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Israeli forces along with the Israeli Civil Administration staff stormed the Shufat refugee camp, in occupied East Jerusalem, and delivered demolition notices to dozens of Palestinian shops, on late Tuesday.

Thaer Fasfous, spokesperson of the Fatah movement in Jerusalem, told Ma’an that the Israeli Civil Administration staff delivered demolition notices to more than 20 Palestinian-owned shops in the Shufat refugee camp.

Fasfous pointed out that the delivered notices mentioned that shop owners have 12 hours to evacuate the premises before the demolitions take place.

The notices also mentioned that the shops would be demolished under the pretext that they were built without the difficult-to-obtain Israeli permit.

Fasfous added that the shops have been built since 2007 and include clothing, groceries, bakeries, and restaurants.

Fasfous said that Israeli authorities started a demolition campaign in the Shufat refugee camp, which affects dozens of Palestinian families, who rely on economic support from these shops.

Additionally, clashes broke out among Israeli forces and Palestinians after the delivery of the demolition notices, during which Israeli forces repeatedly fired tear-gas bombs and sound bombs throughout Shufat.

Israel uses the pretext of building without a permit to carry out demolitions of Palestinian-owned homes on a regular basis.

Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in East Jerusalem, though the Jerusalem municipality has claimed that compared to the Jewish population, they receive a disproportionately low number of permit applications from Palestinian communities, which also see high approval ratings.

For Jewish Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem’s illegal settlements, the planning, marketing, development, and infrastructure are funded and executed by the Israeli government. By contrast, in Palestinian neighborhoods, all the burden falls on individual families to contend with a lengthy permit application that can last several years and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The video below shows shop owners evacuating the premises:

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All images in this article are from MNA

“Iran’s role remains vital, in diplomacy as in support for the long-suffering Syrian military,” Professor Tim Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, said in an interview with the Tasnim News Agency.

“We can readily see the ‘fruit’ of Tehran keeping open its channels with Turkey and Qatar, and all this is despite the pathological hostility of the Muslim Brotherhood network towards Shiite Muslims,” he said, adding, “Iran generously assisted Qatar, when the small monarchy was under attack from Riyadh; and it remains a key balancing force at Astana.”

Professor Tim Anderson is a distinguished author and senior lecturer of political economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Author of the ‘The Dirty War on Syria’, he has been largely published on various issues particularly the Syrian crisis.

The following is the full text of the interview.

Tasnim: Turkey recently rejected Syrian government accusations that it is not meeting its obligations under an agreement to create a demilitarized zone around the insurgent-held Idlib region, saying the deal was being implemented as planned. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem had said that Turkey appeared unwilling to implement the deal. What is your opinion about the comments and the future of the Idlib province, which with adjacent areas is the last stronghold of insurgents?

Anderson: The agreement between Russia and Turkey over Idlib is a temporary diplomatic move, designed to give President Erdogan a chance to prove his goodwill, and to head off planned aggression from the NATO powers (the USA, UK, France and of course Turkey). The mid-October deadline set for creating a buffer zone to prevent armed group attacks on Latakia and Aleppo has long gone. The other major objective was to reopen major road traffic across Idlib between Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia. There is no sign of this yet. The Russian leadership is putting a more hopeful face on the flagging agreement than the Syrian leadership, but both have recently stressed that, if there is little progress on the Russia-Turkey Idlib agreement, and if the ceasefire violations continue, they will liberate Idlib by force. The Syrian and Russian ambassadors both made this clear at the UN Security Council, and President Putin has repeated that commitment. The Syrian leadership does not trust Mr. Erdogan at all, but they have the advantage of two major allies who can still speak with him. The al-Qaeda led groups, for their part, have rejected the agreement and have violated the ceasefire several times, with attacks on adjacent areas. Recently, several people were killed in Aleppo. So it is really just a matter of time before Russia and Iran back a Syrian move to liberate the entire province. One risk has been that the armed groups have been re-supplied; on the other hand, fighters have been buying their way out of the trap and escaping into Turkey and Europe. The diplomatic advantage of the Idlib agreement is that, if Mr. Erdogan fails to deliver on his word, the capacity of Turkey to resist the final move will be weakened.

Tasnim: A four-way summit on Syria recently ended in Turkey’s Istanbul without any major breakthrough. In a joint communique following their meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin called for “an inclusive, Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process” and said conditions needed to be created for the safe and voluntary return of refugees. The comments came as the summit was not attended by any Syrian groups. What do you think about the summit?

Anderson: Each successive external agreement, including the UNSC resolutions, the Astana process and the recent four-party meeting in Turkey, has stressed a Syrian-led process and respect for the territorial integrity of Syria. That increases the difficulty of Turkey maintaining their current military posts in Idlib. They are left with the ‘Kurdish card’; having always seen Turkish Kurd separatists as behind the much smaller group of Syrian Kurdish separatists. They are right on this. However, despite the Syrian Kurds’ naïve reliance on US support, they have also been in discussions with Damascus. Assurance of a Kurdish place in Syria’s constitutional discussions, and allowing the Syria Arab Army into previously YPG held areas, could help Turkey disengage from Idlib.

As for the recent talks in Turkey, which included Russia, Germany, and France, we cannot say that there is much new in substance. However, it is symbolically important that European states, which have assisted the anti-government armed groups, are now effectively linked into the Astana process without the presence or permission of the mastermind of the regional aggression, the government of the USA. Washington had previously refused observer status at Astana, so this is yet another measure which excludes the key external aggressor from the regional peace process and which opens the possibility of a more independent European stance. At the recent UNSC meeting, the US, UK, and some Europeans did try to demand a UN-driven constitutional committee for Syria. However, Syria, Russia, and others seem to have successfully countered that the UN’s role should remain as a facilitator of that process, not a controller. That, of course, is consistent with all the agreements which have demanded a ‘Syrian-led’ settlement. Astana remains the main road to a UN-sanctioned settlement; all the progress in recent years has come from these talks.

Tasnim: Iran, Russia, and Turkey – the three guarantor states of de-escalation zones in Syria – have held several rounds of peace talks in Kazakhstan’s Astana and elsewhere to help end the conflict in the Arab country. The fourth round of those talks in May 2017 produced a memorandum of understanding on de-escalation zones in Syria, sharply reducing fighting in the country. What is your assessment of the parallel talks between the three countries on the Syrian crisis and Tehran’s role in the peace process?

Anderson: It is quite true that the Astana talks have helped de-escalation, and indeed (alongside the Syria-Russia-Iran military victories) they have also helped the Syrian ‘reconciliation’ process, which includes surrenders and amnesties. It is the case that the fighters in Idlib now include many who rejected earlier amnesties, but that helps underline why the diplomatic process remains so important. The more these gangs are isolated, the less likely they are to be able to resist a rapid assault. We saw how quickly the ‘southern front’ collapsed after Washington withdrew its support. That group had the advantage of supply from and safe havens in Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. However, when President Trump abandoned them, both Jordan and Israel immediately followed suit. That really did show who was ‘calling the shots’.

Iran’s role remains vital, in diplomacy as in support for the long-suffering Syrian military. We can readily see the ‘fruit’ of Tehran keeping open its channels with Turkey and Qatar, and all this is despite the pathological hostility of the Muslim Brotherhood network towards Shiite Muslims. Iran generously assisted Qatar, when the small monarchy was under attack from Riyadh; and it remains a key balancing force at Astana. Despite the hostility from Israel and Washington, Turkey has been forced to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran as a strategic neighbor and partner of substance. That swings the balance even further towards a Syrian victory, which will be of great significance for the region.

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The Dirty War on Syria 

by Professor Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2016

Pages: 240

Author: Tim Anderson

List Price: $23.95

Special Price: $15.00

click to purchase, directly from Global Research Publishers

Like numerous other endless conflicts, Yemen is Washington’s war, waged for strategic interests, the Saudis and UAE involved for their own – along with aiding the US achieve its objectives.

There’s nothing civil about war in Yemen. The notion of possible diplomatic resolution near-term is pure illusion. Fierce clashes continue.

In his days earlier address, Saudi king Salman lied, falsely claiming support for ending years of war – a notion he, crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, and Trump regime hardliners reject.

After suspending hostilities on Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah days earlier, the country’s humanitarian lifeline, a scheme to regroup, Saudi/UAE terror-bombing resumed intensively on Monday.

A UK Security Council draft resolution, calling on all parties to cease hostilities in Hodeidah and elsewhere in densely populated areas, along with permitting unhindered humanitarian aid to enter the country will accomplish nothing even if unanimously adopted.

Washington, NATO, the Saudis and their warrior partners flagrantly breach Security Council resolutions and other international laws, letting nothing stand in the way of pursuing their imperial agenda.

Years of US drone terror-bombing alone, greatly escalated by Trump, massacred countless thousands of defenseless Yemeni children and other civilians.

One Yemeni spoke for others, saying “(w)e live in fear. Drones don’t leave the sky” – reigning death and destruction on the country and its people, along with US, Saudi, UAE terror-bombing, massacring countless thousands more.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is part of the problem, supporting Washington’s imperial agenda like his predecessors while pretending otherwise. Weeks earlier UN statistics on Yemen turned truth on its head, claiming years of war killed 6,400 people, injuring 30,000 more.

Since Washington launched naked aggression on the country in late October 2001, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis perished from war, untreated diseases, starvation, and overall deprivation.

Grossly understating casualty numbers by the UN secretary-general’s office is a crime against humanity, a horrendous affront to millions of long-suffering Yemenis, victims of US imperial viciousness.

A months earlier statement by Guterres through his spokesman on Yemen was much like what he always says about US, NATO, and Israeli aggression – calling on all sides to show restraint, spare civilians, and resolve things diplomatically.

He pretends both sides of ongoing conflicts are evenly matched, ignoring naked aggression, failing to blame the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners for their high crimes of war and against humanity too great to ignore.

Like most of his predecessors, he disgraces the office he holds, violating the UN Charter he’s sworn to uphold.

The days earlier Houthi peace offering was genuine but unattainable because Washington, NATO, the Saudis, and UAE reject conflict resolution.

The horrendous human toll mounts exponentially daily. Save the Children conservatively estimated around 85,000 children under age-five perished from starvation and untreated diseases since early 2015 alone.

UNESCO earlier estimated over 50,000 children under age-five perishing annually since March 2015.

Western and other media-reported lowball figures are bald-faced lies, a way to greatly downplay one of history’s great crimes, continuing daily in the country with no prospect for ending the carnage any time soon – nor in any other active US war theaters.

If US launched aggression continues years longer, along with blockade, millions of Yemenis may perish from starvation and untreated diseases alone.

Save the Children’s Yemen director Tamer Kirolos said the following:

“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,” adding:

“Children who die in this way suffer immensely as their vital organ functions slow down and eventually stop. Their immune systems are so weak they are more prone to infections with some too frail to even cry. Parents are having to witness their children wasting away, unable to do anything about it.”

How many Yemeni deaths are too many? How many more raped and destroyed countries will it take to satisfy Washington’s imperial appetite?

Is higher intelligence more a curse than blessing? Will technologically advanced weapons 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.

Featured image is from Yemen Press

“I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.” — Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), Twitter, Nov 20, 2018

Accused of being mendacious, incapable of holding to a foundation of facts and indifferent to the world of evidence, President Donald J. Trump has stumped international relations watchers with metronomic regularity. He has also torn away the façade of decent, tolerable hypocrisy that is the “value system” of US foreign policy.  In its place is violent and ugly calculation, the allure of unmitigated self-interest. 

Students of such policy have traditionally seen the American imperium as a swaying creature: the realist view shuns sentimentality and sees the international environment as a jungle writ large, teeming with power plays; the idealist, who shades into a liberal internationalist, accepts a moral coating, and a certain degree of sanctimony, regarding international institutions, protocols and the like. From the latter came the at times emetic pronouncements of President Woodrow Wilson, who insisted that the United States shoulder the burdens of making the world safe for democracy. (It was often making it safe for business, but the confusion is an accepted one.)

One foreign policy tradition, identified by Walter Russell Mead, is the Jeffersonian strand.  The eye here is turned inward, and promoting democracy overseas is a matter best left to others.  Within Jefferson, two versions stood out like schizophrenic impulses: the first, keen on seeing the republic remain one of glorious yeomanry freed of imperial obligation; the second, interested to see the Republic embark on its imperial, manifestly deigned mission. 

Mead does not stop there.  If Trump’s policy can ever find some classification – and here, the schemes are only illustrative, not dogmatic – he might well be part Jacksonian, that tradition Mead claims is hostile to Wilson’s view of international institutions and Alexander Hamilton’s insistence on pure open markets, freedom of the seas, and international financial and legal stability.  The followers of Andrew Jackson’s view embrace the military establishment, will use it sparingly, but, when provoked, will be satisfyingly violent. 

The disturbing fascination of Trump’s contribution to this babble on foreign policy is his instinctive revulsion of any position that might prevent a worthy transaction.  Murdering journalists might be “bad”, but worse is to hold a cashed-up medieval theocracy to account for it.  There is no room for the grieving sentimentalist here: Jamal Khashoggi was dismembered, but why let his corpse dictate a change in approach to Riyadh?   

Trump has his own bogey states to worry about, and he sees Iran as, in the words of his November 20 statement, “responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen”, behind the deaths of “many Americans and other innocent people”, a destabiliser of Iraq and a state sponsor of terrorism.  Then there is the filthy lucre, the “record” amount of $450 billion promised by Saudi Arabia as part of investments in the US.   

Trump turns to dreamy fiction on this, imagining that “hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth to the United States” will arise from Kingdom’s deep pockets. The Make America Great Again quotient is satisfied with some $110 billion to “be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other great US defence contractors.”  Besides, Saudi Arabia had been “very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels – so important for the world.”  

True, the death of a man deemed an “enemy of the state” by Saudi Arabia (“my decision is in no way based on that”) was a “an unacceptable and horrible crime” but “great independent research” suggested that 17 were directly connected with his death, deserving sanction.  “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”  

This turn of brutal honesty does not sit well with the hucksters in the GOP who prefer to hawk the wares of the Republic with counterfeit concerns for human rights and free expression.  “When we lose our moral voice, we lose our strongest asset,” argues Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who also claims that the crown prince “has shown disrespect for the relationship”.  This is the sort of fabled nonsense that has shielded US power from proper analysis, ignoring the giant’s cool, if often bungling calculations, while hiding in the comforting duvet of an exacting morality.  One such stonking bungle featured the Saudi-dominated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil. To the US, both oil and apocalyptic terrorism. 

Others speak of a complex situation, one that requires a ginger approach.  This leaves room for much crawling cant.  Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Chattanooga TV station WTVC that,

“It is a delicate situation when we have a long-term ally that we’ve had for decades, but we have a crown prince that I believe ordered the killing of a journalist.” 

Corker’s focus is wearingly slanted, finding specific fault in a regime for one savage incident, and clearly ignoring its otherwise extensive butcher’s bill.  The brutalities of the Saudi security services, the kingdom’s famine inflicting war in Yemen, are chickenfeed matters relative to the sanguinary fate of Khashoggi.  “Everything points to the fact that [the crown prince] knew about it and directed it.”  Doing so enables Corker and his like-minded colleagues to ignore the security and economic dimension of the Saudi-US relationship, one that excuses casual atrocity while affecting a broader concern for the human subject, a sentiment otherwise absent in broader strategic discussions. 

Such a view is replicated in the Tuesday Global Magnitsky letter to Trump from Corker and ranking member, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), requesting

“that your determination specifically address whether Crown Prince Mohamed [sic] bin Salman is responsible for Mr Khashoggi’s murder.”   

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is more businesslike in tone, suggesting that enough house cleaning has already taken place.  The governing Saudi royal family is never mentioned; specific individuals are, a point that keeps the House of Saud distant from the bloody matter. 

“We’ve sanctioned 17 people – some of them very senior in the Saudi government,” he told KCMO in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Rounding off such an approach is the extravagant claim by Trump that he controls the levers, holds the strings, and is captain of the ship.  The world is his market, his veritable playground.  He can influence interest rates; he can control oil prices. 

“Oil prices getting lower,” he tweeted. “Great!  Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World.  Enjoy!” 

Khashoggi should be remembered as much as the victim of state-sanctioned murder as one of unjust ennoblement at the hands of his morally infatuated exploiters.  Trump’s diminution of his fate is crude but violently frank: the US has preferred a different approach to other states whose governments have seemed fit to suspend arms sales.  All will quietly normalise matters in due course, keen to avoid losing market share to competitors.  “Enjoy!” as Trump might well toot, followed by triumphant tones of “Told you so!” 

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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]

Edu Montesanti: RAWA strongly opposes any negotiation among the US, Afghan government and Taliban. This possibility becomes even more unrealistic, not to say hypocritical, taking into account that now ISIS is also terrorizing your country. What are your thoughts on this Afghan Peace Process, Friba?

Friba (RAWA’s representative): The peace talks with the Taliban are meaningless, hypocritical and simply ridiculous. We have the Taliban on one side who are medieval-minded criminals, the puppet regime composed of the Taliban’s brethren-in-creed on the other side, and the third player, the US, is the creator of both. Such a peace deal will not result in peace, it will result in fulfilling the US’s wishes. The only certain result of such a peace deal increases in war, insecurity, corruption, mafia, and the multiplication of our people’s miseries.

The Taliban’s crimes are well-known to the world, their stone-age laws and the oppression of women under their brutal regime was widely shown around the world. In the past decade, these killers have shed the blood of thousands of innocent people in suicide and other bombings.

While these memories are still seared in the minds of our women and men, and their wounds are still bleeding, these criminals are being invited to join the government to complete the circle of fundamentalist, mercenary criminals in power. Like the criminals who are already present in the government, the Taliban would also enjoy complete impunity and not face prosecution for their savage crimes against our people.

The mere mention of these peace talks is pouring salt on the wounds of our suffering people. Just like the peace deal reached with the murderous Gulbuddin this year, was yet another blow to the war-ravaged people of Afghanistan. A criminal who has killed thousands of innocent people during the Afghan civil war, assassinated tens of intellectuals, and used to throw acid on the faces of women who were seen in public when he was a university student, walked across the graves of his victims and into the arms of the US and Ashraf Ghani.

The US occupiers gave its blue-eyed boy and long-term agent, immunity from prosecution and removed his name from the UN blacklist, so he could join his fellow traitors and criminals in the puppet government.

Such peace talks are mainly part of the US propaganda to deceive the world and Afghan people. If the US had wanted this peace deal, it would have resolved this issue easily, because it is the creator and backer of these criminals. Pakistan, the Taliban’s foster parents, is also under the US’s command and would have made sure the peace deal went through. But the US does not want this peace deal, because the Taliban is its justification for the Afghan war, and the US is in dire need of continuing its Afghan occupation.

Any peace deal reached without the participation of the people and especially women of Afghanistan is meaningless, just like democracy and elections in Afghanistan are merely a façade. Gains made without the true struggle of people are just changes imposed by foreign invaders or puppet governments, and these changes can be as easily reversed as they are brought about in the first place.

Edu Montesanti: While Donald Trump has indicated that he wishes US troops to leave Afghanistan, what can you say about the mainstream media coverage of the 17-years US occupation, and its so-called “fight against terror”?

Friba: Despite the announcement of the so-called new strategy, there is so much that we don’t know about the US’s criminal Afghan war, due to the lack of transparency and blatant lies told by the US army in the past seventeen years.

From covering up its heinous crimes – ranging from massacres and torture to assisting fundamentalist criminals – to lying about its actual number of troops and private contractors in the country, the US has continuously deceived the world and its own nation about the reality of the Afghan war.

Afghanistan barely gets any coverage and if it does, the crimes of the US forces will never be shown, as will the insecurity and instability of our country and the devastating situation of women and people will not get any attention.

Thanks to its Goebbels-like lying machine of propaganda, the US has been able to get away with much of its criminal activities, not just in the Afghan war, but in wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, by lying to its people. The very basis of the current US wars were bogus claims exaggerated by a hysterical media that spread fear among people to justify US invasions and occupations of other countries.

The people of the US and West do not have the true picture of the US wars to make proper, informed decisions on them. They should look beyond the mainstream coverage and discover the reality of the Afghan war and other US-led crusades.

They should know that the tax they pay is used by their governments to further their imperialist aims in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries and that their hands are soaked in the blood of our innocent people; they should know that the US, while claiming to lead a “war on terror” abroad, is actually nourishing terrorists and terror groups to achieve its own aims; that while it claims to be the torch-bearer of human rights, it has committed some of the most bloody crimes in its wars, and has provided support for the indigenous human rights violators and war criminals in these countries.

Edu Montesanti: What about the Afghan media?

Friba: The Afghan media, which has grown rapidly since the US invasion, also has the same policy of covering up and whitewashing US crimes and evil plans in Afghanistan, instead of exposing them.

Edu Montesanti: What message would you like to send to the world, to finish this interview?

Friba: RAWA has always stated that the solidarity of the freedom and peace-loving people of the world is very important in strengthening our people’s struggle at home.

These people need to pressure their governments to change this invasion and occupation policy and stand with the people who are the victims of these wars.

These bloody wars also have a blowback for the people of the West, like the increase in deadly terrorist attacks carried out by ISIS sympathizers across Europe and the US, so it is vital, more than ever today, to join hands in annihilating this deadly virus.

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Featured image is from Fabius Maximus Website

The Kremlin uncharacteristically declined to comment on reports that Russia is seeking to broker Iran’s withdrawal from Syria in exchange for the Islamic Republic receiving sanctions relief from the US, which is extremely unusual because Moscow has a track record of issuing sharp unambiguous responses to fake news claims and sometimes even outright mocking them, which strongly suggests that its non-denial implies some degree of truth to the latest reports no matter how “politically incorrect” this may be for the Alt-Media Community to accept.

Rumors are swirling that Russia’s “balancing” strategy is evolving to the point of Moscow taking active measures to “encourage” Iran’s military withdrawal from Syria in exchange for the Islamic Republic receiving sanctions relief from the US, a scenario that the author himself foresaw last May when describing President Putin’s unofficial peace plan for Syria and explaining how Russia is already “balancing” Iran in the Mideast as it is, despite Russia consistently denying that it has any power to do this at all. It turns out, however, that the country’s official statements might have been a classic exercise in “diplomacy” if Axios’ latest report from Tuesday evening turns out to be true, which claims that “Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a closed hearing on Monday that Russia recently proposed to Israel and the U.S. that Iran be granted relief from some U.S. sanctions in return for the removal of Iranian forces and proxies from Syria.”

The First Non-Denial

The Kremlin uncharacteristically declined to comment on the report, with Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov simply saying

“No comment. We don’t comment on the subject matter of closed-door talks with heads of other states.”

This is extremely unusual because Moscow has a track record of issuing sharp unambiguous responses to fake news claims and sometimes even outright mocking them, which strongly suggests that its non-denial implies some degree of truth to the latest reports no matter how “politically incorrect” this may be for the Alt-Media Community to accept. There’s long been a concerted disinformation campaign at play aimed at trying to convince people that Russia is apparently an “anti-Zionist crusader state”, which couldn’t be further from the truth when recalling the regular praise that President Putin lavished on “Israel” during his nearly two decades in office, which led to the author concluding that President Putin is actually a proud philo-Semite.

After all, Russia successfully “convinced” Iran to withdraw it and its allied forces 140 kilometers from the “Israeli”-occupied Golan Heights in southwestern Syria at what RT even cited the Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson as saying “was done at the request of Tel Aviv”. Not only that, but Russia’s flagship international media outlet also quoted the Defense Ministry in the same report as confirming that the country passively facilitated the more than 200 strikes that “Israel” carried out in Syria since January 2017 (which interestingly coincides with when Moscow unveiled its Russian-written “draft constitution” for the Arab Republic). Moreover, Russia “provided assistance in preserving Jewish sacred places and graves in the city of Aleppo” on top of dangerously digging up “the remains of some Israeli servicemen that died during the past conflicts in an area where the Syrian forces were combating Islamic State (IS, former ISIS) terrorists at that time.”

The Second Non-Denial

None of this should be surprising since Russia and “Israel” are allies, or rather, Russia has done so much to ensure “Israel’s” security that the latter could be described as a joint protectorate between Moscow and Washington at this point. In fact, it could even provocatively be argued that Russia has done more for “Israel” lately than the US has, especially when considering that America was unable to carve out the “buffer zone” in southwestern Syria nor put its men’s lives on the line to “preserve Jewish sacred places and graves in the city of Aleppo” as well as dig up “the remains of some Israeli servicemen that died during the past conflicts” in Syria. Therefore, it could have almost been expected that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov would release a follow-up non-denial that also strongly suggests some truthfulness to Axios’ explosive claims that President Putin is coordinating Iran’s withdrawal from Syria with Netanyahu.

The high-ranking official let the cat out of the bag by saying that

“Regarding the specific aspect of lifting sanctions in exchange for something, I can’t confirm it. There were close, but not coinciding with this idea, which did not develop. But we continue to look at what can be done in this area in conjunction with all the participants, all the countries that we are talking about now.”

The part about how “there were close (proposals), but not coinciding with this idea” reveals that Russia was in fact discussing something along these lines all along in spite of its official denials, exactly as the author in hindsight correctly analyzed back in May. In fact, subsequent “policy proposals” by the influential and publicly financed Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) suggest that the Kremlin is very serious about removing Iran from Syria.

Relevant RIAC Reports

Yury Barmin, a RIAC analyst on Russia and its Middle East policy, published a detailed report on “Russia and Israel: The Middle Eastern Vector of Relations” in October that urged the Kremlin to curtail Iran’s activities in Syria as soon as possible and even broker peace between Damascus and Tel Aviv in order to further diminish Tehran’s influence in the Arab Republic. The following are the most relevant passages:

“Israel has been an unofficial ally of Moscow in the Middle East since 1991, when diplomatic relations between the USSR and Israel were restored, having been severed following the Six-Day War in 1967…Israel has made it clear that it views Moscow, and not Washington, as the side that is capable of preventing the conflict with Tehran from turning into a full-scale war…Just like the Sunni-majority countries in the region, Israel was counting on the Russian military presence to contain, and control, Bashar al-Assad and, more importantly, Iran.

…

 Russia stands to benefit from the weakening of Tehran’s military positions in Syria, as it is a clear obstacle to a peaceful settlement, creating the illusion in Damascus that the military option for resolving the conflict remains open. However, Russia has very few political levers to enact such a recalibration of Iran’s position in Syria. Tehran has already stated that no one has the right to demand Iran’s withdrawal from Syria. Therefore, the Israeli campaign to prevent Iranian forces from taking root in Syria actually benefits Russia too, as long as it does not look like an open provocation…By withdrawing Shiite forces from the line of mutual disengagement of forces, Russia has been able to guarantee the security of Israel’s borders in the medium term. 

…

 Israel’s campaign to consistently undermine Iran’s military capabilities on the ground and weaken its influence partly fulfils the functions that Russia would like to take on itself but cannot for political reasons…To minimize the conflict potential between Iran and Israel “on the ground,” Russia will have to comprehensively review the modality of the pro-Iranian forces’ presence in Syria. Presence of pro-Iranian armed units in the country is an issue whose solution will be part of the political settlement and is likely to become an element in the security sector reform. Given the deep-rooted Iranian influence, primarily in the military sphere, one of Russia’s main tasks in Syria will be the reform of the security sector.

 …

 Given the position recently proclaimed by one of Israeli’s ministers that “Lebanon equals Hezbollah”, it now appears that Moscow should confine itself to discussing Hezbollah in the context of the Syrian conflict and avoid talking about the organization’s role in Lebanon, although attempts have been made to do this by the Israeli side…Strategically, right now, for Russia, the focus on Israel–Syria settlement is both feasible and promising, as it is the most achievable task and could help Moscow prove itself as a broker. Building trust between the leaders of Israel and Syria serves the interests of both sides and also partially limits Tehran’s influence in Syria, which Bashar al-Assad may seek in the post-conflict period.”

This was soon thereafter followed up by Alexey Khlebnikov, RIAC’s Middle East expert and Russian foreign policy analyst, who published his report on the “Evolution of the Syrian Military: Main Trends and Challenges” earlier this month. Here are the most pertinent passages to the present analysis:

“Today, one of the central questions for country’s stabilization and political reconciliation is how Syrian armed forces are going to be reformed and whether Damascus will choose the right direction in dealing with re-establishing its military…In this context, Iran’s heavy involvement in creation and sponsoring pro-government militia in Syria exacerbates the complexity of the issue even further. In addition, some of the most efficient pro-government militia groups enjoy sponsorship from abroad, particularly from Iran. It creates quite big risk of becoming over-reliant on the foreign patron that pursues its own interests which might not always coincide with those of the client.

…

Excessive Iranian presence in Syria irritates Israel, the US, Turkey, Russia, and even Damascus itself. Being weak and with no foreign alternative to rely on regarding the funds for reconstruction, Syrian government is pushed closer to Iran. As a result, progress in political process, reconstruction, and return of the refugees seems highly impossible, as all of it requires broad international involvement.

 …

 First, in the last seven years Iran has heavily invested in Syria creating sophisticated multi-layered presence and it is extremely unlikely that Tehran will leave the country without return on its investments. It has already struck a deal with Damascus which grants Tehran exclusive right to assist in rebuilding Syrian military industry and infrastructure. The situation creates additional risks for the Syrian state. Excessive Iranian presence in Syria will be the major irritant for Israel and the US that almost certainly excludes any lift of Syria sanctions which are necessary for the successful reconstruction and economic restoration of the country. Second, Iran’s presence irritates Moscow which has its own military infrastructure in Syria. Excessive Iranian presence in the country is counter-productive for Russia’s long-term Syria policy which eventually envisages political transition, reforms and reconciliation with the regional powers and the West. From the very beginning, deployment of the Russian military was a double-edge sword.

 On the one hand, Kremlin’s decision to deploy its air and special forces to Syria in fall of 2015 was a result of an agreement with Damascus and Tehran aiming at preventing Syria from collapse. Russia’s air cover without Iranian forces on the ground would be meaningless, so it was mutually beneficial division of labor which worked out quite successfully for its purposes. On the other hand, Russia’s military deployment to Syria sent a signal to Israel and the West that Iran would not be left unchecked. Moscow is seen as a force which is able to keep Iranian presence in the country in check to a certain degree. The recent deal on south Syria between Russia, Israel and the US, which envisaged Iranian forces pull out from the Syria-Israeli border, is a good evidence. Damascus understands that and might use this issue as a bargaining chip in its talks with the West and GCC states to eventually attract their money into Syria.

 …

 One of Moscow’s main tasks in Syria is to rebuild country’s armed forces almost from scratch, which is going to be extremely difficult. First, the army must have control over entire country’s territory and to have monopoly on using force which is not the case now and is highly unlikely in the near future. Second, during the last seven years Iran has been creating extensive network of military structures in Syria, which are loyal to Tehran and are unlikely to either disband themselves and leave, or to become part of the state armed forces. This problem might become a major stumbling rock between Russia and Iran in the coming months and years. And third, Russia lacks sufficient resources to accomplish this task alone.

