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Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami visited Damascus Aug. 26-27 in order to have a new military cooperation agreement signed. The move is evidently a response to US and Israeli demands to withdraw Iranian forces from Syria. No details have been provided about the document’s content but it’s logical to surmise it contains a list of mutual obligations in the event that the Iranian military is attacked in Syria.

The deal mentions Iran’s role in the reconstruction of Syria’s defense industry, thus ending any hopes that its military presence in that country will end. According to the Iranian defense chief, the “defense and technical agreement” provides for the continued “presence and participation” of Iran in Syria. He added that an agreement had been reached with Syria that Iran would have “presence, participation, and assistance” in the reconstruction and that “no third party will be influential in this issue.”

The agreement was signed just as the Russia-Turkey-Iran summit was announced, which is scheduled for Sept. 7 in Tehran. Such events normally require thorough preparations. The parties are expected to reach an agreement on further joint steps to achieve progress in Syria. It’s important to align their positions before the UN talks in Geneva, which are slated for Sept. 11-12. UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura has invited the “big three” to participate. They can come up with joint initiatives while the US has nothing to offer but its demands for Iran’s withdrawal. It risks being left out in the cold, while diplomatic efforts initiated by other states bear fruit.

This turn of events will hardly be welcome news for those who would like to stymie the peace efforts and impose their own conditions for reaching any settlement of the problem.

The need to end Iranian assistance to Lebanon’s Hezbollah was emphasized during last week’s visit of US National Security Adviser John Bolton to Israel. The parties did not declare war on Iran, but there is no way to stop the supplies from reaching Hezbollah in Lebanon without cutting off the land routes going through Syria. The US official insisted before the visit to Israel that the withdrawal of Iran’s forces from Syria is a prerequisite to any resolution of the conflict.

The US and its allies in Syria find it important to scuttle Syria’s plans to liberate the province of Idlib from the rebels. A false-flag chemical attack is expected to be staged soon, to create a pretext for military action. Once Syria and Iran are in the same boat, it makes no difference which of them is attacked first or where. There have been media reports that a large-scale military operation is in the works and can be expected in August or September.

There is no way to know what exactly Mr. Bolton discussed with the Israeli authorities during his visit to Jerusalem on Aug. 19 but the reports about the military activities at the US al-Shaddadi base in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah emerged soon afterward. The facility has been reported to have been updated to enable the landing and takeoff of heavy cargo aircraft. Ayn al-Arab (Kobani) has also been expanded. In August, shipments of ammunition and military hardware were delivered to several US-controlled facilities in Syria and Iraq. Radars have been transported to the SDF-controlled areas east of the Euphrates River.

Meanwhile, several thousand militants with heavy weaponry and armored vehicles in Syria’s Idlib province are getting ready to launch an offensive against government-controlled regions of Hama and Aleppo. The attack will be targeted at Syrian as well as Iranian and pro-Iranian forces that have been invited in by the Syrian government.

It looks like plans are underway to force Syria to plunge into turmoil once again. In reality, the combat actions have already started. The US and Israel conducted their first joint operation against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and the Iraqi Shiite Khata’ib Hezbollah, their allies, on Aug. 23 near Abu Kamal, which is situated on the highway between Syria and Iraq. President Trump has said so many times and on so many occasions that he wants the Americans to leave Syria but US foreign policy is known for its flip-flops. Whatever is said today may be forgotten tomorrow.

This time, Lebanon may become a new front. It’s widely believed that a war between Israel and Hezbollah is inevitable. In February, US and Israeli troops held an exercise to practice for a potential war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a country that holds a military agreement with Russia. The offshore drilling contracts Lebanon has signed with other countries, without solving its border dispute with Israel, are spurring the war preparations.

Syria and Iran have defied pressure and demonstrated their resolution not to bow but to protect their right to make independent decisions. They are offering a challenge. If the defense agreement just signed between those two allies provokes a military conflict, it will most certainly spill over to other countries, such as Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. It would lead to a long, protracted, and costly war.

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Peter Korzun is an expert on wars and conflicts.

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The image is truly apocalyptic. It looks as though a bomb has fallen on this stretch of road, which is a major artery – that is how a journalist described the Morandi bridge in Genoa just after it had collapsed, destroying the lives of dozens of people.

These words bring to mind other images, those of about 40 Serbian bridges destroyed by NATO bombing in 1999 – among these the bridge over the Morava in Southern Serbia, where two missiles hit a train and massacred the passengers. For 78 days, taking off mostly from Italian bases supplied by the D’Alema government, 1,100 planes made 38,000 sorties, launching 23,000 bombs and missiles. They systematically destroyed Serbian structures and infrastructures, causing thousands of civilian victims. 54 Italian planes participated in the attacks, making 1,378 sorties and attacking objectives indicated by the US command.

“Taking into account the number of planes involved, we were second only to the United States. Italy is a major country, and there should be no surprise at the engagement we show in this war”, declared D’Alema.

In the same year that it took part in the final demolition of the Yugoslavian State, the D’Alema government dismantled the public property of the Società Autostrade (also manager of the Morandi bridge), by handing over a part of it to a group of share-holders, and listing the rest on the Stock Exchange. The Morandi bridge collapsed fundamentally under the responsibility of a system centred on profit, the same system which is at the heart of the powerful interests represented by NATO.

Source: PandoraTV

The comparison between the images of the collapsed Morandi bridge and the bombed Serbian bridges, which may at first seem forced, is on the contrary well-founded.

First of all, the terrible scene of victims buried under the rubble by the collapse should make us reflect on the horrible reality of war, which the major medias present to us as a sort of ’war game’, with the pilot taking aim at the bridge and the remote-controlled bomb blowing it to pieces.

Secondly, we should remember that on 28 March, the European Commission presented a plan of action which anticipates the repair and maintenance of EU structures, including the bridges, but not in order to make them safer for civilian mobility, but more efficient for military mobility [2 See this].

In reality, this plan was decided by the Pentagon and by NATO, who demanded that the EU “improve civilian infrastructures so that they will be better adapted to military requirements” – in other words, to be able to displace tanks, self-propelled cannons and other heavy military vehicles as quickly as possible from one European country to another, in order to move against “Russian aggression”. For example – if a bridge is not able to support the weight of a column of tanks, it will have to be reinforced or rebuilt.

We might believe that in this case, if the bridge is strengthened, it will therefore also become safer for civilian vehicles. But the question is not so simple.

These modifications will only be made for military mobility on the most important land arteries, and the enormous expenditure will be assumed by each country, which will be obliged to subtract the cost from its resources for the general improvement of its infrastructures.

A financial contribution by the EU is planned for a sum of 6,5 billion Euros, but – as specified by Federica Mogherini, responsible for the “security policy” of the EU – only in order to “ensure that infrastructures of strategic importance are adapted to military requirements”.

But time flies – by September, the European Council will have to specify (on orders from NATO) the list of the infrastructures which must be potentialised for military mobility. Will the Morandi bridge be listed and rebuilt so that US and NATO tanks can safely transit over the heads of the people of Genoa?

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto.

Translated by Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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We keep hearing hard Brexiteers like Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox saying that Britain is heading for a no-deal exit from the EU and that leaving on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms is now likely. For most of Britain’s population, they have no idea what this really means, only that there is some sort of deal, even if it’s a bad one.

What you might not know is that the WTO is under serious threat of extinction anyway, just at the moment Britain needs the trade body more than ever.

The EU is launching its last-ditch plan to save the World Trade Organization just as U.S. President Donald Trump demonstrates ever more increasing signs that he is about to kill it off.

This week, Trump’s administration pushed the WTO closer to the brink by blocking, yet again, the reappointment of another judge at its Geneva-based court that arbitrates trade disputes. With only three judges out of seven left in the WTO, it will now face increasing difficulties in passing rulings on international disputes over tariffs, unfair trade barriers and subsidies. This effectively means that the WTO will not be looked upon as an effective global arbitration service.

Politico.eu reports Tuesday (28th Aug) that

“Many in Europe think Washington wants to destroy the court because it is not sufficiently tough on China and has been too interventionist in criticizing America’s high tariff calculations.”

The American’s are looking for WTO reform to work in its favour and says it’s prepared to talk and negotiate. However, European officials are sceptical and are now out to test whether Washington is bluffing.

“Brussels thinks the WTO plays a vital role as a referee in global trade disputes, so it has prepared reform proposals for next month to tackle exactly the sort of complaints that the U.S. has raised in Geneva. If Washington takes up the offer, it should lift its opposition to the judges, Brussels officials say. If Trump snubs the EU’s suggestions to reform the court, the Europeans will know that he simply wants to blow up the WTO.”

“This is certainly about calling America’s bluff,” said Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee. “The EU will make proposals to the WTO in September to kickstart the [reform] process and to test who is really willing to work on reform. Those who frequently issue criticism will then also have to commit to such a reform. And this means first and foremost the United States.”

If that’s not bad enough, it does get worse. While the WTO can theoretically operate at such bare-minimum levels with just three judges out of seven, there are now growing legitimacy problems with this arrangement. These remaining judges are from the U.S., China and India, the three countries right at the heart of some of the world’s biggest and most sensitive trade disputes. Judges are required to recuse themselves if there are conflicts of interest from their previous careers and that is highly likely for all three, especially the judges from the US and China.

Trump has made no secret of his contempt for the WTO. He takes the view that it is far too lenient toward Beijing. And as Politico points out, Trump has often mapped out strategies where the U.S. bypasses the WTO and wins trade wars simply by flexing its muscle as the world’s biggest economy. In a world without arbitration, Trump simply thinks he can’t lose.

United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is spearheading US actions over the WTO wrote that

“the WTO is undermining our country’s ability to act in its national interest … First among those concerns is that the WTO dispute settlement system has appropriated to itself powers that the WTO Members never intended to give it.”

Simon Lester, associate director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, said that the current blockage is “dangerous” and that “It’s still not clear whether America is willing to negotiate in good faith.”

In reality, without the WTO, America would simply bully its way through trade deals as there would be no effective trade body to act an independent judge on disputes.

As for the much reported no-deal Brexit. With no WTO rules to protect it, where would that leave Britain other than capitulating to the US – exactly as Trump wants it?

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Media outlets from Reuters to The Intercept falsely claimed the UN had condemned China for holding a million Uighurs in camps. The claim is based on unsourced allegations by two independent commission members, US-funded outfits and a shadowy opposition group.

Numerous major media outlets, from Reuters to The Intercept, have claimed that the United Nations has reports that the Chinese government is holding as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in “internment camps.” But a close examination of these news stories, and of the evidence behind them — or the lack thereof — demonstrates that the extraordinary claim is simply not true.

A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed in a statement to the Grayzone that the allegation of Chinese “camps” was not made by the United Nations, but rather by a member of an independent committee that does not speak for the UN as a whole. That member happened to be the only American on the committee, and one with no background of scholarship or research on China.

Moreover, this accusation is based on the thinly sourced reports of a Chinese opposition group that receives funding from foreign governments and is closely tied to exiled pro-US activists. While there have been many on-the-ground reports highlighting discrimination that Uighur Muslims have faced at the hands of the Chinese authorities, information about camps containing one million prisoners has originated almost exclusively from media outlets and organizations funded and weaponized by the American government to turn up the heat on Beijing.

A blatant falsehood introduced by Reuters and echoed across mainstream media

On August 10, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination conducted its regular review of China’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The review, which is conducted periodically for all 179 parties to the Convention, has generated a frenzied response by the Western corporate press — one which is uniformly misleading.

On the day of the review, Reuters published a report with an explosive headline: “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps.”

Screengrab from Reuters

The claim was feverishly reproduced by outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to denounce China and call for international action. Even The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan belted out the breathless headline, “One Million Muslim Uighurs Have Been Detained by China, the U.N. Says. Where’s the Global Outrage?” The impression readers were given was that the UN had conducted an investigation and had formally and collectively made such charges against China. In fact, the UN had done no such thing.

The headline of Reuters’ report attributed its explosive claim to the UN; yet the body of the article ascribed it simply to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. And this committee’s official website makes it clear that it is “a body of independent experts,” not UN officials.

What’s more, a look at the OHCHR’s official news release on the committee’s presentation of the report showed that the only mention of alleged re-education “camps” in China was made by its sole American member, Gay McDougall. This claim was then echoed by a Mauritanian member, Yemhelhe Mint Mohamed.

During the committee’s regular review of China, McDougall commented that she was “deeply concerned” about “credible reports” alleging mass detentions of millions of Uighurs Muslim minorities in “internment camps.” The Associated Press reported that McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing.” (Note that the headline of the AP news wire is much weaker than that of Reuters: “UN panel concerned at reported Chinese detention of Uighurs.”)

Video of the session confirms that McDougall provided no sourcing to back up her remarkable claim.

This is to say, one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims, but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one US individual to the UN as a whole.

In an email to the Grayzone Project, OHCHR spokesperson Julia Gronnevet confirmed that the CERD was not representative of the UN as a whole.

“You are correct that the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is an independent body,” Gronnevet wrote. “Quoted comments were made during public sessions of the Committee when members were reviewing State parties.”

Thus the OHCHR implicitly acknowledged that the comments by McDougall, the lone American member of an independent committee, were not representative of any finding by the UN as a whole. The report by Reuters is simply false.

“Credible reports” from a government-funded opposition group with zero transparency

In addition to this irresponsible misreporting, Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Conveniently left out of the story is that this organization is headquartered in Washington, DC.

CHRD, which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from unnamed governments, advocates full-time against the Chinese government and has spent years campaigning on behalf of extreme right-wing opposition figures.

CHRD is not at all transparent about its funding or personnel. Its annual reports contain notes stating, “This report has been produced with the financial support of generous donors.” But the donors are never named.

Publicly available 990 IRS filing forms reviewed by the Grayzone show that the organization is substantially funded by government grants. In fact, in 2015 virtually all of the organization’s revenue came from government grants.

CHRD’s 2015 form 990 discloses that $819,553 of its $820,023 revenue that year (99.94 percent) came from government grants. A measly $395 came from investments, with another $75 from other sources. According to its 2016 form 990, CHRD received $859,091 in government grants in that year.

Which government provided these grants is not clear. The Grayzone did not receive a response to several emailed interview requests sent to the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

However, it appears likely that CHRD could be receiving funding from the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

A search of the NED’s grants database shows funding from 2014 and 2015 totaling approximately half a million dollars to “support the work of Chinese human rights defenders.” It is not clear if this is a reference to the organization specifically, but the description accompanying the grants matches that of CHRD.

CHRD has used its generous funding to provide grants to opposition activists inside China, bankrolling dozens upon dozens of projects in the country.

On its tax forms, CHRD lists its address as the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch. HRW has long been criticized for its revolving door with the US government and its excessively disproportionate focus on designated enemies of Washington like China, Venezuela, Syria, and Russia.

Human Rights Watch did not respond to an email from the Grayzone inquiring about its relationship with CHRD.

CHRD’s forms 990 also reveal that the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.

The chair of the group is the US-based activist Su Xiaokang, who proclaimed that the Chinese public supposedly “wants the U.S. to watch over activists, and is disappointed when Washington fails.” Fellow US-based dissident Teng Biao is a CHRD director who has sarcastically boasted of how the Chinese communist party dubbed him a “reactionary.”

CHRD’s secretary is the American academic Perry Link, who has built his public reputation on winding up on the Chinese government’s academic “blacklist.” Link testified for the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2014, claiming that the Chinese government is threatening academic freedom in the US.

In his congressional testimony, CHRD secretary Link insisted the US government should crack down on the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute organization and instead fund its own pro-US Chinese-language programs. Link characterized Chinese-language programs as a potential American weapon against the Chinese communist party, arguing they could “very arguably do more to blunt the CPC’s advance than the [B-2 Spirit Bomber] airplane could.”

These are some of the pro-US, anti-Chinese government figures who lead the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Otherwise, there is very little publicly available information about CHRD. It appears to largely be the brainchild of its international director, Renee Xia, an opposition activist who has publicly called for the US government to impose sanctions on Chinese officials under the Magnitsky Act.

Support for the “non violence advocate” who loves America’s wars

CHRD’s founder, Xia, was a strong supporter of the imprisoned hard-right neoconservative Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and she campaigned years for his release.

An archived version of the group’s website shows that as far back as 2010, CHRD was vociferously advocating on behalf of Liu, while likening the Chinese government to Nazi Germany.

