To the troika (EU Commission, EU Central Bank and IMF) Corbyn is a much bigger threat than the failed attempts at sovereignty in Catalonia, Italy, Spain, Greece or Britain. Corbyn may prove to be- if he becomes PM- real leadership: leadership worth following. His sincere path to a return to an old-time Labour platform that returns control to the UK worker rather than elite and the powerful business interests is anathema to the capitalist forces ruling the EU. His consistent leadership reminds his growing group of followers, both in Britain and worldwide, of the good old days when the people did matter to their government and when there was enough for everyone- by law! He is a very dangerous man; for his is a message, not just for the UK but one being heard as a rallying cry in many capitalist dominated countries worldwide.

If Corbyn comes to power, his will- finally– be the first successful attempt at the return to a socialist Britain; the first non- military defeat for the EU and Capitalist forces worldwide. If he becomes PM, which seems increasingly likely, Corbyn’s example will be closely followed by other socialist national leaders in their own countries- sincerely or not (see: Bernie Sanders) –  where the 1% have all the wealth, all the services and all the control over an increasingly impoverished world. Anti-populist forces like the EU have so far globally stopped all forms of democratic expression including those elections that were –temporarily – successful, such as Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Honduras, and Ukraine. So, Brexit and Corbyn must be defeated.

While Brexit might be the unintended spark for a desperate world to watch glow, it is Corbyn who holds in his palm a very large box of matches.

The Mathematics of Treason: Tithing for Politicians.

PM May will not be going quietly. With her Prime Minister-ship, Brexit, EU control over the UK, Tory Control over parliament, and certification of the national rise of socialism at stake, her job is to cajole and lie-again- to an election weary Britain, one that has already suffered the distortions of the Scottish independence referendum (SNP), the ill-fated Brexit referendum, and then a national election- the one that saw May and her Cons club cling to power only by buying Irish DUP support for UK 1.5 Billion pounds. All this in thirty-three months.

The cycle has begun anew.

This time the stakes could not be higher. Ms May has already shown her desperation by offering bribes in the form of peerages to PM’s willing to vacate their current public anti-deal opposition. This week, Downing Street announced that John Hayes, a former MP and Transport Minister, who proclaims to be a staunch Euro-sceptic, would suddenly become Sir John in a rare honor. Earlier this week furious young Tory MPs claimed that now older Euro-sceptics had refused to put in the No Confidence letters against Theresa May because they were hoping for a peerage of their own Thus, Best for Britain champion Virendra Sharma said,

“It seems like Downing Street will do anything to get their bad Brexit deal through.”

But it is Prime Minister Theresa May’s words that Britons should take notice of, particularly two all revealing sentences, that together show the strange mind and divisive, if not delusional, rational used to pass this bad deal. Beyond the oft-debunked claim by the PM that,  “Brexit is Brexit,” she would now, this week, have the MPs and the British public believe that:

“This is the best deal we could get,” and, “We have to follow the will of the voter and pass [this] Brexit.”

The arrogance of these two statements is as incongruent as it is revealing.

Here, Ms. May would actually have the original Brexit voter believe that she has done such a good job negotiating this deal that her current Brexit- which it is not – must now be passed by parliament in order to honor the will of the Brexit voter- which it does not: the same voters that  would never have voted for Brexit in the form she has turned it into. Such is the delusion and arrogance of Ms May.

Ridiculous?  Maybe not.

Ms May must rely on getting her votes this time from parliament, not the people.  She needs 326 votes. Here lies the real threat to Britain.

There are 650 seats in House of Common so 326 is the magic majority. In terms of purported party loyalty, the Cons sit with 315 seats and an only coalition majority. But Labour’s opposition and 257 seats are fractured at best between true labour and faux labour members. The Scottish National Party is third with 35 followed by the Liberal-Democrats with 9. The remainder of 31 seats is split between nationalist parties like Ian Pasley’s Irish DUP, (10 seats) which have come out against the deal publicly, but has already shown it can be bought for the right price (1.5 Billion pounds), as in the last election of 2016.

The UK public must fear the Cons continued allegiance to Brussels. Yes, many have expressed outrage and insisted that they will not vote for this deal. However, with the Cons not having yet been successfully punished at the polls, it is surely a matter of time before the first defector- after a very lengthy and public set of excuses and self-serving rationale- joins the many other existing Tory yes votes. When that happens the floodgates will open and the defections will pour in for their just rewards to come. So, it is safe to assume that the Cons numbers will swell in support by the time of next Wednesday’s vote.

While Corbyn tries to hold ranks in order to achieve the Trifecta of defeating the deal, Ms May’s political future and becoming PM in one blow, there is, however, no chance of party unity on this vote. Like the Cons, it is just a matter of time and the next few days before the first public Labour defections and excuses- likely the same ones- “force” that slippery slope towards UK sovereignty to get suddenly steeper.

It is not likely that the minor parties will vote for the deal as they are ultra-nationalist, such as Plaid Cymru, since a ”yes” vote will see their platforms as utter hypocrisy and therefore doomed. If PM May and here supporters win, it will be the Conservative Party that will be convicted of the crime.

Ms May and the EU can start the count with a firm 90 seats, however. When it comes to UK parliamentary hypocrisy, the leader by far is the self-proclaimed Friends of Israel who are indeed just that. While voting for all things Israel and demonizing all reasonable and factual discussion of Britain’s burgeoning war machine or Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza so, they really hate Corbyn. It is fair to say that most will do as they are told and sell out Britain to central control and Zionist EU interests.

At this juncture, with a final parliamentary vote only days away, it should behoove the British voter to also look more closely at the failed attempt by Greece to leave the EU and the politicians then, who, in a matter of weeks, also turned tail on their country to also answer a call from Brussels.  Brexit, as it stands now before Parliament, is a terrible deal:  a deal that is worse than staying in the EU and a deal that will certainly punish the UK- as was the final result in Greece- for its attempt at sovereignty and populist democratic will. For all this, just like in Greece, is anathema to Brussels and just like in Greece the evil of Brussels does not just stop resistance; it puts it down and then punishes such indiscretions economically and brutally afterwards. Such it is today in Greece, as Alex Tsipras, PM in name only, goes hat in hand selling his countries airports, beaches, islands  and infrastructure for pennies on the Euro merely to service existing loans from Brussels in order to beg for more.

Greece was not a case study in leadership. It was a case study in political treason. Will it be repeated this coming Tuesday!

Regardless of the eventual total, what should be a very easy defeat for this treasonous “deal” being sold as a Brexit fait accompli, like Greece, the final tally may well be a disastrous defeat for Britain. It is likely that all of the UK will be following the final total of the vote. However, the total they should be counting is that of those MPs that turn on them and their country in the lead-up to Tuesday. For, if this deal is passed, it is these faces who must be remembered as the men and women who decided to thumb their nose at the British people and their country. And this they will surely do unless public pressure and outrage- which has not shown itself in decades- is made obvious to them all. Now.

Count Down to Tuesday…

The UK’s Telegraph reports 100 Tory MPs have now indicated they will vote the deal down in Parliament. But will they… after the days to come?

After Sunday’s EU unanimous vote, Ms May strangely offered to debate her deal for the first time, with Jeremy Corbyn. However, at the same time as the whole of Britain pricked-up their ears at this exciting news, Ms May backed out. Likely because she knows every one of her excuses will be cannon fodder for the Labour leader- and his rise in power.

The Express Newspaper polled3154 British adults about their opinion on the latest Brexit developments and no one is happy. Four in ten (42 per cent) of Britons oppose the deal, whilst only 19 per cent are in favor of it.

The remaining 39 per cent answered, “don’t know”. Here, the UK media has done its job via disinformation, thus giving the confidence to those PMs who do vote for the deal, that all will eventually be forgotten, regardless, by the next election.

Three of the many events from recent days should tell the UK voter just how important a real Brexit, one that does extricate Britain from EU control, really is and illustrate how much Brussels is worried about the outcome of this vote.

One: EU Parliament passed Theresa May’s deal in 38 minutes.

Nothing spells winning at the negotiating table like enthusiasm from only one side and this was the message on Sunday. With the last sticking point being the centuries-long contention between Spain and the UK regarding Gibraltar- one so explosive that the UK keeps a large military presence there today- PM May rolled over quickly on that too, leading Conservative MP, Andrew Bridgen to say,

“It appears that there is no-one the prime minister will not betray to achieve her sell-out deal.”

It is safe to that Junker, Tusk and their twenty-seven EU brethren members understood the UK Prime Minister’s negotiating style in exactly the same way.

38 minutes?  Guess who won these negotiations?

Two: Italy.

Down south, this past week in Italy the newly elected Italian government, led by populist Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, and ethno-centrist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, released their proposed annual national budget. Within twenty-four hours, the EU, Tusk and Junker stated clearly that they were not satisfied with Italy’s sovereign decision on how to spend its own national coffers. The EU demanded that Italy revise the budget to suit their unelected whims.

Three: Greece.

Britains  should consider this arbitrary bullying of Italy and of the UK. Then they should consider the sad EU imposed current condition of Greece. Next, they might dwell on the failed outcomes of previous elections within the nearby EU nations, and how similar movements were defeated in their nation as well. Last, they must pay closest of attention to what is actually in the souls of their own politicians and what they truly support.

If not these examples, then the UK citizens would do well to look at the state of subjugation, austerity and further poverty in all these countries and their own: the same countries who also saw, so recently, their hopes so quickly destroyed- like Brexit– by the false-flag allegiance of their elected politicians.

Then, Britons can collectively bend over-like their politicians- and begin to get used to taking it… themselves!

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

It is attrition, suffocation and contortion.  While Theresa May’s Brexit program, weak, compromising and cobbled as it is, endures that bit longer, her opponents from within and without government have been essentially undercutting her on various fronts. 

Foppish and solutions-free Boris Johnson does so from the perspective that the May program as it has been agreed to with the EU so far is a case of Britannia surrendering to the wickedness of the Continent.  He prefers, according to Sir Roger Gale, “the grievance to the solution”.

In the Commons, Johnson persisted with his motif of imprisonment and punishment for the sceptred isle: that the bureaucrats across the channel were cooking up a terrible fate for Britain were the backstop not to be removed from any arrangement.

“They will keep us in permanent captivity as a momento mori, as a reminder to the world of what happens to all those who try to leave the EU.”

Britain would be hostage to Spanish claims on Gibraltar, the French purloining of its fish and bankers, and German pressing for concessions on the free movement of EU nationals.

Opposition parties assail the prime minister from the perspective that the entire campaign for Brexit, and government behaviour since, has been a tissue of irresponsibility and lying.  They are often not sure which, but they are chancing it.  Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn is, however, playing a double game. Being himself sympathetic with the Leavers, he can only, as of this time, trash the Chequers proposals with indignant scrutiny.  Before his fellow parliamentarians, Corbyn insisted that May’s plan would cause a severe case of economic shrinkage: some 4 percent, precipitating the loss of £100 billion over the course of fifteen years. 

What exercised the House of Commons on this occasion most, however, was a historical incident of singular rarity.  Members from Labour and the DUP were permitted by Speaker John Bercow to submit an emergency motion to find the government in contempt.  The motion carried.

The May government had not done itself any favours in that regard, equipping opponents with the bombs to duly situate under their chairs.  As if channelling her former self as home minister, the secretive May refused to release the full legal advice behind the Brexit deal that may yet be doomed.  A circulating rumour (for much, in these shadows, remains rumour), is the fear that the backstop might keep Northern Ireland in the EU customs union indefinitely. 

The government defence proved to be stock standard and would, in most instances, have worked: to release such a report would expose vulnerabilities in negotiating positions ahead of further talks with the EU, thereby rewarding the very individuals deemed enemies by many in parliament.  Besides, argued transport secretary Chris Grayling, himself a former lord chancellor, it remained “a central part of the principles of our legal system that the advice provided from a lawyer to their client is treated as confidential.”

Such is the dire, panicked state of British politics at the moment than even old principles of legal propriety, including that of professional privilege, should be seen to be broken in the higher national interest.  Parliament, as the people’s arbiter, must be informed, and not releasing the attorney general’s legal advice failed to comply, according to the parties behind the contempt motion, with the Commons resolution of November 13.  That resolution stemmed from the principle that legal advice on the Brexit deal would be published in its entirety. 