 In such context, there is an opportunity to attract foreign sources to restore Syrian army and to reconstruct the country. The GCC and Israel should be very much interested in rebuilding Syria with lesser Iranian presence. By helping out Russia to accomplish this task regional players impose indirect limits on Iran’s presence in Syria. With no foreign assistance Tehran receives more room to grow its influence in the country further. This might well help Moscow to make sure the new Syrian army is free from Iranian influence or is at least not dominated. 

 The stronger the army and the central government — the lesser it needs foreign partner to rely on. Moreover, in the MENA region armies also play a role of state-building element — which makes successful military reform crucial for a country’s restoration. Otherwise, Iran has quite good prospects of increasing its influence in Syria and stimulating further rise of sectarianism in the country.”

The immediate reaction of the many people who are indoctrinated with Alt-Media dogma will be to condemn RIAC’s reports as “Zionist propaganda”, but they’d do well to consider that the organization isn’t a foreign lobbying group at all but is rather an official policymaking instrument of the Russian state itself. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov serves on the Board of Trustees, probably because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is one of RIAC’s co-founders. In addition, the Presidential Administration, State Duma, and importantly, the Ministry of Defense are listed as its many partners.

For all practical intent and purposes, RIAC is pretty much the public extension of the Russian permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”), which therefore also allows them to publish controversial “policy proposals” such as this one while retaining “plausible deniability” that this isn’t “officially” state policy. It’s also an excellent platform for the state to network with foreign counterparts and aspiring experts, all the while preconditioning the public to accept certain policy moves before they’re actually implemented out in the open, such as is likely the case with Barmin and Khlebnikov’s “suggestions”.

Supplementary Analyses

Whether one agrees with RIAC’s “proposals” or is strongly opposed to them, they undoubtedly confirm what the author previously analyzed about Russia’s strategy in Syria and the overall dynamics that the war is now taking. As such, the reader is encouraged to reference the following five analyses if they’re interested in obtaining a deeper understanding of what’s happening and why:

“Chaos Theory, Hybrid War, And The Future Of Syria”

“Here’s How The Latakia Tragedy – Nay, Conspiracy! – Might Have Played Out”

“Strategic Assessment Of The War On Syria In Fall 2018: Idlib & The Northeast”

“Russia’s Reshaping Syria’s ‘Deep State’ In Its Own Image”

“The Reopening of The UAE Embassy Might Signal Syria’s Pivot to The GCC”

To sum it up, the kinetic (military) phase of the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria is drawing down as the conflict begins to take on a non-kinetic (political) form that could pave the way for a so-called “political solution”, though this must responsibly include reliable reconstruction aid and other assurances in order to be sustainable, hence the sensitive Russian-led diplomatic efforts underway in order to facilitate this.

Timing Is Everything

Returning back to the latest reports alleging that President Putin told Netanyahu about his plan to broker Iran’s military withdrawal from Syria in exchange for the Islamic Republic receiving sanctions relief from the US, their veracity can’t be confidently assessed without first keeping in mind the four reports that immediately preceded it.

To begin with, Sputnik wrote on Monday about what Haaretz published over the weekend concerning Netanyahu’s meeting with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, during which time he purportedly said that “Russia doesn’t have the necessary influence over Iran to force it to leave Syria”, but that “aerial surveillance has shown a decrease in the amount of supplies to Hezbollah coming through Syria (allegedly being delivered by Tehran)”. This could be interpreted as a two-part message, the first being a subtle acknowledgement that he and President Putin have indeed discussed this scenario and concluded that only Damascus has the power to request the removal of Iranian forces from its territory (seeing as how the Islamic Republic consistently said that it would comply with its partner’s wishes if asked to do so), and the second being that the “Israel’s” Russian-facilitated bombing campaign against the IRGC and Hezbollah over the years has been largely successful in its aims.

The last three reports all came out the day afterwards on Tuesday.

What would have otherwise been a non-eventful weekday began with the US’ Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Franklin Jeffrey surprisingly saying that his country doesn’t demand Russia’s military withdrawal from Syria, claiming that its pre-war naval refueling station in Tartus constitutes a “base” and therefore gives it the right to remain in the country after the war. The official also said that while his government doesn’t approve of President Assad’s continued tenure, it’s not going to try and oust him from his position, which suggests that a behind-the-scenes deal might have been reached between the US and Russia to get Washington to walk back its years-long insistence that “Assad must go”. Included in this speculative agreement might have also been the US recognizing Russia’s right to retain military bases in Syria, provided of course that it succeeds in removing Iran’s military footprint. To “sweeten the deal”, the US might have promised that its GCC allies would rebuild Syria.

Next, the outgoing “IDF” chief of staff declared that “The military capabilities of Iran and Hezbollah near Israel’s northern border are much smaller than they could be because of successful actions by Israel”, which confirms what Netanyahu said over the weekend and downplays any conjecture about serious “deep state” divisions between the premier and his military following the Defense Minister’s resignation last week. Furthermore, it can even be implied that the success of this years-long Russian-facilitated operation has been so great that “Israel” no longer has a “need” to bomb IRGC and Hezbollah targets in Syria at the same pace as it did during the 18-month period between January 2017 and the tragic downing of the Russian spy plane in mid-September 2018. This might not be because of Russia’s “strategically misleading” S-300 deployment to Syria, but possibly because Moscow is taking active measures to curtail Iranian influence there on “Israel’s” behalf per Axios’ report.

Finally, the last relevant news item that came out before the claims that President Putin is brokering Iran’s (potentially “phased”) withdrawal from Syria was that the US suddenly imposed sanctions on Russian and Iranian entities that it accused of violating the recently reimposed unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s energy exports. Whether these allegations are true or not isn’t within the ambit of this analysis, as the larger purpose of announcing them right before news about Russia and “Israel’s” supposedly secret conversations vis-à-vis Iran was “leaked” to the media might have been to proverbially “hold the fire to Moscow’s feet” so that it “convinces” Damascus to request the Islamic Republic’s military withdrawal from Syria. If everything was proceeding apace, then the US wouldn’t have any reason for doing this, so it might have been that some in Moscow, Damascus, and even Tehran are still “uncertain” about this plan and require additional pressure to “convince” them.

“Deep State” Divisions

To explain, Russia, Syria, and Iran aren’t politically homogenous, especially on the level of their “deep states”, and it’s natural that differences over strategic vision exist within each of these countries.

The Syrian “deep state” is split between those who are closer to Iran and those who lean more towards Russia, while the Iranian one is notorious for its bifurcation into “moderate”/”reformist” and “conservative”/”principalist” halves. Regarding Russia, the mid-September downing of its spy plane exposed the rift between the “traditionalist” and “progressive” factions, represented most clearly by the “Israeli”-suspicious military that immediately blamed Tel Aviv for what happened and the “Israeli”-friendly President who – while publicly supporting the military’s position – attributed the tragedy more to “a chain of tragic circumstances” than any preplanned provocation. It’s because of these preexisting “deep state” divisions that the US and “Israel” concluded that they’ll have to commence an organized perception management and preconditioning campaign in order to improve the odds that President Putin’s reported initiative will be a success, even if Washington has to “show its teeth” through sanctions again in order to make it happen.

To simplify a very complicated diplomatic dance, Iran’s military commitment to Syria is already very expensive and the costs are only going to comparatively rise in the face of the US’ reimposed sanctions pressure against it, so the “moderate”/”reformist” argument can be made that Damascus’ possible Russian-“encouraged” request for a “face-saving” “phased withdrawal” from the Arab Republic would be to Tehran’s economic interests. Other than institutional resistance from the “conservative”/”principalist” factions, the other problem to this “master plan” is that there’s a very influential pro-Iranian “deep state” faction in Syria that doesn’t want to see this happen, and even some of the pro-Russian members of the country’s permanent bureaucracy might feel uneasy losing their “balancing” partner and becoming completely dependent on Moscow. Therein lays the relevancy of the UAE possibly reopening its embassy in Damascus in order to accelerate Syria’s pivot to the GCC, as Damascus could theoretically replace Iranian influence with the Gulf’s and continue “balancing” Russia.

As for the Russian perspectives, the military has been working very closely with its Iranian partners for the past three years and they all understandably established a close comradery forged by the fires of battle, while the diplomats never had these sorts of experiences in the field and therefore have a “colder” but – it can be argued – more “impartial” stance regarding the issue of their country “encouraging” Syria to seek Tehran’s “phased withdrawal” from the Arab Republic. Of course, President Putin is the chief decision maker and all elements of the Russian state will dutifully obey his commands, but it might be a lot easier to execute his and his diplomats’ plans if the military sees that its Syrian and Iranian counterparts truly want to go along with all of this on their own will and aren’t being “pressured” by Russia to do this. On their own and without Russia’s knowledge, the joint American-“Israeli” is designed to shape the strategic conditions for facilitating this outcome.

Referring back to the four news items that preceded the “leak” about Russia’s reported talks with “Israel” and the US over this scenario, they could in hindsight be interpreted as signaling Tel Aviv and Washington’s public willingness to support this plan. “Israel” was telegraphing to both Syria and Iran that it doesn’t “need” to continue bombing the Arab Republic anymore, while the US significantly reaffirmed that it won’t take active measures to overthrow President Assad. Fearing that the “deep state” divisions in Syria and Iran might be insurmountable without some extra outside pressure, the US took the step to impose sanctions against both of them and Russia over their alleged violation of the recently reimposed sanctions regime prohibiting the export of the Islamic Republic’s energy resources, wagering that this might compel Moscow to “lean more” on Damascus and therefore set into motion Tehran’s eventual military withdrawal from the country after breaking the strategic impasse.

Incidentally, it was announced on Wednesday afternoon that President Assad is considering another trip to Russia soon, which could mean that he’s finally ready to ‘seal the deal’ with President Putin.

The Bigger Picture Of Bringing Peace To The Mideast

The present analysis wouldn’t be complete without explaining the role that Iran’s Russian-facilitated “phased withdrawal” from Syria is expected to accomplish in terms of the bigger picture of bringing peace to the Mideast. Russia, which envisions itself 21^st-century grand strategic role as being the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, believes that it can play the most important part in building the so-called “New Middle East”, to which end its “balancing” of Iran is expected to be followed up with the reconstruction of Syria’s “deep state” and the UNSC 2254-mandated reform of its constitution. The second-mentioned element should be paid special attention because Article 8 of the Russian-written “draft constitution” contains two clauses decreeing that

“Syria shall maintain good neighborly relations with other countries based on cooperation, mutual security and other principles stipulated by international legal rules” and that “Syria denounces war as an infringement on other countries’ sovereignty and a means to resolve international conflicts.”

If (key qualifier) Article 8 is included in Syria’s forthcoming reformed constitution, then it would for all intents and purposes amount to Damascus de-facto giving up its claims to the “Israeli“-occupied Golan Heights by dint of its denouncement of war as a means to resolve this international conflict, as well as its promise to “maintain good neighborly relations with other countries based on cooperation, mutual security and other principles stipulated by international legal rules”. This would naturally place Russia in the position to broker peace between “Israel” and Syria just like Barmin “suggested” in his RIAC analysis. Should Moscow be successful in this through one way or another, then Khlebnikov’s vision of “Israel” rebuilding Syria together with the GCC would become “politically feasible”, and Tel Aviv might also “advise” its Russian ally on how it should reform the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and reshape the country’s “deep state”.

This scenario would probably be timed to coincide with the GCC making peace with “Israel”, leaving only Lebanon as the last relevant holdout in Tel Aviv’s neighborhood, but one which could possibly be “managed” by Russia replacing Saudi Arabia’s influence there and “balancing” Iran’s. It would probably be around this time that Trump’s so-called “Deal of the Century” for restarting the Palestinian peace process might actually gain traction after the radical changes brought about by Syria and the GCC’s de-facto and/or de-jure recognitions of “Israel” unrecognizably alter the strategic chessboard. By that point, the only two pertinent countries that would likely remain in a position of potentially opposing this “New Middle East” would be Turkey and Iran, both of which would already be more dependent on Russia as a “pressure valve” than ever before due to “Israel’s” anti-Turkish Eastern Mediterranean alliance, the Kurds, and the GCC’s anti-Iranian “containment” measures, therefore granting Russia unprecedented influence over them.

Faced with more pressing threats along their immediate peripheries and conscious of the strategic consequences if they act “too assertively” against their “pressure valve’s” “Israeli” ally, both of these Muslim Great Powers would be unable to stop the “Israeli”-centric regional processes underway that Russia’s successful “balancing” act in Syria unleashed, meaning that the Yinon Plan’s objective of “cleverly securing” “Israel’s” existence would have been accomplished. It pretty much already is whether it’s widely recognized or not because the SAA is unable to pose a credible challenge to “Israel” after the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria decimated the nation’s military and the Russian-enforced 140-kilometer “buffer zone” in the southwest of the country makes it all but impossible for Damascus to ever “threaten” Tel Aviv again. That pretty much guarantees the safety of “Israel’s” northeastern flank, thereby making Lebanese-based Hezbollah the only remaining “problem”, albeit one that might possibly be “contained” by “exporting” Russia’s “balancing” model to that country.

Concluding Thoughts

As the title of the present analysis made clear, Russia’s non-denial about brokering Iran’s withdrawal from Syria is a big deal, and not just because of what it would mean for advancing a “political solution” to the country’s long-running conflict, but also due to the game-changing consequences that it could have for building the so-called “New Middle East” after the de-facto success of the Yinon Plan. Nothing “conspiratorial” is being alleged in this article about Russia supposedly “collaborating” with “Israel” “all along” to this end, but what was plainly conveyed in the text is that Moscow apparently believes that its own long-term strategic interests are best served by “balancing” the Mideast in a manner that largely overlaps with the spirit of the Yinon Plan. This isn’t because of any “special affinity” for “Israel”, but is attributable to the geopolitical circumstances that Russia has found itself in.

After conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis and spending much time weighing the pros and cons, Russia apparently concluded after the tragic mid-September downing of its spy plane that it’s better to remain committed to the “buffer zone” that it carved out for “Israel” in southwestern Syria and continue with the trend of gradually pushing Iranian influence out of the country, albeit in a respectable “face-saving” and “mutually beneficial” way that might see Moscow “encourage” Damascus to request Tehran’s “phased withdrawal” in exchange for sanctions relief from Washington. If this ultra-ambitious gambit is successful (which remains a “work in progress” and is far from certain), then it would definitely be the first major step in the direction of reshaping regional affairs in a way that would sustainably secure “Israel’s” existence and relatedly improve the odds that Trump’s “Deal of the Century” achieves something tangible for Tel Aviv.

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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.

Virginia State senator Richard H. Black has made it clear that the United States makes trade between Iran and Syria more difficult by occupying the north of the Euphrates River in accordance with ‘Plan B’ announced several years ago by Secretary of State John Kerry.

He told the Syriatimes e-newspaper that The U.S. has attempted to block routes between the countries wherever possible and it has established 17 bases in Syria without the slightest lawful justification for doing so.

“The United States has established a semi-autonomous region dominated by Syrian Kurds to control the region. Since Kurds make up only 20% of the area’s population, allowing them to dominate the region creates a political unstable situation; the much larger Arabic population is almost certain to take up arms to avoid falling under the domination of the Kurdish minority. This creates a situation where ethnic violence provides justification for the U.S. to remain in the area indefinitely, since the United States has announced its intention to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. The reemergence of violence in the area would likely be attributed to ISIS and used as a pretext for continued occupation,” the senator said.

U.S. refuses to publicize barbaric nature of its premier “moderate rebel” group

Asked about the US use of internationally banned weapons in attacking areas in the north of Syria, Sen. Black replied:

“There are reports that the U.S. has used cluster bombs and white phosphorus in Syria. The U.S. has denied those allegations. Meanwhile, the U.S. led coalition repeatedly complains about the use of so-called “barrel bombs” by Syria. It is not clear what the distinction is between a barrel containing explosives and shrapnel and a 15,000 pound “bunker-busting” bomb that hurls razor-sharp shrapnel great distances.”

Source: Syria Times

He pointed out that during his recent visit to Syria [in September 2018] he entered a building that contained “barrel rockets” that were manufactured by the terrorists who were driven from Aleppo.

“Some people claim that “barrel bombs” should be illegal because they are not precision-guided. The “barrel rockets” were fired by terrorists into random civilian areas for the sole purpose of killing innocent people. I have not heard any of Syria’s military opponents complaining about the use of “barrel rockets” by the terrorists. In fact, the west has never complained about any legal violations by terrorists that they support,” the Senator stated.

He made it clear that the United States refuses to publicize the barbaric nature of it’s premier “moderate rebel” group [the Free Syrian Army], and its constant cooperation with terror forces like al Nusra and ISIS.

“We know, for example, that the Free Syrian Army frequently beheads and mutilates captives. We know they have cannibalized soldiers in battle. We know that they have thrown postal workers from municipal buildings to their death. Within the last several weeks, the Free Syrian Army distributed a video depicting one of its soldiers carrying out an “honor killing” of his own sister by machine gunning her to death,” the Senator said.

He indicated that he traveled five hours from Damascus to Aleppo on his trip to Syria this September. Everywhere he went, there was a feeling of joy among the people that the terrorists were driven out and that freedom had returned to Syria. There was tremendous gratitude for the Syrian president and the Syrian armed forces.

“Had Western powers, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey overthrown Syria, an al-Qaeda-style government would have seized power. It would have combined with ISIS-held territories to form a massive and violent caliphate with all of the arms presently held by the Syrian Arab Army. Surrounding nations would have collapsed as a result, and been integrated into the savage caliphate. This terroristic government would have annihilated millions of moderate Muslims and religious minorities,” Sen. Black asserted.

He went on to say:

“Had the West and its Arab allies succeeded in toppling Syria, I am convinced that Europe would now be threatened by jihad waged not by isolated terrorists, but by massive armed forces. In 2016, I went to Palmyra right after it was liberated by the Syrian armed forces. When I spoke to the pilots and aircrew standing by an attack aircraft, I told them that they were not only fighting to defend Syria but that they were defending the entire civilized world.”

Continued presence of ISIS is advantageous to the West

The senator, in addition, referred to the fact that the Law of Land Warfare has been completely disregarded by Western and Arab nations seeking to overthrow the legitimate, duly elected government of Syria.

“For example, the Law of Land Warfare prohibits the occupation of another non-belligerent sovereign nation. Nonetheless, the United States has established 17 bases in Syria without the slightest lawful justification for doing so. This has been done under the guise of fighting ISIS. However, the United States has prohibited Iraqi forces from entering Syria to finish off the final ISIS pocket where the Euphrates River crosses into Iraq. By the same token, the U.S. bombed and killed 200-300 Russian fighters who crossed the Euphrates to attack ISIS positions in the same region,” Sen. Black affirmed.

He added that it seems clear that the continued presence of ISIS is advantageous to the West even if a massive ISIS caliphate is not.

The Senator concluded by saying:

“In my lifetime, there has never been a greater force of evil than the terror rained down on Syria by foreign nations. Its cruelty and savagery have had no bounds. Nonetheless, Syria has defended itself against the economic might of 2/3 of the world’s great powers and has beaten them all. As a career military officer and student of military affairs, I cannot explain how Syria could accomplish this if it were not the will of God.”

Besides longstanding US geopolitical interests, Trump’s Saudi Arabia agenda reflects his family’s financial ties to the kingdom, including distress sales to royal family member for cash to meet debt obligations.

In 2015, he created and registered eight companies to do business in Saudi Arabia.

During an August 2015 campaign rally, he said

“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

He’s hugely beholden to Riyadh. As head of the Trump Organization’s many businesses, he actively pursued deals with Saudi investors on building hotels in the kingdom. At least two of his US properties benefitted hugely from Saudi business.

In January 2016, he vowed to “protect Saudi Arabia.” As president, he chose the kingdom as his first foreign trip. Most of the highly touted $110 billion arms deal was agreed on earlier, most yet to be fulfilled.

Whether it turns out as claimed remains very much uncertain. Trump’s claim about deals with Riyadh “bring(ing) many thousands of jobs to our country…millions of jobs ultimately” is pure nonsense.

Some deals with the Saudis may never be fulfilled, others way overblown. Still others may create more jobs in the kingdom than in the US.

Jared Kushner courted a Saudi investor to bail out his troubled 666 Fifth property – after failing to close a deal with Chinese and Russian investors.

Leaked intelligence reports revealed that the Saudis, UAE, China, Israel and Mexico targeted Kushner as an easy mark to manipulate because of “his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience.”

MBS reportedly told his Emirati counterpart and others that he has Kushner “in his pocket.” Trump’s absolving the crown prince of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder he clearly ordered got Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to tweet:

“Hey @realdonaldtrump: being Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not “America First.” Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district voters overwhelmingly reelected her on November 6 with over a 70% majority.

She supports congressional action to end “genocidal” war in Yemen, a resolution rejected by majority Republicans. She blasted what happened, saying:

“If Congress and (Trump) were concerned about the plight of the Yemeni people and peace, all US support for Saudi Arabia’s atrocities would end now. Instead…Republicans voted to shutdown debate.”

Gabbard stopped short of explaining that Yemen is Washington’s war, launched for strategic reasons, ongoing endlessly with no near-term prospect for resolution because the White House and Congress reject resolving it diplomatically.

On Thursday, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Judeir turned truth on its head, calling Khashoggi’s well-planned murder an “unfortunate accident,” adding:

“We will not tolerate any discussion of anything that is disparaging towards our monarch or our crown prince.”

“We have made it very clear that Saudi Arabia’s government is not involved in this and the crown prince is not involved in this at all.”

“The crown prince has the confidence of every Saudi citizen, including King Salman. The crown prince is the architect and driving force behind the reform program in Saudi Arabia and the Vision of 2030.”

All of the above are bald-faced lies fooling no one. Jubeir and other Saudi officials are mouthpieces for kingdom atrocities – supported by Trump, Kushner, and DLT regime hardliners, letting nothing stand in the way of firm US ties to the kingdom.

Congressional rumbling about cutting off US arms sales to Riyadh is more bluster than anything with real teeth being firmed up legislatively – something far less than what’s needed, short-term, amounting to nothing.

Republicans and Dems, supporting all US wars of aggression, are preparing a measure to impose fake sanctions and other punitive actions on the kingdom.

It calls for prohibiting arms sales used for warmaking, excluding whatever is considered defensive. The fine line between offense and defense is too thin to be meaningful.

If veto-proof legislation passes both House and Senate, suspending designated arms sales to the kingdom will only be short-term – dirty business as usual to be resumed once the current furor ends, the way things always work in Washington.

When it comes to committing atrocities and other egregious human rights abuses, Saudi high crimes are a drop in the ocean compared to Washington’s.

Imperial wars of aggression rage endlessly, the Saudis a valued US partner. Khashoggi’s murder won’t change longstanding bilateral relations – not as long as America is a warrior state, a fantasy democracy, not the real thing.

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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.

GR Editor’s Note:

This report was first published on October 30, 2018. There is no firm corroborating evidence that Khashoggi was intent upon investigating Saudi Arabia’s use of chemical weapons in Yemen.

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Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was killed in the Saudi Istanbul consulate on October 2, was investigating the details of Saudi Arabia’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Yemen, sources close to the Saudi dissident told Express.co.uk.

Quoting a friend of Khashoggi, the UK tabloid said that he was about to obtain “documentary evidence” to prove the use of chemical weapons in Yemen.

“I met him a week before his death. He was unhappy and he was worried,” said the Middle Eastern academic, who did not wish to be named. “When I asked him why he was worried, he didn’t really want to reply, but eventually he told me he was getting proof that Saudi Arabia had used chemical weapons.”

The Saudi government has blamed the murder on rogue agents.

Turkish President Erdogan believes otherwise. The journalist was a victim of a carefully planned “political murder”, he said.

The conflict in Yemen began with the 2014 takeover of its capital, Sanaa, by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who toppled the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

A Saudi coalition allied with the Yemen’s government has been fighting the Houthis since 2015.

A UN report published in August said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe all parties to the conflict have “committed a substantial number of violations of international humanitarian law”.

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India’s in the unique position of simultaneously holding military drills with New Cold War rivals Russia and the US, though the message behind this diplomatic maneuver is different for each Great Power and varies depending on their perspective.

India pulled off a unique diplomatic feat by simultaneously holding military drills with New Cold War rivals Russia and the US, albeit on completely different scales and in different parts of the South Asian country, thereby epitomizing its policy of “multi-alignment” in “balancing” between Great Powers. The immediate impression that one has is that New Delhi is trying to convey “neutrality” by showing the world that it refuses to take sides in this global struggle, so much so that two of its main protagonists apparently “trust” it enough to hold separate military exercises on its territory at the same time as one another.

Of course, those with even a cursory knowledge of international politics would know that neither Russia nor the US had any say in the timing of these drills and that it was entirely India’s own initiative to host these two rivals’ militaries at the same time, but that they nevertheless couldn’t refuse to participate in this soft power show because of the fierce competition between both of them over India itself. Accordingly, far from “reassuring” each of them of India’s “loyalty”, this stunt might have actually made them much more suspicions of its intentions, though to different degrees for each one.

From the American viewpoint, some might understand why India can’t rapidly disengage from Russia in spite of its newfound military-strategic partnership with the US, though others might question whether New Delhi is doing enough and ask themselves if it’s just manipulating the US for its own purposes. Concerns about India’s overall commitment to the US’ “Indo-Pacific” vision, which crucially excludes any role whatsoever for Russia, might be why trade talks have stalled between the two Great Powers. While it could be assumed that this is to Russia’s relative benefit, that might not actually be the case.

India has been gradually decreasing its purchase of Russian military equipment over the years as it seeks to diversify its erstwhile dependence on Moscow by replacing it with the US, “Israel”, and France, which is actually why America didn’t impose CAATSA sanctions against it for the S-400s. From one Russian angle, it’s a relief that India felt confident enough with its “multi-alignment” policy to hold drills with it at the same time as it’s also doing this with the US, but from the other, this serves as a reminder that India has other privileged military partners now and that Moscow must more actively compete for it.

It’s become fashionable to analyze international events from the “win-win” perspective nowadays ever since China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) popularized this paradigm (at least when it comes to sloganeering), so with that in mind, India’s simultaneous hosting of military drills with Russia and the US works out to every Great Powers’ interests. Be that as it may, the “zero-sum” perspective is still exceptionally relevant because it informs observers of how India’s actually leaning closer to the US than Russia in spite of the superficial optics suggesting that it’s struck a “balance” between the two.

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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.

It is strange that when you come from the south, near to the DMZ (De-militarized zone, which divides Korea into two parts), you will see many flags and sentimental ‘peace’ slogans, but nothing that would represent the points of view of the North Korean people. All the flags are those of ROK (Republic of Korea, otherwise known as South Korea).

Many people near the division line have turned this entire area into a tourist trap, with observation towers ‘to get a glimpse of North Korea’, with stores selling ROK and US military ‘souvenirs’, even old military gear. As if North Koreans were some rare animals living in a cage, fascinating to study and to observe, but dangerous to touch.

Yes, all flags here are those of the ROK. Even if the two flags are crossed, in what should be a fraternal symbolic unison, they are always two identical ones – those of South Korea. This looks truly bizarre, but that’s how it is.

Something always seems to be desperately missing in this South Korean ‘strive for peace’ and for the re-united Korea. And what is missing is somehow totally basic: it is at least some essential symbolism from the north – the DPRK!

I know both parts of Korea – DPRK and ROK. And what worries me, is that it looks as if the South thinks it can pull this entire ‘businesses of unification’, alone, without considering the needs and desires of the other side.

Near DMZ between ROK and DPRK

And the West takes it for granted that the North will be, eventually, simply swallowed by the South. Because it is used to get what it wants. Because in its fundamentalist zeal, it is not even capable of considering the sensitivities and goals of other political, philosophical and social systems.

The plan of both the West and South Korea is simple, although it is mostly never clearly defined, for ‘strategic reasons’: ‘Once the moment of potential unification arrives, the DPRK would simply cease to exist, as East Germany ceased to exist three decades ago. Right after that, the entire Korea would be run on capitalist principles, under the ‘patronage’ and diktat of the West.’

And both the people and the leadership of North Korea will just fall on their knees and surrender, after the masses break down the border fences with their bare hands. Ordinary people will happily renounce their system, as well as the several decades of determined struggle and sacrifice. Everything will be thrown to the altar of mighty South Korean corporations and the pro-Western regime.

Correct? Keep dreaming!

Korea is not Germany. And the second decade of the 21^st century is very different from those bizarre, confused years when Gorbachev brilliantly demonstrated to the world, how much damage one naïve and useful idiot could cause to his own country and the entire planet.

The truth is – North Korea will never disintegrate the way East Germany did for many reasons, one of them being that, German history is very different: Germany was divided between 4 victorious powers after WWII. The Western part did not necessarily want to be capitalist and pro-Western (US and UK forged the post-war elections), and the East did not necessarily want to be in the Soviet orbit, either. Let’s be honest: the entire country was, just a bit earlier, running amok, shouting bizarre slogans and salivating under swastikas, maniacally admiring a murderous psychopath.

No, North Korea was not and is not East Germany! It was not ‘designated’ to any bloc. It fought a tremendous battle for its own system; it lost millions of its people during the brutal war, or call it genocide, committed by the West. And in the end, after receiving fraternal help from China, it finally won.

Since the beginning, the DPRK was an internationalist country, very much like Cuba. Not yet fully recovered from horrific devastation, it helped to liberate great parts of Africa.

It always knew what it wanted, it fought for it and in the end, it achieved many of its goals!

It never crumbled under sanctions and the combined propaganda of the ROK and its Western backers.

Even after the Soviet Bloc collapsed, it did not change its course.

It is an amazing country, no matter what some people think about its political system. And North Koreans are amazing people (I was privileged to film there, for my ‘poetic’ 25-minute film “Faces of North Korea”). They will not sell their ideals for bigger cars and a pair of designer jeans. Just like for Cuba, the North Korean motherland is not some commodity.

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Then also imagine China and Russia, how ‘ecstatic’ both countries (increasingly under threat from the West) would be, if the entire Korea were to fall into North American hands. Imagine those military bases intimidating Herbin, Dalian, Beijing, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok!

South Korea suspects that the North will not yield.

They have tried everything: erecting enormous propaganda palaces like that infamous “War Museum” in Seoul.

War Museum in Seoul

They broadcasted their propaganda sermons via radio stations, even huge loudspeakers, placing them right near the division line. They joined efforts with the West, trying to isolate, even starve, their own sister in the north. Nothing helped.

ROK used to censor the press, disappear and murder its own dissidents, torture and rape political prisoners. All that, just in order to break any sympathy left for Communist ideals in the South. The South Korean campaign of terror was horrible, only comparable to those in South America under the right-wing dictatorships, and of course to that in post-1965 Indonesia.

Seoul never really apologized to the victims. Unlike in Taiwan, no monuments or museums were erected to the fatalities of the right-wing terror.

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Trying to ‘soften’ the DPRK by sanctions, arms race, and intimidation, has not brought any fruits. And it never will. Just the opposite: North Korea managed to harden itself; to mobilize and learn to produce basically everything: from automobiles to rockets, from computers to cutting edge medical equipment and medicine.