While Liu Xiaobo became a cause celebre of the Western liberal intelligensia, he was a staunch supporter of colonialism, a fan of the most blood-soaked US military campaigns, and a hardcore libertarian.

As writers Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong reported in The Guardian in 2010, Liu led numerous US government-funded right-wing organizations that advocated mass privatization and the Westernization of China. He also expressed openly racist views against the Chinese.

“To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human,” Liu insisted, lamenting that traditional Chinese culture had made its population “wimpy, spineless, and fucked up.”

While CHRD described Liu as an “advocate of non-violence,” he practically worshiped President George W. Bush and strongly supported the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the war in Afghanistan. “Non-violence advocate” Liu was even a fan of America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed millions of civilians.

CHRD’s most recent China report — the one cited by Reuters and other outlets to give credence to the allegations of Uyghur re-education camps — further highlights the organization’s links to Washington and compromised impartiality.

Most sources on the Uighur “camps” story are US government-linked

The most-cited source in the CHRD report, accounting for more than one-fifth of the 101 references, is Radio Free Asia (RFA), a news agency created by the US government. Along with Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Televisión Martí, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia is operated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency of the US government under the supervision of the State Department. Describing its work as “vital to U.S. national interests,” BBG’s primary broadcasting standard is to be “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”

The near-total reliance on Washington-linked sources is characteristic of Western reporting on Uighurs Muslims in China, and the country in general, which regularly features sensational headlines and allegations. In addition to CHRD and RFA, it is common for reports to cite the World Uighur Congress, an organization funded by the NED. At a recent NED event, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal interviewed World Uighur Congress chairman Omer Kanat, who took credit for furnishing many of the claims of internment camps to Western media.

Another favorite congressional and mainstream media source for information about China is the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank founded during the height of the Cold War by Reagan administration personnel with the support of then-CIA Director William J. Casey.  Former Jamestown board members include Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The latest incident of misreporting by Reuters is part of a trend of increasingly hostile, Cold War-like coverage of China by the Western press that coincides with Washington’s push for conflict with Beijing. In a series of policy statements, the Trump administration has repeatedly identified the “threat” posed by “economic and military ascendance” of China, with Defense Secretary James Mattis declaring that “Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the United States seeks to forestall the rise of of an alternative node of international power. A longstanding component of US imperialism is the use of ostensibly impartial “civil society groups” and “think tanks” to promote narratives in the media supportive of US foreign policy goals. Often under the guise of “humanitarian concern,” such stories aim to stir up public outrage and weaponize it to advance imperial ambitions.

This time-tested program is at the heart of the intensifying campaign against China, and as the latest raft of bogus stories demonstrated, the corporate media is eager to play along.

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Ajit Singh is a Canada-based writer, lawyer and activist. He tweets at @ajitxsingh.

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The EU’s de-facto leader officially acknowledged an irreversible sub-bloc integrational reality by requesting to partner with the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative”.

Poland received an unprecedented boost to its rising international prestige after Germany requested to partner with the Warsaw-led “Three Seas Initiative” (TSI) ahead of the sub-regional integrational bloc’s upcoming summit in Bucharest from 17-18 September. The EU’s leader had been loath to recognize this irreversible geopolitical reality because it represents the greatest threat to its EuroLiberal control over the Union as a result of the TSI’s distinctive EuroRealist approach to intra-organizational relations, specifically its emphasis on national sovereignty.

Be that as it may, Berlin realized the wisdom of the age-old adage that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and decided to request an official partnership with the TSI in an attempt to shift its center of gravity and shape (sabotage) the group from within. Warsaw is well aware of its historic rival’s intentions but also knows that it could leverage Germany’s interest in the sub-regional integrational bloc to its ultimate advantage if it succeeds in getting Berlin to use the Polish-led structure for organizing regional investment projects outside of the EU’s existing frameworks.

There’s actually a good reason for Germany to agree to this because the TSI has basically become the US and China’s portal of economic entry into Central & Eastern Europe, as well as being a zone of informal competition between the US and Russia in the New Cold War. Turkey’s also somewhat interested in it too, so it makes sense for Germany to join in the competition, after which Poland can then market the TSI as an even more important international entity than ever before after receiving official recognition of its significance from the EU’s de-facto leader.

Taken together, Poland has everything to gain by endorsing Germany’s request to officially partner with the TSI. Not only has Berlin implicitly accepted that the Warsaw-led sub-regional integrational bloc is an active arena of “friendly” international competition between several of the world’s most influential Great Powers, but this in and of itself essentially elevated Poland’s global strategic standing as a result. Because of these reasons, it’s no longer laughable to suggest that the TSI is the modern-day and much more successful manifestation of the inter-war “Intermarium”, therefore making it among Poland’s most meaningful contributions ever to European geopolitics.

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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.

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For almost seventeen years (Since September 9, 2001) Global Research, together with partner independent media organizations, has sought Truth in Media with a view to eventually “disarming” the corporate media’s disinformation crusade.

To reverse the tide, we call upon our readers to participate in an important endeavor.

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Our objective is to recruit one thousand committed “volunteers” among our 50,000 Newsletter subscribers to support the distribution of Global Research articles (email lists, social media, crossposts). 

Do not send us money. Under Plan A, we call upon our readers to donate 5 minutes a day to Global Research.

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The Real Russian Interference in US Politics

By Diana Johnstone, August 29, 2018

If Russia were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, it wouldn’t be attempting to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change Russia’s, argues Diana Johnstone.

Trump’s Desperate Measures Against Iran Could Lead to US Isolation: Prof. Tim Anderson

By Prof. Tim Anderson and Tasnim News Agency, August 28, 2018

The new measures against Iran by the Trump administration, including the formation of an Iran Action Group, are measures of desperation. Washington has no real allies in this, just some countries which are afraid to contradict Washington. Other countries, which formerly backed the nuclear disarmament moves against Iran (notably Russia and China, but also some European countries) have abandoned the US, leaving it isolated. And that isolation is deepening because Washington is now threatening all its so-called allies.

Russia Is Buying Gold: Will It Save Russia From Dollar Sanctions? End of Dollar Hegemony?

By Peter Koenig and Sputnik, August 28, 2018

The fact that Russia is stocking up on gold is not new. They have been doing this for years, especially during Mr. Putin’s leadership and more so since the imposition of the totally illegal sanctions that are based on falsehood and fabricated reasons in the first place – and continue on fabricated reasons, mostly by the US and the UK. 

The Crucifixion of Jeremy Corbyn

By Philip Giraldi, August 28, 2018

Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some aspects of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed Jews and Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message relating to what is going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the reality is that there exists an “Israel Lobby” in many countries, all dedicated to advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli governments no matter what the actual interests of the host country might be.

John McCain’s Imperial Complex

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 29, 2018

For a politician, aspects of the hero are sketched out, crumples and creases ironed.  In the case of the late Senator John McCain, his role as sober, stable legislator were underscored in a world of Trumpland’s narcissistic chaos.  His five-year stint a prisoner of war in that brutal school of re-education “Hanoi Hilton” constituted an important part of resume building in politics, and it was not forgotten.

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The narrative of Russian intelligence attacking state and local election boards and threatening the integrity of U.S. elections has achieved near-universal acceptance by media and political elites.  And now it has been accepted by the Trump administration’s intelligence chief, Dan Coats, as well. 

But the real story behind that narrative, recounted here for the first time, reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created and nurtured an account that was grossly and deliberately deceptive.

DHS compiled an intelligence report suggesting hackers linked to the Russian government could have targeted voter-related websites in many states and then leaked a sensational story of Russian attacks on those sites without the qualifications that would have revealed a different story. When state election officials began asking questions, they discovered that the DHS claims were false and, in at least one case, laughable.

The National Security Agency and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigating team have also claimed evidence that Russian military intelligence was behind election infrastructure hacking, but on closer examination, those claims turn out to be speculative and misleading as well. Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU military intelligence officers does not cite any violations of U.S. election laws though it claims Russia interfered with the 2016 election.

A Sensational Story 

On Sept. 29, 2016, a few weeks after the hacking of election-related websites in Illinois and Arizona, ABC News carried a sensational headline: “Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4.” The story itself reported that “more than 20 state election systems” had been hacked, and four states had been “breached” by hackers suspected of working for the Russian government. The story cited only sources “knowledgeable” about the matter, indicating that those who were pushing the story were eager to hide the institutional origins of the information.

Behind that sensational story was a federal agency seeking to establish its leadership within the national security state apparatus on cybersecurity, despite its limited resources for such responsibility. In late summer and fall 2016, the Department of Homeland Security was maneuvering politically to designate state and local voter registration databases and voting systems as “critical infrastructure.” Such a designation would make voter-related networks and websites under the protection a “priority sub-sector” in the DHS “National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which already included 16 such sub-sectors.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and other senior DHS officials consulted with many state election officials in the hope of getting their approval for such a designation. Meanwhile, the DHS was finishing an intelligence report that would both highlight the Russian threat to U.S. election infrastructure and the role DHS could play in protecting it, thus creating political impetus to the designation. But several secretaries of state—the officials in charge of the election infrastructure in their state—strongly opposed the designation that Johnson wanted.

On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day three intelligence agencies released a joint “assessment” on Russian interference in the election—Johnson announced the designation anyway.

Media stories continued to reflect the official assumption that cyber attacks on state election websites were Russian-sponsored. Stunningly, The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2016 that DHS was itself behind hacking attempts of Georgia’s election database.

The facts surrounding the two actual breaches of state websites in Illinois and Arizona, as well as the broader context of cyberattacks on state websites, didn’t support that premise at all.

In July, Illinois discovered an intrusion into its voter registration website and the theft of personal information on as many as 200,000 registered voters. (The 2018 Mueller indictments of GRU officers would unaccountably put the figure at 500,000.) Significantly, however, the hackers only had copied the information and had left it unchanged in the database.

That was a crucial clue to the motive behind the hack. DHS Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications Andy Ozment told a Congressional committee in late September 2016 that the fact hackers hadn’t tampered with the voter data indicated that the aim of the theft was not to influence the electoral process. Instead, it was “possibly for the purpose of selling personal information.” Ozment was contradicting the line that already was being taken on the Illinois and Arizona hacks by the National Protection and Programs Directorate and other senior DHS officials.

In an interview with me last year, Ken Menzel, the legal adviser to the Illinois secretary of state, confirmed what Ozment had testified.

“Hackers have been trying constantly to get into it since 2006,” Menzel said, adding that they had been probing every other official Illinois database with such personal data for vulnerabilities as well.  “Every governmental database—driver’s licenses, health care, you name it—has people trying to get into it,” said Menzel.

In the other successful cyberattack on an electoral website, hackers had acquired the username and password for the voter database Arizona used during the summer, as Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan learned from the FBI. But the reason that it had become known, according to Reagan in an interview with Mother Jones, was that the login and password had shown up for sale on the dark web—the network of websites used by cyber criminals to sell stolen data and other illicit wares.

Furthermore, the FBI had told her that the effort to penetrate the database was the work of a “known hacker” whom the FBI had monitored “frequently” in the past. Thus, there were reasons to believe that both Illinois and Arizona hacking incidents were linked to criminal hackers seeking information they could sell for profit.

Meanwhile, the FBI was unable to come up with any theory about what Russia might have intended to do with voter registration data such as what was taken in the Illinois hack.  When FBI Counterintelligence official Bill Priestap was asked in a June 2017 hearing how Moscow might use such data, his answer revealed that he had no clue:

“They took the data to understand what it consisted of,” said the struggling Priestap, “so they can affect better understanding and plan accordingly in regards to possibly impacting future elections by knowing what is there and studying it.”

The inability to think of any plausible way for the Russian government to use such data explains why DHS and the intelligence community adopted the argument, as senior DHS officials Samuel Liles and Jeanette Manfra (image on the right) put it, that the hacks “could be intended or used to undermine public confidence in electoral processes and potentially the outcome.” But such a strategy could not have had any effect without a decision by DHS and the U.S. intelligence community to assert publicly that the intrusions and other scanning and probing were Russian operations, despite the absence of hard evidence. So DHS and other agencies were consciously sowing public doubts about U.S. elections that they were attributing to Russia.

DHS Reveals Its Self-Serving Methodology

In June 2017, Liles and Manfra testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that an October 2016 DHS intelligence report had listed election systems in 21 states that were “potentially targeted by Russian government cyber actors.”  They revealed that the sensational story leaked to the press in late September 2016 had been based on a draft of the DHS report. And more importantly, their use of the phrase “potentially targeted” showed that they were arguing only that the cyber incidents it listed were possible indications of a Russian attack on election infrastructure.

Furthermore, Liles and Manfra said the DHS report had “catalogued suspicious activity we observed on state government networks across the country,” which had been “largely based on suspected malicious tactics and infrastructure.” They were referring to a list of eight IP addresses an August 2016 FBI “flash alert” had obtained from the Illinois and Arizona intrusions, which DHS and FBI had not been able to  attribute to the Russian government.

The DHS officials recalled that the DHS began to “receive reports of cyber-enabled scanning and probing of election-related infrastructure in some states, some of which appeared to originate from servers operated by a Russian company.” Six of the eight IP addresses in the FBI alert were indeed traced to King Servers, owned by a young Russian living in Siberia. But as DHS cyber specialists knew well, the country of ownership of the server doesn’t prove anything about who was responsible for hacking: As cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr pointed out, the Russian hackers who coordinated the Russian attack on Georgian government websites in 2008 used a Texas-based company as the hosting provider.

The cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect noted in 2016 that one of the other two IP addresses had hosted a Russian criminal market for five months in 2015. But that was not a serious indicator, either. Private IP addresses are reassigned frequently by server companies, so there is not a necessary connection between users of the same IP address at different times.

The DHS methodology of selecting reports of cyber incidents involving election-related websites as “potentially targeted” by Russian government-sponsored hackers was based on no objective evidence whatever. The resulting list appears to have included any one of the eight addresses as well as any attack or “scan” on a public website that could be linked in any way to elections.

This methodology conveniently ignored the fact that criminal hackers were constantly trying to get access to every database in those same state, country and municipal systems. Not only for Illinois and Arizona officials, but state electoral officials.

In fact, 14 of the 21 states on the list experienced nothing more than the routine scanning that occurs every day, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Only six involved what was referred to as a “malicious access attempt,” meaning an effort to penetrate the site. One of them was in Ohio, where the attempt to find a weakness lasted less than a second and was considered by DHS’s internet security contractor a “non-event” at the time.

State Officials Force DHS to Tell the Truth

For a year, DHS did not inform the 21 states on its list that their election boards or other election-related sites had been attacked in a presumed Russian-sponsored operation. The excuse DHS officials cited was that it could not reveal such sensitive intelligence to state officials without security clearances. But the reluctance to reveal the details about each case was certainly related to the reasonable expectation that states would publicly challenge their claims, creating a potential serious embarrassment.

On Sept. 22, 2017, DHS notified 21 states about the cyber incidents that had been included in the October 2016 report. The public announcement of the notifications said DHS had notified each chief election officer of “any potential targeting we were aware of in their state leading up to the 2016 election.” The phrase “potential targeting” again telegraphed the broad and vague criterion DHS had adopted, but it was ignored in media stories.

But the notifications, which took the form of phone calls lasting only a few minutes, provided a minimum of information and failed to convey the significant qualification that DHS was only suggesting targeting as a possibility. “It was a couple of guys from DHS reading from a script,” recalled one state election official who asked not to be identified. “They said [our state] was targeted by Russian government cyber actors.”

A number of state election officials recognized that this information conflicted with what they knew. And if they complained, they got a more accurate picture from DHS. After Wisconsin Secretary of State Michael Haas demanded further clarification, he got an email response from a DHS official  with a different account.

“[B]ased on our external analysis,” the official wrote, “the WI [Wisconsin] IP address affected belongs to the WI Department of Workforce Development, not the Elections Commission.”

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said DHS initially had notified his office “that Russian cyber actors ‘scanned’ California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016, including Secretary of State websites.” But under further questioning, DHS admitted to Padilla that what the hackers had targeted was the California Department of Technology’s network.

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos and Oklahoma Election Board spokesman Byron Dean also denied that any state website with voter- or election-related information had been targeted, and Pablos demanded that DHS “correct its erroneous notification.”