Attempt to placate opponents were duly made. The first was the release by the government of an overview on Monday covering the gist of the attorney general’s legal advice.  Then came the appearance of Attorney General Geoffrey Cox in the Chamber. He expressed a willingness to answer questions put to him, but this proved a minor sedative to the proceedings.  A three-line whip, deployed by Conservative MPs in an effort to shield the government, also failed.

Cox’s responses conceded various government weaknesses in their negotiations with the EU.  He would have preferred, for instance, “a unilateral right of termination” over the Northern Ireland backstop.  Additionally, he would have also liked to see “a clause that would have allowed us to exit if negotiations had irretrievably broken down.”  But such frankness was to no avail, and Andrea Leadsom, the Commons leader, was compelled to accede to the wishes of the opponents, with the full advice set to be published on Wednesday.

Contempt matters are ancient things, the sort referred to a privileges committee.  But the focus here will be less seeking sanction against any relevant minister, including Cox, than the vote on December 11 in a house that is already faltering.  The government, surmised shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, “has lost its majority and the respect of the house”.  At this point, the deal in this form will be scuppered, leaving a drawing board bereft of options.  Those filling the void will do so with a formula so repetitive it has become traditional: extol the scenario of total collapse, or embrace the fiction a world outside Europe that can act as appropriate replacement for British trade and power. 

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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]

Friba (*), representante da Associação Revolucionária das Mulheres do Afeganistão (RAWA, na sigla em inglês), fala na entrevista a seguir sobre o processo de paz em seu país, e a cobertura midiática global destes 17 anos da Guerra do Afeganistão. “Esses diálogos de paz são, mais que tudo, parte da propaganda dos EUA a fim de enganar o mundo e o povo afegão”, diz a afegã, defensora dos direitos humanos quem ainda traz sérias denúncias sobre crimes de guerra e de lesa-humanidade.

Edu Montesanti: A RAWA opõe-se fortemente a qualquer negociação entre os EUA, o governo afegão e o Taliban. Esta possibilidade torna-se ainda mais irrealista, para não dizer hipócrita, levando-se em consideração que agora o Estado Islamita (ISIS) também aterroriza seu país. O que você acha deste processo de paz afegão?

Friba: As negociações de paz com o Taleban são algo completamente sem sentido, hipócritas e simplesmente ridículas. Temos os talibans de um lado, criminosos de mentalidade medieval, do outro lado o regime fantoche composto pelos irmãos ideológicos do Taliban, e o terceiro ator, os EUA, criadores de ambos. Tal acordo de paz não resultará em paz, mas no cumprimento dos desejos dos EUA. O único resultado certo desse acordo de paz é que intensificará a guerra, a insegurança, a corrupção, a máfia e a multiplicação das misérias do nosso povo.

Os crimes do Taliban são bem conhecidos de todo o mundo, suas leis da Idade da Pedra e a opressão contra as mulheres sob seu regime brutal já foram amplamente exibidos em todo o mundo. Na última década, esses assassinos derramaram o sangue de milhares de pessoas inocentes através de atentados suicidas, e outros tipos de atentados à bomba.

Enquanto essas lembranças ainda estão fortemente presentes nas mentes de nossas mulheres e homens, e as feridas ainda sangram, esses criminosos estão sendo convidados a juntar-se ao governo para completar o círculo de criminosos fundamentalistas e mercenários no poder. Como os criminosos que já estão presentes no governo, os talibans também desfrutam de total impunidade e não enfrentam processos pelos crimes selvagens contra o nosso povo.

A mera menção dessas conversas de paz está derramando sal nas feridas de nosso sofrido povo. Assim como o acordo de paz alcançado com o assassino Gulbuddin Hekmatyar no ano passado, foi mais um golpe para o povo devastado pela guerra no Afeganistão. Um criminoso que matou milhares de pessoas inocentes durante a Guerra Civil afegã, assassinou dezenas de intelectuais e costumava jogar ácido no rosto das mulheres que eram vistas em público, quando ele era estudante universitário, pisoteou os túmulos das suas vítimas em direção aos braços dos EUA e de Ashraf Ghani [presidente do Afeganistão].

Os ocupantes dos EUA deram ao seu garoto de olhos azuis e agente de longa-data, imunidade contra processos judiciais e retiraram seu nome da lista negra da ONU, para que ele pudesse se juntar aos companheiros traidores e criminosos neste governo fantoche.

Esses diálogos de paz são, mais que tudo, parte da propaganda dos EUA a fim de enganar o mundo e o povo afegão. Se os EUA quisessem um acordo de paz, teriam resolvido esse problema com facilidade porque são os próprios criadores e defensores desses criminosos.

O Paquistão, pai adotivo do Taliban, também está sob comando dos EUA, e teria garantido a aprovação do acordo de paz. Mas os EUA não querem esse acordo de paz, porque o Taliban é sua justificativa para empreender a guerra no Afeganistão, e os EUA precisam urgentemente continuar ocupando nosso país.

Qualquer acordo de paz alcançado sem a participação do povo, especialmente das mulheres do Afeganistão, não tem sentido assim como a democracia e as eleições no Afeganistão são apenas uma fachada. Ganhos obtidos sem a verdadeira luta do povo são apenas mudanças impostas por invasores estrangeiros ou governos fantoches, e essas mudanças podem ser tão facilmente revertidas quanto são implementadas.

Edu Montesanti: Enquanto Donald Trump manifesta desejos de abandonar o Afeganistão, o que você pode dizer sobre a cobertura midiática destes 17 anos de ocupação do regime de Washington, e sua denominada “luta contra o terror”?

Friba: Apesar do anúncio da chamada nova estratégia de Washington, há tantas coisas que não sabemos sobre a criminosa Guerra Afegã dos EUA, devido à falta de transparência e às mentiras descaradas contadas pelo exército dos EUA nos últimos dezessete anos.

Desde o encobrimento de crimes hediondos, que vão de massacres e torturas à assistência a criminosos fundamentalistas, até a mentira sobre o efetivo número de tropas e empreiteiros privados no país, os EUA continuamente enganaram o mundo e sua própria nação sobre a realidade da Guerra Afegã

O Afeganistão mal recebe qualquer cobertura midiática, mas quando raramente isso ocorre os crimes das forças dos EUA nunca são mostrados, assim como a insegurança e a instabilidade do nosso país e a devastadora situação das mulheres e das pessoas, não recebem nenhuma atenção.

Graças à mentirosa máquina de propaganda dos EUA baseada em Goebbels [Paul Joseph Goebbels, ministro de Propaganda da Alemanha Nazista entre 1933 e 1945, que dizia que “uma mentira contada mil vezes torna-se verdade”], os EUA conseguiram escapar impunes de grande parte das suas atividades criminosas, não apenas na Guerra do Afeganistão como igualmente em guerras no Iraque, na Líbia e na Síria, mentindo ao seu povo. A própria sustentação das atuais guerras dos EUA baseou-se em alegações falsas ou exageradas de uma mídia histérica, que espalhou medo entre as pessoas para justificar as invasões e ocupações dos EUA em outros países.

Naturalmente, a devastação de nosso país, política, social e economicamente, é o resultado direto dessa ocupação e dominação. Nosso povo tem provado a guerra neocolonial de 17 anos dos EUA, e os desastres que ela causa. Insegurança, guerra, assassinatos, tortura, violência contra as mulheres, pobreza, máfia, corrupção, desemprego, crise de refugiados, aumento do consumo de drogas, estão todos presentes na ocupação norte-americana sobre nosso povo.

Esta realidade tem cobertura zero em todo o mundo, e é doloroso constatar como as pessoas têm uma imagem distorcida da guerra criminosa dos EUA no Afeganistão e em outros países. Os cidadãos dos EUA e do Ocidente não têm a imagem verdadeira das guerras dos EUA para tomar decisões adequadas, esclarecidas sobre elas. Eles devem enxergar além da cobertura predominante, e descobrir a realidade da Guerra Afegã e de outras cruzadas lideradas pelos EUA.

Eles devem saber que o imposto que pagam é usado por seus governos para promover objetivos imperialistas, no Afeganistão e em outros países devastados pela guerra, e que suas mãos estão encharcadas do sangue do nosso povo inocente. Eles devem saber que os EUA, embora afirmem liderar uma “Guerra ao Terror” no exterior, estão realmente alimentando terroristas e grupos terroristas para alcançar seus próprios objetivos.

Devem saber que, embora Washingon afirme ser o portador da tocha dos direitos humanos, seu governo tem cometido alguns dos crimes mais sangrentos em suas guerras, e forneceu apoio aos violadores locais de direitos humanos e criminosos de guerra nesses países.

Edu Montesanti: E o que se pode dizer da mídia afegã?

Friba: A mídia afegã, que cresceu rapidamente desde a invasão dos EUA em 2001, também tem a mesma política de encobrir e deixar passar os crimes e os planos malignos dos EUA no Afeganistão, em vez de expô-los.

Edu Montesanti: Temos visto no Brasil o avanço de muitos movimentos de origem e aspecto obscuro, com evidências de que são financiados pelos EUA para atingir seus objetivos no país sul-americano, nenhuma novidade na historia da região e do próprio mundo. Na realidade, trata-se de padrão mundial atualmente, a denominada Revolução Colorida idealizada pelo estadunidense Gene Sharp e aplicada em Tunísia, Egito, Síria, Venezuela, Brazil, Ucrânia entre outros países, tentada por Washington sem sucesso também em Cuba, recentemente. Conversei com alguns estudantes afegãos nos EUA, especialmente uma universitaria cujo primeiro nome era Noor, que concedeu entrevistas para a grande mídia norte-americana, com um aspecto muito estranho e muito semelhante à juventude reacionária brasileira: por exemplo, esta Noor smplesmente defendeu, e raivosamente, a Guerra do Afeganistão. Quanto o regime de Washington tem influenciado a juventude afegã?

Friba: Infelizmente, esses agentes educados e treinados nos Estados Unidos aumentaram no Afeganistão, e continuam aumentando com bolsas de estudos como o Programa Fulbright e o Chevening – este segundo é britânico, mas tem os mesmos objetivos [O Reino Unido tem atuado intimamente com os EUA no processo de influencia, espionagem, imbecilização, dominação e exploração global, enfim, o velho e maldito imperialismo].

Garotas como a Noor fazem parte dos planos futuros dos EUA, para que possam continuar ocupando confortavelmente nosso país com o apoio de um Estado traidor, que inclui jovens como Noor.

Essas pessoas e movimentos não são, de fato, afiliados ao governo nem a nenhum outro movimento ou partido reacionário.

Edu Montesanti: Que mensagem você gostaria de enviar ao mundo, para terminar esta entrevista?

Friba: A RAWA sempre afirmou que a solidariedade das pessoas que amam a liberdade e a paz no mundo, é muito importante para fortalecer a luta de nossos povos em casa.

Essas pessoas precisam pressionar seus governos para mudar essa política de invasão e ocupação, e ficar ao lado das pessoas que são vítimas dessas guerras.

Essas sangrentas guerras também têm um forte impacto sobre as pessoas do Ocidente, como o aumento de ataques terroristas perpetrados por simpatizantes do ISIS em toda a Europa e Estados Unidos, sendo portanto vital, mais que nunca hoje, dar as mãos para aniquilar esse vírus mortal.

(*) Dado que a RAWA atua clandestinamente no Afeganistão, ameaçada pelos senhores da guerra locais e pelos talibãs, Friba é um pseudônimo. Nenhuma membro da RAWA menciona publicamente o nome real, nem mostra o rosto. 

The recent death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has helped shed more attention on the Saudi war of aggression in Yemen. According to the UN up to 14 million people are at risk of starvation in Yemen. Yet the American and British governments, who have the ability to stop the Saudi war machine in its tracks, continue the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners. 

Corporate politicians try and defend the military actions of the Saudi led coalition in Yemen by sheer unadulterated lies. UK Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt in a debate in the House of Commons blithely stated that the Saudi led coalition had not breached any international law.*

Yet evidence of war crimes in Yemen abound. Save The Children, which is feeding starving people in Yemen, has recently released figures showing that the Saudi instigated war in Yemen has caused the deaths of 85,000 children over the last four years.

Tamer Kirolos, Save The Children’s Director in Yemen, has recently said:

“We are horrified that some 85,000 children in Yemen may have died because of extreme hunger since the war began. For every child killed by bombs and bullets, dozens are starving to death and it’s entirely preventable.’’