The only way for the two parts of Korea to find a common language is to show to each other deep respect. The German scenario would not, and, never should work here.

Both flags have to fly next to each other. Both political and economic systems have to be respected. When talking about unification, both ‘ways’ should be considered.

Wedding Chapel inside War Museum in Seoul

If South Korea were to ‘devour’ the North, nothing good would come from it: only more tension, discontent and possible confrontation. The North is a proud land. It has achieved plenty, alone. It has survived, against all the odds. It has helped oppressed parts of the world, honestly and generously. It has much to be proud of. Therefore, it will never surrender.

Yet, Korea is one nation and it is longing for unity. It will get it, but first: the ‘two sisters’, both beautiful, both brilliant, both very different, have to sit together and talk honestly and sincerely. They have done it before, and they will do it again. Both, together, are forming a family. But they cannot live together in one room. Not yet. In one house, yes, but in two different apartments.

And when they talk and try to build their home, again, there should be no interference from outside. They don’t need anybody to tell them what to do. They know, they will find a common language if left alone. It is all possible, and hopefully, soon, it will happen. But not the ‘German way’; it will either happen the ‘Korean way’, or not at all.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

All images in this article are from the author; featured image is propaganda art in Seoul

Asked if President Donald Trump’s highly critical tweets about French president Emmanuel Macron were unpleasant and inelegant, Macron elegantly replied, `you summed up everything.’

Yes, they were unpleasant and inelegant, to put it mildly. Worse, Trump’s tweet barrage came on the same day France was commemorating the murder of 130 Parisians by gunmen in 2015. A senior French press official claimed Trump ‘lacked common decency.’ Making matters worse, Trump refused to show up at a graveside memorial for American GI’s killed in the bloody, 1918 Belleau Wood battle. He went the following day to another memorial closer to Paris.

A major faux pas, Monsieur le President Trump. You need some foreign policy pros instead of the amateur ideologues who have made a huge mess of the nation’s affairs and image.

This row arose after Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg and called for a common European army to ‘complement’ NATO.

Earlier, Chancellor Merkel stated that Europe could no longer depend on the US for its protection.

Merkel’s frank talk was clearly a slap in the face to the prickly Trump, whose aggressive policies have put the US in confrontation with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Cuba and much of the Muslim world.

In effect, Germany and France, Europe’s two big powers, were declaring independence from US hegemony seven decades after the end of World War II. Many Europeans – and certainly Germans – consider their nations still militarily and politically occupied by the American Imperium. How else could the US National Security spy agency (NSA) get away with tapping Angela Merkel’s cell phone with nary a German protest?

Given Russia’s military and financial feebleness (a defense budget less than one tenth of the US), what reason is there for a major US military presence from Spain to the Baltic and Black Sea? There are still US military bases in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany (34 bases), Belgium, Holland, Britain, Turkey, Denmark, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Kosovo, Greece and soon Poland.

Large parts of Europe are still militarily occupied by the US. Amazingly, the European Union, the world’s most important economic power, has very little self-defense capability. Instead, the US-runs and finances the lion’s share of NATO. Just as during the old Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was run from Moscow, so NATO is directed by Washington, and is a major component of US global power.

Nations that do not have their own military forces have very little sovereignty. Costa Rica is one charming exception. Great powers like France, Britain and Germany must command a good portion of their own military forces or join them in a common armed force. This is what Merkel and Macron were proposing, to Trump’s fury.

During the 1950’s, Europeans agreed to NATO as much in fear of a recurrence of the horrors of two European wars as fear of Soviet invasion, though the latter was very real at the time. Even the Swiss built fortifications designed to stop an invasion by the Soviet Red Army, and France began work to up-gun and reinforce the Maginot Line defenses.

The angry Trump fired back by reminding France that it was rescued in two world wars by the United States, had major economic problems, and could not trust the Germans. This is a favorite theme of French-hating, know-nothing conservatives and neocons. I suspect their hatred of France comes from being mistreated as tourists by rude waiters in Paris restaurants and sneered at by snooty French as uncultured boors and rustics. Trump’s core supporters – Evangelical Christians – mostly regard French and other Europeans as degenerate, godless, Christian-haters.

They conveniently forget, or don’t know, that French soldiers and sailors delivered decisive victories over British forces during the American Revolution. A key cause of the French Revolution was national bankruptcy caused by King Louis’ heavy spending on military help to the US war of independence.

When I’m in Metz, France, I always go to salute the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette who led French forces helping the American Revolution. Without French help, Americans might be today caught up in the ghastly Brexit mess.

NATO provides huge geopolitical influence to Washington and enormous amounts of military sales. Small wonder the US rages when any mention of an independent European military is voiced. The idea assails America’s domination of Europe and the use of NATO to impose its will on the Mideast, Africa and western Asia.

Ironically, Trump’s evident hatred for Europe and calls by his neocon Praetorian Guard for the US to dominate the entire globe have made Europe turn away from its old subservience to Washington and talk about real independence. But building true Euro-armed forces will be frightfully expensive and politically fraught. Watching EU squabbles over farm laws and other economic issues hardly inspires confidence. But the EU must have its own defense capabilities if it is to escape permanent thralldom to the United States.

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If you are a journalist and you discover something that is clearly unethical, and possibly even illegal, and you choose to report it what happens next? Well, you could win a Pulitzer Prize or, on the other hand, you might wind up hiding in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for six years.

Julian Assange is the founder and editor in chief of the controversial news and information site WikiLeaks. As the name implies, since 2006 the site has become famous, or perhaps notorious, for its publication of materials that have been leaked to it by government officials and other sources who consider the information to be of value to the public but unlikely to be accepted by the mainstream media, which has become increasingly corporatized and timid.

WikiLeaks became known to a global audience back in 2010 when it obtained from US Army enlisted soldier Bradley Manning a large quantity of classified documents relating to the various wars that the United States was fighting in Asia. Some of the material included what might be regarded as war crimes. Manning’s motives for sharing the information can perhaps be debated but he subsequently regarded himself as a whistleblower, a claim that was ignored, and was sentenced to 35 years in military prison for his mishandling of classified information.

WikiLeaks again became front page news over the 2016 presidential election, when the website released the emails of candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta. The emails revealed how Clinton and her team collaborated with the Democratic National Committee to ensure that she would be nominated rather that Bernie Sanders. It should be noted that the material released by WikiLeaks was largely documentary and factual in nature, i.e. it was not “fake news.” The source of the leaked or hacked material is still unknown though it has been attributed to “the Russians” by various governments, politicians and media experts. Assange has denied that the Russians were involved.

The handling of the Manning case by the government is illustrative of how leaks of classified information that wind up in the media are generally handled, i.e. the leaker is punished since he or she had the statutory obligation to protect the information but the journalist, protected by the First Amendment, is generally left alone. The leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, for example, led to the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg the leaker, though The New York Times and Washington Post, which reported the story, fought back against pressure from the Nixon White House and were not punished. More recently, however, the line between the information provider and media has become more blurry, with the government having gone after CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling in 2015 by putting pressure to testify on the journalist he may have provided the information to, James Risen.

The handling of the “threat” posed by journalist Assange is inevitably something altogether different than Manning or Ellsberg the whistleblowers. Assange has been vilified as a Russian agent and was pursued by the Swedish authorities after claims of a rape, later withdrawn, were made against him. To avoid arrest, he was given asylum by a friendly Ecuadorean government six years ago in London and has been confined to the Embassy ever since. The British police have a warrant to arrest him immediately as he failed to make a bail hearing after he obtained asylum.

Julian Assange is currently back in the news for two reasons. First, it has been reliably reported that the Ecuadorean Embassy, which represents a new government in Quito that is unfriendly to Assange and is being pressured by Washington, might soon be taking steps to expel him. And second, last week the US government accidentally revealed in an unrelated legal filing that there exists a sealed criminal indictment against Assange, ready to be used to arrange extradition from Britain as soon as he is expelled from the embassy. The sealed indictment is a major escalation in the struggle to “get Assange,” who is blamed by the Democrats for Hillary Clinton’s loss while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled him a “fraud, a coward and an enemy.” WikiLeaks itself is regarded by the White House as a “hostile non-government intelligence service.”

The actual charges laid out in the indictment are unknown, but possibly relate to the Espionage Act of 1917, which in theory gives the government broad powers to punish anyone who receives classified information. And then there is the possibility that the Justice Department will attempt to make the case that Assange actively colluded with the Russian government, a conspiracy to “defraud the United States” to put it in legalese.

The danger is that the United States government will be able to fearmonger the case sufficiently to actually get a conviction for unauthorized handling of classified information based on the Espionage Act, something that has never actually been done to a journalist before. One hopes that better angels in the Justice Department and White House will realize that the First Amendment and its protection of a free press are far more important than punishing Assange.

If the barn door is opened with a conviction, major damage to freedom of speech and a free media will undoubtedly ensue. One can open The New York Times or Washington Post today and read a number of stories that are attributed to unidentified or confidential sources in the government. If Assange is convicted, the government would be able to exploit the precedent to operate in secret at all levels while reporters and the papers they represent seeking public interest stories would be subject to legal action by the Justice Department. If that happens a free press, even as limited as it currently is in the mainstream, would become nothing more than a memory.

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

Featured image is from Flickr

Fidel Castro died two years ago this week-end. If US Liberals read Fidel Castro, they’d know Trump is uninteresting. They’d know “nicely sweetened but rotten” ideas cause great suffering in the US. It doesn’t take much to see in Fidel a distinct (in these times) vision: in fact, an ancient one.

But you have to think it’s worth looking for. And there’s the rub. You won’t think it’s worth looking for if you don’t think anything else is possible than what you’ve always expected, philosophically.

Philosophy is not a luxury. Your daily thinking depends upon it. Philosophical conceptions – what it means to be human, for instance – guide everyday choices.  This is well-known in analytic philosophy of science. They might have learned it from Marx.

Even those who like Cuba don’t read Fidel.  They take students and show them Cuba’s “culture”. But they ignore the ideas. There’s an irony: Accusing Cuba of dogmatism, academics disregard Cuba’s philosophical foundations. If they don’t ask, it’s because they don’t think there’s anything to know.

They assume there are no such foundations. They are “open” while declaring by behaviour that no dissent to their (liberal philosophical) worldview is possible. It is a damaging form of dogmatism,  unacknowledged.

When I first went to Cuba, I saw, written on a wall, a statement attributed to Fidel: Al valor no le faltara la inteligencia, a la inteligencia no le faltara el valor. I realized then that this society, this Revolution, expressed a departure from philosophical liberalism: the ideology dominating the North, including Marxists, Aristotelians, anarchists, queer theorists and feminists.

Put simply, Fidel’s statement means you can’t be intelligent and bad, and if you manage to be good, that is, if you manage to actually act out of good will for others, and not just appear to do so, you must also be smart because you’ve properly understood causal interdependence.

Morality and science are not separated.

European philosophers separated the intellectual from the moral. They invented the “fact/value” distinction. They denied facts (or knowledge) about value. There is no truth in the field of value, just “myths and fictions”.

You can flourish intellectually living however you want. You can talk about global justice and ethics, living your passions. No one will note the contradiction.

How you live is one thing, how you think is another. This view dominates still. Cuban philosopher Ernesto Limia says the ineffectiveness of the international left is explained by it. He may be right.

Fidel’s view is more sensible and in fact more common, if one looks outside Europe and North America for ideas. It says that how you live and how you think are interconnected.  If I want to flourish intellectually, I should serve others.  I should increase my felt awareness of causal interdependence.

It’s radical but only due to damage done by European liberalism.

Knowing reality (science), we know how to live well as human beings (morality): When we know science, we know about cause and effect. We know causal interdependence: laws of nature. If I know the laws of nature, I know my self-interest requires the well-being of others. It’s simple: When I act out of good will for others, I benefit. When I do harm, I am the first to suffer. Cause and effect. Science.

It’s an ancient view. Cuba has demonstrated its commitment. If its history of internationalism (well-documented) were known. Bolsonaro’s current lies about Cuban doctors would have no effect. [i] But there, again, is the rub. We don’t believe what we don’t expect. Cuba’s internationalism is known. But it is not believed because it is not consistent with the liberal worldview that denies its justification.

Cuba’s internationalism is long-standing, and its explanation is clear: Cause and effect, interdependence, laws of nature. Fidel expresses it in almost everything he said and wrote.

Cuba’s role in Angola is an example. UK historian Richard Gott describes the costly mission as “entirely without selfish motivation”. Cuba sent 300,000 volunteers, more than 2,000 of whom died, to defeat apartheid South Africa. In Pretoria, a “wall of names” commemorates those who died in the struggle against apartheid. Many Cuban names are inscribed there. No other foreign country is represented.[ii]

The US claimed Cuba was acting as a Soviet proxy but according to US intelligence, Castro had “no intention of subordinating himself to Soviet discipline and direction.” Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoire 25 years later that Castro was “probably the most genuinely revolutionary leader then in power”.

He was revolutionary in his thinking, which continues to influence. Bolsonaro says Cuba’s remarkable doctor program is a way for Cuba to enrich itself. It is not surprising that he says it. It is surprising some believe it.

But it is not any more surprising than those who look South for everything except ideas. Fidel Castro said in 1999, in Caracus, after the election of Hugo Chávez:

“They discovered smart bombs but we discovered something more powerful: the idea that people think and feel”.

It shouldn’t be a radical view, and it is not in many traditions, going back millennia. But to see how that is so, there needs to be at least a little bit of doubt about liberal dogmatism. It would be a step forward just to admit that it exists, and that it’s been effectively challenged. Fidel Castro is one place to start.

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Notes

[i] http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2018/11/20/perdon-a-mis-ninos-por-no-haberles-dicho-adios/#.W_at4uhKiM8; http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2018/11/20/minsap-cuba-no-hace-politica-con-la-salud-de-ningun-pueblo-video/#.W_auH-hKiM8

[ii] References are here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/27/thawing-relations-cubas-deeper-more-challenging-significance/

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Who Killed Jamal Khashoggi? Did US Intelligence have Prior Knowledge?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 22, 2018

The Khashoggi affair has the features of a carefully designed intelligence operative (with followup propaganda) rather than a “hit and kill” political assassination.

The Decline of America. Trump Protects Saudi Crown Prince MBS. The Pillars of the US Constitution are Gone

By Richard Galustian, November 21, 2018

President Trump’s fateful decision the other day to protect the Saudi Crown Prince MBS who without doubt ordered the murder of journalist Khashoggi in Istanbul is totally morally and ethically wrong and dangerous for America.

Video: Trump Releases Official Statement on Khashoggi Murder. Points Finger at Iran

By South Front, November 21, 2018

On November 20, US President Donald Trump released a long awaited official statement on the murder of Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government in a Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul on the 2nd of October.

Continuing Furor Over Khashoggi’s Murder

By Stephen Lendman, November 21, 2018

The CIA and White House are at odds over who’s responsible for what happened. Langley’s damning conclusion, pointing fingers at Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), indicates opposition to his becoming Saudi king.

Trump Said Considering Extradition of Turkish Cleric to Quiet Erdogan on Khashoggi Murder

By Juan Cole, November 17, 2018

NBC News maintains that four sources in US government agencies (probably the FBI and the State Department) told its reporters that the Trump White House is seeking ways to expel Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gulen. But the kicker is that Trump apparently is exploring the extradition as a bribe to shut Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan up about the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the orders of crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman.

Five Countries Listened to Khashoggi Murder Tapes, Erdogan Says

By Times of Malta, November 12, 2018

Speaking ahead of his departure for France to attend commemorations to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, Erdogan said Saudi Arabia knows the killer of Jamal Khashoggi is among a group of 15 people who arrived in Turkey one day ahead of the October 2 killing.

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President Donald Trump told a reporter outside the White House on Tuesday that he doesn’t “know anything” about WikiLeaks founder and former editor Julian Assange, whose political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is believed to be under threat largely from pressure by the U.S. government.

Trump’s statements have been widely criticized as hypocritical, given that he heavily promoted WikiLeaks’ release of emails from the Democratic National Committee and former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months and weeks prior to the October 2016 presidential election.

Trump claimed to know very little about Assange or his increasingly precarious situation when a reporter had asked him “Should Julian Assange go free?”

The question was a likely response to the recent news that the Department of Justice was set to indict Assange with the intent of immediately prompting his extradition, as well as the apparently accidental revelation that the DOJ has a sealed indictment waiting for Assange should he ever be extradited to the United States.

President Trump is asked, “Should Julian Assange go free?”
Trump: “I don’t know anything about him. Really. I don’t know much about him. I really don’t.” pic.twitter.com/3RT12rAaB9

— Andrew Blake (@apblake) November 20, 2018

I don’t know the guy, I just used him to get elected

In response to a question on whether Assange should be prosecuted or not, Trump responded that

“I don’t know anything about him. Really. I don’t know much about him. I really don’t.”

However, footage of Trump mentioning WikiLeaks and its releases over 140 times in October 2016 alone has since resurfaced, suggesting that Trump’s recent claims of ignorance in regard to Assange and WikiLeaks are insincere at best.

While Trump heavily promoted WikiLeaks prior to winning the 2016 election, his administration has since taken an aggressive stance towards WikiLeaks and Assange as well as towards government whistleblowers and leakers.

For example, Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general who was forced to resign earlier this month, had stated last year that Assange’s arrest was a “priority.” The Trump administration’s aggressive pursuit of Assange has also been revealed by statements made by top administration officials such as current Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence as well as several U.S. senators, among other important figures in the Washington political establishment. Yet Trump himself has largely avoided speaking publicly about the matter, as his recent response to a direct question about Assange’s fate reveals.

Treating whistleblowers as criminals

Aside from WikiLeaks, the Trump administration has also pursued draconian sentences against alleged whistleblowers. For instance, whistleblowers Reality Winner and Terry Albury were given lengthy prison sentences for providing information to the same online publication, The Intercept. Winner was given five years and three months in prison while Albury was sentenced to four years.

Both had been charged under the Espionage Act, a practice regularly adopted by the Obama administration in its pursuit of whistleblowers. However, the prison sentences sought by the Trump administration have been much more draconian than those previously handed out under Obama’s tenure. Indeed, Winner’s sentence is the longest sentence ever given for an unauthorized disclosure to the media in U.S. history.

If Assange were extradited to the U.S. and indicted, it is likely that he too would be charged under the Espionage Act, as WikiLeaks recently suggested on Twitter.

U.S. government efforts to charge Assange under the Espionage Act long precede Trump’s tenure as president, as the existence of a sealed indictment targeting Assange was “unofficially” revealed after WikiLeaks released emails from the U.S.-based private intelligence company Stratfor.

Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security and former State Department official, wrote in a 2011 email that “Not for Pub — We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.” In a separate email from that same year, Burton had written “Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever.” The emails had been written just a few months before Assange began his extended stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has remained since 2012 in an effort to avoid extradition to the United States.

Putting the squeeze on Ecuador

However, the Trump administration has placed enormous political and economic pressure on Ecuador in an effort to force the country to withdraw its political asylum of Assange, who recently was granted Ecuadorian citizenship. Despite the fact that Ecuador’s current president, Lenín Moreno, has sought to increase U.S. influence within the country, he has been unable to rescind Assange’s asylum, partially due to the fact that Assange is a citizen of Ecuador.

As a result, Moreno cut off Assange’s internet access and barred his access to visitors aside from his legal team, beginning in late March. Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has called the way Assange has been treated by the Moreno-led government akin to “torture” and has claimed that Moreno’s government is trying to make Assange’s time at the embassy so miserable that he will choose to leave of his own accord.

While Trump may now claim ignorance of the situation, he will eventually be forced to take a side, if and when the U.S. government succeeds in its long-standing efforts to extradite and prosecute the well-known journalist. Given that top officials in his administration have applied extreme pressure to Ecuador in order to endanger Assange’s asylum and have called Assange’s arrest a “priority,” it’s not hard to see what side Trump will eventually back when push comes to shove.

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Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

Alarmed by rampant destruction in the Amazon rainforest and the long-term impacts on biodiversity, an alliance of indigenous communities pitched the creation of the world’s largest protected area, which would reach from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean, at a United Nations conference in Egypt on Wednesday.

“We have come from the forest and we worry about what is happening,” declared Tuntiak Katan, vice president of COICA, the alliance. “This space is the world’s last great sanctuary for biodiversity. It is there because we are there. Other places have been destroyed.”

COICA, which represents about 500 groups across nine countries and is seeking government-level representation at the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity, aims to safeguard a “sacred corridor of life and culture” about the size of Mexico.

#happeningnow @EgyptCOP14 NYDF endorser, @coicaorg calls for ambitious action by governments to protect a biociltural corridor in the Amazon. “Indigenous communities are guardians of life for all humanity, but they are in danger for protecting their forest” – @TuntiakKatan pic.twitter.com/ImpK8mdozT

— NYDF Global Platform (@NYDF_Platform) November 21, 2018

The alliance hopes to implement an “ambitious” post-2020 regional plan to protect biodiversity in the Andes-Amazon-Atlantic or “triple-A” corridor from agribusiness, mining, and the global climate crisis, but they are also concerned about territorial rights, as they don’t recognize modern national borders created by colonial settlers.

“Indigenous communities are guardians of life for all humanity, but they are in danger for protecting their forest,” Katan said. “We are integrated with nature—it runs through our lives and we need rights to defend it.”

While fighting for the right to defend the forest from development and the impacts of global warming, the indigenous groups said they welcome opportunities for collaboration.

"Conservation without people is impossible. The govts who come here to say they are doing s'thing must follow up. We must talk w/ brothers and sisters in communities, in NGOs in govts. It's the only way to protect the Amazon & the planet" @coicaorg @Avaaz @UNBiodiversity #COP14 pic.twitter.com/iJiPWfBHI7

— Forest Peoples Programme (@ForestPeoplesP) November 21, 2018

Although Colombia had crafted a similar triple-A plan that was set to be unveiled at next month’s climate talks, as the Guardian noted,

“the election of new rightwing leaders in Colombia and Brazil has thrown into doubt what would have been a major contribution by South American nations to reduce emissions.”

Outlining recent shifts in regional politics, the newspaper reported:

Colombia’s initial proposal was smaller and focused only on biodiversity and climate. But government enthusiasm has waned since an election in June in which the rightwing populist Iván Duque took power. Brazil was more sceptical but had previously engaged in ministerial-level talks on the corridor-plan. Its opposition is likely to grow under its new rightwing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who will take power in January.

Last month Bolsonaro indicated he would only stay in the Paris climate agreement if he had guarantees ensuring Brazilian sovereignty over indigenous land and the “triple-A” region.

Bolsonaro’s comments about environmental and indigenous issues on the campaign trail “are concerning because they nurture a disturbing tendency in different parts of the world, where almost three-fourths of environmental defenders assassinated in 2017 were indigenous leaders; where opposing agroindustry is the main cause for assassination of our leaders worldwide; and where imposing projects on to communities without their free, prior, and informed consent is at the root of all attacks to indigenous and community leaders,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach of COICA.

“Likewise, we see that it is increasingly frequent for indigenous peoples and communities to face costly and difficult processes to legalize their lands, while corporations obtain licenses with ease,” Jintiach noted, calling on Bolsonaro to obey all laws and ensure the rights and safety of the people of Brazil.

Despite the changes to the local political climate, Katan vowed the indigenous communities will keep working to play a key role in protecting the forest.

“We know the governments will try to go over our heads,” he said. “This is nothing new for us. We have faced challenges for hundreds of years.”

“Indigenous peoples and local communities are a solution to the devastation of our ecosystems and climate change both in the Amazon as well as in the rest of the world,” Katan added in a statement. “But whether policies addressed at mitigating climate change and promoting the restoration of rainforests succeed, depends on the security of having possession of community lands.”

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This post has been updated with additional comment from Tuntiak Katan and Juan Carlos Jintiach of COICA.

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The U.S. Navy today released details of a plan to seize more than 600,000 acres of public land in central Nevada to expand a bombing range. The land under threat includes rich habitat for mule deer, important desert springs and nesting sites for raptors like golden eagles.

If approved by Congress, the 1,536-page plan would transform entire valleys and mountain ranges into bombing targets. Combined with another proposal to expand the Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range, the military is attempting to grab 1.75 million acres of public land in Nevada — an area larger than Delaware.

“It’s outrageous that the Trump administration wants to ram another military takeover of public lands down our throats,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The wide-open spaces of central Nevada’s basin-and-range country are part of what makes our state so spectacular. Congress shouldn’t let Trump seize hundreds of thousands of acres of public land so the military can drop bombs on our cherished wildlife and wild places.”

The proposal would triple the size of Fallon Naval Air Station bombing ranges, seizing land in the iconic Fairview Peak area and the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge. The plan released today follows an earlier proposal to expand the Nevada Test and Training Range in southern Nevada, which would take more than 1.1 million acres of Desert National Wildlife Refuge, currently managed to protect bighorn sheep and other wildlife.

The public has 60 days to comment on the enormous draft environmental impact statement, shorter than the 90 days normally given to comment on such a lengthy and complex document. The Navy has scheduled public meetings in Hawthorne and Gabbs (Dec. 10), Austin and Eureka (Dec. 11), Fallon (Dec. 12), and Reno and Lovelock (Dec. 13).

“The military has a long history of trying to stymie legally required public involvement,” said Donnelly. “We’ll shine a bright light on this process and highlight the risks this bombing range expansion poses to wildlife and public lands.”

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US spy agencies are being sued for failing to warn slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that he was facing threat and danger. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which “defends the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age”, filed the lawsuit yesterday at the US District Court for the District of Columbia over intelligence agencies’ failure to uphold a US government policy.

The agencies are being sued under what is known as Directive 191, a government policy that requires American institutions to warn individuals of “impending threats of intentional killing, serious bodily injury or kidnapping”. Details of the lawsuit reported by the Washington Post state that before Khashoggi’s killing,

“US intelligence agencies apparently intercepted communications in which Saudi officials discussed a plan to capture Khashoggi.”

Last month the Post reported that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from Virginia and then detain him, according to US intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan.

The extent to which US intelligence was aware of the nature of the threat faced by Khashoggi also came under scrutiny last weekend when the CIA concluded that Bin Salman – also known as MBS -personally ordered the killing of Khashoggi. Their conclusion contradicted the Saudi government and President Donald Trump’s denial that the de facto ruler was involved.

According to the Post, the Knight Institute filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records related to the murder of Khashoggi. It sent requests to the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The institute sought documents concerning any duty to warn and actions taken with respect to Khashoggi.  So far none of the agencies have released any records, which have forced the institute to file a suit in US District Court for the District of Columbia in an attempt to force them to comply.

“Our request for information about agencies’ compliance with the ‘duty to warn’ was urgent when we filed it, but it has become even more so in light of the White House’s shameful efforts to minimise the gravity and significance of this reporter’s murder, and to shield from responsibility the people who authorised it,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight Institute.

Yesterday, the Committee to Protect Journalists filed its own FOIA request calling for the release of the same records sought by the Knight Institute, the Post reported.

“It’s absolutely essential that the US government makes public what it knew about threats to Jamal Khashoggi before his murder,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said.

The Knight First Amendment Institute has a winning track record in their efforts to hold the US government to account. In 2017 the institute sued President Trump for blocking users from his Twitter account. In their case against Trump, the plaintiffs argued that Trump’s Twitter account is a public forum and that blocking access to it was a violation of their First Amendment rights. In May a judge ruled in favour of the group.

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Who ordered the killing of Jamal Khashoggi? “The CIA and the White House are at odds over who’s responsible for what happened.” (See Stephen Lendman, GR, November 21, 2018). 

According to media reports, Langley is pointing its finger at Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS). 

Prior to the official release of the CIA report, the Washington Post (16 November) reported that

“The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month” (WaPo, November 16, 2018, emphasis added).

“In reaching its conclusions, the CIA examined multiple sources of intelligence…  “The accepted position is that there is no way this happened without him [Crown Prince MBS] being aware or involved,” said a U.S. official familiar with the CIA’s conclusions. A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment”.

Follow the play of words in the above quotation. The “accepted position” by an unnamed “US official” has not been confirmed by the Agency.

Was Saudi intelligence involved in the operation? Two members of  Saudi intelligence (GIP) were allegedly part of the hit team.

Was there foreknowledge? According to the WaPo report, Langley was aware of the assassination plot but US intelligence visibly did not act:

According to the Washington Post, the US had prior intelligence that Khashoggi’s  life “might be in danger”, but at the same time they were unaware of “this intelligence in advance” of his killing. Sounds contradictory, read it carefully:

” Two U.S. officials said there has been no indication that [CIA] officials were aware of this intelligence in advance of Khashoggi’s disappearance or had missed any chance to warn him. (WaPo, November 16, 2018, emphasis added)

ANNEX

The names of several of alleged suspects were released by Turkish media on October 11:

Killed

Meshal Saad M Albostani, A lieutenant in the Saudi Air Forces, reported to have been killed in a mysterious road smash in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Forensic Pathologist

Dr. Salah Muhammad A Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist, head of the Saudi Scientific Council of Forensics and lieutenant colonel of the Armed forces of Saudi Arabia, also working according to the BBC in the forensic science department of the interior ministry’s General Directorate of Public Security responsible for national security.

Members of Saudi Intelligence (GIP) 

Badr Lafi M Alotaibi  is a colonel in Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency.

Mustafa Mohammed M. Almadani, a member of Saudi intelligence.

Members of the Saudi Military 

Mansur Othman M. Abahussain, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Saudi army

Maher Abdulaziz M. Mutreb,  a member of the Saudi Army, with an intelligence background

Waleed Abdullah M. Alsehri, military officer of the Saudi Air Forces,

Meshal Saad M. Albostani, lieutenant of the Saudi Air Forces,

Part of Royal Family Security Detail 

Mohammad Saad H. Alzahrani, Royal Family’s security detail.

Thaar Ghaleb T. Alharbi,  Royal Family security detail

Naif Hassan S. Alarifi,  Special forces official who works for Saudi Crown Prince

Khaled Aedh G Altaibi,  Royal family’s security detail.

Abdulaziz Muhammed M Alhawsawi,  member of the security detail who travels with the crown prince.

Fahad Shabib A Albalawi,  Royal family’s security detail.

Saif Saad Q Alqahtani  works for the crown prince according to the WaPo.

Turki Musharraf M Alsehri, no information

Daily Sabah, MenoM3ay, WaPo, Turkish media and other sources. The information is unconfirmed.

The Saudi State prosecutor confirmed that 11 of the suspects “had been indicted over the death of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that he requested the death penalty for five of them.” (Business Insider). The official Saudi position is that the Crown Prince “had nothing to do with the killing”

Numa amarga ironia, vários líderes mundiais que estavam a comemorar “pacificamente” o fim da Primeira Guerra Mundial em Paris, incluindo Trump, Netanyahu, Macron e May são os protagonistas de guerras no Afeganistão, Palestina, Síria, Líbia, Iraque e Iémen.

Para colocar o assunto sem artifícios, eles são criminosos de guerra de acordo com o direito internacional: Têm sangue nas mãos. Que diabo estavam eles afinal a comemorar?