Despite these embarrassing admissions, a statement issued by DHS spokesman Scott McConnell on Sept. 28, 2017 said the DHS “stood by” its assessment that 21 states “were the target of Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure.” The statement retreated from the previous admission that the notifications involved “potential targeting,” but it also revealed for the first time that DHS had defined “targeting” very broadly indeed.

It said the category included “some cases” involving “direct scanning of targeted systems” but also cases in which “malicious actors scanned for vulnerabilities in networks that may be connected to those systems or have similar characteristics in order to gain information about how to later penetrate their target.”

It is true that hackers may scan one website in the hope of learning something that could be useful for penetrating another website, as cybersecurity expert Prof. Herbert S. Lin of Stanford University explained to me in an interview. But including any incident in which that motive was theoretical meant that any state website could be included on the DHS list, without any evidence it was related to a political motive.

Arizona’s further exchanges with DHS revealed just how far DHS had gone in exploiting that escape clause in order to add more states to its “targeted” list. Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan tweeted that DHS had informed her that “the Russian government targeted our voter registration systems in 2016.” After meeting with DHS officials in early October 2017, however, Reagan wrote in a blog post that DHS “could not confirm that any attempted Russian government hack occurred whatsoever to any election-related system in Arizona, much less the statewide voter registration database.”

What the DHS said in that meeting, as Reagan’s spokesman Matt Roberts recounted to me, is even more shocking.

“When we pressed DHS on what exactly was actually targeted, they said it was the Phoenix public library’s computers system,” Roberts recalled.

Image below: National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (Wikimedia)

In April 2018, a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment reported that the October 2016 DHS intelligence report had included the Russian government hacking of a “county database in Arizona.” Responding to that CBS report, an unidentified “senior Trump administration official” who was well-briefed on the DHS report told Reuters that “media reports” on the issue had sometimes “conflated criminal hacking with Russian government activity,” and that the cyberattack on the target in Arizona “was not perpetrated by the Russian government.”

NSA Finds a GRU Election Plot

NSA intelligence analysts claimed in a May 2017 analysis to have documented an effort by Russian military intelligence (GRU) to hack into U.S. electoral institutions. In an intelligence analysis obtained by The Intercept and reported in June 2017, NSA analysts wrote that the GRU had sent a spear-phishing email—one with an attachment designed to look exactly like one from a trusted institution but that contains malware design to get control of the computer—to a vendor of voting machine technology in Florida. The hackers then designed a fake web page that looked like that of the vendor. They sent it to a list of 122 email addresses NSA believed to be local government organizations that probably were “involved in the management of voter registration systems.” The objective of the new spear-phishing campaign, the NSA suggested, was to get control of their computers through malware to carry out the exfiltration of voter-related data.

But the authors of The Intercept story failed to notice crucial details in the NSA report that should have tipped them off that the attribution of the spear-phishing campaign to the GRU was based merely on the analysts’ own judgment—and that their judgment was faulty.

The Intercept article included a color-coded chart from the original NSA report that provides crucial information missing from the text of the NSA analysis itself as well as The Intercept’s account. The chart clearly distinguishes between the elements of the NSA’s account of the alleged Russian scheme that were based on “Confirmed Information” (shown in green) and those that were based on “Analyst Judgment” (shown in yellow). The connection between the “operator” of the spear-phishing campaign the report describes and an unidentified entity confirmed to be under the authority of the GRU is shown as a yellow line, meaning that it is based on “Analyst Judgment” and labeled “probably.”

A major criterion for any attribution of a hacking incident is whether there are strong similarities to previous hacks identified with a specific actor. But the chart concedes that “several characteristics” of the campaign depicted in the report distinguish it from “another major GRU spear-phishing program,” the identity of which has been redacted from the report.

The NSA chart refers to evidence that the same operator also had launched spear-phishing campaigns on other web-based mail applications, including the Russian company “Mail.ru.”  Those targets suggest that the actors were more likely Russian criminal hackers rather than Russian military intelligence.

Even more damaging to its case, the NSA reports that the same operator who had sent the spear-phishing emails also had sent a test email to the “American Samoa Election Office.” Criminal hackers could have been interested in personal information from the database associated with that office. But the idea that Russian military intelligence was planning to hack the voter rolls in American Samoa, an unincorporated U.S. territory with 56,000 inhabitants who can’t even vote in U.S. presidential elections, is plainly risible.

The Mueller Indictment’s Sleight of Hand

The Mueller indictment of GRU officers released on July 13 appeared at first reading to offer new evidence of Russian government responsibility for the hacking of Illinois and other state voter-related websites. A close analysis of the relevant paragraphs, however, confirms the lack of any real intelligence supporting that claim.

Mueller accused two GRU officers of working with unidentified “co-conspirators” on those hacks. But the only alleged evidence linking the GRU to the operators in the hacking incidents is the claim that a GRU official named Anatoly Kovalev and “co-conspirators” deleted search history related to the preparation for the hack after the FBI issued its alert on the hacking identifying the IP address associated with it in August 2016.

A careful reading of the relevant paragraphs shows that the claim is spurious. The first sentence in Paragraph 71 says that both Kovalev and his “co-conspirators” researched domains used by U.S. state boards of elections and other entities “for website vulnerabilities.”  The second says Kovalev and “co-conspirators” had searched for “state political party email addresses, including filtered queries for email addresses listed on state Republican Party websites.”

Searching for website vulnerabilities would be evidence of intent to hack them, of course, but searching Republican Party websites for email addresses is hardly evidence of any hacking plan. And Paragraph 74 states that Kovalev “deleted his search history”—not the search histories of any “co-conspirator”—thus revealing that there were no joint searches and suggesting that the subject Kovalev had searched was Republican Party emails. So any deletion by Kovalev of his search history after the FBI alert would not be evidence of his involvement in the hacking of the Illinois election board website.

With this rhetorical misdirection unraveled, it becomes clear that the repetition in every paragraph of the section of the phrase “Kovalev and his co-conspirators” was aimed at giving the reader the impression the accusation is based on hard intelligence about possible collusion that doesn’t exist.

The Need for Critical Scrutiny of DHS Cyberattack Claims

The DHS campaign to establish its role as the protector of U.S. electoral institutions is not the only case in which that agency has used a devious means to sow fear of Russian cyberattacks. In December 2016, DHS and the FBI published a long list of IP addresses as indicators of possible Russian cyberattacks. But most of the addresses on the list had no connection with Russian intelligence, as former U.S. government cyber-warfare officer Rob Lee found on close examination.

When someone at the Burlington, Vt., Electric Company spotted one of those IP addresses on one of its computers, the company reported it to DHS. But instead of quietly investigating the address to verify that it was indeed an indicator of Russian intrusion, DHS immediately informed The Washington Post. The result was a sensational story that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. power grid. In fact, the IP address in question was merely Yahoo’s email server, as Rob Lee told me, and the computer had not even been connected to the power grid. The threat to the power grid was a tall tale created by a DHS official, which the Post had to embarrassingly retract.

Since May 2017, DHS, in partnership with the FBI, has begun an even more ambitious campaign to focus public attention on what it says are Russian “targeting” and “intrusions” into “major, high value assets that operate components of our Nation’s critical infrastructure”, including energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors.  Any evidence of such an intrusion must be taken seriously by the U.S. government and reported by news media. But in light of the DHS record on alleged threats to election infrastructure and the Burlington power grid, and its well-known ambition to assume leadership over cyber protection, the public interest demands that the news media examine DHS claims about Russian cyber threats far more critically than they have up to now.

*

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Com todas as pontes destruídas, os moradores de Novi Sad foram forçados a atravessar o Danúbio numa barcaça com flutuadores, do exército. Mais fotos disponíveis aqui AQUI

“A imagem é realmente apocalíptica, parece que uma bomba caiu nesta artéria muito importante “: um jornalista descreveu, assim, a *ponte Morandi recentemente desmoronada em Génova, cortando a vida de dezenas de pessoas

Palavras que lembram outras imagens, as de cerca de 40 pontes sérvias destruídas pelo bombardeio da NATO em 1999, incluindo a ponte no sul de Morava, onde dois mísseis atingiram um comboio e mataram os passageiros.

Durante 78 dias, levantando voo principalmente das bases italianas fornecidas pelo governo de D’Alema, 1100 aviões fizeram 38 mil ataques, lançando 23 mil bombas e mísseis. As estruturas e infra-estruturas da Sérvia foram sistematicamente desmanteladas, causando milhares de vítimas civis. Nos bombardeamentos participaram 54 aviões italianos, que realizaram 1378 surtidas, atacando os objetivos estabelecidos pelo comando dos EUA.

“Pelo número de aviões, fomos ultrapassados, apenas, pelos USA. A Itália é um grande país e não nos devemos surpreender com o empenho demonstrado nesta guerra”, declarou D’Alema.

No mesmo ano em que participava na demolição final do Estado Jugoslavo, o governo de D’Alema demoliu a propriedade pública da Sociedade Autostrade (também administradora da ponte Morandi), vendendo uma parte a um grupo de accionistas privados e fixando o preço do restante na bolsa de valores. A ponte Morandi desmoronou-se, fundamentalmente, devido à responsabilidade de um sistema orientado para o lucro, o mesmo implícito na base dos poderosos interesses representados pela NATO.

A justaposição entre as imagens da ponte Morandi desmoronada e as pontes sérvias bombardeadas, que à primeira vista podem parecer forçadas, é, pelo contrário,   fundamentada. Primeiro de tudo, a cena angustiante das vítimas enterradas pelo colapso, deve-nos fazer reflectir sobre a horrenda realidade da guerra, tornada pelos meios de comunicação aos nossos olhos, como uma espécie wargame (jogo de guerra), com o piloto a enquadrar a ponte e a bomba teleguiada que a faz saltar pelo ar.

Em segundo lugar, devemos recordar que, em 28 de Março de 2018, a Comissão Europeia apresentou um plano de acção para o reforço das infra-estruturas da UE, incluindo pontes, não para torná-las mais seguras para a mobilidade civil, mas mais adequadas para a mobilidade militar (Ver il manifesto, 3 de Abril de 2018).

O plano foi decidido pelo Pentágono e pela NATO, que requereram à UE para “melhorar as infraestruturas civis de modo a adaptá-las às exigências militares”, de modo a poder mover o mais rapidamente possível, tanques, canhões autopropulsores e outros veículos militares pesados, de um país europeu para outro, para enfrentar a “agressão russa”. Por exemplo, se uma ponte não for capaz de suportar o peso de uma coluna de tanques,  precisará de ser fortalecida ou reconstruída.

Alguns dirão que desta forma a ponte se tornará mais segura até mesmo para veículos civis. A questão não é assim tão simples. Essas mudanças serão feitas apenas nas rotas mais importantes para a mobilidade militar e as enormes despesas serão arcadas pelos países individuais, que terão de subtrair recursos à melhoria geral das infraestruturas.

Está prevista uma contribuição financeira da União Europeia de 6,5 biliões de euros, mas – afirmou Federica Mogherini, responsável pela “política de segurança” da UE – apenas para “garantir que as infraestruturas de importância estratégica sejam adequadas às necessidades militares”. Os tempos são apertados: até Setembro, o Conselho Europeu terá de especificar (sob indicação da NATO) quais são as infraestruturas para melhorar a mobilidade militar. Será também a ponte Morandi, reconstruída para que os tanques dos USA/NATO possam passar com segurança sobre a cabeça dos genoveses?

*A ponte Morandi, importante viaduto rodoviário de Génova, administrado por uma empresa privada, ruiu no dia 14 de Agosto de 2018, causando mais de 40 vítimas. A causa provável é uma falha estrutural, cujos sinais foram ignorados durante anos.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 28 de Agosto de 2018

Artigo em italiano :

Ponti crollati e ponti bombardati

Video em italiano com subtítulo em português (PandoraTV) :

«L’immagine è davvero apocalittica, sembra che una bomba sia caduta sopra questa importantissima arteria»: così un giornalista ha descritto il ponte Morandi appena crollato a Genova, stroncando la vita di decine di persone.

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According to Ugur Ergan, Hurriyet Daily News, (yet to be confirmed) the US is installing an Air Defense system and electronic radar systems in Northern Syria, in Kobani, close to the border with Turkey. The Western media has not covered these developments.

The Kobani region is controlled by US supported YPG Kurdish rebels, together with a contingent of 2000 US forces. Turkey is fighting the YPG rebels, which Ankara considers “as the illegal PKK’s Syrian offshoot and, thus, designated as terrorist organizations”.  In fact this last statement constitutes the  justification for the illegal deployment of Turkish troops in Northern Syria.

In other words, the Turkish Armed forces are fighting Kurdish rebels who are supported and generously financed by the United States.

The Hurriyet report intimates that the US air defense system is to be used against Turkish air strikes with a view to protecting the Kurdish YPG rebels within an area now controlled by the U.S. Does this mean that Turkey and the US are at war with one another?

According to Hurriyet:

The Ankara government is closely monitoring the news regarding the installation of airdefense and radar systems reported by some foreign media outlets.  A video circulating on social media purportedly shows U.S. soldiers installing the systems shipped to Kobani with military transport aircraft.

… Radar systems are being installed [by the US] in the rural areas of Kobani just across the Turkish border town of Suruç in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, foreign media outlets reported citing local sources.

(see screenshot of Google map below, the black line indicate the border between Syria and Turkey)

Press TV also confirmed that the US had installed advanced radar systems  at the Ayn al-Arab (Kobane) military airport and the town of Rmelan in Hasakah Province.

The Pentagon has already established a military base in  Manbij, which was initially described as a safe zone (see map)

On August 25, a senior official of the US State Department William Roebuck traveled to Manbij:

“We are prepared to stay here, as the president (Donald Trump) has made clear … We are prepared to stay here [in Syria] to ensure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL],”

US forces in Manbij area, March 2018 source Sputnik

Roebuck was referring to more than 2,000 US and allied troops deployed in territories in Northeast Syria under Kurdish YPG control. (Press Tv, 25 August 2018). 

In an earlier article (August 26) I raised the issue of a US sponsored “No Fly Zone” in Northern Syria:

“The no fly zone” appears to be modelled on that imposed on Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, allegedly to protect Kurds in Northern Iraq.

But in this case the US zone of influence is on Turkey’s door step, the No Fly Zone extends to Turkey’s border.

According to Sputnik News (August 28): “The US military is laying the groundwork to close the airspace over northern Syria” (without consultation with its ally: Turkey?).

While Turkey has established an alliance of convenience with Russia and Iran (both of which are involved militarily in Syria), the  US and Turkey are potentially on a “Collision Course” which could lead the Middle East into a broader war.

Direct military confrontation between two member states of the Atlantic Alliance would inevitably lead to a deep seated crisis within NATO. (This crisis is already ongoing). 

Featured image is from Hurriyet 

As the digital landscape of the internet continues to shift and search engines proceed to set up barriers between readers and independent news sources such as Global Research, we are faced with a question: how do we keep the conversation going?

With the world in crisis, information as to what is actually going on is highly sought after, yet not so easy to find. Whether it be the war on Syria, the recent massacre in Gaza, or the Skripal affair in the UK, the coverage provided by major news corporations is often compromised, biased, and incomplete. The role of independent media is crucial to restoring the balance and untangling the narratives we are presented with by the mainstream media.

To combat the current trend towards silencing independent critical analysis online we need your voice.

With measures being put in place to reduce our reach (such as tacit online censorship of independent media) there are a number of ways you can help us make sure that the questions we ask continue to be heard by more and more people:

• Share our articles via social media
• Build an internet community by discussing our articles in online groups or forums
• Create an e-mail list of people you think could benefit from the themes we cover and send out articles of interest
• Set up a study group or conversation group to keep the discussion going in your university, workplace or community organisation

This is the initial phase of the establishment of a network of communities and groups, further updates will follow. Through truth in media we can take steps towards dismantling the disinformation machine. We thank you for your essential support!

For more information or if you have any questions, please contact: [email protected]

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US National Security Adviser John Bolton – a tireless proponent of US-led war around the globe – has recently claimed the Syrian government is preparing to use chemical weapons to retake territory held by militants in northern Syria. In response, the US has already threatened to carry out military strikes against Syria. 

Bloomberg in its article titled, “U.S. Warns Russia It Will Hit Assad If He Uses Chemical Arms, Sources Say,” claims:

Tensions between the nuclear powers flared after National Security Adviser John Bolton told his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, that the U.S. has information Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may be preparing to use chemical weapons to recapture the northwestern province of Idlib from rebels.