The air, sea and land blockade of Yemen that the Saudi and UAE led coalition imposed a year ago has been a key factor in creating the conditions for mass starvation in Yemen. However, that is only part of the  story.

In Yemen the Saudi and UAE led coalition has systematically set out to destroy the resources of farmers, herders and fishers alongside the deliberate targeting of food processing, storage, transport and water irrigation.

This falls under the UN definition of genocidal acts. The UN Office Of The Special Advisor On The prevention Of Genocide has an analysis framework that comprises eight categories of factors that it uses to determine whether there may be a risk of genocide in a situation. One of the categories that falls under the category of “Genocidal Acts’ is the deliberate destruction of the food infrastructure:

“Less obvious methods of destruction, such as the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services.’’

The Saudi led coalition, unable to achieve any decisive breakthroughs on the battlefield against the Houthi opposition, has resorted to the mass bombing of Yemen’s food infrastructure to try and bring about victory in their illegal war.

A new report by Professor Martha Mundy, The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Aerial bombardment and food war, provides a very detailed analysis of the bombing campaigns carried out by the Saudi led coalition in Yemen. This provides clear evidence of the genocidal nature of the military campaign that is supported by the American and British governments. Martha Mundy explains:

“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanaʿaʾ.”

In the first phase of the war, March to August 2015,  the Saudi coalition focused its bombing primarily upon military targets. However, once their superior fire power failed to crush the Houthi resistance the Saudi led coalition then moved into the realm of deliberate war crimes in the hope of bringing about victory on the battlefield. Professor Mundy, drawing upon data from a wide variety of Yemeni sources, states that the pattern of Saudi bombing moved very early on from military to civilian targets:

“From August 2015 there appears a shift from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, schools, cultural monuments, clinics and hospitals, and houses, fields and flocks.’’

The map below illustrates the systematic way that the Saudi coalition has set out to destroy Yemen’s food infrastructure in every region of the country.

Alongside the bombing of fields and flocks of animals the Saudi led coalition has deliberately targeted the irrigation system of Yemen in an attempt to destroy the agriculture of the country.

The attacks upon the irrigation system has led to severe shortages of water for farmers whose food production has seen massive declines as a consequence. The Tihama region of Yemen, once known as the breadbasket of the country, has seen a devastating collapse of agriculture. Professor Mundy’s report gives figures for 2017, before the Saudi led siege of the port of Hudadaya made the situation even more catastrophic:

• 51% fall in the amount of land under cultivation
• 43% of people go hungry every night
• crop yields per hectare have declined between 21-60%

Professor Mundy notes the complicity of the US and UK in these war crimes. She states categorically that the Saudi targeting of the irrigation works, provided by the Tihma Development Agency has been facilitated by its Western partners:

“It is inconceivable that the US (and UK) military advisors who give target intelligence to the Coalition did not know the location/s and purpose of the Tihama Development Authority.’’

The other aspect of Yemen’s food infrastructure that the Saudi coalition has systematically targetted is its fishing industry. These attacks have inflicted severe damage upon fishing ports all along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. They have destroyed over 220 fishing boats which has led to a 50% fall in fish catches. The map below illustrates the attacks upon fisherman. 

The US and UK along with France are well known for being the major arms sellers to the Saudi coalition  and for protecting its more well known war crimes from diplomatic censure. Less well known is their support for the Saudi coalitions economic war against Yemen, a major cause of starvation, and the deliberate destruction of Yemen’s water and food infrastructure.

Professor Mundy’s report, which draws upon a variety of Yemeni sources, adds to the  growing body of evidence  that reveals how Saudi Arabia and its allies are committing acts of genocide in Yemen. This is with the active complicity of America and its UK ally.

This evidence of the deliberate destruction of the food infrastructure of Yemen, which is designed to create the conditions for mass starvation, is a clear act of genocide. As such, it is the responsibility of ordinary people across the world to pressure their governments into taking action against this genocide.

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*The Saudi Embassy in London was contacted on numeorous occasions for a comment about the issues raised in this article. Not surprisingly, it failed to provide any comment.

A former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian embassy in London has put the final nail in the coffin of credibility for The Guardian, refuting the paper’s fantastical and wholly unsupported claim that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2013, 2015 and the spring of 2016 – a charge vehemently denied by all parties involved. 

Fidel Narváez – who worked at Ecuador’s London embassy from 2010 – 2018 has told The Canary that The Guardian‘s claim is entirely false. The Canary has also reviewed a copy of correspondence between the Guardian and Narváez in which he makes a formal complaint accusing the paper of fabricating an earlier story about a Kremlin plot to smuggle Assange to Russia. 

Both WikiLeaks and Manafort have said they plan to sue The Guardian over the publication, with Manafort slamming the report as “totally false and deliberately libellous.”

Narváez – initially consul and then first secretary at the embassy, told the Canary that to his knowledge, Manafort never visited the embassy while he was employed there. What’s more, his account supports points made by The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald about visitation rights at the embassy.

It is impossible for any visitor to enter the embassy without going through very strict protocols and leaving a clear record: obtaining written approval from the ambassador, registering with security personnel, and leaving a copy of ID. The embassy is the most surveilled on Earth; not only are there cameras positioned on neighbouring buildings recording every visitor, but inside the building every movement is recorded with CCTV cameras, 24/7. In fact, security personnel have always spied on Julian and his visitors. It is simply not possible that Manafort visited the embassy.

The Guardian responded to Narváez’s comments, stating:

“This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.”

This answer is counter to a statement made by Manafort following the story’s publication, in which he said “We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.”Furthermore, Manafort’s passport stamps also refute the Guardian‘s reporting, after the Washington Times reported that Manafort’s three passports reveal just two visits to England in 2010 and 2012, which support his categorical denial of the “totally false and deliberately libelous” report in The Guardian, which said that Manafort visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy – ostensibly to coordinate on the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, bet The Guardian “a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” 

This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the "Hitler Diaries".

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 27, 2018

No word on whether they’ve taken the organization up on its offer.

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Football is the modern-day equivalent of violent chariot races in ancient Rome, the most popular “sport” at the time, mano a mano, no holds barred.

Extreme violence defines modern-day US and Canadian football, especially at the professional level – what television doesn’t show, what major media don’t discuss, including longterm physical damage to many players.

Some experience disabling injuries, others traumatic head ones caused by concussions. Powerful bodies smashing into each other disrupt normal brain functioning, affecting learning, thinking and other cognitive abilities.

Affected players are at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

Short-term fame and fortune are poor compensation for spending later years dependent on others for care – a deplorable state.

Mike Boryla is a former Philadelphia Eagles Pro Bowl quarterback in the 1970s – now passionately opposed to the sport he excelled in.

His Disappearing Quarterback one-man 75-minute autobiographical play on why he walked away from the game he loved is a scathing account of how it brutalizes players.

He finished law school he left to play pro football, later became a lawyer and mortgage banker. He suffered three concussions during his playing days, euphemistically called getting “dinged.”

Since retiring from the game, he saw former teammates and other NFL players suffer from the longterm effects of serious injuries.

Boryla left the game after five years in the NFL to avoid debilitating injuries many others sustain, including disabling ones and shortened lifespans.

A 2013 Harvard University study showed on average former NFL players die nearly 20 years younger than the US average for men.

The study examined the effects of repetitive brain traumas, torn knee and other ligaments, other serious injuries, post-career arthritic joints, along with damage from longterm acute pain and chronic use of potent painkillers.

It’s not a pretty picture, serious health issues far more commonplace than most people outside the game realize.

Many former players struggle with debilitating joint pain, requiring longterm use of powerful painkillers to control.

“(P)rofessional football players in both the United States and Canada have life expectancies in the mid-to late-50s,’’ Harvard researchers explained.

How much pay is enough to risk life and limb on the gridiron? How much is a 20-year shorter lifespan on average worth? How much is enough to compensate for longterm pain and/or disability?

In the 1960s, Philosophy Professor Emeritus John McMurtry played professional football in Canada. In 1971, he wrote a scathing indictment of the sport, titled “Kill ‘Em! Crush ‘Em! Eat ‘Em Raw,” saying:

Football “is a sport in which body wreckage is one of the leading conventions…(B)ody shattering is the very point of football.”

Football lingo is the language of combat.

“Players and fans alike revel in the spectacle of a combatant felled into semiconsciousness, ‘blindsided,’ ‘clothes-lined’ or ‘decapitated.’ “

Crowds roar when players are “smeared,” “knocked silly,” “creamed,” “nailed,” “broken in two,” or even “crucified,” the more violent, the more fans love it, mindless of how destructive to human bodies.

McMurtry had torn knee ligaments at age-13, explaining that “injuries came faster and harder. Broken nose (three times), broken jaw…ripped knee ligaments again.”

“Torn ligaments in one ankle and a fracture in the other…Repeated rib fractures and cartilage tears…More dislocations of the left shoulder than I can remember.”

“Occasional broken or dislocated fingers and toes. Chronically hurt lower back…Separated right shoulder (needled with morphine for the games). And so on.”

“The last pro game I played…I had a recently dislocated left shoulder, a more recently wrenched right shoulder and a chronic pain center in one leg.”

“I was so tied up with soreness I couldn’t drive my car to the airport. But it never occurred to me or anyone else that I miss a play as a corner linebacker.”

“By the end of my football career, I had learned that physical injury -giving it and taking it – is the real currency of the sport. And that in the final analysis the ‘winner’ is the man who can hit to kill even if only half his limbs are working.”

Football is combat by other means, “a warrior game with a warrior ethos…smash and be smashed.”

McMurtry left pro-football in 1962. An academic career teaching philosophy followed.

In June 2001, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) by his peers for outstanding contributions to the study of humanities and social sciences.

Professional and college football may be more violent today than decades earlier – players bigger, perhaps stronger and faster.

The game is big business at both levels, culminating for the pros on Super Bowl Sunday annually.

It’s the most over-hyped entertainment spectacle of the year, audience size far exceeding Oscar night.

Players come and go. Profits for wealthy owners continue. The human wreckage from America’s game goes largely unreported and unnoticed.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

One of the local Washington television stations was doing a typical early morning honoring our soldiers schtick just before Thanksgiving. In it soldiers stationed far from home were treated to videolinks so they could talk to their families and everyone could nod happily and wish themselves a wonderful holiday. Not really listening, I became interested when I half heard that the soldier being interviewed was spending his Thanksgiving in Ukraine.

It occurred to me that the soldier just might have committed a security faux pas by revealing where he was, but I also recalled that there have been joint military maneuvers as well as some kind of training mission going on in the country, teaching the Ukrainian Army how to use the shiny new sophisticated weapons that the United States was providing it with to defend against “Russian aggression.”

Ukraine is only one part of the world where the Trump Administration has expanded the mission of democracy promotion, only in Kiev the reality is more like faux democracy promotion since Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is clearly exploiting a situation that he himself provoked. He envisions setting himself up as a victim of Moscow to aid in his attempts to establish his own power through a security relationship with Washington. That in turn will help his bid for reelection in March 2019 elections, in which his poll numbers are currently running embarrassingly low largely due to the widescale corruption in his government. Poroshenko has already done much to silence the press in his county while the developing crisis with Russia has enabled him to declare martial law in the eastern parts of the country where he is most poorly regarded. If it all works out, he hopes to win the election and subsequently, it is widely believed, he will move to expand his own executive authority.

There also has to be some consideration the encounter with the Russians on the Kerch Strait was contrived by Poroshenko with the assistance of a gaggle of American neoconservative and Israeli advisers who have been actively engaged with the Ukrainian government for the past several years. The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own domestic political reasons but it was also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that surround Trump and proliferate inside the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.

The defection of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, together with the assumption that a lot of anti-Trump dirt will be spilled soon, means that the American president had to be even more cautious than ever in any dealings with Moscow and all he needed was a nod of approval from National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel the encounter. A heads-of-state meeting might not have solved anything but it certainly would be better than the current drift towards a new cold war. If the United States has only one vitally important relationship anywhere it is with Russia as the two countries are ready, able and apparently willing to destroy the world under the aegis of self-defense.

Given the anti-Russian hysteria prevailing in the U.S. and the ability of the neocons to switch on the media, it should come as no surprise that the Russian-Ukrainian incident immediately generated calls from the press and politicians for the White House to get tough with the Kremlin. It is important to note that the United States has no actual national interest in getting involved in a war between Russia and Ukraine if that should come about. The two Eastern European countries are neighbors and have a long history of both friendship and hostility but the only thing clear about the conflict is that it is up to them to sort things out and no amount of sanctions and jawing by concerned congressmen will change that fact.