Nas palavras de Hans Stehling: “Assim como honramos os 15 milhões de mortos de 1914-1918, um Presidente dos EUA em demência entra em Paris com planos de atacar o Irão” [com armas nucleares] (Global Research , 12 de novembro de 2018)

Para que não nos esqueçamos: a guerra é o crime máximo, “o crime contra a Paz”, conforme definido no Julgamento de Nuremberga.

Os EUA e seus aliados embarcaram no crime de guerra fundamental, uma aventura militar a nível mundial, “uma longa guerra”, que ameaça o futuro da humanidade. O projeto militar global do Pentágono é o da conquista mundial.

A guerra para acabar com todas as guerras???

Cem anos depois: o que está a acontecer AGORA, em novembro de 2018?

Grandes operações militares e de serviços secretos foram lançadas no Médio Oriente, Europa Oriental, África Subsariana, Ásia Central e Extremo Oriente. A agenda militar dos EUA combina quer operações de teatro de guerra, quer ações secretas organizadas para desestabilizar Estados soberanos, além da guerra económica.

Ao longo dos últimos 17 anos, logo após o 11 de setembro, uma série de guerras lideradas pelos EUA e pela NATO foram lançadas: Afeganistão, Iraque, Líbano, Líbia, Síria e Iémen, resultando em milhões de mortes de civis e inúmeras atrocidades. Essas guerras foram lideradas pelos EUA e seus aliados da NATO.

É tudo por uma boa causa: “Responsabilidade de Proteger” (R2P), “Ir atrás dos “maus”, “Travar uma Guerra Global contra o Terrorismo”.

Acontece que “o inimigo externo número um”, Osama bin Laden, foi recrutado pela CIA. E as famílias Bush e Bin Laden são amigas.

Tal foi confirmado pelo Washington Post : o irmão de Osama, Shafiq bin Laden , teve um encontro com o pai de George W Bush, George H. Walker Bush , numa reunião de negócios com a empresa Carlyle no Ritz Carlton Hotel de Nova York em 10 de setembro, um dia antes do 11 de setembro:

Não serviu de nada que quando o World Trade Center ardeu em 11 de setembro de 2001, a notícia tenha interrompido uma conferência de negócios do Carlyle no Ritz-Carlton Hotel, onde comparecera um irmão de Osama bin Laden. O ex-presidente Bush, um colega investidor, estivera com ele na conferência no dia anterior ( Washington Post, 16/março/2003).

Será que isto não soa como uma “teoria da conspiração”? Enquanto Osama supostamente coordenava o ataque ao WTC, seu irmão Shafiq encontrava-se com o pai do presidente, de acordo com o Washington Post.

Por sua vez, de acordo com o Wall Street Journal de 27 de setembro de 2001: “A família bin Laden familiarizou-se com alguns dos maiores nomes do Partido Republicano …”.

Aqui está um conceito tipo “acredite ou não”: se os EUA aumentassem os gastos de defesa para perseguir Osama bin Laden (Inimigo Número Um), a família Bin Laden beneficiaria, por assim dizer, porque (em setembro de 2001) eles eram parceiros do Carlyle Group, uma das maiores empresas de gestão de ativos do mundo:

Empreendendo a guerra contra “os maus”

Tal como amplamente documentado, os “maus” ou terroristas, isto é, a Al-Qaeda e seus vários afiliados, incluindo o ISIS-Daesh, são fruto dos serviços secretos ocidentais (também conhecidos como “;ativos de informação”).

Em desenvolvimentos recentes, os EUA e Israel estão a ameaçar o Irão com armas nucleares. Forças terrestres dos EUA e da NATO estão a ser implantadas na Europa Oriental na vizinhança imediata da Rússia. Por sua vez, os EUA estão confrontando a China sob o chamado “Pivot to Asia”, que foi lançado durante a presidência de Obama.

Os EUA também ameaçam fazer explodir a Coreia do Norte com o que é descrito no jargão militar dos EUA como uma “operação de nariz sangrento” que consiste em empregar as mini-bombas nucleares B61-11 de menor rendimento mas “mais utilizáveis”; consideradas “inofensivas para civis porque a explosão é feita no sub solo”, segundo opinião científica em contrato com o Pentágono.

A arma nuclear tática B61-11 tem uma capacidade explosiva entre um terço e doze vezes a bomba de Hiroshima.

Fazendo uma retrospetiva para 6 de agosto de 1945, quando a primeira bomba atómica foi lançada em Hiroshima, 100 mil pessoas foram mortas nos primeiros sete segundos após a explosão.

Mas foi um “dano colateral”: nas palavras do presidente Harry Truman:

O mundo notará que a primeira bomba atómica foi lançada em Hiroshima, uma base militar. Isso porque desejámos, neste primeiro ataque, evitar, na medida do possível, o assassinato de civis.

O que está em jogo neste momento é um empreendimento criminoso global que desafia o direito internaciona l. Nas palavras do falecido promotor de Nuremberg, William Rockler:

“Os Estados Unidos já descartaram pretensões de legalidade e decência internacionais e embarcaram numa via de imperialismo cru e descontrolado” (William Rockler, procurador do Tribunal de Nuremberg).

Lembramos que o arquiteto de Nuremberg, o juiz do Supremo Tribunal e Promotor de Nuremberg, Robert Jackson, disse então com alguma hesitação:

“Nunca devemos esquecer que o registo em que julgamos estes réus é o registo sobre o qual a história nos julgará amanhã. Passar a esses réus um cálice envenenado é colocá-lo em nossos próprios lábios também”.

Esta declaração histórica aplica-se a Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu e Margaret May?

Em desafio ao Tribunal de Nuremberg, os EUA e seus aliados invocaram a condução de “guerras humanitárias” e operações de “contra-terrorismo”, tendo em vista instalar a “democracia” em países alvo.

Os media ocidentais aplaudem. A guerra é rotineiramente anunciada nos noticiários como um empreendimento pacificador. A guerra torna-se paz. As realidades são viradas de cabeça para baixo.

Estas mentiras e fabricações fazem parte da propaganda de guerra, que também constitui um empreendimento criminoso de acordo com Nuremberg.

As guerras lideradas pelos EUA e pela NATO e aplicadas pelo mundo inteiro são um esforço criminoso sob o disfarce de “responsabilidade de proteger” e contra-terrorismo. Violam a Carta de Nuremberga, a Constituição dos EUA e a Carta da ONU. De acordo com o ex-procurador chefe do Tribunal de Nuremberga, Benjamin Ferencz, relativamente à invasão do Iraque em 2003:

“Pode-se argumentar sem necessitar de provar, dado que é percetível por si mesmo, que os Estados Unidos são culpados do crime supremo contra a humanidade – que é uma guerra ilegal de agressão contra uma nação soberana.”.

Ferenz estava a referir-se a “Crimes contra a Paz e de Guerra” (Princípio VI de Nuremberg), o qual afirma o seguinte:

“Os crimes adiante descritos são puníveis como crimes de direito internacional:

(a) Crimes contra a paz:

(i) Planeamento, preparação, iniciação ou desencadeamento de uma guerra de agressão ou guerra em violação de tratados, acordos ou garantias internacionais;

(ii) Participação num plano comum ou conspiração para a realização de qualquer dos atos mencionados em (i).

b) Crimes de guerra:

Violação das leis ou costumes de guerra que incluem, mas não se limitam a: assassinato, maus-tratos ou deportação para trabalho escravo ou para qualquer outro fim da população civil de ou em território ocupado; assassinato ou maus-tratos de prisioneiros de guerra ou pessoas no mar, assassinato de reféns, saque de propriedade pública ou privada, destruição arbitrária de cidades, vilas ou aldeias, ou devastação não justificada por necessidade militar.

c) Crimes contra a humanidade:

Assassinato, extermínio, escravidão, deportação e outros atos desumanos praticados contra qualquer população civil, ou perseguições por motivos políticos, raciais ou religiosos, quando tais atos são praticados ou tais perseguições são executadas em execução ou em conexão com qualquer crime contra a paz ou qualquer crime de guerra.

Michel Chossudovsky

O original encontra-se em globalresearch.ca :

War Criminals in High Office Commemorate the End of World War I, 12 de Novembro de 2018

Traduzido por o site https://resistir.info/

Amply documented but rarely mentioned in mainstream news, ISIS is a creation of US intelligence, recruited, trained and financed by the US and its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and Jordan.   Those who ordered the bombing campaign are those who are behind the Caliphate Project. The Islamic State militia, which has been the alleged target of  a US-NATO bombing campaign under a “counter-terrorism” mandate, is  supported covertly by the United States and its allies. What this means is that the ISIS terrorists are the foot soldiers of the Western alliance. While America claims to be targeting ISIS, in reality it is protecting ISIS. The air campaign is intent upon destroying Syria and Iraq rather than “going after the terrorists”. 

To understand the background of this complex web of deceit aimed at luring the American people and the rest of the world into accepting a military solution which threatens the future of humanity, get your copy of the international bestseller:

America’s “War on Terrorism” by Michel Chossudovsky

“The livelihood of millions of people throughout the World is at stake. It is my sincere hope that the truth will prevail and that the understanding provided in this detailed study will serve the cause of World peace. This objective, however, can only be reached by revealing the falsehoods behind America’s “War on Terrorism” and questioning the legitimacy of the main political and military actors responsible for extensive war crimes.” –Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

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SYNOPSIS: America’s “War on Terrorism”

In this expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 bestseller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The new  edition, which includes twelve additional chapters, focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarization of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalization is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Reviews

“Chossudovsky starts by dispelling the fiction that the US and Al Qaeda have been long-term adversaries. [He] also probes US oil policy, which is obviously of particular concern to George W. Bush. Chossudovsky argues that the US has a much different relationship between Russia and China than is ever indicated in the mainstream (or progressive) press. Simply put, the US is moving into the countries which neighbor Russia and China in order to plunder natural resources and expand the reach of the US Empire. Pakistan?s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been playing a key role in destabilizing the region as well as offering support in other intelligence matters… War and Globalization is full of surprises, even for those of us who consider ourselves well-informed. Chossudovsky is examining the true nature of US foreign policy and arguing that the terrible events of 9/11/01 have changed little of it… Material this provocative and well-researched is ignored by the left at great peril.” – Scott Loughrey, The Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel

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“Canadian professor of economics Michel Chossudovsky contains that rare gift of a writer who can compile massive documentary evidence, then propound it in a succinct, lucid manner. In this illuminating work the host of the critically acclaimed Global Research website takes widely acclaimed and often repeated media assumptions and sharply refutes them, providing a chronology and road map behind 9-11 and related events… A large part of the book involves a necessary topic area that has been nervously glossed over by conventional American media sources for good reason; it hits too close to home and indicts the largest international energy conglomerates. The author spends much time examining the link between big oil and public policy. In terms of providing vital information, this compact volume provides more valuable information in one chapter than so many contemporary volumes do with many pages on 9-11 and related events… Chossudovsky demonstrates that the frequently repeated and fallacious Bushie shibboleths of getting Saddam before he gets us are rhetorical sallies designed to inflame public opinion by skirting around the important truths that only a few courageous authors such as himself dare reveal… Its bullseye clarity cuts through the morass of Bush verbage, daring readers to examine the pure, unvarnished truth of a nation using its military and intelligence capabilities to control the global oil market on the pretext of making the world a safer place.” – William Hare, Florida United States

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US-based Airbnb runs a global online marketplace/hospitality service, letting members arrange or offer lodging, mainly homestays in residences of locals in cities where they travel.

Company revenue comes from commissions on bookings – none henceforth from removed Israeli settlement listings.

Airbnb yielded to years of pressure from Palestinian human rights groups. About 200 West Bank housing listings will be removed, a company statement saying the following:

“(M)any in the global community have stated that companies should not do business (in Israeli settlements) because they believe companies should not profit on lands where people have been displaced.”

“We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Delistings will take place in the coming days, according to Reuters. Human Rights Watch’s director for Israel and the Palestinian territories, Omar Shakid, called Airbnb’s decision a “welcome step,” adding “(c)ompanies like Booking.com should follow suit.”

Under international law, Israeli settlements are flagrantly illegal – developed on stolen Palestinian land.

Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The Hague Convention forbids occupying powers from altering occupied territory, except for military necessity, clearly not the case in the Occupied Territories.

The UN, its Security Council, the  International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and numerous human rights groups call Israeli settlements flagrantly illegal.

Longstanding equivocal US policy considers them “illegitimate,” not illegal – until Trump abandoned all pretense about Israeli/Palestinian evenhandedness, one-sidedly supporting the Jewish state, spurning fundamental Palestinian rights.

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer revealed Trump regime policy on settlements, saying in 2017:

“We don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace” – polar-opposite what’s true, clearly endorsing what’s flagrantly illegal under international law.

A formerly classified September 1967 document revealed that Israeli PM Levi Eshkol’s legal adviser Theodor Meron said

“civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In April 1978, Jimmy Carter’s State Department legal advisor Herbert Hansell called settlements “inconsistent with international law.”

Ronald Reagan disagreed with the Carter administration on the illegality of settlements, calling them “unnecessarily provocative” instead.

In 1982, Reagan called for a moratorium on settlement development, saying they’re hindrances to peace talks.

Half a century after Israel’s 1967 aggression, seizing remaining Palestinian territory it failed to occupy in 1948, including East Jerusalem, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics data indicate around 600,000 Israeli settlers occupy stolen Palestinian West Bank land. Over 200,000 other settlers live in Occupied East Jerusalem.

On July 30, 1980, the Knesset’s Jerusalem Law illegally annexed the UN-designated international city as Israel’s unified capital.

On March 1, 1980, UN Security Council Resolution 465 declared that “all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant (Fourth Geneva) violation…and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

All Security Council resolutions are binding international law. In America, they’re also constitutional law under the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2).

On July 4, 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and an obstacle to peace and to economic and social development (and) have been established in breach of international law.”

Since establishment of the Jewish state in May 1948, its ruling authorities have systematically and repeatedly breached international laws, norm and standards unaccountably.

Israeli settlers reside in 127 strategically located West Bank settlements, dozens more in East Jerusalem, settlement enclaves in Hebron, along with about 100 “settlement outposts” – established to make a contiguous Palestinian state in the Territories impossible to achieve.

Business enterprises operating in the Occupied Territories flagrantly violate international law. Airbnb’s pullout is a welcome step.

Far more is needed from global businesses, notably numerous US and other Western corporations, operating illegally in the Territories, profiting from Israel’s flagrant abuse of power.

Settlement construction escalated under Netanyahu. Their development is the main obstacle to conflict resolution.

It’s unattainable as long as most  Palestinian land remains illegally occupied.

A Final Comment

Ahead of Airbnb’s decision to remove settlement listings, a petition by Jewish Voices for Peace, CODEPINK, and six other human rights groups called on the company “to immediately stop listing vacation rentals in Israeli settlements.”

An online Twitter petition headlined “Tell #Airnub: #Palestinians can’t #LiveThere, So Don’t Rent There.”

After years of equivocating, the company did the right thing. Israel isn’t pleased.

Its strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan called on Occupied Territory hosts to sue Airbnb, citing Israel’s 2011 apartheid Anti-Boybott Law as unjustifiable justification.

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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.

President Trump’s fateful decision the other day to protect the Saudi Crown Prince MBS who without doubt ordered the murder of journalist Khashoggi in Istanbul is totally morally and ethically wrong and dangerous for America. It will haunt US national interests now and decades ahead.

Money, oil and Iran cannot be acceptable reasons for pursuing an obscene, immoral and inhuman foreign policy that stands against everything the USA has claimed to stand for in  two and half centuries of its existence.

It is not only Khashoggi’ s grieving family and fiance that President Trump’s decision betrays. The decision betrays all Press, even all of us humans who feel the family’s pain and grief. To many across this planet, the USA. Washington hardly looks like the ultimate Super Power glorious city on a glittering hill; more like an uncivilised insane rogue city and State. It looks like what it has now actually become; a country where the poor are very poor; an isolated rogue nation, though currently the world’s only hyper-power, with unenviable friendships almost only with totalitarian barbaric and murderous States like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

America has bankrupted its economy, its original ideals and now, after Khashoggi’s murder, its sense of decency, its core morality. These are all gone forever.

One book that predicted and encapsulated the description of what America was and will be was published in July 2002, it was in fact a series of essays written over 10 years. Its name ‘The Decline and Fall of the American Empire’ written by the outstandingly unique genius, the late Gore Vidal.

However rather than I pontificate on the wisdom of Vidal, I suggest you stop reading and judge for yourself by watching this hour or so lecture by him from 2003 that sums up his thoughts of, the United States of Amnesia, as he liked to refer to it.

Gore Vidal explains how the pillars of the US constitution are gone & they’re gone forever until we force a violent people’s revolution. That there has been a silent coup in America by the NeoCons creating what we now call ‘the Deep State’.

In the first decade of the 21st Century we have witnessed the destruction of the constitution & due process of law. The start of endless wars. Also the fall of the American republic, which inevitably will be followed by a totalitarian led police state, even soon maybe Marshall law, possibly rationing with basically eventually America reverting to third world status.

The video speaks for itself but I would like to quote now – for those of you with staying power – extensively from an interview Vidal gave to the BBC in 2001.

In Gore’s opinion, “the [American] Republic ended in 1950. Since then we have had an imperial system.” What are the chief characteristics of this system?

First, the USA intervenes in an aggressive way in every part of the world. According to his researches, since 1950, the USA has waged at least 300 wars in different parts of the globe. Yet, although the Constitution stipulates that any war must be approved by Congress, not one of these conflicts has been so approved. In fact, the last time an American president sought and obtained congressional approval for a war was in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Vidal points out something that has been long known to us, but has never been admitted, namely that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. “Roosevelt wanted the USA to enter the war against Hitler, but he knew that 80 percent of Americans were against this. He knew that the only way to change this was by a major shock, and therefore set out to provoke the Japanese – who were the allies of Germany and Italy – to attack the USA.

Vidal then explains how President Truman got the USA involved in the Korean War (“which we lost”) by presenting it as a “police operation” that did not require the approval of Congress. Instead he referred it to – the United Nations! The US military aggression in Korea took place under the banner of the UN – like many many subsequent adventures.

Finally its important to reflect that Vidal was a most effective raconteur, who also possessed the necessary sense of humour. In his hands, wit is a deadly weapon, as sharp as a dagger. George W. Bush (“How I love that man!”) provides him with an endless source of anecdotes, one of which was new to me and worth repeating. Bush’s opinion of the French: “The trouble with those guys is that they just don’t have a word for entrepreneur!”

Vidal speaks with a smile, but in the words of Dylan Thomas, his smile is as sweet as a razor. The form may be amusing, but the content is deadly serious.

He points out that the much-vaunted American freedom is largely fictional: around 5% percent of the population is either in jail or on parole, connected up by electric devices to the prison administration. There is very little real freedom. Freedom of the press? “The press and the media are owned and controlled by ‘our corporate masters’. I’ve never seen the media so tightly controlled as now. They control all the flow of information, so that the great majority of Americans do not know what is going on.”

What about living standards in the USA? “Ninety percent of Americans have been falling behind since 1973. That is the date they usually cite for the oil crisis.

Nowadays a husband and wife make less money than the husband alone made at that time. On the other hand, some people have become fabulously rich. One percent owns everything – like the CEOs who now seem to be queuing up to go to jail!

Under them there is a further twenty percent who support ‘the Empire’. These are the lawyers, the journalists, politicians and bankers and so on;…and the one percent hires the twenty percent.”

Gore Vidal had personal experience of American “press freedom”. When after September 11 he wrote an article pointing out that the USA had brought this on itself, building up bin Laden and the Taliban against Russia. The article was not published by any US paper or magazine, including the supposedly “left wing” The Nation, for which Vidal has contributed articles for half a century. “The media never asks why,” he says:

“We still have not been told the reason why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor! Roosevelt provoked the attack, but the national mythology requires him to be a Saint, so nothing is said about it. Then we demonise Osama bin Laden, who was not a very nice man and looks the ‘boogie man’ part. We do not really know what degree of involvement he had in the September 11 attacks. Nor for that matter do we know to what degree American neocons with Israel played in the tragedy.

Nevertheless George W. Bush immediately says: ‘Dead or alive, we’re going to get him.’ Well, they have not got him. And he is not the reason America is in Afghanistan.

In fact, one journalist got into Afghanistan early on, which he was not supposed to do, and asked a US general there where Osama was. The general did not even remember who Osama was. Only when the astonished journalist reminded him, did he recall what the aim of the mission was supposed to be!”

In Vidal’s opinion, the USA’s interventions are connected with only money; mega-projects with oil interests. For example, to build a pipeline connecting the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. “They want stability in Afghanistan to build the pipeline. The Taliban did not give them stability, so they decided to overthrow them.”

No matter how imperfect or incomplete you may feel Gore Vidal’s analysis is, it is not really the point. The point that was underlined by Andrew Marr, a respected British political commentator (and certainly no Marxist) is this: How does it happen that America’s then greatest living writer [Marr’s words] did not find it possible to get his opinions printed in the USA? Eventually, he had a collection of articles published in book form in Italy, where it was a best-seller. It was also published in other European countries. The only other great writer I know with this problem that still exists today, of not being able to publish in America is the irrepressible and brilliant Seymour Hersh.

Worth mentioning is Vidal’s book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, which was published in the USA, but then, as he remarked wryly, it got worse. Not a single paper was prepared to review the book. There was no publicity and no advertisements were accepted. As a well-known public figure and broadcaster, he received seven invitations to appear on different television programmes. Five of these were soon cancelled. CNN had invited him to debate his views, but the programme was cancelled half an hour before it was due to commence. The instructions evidently came from the top level in Washington.

“Citizens’ rights have been demolished in our country. The Bill of Rights has been either suspended or cut down. Bill Clinton started the process at the time of the Oklahoma bomber. Then they passed the US Patriot Act, a document of 300 odd pages that nobody bothered to read. It permits the government to organize surveillance, arrests and deportations. In fact, if you criticise the government you could be arrested for ‘giving comfort to the enemy’. And Congress passed this Act and the President signed it immediately!

And what are Gore Vidal’s conclusions? “Our liberation from this system will come about as a result of an economic collapse,” he asserts. “This is inevitable, on the basis of the colossal debts we have been building up. This must lead to monetary breakdown at some stage. The writing is on the wall.”

His only hope seems for, as in the Depression of the 1930s, a reforming President like F. D. Roosevelt will introduce something like the New Deal. “If not, we will end up with a dictatorship.”

The fact is, as Gore Vidal was the first to point out, America is already ruled by a dictatorship – the dictatorship of Money, of the “corporate masters” who take all the real decisions while giving the masses the illusion of democracy. There is one Party in America, the Capitalist Party, with two wings, Democrats and Republicans.

In effect, simply put, his recipe was to put the clock back about 200 years, to return America to its pristine roots of Republicanism.

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Justice has disappeared in the West. In Justice’s place stands Revenge. This fact is conclusively illustrated by Julian Assange’s ongoing eight year ordeal.

For eight years Julian Assange’s life has been lived in a Kafka Police State. He has been incarcerated first under British house arrest and then in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, despite the absence of any charges filed against him.

Meanwhile, the entirety of the Western world, with the exception of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and a UN agency that examined the case and ruled Assange was being illegally detained by the UK government’s refusal to honor his grant of political asylum, has turned its back to the injustice.

Assange is locked away in the Ecuadorean Embassy, because to protect him from false arrest, former Ecuadorean President Correa gave him political asylum. However, the corrupt and servile UK government that serves Washington, and not justice or law, refused to honor Assange’s asylum. The US vassal known as the UK stands ready to arrest Assange on Washington’s orders if he steps outside the embassy and to hand him over to Washington, where a large number of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have said he should be executed. The Trump regime, carrying on the illegal practices of its forebears, has a secret indictment waiting to be revealed once they have their hands on Assange.

The current president of Ecuador a servant of Washington, Lenin Moreno—a person so lacking in character that his name is an insult to Lenin— is working a deal with Washington to rescind Assange’s grant of asylum so that the Ecuadorean Embassy in London has to expel Assange into the hands of Washington.

What has Assange done? He has done nothing but to tell the truth. He is a journalist who heads Wikileaks, a news organization that publishes leaked documents—exactly as the New York Times published the leaked Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. Just as the publication of the Pentagon Papers embarrassed the US government and helped to bring about the end of the senseless Vietnam War, the documents leaked to Wikileaks embarrassed the US government by revealing Washington’s war crimes, lies, and deception of the American people and US allies.

The allies, of course, were bought off by Washington and remained silent, but Washington intends to crucify Assange for the embarrassment and payoff expense he caused the criminal government in Washington.

In order to assert authority over Assange, Washington is using the extra-territoriality of US law, a claim that Washington bases not on law but on might alone and uses to violate the sovereignty of independent countries. Assange is a citizen of Australia and Ecuador. He is not subject to US law. Even if he were, he has committed no espionage. The false equivalence Washington is trying to establish between the exercise of the First Amendment and treason shows how totally lost are the American people. The silence of the US media demonstrates that the presstitutes don’t mind losing the First Amendment’s protection as they have no intention of telling any truths.

Washington’s secret indictment—it is secret so that two-bit punks such as James Ball can write in the Guardian that Assange faces no threat of arrest (see this) —most likely accuses Assange of espionage. But it is not legally possible to accuse a non-citizen operating outside the country of espionage. All countries engage in espionage. Every country on earth could accuse Washington of espionage and arrest the CIA. The CIA could, as it often has, accuse Israel of espionage. Of course, any Israeli, such as Jonathan Pollard, who is convicted of espionage in the US becomes a point of contention between Washington and Israel and Israel always wins. The corrupt Obama regime released Pollard from his life sentence on orders and, no doubt, generous bribes, from Israel.

If Assange were Israeli, he would be home free, but he is a citizen of two countries whose governments place high value on being Washington’s vassals.

There was a time in America, many decades ago, when the Democrats stood for justice and the Republicans stood for greed.

There was a time in America, prior to 9/11, when the media would have rushed to the defense of the freedom of the press and defended Assange from his mistreatment and false charges. To be sure that the reader understands the mistreatment of Assange, it is identical to the mistreatment of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty (image on the right) of Hungary whose asylum in the US Embassy in Budapest was not acknowledged by the Soviet government, forcing Mindszenty to live out all but three years of his remaining life in the US embassy. President Nixon negotiated his release in 1971, but the Nixon haters give Nixon no credit for his attention to one man locked away in an injustice part of the earth. (See this)

Today there is no such attention to injustice except for the “victim” groups in Identity Politics. Where is the champion of Assange now that Rafael Correa has to live abroad to avoid persecution by Washington’s puppet Moreno?

The weakness of the intellect in the West is scary. Caitlin Johnstone tells us about it:

“Trump’s despicable prosecution of Assange, and corporate liberalism’s full-throated support for it, has fully discredited all of mainstream US politics on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in that hot mess stands for anything. If you’re still looking to Trump or the Democrats to protect you from the rising tide of fascism, the time to make your exit is now.”

The entirety of the Western print and TV media—even Russia’s RT—serves as a propaganda ministry for Washington against Assange. For example, we read over and over that Assange is hiding out in the London Ecuadorean Embassy to avoid rape charges in Sweden. That the presstitutes and the feminists can keep this bogus claim alive despite all the official repudiation of it shows the Matrix in which Western peoples are corralled.

Assange has never been charged with rape. The two Swedish women who seduced him and brought him into their beds in their homes never said he raped them. Assange’s tribulations began when one of the women who seduced him worried that he did not use a condom and that he might have HIV or Aids. She asked Assange to take a test to see if he was sex disease free, and Assange, offended, refused. This was his mistake. He should have said, “of course, I understand your concern” and taken the test.

The woman went to the police to see if Assange could be forced to take the test. It was the police who turned this into a rape investigation. Charges were brought, and the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dropped all charges as the sex was consensual.

Assange left Sweden legally, not in flight as the story that Washington has planted has it. He went to England, another mistake as England is Washington’s playground. Washington and/or lesbian feminists lusting for the conviction of a heterosexual male convinced a female Swedish prosecutor to reopen the closed case.

In an unprecedented act, the Swedish prosecutor issued an order to the UK for Assange to be handed over for questioning. Extradition orders are only valid for filed charges, and there were no filed charges, only dismissed charges. Never before had even the corrupt UK government granted an extradition order for questioning. The UK government, Washington’s puppet, agreed to hand over Assange to Sweden. It was completely clear as there was no case in Sweden against Assange that the Swedish prosecutor, probably for a large sum, would turn Assange over to Washington, a place in which no legal protections exist for anyone, not even for those, such as whistleblowers, who are protected by US law, but, despite the protection of law, nevertheless go to prison.

Seeing what was coming, Assange was granted political asylum by President Correa and escaped house detention in the UK to make it to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been ever since, despite the Swedish government’s dropping of all charges against Assange and again closing the investigation.

In the meantime a US attorney, corrupt as they all are—never believe any federal indictment as they are created out of whole cloth without any need of evidence—managed to convince an incompetent American grand jury to indict Assange for what we do not yet know, but most likely for espionage.

The US grand jury that approved the secret indictment has no comprehension that they indicted a person for telling the truth precisely as protected—and required if government is to be controlled by the people—by the US Constitution. All Assange did was to publish documents sent to Wikileaks by a person with a moral conscience who was disturbed at the blatant criminality and inhumanity of the US government.

There is no legal difference whatsoever between Wikileaks publishing the documents leaked to Wikileaks, and the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times.

The difference is the difference in time. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the media had not been concentrated into a few hands by the corrupt Clinton regime, and 9/11, which was used by Dick Cheney to criminalize truth-telling, had not occurred. Therefore in the 1970s it was still possible that some important part of the media might tell the truth. Nevertheless, the only reason that the NYTimes published the Pentagon Papers is that the newspaper hated Richard Nixon, who the Democratic media blamed for the Vietnam War even though it was Democratic President Johnson’s war and Nixon wanted to end it.

When the insouciant American and Western peoples accept their governments’ lies, they accept their own demise and servitude. The willingness and abandon with which the Western peoples submit makes one conclude that they prefer servitude. They don’t want to be free, because freedom has too many responsibilities, and they don’t want the responsibilities. They want go watch a movie, or a TV program, or play video games, or have sex, go shopping, get drunk, have a drug high, or whatever form of amusement that they value far more than they value liberty, or truth, or justice.

To a person of my disappearing generation, it is inexplicable that the nations of the world, much less Americans, would stand moot while the world’s best, most trusted and most honest journalist is set up by a totally corrupt US government for destruction. The result of Assange’s persecution will be to criminalize embarrassing the US government.

When I contemplate this massive injustice to which the peoples of the world reply with silence, I wonder if those trying to save Western Civilization are not misguided. (See this) What is the point of saving a totally corrupt civilization?

Those who attack Assange are despicable. If you have a chance to push one or more of those who are members of the lynch mob in front of a truck, think of the act as a cleansing opportunity. (See this and this)

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

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

A Ukraine-initiated resolution, condemning alleged human rights violations in Crimea, has been approved by the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian & Cultural Issues) of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). The text is openly hostile toward Russia. The peninsula is supposedly “annexed” and “occupied” as a result of “military conflict” – the term used for the first time to toughen the wording as compared to the two previous UN resolutions on the issue.