The article also claimed:

In April 2017, and again a year later, the U.S. carried out limited airstrikes on Syrian targets as punishment for what it said was the use of chemical weapons. Bolton said any U.S. action will be stronger this time, the people familiar with the talks said.

Screengrab from Bloomberg.

However, not only has the US failed categorically to produce the evidence it claimed to possess regarding previous alleged chemical weapon attacks blamed on Damascus, it has also failed to provide any logical motive to explain why Damascus would carry out such attacks.

The Syrian military along with its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese allies have retaken large swaths of occupied Syrian territory from Western-backed terrorists through the use of conventional weapons, including precision strike capabilities provided by Russian military aviation.

Alleged chemical weapon attacks have been on such small scales as to have no tactical or strategic value to Damascus, but demonstrable political value to the United States, its regional partners, and the militants it has been arming and backing since the 2011 conflict began.

Chemical Weapon Attacks: Cui Bono? 

The US media and its corporate sponsors have repeatedly attempted to explain the rationale behind Damascus’ alleged use of chemical weapons. This struggling narrative is best summed up by Atlantic Council “expert” Aaron Stein and US Army Reserve officer Luke O’Brien in their coauthored article titled,  “The Military Logic Behind Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons.”

The article claims that chemical weapons are a cheap alternative for struggling regimes fighting wars “on the cheap.” The article proposes that chemical weapons are ideal for terrorizing the population and to target “buried facilities” that a lack of precision munitions have left otherwise invulnerable.

The article claims:

 Chemical weapons have proved to be more psychologically damaging to populations than conventional munitions, and are thus well-suited to the regime’s strategy of mass punishment.

Yet the article can only cite 4 instances in which the Syrian government allegedly even used chemical weapons in the past 5 years. There have literally been more total cities the Syrian military has had to retake from foreign-sponsored militants than even the most liberal number of alleged chemical weapon attacks blamed on Damascus.

Stretching the credibility of this narrative further, the article assigns another impetus to Damascus’ alleged use of chemical weapons, claiming:

For Assad, chemical weapons also compensate for the limitations of his army’s older, less sophisticated weapons. While the use of precision-guided munitions has grown in militaries around the world, they are still a comparatively small part of most countries’ arsenals, limited to anti-tank roles or against naval targets. As a result, most states are forced to use unguided munitions instead. Many targets, if sufficiently protected, can weather most unguided attacks by sheltering in structures, tunnels, or fighting positions.

The article claims that chemical weapons can seep into these heavily defended positions “with relative ease.” However – again – the article itself can only cite 4 instances where Damascus allegedly used chemical weapons in the past 5 years. Syrian forces have obviously encountered well-fortified militant positions more than 4 times in the past 5 years – having retaken buildings, blocks, districts, and even entire cities through the use of conventional weapons and military tactics.

The routine use of humanitarian corridors, cease-fire deals, and the government-sponsored relocation of militants lays to rest the West’s claims that Damascus aims to “collectively punish” its own population.

The Western narrative falls apart even further when considering the Syrian government most certainly does have access to precision munitions and the ability to deliver them to specific, well-fortified targets – through the aid of Russian military aviation.

As pointed out by even the Western media, Russian warplanes have carried out over 70 sorties per day at certain points during the Syrian conflict – a number in a single day dwarfing even the wildest accusations leveled against Damascus about chemical weapon use since the conflict began in 2011.

There is clearly no tactical, strategic, or political gain for Damascus to use chemical weapons. But there is every reason for the US and its partners to lie and claim it does.

Blatant False Flags 

The Western narrative – summarized by Stein and O’Brien – also attempts to account for the most obvious explanation for repeated instances of chemical weapon attacks carried out at critical junctures of the conflict, just before major breakthroughs are achieved by Syrian forces – that the attacks are staged to create a pretext for Western military intervention.

To this, the likes of Stein and O’Brien claim the US has no way of leveraging staged chemical weapon attacks to its benefit. The article claims:

The regime presumably weighs the expected cost of retaliatory strikes against the clear military benefit of chemical weapons use. The United States, for its part, has to balance the desire to punish the regime for violating its commitment not to use chemical weapons with other factors, like protecting American troops in northeast Syria and limiting the risk of unintended escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have signaled that they do not want to risk such escalation over the war in Syria. Thus, Assad can count on the presence of Russian forces in Syria to act as a deterrent against strikes that could threaten regime stability.

Of course, there are no military benefits for Damascus in using chemical weapons – and of course, the US presence and its multiple strikes on Syrian forces have all been predicated at least in part to allegations of chemical weapon use by Damascus. The US State Department has also repeatedly cited “chemical weapons” as a pretext to maintain a US military presence in Syria.

As Syrian forces close in on Idlib, with Western-sponsored militants flushed out of virtually every other city, town, and governorate west of the Euphrates, little will stop Damascus from finally returning security and stability to Idlib as well.

Only staged provocations used as a pretext for US forces and their allies to strike at advancing troops or command and control elements of the Syrian armed forces can delay or stop an inevitable victory for Damascus and its allies. With the liberation of Idlib, America’s occupation of eastern Syria will become more tenuous still.

Bolton’s baseless accusations, built on equally baseless, irrational narratives signals a new level of political and diplomatic desperation in Washington, where blatantly staged provocations are done in the open in the hopes the threat of naked force is enough to coerce Syria and its allies to hesitate or withdraw from retaking Idlib.

It will be up to Damascus and its allies to ensure sufficient deterrence is put in place to ensure the consequences of America’s use of naked force are greater than any perceived benefits gained from exercising it – tactically, strategically, politically, and diplomatically.

*

Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially 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 the author.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

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The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a conflict between two ideologies and two socio-economic systems.

All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly, but today capitalism rules the world. At first glance, it may seem to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between American unipolar dominance and a multipolar world.

The defeat of communism was brutally announced in a certain “capitalist manifesto” dating from the early 1990s that actually proclaimed: “Our guiding light is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life.” The authors of this bold tract were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who went on to become the richest man in Russia (before spending ten years in a Russian jail) and his business partner at the time, Leonid Nevzlin, who has since retired comfortably to Israel.

Loans for Shares

Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using the “loans for shares” trick.

In a 2012 Vanity Fair article on her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked:

“The new oligarchs—a dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money brought—concocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval.”

This worked so well that from his position in the Communist youth organization, Khodorkovsky used his connections to get control of Russia’s petroleum company Yukos and become the richest oligarch in Russia, worth some $15 billion, of which he still controls a chunk despite his years in jail (2003-2013).

His arrest made him a hero of democracy in the United States, where he had many friends, especially those business partners who were helping him sell pieces of Yukos to Chevron and Exxon. Khodorkovsky (image below), a charming and generous young man, easily convinced his American partners that he was Russia’s number one champion of democracy and the rule of law, especially of those laws which allow domestic capital to flee to foreign banks, and foreign capital to take control of Russian resources.

Vladimir Putin didn’t see it that way. Without restoring socialism, he dispossessed Khodorkovsky of Yukos and essentially transformed the oil and gas industry from the “open society” model tolerated by Yeltsin to a national capitalist industry. Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were accused of having stolen all the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003, tried, convicted and sentenced to 14 years of prison each. This shift ruined U.S. plans, already underway, to “balkanize” Russia between its many provinces, thereby allowing Western capital to pursue its capture of the Russian economy.

The dispossession of Khodorkovsky was certainly a major milestone in the conflict between President Putin and Washington. On November 18, 2005, the Senate unanimously adopted Resolution 322 introduced by Senator Joe Biden denouncing the treatment of the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as politically motivated.

Who Influences Whom?

There is an alternative view of the history of Russian influence in the United States to the one now getting constant attention. It is obvious that a Russian who can get the Senate to adopt a resolution in his favor has a certain influence. But when the “deep state” and the corporate media today growl about Russian influence, they aren’t talking about Khodorkovsky. They are talking about alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. They are seizing, for example, on a joking response Trump made to a reporter’s snide question during the presidential campaign. In a variation of the classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” the reporter asked if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to “stay out” of the election.

Since a stupid question does not deserve a serious answer, Trump said he had “nothing to do with Putin” before adding, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Many Trump opponents think this proves collusion. Irony appears to be almost as unwelcome in American politics as honesty.

When Trump revoked his security clearance earlier this month, former CIA chief John Brennan got his chance to spew his hatred in the complacent pages of The New York Times. Someone supposed to be smart enough to head an intelligence agency actually took Trump’s joking invitation as a genuine request. “By issuing such a statement,” Brennan wrote, “Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.”

As America’s former top intelligence officer, Brennan had to know that (even if it were true that Trump was somehow involved) it is ludicrous to suggest that Trump would have launched a covert intelligence operation on national television. If this were a Russian operation to hack Clinton’s private server it would have been on a need-to-know basis and there is no evident need for Trump or his campaign team to have known.

Besides, Clinton’s private server on the day Trump uttered this joke, July 27, 2016, had already been about nine months in possession of the Department of Justice, and presumably offline as it was being examined.

Since Brennan knows all this he could only have been lying in The New York Times.

The Russians, Brennan went on, “troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters.”

But which Russians do that? And who are those “individuals?”

‘The Fixer-in-Chief’

To understand the way Washington works, one can focus on the career of lawyer Jonathan M. Winer, who proudly says that in early 2017 the head of the Carnegie Endowment, Bill Burns, referred to him as “The Fixer-in-Chief.” Let’s see what the fixer has fixed.

Winer served in the Clinton State Department as its first Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Law Enforcement from 1994-1999. One may question the selectivity of Bill Clinton’s concern for international law enforcement, which certainly did not cover violating international law by bombing defenseless countries.

In any case, in 1999 Winer received the State Department’s second highest award for having “created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions.” The award stated that “the scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official.”

After the Clinton administration, from 2008 to 2013, Winer worked as a high-up consultant at one of the world’s most powerful PR and lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO’s many clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was jailed.

Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovsky after his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act. APCO president Margery Kraus is a member of the Institute of Modern Russia, which is headed by Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel, with the ostensible purpose of “promoting democratic values” – in other words, of building political opposition to Putin.

When John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, allowing Hillary to prepare her presidential campaign, Winer went back to the State Department. Winer’s extracurricular activities at State brought him into the public spotlight early this year when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) named him as part of a network promoting the notorious “Steele Dossier,” which accused Trump of illicit financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia, in a word, “collusion” with Moscow.

By Winer’s own account, he had been friends with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, as well as to top Russia experts. Among these reports was the infamous “Steele dossier,” opposition research on Trump financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

But dirt seemed to pass the other way too. According to a Feb. 6 Washington Post story, Winer passed on to Steele the story of Trump being urinated on by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel with Russian agents allegedly filming it for blackmail material. The Post says the story was written by Cody Shearer, a Clinton confidante. A lawyer for Winer told the paper that Winer “was concerned in 2016 about information that a candidate for the presidency may have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. Any actions he took were grounded in those concerns.” Shearer did not respond to a request for comment from Consortium News. (Full disclosure: Cody Shearer is a member of the advisory board of the Consortium for Independent Journalism, which publishes Consortium News, and has been asked to resign.)

All this Democrat paid-for and created dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being revealed publicly just before Trump’s inauguration. The Steele dossier was used by the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. 

Winer and the Magnitsky Act

Winer played a major role in Congress’s adoption of the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012” (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder.  According to Browder, Magnitsky was a lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.

However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov’s investigative documentary (blacklisted in the U.S.), Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder’s business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate prison care. The case was hyped as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian tax fraud charges against himself.

By adopting a law punishing Magnitsky’s alleged persecutors, the U.S. Congress acted as a supreme court judging internal Russian legal issues.

The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.

It was Winer who found a solution to Browder’s predicament. As Winer wrote in The Daily Beast:

“When Browder consulted me, he wanted to know what he could do to hold those involved in the case accountable. As Browder describes in his book, Red Notice, I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts, including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom.”

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have been trying for years to pursue their case against Browder (image on the right). Putin brought up the case in his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump. Putin suggested allowing U.S. authorities to question the 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, among others. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia’s best friend.

But the naïve Russians underestimated the craftiness of American lawyers.

As Winer wrote, “Under that treaty, Russia’s procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney general … to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a politically motivated case (my emphasis). I know this because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999, when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations.”

The clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. It doesn’t apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. (The irony is that Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU Russian military intelligence agents appears to be more a political than a legal document. For one thing, it accused the agents of interfering in a U.S. election but never charges them under U.S. electoral law.)

On July 15, 2016, Browder’s Heritage Capital Management firm registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice accusing both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); adopted in 1938 with Nazis in mind.

As for Russian lawyers attempting to bring their case against the Act to the U.S., the Heritage Capital Management brief declared:

“While lawyers representing foreign principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to influence policy at the behest of his client. By disseminating anti-Magnitsky material to Congress, [lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya is clearly trying to influence policy and is therefore in violation of her filing requirements under FARA.”

Veselnitskaya was at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in the summer of 2016 to lobby a possible incoming Trump administration to oppose the Magnitsky Act. A British music promoter, not a spokesman for the Russian government, offered dirt on Clinton in an email to Donald Trump Jr. No dirt was apparently produced and Don Jr. saw it as a lure to get him to the meeting on Magnitsky. Democrats are furiously trying to prove that this meeting was “collusion” between the Trump camp and Russia, though it was the Clinton campaign that paid for opposition research and received it from foreigners, while the Trump campaign neither solicited nor apparently received any at that meeting.

The Ideological Conflict Today

Needless to say, Khodorkovsky’s Corbiere Trust lobbied hard to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act. This type of “Russian interference intended to influence policy” goes unnoticed while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.

The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia. Russia’s position, as Putin made clear in his historic speech at the Munich security conference in 2007, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries’ politics on principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to do the same.

The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single “democratic” system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs.

So, if Putin were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, he would not be trying to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change his own.

U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those Russians like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans – all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from and put themselves in power. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America.

Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public opinion against “multipolar” Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests, including the military industries, helps break down national borders (except those of the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of Congress.

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This article was originally published on Consortiumnews.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization  (CRG). 

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Obituaries are not the best places to identify faults unless they assume the form of a hatchet job.  The opposite is more often the case: worshipful and respectful to the point of being cloying.  As the tears dry, and the sobs of reflection pass, the figure transmogrifies.  For a politician, aspects of the hero are sketched out, crumples and creases ironed.  In the case of the late Senator John McCain, his role as sober, stable legislator were underscored in a world of Trumpland’s narcissistic chaos.  His five-year stint a prisoner of war in that brutal school of re-education “Hanoi Hilton” constituted an important part of resume building in politics, and it was not forgotten.

A drier eye would be more circumspect in looking at the senator from Arizona.  Christopher Hitchens did not have much time for a person he regarded as a poor politician who never quite got over an inner gunpowder tendency to blow.

“He combines the body of an ox with the brains of a gnat,” he tartly observed in Slate in a year the senator was contesting the presidency against Barack Obama.  “Indeed, if his brains were made of gunpowder and were to accidentally explode, the resulting bang would not even be enough to rearrange his hair.”

For Hitchens on McCain, the question was whether rage was of the generous sort, or an ungovernable one leading to instability.

The case of McCain the erratic did not convince that other late scion of neoconservative enthusiasm, Charles Krauthammer, holding fort at the Washington Post in claiming that it was merely a “cheap Obama talking point.  The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.”  What held sway for Krauthammer against Obama was McCain’s insistence that the global financial crisis had softened US resolve; the need to be fearful of the outside world was ever present.  He proceeded to outline a laundry list of terrors current and imminent, all necessary mental baggage for the neoconservative zealot:

“We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism.  An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran.  A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation.  A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism.  Plus to sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.”

If you deal in the economy of fear, McCain was your man.

This harnessing of insecurity was something that played well with an individual who had transformed from hardened realist to messianic neoconservative, a process that was complete by 1999. That conversion saw a notable voice in Congress enlisted in the service of the American imperium, one far from cautious about the sorrows of imperial overstretch.  Even after the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, he would still stump for the neoconservative cause, issuing a manifesto of such themes for presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012:

 “We are now engaged in a great debate over whether America’s core challenge is how to manage our own decline as a great power – or how to renew our capacity to carry on our proud tradition of world leadership.  Ultimately, this is what’s at stake in this election, and the stakes could not be higher.”