Other Eastern European nations that similarly have problems with Russia should also be considered provocateurs as they seek to create tension to bind the United States more closely to them through the NATO alliance. The reality is that today’s Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union and it neither aspires to nor can afford hegemony over its former allies. What it has made very clear that it does want is a modus vivendiwhere Russia itself is not being threatened by the West.

Recent military maneuvers in Poland and Lithuania and the stationing of new missiles in Eastern Europe do indeed pose a genuine threat to Moscow as it places NATO forces on top of Russia’s border. When Russia reacts to incursions by NATO warships and planes right along its borders, it is accused of acting aggressively. One wonders how the U.S. government would respond if a Russian aircraft carrier were to take up position off the eastern seaboard and were to begin staging reconnaissance flights. Or if the Russian army were to begin military exercises with the Cubans? Does anyone today remember the Bay of Pigs?

When it comes to international conflicts context is everything. Seeing the incident between Russia and Ukraine in Manichean terms as an example of Moscow’s aggressive instincts is satisfying in some circles, but it does not in any way reflect the reality on the ground. Internal politics of the two countries combined with deliberate fabrications that are expected to generate a certain response operate together to create a largely false narrative for both international and domestic consumption. Unfortunately, narratives have consequences: in this case, the sacrifice of the possibly beneficial meeting between Trump and Putin.

The same dynamic works vis-à-vis Washington’s other enemy du jour Iran. In the case of Russia, useless “friend” Ukraine is pulling the strings while regarding Iran it is conniving Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran has been accused of being the world’s leading sponsor of terror, of destabilizing the Middle East, and of having a secret nuclear weapon program that will be used to attack Israel and Europe. None of those assertions are true. The terrorism tag comes from the country’s relationship with Hezbollah, which is only a terrorist group insofar as it is hostile to Israel and pledged to resist any future Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Washington and Israel have pushed the terrorism label for Hezbollah, but most Europeans have begun to disregard the designation since the group has become a part of the Lebanese government.

And regarding destabilizing the Middle East, that has largely been the end result of actions undertaken by the United States, Israel and the Saudis, while the alleged Persian nuclear weapons program is a fantasy. If someone in the U.S. national security apparatus had any brains the United States would work to improve relations with Iran real soon as the Iranians would in the long run quite likely prove to be better friends than those rascals who are currently running around using that label.

And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don’t expose anything done by the Russians. Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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George H.W. Bush’s Complicity in the 1991 “Highway of Death” Massacre.

By Joyce Chediac, December 04, 2018

When George H.W. Bush was president he ordered the massacre of Iraqi soldiers after the ceasefire in 1991, and after he had promised them safe passage out of Kuwait.

George H. W. Bush: “October Surprise” Denials, Iran Contra

By Robert Parry, December 04, 2018

“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016

Les Gilets Jaunes – A Bright Yellow Sign of Distress

By Diana Johnstone, December 04, 2018

Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.

A US-China Trade War ‘Armistice’? Trump Blinks and Retreats at G-20

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, December 04, 2018

The first reports emerging from the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, December 2, 2018, are that Trump and Xi have agreed to put their trade war on hold, a kind of ‘trade war armistice’, at least for the next 90 days.

Israel’s New War of Attrition on Jerusalem’s Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook, December 04, 2018

Israel has never hidden its ambition to seize control of East Jerusalem, Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967 and then annexed, as a way of preventing a viable Palestinian state from emerging.

The Bin Ladens and the Bushes: On 9/11 George Herbert W. Bush Meets Osama’s Brother Shafiq bin Laden

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 03, 2018

Lest we forget, one day before the 9/11 attacks [as well as on the morning of 9/11, the dad of the sitting President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting none other than Shafiq bin Laden, the brother of the alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

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After a week of insisting that a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Trump at the last minute sent out a Tweet explaining that due to a Russia/Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be willing to meet his Russian counterpart.

According to Trump, the meeting had to be cancelled because the Russians seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in Russian waters that refused to follow instructions from the Russian military. But as Pat Buchanan wrote in a recent column: how is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business?

Unfortunately it is “our business” because of President Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically-elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his Administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama Administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote.

US interventionism in Ukraine led to the 2014 coup and many dead Ukrainians. Crimea’s majority-Russian population held a referendum and decided to re-join Russia rather than remain in a “pro-West” Ukraine that immediately began discriminating against them. Why would anyone object to people opting out of abusive relationships?

What is most disappointing about President Trump’s foreign policy is that it didn’t have to be this way. He ran on a platform of America first, ending foreign wars, NATO skepticism, and better relations with Russia. Americans voted for this policy. He had a mandate, a rejection of Obama’s destructive interventionism.

But he lost his nerve.

Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course. What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that.

But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest. Just this week he told the Washington Post, in response to three US soldiers being killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, that he has to keep US troops fighting in the longest war in US history because the “experts” tell him there is no alternative.

He said,

“virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.”

That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq! We’ve got to fight Saddam over there or he’d soon be in our streets. These “experts” are worthless, yet for some reason President Trump cannot break free of them.

Well here’s some unsolicited advice to the president: Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your “experts” a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism.

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The Trump administration plans to auction more than 900,000 acres for oil and gas extraction on the doorstep of Nevada’s only national park and other protected public lands. It would be the largest single lease sale of public lands in the lower 48 states in at least a decade.

“The Trump administration is doubling down on its reckless ‘drill-anywhere’ strategy,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Nevadans cherish our national park and wildlife refuges. It’s disgusting that Trump officials are willing to permanently defile these spectacular places to appease the oil industry.”

The Bureau of Land Management lease sale, scheduled for March 12, 2019, will auction off public land next to Great Basin National Park and Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, an internationally known migratory waterfowl stopover cherished by birders and hunters.

One parcel comes within a half-mile of South Ruby Lake, where a spill of fracking fluids or a well failure could contaminate one of the Great Basin’s most vibrant aquatic ecosystems.

Great Basin National Park has been designated an International Dark Sky Park in recognition of its remoteness. The area surrounding the park is undisturbed except for a few multigenerational ranches.

The plan threatens imperiled wildlife, including greater sage grouse, since the massive lease sale includes hundreds of thousands of acres of important grouse habitat. The sale also covers tens of thousands of acres of designated critical habitat for the federally protected desert tortoise and parcels adjacent to springs harboring rare native fish, including the threatened Railroad Valley springfish.

“Every time the BLM invites the oil and gas industry to drill and frack sage-grouse habitat, the grouse moves closer to extinction,” said Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for Western Watersheds Project. “The BLM needs to stop leasing sage-grouse habitat, period.”

The BLM deferred roughly 400,000 acres of sage-grouse habitat from an October auction to the March sale in response to a federal court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Center, Western Watersheds and Advocates for the West.

“The BLM is doing the absolute minimum to claim it’s complying with the court order,” Donnelly said. “Meanwhile the agency is rushing ahead with the illegal action that prompted the lawsuit in the first place, offering massive swaths of critical sage-grouse habitat in violation of its own plans to protect the bird.”

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Featured image: Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

India is sending several messages by bragging about its alleged ability to track one of its “frenemy’s” submarines in the “Indian Ocean”, though the timing of this announcement might inadvertently raise further suspicions in Russia about its South Asian partner’s true long-term strategic intentions.

Sputnik reported that Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba just disclosed during a press conference on Monday that his country had secretly tracked a Chinese submarine in the “Indian Ocean” in October, which sent several important messages irrespective if his claims are true or not:

The “Indian Ocean” Is Hegemonically Regarded By India As Its “Backyard”

India considers one of the world’s largest bodies of water to be exclusively within its “sphere of influence”, giving it the self-proclaimed “right” to supposedly track foreign submarines that traverse through the tens of millions of square miles of international waters here in a thinly disguised hegemonic message meant to convey its aspirations as a rising Great Power.

India’s American Ally Might Have Lent A Helping Hand

Supposing that a Chinese submarine did indeed enter the “Indian Ocean” during October and was tracked the entire time, it’s very likely that India was able to do this only through the help of its new American ally via the working channels between their two militaries that were recently established through the Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) that was finally agreed to in early September.

New Delhi’s Naval Capabilities Are Much Better Than Previously Thought

Considering that the “Indian Ocean Region” is expected to become the geostrategic center of gravity in the New Cold War, India has an interest in deceptively portraying its naval capabilities as being much better than previously thought, both in order to “deter” China but also to prove its military-strategic “value” to the US in the face of rising skepticism at home about its role in this alliance.

The BJP Isn’t “Going Soft” On China Ahead Of General Elections Next May

Practically every domestic and international political development concerning India nowadays must be seen through the prism of next May’s general elections, meaning that the ruling BJP is also signaling to its supporters that it isn’t “going soft” on China despite the faux ‘rapprochement’ that it’s partaking in with its “frenemy” as part of a deal for both of them to increase their respective negotiating leverage vis-à-vis the US.

India Doesn’t Care How Russia Interprets Its Statement

It says a lot that India would make this announcement just days after Admiral Lanba returned from Russia and at the same time as his country’s Eurasian partner is holding joint naval drills with Pakistan, strongly suggesting that New Delhi doesn’t care how Moscow interprets the pro-American and anti-Chinese messages that it conveyed because India sees itself as much closer to the US than Russia in the military-strategic sense.

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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 India Today

On November 30^th, Khalid al-Mahamid, a prominent figure of the Syrian opposition, revealed that there is “an international agreement” to eliminate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib. Al-Mahamid is known as the godfather of the reconciliation process which took place in southern Syria in 2018. The UAE-based businessman reportedly persuaded thousands of former FSA fighters in the governorates of Daraa and al-Quneitra to join the ranks of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) 5^th Assault Corps.

On the same day, a military source told SF that units of the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) 4^th Armored Division were redeployed from the northern al-Suwayda countryside to frontlines in the northern Lattakia countryside and the northwestern Hama countryside.

On December 1^st, the SAA deployed additional units of the 5^th Assault Corps and the Republican Guard in several positions around Aleppo, pro-government sources reported. A video showed several T-72 battle tanks and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) heading towards advanced positions west of Aleppo.

Syria’s SANA news agency reported that the SAA tracked militant movements in the southern parts of Latimineh city and conducted concentrated strikes on them while they were attempting to infiltrate the military posts around al-Zalaqiyat village.

Furthermore, an army unit in the area surrounding al-Hamamiyat village shelled another group of militants while they were attempting to infiltrate from the surroundings of al-Jaisat and Tal al-Sakhir.

In Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) efforts against ISIS are also on-going with mixed success. On November 30^th, the SDF Media center reported that Abu Awayd, a close aide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was captured.

The SDF also announced that its forces evacuated dozens of civilians from the ISIS-held pocket in the middle Euphrates River Valley during a successful special operation.

Last weekend, SDF claimed that they repelled an attack by ISIS on positions in eastern Deir Ezzor. US-led coalition warplanes supported SDF fighters during the clashes and conducted 34 airstrikes on positions, vehicles and gatherings of ISIS. Reportedly 33 militants were killed as a result of the clashes.

During the last week, ISIS carried out several attacks on the SDF confirming by actions that the terrorist group is still relatively strong on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in this part of Syria.

Fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), SDF’s core, launched a hit and run attack on positions of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the town of Ablah, near Aleppo.

On November 30^th, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) reported that its agents had arrested Jamal Khalil Taha Znad Mashhadani, another prominent commander of ISIS during a special operation in Baghdad. On December 9^th, 2017 Iraq announced the defeat of ISIS in the country. However, since then there have been continuous operations to hunt commanders and remaining ISIS elements and sleeper cells in the country.

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Ignored by French President Emmanuel Macron, distorted by the media, courted by the Right, snubbed by the Left, the self-organized mass movement known as the Yellow Vests (Mouvement des gilets jaunes) is seriously challenging the political and economic order in France.

In Paris, on the morning of Saturday December 1st, as thousands of self-organized Yellow Vest protestors attempted to gather to express their grievances on the Champs-Elysées at a planned, peaceful demonstration, French CRS riot police in Paris attacked them savagely with tear-gas, flash-bombs and water-canons. By the end of the day, cars were burning near the Arc de Triomphe, and all of Paris was in chaos as groups of would-be peaceful marchers, joined by the usual casseurs (smashers) spread throughout the capital, expressing their anger at the system and calling for the resignation of President Macron.