Has anybody heard about combat actions in Crimea? Definitely not, but the authors of the document think otherwise. The resolution affirms that Crimea was “seized” and offers its readers concocted stories about detentions, tortures and the usual stuff about “human rights violations”. According to it, the rights of people in Crimea to have Russian citizenship with all the social benefits it implies, to vote or serve in the armed forces go against international law. It says minorities are oppressed and not allowed to speak their native languages, which is evidently not true. Many Western delegations have visited Crimea. None of them saw anything to show that were any problems with human rights or the plight of minorities.

A group of German politicians visited the peninsula in February. What they saw made them call for lifting the sanctions against Russia. A delegation from Norway went to Crimea last month to express its satisfaction with the progress the region had made. This year, Matteo Salvini, Vice Prime Minister of Italy, told the Washington Post that he believes that Crimea’s re-unification with Russia is legitimate and branded the Ukraine’s 2014 “revolution” as fake and funded by other countries. Mr. Salvini is a staunch opponent of the sanctions imposed by the EU on Moscow for incorporating Crimea – the region he visited himself in 2014 after it became Russian. The Yalta International Economic Forum – 2018 brought together a large number of high-level guests on April 19-21. In August, a Slovak delegation of businessmen led by Peter Marcek, a deputy of the National Council of Slovakia, was in Crimea to study business opportunities.

The document calls on all international bodies to use the term “the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, Ukraine, temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.” The Secretary General is to ensure the implementation of the resolution, which will be put to vote in December to be endorsed by UN General Assembly.

The resolution was supported by only 67 votes, with 26 nations voting against, including Russia, China, India, South Africa and Serbia, and 87 abstaining. Totally, 108 out of 193 UN member states did not vote for it.

The results deprive Ukraine of opportunity to affirm that its stance on Crimea enjoys wide international support. Last year, a similar resolution with a “milder’ wording was endorsed by 70 states (26 voted against and 76 abstained). The first Crimea resolution in 2016 was backed by 70 UN members with 71 abstaining and 26 voting against. So, the approval has gone down a bit while the number of abstentions grew with the number of nations backing Russia to remain unchanged. As one can see, the support for Ukraine’s position is growing weaker.

The principle of responsibility to protect (R2P or RtoP) adopted at the World Summit in 2005 is omnipresent in all UN documents. Suppose Crimea was Ukrainian today, would the people living there be protected? It’s important to be impartial. No way could anybody accuse the famous British Chatham House think tank of having anything to do with “Russian propaganda”. Here is its report published on Nov.8 devoted to the threat coming from Ukraine’s radicals and the violence they spread. It’s horrible. Even Atlantic Council admits Ukraine’s Nazi problem. It expressed its alarm in the report published in October. As a UN member, Russia was obliged to protect the people of Crimea from this threat. That’s what it did in strict compliance with its international commitment.

Nazism on the rise in Ukraine is an acute problem for all. On Nov.15, the Third Committee approved a draft on combating the glorification of Nazism by a recorded vote of 130 in favor to 2 against with 51 abstentions. Guess what countries said no. The only ones to object were Ukraine and the United States. The UN resolution expresses concern over the influence and intensified activities of ultra right and neo-Nazi groups. It calls for the universal implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. If Ukraine thinks the vote on Crimea was a victory, the vote on Nazi glorification was a big loss. Everyone can see where the threat comes from and who tried to obstruct the UN resolution, which was first of all targeted at Kiev, even if it did not say so directly.

Also in December, the UNGA will vote on an Azov Sea resolution. The area has turned into a real flashpoint where a spark can easily ignite a big fire anytime. Here again, Ukraine pins its hopes on the West, hoping its pressure, not negotiations with Russia, will help solve the problem. Perhaps, the West exerts its influence to make push through a “tough language” Azov Sea resolution to condemn Russia. So what? Is Moscow in violation of the 2003 agreement with Ukraine on the Azov Sea? Certainly not, nobody says it is, even Kiev. Ship inspections are allowed under the document.

The Azov Sea situation is artificially created by Ukraine to distract the attention of international community from what’s happening in the country. Neo-Nazis gain prominence in Ukraine – that’s the gist of the problem. This fact is key to understanding why re-unification of Crimea with Russia was a step in the right direction. The people of the peninsula expressed their will in a referendum. One of the reasons the idea of re-unification received overwhelming support was the search for protection against the Nazi threat – the problem addressed in the recent UN resolution that Kiev vigorously opposed. Russia fulfilled its international duty in line with the UN guiding principle, stating that “all states have a responsibility to protect.” The time is right for the UN to adopt a special resolution to condemn Ukraine as a state where neo-Nazism is thriving while the US and some other states, who sponsor the Ukrainian government, hush up the burning problem.

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Alex Gorka is defense and diplomatic analyst.

It’s hard remembering when the assassination of anyone, other than a key head of state, aroused as much international furor that won’t die as Khashoggi’s murder.

His elimination remains a headlined story over seven weeks since the October 2 incident.

The CIA and White House are at odds over who’s responsible for what happened. Langley’s damning conclusion, pointing fingers at Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), indicates opposition to his becoming Saudi king.

Key for the agency is he displaced a Western intelligence favorite – Mohammad bin Nayef, as well as Langley and some of Riyadh’s closest allies believing he’s too reckless and untrustworthy to lead the kingdom when his father, king Salman, passes.

Clearly he ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Yet Trump and his regime hardliners refuse to lay blame where it belongs, sticking by MBS despite his reckless actions since becoming crown prince, destabilizing the region more than already.

On Monday, Reuters reported that “some members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family are agitating to prevent (MBS) from becoming king, three sources close to the royal court said,” adding:

“Dozens of princes and cousins from powerful branches of the Al Saud family want to see a change in the line of succession, but would not act while King Salman – the crown prince’s 82-year-old father – is still alive, the sources said. They recognize that the king is unlikely to turn against his favorite son…”

Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, king Salman’s younger brother (age-76), appears their favorite to succeed him, according to unnamed Saudi sources.

He’s supported by some royal family members, Saudi intelligence officials, and some Western nations. In 2017, he opposed MBS becoming crown prince, criticizing his actions.

In October, he returned to the kingdom from short-term self-exile in London, reportedly to challenge MBS or find someone else to replace him as crown prince – reportedly with US and UK guarantees for his safety.

His senior ruling family status may protect him. According to Middle East Eye sources, he was “encouraged to usurp” MBS, three unnamed senior princes backing him, a figure considered more stable and reliable than the crown prince.

Reuters said

“(s)enior US officials have indicated to Saudi advisers in recent weeks that they would support prince Ahmed…according to Saudi sources with direct knowledge of the consultations.”

US officials are concerned that MBS “urged the Saudi defense ministry to explore alternative weapons supplies from Russia,” said Reuters, citing unnamed Saudi sources, adding:

A May 15 kingdom letter, seen by Reuters, said MBS requested Saudi’s defense ministry to “focus on purchasing weapon systems and equipment in the most pressing fields” – notably Russia’s S-400 air defense system he and king Salman agreed to buy last year.

In early November, Saudi Ambassador to Russia Raed Bin Khaled Qrimli said talks on the purchase “are still ongoing. They are not over yet.”

The kingdom’s purchase was agreed on during king Salman’s first-ever state visit to Moscow in October 2017, MBS supporting it, angering Washington, pressuring Riyadh to cancel it, wanting the Saudis to buy Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic-missile system instead – despite superior S-400 technology, the world’s best.

Sources Reuters quoted and cited said actions by MBS weakened the House of Saud, adding:

“According to one well-placed Saudi source, many princes from senior circles in the family believe a change in the line of succession ‘would not provoke any resistance from the security or intelligence bodies he controls’ because of their loyalty to the wider family.”

Riyadh’s security apparatus “will follow any consensus reached by the family.” King Salman remains an obstacle to succession, sticking by his favorite son, “believing there(’s) a conspiracy against the kingdom,” said Reuters.

To succeed his father as king, MBS needs the kingdom’s 34-member Allegiance Council to agree to his ascension.

Saudi source told Reuters that MBS “destroyed the institutional pillars of nearly a century of Al Saud rule: the family, the clerics, the tribes and the merchant families. They say this is seen inside the family as destabilizing.”

The Khashoggi incident weakened his grip on power, whether enough to be replaced as crown prince remains to be seen.

A Final Comment

According to a Middle East Eye senior Saudi source, Mike Pompeo gave MBS “a roadmap to insulate himself from the (Khashoggi) scandal” during his mid-October visit to Riyadh, adding:

It “includes an option to pin (Khashoggi’s) murder on an innocent member of the ruling al-Saud family in order to insulate those at the very top” – the convenient patsy yet to be chosen.

I discussed the possibility in an October 18 article headlined: Saudis Likely to Follow Key Machiavellian Principle in Handling Khashoggi Incident Fallout, saying:

In The Prince, Machiavelli explained how rulers should distance themselves from state-sponsored criminality – shifting blame onto convenient patsies.

The Saudis are likely to follow this principle – if left with no other viable option. Recalling its Istanbul consul general, Mohammed al-Otaibi, and sacking him may, in hindsight, have been step one to shift blame away from where it clearly belongs.

There’s virtually no doubt about MBS’ direct involvement in authorizing Khashoggi’s murder. All that’s in doubt is whether he can remain crown prince.

The issue will likely come to ahead one way or the other in the coming days.

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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.

From November 8 to 18, 2018, Venezuela was the vibrant scene of the Fourteenth International Book Fair (FILVEN) that took place in the historic center of the city of Caracas. Bolívar Square, one of the most important and recognized public spaces in Venezuela, was decorated with shelves and displays of books from all over the world. The featured country this year was Turkey. Special tribute was also paid to the Venezuelan poet Ana Enriqueta Terán, as well as to the newspaper Correo del Orinoco which was founded by Simón Bolívar in 1818.

During the fair there were 111 exhibitions with more than 565 activities including book presentations, awards and tributes, a children’s pavilion, forums, conversations and meetings, workshops, poetry recitals and artistic performances.

I had the honor of being invited to participate in FILVEN along with a group of writers, authors, editors and representatives of social movements.

I am not oblivious to what is happening in Venezuela, I read daily what the alternative and corporate media publish. And I communicate with friends who live there through social networks. Having stayed in the country for only four days, I don’t pretend in any way to be an expert on the situation in Venezuela. But I do feel the need to write some personal observations and share what I could see in that short time.

The corporate media brazenly lies about Venezuela. If you let yourself be carried away by what you read or hear in the corporate media you would think that people are starving, that the country is empty because so many people have left, and that violence is prevalent. That’s not what I saw. Let me begin by saying that Venezuela is an extremely hospitable country, and Venezuelans are a cheerful people who enjoy themselves in spite of the difficulties.

On Thursday, November 8, during the inauguration of the Book Fair, President Nicolás Maduro welcomed all ambassadors present and the national and international guests by saying,

“this has been 14 continuous years of  promoting publishing, the debate of ideas, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, cultural dialogue, free knowledge and free access to information and culture.”

For his part, Venezuelan Minister of Culture, Ernesto Villegas, explained that the fair included an exhibition on the waves of migrants that Venezuela has received throughout its history.

“Today, when a wave of induced xenophobia seeks to turn Venezuela into a bad word, we are here to vindicate the hospitable nature of Bolivar’s homeland and our indestructible brotherhood with all the peoples of the world.”

I would be lying if I said that I saw a single person sleeping in the streets of Caracas like what I see every single day a few blocks from where I live in the city of Oakland, California.  Here there are thousands living under the bridges of the great highways in the richest country in the world. On the contrary, on my way from the Maiquetía Simón Bolívar International Airport to the city I was able to see with my own eyes the big housing projects which are part of the Misión Vivienda. Called repressive by the US media, Venezuela began to emphasize housing of the people with the Hugo Chávez government and continues to do so under President Maduro, with another two million housing units created for low-income people. Venezuela gets the label “repressive” because it is guilty of being a good example.

In addition to speaking in two workshops I participated in several book presentations, all very well attended, where most of the attendees were Venezuelans, who asked questions and expressed their opinions, proud that their country gave them that freedom. I have no doubt that FILVEN is an important people’s event organized by and for the Venezuelan people.

Source: author

During the weekend the fair was busier with families and especially many children. On Sunday afternoon I witnessed a public cultural event full of people in the Plaza Bolívar that also touched my heart. It was an event to commemorate the life of Alí Primera, who would have been 77 years old this year. Primera was a musician, singer, composer, poet and political activist. He was and continues to be “The Singer of the Venezuelan People.” His nephew Alí Alejandro Primera, current president of the National Music Center (part of the Ministry of Culture) was in charge of the tribute, and there were also Sol Musset, singer and wife and mother of four of his children, and the renowned singer-songwriter Lilia Vera.

In the early 1980s, Alí Primera’s songs caused a sensation among those of us who admired the Nueva Canción movement. In particular I remember Techos de Cartón:

“how sadly the children live in the cardboard houses … Children, color of my land, with the same scars, millionaires of worms…”

Many years have passed since Alí Primera’s departure in 1985, but Alí’s songs continue to reflect the uncertain future in which we live, with the advent of new right-wing governments on the continent.

Being part of that cultural event fills me with joy and emotion, especially seeing so many people enjoying themselves, and singing in chorus the songs of this humble man who left his voice and the heartfelt lyrics of his songs to his people.

What was clear to me is that the FILVEN represents the will of a government under attack that despite the adverse conditions is able to organize a book fair, with few resources, so that the entire population could benefit by being able to access all this culture.

Venezuela is the victim of an all-out blockade that began with an executive order from Obama when he declared Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security. The order continues under Trump but he has taken it further by implementing a blockade that affects the daily lives of all Venezuelans. In addition to the blockade, Venezuela is a victim of terrorist acts such as the one that occurred on November 4, when three members of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard died after a confrontation with Colombian paramilitary groups in the border state of Amazonas.

Humanitarian crisis? What could be more humanitarian than the organization of a Book Fair for the enjoyment of a nation? One of Cuban hero José Martí’s most remembered and repeated phrase is precisely,

“To be educated is the only way to be free.”

There are governments who lack the will to educate their people and seem to do everything to do just the opposite, content to have a population lacking in critical thinking. Perhaps that is why there is not a Department of Culture in the United States.

If there is one thing I brought back with me besides the hugs, the warmth and hospitality of the Venezuelan people is that VENEZUELA WANTS TO LIVE IN PEACE.

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Alicia Jrapko is a co-editor of Resumen Latinoamericano, US bureau, a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba and the US coordinator of the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity.

Featured image: People dressed in historic costumes led the close of 2018 International Book Festival. (Correo del Orinoco)

At the close of the 13^th ASEAN Summit in Singapore on the 15^th of November 2018, the Prime Minister of the island Republic of Papua New Guinea, Lee Hsien Loong, warned that the trade war between the United States of America and China may create circumstances “ where ASEAN will have to choose one or the other.” He added, “I hope it does not happen soon.”

The current trade war between the two economic powers was triggered by President Donald Trump raising tariffs on a variety of Chinese goods and the Chinese government retaliating with its own counter-measures. In spite of this, US companies based in China are not leaving the country in any significant way. Analysts are of the view that many of them are waiting for the outcome of the meeting between Trump and Chinese President, Xi Jinping, scheduled to take place during the G-20 meeting in Buenos Aires on the 30^th of November and 1^st December 2018.

Even if the trade war is not resolved, it may not have an immediate, adverse impact upon the present trade pattern where ASEAN states trade with both China and the US. A major disruption of the supply chain which will force countries in the region to choose between the two is unlikely. What is more likely is that some US companies in China may transfer their operations to places like Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia which have the infrastructure and are well-positioned to manufacture low-end IT products.

Of course, if the trade war is prolonged and escalates, it may generate consequences that will go beyond trade. There may be serious implications for global politics and security. It is doubtful if the world will allow this to happen.

A more urgent challenge to ASEAN and Asia is the forging of alliances and the emergence of re-alignments which will undoubtedly increase distrust and suspicion between states leading to tension and friction. On the sidelines of the Singapore Summit for instance the grouping known as the “Quad” consisting of the US, Australia, Japan and India met to re-affirm its “shared commitment to maintain and strengthen a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific in which all nations are sovereign, strong and prosperous.” Right from the outset, the Quad’s gestures and postures have been interpreted as directed against what is perceived as China’s growing power. Two of the members of Quad, the US and Australia, are now joining forces to develop a new naval base in Papua New Guinea. All three nations, it is said, will protect sovereignty and maritime rights in the Pacific Islands. Once again, it is the so-called “Chinese threat” that is the motive behind this military move.

It is fortunate that no ASEAN state has been overtly drawn into these new alignments and alliances. If ASEAN does not want to be turned into a cockpit of conflict between a declining superpower and an emerging global power, it should endeavour to preserve its independence at all costs while striving to maintain good relations with China on the one hand and the US on the other. In this regard, ASEAN should be guided by a Declaration from the past adopted by five of its member-states in 1971 in Kuala Lumpur.

This is the 1971 declaration on Southeast Asia as a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) initiated by Malaysia’s second Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein and endorsed by Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. ZOPFAN’S simple goal is “to keep Southeast Asia free from any form or manner of interference by outside powers.”

The time has come to give concrete meaning to ZOPFAN. Apart from ensuring that ASEAN is not torn asunder by competing military alliances, the 10 member states should reject the establishment of foreign military bases in the region. It should also take a position against the deployment of warships in ASEAN waters — a point that was lucidly articulated by Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, recently. As he put it, the US’s Seventh Fleet should not be sent to the area. At the same time, freedom of navigation and non-interference with flights should be guaranteed.

If ZOPFAN should be given a fresh thrust, ASEAN should also urge China to expedite the formulation of a Code of Conduct that would govern its relations with ASEAN states on disputes pertaining to the South China Sea. The exercise has taken quite a while. It is in China’s own interest to forego its claim over almost 80% of the resource rich, strategically critical Sea — a claim which infringes upon the sovereign rights of a number of its neighbours.

For ASEAN to assert its rights, it should enhance its internal cohesion and unity. On its relations with China or the US or any other major power, ASEAN should as far as possible speak with one voice. It has to evolve a shared understanding, a common perspective, on how it views its own identity and personality vis-à-vis other states and regions. The people of ASEAN should have a common vision of the region’s destiny.

In developing a shared vision of itself and its future, ASEAN should harness the energies of all its citizens. It has to become — in that hackneyed cliché — a people’s grouping, not an elite entity. Only when ASEAN is rooted in the hearts and minds of its 670 million citizens will it be a resilient force capable of withstanding the pulls and pressures of power.

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

Binyamin Netanyahu is not only Prime Minister of Israel but also Defence Minister, Foreign Minister and Health Minister, whilst still subject to police investigation for fraud and corruption – which he denies.

Presumably, the next ministerial appointments to add to his portfolio for himself will be Justice Minister and Attorney General which will enable him to scrap all investigations into his family affairs in a copycat move from the increasingly surreal Donald Trump White House.

This Prime Minister of Israel doesn’t need a cabinet, he needs merely a mirror.

Together, these two megalomaniacs, Trump and Netanyahu, are leading us inexorably into a world war, on a planet which is gradually becoming too hot to live on.  An irradiated earth not only subject to catastrophic fires and floods of biblical proportions but which will be contaminated with fallout from the US-Israeli nuclear armed forces intent on destroying Iran and the Middle East.

And we have to ask ourselves, “How did we get here?” How did the international community allow such narcissistic individuals to gain such undue power and control over our world?

The symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder include: grandiose sense of importance, preoccupation with unlimited success, belief that one is special and unique, exploitative of others, lack of empathy, arrogance, and jealousy of others. These symptoms cause significant distress to self and to others.

In this case, the damage is becoming immense: climate change is gradually making our world uninhabitable as the Trump and Netanyahu families gain further control over our environment, employment and all our lives, each day that passes.

Down the pages of history, no families have ever wielded such power, both military and economic.

There must now be an urgent paradigm shift whereby democratic government, justice and human and civil rights are returned to the vast majority of UN member states and a systemic turn away from occupation, conflict and the very real threat of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare under the control of these two ‘out of control’ elected heads of state with dangerously flawed personality traits.   That time is now.

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

Donald Trump’s decision to send thousands of troops to the US-Mexican border to intercept migrants who intend to apply for asylum is not just a bald-faced political stunt — it is also illegal.

Passed in 1878 to end the use of federal troops in overseeing elections in the post–Civil War South, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military to enforce domestic US laws, including immigration laws. For this reason, Trump’s decision to deploy the military to the border to enforce US immigration law against thousands of desperate migrants from Central America — who have undertaken the perilous journey over 1,000 miles through Mexico to the US border in order to apply for asylum — is an unlawful order.

Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force, told Truthout,

“The deployment of US troops to the Southern border is an illegitimate political ploy and a serious misuse of the military. This action casts shame on a government that treats refugees seeking asylum as enemies.”

The illegality of Trump’s order to the military opens the door to the possibility that service members will resist it: Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Nuremberg Principles and Army Field Manuals, service members have a duty to obey lawful orders and a duty to disobey unlawful orders.

Before the midterm elections, pandering to his nativist base, Trump began the deployment of 5,200 active duty troops to Texas, California and Arizona at the southern US border, with the promise of nearly 10,000 more. On October 29, describing the impending arrival of migrants seeking asylum as an “invasion,” Trump tweeted,

“This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

The Trump administration had originally dubbed the military deployment as “Operation Faithful Patriot,” but it soon abandoned that name, ostensibly to downplay the law enforcement duties of the military troops. Trump’s lawyers invariably realized that using the military to enforce the laws is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Military Is Legally Forbidden From Enforcing Immigration Law

The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the willful use of “any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws.” It has been applied as well to the Navy and Marine Corps. The only exception to the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition is “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”

Defense Department officials told The New York Times that troops deployed to the border would help construct tents and fencing and some would “potentially” operate drones on the border.

Whether the drones are armed or used for surveillance, they would be assisting in the enforcement of the immigration laws.

Moreover, the Los Angeles Times reported,

“Black Hawk helicopters equipped with night sensors will be available to ferry Border Patrol personnel ‘exactly where they need to be’ to ‘spot groups’ and ‘to fast-rope down’ to intercept migrants trying to cross the border. Military aircraft will conduct surveillance.”

Troops who carry out these functions would also be participating in the enforcement of the immigration laws.

Only in the event of an invasion or insurrection on US soil does the president have the power to order the use of the military within the United States.

There is no invasion or insurrection occasioned by the migrant caravan. In an interview with The New York Times, Adm. James G. Stavridis, former commander of the US military’s Southern Command, called out Trump’s “fictitious caravan invasion.”

Indeed, “Military personnel are legally prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement, and there is no emergency or cost-benefit analysis to justify this sudden deployment,” Shaw Drake, policy counsel for the ACLU Border Rights Center, said in a statement.

The Duty to Disobey Unlawful Orders

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires that all military personnel obey lawful orders. Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says,

“A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States….”

Both the Nuremberg Principles and the Army Field Manuals create a duty to disobey unlawful orders.

“Sending troops to the US border with Mexico is as immoral and illegal as sending them to invade and occupy foreign lands,” Gerry Condon, president of Veterans For Peace, told Truthout. “Donald Trump is carrying out a racist war against asylum seekers who are fleeing extreme violence, which in turn is caused by decades of US support for repressive regimes in Central America.”

Members of Veterans For Peace are fanning out along the US/Mexico border from California to Texas in order to reach out to the troops that Trump has ordered to the border.

Condon added,

“Soldiers who follow their conscience and refuse to follow illegal orders will have our support. We can also put GIs in contact with legal resources to help them get honorably discharged from the military.”

Trump’s Cynical and Illegal Attack on the Right to Apply for Asylum

Trump’s verbal attacks on the migrants and his deployment of troops to the border was a cynical ploy to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Although he mounted a consistent tirade against the “caravan” in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Trump has hardly mentioned it since November 6. He did cite it when he announced his new proclamation limiting asylum claims.

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, any person who arrives in the United States has the right to apply for asylum. Applicants must show they are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin due to a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Yet Trump’s new proclamation would deny migrants the right to apply for asylum unless they entered the United States at a designated port of entry, which violates the 1951 Refugee Convention.

On November 9, the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking an injunction to block Trump’s new restrictions on asylum. The complaint states that Trump’s proclamation is “in direct violation of Congress’s clear command that manner of entry cannot constitute a categorical asylum bar.”

Congressional Pushback

In a November 1 letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis, 108 House Democrats decried the “militarization of the southern border to score political points and stoke misleading fears among Americans of immigrants.” They noted,

“The President has exploited the caravan of people traveling to the US to seek asylum for his own political gain, and he continues to politicize and militarize this humanitarian crisis as these men, women, and children are fleeing violence and persecution in an unstable part of the world.”

The congress members called on Mattis to clarify the duration of the deployment, the number of troops deployed, the rules of engagement, what training troops have received, and how much the deployment will cost American taxpayers.

Nearly 2,500 hopeful migrants have already arrived in Tijuana and thousands more are en route. Several organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, have sent legal backup to the border. Members of Veterans For Peace are also at the border, offering support to troops who refuse unlawful orders to enforce the immigration laws.

Trump’s border deployment order ends December 15. Pushback by individual Congress members is important. But Trump responds to negative publicity, so it is the mass mobilization of opposition that may cause him to back down.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. Cohn, who has testified at military hearings and courts-martial about the duty to disobey unlawful orders, is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent.  She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

We need an objective evaluation of the President’s foreign and domestic polices – the means, the goals, their results and consequences.  The Trump performance requires we discuss the style and substanceof foreign and domestic policies.

We will ignore the fly swatting by Trump critics who ply peripheral issues – the state investigation of the fading Russian conspiracy tales — and focus on strategic issues that purport to transform global economic, political and social relations.

‘Trump at Work’:  Foreign Policy

President Trump has a strategy and he works hard at realizing it.

High on Trump’s agenda is, first and foremost, asserting US global supremacy by word and deed.

In pursuit of world power, he utilizes multiple weapons:  he believes in the magic powers of weapons and words. He asserts that prior Presidents ‘were weak and allowed others to exploit us’. Today, under Trump’s leadership, he claims we are strong and flexing our power everywhere at all time.

How does the President reveal strength? Through multiple wars, severe sanctions, increased military spending and greater concentration of wealth, in strategic locations. As a result, according to Trump, we intimidaterivals, competitors and adversaries.

Trump cites numerous examples.  In Syria, we occupy regions, build new military bases, hire and arm more mercenaries and drop larger bombs on more Syrian cities. Trump boasts that he weakens Iranby ending the nuclear agreement, increasing sanctions precipitating an imminent collapse and regime change. Trump trumpets the success of the economic trade war against China and the downfall of Russia by encircling them with nuclear missiles, military bases and economic sanctions.

Trump hails new political successes and military allies in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Ecuador are viewed as Trump’s market successes and providing a vassal army to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Trump brags about his success in ‘renegotiating’ NAFTA, renaming it and claiming more favorable trade ‘deals’ with Mexico and Canada.

The European Union and each of its members have felt the wrath of Trump’s threat of trade wars, and his demands for greater military contributions to NATO.

He has demanded the Germans buy US oil and gas instead of Russian; he threatens to sanction European corporations who dare to abide by agreements with Iran; Trump boasts of hundred-billion-dollar arms sale with Saudi Arabia,  while affirming US supremacy in the Middle East and North Africa.

President Trump, according to his bluster and boisterous self-acclaim, has won every war, conquered all competitors and has laid the groundwork for an ‘American Century’.

How many of Trump’s foreign policy twitters correspond to the real world and how many are empty-handed ejaculations?

President Trump:  Claims and Reality

Trump’s foreign policy strategy is mostly bluster than conquest, more boisterous than business, more bluff than success.

Let’s start with Russia.  Trump’s sanctions and military encirclement have failed to weaken Russia.  Berlin deepens trade ties with the Kremlin – buys more oil and gas, builds pipelines and affirms EU autonomy in dealing with Russia.  Military encirclement involves third rate Baltic partners, and missile bases stationed in Poland.  In contrast Russia has deepened multi-billion-dollar military and economic agreements with China, a world power.

Russia has responded to Trump’s ending of nuclear missile agreements by building superior weaponry.  By any measure, Russia has defeated Trump’s sanctions and military threats.

Despite Trump’s bombast about ‘squeezing China’ with tariffs, China’s trade surplus with the US has increased, while the US trade deficit has risen.

The US has grown by 2.8%, China’s by 6.5%. The US has failed to convince any of its Asian allies to join its trade war against China.  On the contrary, US so-called trade war has encouraged Asia to replace US exporters.  While Trump’s economic advisers threaten Wall Street’s largest bankers to stop making billion dollar deals with China, most have brushed Trump off.  The bankers ignore Trump’s ‘trade war’ because profits count more than gaseous rhetoric.

Saudi Arabia signs a $110 billion-dollar military agreement with Trump and then buys only 10% . . . ‘fake deals’ to paraphrase the President.

Trump claims that the Saudi monarchy is a great ally, despite its boycott of Qatar, home of the biggest US military base in the region. Israel, Trump’s Middle East ally, ignores Trump’s economic sanctions with Russia and trade war with China, two of its biggest high-tech trade partners.

The US wars are losing propositions.  Afghan rebels control most of the country, surround the provincial capitals and force US generals to seek withdrawal.  US allies in Syria have retreated.  He relies on Kurdish separatists who have their own agenda, not Trump’s.

In Latin America, Trump collects kudos from far-right regimes in Brazil and Argentina which hover on the verge of economic collapse, social crisis and political upheaval.

Domestic Success of Dubious Value

Trump trumpets his big tax cut for billionaires with overseas holdings.  He claims it is a success story – creating jobs and producing growth. In fact, over three quarters of the returned profits have resulted in buy-backs increasing corporate dividends not investment in productive activity,

Trump’s trade war with China has not added jobs – it has added cost for consumers through higher prices.

His pro-business policies have strengthened the leverage of corporations in securing multi-billion-dollar concessions from local and state governments.  Jeff Bezos the mega-billion dollar owner of Amazon, received over $10 billion dollars in tax exemptions, in addition to state financed concessions.

In effect Trump’s large scale, long-term income transfers benefit the rich over the poor, increase inequalities and lowering public funds for education, health and welfare.

Trump’s opposition to public health for all, international climate change agreements,   national infrastructure investments and regulation of bank oversight, has increased the risk of natural disasters, financial crises and transport breakdowns.

Despite his retrograde domestic program, Trump retains electoral support and does not face an immediate political threat —for one basic reason:  The Democrats offer no alternatives.

The corporate Democrats who lead the Party, back all of his retrograde policies:  they support Trump’s increases in military spending; support tax reduction for the rich; oppose a national health program for all.

Moreover, during Democratic President Obama’s two terms in office, trillions of dollars bailed out the biggest banks while 3 million households suffered foreclosures; minimum wages remained below the poverty level; inequalities widened ,as did racial disparities.

Under President Obama 2 million immigrants were seized and expelled, establishing a precedent for Trump’s anti-asylum policies.

In other words, Trump’s policies are a continuation and exacerbation of the Obama regime.

Conclusion

Trump’s domestic and foreign policy demagogically capitalized on the failures of the Democratic Party’s corporate socio-economic programs and multiple wars.