It is precisely such a vision that landed US marines in Vietnam, in total ignorance of the nature of polycentric communism, and old Mesopotamia, in total obliviousness to the complex dynamic of Middle Eastern politics.  Both constituted failed experiments of a misguided, imperial cast of mind. The latter case supplied an object lesson in the tormentedly flawed policy of regime change, a point McCain refused to accept.  As Jacob Heilbrunn would observe in The National Interest,

“McCain’s vision of American power and influence around the globe is so open-ended that it constitutes an invitation for hegemony, something that China is bound to reject.”

Such a vision is, by nature, intolerant of rivals, and naturally inflating of threats.  Foes must be found; their potency must be exaggerated.  It persuaded McCain that North Korean nuclear tests, conducted in 2006, warranted the acquisition of a missile defence shield both futile and costly.

McCain’s other chequered side sported a certain insensitivity to race, a point that surfaced with a murmur in 2008.  Eight years prior, while on a bruising campaign trail for the White House that saw him pitted against the Bush dynasts, he made a crass remark reflecting on his time as a prisoner of war.

“I hate the gooks,” he shot at reporters aboard his campaign bus.  “I will hate them as long as I live.”

Executive director of the San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action was plainspoken in her disgust:

“For someone running for president not to recognize the power of words is a problem.”

McCain’s response was to issue a modest qualifier:

“I was referring to my prison guards and will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

Tributes to McCain have attempted to isolate the good and noble from the rot and the core. Contrast McCain the principled man with the GOP, an unprincipled entity pockmarked by corruption.  Eugene Robinson of the Post is an exponent of this exercise.

“President Trump’s GOP,” he reflected, “could not care less about the ideals McCain stood for, such as honour, service and community.  The party is shamefully moulded in Trump’s image now, with its enormous corruption, monumental selfishness and grasping little hands.”

Sterling, graphic stuff, made less plausible by its errors: Trump’s GOP, the same entity so incredulous at his rise? The same entity so utterly opposed to him in favour of family nepotism?

For all his deeply critical faults, Trump lacks an ideological worldview that idolises the neoconservative creed.  His interventions leave aside the messianic urge to meddle in the name of a higher good – hardly surprising for one immune to such notions.  McCain, in razor sharp contrast, remained, to the last, the spokesman of US valour and its legions, even to the detriment of his own country and its cruel predations.

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

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The US military is creating a strike force to carry out an attack on government forces in Syria, which is to be justified by a staged chemical attack in the province of Idlib, the Russian military says.

Besides the already noted deployment of the USS The Sullivans to the Persian Gulf and the rebasing of a B-1B Lancer strategic bomber to an air base in Qatar, the missile destroyer USS Ross carrying 28 Tomahawk cruise missiles entered the Mediterranean. Thus, the US could launch at least 84 Tomahawk cruise missiles and 24 AGM-158 joint air to surface stand-off missiles (JASSM) if it were to decide to strike the war-torn country right now.

According to Russian military spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov,

“these preparations are fresh confirmation of US intentions to use as a pretext a likely simulation of the government forces’ chemical attack, which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham [formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda] militants are plotting with active support from British secret services.”

Reports are appearing that the Syrian Air Defense Forces (SADF) have already started preparing to repel an expected US-led missile strike by deploying additional specialists and air defense systems near the crucial objects of the infrastructure, which they expect may be targeted.

On August 22, US National Security Advisor John Bolton claimed that

“if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons, we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time.”

This was only one of a series of threats to the Syrian government issued by the US, the UK and France. While all these threats are clearly exploiting the chemical weapons narrative, their main goal is to prevent the defeat of the terrorists in Idlib by delaying the Syrian Army operation.

On August 25, a source close to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) told the Kurdish news outlet Bas News that the US-led coalition began deploying radar stations at its bases in the governorates of al-Hasakah and Aleppo as part of a new plan to increase its control of Syrian airspace. The report  pointed out the airbases in Kobani and Rmelan as places where the radars were installed.  The US 727 Expeditionary Air Control Squadron is reportedly involved in this effort.

Meanwhile, clashes between the Syrian Army and ISIS continued in the area of al-Safa where at least one vehicle of the terrorist group was destroyed. However, ISIS resistance in the desert is still strong enough to draw Syrian military resources from other important frontlines.

In the Idlib de-esclation zone, militants feeling the support of the so-called international community have increased their preparations for the battle against government forces. An important part of these preparations are arrests and abductions of civilians, public figures and field commanders who would probably support peaceful negotiations with Damascus.

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Hysteria reigned supreme after the first round of US sanctions were reinstated against Iran over the past week. War scenarios abound, and yet the key aspect of the economic war unleashed by the Trump administration has been overlooked: Iran is a major piece in a much larger chessboard.

The US sanctions offensive, launched after Washington’s unilateral pullout from the Iran nuclear deal, should be interpreted as an advance gambit in the New Great Game at whose center lies China’s New Silk Road – arguably the most important infrastructure project of the 21st century — and overall Eurasia integration.

The Trump administration’s maneuvers are a testament to how China’s New Silk Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), threaten the US establishment.

Eurasian integration on the rise

Eurasian integration is on display in Astana, where Russia, Iran and Turkey are deciding the fate of Syria, in coordination with Damascus.

Iran’s strategic depth in post-war Syria simply won’t vanish. The challenge of Syrian reconstruction will be met largely by Bashar al-Assad’s allies: China, Russia and Iran.

Echoing the Ancient Silk Road, Syria will be configured as an important BRI node, key to Eurasia integration.

In parallel, the Russia-China strategic partnership – from the intersection between the BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) to the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the solidifying of BRICS Plus — has immense economic stakes in the stability of Iran.

The complex interconnection of Iran with both Russia (via the EAEU and the International North-South Transportation Corridor) and China (via BRI and oil/gas supplies) is even tighter than in the case of Syria in the past seven years of civil war.

Iran is absolutely essential for Russia-China for the partnership to allow any “surgical strike” — as floated in Syria — or worse, hot war initiated by Washington.

A case could be made that with his recent overture to President Putin, President Trump is trying to negotiate some sort of freeze in the current configuration — a remixed Sykes-Picot for the 21st century.

But that assumes Trump’s decision-making is not being dictated or co-opted by the US neocon cabal that pressed for the 2003 war in Iraq.

North Korea two?

If the situation turns volcanic when the US oil sanctions on Iran kick in by early November, an actual remix of the recent North Korea scenario would be in the cards. Washington simultaneously sent three carrier battle groups to terrify North Korea. That failed – and Trump ended up having to chat with Kim Jong-un.

Despite the US record around the world — endless threats of a Venezuela invasion with the only tangible result an amateurish, failed drone attack; 17 years of endless war in Afghanistan, with the Taliban still as immovable as the Hindu Kush peaks;  the “4+1” – Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, plus Hezbollah – winning the vicious proxy war in Syria — US neocons scream and shout about striking Iran.

As with North Korea, Russia and China will send unmistakable signs that Iran is in their closely coordinated Eurasian sphere of influence, and any attack on Iran will be considered an attack on the whole Eurasian sphere.

Stranger things have happened, but it’s hard to see any rational actors in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh wishing to have Beijing and Moscow — simultaneously — as lethal enemies.

All across Southwest Asia, there are no doubts the official Trump administration – and in fact, the whole Beltway – policy on Iran is regime change. So from now on, short of hot war, the new rules of the game spell out stepped-up cyber-warfare.

From Washington’s point of view, in terms of return on investment that’s a relative bargain; cyber-warfare keeps the Russia-China partnership away from direct involvement while in theory digging deeper into the economic collapse of Iran, heavily advertised as imminent by Trump administration officials.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry could not be more explicit on the US effort to reimpose global sanctions on Iran.

“China’s commercial cooperation with Iran is open and transparent, reasonable, fair and lawful, not violating any United Nations Security Council resolutions,” it said.

That echoes the Russian Foreign Ministry on the US sanctions:

“This is a graphic example of Washington’s continued violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and trampling upon the norms of international law.”

President Trump for his part has also been explicit: any nation that violates the sanctions against Iran will not do business with the US.

Good luck with having support from Turkey or Qatar – completely dependent on Iran for food, use of civilian airspace and sharing gas exploration in South Pars. Not to mention Russia-China assuring Tehran’s back on all fronts.

How not to do business with China?

The die is cast. China not only will continue but also will increase its purchase of Iranian oil and gas.

The Chinese auto industry – currently with 10% of the Iranian market – will simply take over as the French leave. Chinese companies are already responsible for 50% of auto parts imported into Iran.

Russia for its part has pledged to invest as much as $50 billion in Iranian oil and natural gas. Moscow is very much aware of the Trump administration’s next possible step; imposing sanctions on Russian companies investing in Iran.

Washington simply can’t “not do business” with China. The entire US defense industry is dependent on China for rare earth materials. Since the 1980s, US multinationals set up their export supply chains in China with direct encouragement of the US government.

The EU for its part has enforced a Blocking Statute – never used before, although in existence for already two decades — to protect European companies, even coming to the point of imposing fines on businesses that pull out of Iran because of plain fear.

In theory, that shows some balls. And yet, as EU diplomats in Brussels told Asia Times, there’s a major conditional: US satrapies/vassals abound across the EU, so quite a few EU-based companies, as in the case of Total and Renault, in the end, will simply roll over.

Meanwhile, what Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said about US unilateralism – the world “is sick and tired”
of it – keeps echoing all across the Global South.

The Mother of All Financial Hurricanes

Those clamoring for war with Iran cannot possibly understand that the nightmare scenario of a Strait of Hormuz/Persian Gulf energy transit closure – the choke point for 22 million barrels of oil a day – would represent, ultimately, the death of the petrodollar.

The Strait of Hormuz can be configured as the Achilles heel of the entire West/US economic power; a closure would detonate the mother of all hurricanes in the quadrillion-dollar derivatives market.

Unless China does not buy Iranian energy, US sanctions — as a geo-economic tool — are essentially meaningless.

Certainly not, of course, for the “Iranian people” so dear to the Beltway, as more day-to-day financial grief is already setting in, side by side with a sense of national cohesiveness in the face, once again, of an external threat.

China and Russia have already pledged to continue to implement the JCPOA, alongside the EU-3; after all, this is an UN-endorsed multilateral treaty.

Beijing has already informed Washington in no uncertain terms that it will continue to do business with Iran. So the ball is now in Washington’s court. It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to sanction China for its unwillingness to stop trading with Iran.

It’s not exactly a wise move to threaten China – especially with Beijing on an irresistible historical ascendancy. Nehru threatened China and lost a big chunk of Arunachal Pradesh to Chairman Mao. Brezhnev threatened China and faced the wrath of the PLA on the banks of the Ussuri River.

China is able to cut the US off in a minute from its rare earth exports, creating a US national security catastrophe. Now that’s when a trade war will enter real incandescent territory.

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Featured image is from Anadolu Agency/Fatemeh Bahrami.

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Former First Lady Simone Gbagbo was one of 800 political detainees granted amnesty by President Alassane Ouattara early in August.

Ouattara was installed in power during April 2011 by the previous colonial power of France with a mandate from the western imperialist governments and their allies in the West Africa region.

Reports indicate that some 3,000 people died as a direct result of internecine violence over a dispute surrounding the national elections held in 2010. The French, United States and others supported Ouattara leaving Ivorian Popular Front (PFI) leaders President Laurent Gbagbo and his wife Simone as targets of the paratroopers from Paris.

The couple along with other PFI leaders took refuge in an Abidjan hotel which was raided by French soldiers taking the leadership of the government into custody. Former President Gbagbo was put on an airplane and sent to the Netherlands under the jurisdiction of the controversial and dreaded International Criminal Court (ICC).

Simone Gbagbo (image on the right) was held under the custody of the neo-colonial Ouattara regime in Abidjan where she was put on trial by people who obviously had a vested interest in her long-term imprisonment. The prosecution of the former first lady in such a politically charged atmosphere where the Ouattara regime sought to punish those who took a stand against French imperialist intervention during 2010-2011, led to the conviction of Simone Gbagbo who was given a 20 year prison sentence. 

Despite these legal developments a ban of supporters of the PFI continued to demand the release of the former president and the first lady. Some seven years have passed where today there is only a tenuous façade of normalcy prevailing. Ouattara is prohibited from running for another term in office and the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) functionary is tasked with creating the conditions for the continuation of the status quo.

A key element of the broader society as exemplified within the Catholic Church took a position which advocated some form of national reconciliation. After the granting of amnesty, Father Donald Zagore, a priest of the Society of African Missions, issued a statement expressing satisfaction that Ouattara had moved in the direction releasing political prisoners.

Zagore said that:

“[A] great step has been taken towards a true and definitive reconciliation, even if the road still remains long. The truth is that all of us Ivorians are very thirsty for peace and reconciliation. In the process of reconciliation initiated by the current power, justice was the fundamental principle on which to build this national reconciliation. Unfortunately, the Ivorian judiciary has remained in a logic of blatant impartiality, practicing the justice of winners, making it no longer an instrument of peace and reconciliation, but an instrument of injustice and division.” (Fides News Agency, Aug. 27, 2018)

Further noting the sectarian policies of the Ouattara government in maintaining its hegemony on the administrative, security and economic direction of the state, Zagore continued emphasizing:

“Peace was no longer possible in such a context. The only way out was an amnesty policy with the release of all political prisoners who favored an open dialogue for true reconciliation. The appeal was unanimous, social, political and religious groups intervened in favor of the release of political prisoners.”

Political Realignment and the Role of the Military

The political parties and coalitions backing both the former President Gbagbo and incumbent Ouattara have fractured leaving wide open the trajectory of the country. 

Earlier in August, the leader of the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), former President Henri Konan Bedie, announced that he would not remain in the alliance with Ouattara’s Rally of the Republicans (RDR) after the president proposed to constitute the governing coalition known as the Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP) into one party. The PDCI indicated that it would contest local and regional elections scheduled in October on its own or form alliances with other political forces in the country. 

The dispute appears to be over who will succeed Ouattara in 2020. Both parties within the RHDP want to select their own respective candidates to run for the presidency in two years.

Ivorian supporters of Laurent Gbagbo and the FPI

Meanwhile the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) founded by Gbagbo has split over the question of leadership in the party. Gbagbo was elected as head of one faction with overwhelming support. The other wing of the FPI whose leader is former Prime Minister Pascal Affi Guesson, is in conflict with Abdoudramane Sangare, a staunch ally of Gbagbo. If these internal divisions are not resolved there is the possibility of two different candidates running for the presidency on behalf of the FPI in 2020.

Another aspect of the Ivorian political crisis is the role of the security forces particularly within the military. There have been several mutinies by army personnel over the last three years which threatened the overall stability of the country. Soldiers rebelled demanding that promised bonuses from the Ouattara regime be paid in full. The military consists of professionally trained soldiers and former rebels which sided with the French-backed RDR during the conflict over the outcome of the 2010 elections. 

There have been interventions by the military in Ivorian politics in the past most notably in 1999 when the soldiers took power opening the way for Ouattara to re-enter the country. A civil war erupted in 2002 where the country was divided between the North and the South. Questions of nationality and political rights led to sharp divisions within the political landscape and the military. The North of Ivory Coast is predominately Muslim where politicians disagreed over whether certain ethnic groups have full voting and participatory guarantees.

These conflicts arose after the death of long-time President Felix Houphouet-Biogny who ruled the country from the time of independence in 1960 to the early 1990s. Houphouet-Biogny maintained a close relationship with the former colonial power of France. The country was often praised by the western imperialists as a model for post-colonial development due to its rejection of any form of socialist-orientation.

The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism

A similar pattern has emerged since 2011 when France with the support of the United States administration of former President Barack Obama overthrew Gbagbo and the FPI placing Ouattara in office. Since April 2011, Ivory Coast once again is hailed as an example of phenomenal economic growth in Africa.

Western financial publications cite the nine percent annual growth rate as the largest in the West Africa region. Nonetheless, this activity derives from foreign direct investment fostered by transnational corporations and banks on terms favorable to imperialism. Such an approach to development is not sustainable due to the dependent character of the Ivorian national economy.

The instability inherent is such a development agenda has been revealed over the last four years with the plunge in energy, agricultural and mineral prices of these commodities on the western capitalist dominated global markets. This decline in oil and natural gas prices was engineered by the U.S. under the Obama administration where the overproduction of these resources cut export earnings to emerging economies precipitously. 