This militarized state over-reaction to a peaceful mass demonstration breaks with a long tradition of tolerance for muscled demonstrations by rowdy angry farmers and militant labour unions. A tolerance Macron, in speeches, has blamed for the failure of previous governments to pass needed pro-business counter-reforms. Predictably, Macron (who must have ordered Saturday morning’s unprovoked, violent attacks on unarmed demonstrators arriving early for the planned march) blamed the victims:

“What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate anger,” he said on Saturday. “Nothing justifies attacking the security forces, vandalizing businesses, either private or public ones, or that passers-by or journalists are threatened, or the Arc de Triomphe defaced.”

Meanwhile, throughout the French provinces, at least 75,000 Yellow Vest protesters (police estimate) were blocking highway entrances, intersections, and shopping centers all day – all with minimal violence and apparent general approval (80% according to recent polls).

Why France’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Mad as Hell

Like all the spontaneous mass uprisings that dot French history going back to Feudal times, the Yellow Vest revolt was initially provoked by taxes. In this case, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Macron’s decision to increase taxes on gas and diesel fuel, which affect ordinary working and lower-middle class French people dependent on their cars to earn a living. The rebels, donning the yellow breakdown-safety vests they are required to keep in their cars by the government, have been on the warpath for three weeks now. Spurning all political parties, the Yellow Vests got organized on social media and acted locally. The broadcast media, although highly critical, spread the news nationally, and the Yellow Vest movement spread across France, blocking intersections, filtering motorists, and gathering to demonstrate, more and more numerous and militant, on successive Saturdays.

Why Saturdays?: “I can’t go on strike,” explains one woman. “I’m raising three kids alone. My job, that’s all I have left. Coming on Saturdays is the only way for me to show my anger.” Women workers – receptionists, hostesses, nurses-aids, teachers – are present in unusually large numbers in these crowds, and they are angry about a lot more than the tax on diesel.

To begin with, inequality: Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron has showered corporations and millionaires with huge tax cuts, creating a hole in the budget which he has compensated by cuts in public services (hospitals, schools, transit, police) and by tax increases for ordinary people (up to 40% of their income), large numbers of whom are struggling hard to make ends meet and going into debt. “We’re hungry and we’re fed up,” said Jessica Monnier, 28, who works in a watch factory in the French Alps. She earns €970 a month, and said: “Once I pay my bills, I don’t have enough to eat. We’re just hungry, that’s all.”

This anger has been building since last Spring, the 50th anniversary of the 1968 worker-student uprising, but was frustrated when Macron won the stand-off with labour over his neoliberal, pro-business counter-reforms. This labour defeat was facilitated by the leadership of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and other unions, played the same negative role in the 1968 sell-out to Charles de Gaulle. A half-century later the French union leaders, eager to keep their place at the political table (and on the government payroll), avoided a major confrontation, met with the government behind the scenes, and only went through the motions of carrying out strikes, spreading them over months and tiring out the workers [see my “French Labour’s Historical Defeat”].

Macron is also hated for his truly monarchical arrogance, ruling alone like Louis XIV, imposing his will by decrees, ignoring his opponents and patronizing the common people in a pedantic style that humiliates and enrages them. By dismissing the Yellow Vests, haughtily refusing to address their issues, and then violently repressing them despite their popularity, Macron has revealed the vast gap between his authoritarian, neoliberal regime and the mass of the French population. The French elected him in 2017, in the run-off following the first round collapse of the traditional parties of the Left and the Right. Macron was a stop-gap to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen of the extreme-right, openly racist National Front. He has no real mandate and no political party behind him, despite an unorganized parliamentary majority.

This Saturday, the demonstrators were heard booing the TV network people on Place de la Concorde, furious at being been presented as deliberate vandals, calling the press “Usurpers.” “We wanted to come and demonstrate calmly,” said one fifty-ish Yellow Vest interviewed by Médiapart. “I came by train, I had my ID card in my pocket. They threw so much tear-gas at us that we ran like rabbits.” He then held out a rubber cartridge. “They even fired Flash-balls at us” he added as two nearby women nodded. “Who are the Vandals?”

Another would-be demonstrator, Franck, from nearby Seine-et-Marne, added: “We came to the Champs-Elysées this morning and when we tried to approach the entry-points, we were immediately inundated with tear-gas, 300 meters before the check-points.” Furious, he spits out “Macron gasses his own people like Bashar al-Assad!”

Marité, a retiree from the suburbs, kept repeating over and over: “I confess before the CGT that I voted for Macron, and beg your forgiveness.” She has worked for 42 years, her husband for 44; together their retirement comes to $3,200 a month and their anger is deep. A woman named Morgane hisses through clenched teeth a phrase heard all over France since the beginning of the movement: “Marie-Antoinette was living high off the hog just before the Revolution also. And they cut off her head.”¹

What was remarkable at this Saturday’s chaotic mass outbreak in the streets of Paris was the fortuitous convergence of the Yellow Vests with previously scheduled demonstrations organized by the CGT and other unions as well as the feminist #MoiAussi (#MeToo) movement, and the LGBT movement. So happenstance created the first real dialogue between members of these disparate movements which took place under clouds of tear-gas as the various demonstrators, driven away from the Champs-Elysées area by the police, wandered through the half-empty streets.

A start: Angry French people waited all Spring for the promised “convergence” of the various unions of students and workers united against Macron’s reactionary anti-reforms which the leaders never organized, leaving the different groups of strikers isolated.

Popular Risings, Elite Contempt

The French popular classes have long historical memories, and seem unaffected by the postmodern scholarly denigration of the 1789 French Revolution and its successors as useless explosions of popular violence which inevitably led to bloody dictatorships. Morgane knows all she needs to know about the guillotine. According to Gérard Noiriel, author of a monumental history of France ‘from below,’ “The Yellow Vests who block highways and refuse to be coopted by political parties have taken up, in confused form, the tradition of the Sans-culottes of 1792-93, the citizen-combatants of February 1848, the Communards of 1870-71 and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Banquet Years.”

Indeed, these traditions go back much earlier, to the Feudal period, with its periodic uprisings of peasants burning landlord’s chateaux and urban rioters taking over towns. What changed in late 18th Century France was the development of roads and mail service, that enabled revolutionary Committees of Correspondence to coordinate and organize discontent on a national level. Today, Internet social networks and network news play the same role in real time.

Like today’s Yellow Vest rebellion, all these historical uprisings were initially about excessive unfair taxes, like the Tithe of 10% (imposed by the wealthy Catholic Church on the poor), the royal Gabelle tax on salt (necessary for life and preserving foodstuffs) and the Corvée (days of free labour owed to the noble landlord, the Church and the government). Although violent, these spontaneous, self-organized risings eventually led to the democratic republic, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, free secular education, etc. (all under threat today).

The other common denominator between the Yellow Vests and historical popular movements is the near-universal contempt with which they were (are) treated by France’s elite classes: the royalty, the nobility, the upper clergy, official academic historians, and today the media and the leadership of the unions and Left parties, who have joined the establishment and are an integral part of what the French call the “political class.”

Class Prejudice

Not so much has changed since the Old Regime. Then, the nobles derisively referred to any peasant as “Jacques Bonhomme” (Jack Goodfellow), and to their violent uprisings as “Jacqueries.” Around 1360 the revered French chronicler Jean Froissart reported: “These evil folk assembled together without a leader and without arms were stealing and burning everything and killing without pity and without merci, like rabid dogs. And they made a king among them who was the worst of the bad; and this king they called Jacques Bonhomme.”

In fact, says Noiriel, the archives show the peasants selected as their spokesman one Guillaume Carle, known to be “a good thinker and a good talker.”

Similarly, for three weeks the government, the media, and even the Left (parties and unions) have been attempting to present the Yellow Vests as red-necks and/or vandals, while reducing their generalized anger to the issue of gas taxes. On one TV broadcast, the reporter kept trying to get the Yellow Vest being interviewed to say she was rebelling against taxes, but the woman kept repeating over and over: “Fed up to the ass-hole,” “We’ve had it up to the ass,” “Everything.”²

The organized Left has shown little sympathy for this, self-organized, autonomous (albeit amorphous) uprising of desperate and angry lower middle class people who, out of long experience, reject domination by union and party leaders. Plus, they live in places no one has heard of and sing the Marseillaise (originally a revolutionary song, but who remembers). More, the color “Yellow” used to stand for “scab unions.” So the unions and Left parties, as usual embroiled in infighting among each other, instead of supporting the Yellow Vests’ struggle against Macron and offering leadership by example, left the field open to the Right. Le Pen’s people (also embroiled in internal squabbles) attempted to manipulate the movement and made little headway, as did belatedly Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

France in Crisis?

Hegemonic Balance Sheet:

An autocratic President without a party or a mandate. Crowds calling for him to resign. A desperate lower class population angry over growing economic inequality in a rich country and government indifference to their plight. A class of organized civil servants and unionized workers still licking their wounds and paying their bills after failing to block the President’s counter-reforms last Spring.

Traditional parties – Left (Socialists, etc.) and Right (Gaullists etc.) – that have alternated in power since the end of WWII diminished and eclipsed. The parties of the far Left (Mélenchon, various Trotskyists, etc.) and the far Right (the former National Front) are too preoccupied with internal fights to play any significant role.

Powerful, effective mass media dominated by the interests of big business but viewed with suspicion by more and more of the population.

A brand-new “leaderless” spontaneous mass movement connected by social media, “finding its way by walking,” more or less consciously embedded in a long history of rebellions and struggle, finding its natural leaders (“good thinkers, good talkers” like old Guillaume Carle), putting forth its own ideas for the reorganization of society.

Here are the two latest proposals coming from the Yellow Vests and borrowed from the history the 18th Century French revolution. First, a call for a kind of democratic constituent assembly. Second, the creation of Cahiers de doléances (Grievance Notebooks) like the ones in 1788 listing all the people’s complaints and proposed remedies. Both great ideas. We can only hope that given the hollowness of the hegemony of the French political class, the convenience of social media for self-organization, and the desperate desire for dignity and participatory democracy incarnated in this latest historical uprising, something good may come of it.

Meanwhile, here are excerpts from the 2018 Yellow Vest Grievance list³:

• No one left homeless.
• End the austerity policy. Cancel the interest on illegitimate debt. Don’t tax the poor to pay it back, find the €85-billion of fiscal fraud uncollected.
• Create a true integration policy, with French language, history and civics courses for immigrants.
• Minimum salary €1500 per month.
• Privilege city and village centers. Stop building huge shopping centers.
• More progressive income tax rates.
• Big companies like McDonald’s, Google, Amazon and Carrefour should pay big taxes, and little artisans low taxes. •

1. Quotations translated from Les «gilets jaunes» débordent dans les rues de Paris.
2. «on en a ras le cul», «ras le cul», «ras le bol généralisé” BFM-TV, Nov.17, reported in Les gilets jaunes et les «lecons de l’histoire».
3. Great long list.

All images in this article are from The Bullet

In 1973 I was still a somewhat naive college senior ready to face the business world. My major had been in Speech and Theater, with a minor in Sociology. As the year was ending and the new one upon us, I was engaged to be married and needed to find secure employment. Graduation was really just a formality… I needed a steady income. My present job was as a commissioned telephone salesman working in what had been labeled a ‘boiler room operation’. We sold office supplies over the phone, using the infamous ‘going out of business, 40% off’ pitch. I was actually very good at this rap, but the weekly returns were too inconsistent. So, with the urging from my parents and my fiancée, out came the Sunday Times want ads. Not too many jobs in recreation, as the ’73 recession hit hard on most programs for youth. What could I do?

The ad said ‘Management trainee, college degree necessary, no experience needed’. I called the place, The ****Linen Corporation, and got an interview. Their plant was in downtown Brooklyn, maybe a 30 minute commute from home. After I finished all the paperwork the sales manager interviewed me for maybe just 20 minutes. He was Italian American like myself, wore a suit that was too tight for his expanding paunch, and had this ( pardon the French) greasy look to him. Basically, what he said to me should have signaled all that I would really  need to know about this company: “Listen kid, the way it works is that the more you save the company, the more you can earn… period!” He told me of my duties, which were basically to ‘Hold the whip over all the workers and drivers’. Then, he walked me into the GM’s office to meet him. This guy, a bit older than the sales manager at maybe fifty years of age, gave me the once over and repeated what the other guy had said. He then told the sales manager to give me a tour of the facility.