As a result, Trump’s exploited popular discontent and attracted big business support by promising lower taxes and the end of regulations.  In practice Trump’s aggressive foreign and domestic policies contributed and added to Washington’s isolation and decline.  None of Trump’s original objectives have been achieved.  The US has multiplied adversaries who have grown stronger and more unified.  Washington has lost established markets without gaining new ones.  His original electoral support has declined without gaining new adherents.  Trump’s reliable ‘allies’ (Israel, Saudi Arabia Germany, etc.) have undermined his aggressive trade policies to China and Russia.  Anti-Iran sanctions have exempted the biggest buyers of Teheran’s oil exports. While Trump failed to secure his domestic and foreign policy objectives, these failures have not led to any major loss of influence.

Europe is internally divided and unable to formulate any consequential alternatives. Latin America faces economic crises which precludes any joint military intervention despite ‘paper agreements’.

But the biggest failure is Trump’s policies to China. Each and every one of Trump’s major Asian allies has retained and increased trade agreements with Beijing. Trump’s premature celebration of diplomatic victory over North Korea has evaporated.  North Korea has returned to and extended ties with China and Russia.

Trump’s strategic decisions have failed to secure his objectives.  Not a single world-shaking change has taken place.  Trump’s generals may abandon Afghanistan but no thanks to the Democrats or Europeans.

Trump trade wars with China has failed to secure more jobs in America, but his Wall Street critics have negotiated bigger and more lucrative financial deals.

In a word, Trump’s failures have not led to greater and better conditions for global markets, nor ended wars or improved living standards.  Nevertheless many progressives are pleased by Trump’s failures even though they are not beneficiaries.

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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is preparing to add Venezuela to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in what would be a dramatic escalation against the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro, according to U.S. officials and internal government emails.

The (American) list is reserved for governments accused of repeatedly providing “support for acts of international terrorism,” which includes only Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Countries, where terrorism is endemic to daily life in more recent years, are quite often those that America and its allies have attacked, namely: Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, which are not mentioned in their list. There are other countries in the same region who should be on that list, that isn’t.

Republicans have long accused Venezuela of having ties to terrorist organizations but experts all over the world have played down any such assertions. They warn that the legitimacy of the U.S. list is applied inconsistently anyway.

Relations between Cuba and Venezuela, since 1902 were aggravated by the Cold War but then changed towards defending themselves from a common enemy – America.

It is a Cuban American politician that is calling for the terrorism designation? He has clamoured for a tough U.S. posture toward Venezuela, a longtime backer of the Castro regime in Cuba.

In the meantime, the proven oil reserves in Venezuela are recognised as the largest in the world, totalling 297 billion barrels, currently worth well over one trillion dollars. Saudi Arabia was knocked off the number one slot just a couple of years ago in terms of known reserves.

Another stunning statistic that should surprise absolutely no-one with an internet connection, is that Venezuela also happens to be the largest supplier of oil to the United States, sending about 1.5 million barrels per day.

Not paying for that would be good for America’s economy, as would stemming their supply to America’s competitors.

During a press conference with Calixto Ortega, the president of the Central Bank of Venezuela on Tuesday, Economy Vice President Tareck El Aissami said in early October that all future transactions on the exchange market would be made in euro, yuan and “other convertible currency” instead of the US dollar.

It should not be forgotten that Iraq’s Saddam Hussian had gradually converted from the dollar to the Euro in the years leading up to the second war that reduced the country to rubble. In fact, the process was completed only months before the US-led coalition invaded. Gadhafi’s plan to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. dollars — demanding payment instead in gold-backed “dinars” (a single African currency made from gold) — was quite possibly a cause for their demise. Libya now boasts open slave trade markets and human trafficking as one of its sources of income after being turned into a failed state by a NATO-backed coalition fronted by Britain, France and the USA.

Before Syria was attacked, it produced 338,000 barrels of oil a day – today, that figure is just 15,000 barrels. The US, largely seen as having failed in its bid to oust its leader and destroy the state, now occupies 30 per cent of the country including the areas containing most of its oil, gas and water. The bombing damage to Syria’s infrastructure is estimated to be in the region of $250 billion. In a bid for further security, Syria has now signed oil and gas agreements with Russia.

As for Venezuela, one could assume the usual American playbook of destabilisation strategies to be deployed very soon.

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And I can’t help but wonder no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause?’
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
The suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

– from Eric Bogle’s song The Green Fields of France. This verse was deleted in Joss Stone’s rendition for the Royal British Legion’s 2014 Poppy Appeal.

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(This is a repeat broadcast of an episode originally airing November 7, 2014)

One of the most devastating conflicts in history the First World War drew in all the major powers at the time. Eight and a half million soldiers and Six and a half million civilians are estimated to have perished in the war that was supposed to end war. [1][2]

Set off by a diplomatic crisis, triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June of 1914, The Great War as it was known at the time lasted four bloody years. On November 11, 1918, Germany became the last of the Central Powers to capitulate and sign an armistice with the victorious Allied Powers, signalling the end of the war.

To this day, the 11th hour of the eleventh month is set aside to reflect and honour those military men and women who paid the ultimate cost to secure a more peaceful and just world. The occasion is referred to as Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth.

The spirit of Remembrance Day has shifted in recent years, especially in Canada.

Following the centenary of the start of World War I, the Canadian Prime Minister credited the war as a critical ingredient in establishing the country as an independent nation. [3]Harper stokes national pride over Allied victories in Ypres, Vimy and Passchendaele rather than lament a tragic loss of life over a mostly pointless war. [4]

Cautionary warnings about the terrible toll of war with slogans like “Never Again” and “Lest We Forget” seem to have been eclipsed by imperatives to paint the sacrifices of military men and women serving the State (for whatever reason) as heroic and necessary.

Today, Remembrance Day may as well be called “Thank a Soldier for your Freedoms Day.”

Without disrespecting those who have died serving in past conflicts, it is worth reflecting during Remembrance Week on exactly why World War I and other twentieth century conflicts were waged in the first place. Were these wars truly for democracy, peace and democracy? Or were there more cynical motives being pursued by Canada and the other major powers?

To this end, this week’s Global Research News Hour interviews two prominent authors and dissident thinkers on the century old conflict known as World War I and Canada’s role in this and other military forays.

Yves Engler is an activist and author of numerous books on Canadian foreign policy including The Black Book on Canadian Foreign Policy, Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and his latest The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy.

Dr. Jacques Pauwels, Canadian historian and author of the 2000 book The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War . He has a French language book on World War 1 available now. An English version will be available in 2015.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.

On November 20, US President Donald Trump released a long awaited official statement on the murder of Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government in a Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul on the 2nd of October.

The statement came amid reports from CIA-linked sources that it was Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered the killing of the journalist and the official stance of the Turkish investigation that the order to kill the journalists had come from the highest level of the Saudi government.

It was reasonable for the US administration, before making an official statement on this crime, to collect some important facts and intelligence. They are as follows:

• “The world is a very dangerous place!”
• Iran is guilty of destabilizing the situation in the Middle East
• Hezbollah is also guilty
• The Houthis are very guilty as they are resisting the Saudi invasion in Yemen
• Bashar al-Assad? …bloody “dictator”, “who has killed millions of his own citizens”
• Israel – a great country
• The crime against Jamal Khashoggi – “terrible”
• Did Mohammed bin Salman order the murder? – “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
• Multi-billion deals with Saudi Arabia – remain in force
• Sanctions against Saudi Arabia – what sanctions? Washington already sanctioned “17 Saudis” involved in the murder and already detained by the Saudi government because it’s impossible to hide them.
• No practical steps will be taken to punish the Saudi regime. It’s a “great ally”
• “America First!”

Additionally, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a press briefing saying that Washington’s relations with Saudi Arabia won’t be affected by the Khashoggi case because “this is a long historic commitment and one that is absolutely vital to America’s national security.”

So, kill journalists, invade other countries, support al-Qaeda, and order death penalties for witchcraft. That is all fine as long as there is some US “historic commitment” at your back.

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Before this lame-duck Congress adjourns in December we could face the most serious constitutional crisis in the history of the republic if Donald Trump attempts to shut down the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

A supine and pliant Republican Party, still in control of the House and the Senate, would probably not challenge Trump. The Supreme Court, which would be the final arbiter in any legal challenge to the president, would probably not rule against him. And his cultish followers, perhaps 40 million Americans, would respond enthusiastically to his trashing of democratic institutions and incitements of violence against the press, the Democratic Party leadership, his critics and all who take to the streets in protest. The United States by Christmas, if Trump plays this card, could become a full-blown authoritarian state where the rule of law no longer exists and the president is a despot.

Trump has flouted the Constitution since taking office. He has obstructed justice by firing the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing Sessions with the Trump partisan Matthew Whitaker. The president regularly ridicules the Mueller investigation and insults its leader. In a tweet last week he called the investigation a “witch hunt,” a “total mess” and “absolutely nuts,” and he went on to assert that Mueller and his investigators were “screaming and shouting at people” to make them provide “the answers they want.” He called those involved in the probe “a disgrace to our nation.”

He has repeatedly delivered diatribes against the press as “the enemy of the people,” belittled, mocked and insulted reporters during press conferences and defended his revoking of the White House press credentials of a CNN reporter. He and his family openly use the presidency for self-enrichment, often by steering lobbyists and foreign officials to Trump’s hotels and golf courses. He has peddled numerous conspiracy theories to discredit U.S. elections and deployed military troops along the southern border to resist an “invasion” of migrants. However, an attempt to fire Mueller and shut down the investigation would obliterate the Constitution as a functional document. There would be one last gasp of democracy by those of us who protest. It is not certain we would succeed.

The potential crisis the nation faces is far more serious than the one that occurred when it was revealed that President Richard Nixon had funded and covered up the June 17, 1972, burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. (Nixon’s lying about the secret bombing of Cambodia, which occurred from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970, and killed over half a million people, was, like all crimes of empire, never formally addressed and was not cited in the impeachment documents that were prepared.) The institutions tasked with defending democracy and the rule of law were far more robust during the Nixon constitutional crisis: There were Republicans in the Congress willing to hold the president accountable to the law; the courts were independent; the press had widespread credibility. In addition, the president met the onslaught of charges and revelations by retreating from the public. None of this is true now. Trump, with Fox News acting as a megaphone for his hate speech and conspiracy theories, has been holding Nuremberg-like rallies across the country to prepare the roughly 40 percent of the public who remain loyal to him to become shock troops. His followers are filled with hate and resentment for the elites who betrayed them. They are hungry for revenge. They do not live in a fact-based universe. And they are awash in weapons.

“Trump knows once the Democrats control the House, they can subpoena the records of his administration,” Ralph Nader said when I reached him by phone in Connecticut. “He’s going to want to get this over with, even if it sparks a constitutional crisis, while the Republicans still control the Congress. There’s little doubt this will all come to a head before the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately for Mueller, he has not issued a subpoena to the president that would have protected him [Mueller]. If he had issued a subpoena, which he has every right to do, especially after being rebuffed in hours and hours of private negotiations for information from the president, he would be protected. Once you issue a subpoena, you have a lot of law on your side. If Trump defied a subpoena, he would get in legal hot water. But short of a subpoena, it’s just political back and forth. By not issuing a subpoena Mueller is more vulnerable to Whitaker and Trump.”

So far, there have been no hints from the Mueller investigation’s criminal charges or the guilty pleas by Trump associates that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty on eight of the 18 counts that Mueller brought against him, but none of his crimes had anything to do with the presidential election or Russian influence. Manafort’s financial crimes included five counts of tax fraud, one of hiding foreign bank accounts and two of bank fraud. These crimes predated the Trump campaign. Rick Gates, the former deputy campaign chairman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements. George Papadopoulos spent 14 days in jail for lying to the FBI. Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime lawyer, pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions by paying hush money to the porn actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Cohen, due to be sentenced Dec. 12 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on charges of tax evasion, making false statements to a bank and the two campaign contribution violations, appears to be cooperating with the investigation, like most of those who have been indicted.

In February Mueller indicted 13 Russians and three Russian entities on charges of interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections, indictments that would not, I suspect, have taken place without hard evidence, but these indictments still do not appear to link the Trump campaign directly to Russia in an act of collusion. Perhaps the expected indictments of Roger Stone, reportedly for his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks, and Jerome Corsi, who said he expects to be indicted for “giving false information to the special counsel or to one of the other grand [juries],” will connect Trump and Russia, but until now the Mueller investigation appears to be focused on financial crimes, which appear rampant within the Trump business organization and among Trump associates. It is questionable, however, whether financial crimes will be enough to justify impeachment proceedings. Trump says he has finished answering written questions submitted to him from Mueller’s team and has promised to turn them over this week.

“Trump is in a dimension by himself,” said Nader. “He has inured the public to all kinds of scandals, bad language, accusations, admissions, harassment of women, boasting about it, lying about his business and keeping his tax returns a secret. You have to have an even higher level of damning materials in the [Mueller] report in order to breach that level of inurement that the public has become accustomed to.”

Trump wields the power of the presidential pardon and has suggested he can use it to pardon relatives and himself. There is no legal precedent for such pardons, but the Supreme Court would probably uphold whatever novel legal interpretation the Trump White House would use. Trump might also try to divert attention away from the political meltdown by starting another war.

“Trump may try to save himself by starting hostilities abroad,” Nader said. “He is especially inclined to do this because of his extraordinary psychological instabilities and impulsiveness. He also has a monumental ego that lets him live in a fantasy world. The signal that he is planning this kind of move, a move he would carry out if he loses all other options to stay in office and be re-elected, will be if he replaces chief of staff John Kelly with a war hawk and his secretary of defense, James Mattis, with another war hawk. He has two war hawks who would like to see this happen. One is John Bolton, his national security adviser, and the other is the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Bolton and Pompeo have similar views about using military might abroad and ignoring constitutional, statutory and treaty restraints. They would like to see Kelly and Mattis removed. Pompeo, a graduate of West Point, has ambitions to become secretary of defense. If you see Kelly and Mattis replaced with warmongers, this move might reveal his ultimate trump card. He can use a war to shut down political opposition and dissent in the name of supporting the troops.”

Trump has a few weeks before the Democrats take control of the House. This may give him enough time to carry out his constitutional coup and consolidate power. Our decayed democratic institutions, including a corporate press that has rendered the working class and the poor invisible and serves as an apologist for corporate power, are detested by many Trump Republicans. Trump can rally his cultish supporters, hermetically sealed in their non-reality-based belief system, to attack and demolish the last of our democratic protections.

“We have a tremendous dearth of readiness by major constituencies such as civic groups, the legal profession, the business community and academia to deal with someone who misuses his authority, power and resources,” Nader warned. “Nobody knows how to do it more precisely, relentlessly, strategically and tactically than the cunning Donald J. Trump.”

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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

The US dollar is no longer used by Tehran and Baghdad in bilateral trade, giving way to the euro and local currencies, as well as direct barter of goods, head of the Iran-Iraq Chamber of Commerce Yahya Ale-Eshagh has revealed.

The American empire is in a deadly spiral of military industrial rule, NATO expansion, and its latest rubric—the New Cold War. See “Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 04.13.2017” Pompeo, who is now Secretary of State, repeatedly damned Russia, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks, and I stopped counting how many times he damned Julian Assange.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that anonymous “people familiar with the matter” had said that the Justice Department is preparing to prosecute Assange and “is increasingly optimistic that it will be able to get him into a U.S. courtroom.”

Seamus Hughes, a career national security professional who is currently the Deputy Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, says that—as he was putting his son to bed—someone texted him the Wall Street Journal report, and it triggered his memory of seeing Assange’s name in a paragraph mistakenly pasted into an Eastern District of Virginia court filing, which he was studying as part of his research on extremism. The paragraph read:

The United States has considered alternatives less drastic than sealing, including, for example, the possibility of redactions, and has determined that none would suffice to protect this investigation. Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, 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.

Hughes went back to his computer, took a screenshot of the paragraph, and tweeted it, thus verifying the claim made by the Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources.

However unlikely that series of events, the Justice Department has not denied the indictment. And we know that when the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or Washington Post quote “anonymous sources,” high level government officials are getting the word out. The security state has been circling Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, coming closer and closer since US lapdog Lenin Moreno became president of Ecuador, and now they’re closing in. Hopefully not for the kill, although espionage is a federal capital offense. Speaking in Madrid last July, President Moreno reportedly said,

“The death penalty does not exist in Ecuador, and we knew that possibility existed… The only thing we want is a guarantee that his life will not be in danger.”

Former CIA official John Kiriakou, who served two years in prison after exposing the CIA’s official use of torture, predicted that Assange would be indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia during a Unity4J vigil:

The rumor here in Washington is that Julian has been secretly indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia. That’s here where I live. It’s based in Alexandria, Virginia. And they call the Eastern District of Virginia the “espionage court” because almost all national security cases are tried here. And the reason they’re tried here is because this is the home of the CIA, of the Pentagon, and of almost every intelligence-related private contractor in the Washington area. So look who’s going to be on the jury. It’s going to be CIA employees, FBI employees, military employees, or their spouses. Intelligence contractors or their spouses. Julian couldn’t possibly get a fair trial in a place like this. So they do it on purpose.

And in addition to that, no national security defendant has ever won a case in the Eastern District of Virginia. It’s called venue shopping. Even though no crime was actually physically committed in the Eastern District of Virginia, they know that the judges here are the toughest in America on national security cases, so they would charge him here. You wouldn’t charge him in New Mexico or California because he would probably be acquitted.

Jury nullification

No one but the prosecutors know what Assange is charged with, under what law, though the wide expectation seems to be that he’ll be tried under the Espionage Act for publishing classified material. Daniel Ellsberg has said he believes that the Justice Department will use Assange’s case to set a legal precedent, and Trump has such a hostile relationship with the press that he’d no doubt love to break the knees of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the rest with very few exceptions. So would I, though for different reasons.

Because criminal conviction requires a unanimous jury, John Kiriakou said that jury nullification is his best hope for Assange’s freedom:

Jury nullification is when a jury hears a case. The person violated the law, and the jury finds that the law is unfair. The law shouldn’t be the law, that this is a miscarriage of justice. So even though the government has been able to prove its case, the defendant is found not guilty because the law is wrong and it’s unfair. And that’s really my hope for Julian.

Most jurors aren’t informed that they can nullify charges by concluding that the law is wrong. (Imagine if they were.) However, it will take only one informed and courageous juror in US Intel’s company town to say that the law is wrong. Assange would no doubt be retried, but he’d be acquitted each time one courageous juror stepped up.

The most famous case of jury nullification is that of another journalist, John Peter Zenger, who was charged with seditious libel in the colony of New York in 1735. The jury nullified that case by concluding that Zenger should not be criminally liable for publishing information that was true. Word.

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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

No resumo de seu último documento estratégico – 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America(cujo texto completo é um segredo) – o Pentágono afirma que “depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, os Estados Unidos e os seus aliados instauraram uma ordem internacional livre e aberta para salvaguardar a liberdade e os povos da agressão e da coerção”, mas que “agora esta ordem está a ser minada a partir do interior pela Rússia e pela China, que violam os princípios e as regras das relações internacionais”. Alteração completa da realidade histórica.

O Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Director do Centre for Research on Globalization,recorda que estes dois países, hoje classificados como inimigos, são aqueles que, quando eram aliados dos Estados Unidos durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, pagaram a vitória do Eixo nazi-fascista Berlim-Roma-Tóquio com o preço mais elevado em vidas humanas: a União Soviética, cerca de 26 milhões e a China, 20 milhões, em comparação com pouco mais de 400 mil dos Estados Unidos.

Com esta premissa, Chossudovsky, do Global Research, apresenta um estudo documentado por James A.Lucas, sobre o número de pessoas mortas pela série ininterrupta de guerras, golpes de Estado e outras operações subversivas efectuadas pelos Estados Unidos, desde o final da guerra, em 1945, até hoje: estima-se de 20 a 30 milhões. Cerca do dobro do número de vítimas da Primeira Guerra Mundial, cujo centenário acaba de ser celebrado em Paris, com um “Fórum da Paz”. Além dos mortos, incluímos os feridos, que muitas vezes são deixados com deficiências: alguns especialistas estimam que, por cada pessoa que morreu na guerra, outras 10 ficam feridas. Isto significa que os feridos provocados ​​pelas guerras USA atingem centenas de milhões. À quantidade estimada no estudo adiciona-se um número inquantificado de mortes, provavelmente centenas de milhões, provocados desde 1945 até hoje, pelos efeitos indirectos das guerras: fomes, epidemias e migração forçada, escravidão e exploração, danos ambientais, roubo de recursos às necessidades vitais a fim de  cobrir as despesas militares.

O estudo documenta as guerras e golpes realizados pelos Estados Unidos em mais de 30 países asiáticos, africanos, europeus e latino-americanos. O que  revela que as forças militares dos EUA são directamente responsáveis ​​por 10 a 15 milhões de mortes, causadas por grandes guerras: as da Coreia e do Vietnamee as duas contra o Iraque. Outros 10 a 14 milhões de mortes foram provocadas pelas guerras ‘por procuração’,conduzidas pelas forças armadas aliadas, treinadas e comandadas pelos USA no Afeganistão, em Angola, no Congo, no Sudão, na Guatemala e noutros países. A Guerra do Vietname estendeu-se ao Camboja e ao Laos, causou um número de mortes estimado em 7,8 milhões (além de um grande número de feridos e lesões genéticas nos orgãos reprodutores, devido à dioxina espalhada pelos aviões de guerra USA). A guerra ‘por procuração’,na década de oitenta, no Afeganistão, foi organizada pela CIA que treinou e armou, com a colaboração de Osama bin Laden e do Paquistão, mais de 100.000 mujaidin para combater as tropas soviéticas caídas na “armadilha afegã” (como mais tarde a definiu Zbigniew Brzezinski, salientando que o treino dos mujaidin havia começado em Julho de 1979, cinco meses antes da invasão soviética do Afeganistão).

O golpe mais sangrento foi organizado na Indonésia, em 1965, pela CIA: forneceu aos esquadrões da morte indonésios, a lista dos primeiros 5.000 comunistas e outros a serem mortos. O número de abatidos é estimado entre meio milhão e 3 milhões.

Esta é “a ordem internacional livre e aberta” que os Estados Unidos, independentemente dos que presidem à Casa Branca, procuram alcançar para “salvaguardar os povos da agressão e da coerção”.

Manlio Dinucci

Dal 1945 ad oggi 20-30 milioni uccisi dagli Usa

il manifesto, 20 de Novembro de 2018

Tradução pour Luisa Vasconcellos

VIDEO (PANDORATV) :

In der Zusammenfassung seines letzten strategischen Dokuments – 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (dessen gesamter Text geheim ist) – behauptet das Pentagon, dass “die Vereinigten Staaten und ihre Verbündeten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg eine freie und offene internationale Ordnung geschaffen haben, um die Freiheit des Volkes vor Aggression und Zwang zu schützen”, aber dass “diese Ordnung derzeit von Russland und China untergraben wird, die gegen die Grundsätze und Regeln der internationalen Beziehungen verstoßen”. Dies ist eine völlige Umkehrung der historischen Realität.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Direktor des Zentrums für Globalisierungsforschung, erinnert uns daran, dass diese beiden Länder, die heute als Feinde aufgelistet sind, diejenigen sind, die, als sie im Zweiten Weltkrieg mit den Vereinigten Staaten verbündet waren, den Sieg über die nationalsozialistische faschistische Achse Berlin-Rom-Tokio mit dem höchsten Preis an menschlichen Leben bezahlt haben – etwa 26 Millionen aus der Sowjetunion und 20 Millionen aus China, verglichen mit etwas mehr als 400.000 aus den Vereinigten Staaten.

Mit dieser Einleitung stellt Chossudovsky der Global Research eine dokumentierte Studie von James A. Lucas über die Zahl der Toten vor, die durch die ununterbrochene Serie von Kriegen, Staatsstreichen und anderen subversiven Operationen der Vereinigten Staaten seit dem Ende des Krieges 1945 bis heute getötet wurden – eine Zahl, die auf 20 bis 30 Millionen Opfer geschätzt wird. Etwa doppelt so viele Todesopfer wie im Ersten Weltkrieg, dessen hundertjähriges Ende gerade in Paris mit einem Friedensforum begangen wurde.

Abgesehen von den Toten gibt es die Verwundeten, die sehr oft lebenslang verkrüppelt sind – einige Experten gehen davon aus, dass auf jeden Kriegstoten  zehn weitere Versetzte kommen. Das bedeutet, dass die Zahl der durch US-Kriege verwundeten Menschen in die Hunderte von Millionen gehen muss.

Zu dieser Schätzung in der Studie müssen wir eine nicht quantifizierte Zahl von Toten, wahrscheinlich Hunderte von Millionen, hinzufügen, die von 1945 bis heute durch die indirekten Auswirkungen von Kriegen verursacht wurden – Hungersnot, Epidemien, Zwangsmigrationen, Sklaverei und Ausbeutung, Umweltschäden, Abzug von Ressourcen für lebenswichtige Bedürfnisse, um die Militärausgaben zu decken.

Die Studie dokumentiert die Kriege und Staatsstreiche der Vereinigten Staaten in 30 asiatischen, afrikanischen, europäischen und lateinamerikanischen Ländern. Daraus geht hervor, dass die US-Streitkräfte direkt für zwischen 10 und 15 Millionen Tote verantwortlich sind, die durch die großen Kriege verursacht wurden – die gegen Korea und Vietnam und die beiden Kriege gegen den Irak. Zwischen 10 und 14 Millionen weitere Tote wurden durch die Stellvertreterkriege der alliierten Streitkräfte verursacht, die von den USA in Afghanistan, Angola, Kongo, Sudan, Guatemala und anderen Ländern ausgebildet und befehligt wurden.

Der Vietnamkrieg, der sich auf Kambodscha und Laos ausbreitete, verursachte eine Reihe von Todesfällen, die auf 7,8 Millionen geschätzt wurden (plus eine große Zahl von Verwundeten und genetischer Folgeschäden, die Generationen aufgrund des von US-Flugzeugen versprühten Dioxins betreffen).

Der Stellvertreterkrieg der 1980er Jahre in Afghanistan wurde von der CIA organisiert, die – in Zusammenarbeit mit Oussama ben Laden und Pakistan – mehr als 100.000 Mudschahedin ausgebildet und bewaffnet hatte, um die sowjetischen Truppen zu bekämpfen, die in die “afghanische Falle” gegangen waren (wie es später von Zbigniew Brzezinski beschrieben wurde, indem er erklärte, dass die Ausbildung der Mudschahedin im Juli 1979, fünf Monate vor der sowjetischen Intervention in Afghanistan, begonnen hatte).

Der blutigste Staatsstreich wurde 1965 in Indonesien von der CIA organisiert – sie übergab die Liste der ersten 5.000 Kommunisten und anderer zum Tode verurteilter Kommunisten an die indonesischen Todesschwadronen. Die Zahl der ermordeten Menschen wird auf 500.000 bis 3 Millionen geschätzt.

Das ist die “freie und offene internationale Ordnung”, die die Vereinigten Staaten, unabhängig vom Weißen Haus, weiterhin verfolgen, um “die Menschen vor Aggression und Zwang zu schützen”.

Manlio Dinucci

Dal 1945 ad oggi 20-30 milioni uccisi dagli Usa

il manifesto, 20.November 2018

Übersetzung: K.R.

VIDEO (PandoraTV) :

Nel riassunto del suo ultimo documento strategico – 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (il cui testo integrale è segretato) – il Pentagono sostiene che «dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale gli Stati uniti e i loro alleati hanno instaurato un ordine internazionale libero e aperto per salvaguardare la libertà e i popoli dalla aggressione e coercizione», ma che «tale ordine viene ora minato dall’interno da Russia e Cina, le quali violano i principi e le regole dei rapporti internazionali». Completo ribaltamento della realtà storica.

Il prof. Michel Chossudovsky, direttore del Centre for Research on Globalization, ricorda che questi due paesi, classificati oggi come nemici, sono quelli che, quando erano alleati degli Stati uniti durante la Seconda guerra mondiale, pagarono la vittoria sull’Asse nazi-fascista Berlino-Roma-Tokyo con il più alto prezzo in vite umane: circa 26 milioni l’Unione Sovietica e 20 milioni la Cina, in confronto a poco più di 400 mila degli Stati uniti.

Con questa premessa Chossudovsky introduce su Global Research un documentato studio di James A. Lucas sul numero di persone uccise dalla ininterrotta serie di guerre, colpi di stato e altre operazioni sovversive effettuata dagli Stati uniti dalla fine della guerra nel 1945 ad oggi: esso viene stimato in 20-30 milioni.  Circa il doppio dei caduti della Prima guerra mondiale, di cui si è appena celebrato a Parigi il centenario della fine con un «Forum della pace». Oltre ai morti ci sono i feriti, che spesso restano menomati: alcuni esperti calcolano che, per ogni persona morta in guerra, altre 10 restino ferite. Ciò significa che i feriti provocati dalle guerre Usa ammontano a centinaia di milioni. A quello stimato nello studio si aggiunge un numero inquantificato di morti, probabilmente centinaia di milioni, provocati dal 1945 ad oggi dagli effetti indiretti delle guerre: carestie, epidemie, migrazioni forzate, schiavismo e sfruttamento, danni ambientali, sottrazione di risorse ai bisogni vitali per coprire le spese militari.

Lo studio documenta le guerre e i colpi di stato effettuati dagli Stati uniti in oltre 30 paesi asiatici, africani, europei e latino-americani. Esso rivela che le forze militari Usa sono direttamente responsabili di 10-15 milioni di morti, provocati dalle maggiori guerre: quelle di Corea e del Vietnam e le due contro l’Iraq. Altri 10-14 milioni di morti sono stati provocati dalle guerre per procura condotte da forze alleate armate, addestrate e comandate dagli Usa, in Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Sudan, Guatemala  e altri paesi. La guerra del Vietnam, estesasi a Cambogia e Laos, provocò un numero di morti stimato in 7,8 milioni (più un enorme numero di feriti e danni genetici generazionali dovuti alla diossina sparsa dagli aerei Usa). La guerra per procura negli anni Ottanta in Afghanistan fu organizzata dalla Cia che addestrò e armò, con la collaborazione di Osama bin Laden e del Pakistan, oltre 100 mila mujaidin per combattere le truppe sovietiche cadute nella «trappola afghana» (come dopo la definì Zbigniew Brzezinski, precisando che l’addestramento dei mujaidin era iniziato nel luglio 1979, cinque mesi prima dell’invasione sovietica dell’Afghanistan).

Il colpo di stato più sanguinoso fu organizzato nel 1965 in Indonesia dalla Cia: essa fornì agli squadroni della morte indonesiani la lista dei primi 5 mila comunisti e altri da uccidere. Il numero dei trucidati viene stimato tra mezzo milione e 3 milioni.

Questo è «l’ordine internazionale libero e aperto» che gli Stati uniti, indipendentemente da chi siede alla Casa Bianca, perseguono per «salvaguardare i popoli dalla aggressione e coercizione».