Many of these same states have been thrown into recession and uncertainty. Currency values consequently are lowered with the concomitant unemployment and poverty soon to follow. 

The current situation calls for the resumption of dialogue and negotiations across the political spectrum in Ivory Coast. Moreover, the release of former President Gbagbo and the others held in the Netherlands by the ICC should be a focus of the PFI and other parties as a means to enhance national unity and the realization of genuine economic development and territorial sovereignty.     

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author.

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In an extraordinary 11-page written testament, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States has accused several senior prelates of complicity in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s allegations of sexual abuse, and has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI but chose to repeal them.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016, said that in the late 2000s, Benedict had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis” and that Viganò personally told Pope Francis about those sanctions in 2013.

Archbishop Viganò said in his written statement, simultaneously released to the Register and other media, (see full text below) that Pope Francis “continued to cover” for McCarrick and not only did he “not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him” but also made McCarrick “his trusted counselor.”  Viganò said that the former archbishop of Washington advised the Pope to appoint a number of bishops in the United States, including Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark.

Archbishop Viganò, who said his “conscience dictates” that the truth be known as “the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” ended his testimony by calling on Pope Francis and all of those implicated in the cover up of Archbishop McCarrick’s abuse to resign.

On June 20, Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, on the order of Pope Francis, prohibited former Cardinal McCarrick from public ministry after an investigation by the New York archdiocese found an accusation of sexual abuse of a minor was “credible and substantiated.”  That same day,the public learned that the Archdiocese of Newark and the Diocese of Metuchen in New Jersey had received three accusations of sexual misconduct involving adults against McCarrick. Since then media reports have written of victims of the abuse, spanning decades, include a teenage boy, three young priests or seminarians, and a man now in his 60s who alleges McCarrick abused him from the age of 11. The Pope later accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals.

But Viganò wrote that Benedict much earlier had imposed sanctions on McCarrick “similar” to those handed down by Cardinal Parolin.

“The cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living,” Viganò said, “he was also forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.”

Viganò did not document the exact date but recollected the sanction to have been applied as far back 2009 or 2010.

Benedict’s measures came years after Archbishop Viganò’s predecessors at the nunciature — Archbishops Gabriel Montalvo and Pietro Sambi — had “immediately” informed the Holy See as soon as they had learned of Archbishop McCarrick’s “gravely immoral behavior with seminarians and priests,” the retired Italian Vatican diplomat wrote.

He said Archbishop Montalvo first alerted the Vatican in 2000, requesting that Dominican Father Boniface Ramsey write to Rome confirming the allegations. In 2006, Archbishop Viganò said that, as delegate for pontifical representations in the Secretariat of State, he personally wrote a memo to his superior, then Archbishop (later Cardinal) Leonardo Sandri, proposing an “exemplary measure” be taken against McCarrick that could have a “medicinal function” to prevent future abuses and alleviate a “very serious scandal for the faithful.”

He drew on an indictment memorandum, communicated by Archbishop Sambi to Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then Secretary of State, in which an abusive priest had made claims against McCarrick of “such gravity and vileness” including “depraved acts” and “sacrilegious celebration of the Eucharist.”

Memos Ignored

But, according to Viganò, his memo was ignored and no action was taken until the late 2000s — a delay which Archbishop Viganò claims is owed to complicity of John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s respective Secretaries of State, Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone.

In 2008, Archbishop Viganò claims he wrote a second memo, this time to Cardinal Sandri’s successor as sostituto at the Secretariat of State, then Archbishop (later Cardinal) Fernando Filoni. He included a summary of research carried out by Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and specialist in clerical sexual abuse, which Sipe had sent Benedict in the form of a statement. Viganò said he ended the memo by “repeating to my superiors that I thought it was necessary to intervene as soon as possible by removing the cardinal’s hat from Cardinal McCarrick.”

Again, according the Viganò, his request fell on deaf ears and he writes he was “greatly dismayed” that both memos were ignored until Sipe’s “courageous and meritorious” statement had “the desired result.”

“Benedict did what he had to do,” Archbishop Viganò told the Register Aug. 25, “but his collaborators — the Secretary of State and all the others — didn’t enforce it as they should have done, which led to the delay.”

“What is certain,” Viganò writes in his testimony, “is that Pope Benedict imposed the above canonical sanctions on McCarrick and that they were communicated to him by the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Pietro Sambi.”

The Register has independently confirmed that the allegations against McCarrick were certainly known to Benedict, and the Pope Emeritus remembers instructing Cardinal Bertone to impose measures but cannot recall their exact nature.

In 2011, on arrival in Washington D.C., Archbishop Viganò said he personally repeated the sanction to McCarrick.

“The cardinal, muttering in a barely comprehensible way, admitted that he had perhaps made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed with some seminarians at his beach house, but he said this as if it had no importance,” Viganò recalled in his testimony.

In his written statement, Viganò then outlined his understanding of how, despite the allegations against him, McCarrick came to be appointed Archbishop of Washington D.C. in 2000 and how his misdeeds were covered up. His statement implicates Cardinals Angelo Sodano, Tarcisio Bertone and Pietro Parolin and he insists various other cardinals and bishops were well aware, including Cardinal Donald Wuerl, McCarrick’s successor as archbishop of Washington D.C.

“I myself brought up the subject with Cardinal Wuerl on several occasions, and I certainly didn’t need to go into detail because it was immediately clear to me that he was fully aware of it,” he wrote.

Ed McFadden, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Washington, told CNA that Wuerl categorically denies having been informed that McCarrick’s ministry had been restricted by the Vatican.

The second half of Viganò’s testimony primarily deals with what Pope Francis knew about McCarrick, and how he acted.

He recalled meeting Cardinal McCarrick in June 2013 at the Pope’s Domus Sanctae Marthae residence, during which McCarrick told him “in a tone somewhere between ambiguous and triumphant:

‘The Pope received me yesterday; tomorrow I am going to China’” — the implication being that Francis had lifted the travel ban placed on him by Benedict. (Further evidence of this can be seen in this interview McCarrick gave the National Catholic Reporter in 2014.)

At a private meeting a few days later, Archbishop Viganò said the Pope asked him “‘What is Cardinal McCarrick like?’” to which the archbishop replied:

“He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”

The former nuncio said he believes the Pope’s purpose in asking him was to “find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.”

Freed From Constraints

He said it was “clear” that “from the time of Pope Francis’s election, McCarrick, now free from all constraints, had felt free to travel continuously, to give lectures and interviews.”

Moreover, he added, McCarrick had

“become the kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States, and the most listened to advisor in the Vatican for relations with the Obama administration.”

Viganò claimed that the appointments of Cardinal Cupich to Chicago and Cardinal Joseph Tobin to Newark “were orchestrated by McCarrick,” among others. He said neither of the names was presented by the nunciature, whose job is traditionally to present a list of names, or terna, to the Congregation for Bishops. He also added that Bishop Robert McElroy’s appointment to San Diego was orchestrated “from above” rather than through the nuncio.

The retired Italian diplomat also echoed the Register’s reports about Cardinal Rodriguez Maradíaga and his record of cover-up in Honduras, saying the Pope “defends his man” to the “bitter end,” despite the allegations against him. The same applies to McCarrick, wrote Viganò.

“He [Pope Francis] knew from at least June 23, 2013 that McCarrick was a serial predator,” Archbishop Viganò stated, but although “he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end.”

“It was only when he was forced by the report of the abuse of a minor, again on the basis of media attention, that he took action [regarding McCarrick] to save his image in the media,” wrote Viganò.

The former U.S. nuncio wrote that Pope Francis “is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren,” and urged him to “acknowledge his mistakes” and, to “set a good example to cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”

In comments to the media Aug. 25, Viganò said his main motivation for writing his testimony now was to“stop the suffering of the victims, to prevent new victims and to protect the Church: only the truth can make her free.”

He also said he wanted to “discharge my conscience in front of God of my responsibilities as bishop for the universal Church,” adding that he is an “old man” who wanted to present himself to God “with a clean conscience.”

“The people of God have the right to know the full truth also regarding their shepherds,” he said. “They have the right to be guided by good shepherds. In order to be able to trust them and love them, they have to know them openly, in transparency and truth, as they really are. A priest should always be a light on a candle, everywhere and for all.”

After requests from EWTN News for comment, the Vatican press office has declined to give immediate response to Viganò’s letter.

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Global Research Editor’s Note

The former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò  has intimated in an eleven page Testimony that Pope Francis  was involved in the coverup of sex abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, from the outset of his papacy in March 2013. Vigano says that Pope Francis should step down from the papacy.

In his  Testimony, Archbishop Vigano acknowledged that

“Bishops and priests, abusing their authority, have committed horrendous crimes to the detriment of their faithful, minors, innocent victims, and young men eager to offer their lives to the Church, or by their silence have not prevented that such crimes continue to be perpetrated. … We must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truths we have kept hidden.”

Read the full text of the Testimony below.

Our thanks to Diane Montagna and lifesitenews.com

M. Ch. GR Editor, August 29, 2018

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Original in Italian.

Official translation by Diane Montagna

 The official English text of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s Testimony.

 (The PDF of the English translation here, and a PDF of the original Italian here.) Emphasis not added.

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The U.N. peace envoy for Syria will host senior officials from a range of Western and Middle-Eastern countries next month for talks on drafting a new Syrian constitution, the U.N. said Tuesday.

Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura has been tasked with setting up a committee to write a new constitution for the war-ravaged country.

He is already set to host a meeting on Sept. 11-12 at the U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva of senior officials from the main foreign powers backing the project, Syrian government allies Russia and Iran, as well as Turkey, which supports some opposition groups.

And on Tuesday, U.N. spokeswoman Alessandra Vellucci said de Mistura had convened a one-day meeting on Sept. 14 with senior representatives from Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The meeting, Vellucci said, was to focus on “the way ahead on the political process” for Syria, “including the U.N. effort to facilitate the establishment of a constitutional committee.”

De Mistura has said he wants to have the constitutional committee in place before world leaders meet at the General Assembly in New York in late September.

De Mistura’s previous efforts to negotiate an end to the Syrian conflict have achieved no breakthroughs.

More than 350,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since Syria’s war started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

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Featured image: South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embrace each other after releasing a joint statement at the truce village of Panmunjeom, Friday. / Korea Summit Press Pool

Are the neocons running circles around President Trump? His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has opposed the president’s moves to open dialogue with North Korea from the get-go. Now he has managed to scuttle a visit to Pyongyang by showing Trump a letter from a North Korean official that is reported to be “belligerent.” That was enough for Trump to cancel Pompeo’s trip. Meanwhile, South Korea is pursuing good relations with the North regardless of US backtracking. Washington is reportedly considering sanctions on its South Korean ally if Seoul continues on a peace path with Pyongyang. More on this bizarre turn of events in today’s Liberty Report:

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A group of UN experts has said that Saudi and Emirati forces may have committed war crimes in Yemen.

A report launched on Tuesday by the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (YemenGEE) established in 2017 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, concluded that individuals in the governments of Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) could be prosecuted for acts that amount to international crimes “subject to determination by an independent and competent court”.

The report comes as US officials have expressed concerns over recent deadly air strikes, with the Pentagon reportedly warning Saudi Arabia that it is prepared to cut its support to the Saudi-led coalition if it continues to target civilians.

According to evidence gathered by YemenGEE, some attacks and actions by the coalition and the Yemeni government have violated “the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution”, including the imposition of a naval and air blockade on Yemen since March 2015.

“There is little evidence of any attempt by parties to the conflict to minimise civilian casualties. I call on them to prioritise human dignity in this forgotten conflict,” said Kamel Jendoubi, chairperson of YemenGEE.

Based on interviews with victims and witnesses, the group found that the UAE and its allied Yemeni security forces have committed acts of rape and sexual violence against vulnerable groups.

In March 2018, the panel said that 200 male detainees were subjected to anal examinations and rape with tools and sticks by UAE personnel at Bir Ahmed prison in southern Yemen.

The report attributed two-thirds of 842 verified cases of recruitment of children in 2017 to the Houthi forces. In some cases, children as young as eight were conscripted to take part in hostilities.

A Saudi coalition spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday that the UN report had been referred to the coalition’s legal team.

The findings were released a day after top US military commander in the Middle East Lieutenant General Jeffrey Harrigian expressed “frustration” at a recent coalition air strike that killed 40 children in Yemen, using US-supplied bombs.

“Clearly, we’re concerned about civilian casualties, and they know about our concern,” he told the New York Times. “The key here is to take appropriate action.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has warned Saudi Arabia that the US is prepared to cut its military and intelligence support to the coalition if it continues to target civilians, CNN reported.

Most recently, a Saudi strike last week killed 27 civilians, mostly children, fleeing the violence in the besieged southern city of Hodeidah.

The US and the UK have provided military and intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition which was formed in March 2015 to restore the government of president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi who was ousted by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels that year.

The UN report, however, has not investigated the US and UK role in what it described as potential war crimes committed in Yemen.

The UN panel did not immediately respond to a Middle East Eye request for comment.

At a press conference on Tuesday, US Secretary of State James Mattis told reporters that the US “has not seen any callous disregard” by the Saudi-led coalition, and thus “will continue to work with them to reduce this tragedy,” in reference to the killing of non-combatants in the war using US-supplied weapons.

He also said the US support for the coalition is “not unconditional”. It is conditioned on the coalition “doing everything humanely possible to avoid any possible loss of life” and supporting the UN-brokered peace process.

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Featured image is from Julien Harneis / Flickr.

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Are soldiers more valuable to society than teachers? Are they more essential than the people who drive buses or clean up our waste? Are their jobs that much more dangerous than firefighters, or psychiatric nurses or loggers? Is what they do more honourable than parenting, caring for elders, providing essential social services or reporting the news?

These questions arose when reading that British Columbia is currently holding a six-week public consultation on whether former RCMP members should be permitted access to special veterans license plates. The opposition has complained the consultation is only taking place online while some military veterans have threatened to return their special license if the RCMP are allowed to join their exclusive club.

“I am very, very proud to be given that particular plate,” said Lt.-Col. Archie Steacy of the B.C. Veterans Commemorative Association, which is leading opposition to the change. “Having served in the armed forces for a period of 38 years I feel really good when I am driving my car and people stop me to say thank you.”

Granted a monopoly over the poppy symbol nearly a century ago, the Royal Canadian Legion allows provincial governments to use their trademark poppy on licence plates to signify the driver is a veteran. Much to the chagrin of some military veterans, the Legion’s definition of a ‘veteran’ now includes former RCMP.

In the mid-2000s every province adopted a special veterans licence plate. Generally Canadian Forces (CF) members, RCMP officers who served under CF command and anyone who served in a NATO Alliance force are eligible.

But special license plates are only one of the many initiatives that reinforce the military’s special cultural standing. On August 18 MiWay (Mississauga) transit offered military veterans a free ride to attend the Warriors’ Day Parade at the Canadian National Exhibition. In December Sherbrooke, Quebec, joined a long list of cities that offer free parking to veterans. In another automotive- centred militarist promotion, a Ford dealership in Kingston, Ontario, offered a special discount package to former or current soldiers. Its January release stated,

“whether you’re a local weather presenter, a plumber or play drums in a weekend cover band, your way of life is possible, in part, due to the brave sacrifice of the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces.”

But for men with guns an evil force would prevent you from drumming? Is that really what this is about?

Prioritizing soldiers above reporters, poets, janitors etc., the government set up a program  in 2014 to allow foreign nationals who join the CF to get their citizenship fast tracked. A number of initiatives also benefit students of military families and help soldiers access civilian work. The Canada Company Military Employment Transition Program assists CF members, Reservists and Veterans in obtaining non-military employment. It offers companies/institutions the status of Designated Military Friendly Employer and National Employer Support Awards. Taking this a step further, Barrick Gold hired a Director of Veteran Sourcing and Placement to oversee a Veterans Recruitment Program. According to program Director Joel Watson, “veterans self-select to put service before self, which says much about their individual character, drive and willingness to work together in teams.”

But no special recruitment program for single mothers?

Underlying all these initiatives is the notion that soldiers (or the military in general) have a unique social value, more than teaching assistants, plumbers, daycare workers, hairdressers and single mothers. Or, if danger is the primary criteria, how about those who build houses or feed us?

Over the past half-century tens of times more Canadian construction workers have been killed on the job than soldiers. While 158 Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, there were 843 agriculture -related fatalities in Canada between 2003 and 2012.