When we walked into the tremendous area of the plant where the linens were washed and dried, I thought I was back in the days of the plantations. Here we were, two white guys strolling into a two tiered area, hot as hell (and this was mid January) and noisy enough to force us to shout in order to hear each other. The giant plant was filled with all black faces, with the women wearing outfits that looked like Aunt Jemima from the pancake box. The men all wore white pants and tops, and when we arrived there it seemed like all I could see was a myriad of ‘the whites of eyes’ peering at me. Everything seemed to just stop for perhaps 30 seconds. I felt like I was the new overseer at a plantation in the  colonial South. The sales manager shouted into my ear “You gotta keep an eye on these birds or they’ll goof off every chance kid”. He then took me back to his office for my work instructions.

The next morning I was to report to the giant garage area to meet up with the delivery drivers. I was to spend one full day on the road with a driver, and then repeat this the next day with another driver… until I went through the lot of them. In the AM, very early, maybe at 6 o’clock, I showed up at the garage area, and man was it frigid cold in there. The driver’s foreman greeted me and introduced me to the first guy to take me out with him. We got going and I mean this truck was so old it must have had arthritis!

The heater wasn’t working too well, and the ride was like a jeep in the jungle! The driver was pleasant, chain smoking one ciggie after another. He had the Bronx territory so we were able to chat for awhile. I learned that the union was what they called a ‘Sweetheart union’ whereupon the union officials were basically ‘in the pocket’ of the corporation. This guy pulled no punches. We began making stops, and man there were so many of them. These were bakeries, butcher shops, food stores and restaurants mostly. He told me I could wait in the truck, but I needed to see how things went. After all, in reality I was his boss, yes? At the first stop, which was a bakery, the driver greeted the owner with a few funny hellos about the frigid weather. Then, the ‘mad scramble’ began. After dropping off the fresh linens, he had to search the premises for the old, dirty ones. I mean, they were everywhere! “Is this the way it always is?” I asked him. He nodded as we went down the basement stairs. I really got nervous when I could sense that something down those steps was fixed on me. “Don’t get too scared kid, those rats are as scared of us as we are of them. They won’t hurt ya” as he laughed.

One day on that job was enough for me. I went home and didn’t show up the next day. What really hurt me was the fact that those workers didn’t have the luxury that I still had. I lived at home and could move on whereas many of these folks couldn’t. Those black faces in that plant were mostly uneducated and unskilled folks from the Caribbean and the only jobs they could secure were similar to this shit. The drivers, going by the two or three I had met, were not educated men, and thus another shitty driving job would be the same. The workers in the plant had NO union at all, and I already was alerted to the driver’s lot. Sadly, forty five years later nothing has changed, perhaps for the worst! A Neo feudalistic society is what the corporate predators want… and still get!!

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]

In August two Belfast journalists were arrested in dawn raids involving up to 100 police officers for exposing state protection of the perpetrators of a notorious sectarian massacre. This Thursday they will speak at a special screening of their documentary in defence of press freedom, writes Barry McCaffrey

***

We didn’t know it at the time, but at 7am on August 31, my colleague Trevor Birney and I were both about to feel the full angry retribution of a state who had not taken kindly to our documentary No Stone Unturned.

Released in 2017, the film had revealed evidence that loyalist gunmen, who massacred six unarmed men as they sat in a quiet little village pub watching football in June 1994, had been protected from prosecution by police.

Why arrest journalists?

This wasn’t Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan or South America — it was sleepy, suburban Belfast.

For Birney’s eight-year-old daughter Freya it should have been her first day back at school.

She should have been telling her friends all about her summer adventures.

Instead she was left shaking and sobbing as armed police took part in co-ordinated dawn raids on both our homes and Birney’s film and television company offices.

We were both forced to undress and wash in front of armed police before being arrested and hauled off in front of families and neighbours who could only have been imagining what heinous “crimes” we must have committed.

Laptops, telephones, documents and materials that had clearly nothing to do with the documentary were being scooped up and taken away without any questions of relevance.

Freya’s pink mobile telephone was one of the items seized by police. Another daughter had homework on a pen drive seized. All supposed evidence in this alleged “crime.” Three months on, nothing has been returned.

Meanwhile at our offices, more police officers were going through every desk and computer, removing note books belonging to our colleagues and sucking every piece of data from our main server.

Police technicians fed on the main computer for a full 12 hours before they removed every scintilla of information, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the data had no relevance to what they were supposedly searching for.

Thousands of hours of interviews and notes relating to investigations which had nothing to do with No Stone Unturned were seized despite the protests of our colleagues.

These materials involve highly sensitive and confidential documents relating to investigations all across the world.

Only a tiny percentage of it relates to No Stone Unturned.

Before we’d even been finger-printed and had our mugshots taken, police had released a press statement claiming that they were investigating a complaint from the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI) that documents had been stolen from PONI offices in Belfast.

The statement said the documents were covered by the Official Secrets Act.

The only problem is that the Police Ombudsman never made a complaint — and has now said so publicly.

What is this all about and why do we now find ourselves looking at potential prison sentences? You may well ask!

We both worked with the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on No Stone Unturned. It told the story of the 1994 massacre of six Catholic men at a pub in the village of Loughinisland, deep in the heart of rural County Down.

The men were watching Ireland beating Italy in the World Cup on a battered television in the bar when a gunman armed with an assault rifle burst in and opened fire.

No-one had ever been charged with the killings and the Police Ombudsman in Belfast, Dr Michael Maguire, concluded in a 2016 report that police had colluded with the loyalist killers.

In 2011, a document into the Loughinisland murder investigation had been leaked to us. It was a draft report into the massacre. It named the chief suspects and outlined significant failings in the murder investigation.

Once No Stone Unturned premiered in London in October 2017, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) apparently became concerned that the document, and the highly damaging information it contained, had found its way into the public domain.

They were so concerned, they launched a fresh investigation — just not into the massacre and the unsolved deaths of six innocent men.

Instead, the PSNI called in Durham Constabulary to examine how the documents came to be in the film. The relatives of the murdered men were horrified.

On the day of our arrests, Durham Police told the press that the arrests were the result of a complaint from the Police Ombudsman.

Maguire’s report into Loughinisland and his damning conclusions had played a pivotal role in our documentary.

The Police Ombudsman’s office had been set up after the Good Friday Agreement to investigate complaints relating to police officers.

It wasn’t designed to investigate the so-called dirty war, but in Northern Ireland’s complicated world of politics and policing that’s what a huge amount of its resources has been dedicated to do.

PONI continues to deal with a huge number of complaints from relatives believing police colluded with loyalist and republican terrorists.

Once he’d seen No Stone Unturned, Maguire had alerted police that our film named four suspects. His office has no ability to take an assessment of any increased risk to the suspects, so by telling police he was advising the force best placed to decide.

Critically, he didn’t make any complaint about the documents we used in the film.

So why did Durham Constabulary say they were called in on the back of a complaint?

We don’t know the answer because the PSNI won’t comment on the case, ironically citing our arrests as the reason they’re unable to explain what has been going on.

Durham Police have told journalists that their investigation had “a definite and clear starting point.” Whatever that start point is, Maguire insists it wasn’t a complaint from him.

On the day of our arrests we were taken to a high-security Belfast police station and held for 14 hours in cells normally set aside for terror suspects.

We were kept apart, spending countless hours in separate cells with the only human interaction being when we were taken out to be questioned throughout the day.

At no time during that questioning were the names of the victims ever mentioned — Barney Green (87), Dan McCreanor (59), Adrian Rogan (34), Patsy O’Hare (35), Malcolm Jenkinson (52), Eamon Byrne (39).

We didn’t know it at the time, but the Loughinisland families, whose case we were supposed to be highlighting, were instead holding a vigil for us at the site of the massacre.

Unwittingly, we had become the latest victims in a very dark story of how Northern Ireland chooses to deal with its past.

We were released on police bail shortly before 9pm that night. Three months on we’re still living under those same police bail conditions.

We have to ask police permission any time we want to leave the jurisdiction, even for family birthdays in the Republic of Ireland. We were ordered to hand ourselves in for further police questioning on November 30.

The support we’ve received from our journalistic colleagues in Belfast, Dublin and abroad has been immense. The NUJ has led the way from the moment we were arrested — campaigning and raising awareness of our case in the UK, Ireland and across the world.

We believe that the police actions are an act of intimidation designed to send a chill down the spines of any other journalists seeking to unearth the truth about Northern Ireland’s dark and dirty past.

We believe that the PSNI and Durham are trying to distract from the police failures to not only bring to justice the killers responsible for the deaths of six innocent men but the high-level cover-up that has gone on for over 24 years.

In Belfast, they’re coming after the journalists, but as one of our colleagues has said: they cannot arrest the truth.

*

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Barry McCaffrey is senior reporter for The Detail.

Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, will be in London for a public screening of the documentary on Thursday December 6 7pm at the NUJ’s Headland House, Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 9NB. Tickets for the event can be bought online via Eventbrite – mstar.link/NoStoneUnturned.

Featured image: The scene in the Loughinisland village pub in 1994 after the paramilitary murder of six Catholic men (Source: Morning Star)

First published by Consortium News on April 6, 2016

“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016

A recently discovered lecture by the late British traitor Kim Philby contains a lesson that may help explain how George H.W. Bush could bluff and bluster his way past mounting evidence that he and other Republicans conspired in 1980 to block release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran and thus ensure Ronald Reagan’s election, an alleged gambit that bordered on treason itself.

In a speech in East Berlin in 1981 – just aired by the BBC – the Soviet double-agent Philby explained that for someone like himself born into what he called “the ruling class of the British Empire,” it was easy to simply “deny everything.” When evidence was presented against him, he simply had to keep his nerve and assert that it was all bogus. With his powerful connections, he knew that few would dare challenge him.

“Because I was born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of an influential standing, I knew that they [his colleagues in Britain’s MI-6 spy agency] would never get too tough with me,” Philby told members of East Germany’s Stasi. “They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they had been proved wrong afterwards, I could have made a tremendous scandal.”

That’s why growing evidence and deepening suspicions of Philby’s treachery slid by while he continued spying for the Soviet Union. He finally disappeared in January 1961 and popped up several months later in Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1988.

Image on the right: British double-agent Philby, who spied for the Soviet Union and fled to Moscow in 1961.

Though the circumstances are obviously quite different, Philby’s recognition that his patrician birth and his powerful connections gave him extraordinary protections could apply to George H.W. Bush and his forceful denials of any role in the Iran-Contra scandal – he falsely claimed to be “out of the loop” – and also the October Surprise issue, whether the Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran began in 1980 with the obstruction of President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. Embassy hostages seized by Iranian radicals on Nov. 4, 1979.

Carter’s failure to secure the hostages’ release before the U.S. election, which fell exactly one year later, doomed his reelection chances and cleared the way for Reagan and the Republicans to gain control of both the White House and the Senate. The hostages were only released after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981, and as Bush became Vice President.

We now know that soon after the Reagan-Bush inauguration, clandestine U.S.-approved arms shipments were making their way to Iran through Israel. An Argentine plane carrying one of the shipments crashed in July 1981 but the incriminating circumstances were covered up by Reagan’s State Department, according to then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes, who traced the origins of the arms deal back to the 1980 campaign.

This hard-to-believe reality – that the tough-guy Reagan-Bush administration was secretly shipping weapons to Iran after Tehran’s mullahs had humiliated the United States with the hostage crisis – remained a topic for only occasional Washington rumors until November 1986 when a Beirut newspaper published the first article describing another clandestine shipment. That story soon expanded into the Iran-Contra Affair because some of the arm sales profits were diverted to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

For Bush, the emergence of this damaging scandal, which could have denied him his own shot at the White House, was time to test out his ability to “deny everything.” So, he denied knowing that the White House had been secretly running a Contra resupply operation in defiance of Congress, even though his office and top aides were in the middle of everything. Regarding the Iran arms deals, Bush insisted publicly he was “out of the loop.”