Repressive Israeli rule way exceeds the worst of South African apartheid. The Occupied Territories are virtual battlegrounds, Gaza most of all. 

Palestinians are terrorized daily by Israeli soldiers and police, along with PA security forces, acting as the Jewish state’s enforcer against their own people.

Time and again, Israel’s Supreme Court upholds apartheid ruthlessness in its rulings – judicial fairness abandoned, fundamental Palestinian rights affirmed under international law ignored.

In May, Supreme Court justices rejected petitions by human rights groups, ruling for Israeli soldiers to use live fire and other terrorist tactics against peaceful Palestinian demonstrators.

At the time, the Adalah and Al Mezan human rights groups slammed the ruling in a joint statement, saying

justices “completely ignored the broad factual basis presented to it by the petitioners, which includes multiple testimonies of wounded and reports of international organizations involved in documenting the killing and wounding of unarmed protesters in Gaza.”

In 2015, the High Court rejected the right of free expression, supporting Israel’s repressive 2011 Anti-Boycott Law.

It criminalizes legitimate calls for boycotting the Jewish state, permitting ruling regimes to impose harsh punishments on individuals, groups, and institutions, calling for or participating in boycott activities.

Human rights groups call the law a “shut mouths” measure, aiming to silence legitimate criticism, Israel’s High Court upholding what no just societies and their courts would tolerate – what America’s First Amendment prohibits.

At the time, Adalah Attorney Sawsan Zaher said

“(t)his arbitrary law harms Palestinians more than others because they are on the frontlines of struggling against the Occupation and the violation of the human rights of their people under Occupation in the West Bank, (East Jerusalem), and Gaza.”

In 2014, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the so-called Admissions Committee Law, permitting Negev and Galilee towns to ban Israeli Arab citizens, claiming they’re “unsuitable” for Jewish communities.

In response, an Adalah press release said

“(t)his law is one of the most racist pieces of legislation enacted in recent years, the primary objective of which is to marginalize Arab citizens and prevent them from accessing housing on ‘state land’ in many communities. The court’s decision upholds one of the most dangerous laws in Israel.”

Last Thursday, Israeli Supreme Court justices approved the eviction of 40 East Jerusalem families from their East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah homes.

The neighborhood is designated for Jews-only residency as part of the Netanyahu regime’s E1 Jerusalem plan, wanting the international city entirely Judaized.

The High Court ruling jeopardizes the right of the neighborhood’s 3,000 residents to remain in their homes. Evicting 40 Palestinian families could be prelude to dispossessing all others in Sheikh Jarrah.

Israel’s Land Fund’s Arieh King admitted that the group’s plan is to displace all neighborhood Palestinian residents, permitting it exclusively for Jews.

Families ordered displaced by Israel’s High Court have lived in Sheikh Jarrah since 1956 on their own land.

An Israeli district court refused to hear their case. Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, Justice Barak-Erez saying:

“We cannot intervene in the findings of fact by the district court. According to the laws on the statute of limitations and the factual findings, we have no tools to intervene in the decision.”

The aggrieved Palestinians refused to withdraw their appeal, asking for a High Court ruling – delivered against them on Thursday.

Justice was again denied, the way it nearly always is against fundamental Palestinian rights throughout the Territories.

That’s what apartheid rule is all about!

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old Gaza medic killed by an Israeli sniper on June 1, treating an injured man, undated photo from Palestine Live on twitter.

“Agriculture is one of the most creative acts that human beings be involved in.

Small farmers are the real source of real food. Commodities are ruining the farmers, they are ruining the land and the environment.

The chemical industry and GMO are killing real agriculture. They are instruments of war.

Prof. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers.

She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers’ rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993. She is executive director of the Navdanya Trust.

Vandana Shiva opens the We Feed the World exhibition in London, 11 October 2018. The Gaia Foundation. @GaiaFoundation @WeFeedtheWorld_ We Feed the World is a photographic exhibition celebrating the smallholder farmers and fisherfolk who feed the world.

TMS: Vandana Shiva on the Smallholder Farmers Who Feed the World

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I’m willing to bet that if I asked everyone in Ireland whether the Irish government should take orders from Donald Trump, most people would say no. But last year the Irish Ambassador to the United States came to the University of Virginia, and I asked her how allowing U.S. troops to use Shannon Airport to get to their wars could possibly be in compliance with Irish neutrality. She replied that the U.S. government “at the highest level” had assured her it was all perfectly legal. And she apparently bowed and obeyed. But I don’t think the people of Ireland are as inclined to sit and roll over on command as their ambassador.

Collaboration in crimes is not legal.

Bombing people’s houses is not legal.

Threatening new wars is not legal.

Keeping nuclear weapons in other people’s countries is not legal.

Propping up dictators, organizing assassins, murdering people with robotic airplanes: none of it is legal.

U.S. military bases around the world are the local franchises of the greatest criminal enterprise on earth!

And NATO involvement doesn’t make a crime any more legal or acceptable.

A lot of people in the United States have trouble distinguishing NATO from the United Nations. And they imagine both of them as murder-laundering operations — that is, as entities that can render mass murder legal, proper, and humanitarian. A lot of people think the U.S. Congress possesses this same magical ability. A presidential war is an outrage, but a Congressional war is enlightened philanthropy. And yet, I have not found a single person in Washington, D.C. — and I’ve asked Senators and street vendors — not a single person who tells me they would give the slightest damn if Washington was being bombed whether it was being bombed at the order of a parliament, a president, the United Nations, or NATO. The view is always different from under the bombs.

The U.S. military and its European accomplices make up some three quarters of the world’s militarism in terms of their own investment in wars plus their dealing of weapons to others. Attempts to claim that an external threat exists have reached ludicrous levels. I can’t imagine weapons companies would like anything more than some intra-NATO competition. We need to tell advocates of a European military that you can’t oppose U.S. madness by imitating it. If you don’t want to buy more weapons on Trump’s orders, the answer is not to run off and buy even more under another name. This is a vision of a future dedicated to high tech barbarism, and we don’t have time for it.

We don’t have the years left to be monkeying around with medieval balances of power. This planet is doomed as a habitable place for us, and the hell that is to come can be lessened only by outgrowing the acceptance of war.

Source: World Beyond War

The answer to Trump is not to outdo him but to do the opposite of him.

A tiny fraction of what just the United States spends just on foreign bases could end starvation, the lack of clean water, and various diseases. Instead we get these bases, these toxic instigators of war encircled by zones of drunkenness, rape, and cancer-causing chemicals.

War and preparations for war are the top destroyers of our natural environment.

They are a top cause of death and injury and destruction.

War is the top source of the erosion of liberties.

The top justification for government secrecy.

The top creator of refugees.

The top saboteur of the rule of law.

The top facilitator of xenophobia and bigotry.

The top reason we are at risk of nuclear apocalypse.

War is not necessary, not just, not survivable, not glorious.

We need to leave the entire institution of war behind us.

We need to create a world beyond war.

People have signed the declaration of peace at worldbeyondwar.org in more countries than the United States has troops in.

People’s movements are on our side. Justice is on our side. Sanity is on our side. Love is on our side.

We are many. They are few.

No to NATO. No to bases. No to wars in distant places.

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On November 17^th, the Syrian Army (SAA) and its allies regained control of al-Safa after the collapse of ISIS defense in the area. An SAA source told SouthFront that heavy rain had destroyed most of the fortifications and hideouts of the terrorist group during the last few days. The remaining terrorists fled towards the eastern Homs desert. The state news agency SANA confirmed that the SAA had made significant gains and that the highest positions in the are under army control.

On the same day, heavy clashes between ISIS militants and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) broke out around the strategic town of Hajin in the middle of the Euphrates valley. The SDF said that it had killed 20 ISIS terrorists during the attack.

Additionally, pro-government as well as opposition sources reported that US-led coalition airstrikes had killed more than 40 civilians, half of which reportedly children. The US-led coalition increased its aerial strikes in the Euphrates Valley to assist the SDF, which is still unable to deliver a devastating blow to ISIS there.

The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) announced that its units in the western province of al-Anbar struck ISIS fighters in the Syrian town of al-Baghuz al-Fawqani in Syria. Kassem Musleh, commander of the PMU’s operation in the region said that the PMU had reinforced its positions along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The move was a response to the increased ISIS activity in the US sphere of responsibility on the Syrian side of the border.

On November 18^th, SANA reported that the SAA foiled another infiltration attempt by opposition members in the northern Hama countryside. The terrorist groups were infiltrating from the direction of al-Bouaida and Ma’ar Keba at the same time. According to SANA, the SAA opened fire and launched bombardments inflicting heavy losses to the militants.

SAA forces shelled militant positions in the towns of al-Tamanah, Aziziya and Jarjnaz in the southern Idlib countryside. Pro-government sources said that it was a response to an attack by Wa Harid al-Muminin militants in northern Lattakia, which left 18 Syrian soldiers dead.

On November 16^th, militants from the “Wa Harid al-Muminin” operations room targeted positions of the SAA in the areas of al-Harishah and Mazra’at Waridah in the southwestern Aleppo countryside with an armed drone.

On the same day, the al-Mayadeen TV correspondent in Syria Dima Nasir said that the SAA and its allies are preparing for a limited military operation in Idlib, in response to the repeated violations of the Russian-Turkish deconfliction agreement.

Besides this the situation within the opposition-held area in Idlib also remains unstable. On November 17^th, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants attacked a headquarters of al-Qaeda affiliated Horas al-Din in the town of Harim in the northern Idlib countryside and clashes with several French militants who were hiding inside it. According to Syrian opposition sources, 5 French militants were killed in the clashes, while 45 more are besieged inside the base.

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The Great Lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and justified US military interventions all over the planet.

“The institutionalization of the ‘Rwandan genocide’ has been the remarkable achievement of a propaganda system sustained by both public and private power.”

During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said,

“That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won’t have anything to do with each other, and that jealousy turns into hate—we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, it turned into a genocide. A million-people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what’s happening here.”

That got a lot of headlines even though US ethnicity is binary only if seen as white vs. everybody else. Whatever Senator Nelson meant, those who do see it that way have certainly gained prominence since Trump took the White House.

However, that is a newly minted reference to the Rwandan Genocide in US discourse. It’s most often remembered in urgent calls for “humanitarian intervention,” aka war, to stop another genocide. We’re told that the US failed to stop Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, so we’re now obliged to “intervene” anytime and anywhere another genocide is underway. That’s why, we’re told, the US and its NATO allies had to bomb Libya into ongoing chaos in 2011. That’s why Lockheed Martin had to step up production of cruise missiles to drop on Syria. That’s why Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, both 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, became initial co-sponsors of an Orwellian bill to “enhance” our government’s ability to “prevent genocide and mass atrocities” with military force: Senate Bill 1158, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 201 8.

“We’re told that the US failed to stop Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, so we’re now obliged to ‘intervene’ anytime and anywhere another genocide is underway.”

More soberly, given the lies we’ve all been told in order to start wars, doesn’t it seem likely that this story—that the US failed to stop the Rwandan Genocide—is one more lie? Not that the genocide didn’t happen and not that it wasn’t a terrible tragedy, but that the story we were all told and Bill Clinton’s crocodile tears about his “worst mistake” are a lie. In fact, the US and UK backed General Paul Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990, and prevented a UN intervention until he and his army had massacred their way to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to seize power on July 4, 1994. Just over three weeks later, on July 28, the New York Times reported that the “U.S. Is Considering a Base in Rwanda for Relief Teams ,” and Kagame has been a key US ally and “military partner” ever since. He not only collaborated with the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) but also invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, left millions dead, and thus created new opportunities for US mining corporations.

Professor Edward S. Herman and researcher/author David Peterson deconstructed the propaganda about Rwanda in “The Politics of Genocide ” and “Enduring Lies: T he Rwandan Genocide 20 Years On .” In “Enduring Lies,” they wrote that

“The institutionalization of the ‘Rwandan genocide’ has been the remarkable achievement of a propaganda system sustained by both public and private power, with the crucial assistance of a related cadre of intellectual enforcers. The favorite weapons of these enforcers are reciting the institutionalized untruths as gospel while portraying critics of the standard model as ‘genocide deniers,’ dark figures who lurk at the same moral level as child molesters, to be condemned and even outlawed.”

“Kagame collaborated with the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) and also invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, left millions dead.”

Ed Herman and I had many conversations about this before his death in November 2017, including one on KPFA Radio’s Project Censored Show on New Year’s Day, 2016 .The transcript was published by the San Francisco Bay View , Black Agenda Report, and Global Research .

More recently, former Agence France Presse and Radio France International journalist Judi Rever broke down the simple story of Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators in her book “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front .” Here’s some of what she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after the book’s publication:

Judi Rever: He [Kagame] did not stop the genocide because at the same time that ethnic Tutsis were being killed in Hutu controlled zones, his Tutsi troops were killing with equal zeal and organization. And in every zone that the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its army entered, they killed massively and in an organized way.

CBC: Killed Hutus?

Judi Rever: Killed Hutus. They also fueled the genocide against the Tutsis. They infiltrated the Hutu militias very successfully, and they baited the violence. They egged on the violence, but they also—some of their commandos—participated in the slaughter of Tutsis at roadblocks.

Kagame knowingly ordered and encouraged Tutsi massacres to build a storyline that would justify his Tutsi minority dictatorship after he’d seized power and control of the country’s electoral apparatus. Had he proceeded to real elections, as mandated by the Arusha Accords signed to end the war, the Hutu majority would have elected a Hutu president. Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ndagijimana tells the same story from a different standpoint in“How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi .” Most of these victims were poor Tutsis who had been left behind when the wealthy and aristocratic Tutsis fled to Uganda during the Hutu Peasant Revolution of 1959-1961.

“Kagame knowingly ordered and encouraged Tutsi massacres to build a storyline that would justify his Tutsi minority dictatorship after he’d seized power.”

Rever’s conclusions are based on years of research and interviews, many of them with RPF troops who were tormented by memories of what they had done and felt compelled to confess. Her book also includes accounts of how she, her husband, and even her children were threatened while she was researching it, and how Belgian security operatives accompanied her everywhere during a research trip to Brussels to interview political exiles and refugees.

In an email released by Wikileaks, a Stratfor intelligence analyst said that “Rwandans are cold ass mofos ” and detailed Rwandan operatives’ transnational assassinations and assassination attempts. Their targets are almost always high-profile figures who, like Rever, challenge the story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators that is so essential to Kagame’s survival and international stature.

I myself haven’t feared for my life at the hands of Rwandan operatives, but I did file an assault complaint after a dustup with Kagame’s contingent at Sacramento State University’s 2011 Third International Genocide Conference.

Et tu, RT?

Despite all this, the propaganda has been so effective that the standard story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators, and Bill Clinton’s failure remains all but unassailable in mainstream media. It’s in the Wikipedia, where a host of “edit alerts” assure that any attempt to change it starts a tireless “editing war” that Wikipedia moderators will finally shut down with no changes made. It’s at the heart of former UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s interventionist bible “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide .” It’s in Obama’s 2011 Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities and “Mass Atrocities Response Operations: A Military Handbook ,” which was produced by the Pentagon and Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights with help from Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United Foundation. And it’s in the template of every Reuters and AP newswire that ever touches on the subject.

I was nevertheless surprised when RT repeated the standard propaganda as well. Mightn’t one expect RT to dig a little deeper into a narrative used to justify the US war in Syria among others? I don’t know why, but they hadn’t before asking me to comment on a news story about the recent appeal of a French court’s ruling that French soldiers were not criminally complicit for failing to protect Tutsis massacred at Bisisero, Rwanda, in 1994. I agreed, so they called me on Skype, but the host and I proceeded to frustrate one another, and most of what I said was left on the cutting room floor. CIUT 89.5fm-Toronto host and former ICTR investigator Phil Taylor sent me a consolation note saying, “I felt for you, Ann. I saw the item in real time and slapped my forehead. The cutting was done with shears.”

Basic journalistic ethnics and not wanting to be misrepresented compelled me to write about why this interview turned into such a hot mess after beginning with the usual false recitation:

“The genocide in Rwanda lasted just over three months and left nearly a million people dead.

…

The genocide was committed mainly by the Hutu government and its backers against the ethnic minority Tutsi tribe. Allegations of the French government’s support for the Hutus, who carried out most of the slaughter in the genocide, have been rough on the French government’s relations with the Rwandan government for years. But the French, although they admit that they’ve made mistakes, they say they have no complicity in the genocide that took place there.”

“It was a distortion to discredit the French troops over this one incident.”

I told RT that the context of the 1994 Bisisero massacre was a four-year war that began on October 1, 1990, when a detachment of the Ugandan Army led by then General, now President, Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda from Uganda. I said that those Ugandan troops were Rwandan Tutsis or the children of Rwandan Tutsis who had fled to Uganda between 1959 and 1961, when the Hutu majority finally liberated themselves from centuries long domination by the Tutsi minority.

I said that focusing on this single tragic incident, the Tutsi massacres at Bisisero, imposed the propaganda narrative about the Rwandan Genocide on their story.

I said that France’s Operation Turquoise had created a humanitarian corridor for civilians fleeing to Congo in terror of Kagame’s advancing army, so it was a distortion to discredit the French troops over this one incident in which they were accused of failing to act even though it wasn’t clear they had a mandate.

I considered quoting Ed Herman, David Peterson, and Judi Rever, but ran out of time. That was more complexity than RT wanted to add to their news story . They had already built it on the widely received account of what happened in Rwanda before calling me. Having produced some radio news myself, I know that the show must go on at the scheduled hour even if it could be better. Had they nevertheless considered that there might be something wrong with their premises? I don’t know, but I’m going to send this to the producer and hope they understand that I’m just encouraging them to review this Western narrative as they do so many others. Stay tuned.

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Dear Friends,

It is good to be here with you all. I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to address the conference.  Firstly I thank you all for your work for peace.  It is good that we will have an opportunity in the next few days to get to know each other and together discuss what kind of a world we want to live in?  There will be many different perspectives on this and the way forward, but let us agree to respect each other and to engage in deep listening and conversation no matter how hard and where the dialogue might take us!

Let us be encouraged by the fact that we have made an important first step when we agree to enter into dialogue, and when we agree that peace is both the means and the great achievable gift. It would be wonderful too no matter what area of social/political change we work in, if we can unite on a shared vision of a demilitarized world and find strength in agreeing we will not limit ourselves to civilizing and slowing down militarism, but demanding its total abolition.

Some people might argue that peace is not possible in such a highly militarized world.  However, I believe that peace is both possible and urgent.  It is achievable when we each become impassioned about peace and filled with an ethic that makes peace our objective and we each put into practice our moral sense of political/social responsibility to build peace and justice.

To build peace we are challenged to reject the bomb, the bullet, and all the techniques of violence.  Unfortunately, we are constantly bombarded with the glorification of militarism and war; therefore building a culture of peace and nonviolence will not be an easy task.  We are hearing about the building of a European army and we are asked to accept austerity and budget cuts to our health, education, etc. whilst increasing money to our own armies and also European military expansion.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization-NATO, which should have been disbanded when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, continue to carry out wars and proxy wars in many countries pushing towards the borders of Russia and resurrecting a cold war between the East and West. I believe that NATO should be disbanded and should be made accountable and make restitutions to the millions of people in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and many others it has illegally attacked, invaded, destroyed.   We will never be allowed by our governments, or our mainstream media, to hear many of the stories of the lives of so many civilians killed by US/NATO forces.  NATO forces have targeted and assassinated individuals and entire families.

It is to all our shame in the International community, that their illegal criminal acts   of horror and bloodletting which embodies the comeback of barbarism, is allowed to continue.  NATO should be brought before the International Criminal Court  for war crimes.

It would be all too easy to point fingers and play the blame game but unless we all take responsibility for the highly dangerous militarised situation with which we are faced in the world today, things will not get better.

Ireland with the militarization of its Foreign and Defence Policy has been unfaithful to the Irish peoples’ wish for a Neutral State and worse by being complicit in accommodating illegal wars.  Ireland’s peace activists have been peacefully protesting US military use of Irish airports whereby over two and a half million armed US troops have passed through Shannon Airport on their way to and from the US-led Afghan and Iraq wars.  I believe ireland should refuse permission to any further stopover and refueling facilities being granted to aeroplanes ferrying troops or munitions to the wars and also withdraw Irish participation from all NATO and EU military operations overseas.

Ireland is deeply admired in many countries and has a proud record in helping developing countries.   Their role as mediators and peace negotiators is well known.   I would like to propose that Ireland disband their army and focus their finance and people on developing their great expertise in the science of peacemaking through a Government Dept. of Peace.   Recommitting to its tradition of neutrality and multilateralism, placing ethics, morality and justice as core values at the heart of its foreign policy would send out a clear message of Irish Government rejecting the road of militarism and war and choosing the road of peace and reconciliation, both locally and internationally.

For our survival through the UN we need to move to General and Complete Disarmament – including nuclear weapons.  This is not an impossible dream.  I commend the Irish Government in their work at UN to work for Nuclear Disarmament.  I believe we can take hope from Pope Francis statement after pointing out the dangers of nuclear weapons when he says‚

‘The threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.’

And the Pope quotes as an example the

‘historic vote at the UN the majority of the members of the international community determined that nuclear weapons are not only immoral, but also must be considered an illegal means of warfare.’

It is to be hoped that UK, Israel, USA and other nuclear armed states will begin to dismantle their nuclear weapons and help turn back the hands of the doomsday clock.   Up to the end of 1961 at the United Nations general and complete disarmament was the aim of all governments.  In a joint Soviet-United states statement of 20 Sep l961 they stated,

‘The goal of negotiations is to achieve agreement on a program which will ensure that disarmament is general and complete and war is no longer an instrument for settling international problems’.

Let us unite our voices to call for an end to enmity and war, and for President Trump and President Putin to join together with all world leaders in a World Peace Conference to work for an agreed Programme of General and Complete Disarmament.  Such courageous leadership towards dialogue and disarmament would give hope to humanity.

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Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.

Featured image is from FAIR

Major news outlets have resumed efforts to pressure President Donald Trump to pull back from trying to negotiate a deal with Pyongyang. In their latest salvo last week, The New York Times and CNN completely misrepresented the findings of a recent study of satellite photos of a North Korean missile base as evidence of bad faith and “deception” in talks with the United States.

A New York Times article bore the sensational headline, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.” In a breathless tone, the writers, David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, declared that the satellite images “suggest that North Korea has been engaging in a great deception,” because it had offered to dismantle a major launching site while “continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.”

Screengrab from The NYT

If such improvements had been made during the U.S.-North Korean exchanges, they have might well merit official and public attention—if they have given North Korea new capabilities for threatening the United States or its allies, as Sanger and Broad suggested. But a review of the study of the satellite images of the base reveals that it does not describe any such improvements as claimed by the Times. On the contrary, the study says the satellite images “show minor infrastructure changes to the base that are consistent with what is often seen at remote KPA {Korean People’s Army] bases of all types.”

Furthermore, according to the study issued by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), those same minor infrastructure changes had been observed at a number of similar missile bases, along with training and operational readiness improvements that the authors presume have existed ever since the reorganization of the Strategic Rocket Command into the Strategic Force in 2013.

In short, there were no “improvements that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads” that could be cited as evidence of an effort by North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un to deceive Trump. Sanger and Broad either a) did not actually read the study of the satellite images on which they were supposedly basing their accusation or b) were deliberately deceiving their readers.

Further obfuscating the issue, Sanger and Broad argued that the failure of North Korea to “acknowledge” those missile bases “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the eliminating of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.” That mysterious formulation seems to imply-–-absurdly—that North Korea had somehow welshed on an obligation to fully inform the United States of its missile assets in advance of a negotiated agreement on the sequence and timing of the steps both sides would need to take to conclude an denuclearization agreement.

Sanger and Broad are well aware that revealing the specific locations of its ballistic missiles to the United States under present circumstances would involve serious military risk for the DPRK. Kim Jong Un cannot reasonably be expected to reveal such information until an a significantly less threatening atmosphere has been established between the United States and North Korea.

And in any case it is completely unrealistic to expect North Korea to end all of its ballistic missile programs. As Vipin Narang of MIT observed to CNN, “Many of these are short-range conventional missiles which North Korea has never said were on the table.” North Korea cannot give them up without losing completely its ability to deter outside attack, since it does not have a modern air force with the necessary capability for deterrence.

CNN’s coverage of the CSIS study made essentially the same false and deceptive claims. “New satellite images cast grave doubt on President Trump’s claim that his negotiations with North Korea are working,” the on air report by Jim Sciutto began. That conflated Trump’s citation of the North Korean cessation of missile testing before any negotiations had begun with any claim about progress on the North Korean missile program in general.

Then came the outright falsehood: “The photos show that Kim Jong Un’s regime is making improvements to more than a dozen hidden missile bases.” Like the Times’ reporters, the network had either failed to read the report at all or had decided to simply lie about what it said. And also like Sanger and Broad, by calling the missile bases “hidden,” it sought to suggest that Kim Jong Il was somehow deceiving the United States by storing them underground.

Buried deep in the Times story is the real reason the newspaper and CNN have both gone to such extreme journalistic lengths to present the CSIS study as new evidence of North Korean “deception.” Victor Cha, one of the authors of the CSIS-sponsored study, commented in an interview with the Times, “What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal—they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things and in return they get a peace agreement.”

The “peace agreement” to which Cha refers would be a declaration by the United States, North Korea and possibly China that the Korean War, which has technically only had an armistice but not formally ended, is indeed over. Kim Jong Un and Trump talked about such a declaration at the Singapore summit, and Trump promised to sign such a peace declaration, according to two sources who knew what transpired between the two men.

The summit meeting’s final statement referred to “establishment of new U.S.–DPRK relations and the building of a lasting and robust peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” including U.S. security assurances to North Korea.

And last month South Korean foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha suggested that North Korea would be willing to permanently dismantle their nuclear facilities at Yongbyon in return for such a political declaration by the United States.

But as Victor Cha suggested, the Pentagon and the national security elite in general are determined to prevent Trump from entering into such an agreement. The reason for that opposition, as the New York Times itself reported in August, is that it would force the United States to begin “talking about how many American troops are needed in South Korea.” Then it would then have to acknowledge that the U.S. troop presence in South Korea is not only to deter North Korea but “helps the United States maintain a military footprint in Asia and a grand strategy of American hegemony”.

A campaign of bureaucratic resistance to any move toward a peace deal with North Korea is in full swing.  And as the latest round of journalist malpractice dramatically illustrates, the corporate media will not hesitate to resort to blatant untruth to support that resistance.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Featured image: President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un shake hands in summit room, June 12, 2018. (Office of the President of the United States/Public Domain)

Alan Robock discusses his research into nuclear winter and considers how devastating even a small nuclear war could be for our climate and for human survival.

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At the recent International Conference Against US/NATO Military Bases (held on November 16-18, 2018, in Dublin, Ireland), David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War, noted that when:

“last year the Irish Ambassador to the United States came to the University of Virginia, [he] asked her how allowing U.S. troops to use Shannon Airport to get to their wars could possibly be in compliance with Irish neutrality. She replied that the U.S. government “at the highest level” had assured her it was all perfectly legal. And she apparently bowed and obeyed. But I don’t think the people of Ireland are as inclined to sit and roll over on command as their ambassador.”

In fact, in February 2003 the Irish Times reported:

“The Army has been called in to provide security around Shannon Airport after five peace activists broke into a hangar and damaged a US military aircraft early this morning. It is the third embarrassing security breach at the airport where US military planes are refuelling en route to the looming war with Iraq.”

One anti-war activist Mary Kelly was convicted of causing $1.5m in damage to a United States navy plane at Shannon airport.

She attacked the plane with a hatchet causing damage to the nose wheel and electric systems at the front of the plane.

In the aftermath, it took until Friday 25th February, 2011, when the Court of Criminal Appeal in Dublin overturned the conviction against Mary Kelly for criminal damage to a US military aircraft at Shannon Airport on 29 January 2003.

This weekend’s conference in Dublin included speakers: Dr. Aleida Guevara, Member of Cuban National Assembly, Cuba, Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD, Sinn Féin Defense Spokesperson, Ireland, Clare Daly TD, Dail Eireann, Ireland, Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Northern Ireland, Silvio Platero, President, MOVPAZ, Cuba, Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace, CODEPINK, USA and Chris Nineham, Vice-Chair, Stop the War Coalition, UK.

The conference was organised by the Global Campaign Against US/NATO Military Bases which itself is a coalition of peace organisations from around the world. The organisers are deeply concerned by the constant “threat of war that permeates the present Global atmosphere.”

Their main raison d’etre is outlined on their website and is summarised as follows:

“The increasingly aggressive and expansionist actions of US/NATO forces in violation of international law and the sovereign rights of all nations, the raging wars in the Middle East, the expansive militarization of the African continent via AFRICOM, the burgeoning arms race devastating the national treasuries, the bellicose language replacing diplomatic negotiations, the economic crises facing country after country, and the destruction of the global environment through war and unfettered exploitation, and their impact on public health, have all created crises that, unless checked by popular opposition, can lead to unimaginable catastrophe and war.”

They call on people all over the world to mobilise in their millions to unite for peace. The conference in Dublin is the organisation’s first initiative to kick-start this campaign and was hosted by the Irish organisation Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA).

You can watch the entire conference here.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from http://nousnatobases.org

The Pakistani Prime Minister is correct in pointing out how much his country did for the US in response to Trump’s disrespectful attack against it this weekend.  

One of Trump’s prerecorded interviews aired this weekend where the American President attacked Pakistan for supposedly doing nothing for the US during the nearly two decades that the two Great Powers have been notionally “allied” in the War on Terror. He mocked the country for supposedly knowing about Bin Laden’s alleged whereabouts in Abbottabad, implying that it was only leeching off of American taxpayers this entire time and was never serious about fighting terrorism in exchange for aid. Trump’s insults might have went unanswered under previous administrations, but Prime Minister Khan’s “Naya Pakistan” (“New Pakistan”) made a point to directly reply to him on the President’s favorite medium, Twitter. In a series of hard-hitting tweets, the Pakistani leader protected his country’s reputation by responding with the following clarification:

“Record needs to be put straight on Mr Trump’s tirade against Pakistan: 

1. No Pakistani was involved in 9/11 but Pak decided to participate in US War on Terror. 

2. Pakistan suffered 75,000 casualties in this war & over $123 bn was lost to economy. US “aid” was a miniscule $20 bn.

3. Our tribal areas were devastated & millions of ppl uprooted from their homes. The war drastically impacted lives of ordinary Pakistanis. 

4. Pak continues to provide free lines of ground & air communications(GLOCs/ALOCs).

Can Mr Trump name another ally that gave such sacrifices?

Instead of making Pakistan a scapegoat for their failures, the US should do a serious assessment of why, despite 140000 NATO troops plus 250,000 Afghan troops & reportedly $1 trillion spent on war in Afghanistan, the Taliban today are stronger than before.”