Does the CF do more to enable people to “play drums” than those growing our food? Is the “local weather presenter” more indebted to soldiers than those who build homes? Should the “plumber” be more grateful to troops than teachers?

The problem with glorifying soldiers is that veterans’ organizations generally use their cultural standing to uphold militarism and reactionary politics. Politicians justify weapons purchases by claiming we need to give the troops the best equipment possible and then demand the public “support the troops” they’ve deployed abroad.

Is this really the best we can be?

There is a burning need to rekindle anti-militarist political movements in this country. Next month’s World Beyond War  conference in Toronto offers a good opportunity to start.

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Yves Engler is the author of A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation . To help organize an event as part of the fall tour for my forthcoming book Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada please get in touch at yvesengler [at] hotmail.com Read other articles by Yves.

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In Stanley Kubrick‘s classic film Spartacus we can see the caged area where the gladiators fought. If you fork out  Pay Per View fees from $ 40 to $ 65 you can watch our modern day gladiators go at it. Oh, they don’t fight to the death, but this combination of wrestling, boxing and kick boxing using those tiny gloves the weightlifters use can be painful and physically damaging. And the natives love this shit! They don’t see the need to watch traditional boxing, as it’s not violent enough for them. Yet, we aficionados of the  ‘ Sweet Science’ always felt it was too violent at times. This writer wanted to see boxers wear headgear like the amateurs do. Well, times sure have changed… and not for the better.

Pro football, any football, is a violent sport. Having played the game for four of my college years, things were rough at times. When they began using the head, or snoot as they called it, around 1970 or so, to block and tackle, it got really dangerous. I knew then, as I was too chickenshit to put my head first as I blocked, that this was not a good idea. Well, everyone disagreed, and the head as a weapon became in vogue. Now, finally, after countless injuries and too many deaths, the masters of football are seeing the light. Perhaps they can see that same light and teach our young folks about the excessive and primitive violence in the misclassified  ‘sport’  of Ultimate Fighting. One guesses that the caged fighters become, in the minds of many viewers, almost like the characters from the violent video games they all played growing up.’ Violence begets…’  and thus many of our now 20 and 30 and even 40 somethings grew up watching our two ‘ Shock and Awe ‘ campaigns against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. The mainstream media was filled with our carpet bombing the shit out of that nation. The mowing down of retreating Iraqi soldiers from above was right out of a video game. Of course, the 2007 Apache Helicopter slaughter of 19 Iraqi men walking peacefully made Wiki Leaks famous.

So, we have established that Pro Football and UFC are violent. Sadly, many Amerikans love violence, as long as they are not on the receiving end of it. Too many of them  even can enjoy dishing it out at times… making the ‘ Big Dick ‘ theory valid. Yet, not too many out there in these ‘ Amerikan wastelands’ can enjoy seeing or hearing about unarmed black men being gunned down by the police. Even that is beyond the pale, except for the few virulent racists among us. So, when 70% of the NFL happens to be black, and the average salary of these guys is well over $ 2 million per year, cannot they afford to use their power and prestige to set an example? I say ‘ Power ‘ because just ponder this for a minute: How in the hell can they suspend or release players who refuse to stand and salute during the anthem, if even 50% of players, black and white, refuse to play if retributions occur? Remember  Gandhi? When he called for a nationwide strike by native Indian workers, he called it ‘ A day of prayer’, and not a strike or walkout. Well, if the millionaire NFL black ( and why not white? ) players really cared about sending a message to the nation’s masters, they would simply ‘ Call in sick ‘ the following week and thus not be able to play… if even one of their guys was reprimanded, suspended or released.

Sometimes the cage is not visible at all. Yet, we are all living in one here at home. We who love our nation truly wish to see all the cages gone. Those who work for exploitive wages under unsafe conditions are in cages. Families paying exorbitant rents to landlords who do as little as possible for them, are in cages. Our phony and manipulated Two Party/ One Party system keeps us in electoral cages without the ‘key to freedom of choice’ from a viable 3rd Party system. When we continue to occupy Afghanistan, as we did in Iraq, the citizens there are caged to a certain extent. Our use of the International Monetary Fund keeps so many citizens of too many nations caged through massive austerity measures. Our young students are, for the most part, caged for the propaganda that the Pentagon pays for, and the excessive corporate advertising on their school’s television station. Funny how I used to love to go to the zoo. No more.

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

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A senior professor and political analyst based in Australia described the recent formation of an Iran Action Group (IAG) in the US as one of the Donald Trump administration’s desperate moves against Tehran, which will only isolate Washington.

“The new measures against Iran by the Trump administration, including the formation of an Iran Action Group, are measures of desperation,” Professor Tim Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, said in an interview with the Tasnim News Agency.

“Washington has no real allies in this, just some countries which are afraid to contradict Washington,” he added.

The main effect of these desperate measures “will be to isolate the USA” in the long term, the analyst said.

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: As you know, the US government’s hostility toward Iran has recently entered a new stage. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has formed a dedicated group to coordinate and run the country’s policy towards Iran following President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Pompeo announced the creation of the Iran Action Group (IAG) at a news conference, naming Brian Hook, the Department of State’s director of policy planning, as its head. What do you think about the group and its objectives and do you think that it would be able to reach its goals?

Anderson: The new measures against Iran by the Trump administration, including the formation of an Iran Action Group, are measures of desperation. Washington has no real allies in this, just some countries which are afraid to contradict Washington. Other countries, which formerly backed the nuclear disarmament moves against Iran (notably Russia and China, but also some European countries) have abandoned the US, leaving it isolated. And that isolation is deepening because Washington is now threatening all its so-called allies.

All this might seem quite irrational, but we should remember that, for the US, the stakes are high.  The destruction of Syria was meant to pave the way for the isolation of and siege on Iran. That was the goal of the ‘New Middle East’ (by the Bush 2 and Obama regimes), which was supposed to usher a world of ‘freedom and democracy’, under North American tutelage.

Yet after several bloody wars the US proxy armies led by Jabhat al Nusra and DAESH, financed and armed by US agents in the region, were defeated by resistance forces in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Syria and its allies prevailed. So while the US and its proxies remain dangerous, and they continue to kill and destabilize, strategically they have failed, and they know it.

Compounding the US obsession with Iran is the fact that, as the ‘New Middle East’ project was failing, an even greater counter project for Eurasia integration was building, and here also Iran is important. Tehran now has mega linkage projects with Russia and China, and developing links across central Asia. Pepe Escobar’s recent article ‘Economic war on Iran is war on Eurasia integration’ outlines this quite well.

China’s new network of infrastructure projects (the Belt and Road Initiative) move forward inexorably, as Russia’s economic links with East Asia, West Asia and parts of Europe steadily grow, avoiding US interference. If Asia and Europe succeed in building strong economic links, the role and influence of North America across the entire Eurasian super-continent will be reduced.

In short, Washington sees Iran as the major obstacle to its plan to dominate West Asia, and also an important part of the Chinese and Russian led Eurasian integration, which they oppose. That is why, in my view, we see these desperate measures, with President Trump threatening most of his ‘allies’ over Iran. The main effect, in the longer run, will be to isolate the USA.

Tasnim: The Trump administration recently threatened to cut Iranian oil exports to zero, saying that countries must stop buying its oil from Nov. 4 or face financial consequences. Washington later softened its threat, saying that it would allow reduced oil flows of Iranian oil, in certain cases. Since oil is a strategic product and countries around the world always demand it, do you think that the US is able to carry out this threat at all?

Anderson: The US has been threatening many countries not to buy Iran’s oil. This has some influence on some countries. India, for example, seems to be hedging its bets. The French company Total has pulled out of its investments, no doubt judging that its business in the USA is worth more to it than those in Iran. However, oil is a global commodity and there are limits on how much economic loss companies and states will tolerate in seeking ‘safer’ but more expensive alternatives. And of course, the sanctions on Iran hardly deter the other countries which face their own unilateral sanctions from Washington.

For those which chose to maintain at least normal business links with Iran, there are some unintended consequences which are unfavorable to the US. China, for example, which has no problems in purchasing Iran’s oil, seems to have created a boom in Iranian shipping, through its deal to import Iranian oil in Iran’s ships, with Iran covering the insurance side (See this). The ‘petrodollar’ is also being undermined. China, which has been trading in bilateral swaps with many countries over the last decade, is quite happy to pay for its oil in Yuan.

US sanctions do bring pressure to bear on vulnerable countries, not least Iraq, still struggling to escape a virtual colonization by the US, after the brutal 2003 invasion. Iran-Iraq trade is substantial and of strategic importance, for both neighboring countries. In the short term, the US can pressure Iraq over its use of US dollars. However, as US analysts have recognized, these pressures are ‘backfiring’. Given the popular mood and economic realities, even the most compliant Iraqi leaders ‘cannot afford’ to cut economic ties with Iran. If Iraq ‘violates sanctions and is hit by US penalties, it is likely to place the country further into Iran’s sphere of influence’ (See this).

US unilateral sanctions on Russia also add to pressures on other US allies to move out of the North American financial sphere. Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Mass recently called for an alternative to the SWIFT system for international transactions (See this), not least so as German industry can purchase cheaper Russian gas. Now the Europeans have been slow in this regard, but at least they are talking openly about seeking greater independence from their NATO ‘big brother’.

In short, US sanctions will cut some markets and force some adjustments. However, the demand for Iran’s oil is not going away. Unlike a decade ago, the US has few allies in this campaign. Fairly rapidly this economic aggression will consolidate relations amongst Iran’s more reliable strategic partners, weaken the petrodollar and pressure a range of more independent policies amongst US allies.

Tasnim: Trump’s threat is part of his walking away from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He also plans to fully reinstate anti-Tehran sanctions from November 4. In the meantime, the EU has vowed to counter Trump’s renewed sanctions on Iran, including by means of a new law to shield European companies from punitive measures. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas recently said Europe should set up payment systems independent of the US if it wants to save the JCPOA. What do you think about the EU’s role in reducing Washington’s pressures against Tehran and saving the deal?

Anderson: Washington’s cynical rejection of the JCPOA / Barjam has undermined its support across the board. The Europeans clearly took the nuclear agreement more seriously than Washington. While European companies are now under serious pressure to abandon their Iranian investments, so as to maintain their US investments, the European Union has begun to ‘grow a spine’ in face of Trump’s bullying.

Alongside the German proposal for bypassing the US controlled SWIFT system, the EU has re-activated its ‘block law’, to protect companies doing business in Iran (See this). This law was first created to avoid the third-party impact of unilateral US sanctions on Cuba. The statute protects ‘against the effects of the extra-territorial application of legislation adopted by a third country’. It prohibits compliance with non-recognized US sanctions while rejecting any court rulings to apply US penalties.

There is genuine resentment in Europe at US unilateralism and at Trump’s bullying, but the EU has been deeply embedded in US strategy for some time and its incipient moves must be read in that light. There are some rumblings of European economic independence, as regards US aggression against both Russia and Iran; but greater dynamism for structural change is coming from the east, through the Eurasian initiatives of China and Russia.

Will the JCPOA/Barjam survive? I suspect not. The US has openly betrayed the deal and split with all other players. Most of the Europeans seem to want to maintain the deal, but if they cannot deliver on their side, to remove sanctions against Iran, there is nothing in it for Tehran. Russia and China are long gone. US analysts recognize that Washington has no credibility to renegotiate anything and nothing to offer; so there will be no second JCPOA (See this). Both Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the country’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are now calling the 2015 agreement a ‘mistake’. That seems to bridge the gap between Iran’s liberals and ‘principlists’ over the matter: greater Iranian unity in face of an imperial project with seriously eroded support. Why would Iran allow foreign surveillance of its energy and nuclear sector, and get nothing in return? Time to move on, it seems.

The Dirty War on Syria

Author: Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2016

Pages: 240

List Price: $23.95

Special Price: $15.00

click to purchase, directly from Global Research Publishers

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So-called free trade isn’t fair. It’s a license for corporate predators to plunder, exploit, pollute, and operate unrestrained – solely for maximum profit-making.

Generation-ago NAFTA promises, touted by the Clinton co-presidency, were Big Lies – well known at the time. Yet the deal was consummated anyway.

US trade deals and related bipartisan policies exclusively serve corporate interests at the expense of ecosanity and worker pay, benefits and other rights – millions of manufacturing and other jobs lost since the 1990s.

On Monday, Trump touted the new US/Mexico trade deal, talks with Canada to join it continuing.

In a White House statement, DJT lied calling what the US and Mexico agreed on “a big day for trade, a big day for our country…a tremendous thing…a really good deal for both countries.”

The new “United States-Mexico Trade Agreement” is just the opposite.

All US trade deals are secretly negotiated behind closed doors, corporate interests having final say over what’s agreed on, assuring they’re granted new powers and privileges.

They make it easier for them to offshore jobs, ignore ecosanity, trash worker rights, and abandon policies vital for human health and well-being.

NAFTA’s investor protections incentivize offshoring production and jobs. Since taking effect on January 1, 1994, around a million US jobs were lost from this deal alone.

Wages were lowered, benefits lost, and inequality increased at the expense of fast eroding social justice.

So-called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) facilitates offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries.

The so-called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system grants corporate predators the right to sue governments for virtually unlimited compensation before a rigged panel of three corporate lawyers – their ruling final, not subject to appeal.

Rulings in their favor can be gotten by claiming laws protecting public health or ecosanity violate their trade agreement rights.

If a nation refuses to pay, its assets can be seized for compensation. ISDS incentivizes offshoring of jobs by providing special privileges and rights for firms relocating operations abroad – facilitating a global race to the bottom.

Most NAFTA provisions have nothing to do with trade – everything to do with compromising ecosanity and worker rights, along with human health and welfare.

The new US-Mexico trade agreement (NAFTA by another name) empowers corporations to continue offshoring jobs.

It lets them ignore ecosanity, human health and welfare in both countries. It trashes worker rights, sub-poverty wages in Mexico as low or lower than in China, America heading in the same direction.

A petition to Congress by partnered organizations states the following:

“We, the undersigned, demand that any NAFTA replacement must…

Eliminate the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system and the special investor protections it enforces that make it less risky and cheaper to outsource jobs, and that also empower corporations to attack environmental and health laws before tribunals of three corporate lawyers and get unlimited payouts of our tax dollars.

And add strong labor and environmental standards with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages and strengthen lax environmental rules in Mexico to prevent companies from moving jobs to pay workers a pittance and dump toxins.”

Signed by:

CAF-People’s Action

Citizens Trade Campaign

Corporate Accountability

CREDO Action

Daily Kos

Demand Progress

Democracy for America

Food & Water Watch Action

Friends of the Earth Action

Good Jobs Nation

Green America

Just Foreign Policy

Open Media

Progressive Caucus Action Fund

Public Citizen

Sierra Club

Supporting organizations include:

Alliance for Democracy

Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL)

Communications Workers of America (CWA)

Connecticut Fair Trade Coalition

Franciscan Action Network

Our Revolution

A Final Comment

Large-scale migration from Mexico to America since the 1990s was largely because US-subsidized agricultural exports under NAFTA displaced millions of Mexican farmers and related workers.

The deal also let large US manufacturers and retailers operate freely in Mexico, bankrupting its small companies.

Large corporations in both countries benefitted at the expense of everyone else.

Once full details of the new US-Mexico trade deal are known, it may show what was agreed on is worse than NAFTA.

*

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

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A UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission accused Myanmar’s military and security forces of genocide and war crimes against Royinghas and other ethnic minorities – calling their actions “the gravest crimes under international law.”

According to former Indonesian attorney general mission chair Marzuki Darusman, Myanmar’s military committed “shocking human rights violations,” showing “flagrant disregard for lives,” displaying “extreme levels of brutality.”

Its military shows “contempt for human life, dignity and freedom – for international law in general.”

“The Rohingya are in a continuing situation of severe systemic and institutionalized oppression from birth to death.”

Offenses cited include gang rape, torching villages, enslavement, massacres, false imprisonments, torture, and other crimes against humanity in Kachin, Shan and Rakhine states.

The report called for a mechanism to hold Myanmar authorities accountable – including state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, complicit through silence and inaction.

The report said she

“has not used her de facto position as Head of Government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events in Rakhine State.”

“The Government and the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military) have fostered a climate in which hate speech thrives, human rights violations are legitimized, and incitement to discrimination and violence facilitated.”