Behind closed doors where he ran the risk of perjury charges, Bush was more forthcoming. For instance, in non-public testimony to the FBI and the Iran-Contra prosecutor, “Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales.” [See Special Prosecutor’s Final Iran-Contra Report, p. 473]

But Bush’s public “out of the loop” storyline, more or less, held up going into the 1988 presidential election. The one time when he was directly challenged with detailed Iran-Contra questions was in a live, on-air confrontation with CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Jan. 25, 1988.

Instead of engaging in a straightforward discussion, Bush went on the offensive, lashing out at Rather for allegedly ambushing him with unexpected questions. Bush also recalled an embarrassing episode when Rather left his anchor chair vacant not anticipating the end of a tennis match which was preempting the news.

“How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” Bush asked testily. “How would you like that?”

Fitting with Philby’s observation, Bush’s bluster won the day. Much of the elite U.S. media, including Newsweek where I was working at the time, sided with Bush and slammed Rather for his sometimes forceful questioning of the patrician Bush.

Having put Rather in his place and having put the Iran-Contra issue to rest – at least as far as the 1988 campaign was concerned – Bush went on to win the presidency. But the history still threatened to catch up with him.

October Surprise Mystery

The October Surprise case of 1980 was something of a prequel to the Iran-Contra Affair. It preceded the Iran-Contra events but surfaced publicly in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra disclosures. This earlier phase slowly came to light when it became clear that the U.S.-approved arms sales to Iran did not begin in 1985, as the official Iran-Contra story claimed, but years earlier, very soon after Reagan and Bush took office.

Also, in the wake of the Iran-Contra Affair, more and more witnesses surfaced describing this earlier phase of the scandal, eventually totaling about two dozen, including former Assistant Secretary of State Veliotes; former senior Iranian officials, such as President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and Defense Minister Ahmad Madani; and intelligence operatives, such as Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and a CIA-Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi. Many of these witnesses were cited in a PBS documentary that I co-wrote in April 1991, entitled “The Election Held Hostage.”

After the documentary aired – and amid growing public interest – pressure built on Congress to open a new inquiry into this prequel, but President Bush made clear that his reaction would be to “deny everything.”

On May 3, 1991, at a White House press availability, Bush was asked about reports that he had traveled to Paris in October 1980 to personally seal the deal on having the 52 hostages released only after the election – as Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe had described.

“Was I ever in Paris in October 1980?” a clearly annoyed Bush responded, repeating the question through pursed lips. “Definitely, definitely, no.”

Bush returned to the October Surprise topic five days later, his anger still clearly visible:

“I can only say categorically that the allegations about me are grossly untrue, factually incorrect, bald-faced lies.”

Yet, despite Bush’s anger – and despite “debunking” attacks on the October Surprise story from the neoconservative New Republic and my then-former employers at Newsweek – the House and Senate each started investigations, albeit somewhat half-heartedly and with inadequate resources.

Image below: President George H. W. Bush addresses the nation on Jan. 16,1991, to discuss the launch of Operation Desert Storm.

Still, the congressional October Surprise inquiries sent Bush’s White House into panic mode. The President, who was expecting to coast to reelection in 1992, saw the October Surprise issue – along with the continued Iran-Contra investigation by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – as threats to his retention of power.

By fall 1991, the Bush administration was pulling together documents from various federal agencies that might be relevant to the October Surprise inquiry. The idea was to concentrate the records in the hands of a few trusted officials in Washington. As part of that process, the White House was informed that there appeared to be confirmation of a key October Surprise allegation.

In a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991, Associate White House Counsel Paul Beach Jr. wrote that one document that had been unearthed was a record of Reagan’s campaign director William J. Casey traveling to Madrid, Spain, a potentially key corroboration of Jamshid Hashemi’s claim that Casey had met with senior Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi in Madrid in late July and again in mid-August 1980.

The U.S. Embassy in Madrid’s confirmation of Casey’s trip had gone to State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who was responsible for assembling the State Department documents, according to the memo. Williamson passed on word to Beach, who wrote that Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”

The significance of this confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid can hardly be overstated. The influential October Surprise debunking stories – ballyhooed on the covers of Newsweek and The New Republic – hinged on their joint misreading of some attendance records at a London historical conference which they claimed proved Casey was there and thus could not have traveled to Madrid. That meant, according to the two magazines, that the CIA’s Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi was lying about arranging Casey’s two meetings with Karrubi in Madrid.

In their double-barreled shoot-down of the October Surprise story, Newsweek and The New Republic created a Washington “group think,” which held that the October Surprise case was just a baseless “conspiracy theory.” But the two magazines were wrong.

I already knew that their analyses of the London attendance records were inaccurate. They also failed to interview key participants at the conference, including historian Robert Dallek who had looked for Casey and confirmed to me that Casey had skipped the key morning session on July 28, 1980.

But 1991 was pre-Internet, so it was next to impossible to counter the false reporting of Newsweek and The New Republic, especially given the powerful conventional wisdom that had taken shape against the October Surprise story.

Not wanting to shake that “group think,” Bush’s White House withheld news of the Williamson-Beach discovery of evidence of Casey’s trip to Madrid. That information was neither shared with the public nor the congressional investigators. Instead, a well-designed cover-up was organized and implemented.

The Cover-up Takes Shape

On Nov. 6, 1991, two days after the Beach memo, Beach’s boss, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.

At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation where some of prosecutor Walsh’s investigators also were coming to suspect that the origins of the Reagan-Bush contacts with Iran traced back to the 1980 campaign.

The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s political future. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Image on the right: Gray (oregonlive.com)

Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]

Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings, the document said.

In other words, just as the Reagan administration had insisted on walling off the Iran-Contra investigation to a period from 1984-86, the Bush administration wanted to seal off the October Surprise investigation to 1979-80. That would ensure that the public would not see the two seemingly separate scandals as one truly ugly affair.

Meanwhile, as Bush’s White House frustrated the congressional inquiries with foot-dragging, slow-rolling and other obstructions, President Bush would occasionally lash out with invective against the October Surprise suspicions.

In late spring 1992, Bush raised the October Surprise issue at two news conferences, bringing the topic up himself. On June 4, 1992, Bush snapped at a reporter who asked whether an independent counsel was needed to investigate the administration’s pre-Persian Gulf War courtship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

“I wonder whether they’re going to use the same prosecutors that are trying out there to see whether I was in Paris in 1980,” the clearly peeved President responded. “I mean, where are we going with the taxpayers’ money in this political year? I was not in Paris, and we did nothing illegal or wrong here” on Iraq.

At another news conference at the world environmental summit in Brazil, Bush brought up the October Surprise case again, calling the congressional inquiries “a witchhunt” and demanding that Congress clear him of having traveled to Paris.

Taking their cue from the President, House Republicans threatened to block continued funding for the inquiry unless the Democrats agreed that Bush had not gone to Paris. Although Bush’s alibi for the key weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980, was shaky, with details from his Secret Service logs withheld and with supposedly corroborating witnesses contradicting each other, the Democrats agreed to give Bush what he wanted.

After letting Bush off the hook on Paris, the inquiry stumbled along inconclusively with the White House withholding key documents and keeping some key witnesses, such as Bush’s former national security adviser Donald Gregg, out of reach.

Perhaps more importantly, the Casey-Madrid information from Beach’s memo was never shared with Congress, according to House Task Force Chairman Lee Hamilton, who I interviewed about the missing material in 2013.

Whatever interest Congress had in the October Surprise case faded even more after Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. There was a palpable sense around Official Washington that it would be wrong to pile on the defeated President. The thinking was that Bush (and Reagan) should be allowed to ride off into the sunset with their legacies intact.

So, even as more incriminating evidence arrived at the House task force in December 1992 and in January 1993 – including testimony from French intelligence chief Alexander deMarenches’s biographer confirming the Paris meeting and a report from Russia’s duma revealing that Soviet intelligence had monitored the Republican-Iranian contacts in 1980 – it was all cast aside. The task force simply decided there was “no credible evidence” to support the October Surprise allegations.

Trusting the Suspect

Beyond the disinclination of Hamilton and his investigators to aggressively pursue important leads, they operated with the naïve notion that President Bush, who was a prime suspect in the October Surprise case, would compile and turn over evidence that would prove his guilt and seal his political fate. Power at that level simply doesn’t work that way.

Image below: Casey

After discovering the Beach memo, I emailed a copy to Hamilton and discussed it with him by phone. The retired Indiana Democratic congressman responded that his task force was never informed that the White House had confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.

“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said. Hamilton added that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

Therein, of course, lay the failure of the October Surprise investigation. Hamilton and his team were counting on President Bush and his team to bring all the evidence together in one place and then share it with Congress, when they were more likely to burn it.

Indeed, by having Bush’s White House gather together all the hard evidence that might have proved that Bush and Reagan engaged in an operation that bordered on treason, Hamilton’s investigation may have made it impossible for the historical mystery ever to be solved. There is a good chance that whatever documentary evidence there might have been doesn’t exist anymore.

After discovering the Beach memo, I contacted both Beach and Williamson, who insisted that they had no memory of the Casey-to-Madrid records. I also talked with Boyden Gray, who told me that he had no involvement in the October Surprise inquiry, although I had the minutes to the Nov. 6, 1991 meeting where he rallied Bush’s team to contain the investigation.

I also filed a Freedom of Information Act request to have the records of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid searched for the relevant cable or other documents regarding Casey’s trip, but the State Department said nothing could be found.

So, the question becomes: Did Bush’s loyal team collect all the raw documents in one place, not so they could be delivered to Congress, but rather so they could be removed from the historical record permanently, thus buttressing for all time the angry denials of George H.W. Bush?

Surely, someone as skilled in using power and influence as former President Bush (the elder) would need no advice from Kim Philby about how to use privilege and connections to shield one’s guilt. That, after all, is the sort of thing that comes naturally to those who are born to the right families, attend the right schools and belong to the right secret societies.

George H.W. Bush came from the bosom of the American ruling class at a time when it was rising to become the most intimidating force on earth. He was the grandson of a powerful Wall Street banker, the son of an influential senator, and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Along the way, he attended Yale and belonged to Skull and Bones.)

Indeed, Poppy Bush could probably have given Kim Philby lessons on how to brush off suspicions and cover up wrongdoing. Still, Philby’s insight into how the powerful and well-connected can frustrate the investigations and questions of lesser citizens is worth recalling: “Deny everything.”

[To watch a video interview with Robert Parry discussing this article, click here.]

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The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

All images in this article are from Consortiumnews

Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.

So the idea of wearing your yellow vest to demonstrate against unpopular government measures caught on quickly.  The costume was at hand and didn’t have to be provided by Soros for some more or less manufactured “color revolution”.  The symbolism was fitting: in case of socio-economic emergency, show that you don’t want to be run over.

As everybody knows, what set off the protest movement was yet another rise in gasoline taxes. But it was immediately clear that much more was involved. The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population. That is why the movement achieved almost instant popularity and support

The Voices of the People

The Yellow Vests held their first demonstrations on Saturday, November 17, on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.  It was totally unlike the usual trade union demonstrations, well organized to march down the boulevard between the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille, or the other way around, carrying banners and listening to speeches from leaders at the end.  The Gilets Jaunes just came, with no organization, no leaders to tell them where to go or to harangue the crowd.  They were just there, in the yellow vests, angry and ready to explain their anger to any sympathetic listener.

Briefly, the message was this: we can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down.  We just can’t take it any more.  The government must stop, think and change course.

Source: NDTV.com

But so far, the reaction of the government was to send police to spray torrents of tear gas on the crowd, apparently to keep the people at a distance from the nearby Presidential residence, the Elysee Palace. President Macron was somewhere else, apparently considering himself above and beyond it all.

But those who were listening could learn a lot about the state of France today. Especially in the small towns and rural areas, where many protesters came from. Things are much worse than officials and media in Paris have let on.

There were young women who were working seven days a week and despaired of having enough money to feed and clothe their children.

People were angry but ready to explain very clearly the economic issues.

Colette, age 83, doesn’t own a car, but explained to whoever would listen that the steep raise of gasoline prices would also hurt people who don’t drive, by affecting prices of food and other necessities. She had done the calculations and figured it would cost a retired person 80 euros per month.

“Macron didn’t run on the promise to freeze pensions”, recalled a Yellow Vest, but that is what he has done, along with increasing solidarity taxes on pensioners.