As can plainly be seen, Pakistan has done everything that it could for America while receiving nothing but turmoil and terrorism in return for a paltry amount of so-called “aid”. Even to this very day Pakistan “continues to provide free lines of ground & air communications” for the US to Afghanistan, showing not only a genuine dedication to the cause, but also a loyalty that many in the country are arguing is undeserved after the disrespect that they’ve consistently experienced from the new American administration. Pakistan suffered from terrorism many orders of magnitude more than the US ever did, most of which happened after its post-9/11 anti-terrorist “alliance” with America, but the only “thanks” that it’s getting for its sacrifices is to be scapegoated for Washington’s military failure in Afghanistan. 

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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 The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

The ongoing de facto genocide in the Republic of Yemen in a war whose most intense phase began in 2015, has until very recently been all but ignored in the Western mainstream media. What has also been ignored is the fundamental casus belli for the US-backed Saudi war, ostensibly against the Shi’ite Houthi by the Sunni Wahhabite Saudis. As with virtually every war and destabilization since the British first discovered abundant oil in the Persian Gulf over a century ago, the Yemen war is about oil, more precisely about control of oil, lots of oil.

Yemen is a strategically key geopolitical stretch of land at the critical connecting point of the Red Sea which links to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. It’s the site of one of the world’s most strategic shipping choke points, the Bab el Mandab, a narrow passage a mere 18 miles distance from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, making it one of the US Department of Energy’s Oil Transit Chokepoints. According to the US Department of Energy an estimated 4.7 million barrels of oil passesthrough Bab el Mandab in both directions daily, including oil bound for China.

In March 2015 a new civil war raged in Yemen between the group known popularly as Houthis after Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, of the Zaidi sect of Islam. The Zaidi area traditionally moderate group who favors equality of women, something anathema to the Saudi Wahhabites. The Zaidi had ruled Yemen for more than 1,000 years until 1962.

The Houthi movement had forced the ouster of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in late 2011 on charges of vast corruption. He was succeeded by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s Vice President. At that time both Saleh and Hadi were proxy presidents of Saudi influence.

Things began to change when Hadi refused to step down after his mandate expired. His decision to cut subsidies on fuel prices as well as refusing agreed reforms led to his arrest by the Houthi movement forces in early 2015. He managed later to flee to Saudi Arabia on March 25, 2015 and that same day Saudi Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman ordered the start of the ongoing bombing war against Yemen and the Houthis.

By the end of 2015 Prince bin Salman and his coalition in the strangely-named Operation Decisive Storm (remember Desert Storm) had inflicted atrocities on the civilian population of Yemen. Within six months of relentless Saudi-led bombing, the UN declared Yemen a “Level Three” emergency, the highest level. Bombings destroyed critical civilian infrastructure, health facilities and the Saudis blockaded urgently needed food, water and medical aid to an estimated 20 million Yemenis, in violation of international law. Some 2,500,000 Yemeni civilians have been displaced. Famine and cholera are rampant. In short, it is genocide.

Cheney Oil Wars

The roots of the ongoing Yemen war with the Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states can be traced back to the Bush-Cheney Administration in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and declaration of the so-called War on Terror.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was about oil. Several US officials admitted so at the time including Paul Wolfowitz. 

”You’ve got to go where the oil is. I don’t think about it [political volatility] very much,” Cheney told a meeting of Texas oilmen in 1998 when he was still CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil services company.

As Vice President under Bush Jr, Cheney by all indications architected the US military campaigns of Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to “take out seven countries in five years,” as General Wesley Clark famously reported it several years later. All those seven are strategic to control of the huge Middle East oil flows to China, to the EU and to the world economy.

In 2004 when the Cheney-Bush “War on Terror” went to Yemen to support then-president Saleh, Saudi domination of Yemen was unquestioned. US and British forces backed Saleh against an uprising by the Houthi minority that began after Saleh tried to arrest Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the Zaidi religious leader.

By 2015 that US proxy war changed and the Pentagon and Obama Administration quietly backed a full-scale catastrophic Saudi military assault on Yemen.

What is the US or Saudi interest in Yemen? Control of the oil is the short answer, but perhaps not in the usual sense.

In November 2005 the Republic of Yemen expropriated its oil basins — the Marib Al-Jawf Block — from US Hunt Oil Company and ExxonMobil. That was an irritant but not a decisive game-changer. It was in 2014 when the Houthi rebellion against the President, Saudi-backed Hadi, was victorious that the war took a new form. By March 2015 the Houthi-led Supreme Revolutionary Committee declared a general mobilization to overthrow Hadi, after taking over Sana’a and the Yemeni government and proceeding to Aden.

Undiscovered potential

There are two strategic aspects of who is in control of Yemen, especially the areas now in control of the Houthi. One is the mentioned geostrategic control of oil flows passing Bab el Mandab in the Horn of Africa. The second is the control of the largely untapped oil wealth of Yemen itself.

In 2002 a public report by the US Geological Survey (USGS) concluded that, “When undiscovered potential is added to known reserves, the total petroleum endowment for the MadbiAmran / Qishn TPS rises to 9.8 BBOE, which then ranks Yemen 51st for potential of petroleum resources, exclusive of the US.”

Now, 10 billion barrels of crude oil might not seem huge compared with the Saudi claim to hold proven reserves of 266 billion barrels. Here, however, a CIA report from 1988 becomes interesting. The report, South Yemen’s Oil Resources: The Chimera of Wealth, heavily redacted and declassified, has a cryptic note on potential oil reserves in the large disputed border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The CIA points to oil and gas reserves along what during the Cold War was the disputed border Neutral Zone between North Yemen and South Yemen.

The Hunt Oil Company of Texas has been sitting in the Alif Field since 1982 and discovered oil there in 1984. The Alif Field lies in the Houthi-controlled north of Yemen near the undefined border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The author had the occasion almost two decades ago during an interview with someone associated with the US Government to discuss notions of peak oil and oil geopolitics. At that point the person in discussion volunteered that the undefined desert lands between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, according to non-published US aerial and geophysical surveys, held oil reserve potential that likely exceeded that of Saudi Arabia.

Whether that statement was accurate is not possible to independently confirm. What is clear is that the space surrounded by the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, including Yemen and Somalia is one of the most tectonically active areas on our planet, a prerequisite for hydrocarbon discovery. Presence of huge oil and gas reserves in Yemen would explain much about why the Pentagon has actively backed the Saudi brutal effort to retake control of Yemen from the Houthi.

It has little to do with any Shi’ite versus Wahhabite Sunni conflict. Rather it has to do with strategic control of world energy. So long as Saana was in control of a Saudi proxy, whether Saleh or then Hadi, it was a secondary priority for Washington. The oil was “safe,” even if the Yemen government had expropriated the US company oil properties. Once a determined independent Houthi Zaidi force was in control of Yemen or a major part, the threat became serious enough to give the eager new Saudi Defense Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman the green light to begin the war. That Houthi-controlled Yemen would be potential client for Russian or Chinese oil companies to open up serious exploration of the potentials. That combined with the fact that the Houthi also had friendly relations with Iran clearly set off red lights in the Obama Administration.

Salman not surprisingly claimed it was a war of Iran-led “imperialists” against the forces of Saudi-led “freedom-loving” Sunnis.China now has its first overseas military base across from Yemen in Djibouti, next door to the US whose Camp Lemonnier is the largest American permanent military base in Africa. Former colonial occupier France is also there. There is far more at stake in Yemen than we are being told.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

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U.S Green Party Urges International Criminal Court to Prosecute Israel for Crimes Against Palestinians

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, November 20, 2018

Members of the delegation understand they have a responsibility to act and to educate others in the United States about the truth of the violent Israeli occupation of Palestine and apartheid state.

Netanyahu’s Ceasefire Is Meant to Keep Gaza Imprisoned

By Jonathan Cook, November 20, 2018

Palestinians in Gaza should have been able to breathe a sigh of relief last week, as precarious ceasefire talks survived a two-day-long, heavy exchange of strikes that threatened to unleash yet another large-scale military assault by Israel.

Military Escalation in the Gaza Strip, Israeli Missile and Bombing Attacks on Civilian Buildings

By IMEMC, November 16, 2018

New Israeli Military Escalation in the Gaza Strip: Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of airstrikes, launching 197 missiles at civilian buildings and military sites belonging to Palestinian Armed Groups.

Escalation of Israeli Attacks against Gaza: Global Solidarity Campaign with the Palestinian People

By Salah Abdelati, November 14, 2018

Let us urgently work together in the biggest global solidarity campaign with the Palestinian people against the Israeli aggression on Gaza Strip, in order to boycott, alienate and hold accountable the Israeli occupation.

Video: Gaza Is on Edge of Israeli Ground Invasion

By South Front, November 13, 2018

The current round of escalation started on November 11 when a covert unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) opened fire at a patrol of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, in the town of Khan Yunis inside the Gaza Strip.

Gaza Needs International Intervention Now to Prevent Another Israeli Offensive

By Yousef Alhelou, November 13, 2018

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, injured or maimed when a truce is supposed to be in place. Endless efforts mediated by regional countries have tried to put pressure on Israel and the Palestinian resistance factions to abide by the terms of the truce to provide some calm in one of the most volatile regions in the world.

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The parents on the global stage of power are bickering and now, such entertainingly distracting forums as APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum) are left without a unifying message.  This should hardly matter, but the absence of a final communiqué of agreement is being treated in some circles as the preliminary perturbations to conflict between Beijing and Washington.

Often forgotten at the end of such deliberations is their acceptable irrelevance.  APEC as a forum was already deemed by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans in 1993 to be “four adjectives in search of a noun.”  Charles E Morrison of the East-West Centre in Hawaii noted another view.  “Some wag described it as an international dating service for leaders.”  On this occasion, the dates failed to reach a merry accord.

Such gatherings provide distractions and fodder for the global press corps to identify trouble, brewing or actual.  They can also supply the converse: that the state of adherence to international norms, whatever they may be, is better because of such meetings.  But in Port Moresby, coarseness emerged with tartness.  China and the United States were jostling.

US Vice President Mike Pence, who revealed his interest in the summit by basing himself in Australia rather than staying in Port Moresby, threw down what must have been a gauntlet of sorts.  At the Hudson Institute in October, he was moodily accusing Beijing of pilfering military blueprints, “using that stolen technology” to turn “ploughshares into swords on a massive scale”.

A puzzled Pence seemed to be gazing at a mirror, accusing Beijing of “employing a whole-of-government, using political, economic and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States.”

At the APEC gathering itself, Pence made it clear that there would be no warming of relations with Beijing.  Rather amusingly, he insisted that,

“The United States deals openly, fairly.  We do not offer a constricting belt or a one-way road.”

China’s Xi Jinping, for his part, was also in a mood to impress.

“Unilateralism and protectionism will not solve problems but add uncertainly to the world economy.”

The forum was filled with more rumours than a village from the middle ages.  Chinese officials, went one well flighted suggestion, supposedly forced their way into the office of Rimbink Pato, PNG’s foreign minister, being most insistent on discussing the wording of a section of the proposed communiqué.  A suggested sentence featured in the agitated encounter: “We agreed to fight protectionism, including all unfair trade practices.”  So worded, it was clear what the intended meaning was: Beijing was being singled out as a possible purveyor of unfair trade practices.   These were deemed “malicious rumours” by the Chinese delegation.

At the conclusion of the summit, Papua New Guinea, as host, expressed its concerns through a rattled Prime Minister Peter O’Neill: the “giants” had disagreed; the “entire world” was worried.  Other delegates bore witness to the Beijing-Washington tension, and were similarly left disappointed.  New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern was tepid in suggesting that there were “some minor differences in the international trade environment”.  She claimed, as did others, that

“it was disappointing that we were unable to have a communiqué issued at the conclusion of the APEC meeting… but it shouldn’t diminish from the areas of substantive agreement.”

Former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is one who is pessimistic about such “minor differences” between the powers, insisting that nothing less than an “Economic Iron Curtain” risks coming down upon the globe.  Given Paulson’s stint at that rogue-of-rogue banks Goldman Sachs, such warnings should be treated with due caution, largely because they fly in the face of the ideology of, to use Paulson’s own words, the “free flow of investment and trade”.

Commentators such as veteran journalist Tony Walker did not spare the drama, peering into the implications with the keenness of a history student in search of parallels.  “Port Moresby may not be Yalta, nor, it might be said, is it Potsdam.”  (Highly tuned, is Walker’s embellishing antennae.)  “But for a moment at the weekend the steamy out-of-the-way Papua New Guinea capital found itself at the intersection of great power combustibility.” Yet no bullets were fired, nor vessels launched.

The disagreement is merely the consequence of initiatives that are grating on both powers.  China is getting bolder with its global investment and infrastructure strategy, wooing states with no-strings financing. It is huffing in the South China Sea.  The United States can no longer claim to be the primary occupant of the world’s playgrounds, the bully of patronage, sponsorship and cant haloed by that advertising slogan, “the American way of life”.  Building sand castles is a task that will have to be shared, but bullies tend to eventually let the punches fly.

The result, at the moment, is a trade war of simmering intensity that continues to govern relations between Beijing and Washington.  APEC was meant to supply a forum of diffusion but merely affirmed the status quo. (On January, US tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods will increase from 10 per cent to 25 per cent.)

Countries keen to back both powers find themselves facing split loyalties, though that point is often exaggerated.  China knows where many countries in the South East Asian-Australasia region will turn to if the beads of sweat start to show.  Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was trying to make the obvious sound simple.  “It’s easiest not to take sides when everybody else is on the same side.  But if you are friends with two countries which are on different sides, then sometimes it is possible to get along with both, sometimes it’s more awkward if you try to get along with both.”

The next show takes place in Buenos Aires, and that November 30 gathering of the G20 promises another re-run of tensions.  On that occasion, President Donald Trump will be bothered to turn up.  Again, such a summit is bound to yield to the law of acceptable chaos and modestly bearable tension.

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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 Channel NewsAsia

The United States has threatened “consequences” as Palestinians step up efforts for statehood demanding accession to almost a dozen international bodies and conventions.

The threat came after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the documents on Thursday to join the Universal Postal Union, a UN agency that coordinates international postage, and 10 international protocols and conventions.

The move infuriated the US, Israel’s staunch ally, with a State Department official claiming that the Palestinian efforts to join international institutions were “premature” and “counterproductive.”

“We are currently reviewing possible consequences of the Palestinians’ recent actions,” the official said in a statement published by the Times of Israel on Sunday.

In November 2012, the UN General Assembly upgraded Palestine’s status from “non-member observer entity” to “non-member observer state” despite strong opposition from Israel.

Since then, the Palestinians have joined dozens of international or organizations and agreements, among them the International Criminal Court, as part of a campaign to garner support for the recognition of their homeland as a sovereign state.

Washington has asked the Palestinians not to join international agencies, citing laws dating to the early 1990s that require the US government to cut off funding to any UN organization that grants the Palestinians full membership.

Abbas, however, said a Palestinian agreement with the US not to join international bodies was conditioned on the US not ending aid payments, not moving its embassy to Jerusalem al-Quds and not changing the status of the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington.

The US withdrew some funding for UNESCO after the Palestinians joined the cultural and education organization back in 2011. It also pulled out of the agency altogether in 2017.

Most recently, Washington cut funds to the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.

The US-Palestine ties deteriorated last December when President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the “capital” of Israel.

The American embassy was also relocated from Tel Aviv to the ancient city in May, sparking angry reactions from Palestinians and severe criticism from the international community.

At that time, Abbas formally declared that Palestinians would no longer accept the US as a mediator to resolve the conflict because Washington was “completely biased” towards Tel Aviv.

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From November 18 to November 20, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) carried out a military operation against their own proxies in the region of Afrin. The TAF attacked and partially disarmed a group of about 200 members of the al-Sharqiyah Martyrs Gathering and its allied groups. The Hamza Division, the Sultan Murad Division, the al-Sham Corps and the 3rd Corps participated in the operation on the side of the TAF. At least 25 militants were reportedly killed in the clashes.

The formal explanation of the move is that members of the al-Sharqiyah Martyrs Gathering have been involved in looting and other crimes. However, this is not something uncommon for Turkish-backed groups, which participated in Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations.

Local sources say that the al-Sharqiyah Martyrs Gathering has just become too independent in its decisions and Ankara has decided to punish it for this.

On November 18, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named himself Defense Minister in addition to also being the Foreign Minister and Health Minister.

“The security of the state is above all else,” Netanyahu said criticizing Avigdor Lieberman’s decision to resign from the post of defense minister. He also insisted that there should be no election for another 12 months and that in such “a complex security period” it would be “irresponsible”.

A political crisis has been developing in Israel since the recent round of escalation in Gaza. A notable part of politicians and power groups, especially radicals, openly describe the ceasefire with Hamas as a defeat. They are pushing an idea of snap elections to reshape the government.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked have also threatened to resign recently. But they have not turned their threats into reality so far.

It should be fine, however, even if both Bennett and Shaked resign. It seems that even if Netanyahu gets all minister positions in his own cabinet, the US and the mainstream media will continue to highlight Israel as “the staple of democracy” in the Middle East and a great example of alternation of power.

Taking into account Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, the conflict in Syria and other key security issues, it’s an open secret that Israel appears to not be a defender of the stability in the region.

It would be interesting, however, what the international reaction would be if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also announced that he is to become Syrian Foreign, Defense and Health Minister.

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Depending on what criteria one uses, there are between 200 and 600 groups in the United States that wholly or in part are dedicated to furthering the interests of Israel. The organizations are both Jewish, like the Zionist Organization of America, and Christian Zionist to include John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, but the funding of the Israel Lobby and both its political and media access comes overwhelmingly from Jewish supporters and advocates.

Many of the groups are registered with the Internal Revenue Service for tax purposes as 501(c)3 “educational” or “charitable” foundations, which enables them to solicit tax exempt donations. One might dispute whether promoting Israeli interests in the United States is actually educational, but as of right now the Department of the Treasury believes it can be so construed, protected by the First Amendment.

But there is a more serious consideration in terms of the actual relationships that many of the groups enjoy with the Israeli government. To be sure, many of them boast on their promotional literature and websites about their relationships with the Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, so the issue of dual loyalty or, worse, acting as actual Israeli government agents must be considered.

There is a legal remedy to hostile foreigners acting against American interests and that is the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). Originally intended to identify and monitor agents of Nazi Germany propagandizing in the United States, it has since been applied to individuals and groups linked to other nations. Most recently, it was used against Russian news agencies RT America and Sputnik, which were forced to register. It is also being considered for Qatar based al-Jazeera.

FARA requires identified agents to be transparent in terms of their funding and contacts while also being publicly identified as representing the interests of a foreign nation. They must report to the Department of Justice every contact they have with congressmen or other government officials. The text of the Act defines a foreign agent as

“any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal, and who directly or through any other person— (i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (ii) acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee or political consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (iii) within the United States solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of such foreign principal; or (iv) within the United States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States.”

In spite of language that would presumably cover many of the hundreds of Jewish organizations acting for Israel, FARA has never been used to compel registration of any such groups or individuals even when it was public knowledge that they were working closely with the Israeli government to coordinate positions and promote other Israeli interests. That failure is at a minimum a tribute to Jewish power in the United States, but it is also due to the fact that the organizations are funded from within the United States by wealthy American Jews, not by Israel, which is the argument sometimes inaccurately made by the groups themselves to demonstrate that they are not being directed by the Israeli government.

The difficulty in proving that one is directed by a foreign government has been definitively resolved regarding one group the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has become the leading neoconservative bastion seeking a war with Iran, Israel’s bête noir. The recent al-Jazeera expose on the activities of the Israeli lobbies in both Britain and the United States, which I wrote about last week, included a surreptitiously filmed conversation with Sima Vaknin-Gil (image on the right), a former Israeli intelligence officer who now heads the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which is tasked with countering what is perceived to be anti-Israeli activity worldwide. The Ministry is particularly focused on the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which is increasingly active in both the United States and Europe.

Vaknin-Gil was discussing his activities with Tony Kleinfeld, an undercover investigative reporter who was secretly recording and filming his encounters with various members of the Israel Lobby as well as of the Israeli government.Vaknin-Gil provided explicit confirmation that the FDD works directly with the Israeli government, making it an Israeli agent by the definition of FARA.

For those who are unfamiliar with FDD, it is probably currently the most prominent neocon organization though it nevertheless claims to be a non-partisan “research group.” It focuses on foreign policy and security issues by “Fighting Terrorism and Promoting Freedom,” as it informs us on its website masthead. It works to “defend free nations against their enemies,” which frequently means in practice anyone whom Israel considers to be hostile, most particularly Iran. FDD’s Leadership Council has featured former CIA Director James Woolsey, Senator Joe Lieberman, and Bill Kristol. Its Executive Director is Canadian import Mark Dubowitz, who is obsessed with Iran. Its advisors and experts are mostly Jewish and most of its funding comes from Jewish oligarchs.

FDD’s auditorium has become a preferred venue for senior officials of the Trump Administration to go and make hardline speeches, just as the American Enterprise Institute was under George W. Bush. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Nikki Haley have all spoken there recently, frequently focusing on Iran and the threat that it allegedly constitutes.

FDD aside, Vaknin-Gil also confirmed that there were other groups in the United States doing the same sorts of things on behalf of Israel. He said

“We have FDD. We have others working on this,” elaborating that FDD is “working on” projects for Israel including “data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail.”

So Vaknin-Gil was admitting that FDD and others were working as Israeli proxies, collecting information on U.S. citizens, spying on legal organizations, and both planning and executing disinformation at Israeli direction. Kleinfeld also spoke with a Jonathan Schanzer, a senior official in FDD, who filled in a bit more of what the foundation is up to in terms of discrediting groups in the U.S. that support the BDS movement.

Schanzer admitted “BDS has taken everybody by surprise” before complaining that the Jewish response has been “a complete mess. I don’t think that anybody’s doing a good job. We’re not even doing a good job.” He then complained that attempts to discredit Palestinian groups by linking them to terrorist groups had failed, as also had the use of the label anti-Semitism. “Personally I think anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be.”

So, when will the Justice Department move on FDD now that its true colors have been exposed by al-Jazeera? The group must be required to register if justice be done, but will it? Its principal partner in crime the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has avoided registering for more than sixty years by claiming that it is an American organization working to educate the U.S. public about the all the good things connected to Israel. Even though it meets regularly with Israeli government officials, it claims not to be representing Israeli interests. But just as in the case of FDD, it is time to require AIPAC to register as what it really is: a foreign agent. As a registered agent, it will still be able to exercise First Amendment rights to defend Israel but it would not be able to be involved in lobbying on Capitol Hill and directing money to politicians who are described as pro-Israeli, as it does now. Its finances will be transparent and it will be perceived as an official advocate for Israel, not as an educational resource for what is happening in the Middle East. Hopefully, when AIPAC stops throwing money around, the politicians and media types will find another place to roost.

To be sure the lovefest for Israel in government extends far beyond FDD and AIPAC. It can be found in many dark corners. National Security Advisor John Bolton recently received the “Defender of Israel” award from the Zionist Organization of America. And one might suggest that the U.S. United Nations delegation, headed by Ambassador Nikki Haley, is directed by the Israeli government, particularly given events of last Friday whereby the U.S. voted against a motion condemning Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, thereby recognizing for the first time Israel’s sovereignty over the area. Whether Haley was speaking for herself or for the administration was characteristically unclear, but it hardly matters. Nikki Haley might be referred to as a useful idiot, as Lenin put it, but her consistent pattern of extreme loyalty in defense of Israel marks her out as being particularly beholden to the Jewish state, which will no doubt arrange to richly reward her through some position in financial services for which she is totally unqualified when she leaves her post in January. And then she will be well funded to run for president in 2020. Having Haley in charge, one might just as well vote for Benjamin Netanyahu.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

Featured image is from The Unz Review

The Hague, The Netherlands (Monday, November 19, 2018) – Members of the Green Party United States traveled to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday, November 29, 2018 to deliver a letter calling for a full investigation of Israel for war crimes it has committed against the Palestinians. [Read the text here.]

In addition to being endorsed by the Green Party U.S., the letter was signed by over 1,000 organizations, including Popular Resistance, and individuals from the United States who want prosecutors at the ICC and the world to know that there is a political party along with people in the US who support holding nations accountable to international law. The Green Party recognizes that the United States is complicit in Israel’s crimes by providing financial support, selling weapons and providing political cover to Israel.

The letter states:

For 70 years [Palestinians] have: suffered the most appalling living conditions imposed upon them by the military occupation and apartheid rule; peacefully resisted the unabated illegal settlements upon their land (at least 80% has been seized since the Nakba); withstood the blockade of Gaza and survived genocidal assaults. Since 1947 the Palestinians have steadfastly and peacefully fought for their safety, dignity, freedoms and Right of Return proclaimed by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 passed in 1948. The Right of Return, to include damages and compensation, was deemed their inalienable right in Resolution 3236 passed in 1974. [footnotes omitted.]

Green Party co-chair, Margaret Flowers and Miko Peled, a member of the Green Party U.S., a dual Israeli and American citizen and author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine and other books, met with a representative of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor to deliver a copy of the signed letter. The letter will be entered into the body of evidence being collected as part of a preliminary investigation to determine whether a full investigation will be conducted.

A delegation of Green Party U.S. members, many of whom are on the Green Party U.S. Peace Action and International Committees, made video statements outside the ICC after the letter was delivered. [Video here.]

The delegation included Kevin Zeese, Diane Moxley, Marie Spike, who authored the original draft of the letter, and Stephen Verchinski. The delegation was joined by Dirk Adriaensens of the BRussells Tribunal, which conducted a tribunal on Palestine.

Miko Peled stated,

“It was an honor to be part of the GPUS delegation to the ICC, to add our voice to the growing demand to investigate Israel for war crimes. Only when people of the world speak up will the Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity be brought to justice.”

Members of the delegation understand they have a responsibility to act and to educate others in the United States about the truth of the violent Israeli occupation of Palestine and apartheid state. It is by countering the myths put out by the media and U.S. lawmakers, due to the significant Israeli influence over them, and showing solidarity with Palestinians that the tide will shift toward justice for people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee.

While the Green Party worked on the issue for months, on the same day that the Green Party National Committee voted to endorse the letter, John Bolton said the United States would not cooperate with war crime investigations and called for sanctions against ICC judges if they proceed with an investigation of the United States or Israel.

Delegation at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands on November 19, 2018. From left to right Margaret Flowers, Green Party co-chair, member of the Green Party Peace Action Committee and Green Party of Maryland, Miko Peled, Green Party US member, Dirk Adriaensens of the BRussells Tribunal, Diane Moxley of Green Party International Committee and Green Party of New Jersey, Stephen Verchinski of the Green Party International Committee and Green Party of New Mexico, Marie Spike, of the Green Party International Committee and Green Party of Michigan and Kevin Zeese of the Green Party Peace Action Committee and Green Party of Maryland (Source: Popular Resistance)

Prior to visiting the ICC, members of the delegation met with Nils Mollema of Al Haq, an organization founded by Palestinian lawyers to address Israel’s occupation and apartheid. Members of the Green Party of The Netherlands (De Groenen) including Otto ter Haar as well as members of the Green Left Party (Groen Links) participated in that meeting.

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Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

“I was playing football with friends when a bomb exploded right under my feet. They took me to the hospital: both my legs and also the lower part of my left arm were amputated.”

Kaum was just 14 when in 2014 he fled the village of Bartalla, 20km east of Mosul, as the Islamic State group began its rampage across Iraq. For three years, he lived in a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. In December 2017, he finally returned home and his daily life was slowly returning to normality – when he accidentally detonated an explosive remnant.

His life was changed forever.

“I can’t go to school anymore because I am still traumatised. My friends are helping me, they always give me a ride to go out with them, but I know I will never be able to play football with them again.”

We met Kaum at the East Mosul rehabilitation centre. His story details an emergency inside the emergency. A year after its liberation, the area surrounding Iraq’s second largest city remains a ticking time-bomb.

According to UN Habitat, eight million tons of explosive remnants contaminate the city.

Thousands of people have been injured returning home from camps for the displaced.

“It is very difficult for those who return to rebuild their homes because under the rubble there are still many IEDs, explosive devices and remnants. IEDs were mainly home-made by [the Islamic State group] and for this reason they are even more dangerous,” says Hawar Mustafa, programme coordinator at Emergency, an Italian NGO.

Prosthetic clinics have teamed up after the maunfacturer’s factory was targeted [Laura Cappon]

Mustafa coordinates the emergency rehab centre in Sulemaniya, which coordinates with its partner in Mosul to provide prosthetic limbs after the local factory that produced them was hit, seriously compromising production.

The emergency center in Sulemaniya still receives a high number of patients from Mosul. Mahfouz is one.

He was walking with his son through the streets of Bab Sinjar’s old district in Mosul when an explosive device inside a nearby car detonated due to a small fire.

“Since I lost my leg, I can’t work anymore,” Mahfouz tells The New Arab. “I was a driver and now I can’t do anything anymore. I’m sitting home and my son is the only one providing an income for the family.

“Now with this prosthesis I feel better and I hope to be able to drive soon, perhaps with a car with special equipment, which would allow me to resume a sort-of normal life after years of war.”

Hundreds of displaced people are still living in camps and refuse to return to their homes because of the numbers of “victim-activated IEDs” and explosive remnants in the city.

“A couple of weeks ago, Iraqi soldiers found a grenade in a building beside my house. It was a former IS member’s house and now the authorities forbid us to enter in any building which was occupied by IS,” Nawal says.

She lives in Badush, northwestern Mosul. Her daughter is among 4,800 people who – according to to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) – lost a limb during the war.

“There are still a lot of explosive devices in my area – and this is a huge problem. Our daily life is already difficult, we don’t have drinkable water; we have to boil it before use it. My daughter’s life was destroyed when she lost her leg and I don’t want it to happen again – to me or to anyone else of the family.”

In the same village, Jazm lost his legs in October 2017. He was playing football with his friends close to a concrete factory. He was only 11 years old at the time.

“After the amputation, I spent ten months without going to school. I was hospitalised for months and underwent surgery several times. My eyes were also damaged by the exposion,” he says.

“Now that I wear a prosthesis, I will try to return to school, because I want to go to college. I would like to study medicine in order to be able to help people in need as the doctors hepled me after the incident.”

The presence of anti-personnel mines and unexploded ordnance is not a new problem in northern Iraq. Three decades of fighting in Iraq’s northern governorates of Dohuk, Arbil and Sulaymaniyah left behind a huge number of landmines and bomblets. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), these devices threaten an estimated 1,100 communities in northern Iraq and cause an average of 30 accidents per month.

New prosthetic limbs are crafted carefully and slowly, and demand is high [Laura Cappon]

The consequences have been felt by entire generations.

Naswan is from west Mosul. He lost his hand when he was only ten years old, picking up a grenade from the ground when he was playing in the outskirts of the city. Twenty-five years later, his cousin lost a leg when he accidentally detonated a mine in the rubble of his former family home.

“I can’t believe the same thing happened to my cousin,” Naswan says. “He returned to rebuild his partially destroyed house. As soon as he entered, a bomb went off, and his mother was also injured. I’m scared: the area is not properly cleared and I’m afraid not only for my three sons and my daughter but for everyone around.”

The work of securing the city of Mosul and the surrounding area is moving at a slow pace. According to the UN it could take another ten years, during which many more people will be victims of these hidden devices.

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