A significant and recurring complaint concerned the matter of health care.  France has long had the best public health program in the world, but this is being steadily undermined to meet the primary need of capital: profit.  In the past few years, there has been a growing government campaign to encourage, and finally to oblige people to subscribe to a “mutuelle”, that is, a private health insurance, ostensibly to fill “the gaps” not covered by France’s universal health coverage. The “gaps” can be the 15% that is not covered for ordinary illnesses (grave illnesses are covered 100%), or for medicines taken off the “covered” list, or for dental work, among other things.  The “gaps” to fill keep expanding, along with the cost of subscribing to the mutuelle.  In reality, this program, sold to the public as modernizing improvement, is a gradual move toward privatization of health care.  It is a sneaky method of opening the whole field of public health to international financial capital investment.  This gambit has not fooled ordinary people and is high on the list of complaints by the Gilets Jaunes.

The degradation of care in the public hospitals is another complaint. There are fewer and fewer hospitals in rural areas, and one must “wait long enough to die” emergency rooms. Those who can afford it are turning to private hospitals.  But most can’t. Nurses are overworked and underpaid. When one hears what nurses have to endure, one is reminded that this is indeed a noble profession.

In all this I was reminded of a young woman we met at a public picnic in southwestern France last summer.  She cares for elderly people who live at home alone in rural areas, driving from one to another, to feed them, bathe them, offer a moment of cheerful company and understanding.  She loves her vocation, loves helping old people, although it barely allows her to make a living.  She will be among those who will have to pay more to get from one patient to the next.

People pay taxes willingly when they are getting something for it.  But not when the things they are used to are being taken away. The tax evaders are the super-rich and the big corporations with their batteries of lawyers and safe havens, or intruders like Amazon and Google, but ordinary French people have been relatively disciplined in paying taxes in return for excellent public services: optimum health care, first class public transport, rapid and efficient postal service, free university education. But all that is under assault from the reign of financial capital called “neo-liberalism” here.  In rural areas, more and more post offices, schools and hospitals are shut down, unprofitable train service is discontinued as “free competition” is introduced following European Union directives – measures which oblige people to drive their cars more than ever.   Especially when huge shopping centers drain small towns of their traditional shops.

Incoherent Energy Policies

And the tax announced by the government – an additional 6.6 cents per liter for diesel and an additional 2.9 centers per liter of gasoline – are only the first steps in a series of planned increases over the next years.  The measures are supposed to incite people to drive less or even better, to scrap their old vehicles and buy nice new electric cars.

More and more “governance” is an exercise in social engineering by technocrats who know what is best. This particular exercise goes directly opposite to an earlier government measure of social engineering which used economic incitements to get people to buy cars running on diesel. Now the government has changed its mind. Over half of personal vehicles still run on diesel, although the percentage has been dropping.  Now their owners are told to go buy an electric car instead.  But people living on the edge simply can’t afford the switch.

Besides, the energy policy is incoherent.  In theory, the “green” economy includes shutting down France’s many nuclear power plants.  Without them, where would the electricity come from to run the electric cars? And nuclear power is “clean”, no CO2.  So what is going on? People wonder.

The most promising alternative sources of energy in France are the strong tides along northern coasts.  But last July, the Tidal Energies project on the Normandy coast was suddenly dropped because it wasn’t profitable – not enough customers.  This is symptomatic of what is wrong with the current government.  Major new industrial projects are almost never profitable at first, which is why they need government support and subsidies to get going, with a view to the future.  Such projects were supported under de Gaulle, raising France to the status of major industrial power, and providing unprecedented prosperity for the population as a whole.  But the Macron government is not investing in the future nor doing anything to preserve industries that remain.  The key French energy corporation Alstom was sold to General Electric under his watch.

Source: Archy news nety

Indeed, it is perfectly hypocritical to call the French gas tax an “ecotax” since the returns from a genuine ecotax would be invested to develop clean energies – such as tidal power plants.  Rather, the benefits are earmarked to balance the budget, that is, to serve the government debt.  The Macronian gas tax is just another austerity measure – along with cutting back public services and “selling the family jewels”, that is, selling potential money-makers like Alstom, port facilities and the Paris airports.

The Government Misses the Point

Initial government responses showed that they weren’t listening. They dipped into their pool of clichés to denigrate something they didn’t want to bother to understand.

President Macron’s first reaction was to guilt-trip the protesters by invoking the globalists’ most powerful argument for imposing unpopular measures: global warming. Whatever small complaints people may have, he indicated, that is nothing compared to the future of the planet.

This did not impress people who, yes, have heard all about climate change and care as much as anyone for the environment, but who are obliged to retort: “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.”

After the second Yellow Vest Saturday, November 25, which saw more demonstrators and more tear gas, the Minister in charge of the budget, Gérard Darmanin, declared that what had demonstrated on the Champs-Elysée was “la peste brune”, the brown plague, meaning fascists. (For those who enjoy excoriating the French as racist, it should be noted that Darmanin is of Algerian working class origins).  This remark caused an uproar of indignation that revealed just how great is public sympathy for the movement – over 70% approval by latest polls, even after uncontrolled vandalism.  Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, was obliged to declare that government communication had been badly managed.  Of course, that is the familiar technocratic excuse: we are always right, but it is all a matter of our “communication”, not of the facts on the ground.

Maybe I have missed something, but of the many interviews I have listened to, I have not heard one word that would fall into the categories of “far right”, much less “fascism” – or even that indicated any particular preference in regard to political parties.  These people are wholly concerned with concrete practical issues. Not a whiff of ideology – remarkable in Paris!

Some people ignorant of French history and eager to exhibit their leftist purism have suggested that the Yellow Vests are dangerously nationalistic because they occasionally wave French flags and sing La Marseillaise. That simply means that they are French.  Historically, the French left is patriotic, especially when it is revolting against the aristocrats and the rich or during the Nazi Occupation[i].  It is just a way of saying, We are the people, we do the work, and you must listen to our grievances. To be a bad thing, “nationalism” must be aggressive toward other nations.  This movement is not attacking anybody, it is strictly staying home.

The Weakness of Macron

The Yellow Vests have made clear to the whole world that Emmanuel Macron was an artificial product sold to the electorate by an extraordinary media campaign.

Macron was the rabbit magically pulled out of a top hat, sponsored by what must be called the French oligarchy.  After catching the eye of established king-maker Jacques Attali, the young Macron was given a stint at the Rothschild bank where he could quickly gain a small fortune, ensuring his class loyalty to his sponsors.  Media saturation and the scare campaign against “fascist” Marine LePen (who moreover flubbed her major debate) put Macron in office. He had met his wife when she was teaching his theater class, and now he gets to play President.

The mission assigned to him by his sponsors was clear.  He must carry through more vigorously the “reforms” (austerity measures) already undertaken by previous governments, which had often dawdled at hastening the decline of the social State.

And beyond that, Macron was supposed to “save Europe”. Saving Europe means saving the European Union from the quagmire in which it finds itself.

This is why cutting expenses and balancing the budget is his obsession. Because that’s what he was chosen to do by the oligarchy that sponsored his candidacy. He was chosen by the financial oligarchy above all to save the European Union from threatening disintegration caused by the euro.  The treaties establishing the EU and above all the common currency, the euro, have created an imbalance between member states that is unsustainable.  The irony is that previous French governments, starting with Mitterrand, are largely responsible for this state of affairs. In a desperate and technically ill-examined effort to keep newly unified Germany from becoming the dominant power in Europe, the French insisted on binding Germany to France by a common currency.  Reluctantly, the Germans agreed to the euro – but only on German terms. The result is that Germany has become the unwilling creditor of equally unwilling EU member states, Italy, Spain, Portugal and of course, ruined Greece. The financial gap between Germany and its southern neighbors keeps expanding, which causes ill will on all sides.

Germany doesn’t want to share economic power with states it considers irresponsible spendthrifts.  So Macron’s mission is to show Germany that France, despite its flagging economy, is “responsible”, by squeezing the population in order to pay interest on the debt. Macron’s idea is that the politicians in Berlin and the bankers in Frankfurt will be so impressed that they will turn around and say, well done Emmanuel, we are ready to throw our wealth into a common pot for the benefit of all 27 Member States.  And that is why Macron will stop at nothing to balance the budget, to make the Germans love him.

So far, the Macron magic is not working on the Germans, and it’s driving his own people into the streets.

Or are they his own people?  Does Macron really care about his run of the mill compatriots who just work for a living?  The consensus is that he does not.

Macron is losing the support both of the people in the streets and the oligarchs who sponsored him.  He is not getting the job done.

Macron’s rabbit-out-of-the hat political ascension leaves him with little legitimacy, once the glow of glossy magazine covers wears off.  With help from his friends, Macron invented his own party, La République en Marche, which doesn’t mean much of anything but suggested action.  He peopled his party with individuals from “civil society”, often medium entrepreneurs with no political experience, plus a few defectors from either the Socialist or the Republican Parties, to occupy the most important government posts.

The only well-known recruit from “civil society” was the popular environmental activist, Nicolas Hulot, who was given the post of Minister of Environment, but who abruptly resigned in a radio announcement last August, citing frustration.

Macron’s strongest supporter from the political class was Gérard Collomb, Socialist Mayor of Lyons, who was given the top cabinet post of Minister of Interior, in charge of national police.  But shortly after Hulot left, Collomb said he was leaving too, to go back to Lyons. Macron entreated him to stay on, but on October 3, Collomb went ahead and resigned, with a stunning statement referring to “immense problems” facing his successor.  In the “difficult neighborhoods” in the suburbs of major cities, he said, the situation is “very much degraded : it’s the law of the jungle that rules, drug dealers and radical Islamists have taken the place of the Republic.”  Such suburbs need to be “reconquered”.

After such a job description, Macron was at a loss to recruit a new Interior Minister.  He groped around and came up with a crony he had chosen to head his party, ex-Socialist Christophe Castaner.  With a degree in criminology, Castaner’s main experience qualifying him to head the national police is his close connection, back in his youth in the 1970s, with a Marseilles Mafioso, apparently due to his penchant for playing poker and drinking whiskey in illegal dens.

Saturday, November 17, demonstrators were peaceful, but resented the heavy teargas attacks.  Saturday November 25, things got a big rougher, and on Saturday December 1st, all hell broke loose.  With no leaders and no service d’ordre (militants assigned to protect the demonstrators from attacks, provocations and infiltration), it was inevitable that casseurs(smashers) got into the act and started smashing things, looting shops and setting fires to trash cans, cars and even buildings.  Not only in Paris, but all over France: from Marseilles to Brest, from Toulouse to Strasbourg.  In the remote town of Puy en Velay, known for its chapel perched on a rock and its traditional lace-making, the Prefecture (national government authority) was set on fire.  Tourist arrivals are cancelled and fancy restaurants are empty and department stores fear for their Christmas windows. The economic damages are enormous.

And yet, support for the Yellow Vests remains high, probably because people are able to distinguish between those grieved citizens and the vandals who love to wreak destruction for its own sake.

On Monday, there were suddenly fresh riots in the troubled suburbs that Collomb warned about as he retreated to Lyons.  This was a new front for the national police, whose representatives let it be known that all this was getting to be much too much for them to cope with. Announcing a state of emergency is not likely to solve anything.

Macron is a bubble that has burst.  The legitimacy of his authority is very much in question.  Yet he was elected in 2017 for a five year term, and his party holds a large majority in parliament that makes his destitution almost impossible.

So what next?  Despite having been sidelined by Macron’s electoral victory in 2017, politicians of all hews are trying to recuperate the movement – but discreetly, because the Gilets Jaunes have made clear their distrust of all politicians.  This is not a movement that seeks to take power.  It simply seeks redress of its grievances. The government should have listened in the first place, accepted discussions and compromise.  This gets more difficult as time goes on, but nothing is impossible.

For some two or three hundred years, people one could call “left” hoped that popular movements would lead to changes for the better.  Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism”.  This attitude is one of many factors indicating that the changes ahead will not be led by the left as it exists today.  Those who fear change will not be there to help make it happen.  But change is inevitable and it need not be for the worse.

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Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected].  Diana Johnstone is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization  (CRG). 

Note

[i]  The exception was the student uprising of May 1968, which was not a revolt of the poor but a revolt in a time of prosperity in favor of greater personal freedom: “it is forbidden to forbid”. The May ’68 generation has turned out to be the most anti-French generation in history, for reasons that can’t be dealt with here. To some extent, the Yellow Vests mark a return of the people after half a century of scorn from the liberal intelligentsia.