The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over the country because it’s not a Rome Statute signatory.

The universal jurisdiction principle (UJ) holds that certain crimes are too grave to ignore, including genocide, crimes of war and against humanity.

Under UJ, nations may investigate and prosecute foreign nationals when their country of residence or origin won’t, can’t, or hasn’t for any reason. Israel used it to convict and execute Adolph Eichmann.

A US court sentenced Chuckie Taylor, son of the former Liberian president, to 97 years in prison for torture.

Britain used a Spanish court provisional warrant to apprehend former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, holding him under house arrest for 18 months.

Instead of prosecuting him for high crimes too grave to ignore, he was released and sent home, based on bogus ill health claims.

Under Article 7 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:

“The official position of defendants, whether as Head of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment.”

No one deserves immunity for high crimes demanding accountability. It’s time that standard applied to America, other NATO countries, Israel, and their imperial partners for high crimes too egregious to ignore.

Established by the Rome Statute in July 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is empowered to prosecute individuals for genocide and aggression, as well as crimes of war and against humanity.

The UN was created “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

Its leadership did nothing to deter endless wars of aggression, human rights abuses, or other high crimes committed by powerful member states, notably Western ones, Israel, and their imperial partners, doing what they please, operating with impunity.

Nor has the ICC, functioning as an imperial tool, targeting officials of nations Washington and NATO want prosecuted, victims of US-led aggression.

The court, world body, and special international tribunals never sought to hold officials of Western nations, Israel, and their allies accountable for naked aggression and related high crimes too egregious to ignore.

Myanmar officials are easy targets. So were former Yugoslav officials Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, Iraq’s deputy PM and foreign minister Tariq Aziz, Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, the DRC’s Jean-Pierre Bemba, Uganda’s Joseph Kony, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, among others.

The highest of high crimes committed by Western and allied officials go unpunished.

Their adversaries and enemies are held accountable for crimes of war, against humanity, and genocide committed against their countries by foreign powers.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

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“Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths.” – Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò, Aug 25, 2018

It could be called the apology drive, a journey of institutional contrition.  Pope Francis’ Ireland trip has seeped with remarks of forgiveness, seeking understanding from those who found themselves victims of child abuse within the Catholic Church.

“We apologise,” he told a church service attended by some hundred thousand at Dublin’s Phoenix Park, “for some members of the hierarchy who did not take care of these painful situations and kept silent.” He “wished to put these crimes before the mercy of the Lord and ask forgiveness for them.”

The Vatican, however, is sibilant with the calls of vipers, and the efforts being made within the organisation to out and implicate Pope Francis as a hypocrite in the business of targeting child abuse found form in Saturday’s note of condemnation by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.  Viganò had cut his teeth as the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington, and has never warmed to Francis, an official he accused of nursing a “pro-gay ideology” receptive to homosexual clerics.

On Saturday, the National Catholic Register, amongst other sites, ran news of testimony purportedly written by the aggrieved Cardinal.  The flashpoint here was the case of former Cardinal and retired archbishop of Washington, D.C. Theodore McCarrick, who now stands as a gruesome personification of institutional climbing and abuse in authority.

In his strident note, Viganò alleges that the Vatican was made privy to sexual misconduct allegations of the then Archbishop McCarrick sometime back in 2000.  Memoranda demanding action on conduct towards minors and seminarians were ignored; actions were delayed by Secretaries of State Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone.

This is where Viganò places himself in the picture of concern and worry, claiming that he had been the emissary responsible for passing on the material to the Vatican, not to mention his own insistence that McCarrick be removed from the ministry.  The unmistakable point he wishes to leave us is that of a thoughtful official who was ahead of the game. A cynical reading of this could be that some hand washing is taking place.

Consider the observation about efforts to keep the matter of abuse an internal affair, rather than charging off to the fourth estate to spill the beans.

“I had always believed and hoped that the hierarchy of the Church would find within itself the spiritual resources and strength to tell the whole truth, to amend and to renew itself.  That is why, even though I had repeatedly been asked to do so, I always avoided making statements to the media, even when it would have been my right to do so, in order to defend myself against the calumnies published about me, even by high-ranking prelates of the Roman Curia.”

A decade later, Pope Benedict XVI sanctioned the cardinal, leading Viganò to claim that the previous Pope had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis”.  Church punishments, it would seem, can be recyclable.

The note, in a sense, seems to be an effort to outdo the Pope, a call to bring in, not merely brooms but a whole set of cleansing apparatuses.

“To restore beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ, which is terribly disfigured by so many abominable crimes, and if we truly want to free the Church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truth we have kept hidden.”

It is also an effort to catch Francis out, a bureaucrat’s trick to identify inaction and faulty paperwork.

“He knew from at least June 23, 2013 that McCarrick was a serial predator”.  Despite such knowledge, “he covered for him to the bitter end” permitting him to become nothing less than a “kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States, and the most listened to advisor in the Vatican for relations with the Obama administration.”  Only when “forced by the report of abuse of a minor, again on the basis of media attention” did Francis take “action [regarding McCarrick] to save his image in the media.”

The Pope has been reticent and mild-mannered about the whole thing, though one senses that any effort to combat such remarks would be equivalent to taking a mop to sea.

“I read the statement this morning. I read it and I will say sincerely that I must say this, to you [the reporter] and all of you who are interested: read the document carefully and judge for yourselves.”

Viganò’s accusations are typical of a corporate conspiracy where the corrupt expose the corrupt, and the guilty attempt catharsis.  While critical of the Pope’s own methods, he was very happy to quash an inquiry into claims made against Archbishop John Nienstedt, former head of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St. Paul, that he mishandled claims of sexual abuse.  Nienstedt’s redeeming feature was his ardent advocacy against same-sex marriage.

No one is spared in the accusatory rounds (other than those he is sympathetic to and remain, therefore, unmentioned); there are no “angels”, and anyone in power and positions of accountability are marked by the scathing remarks of Viganò.  Acknowledge your mistakes, he demands of Francis, and abandon all hope for a proper reckoning in office; “set a good example to cardinals and bishops who covered by McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with them.”

Viganò has appropriated the very weapons he accuses Francis of using, but the Pope remains the institution amongst the faithful as much as the man.  Behind the scenes, the factions continue to plot and sharpen what tools they have available.  The call for “transparency and truth” delivered by the “good shepherds” one can trust is all well and good, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that officials in Viganò’s shoes are simply preparing for a change of man rather than a change of attitude.

*

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

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As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”

“I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”

The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.

During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000,

“I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”

After he was criticized for the racist remark, McCain refused to apologize.

“I was referring to my prison guards,” he said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

Image on the right: ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)

McCain’s visceral resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing contra death squads in Central America — any proxy group sworn to the destruction of communist governments.

So committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that in the mid-1980s he had joined the advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL’s British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974, described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”

Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as Jaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the extermination of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon. Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing “a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”

Being Lauded as a Hero

On the occasion of his death, McCain is being honored in much the same way — as a patriotic hero and freedom fighter for democracy. A stream of hagiographies is pouring forth from the Beltway press corps that he described as his true political base. Among McCain’s most enthusiastic groupies is CNN’s Jake Tapper, whom he chose as his personal stenographer for a 2000 trip to Vietnam. When the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Tapper in February, 2000,

“When you’re on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall under the magical McCain spell?”

“Oh, you can’t. You become like Patty Hearst when the SLA took her,” Tapper joked in reply.

But the late senator has also been treated to gratuitous tributes from an array of prominent liberals, from George Soros to his soft power-pushing client, Ken Roth, along with three fellow directors of Human Rights Watch and “democratic socialist” celebrity Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (image on the left), who hailed McCain as “an unparalleled example of human decency.” Rep. John Lewis, the favorite civil rights symbol of the Beltway political class, weighed in as well to memorialize McCain as a “warrior for peace.”

If the paeans to McCain by this diverse cast of political climbers and Davos denizens seemed detached from reality, that’s because they perfectly reflected the elite view of American military interventions as akin to a game of chess, and the millions of dead left in the wake of the West’s unprovoked aggression as mere statistics.

There were few figures in recent American life who dedicated themselves so personally to the perpetuation of war and empire as McCain. But in Washington, the most defining aspect of his career was studiously overlooked, or waved away as the trivial idiosyncrasy of a noble servant who nonetheless deserved everyone’s reverence.

McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.

In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.

While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.

American media may have sought to bury this legacy with the senator’s body, but it is what much of the outside world will remember him for.

‘They are Not al-Qaeda’

When a violent insurgency swept through Libya in 2011, McCain parachuted into the country to meet with leaders of the main insurgent outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), battling the government of Moamar Gaddafi. His goal was to make kosher this band of hardline Islamists in the eyes of the Obama administration, which was considering a military intervention at the time.

McCain with Abdelhakim Belhaj, leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a former Al Qaeda affiliate.

What happened next is well documented, though it is scarcely discussed by a Washington political class that depended on the Benghazi charade to deflect from the real scandal of Libya’s societal destruction. Gaddafi’s motorcade was attacked by NATO jets, enabling a band of LIFG fighters to capture him, sodomize him with a bayonet, then murder him and leave his body to rot in a butcher shop in Misrata while rebel fanboys snapped cellphone selfies of his fetid corpse.

A slaughter of Black citizens of Libya by the racist sectarian militias recruited by McCain immediately followed the killing of the pan-African leader. ISIS took over Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte while Belhaj’s militia took control of Tripoli, and a war of the warlords began. Just as Gaddafi had warned, the ruined country became a staging ground for migrant smugglers on the Mediterranean, fueling the rise of the far-right across Europe and enabling the return of slavery to Africa.

Many might describe Libya as a failed state, but it also represents a successful realization of the vision McCain and his allies have advanced on the global stage.

Following the NATO-orchestrated murder of Libya’s leader, McCain tweeted,

“Qaddafi on his way out, Bashar al Assad is next.”

McCain’s Syrian Boondoggle

Like Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and was suddenly confronted with a Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once again, McCain made it his personal duty to market Islamist insurgents to America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful DC-based Syria-American operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a consultant to the Libyan Transitional Council during the run-up to the NATO invasion.

In May 2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal trip across the Syrian border and meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli millionaire named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts between the Syrian opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed to have “financed the opposition group which took senator John McCain to visit war-torn Syria.”

“This could be like his Benghazi moment,” Moustafa remarked excitedly in a scene from a documentary, “Red Lines,” that depicted his efforts for regime change. “[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came back, we bombed.”

During his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of CIA-backed insurgents and blessed their struggle. “The senator wanted to assure the Free Syrian Army that the American people support their cry for freedom, support their revolution,” Moustafa said in an interview with CNN. McCain’s office promptly released a photo showing the senatorposing beside a beaming Moustafa and two grim-looking gunmen.

Days later, the men were named by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour and Abu Ibrahim. Both had been implicated in the kidnapping a year prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were identified by one of the survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S. the targets of mockery from Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly critical reports from across the media spectrum. At a town hall in Arizona, McCain was berated by constituents, including Jumana Hadid, a Syrian Christian woman who warned that the sectarian militants he had cozied up to threatened her community with genocide.

McCain with then-FSA commander Salam Idriss, right, and an insurgent, left, later exposed for kidnapping Shia pilgrims.

But McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he introduced another shady young operative into his interventionist theater. Named Elizabeth O’Bagy, she was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, an arms industry-funded think tank directed by Kimberly Kagan of the neoconservative Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O’Bagy was consulting for Moustafa at his Syrian Emergency Task Force, a clear conflict of interest that her top Senate patron was well aware of. Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal editorial by O’Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately “moderate,” and potentially Western-friendly.

Days later, O’Bagy was exposed for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As soon as the humiliated Kagan fired O’Bagy, the academic fraudster took another pass through the Beltway’s revolving door, striding into the halls of Congress as McCain’s newest foreign policy aide.

McCain ultimately failed to see the Islamist “revolutionaries” he glad handled take control of Damascus. Syria’s government held on thanks to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and Moscow, but not before a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there were other intrigues seeking his attention, and new bands of fanatical rogues in need of his blessing. Months after his Syrian boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned his attention to Ukraine, then in the throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S. and EU-funded soft power NGO’s.

Coddling the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

On December 14, 2013, McCain materialized in Kiev for a meeting with Oleh Tyanhbok, an unreconstructed fascist who had emerged as a top opposition leader. Tyanhbok had co-founded the fascist Social-National Party, a far-right political outfit that touted itself as the “last hope of the white race, of humankind as such.” No fan of Jews, he had complained that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” had taken control of his country, and had been photographed throwing up a sieg heil Nazi salute during a speech.

None of this apparently mattered to McCain. Nor did the scene of Right Sector neo-Nazis filling up Kiev’s Maidan Square while he appeared on stage to egg them on.

“Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better!” McCain proclaimed to cheering throngs while Tyanhbok stood by his side. The only issue that mattered to him at the time was the refusal of Ukraine’s elected president to sign a European Union austerity plan, opting instead for an economic deal with Moscow.

Image on the right: McCain met with Social-National Party co-founder Oleh Tyanhbok.

McCain was so committed to replacing an independent-minded government with a NATO vassal that he even mulled a military assault on Kiev. “I do not see a military option and that is tragic,” McCain lamented in an interview about the crisis. Fortunately for him, regime change arrived soon after his appearance on the Maidan, and Tyanhbok’s allies rushed in to fill the void.

By the end of the year, the Ukrainian military had become bogged down in a bloody trench war with pro-Russian, anti-coup separatists in the country’s east. A militia affiliated with the new government in Kiev called Dnipro-1 was accused by Amnesty International observers of blocking humanitarian aid into a separatist-held area, including food and clothing for the war torn population.

Six months later, McCain appeared at Dnipro-1’s training base alongside Sen.’s Tom Cotton and John Barasso.

“The people of my country are proud of your fight and your courage,” McCain told an assembly of soldiers from the militia.

When he completed his remarks, the fighters belted out a World War II-era salute made famous by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators:

“Glory to Ukraine!”

Today, far-right nationalists occupy key posts in Ukraine’s pro-Western government. The speaker of its parliament is Andriy Parubiy, a co-founder with Tyanhbok of the Social-National Party and leader of the movement to honor World World Two-era Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera. On the cover of his 1998 manifesto, “View From The Right,” Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style brown shirt with a pistol strapped to his waist. In June 2017, McCain and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan welcomed Parubiy on Capitol Hill for what McCain called a “good meeting.” It was a shot in the arm for the fascist forces sweeping across Ukraine.

The past months in Ukraine have seen a state sponsored neo-Nazi militia called C14 carrying out a pogromist rampage against Ukraine’s Roma population, the country’s parliament erecting an exhibition honoring Nazi collaborators, and the Ukrainian military formally approving the pro-Nazi “Glory to Ukraine” greeting as its own official salute.

Ukraine is now the sick man of Europe, a perpetual aid case bogged down in an endless war in its east. In a testament to the country’s demise since its so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” the deeply unpopular President Petro Poroshenko has promised White House National Security Advisor John Bolton that his country — once a plentiful source of coal on par with Pennsylvania — will now purchase coal from the U.S. Once again, a regime change operation that generated a failing, fascistic state stands as one of McCain’s greatest triumphs.

McCain’s history conjures up memory of one of the most inflammatory statements by Sarah Palin, another cretinous fanatic he foisted onto the world stage. During a characteristically rambling stump speech in October 2008, Palin accusedBarack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” The line was dismissed as ridiculous and borderline slander, as it should have been. But looking back at McCain’s career, the accusation seems richly ironic.

By any objective standard, it was McCain who had palled around with terrorists, and who wrested as much resources as he could from the American taxpayer to maximize their mayhem. Here’s hoping that the societies shattered by McCain’s proxies will someday rest in peace.

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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and the forthcoming The Management of Savagery, which will be published by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the newly released Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the GrayzoneProject.com in 2015 and serves as its editor.

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The German newspaper “Die Welt” announced that Russia actively seeks to get rid of dependency on the US dollar by purchasing gold and selling the bulk of the Moscow-owned US Treasury bonds.

According to political advisor and author James Rickards, cited by the newspaper, the Russian government pursues “a strategic plan” aimed at protecting the country from “dollar sanctions” by building up Russia’s gold reserves.

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Sputnik: The author of the article for “Die Welt” called gold ‘a perfect investment’ for Russia in the face of US sanctions. How much does this assessment correspond to reality? If it is true, why?

Peter Koenig: Yes, Mr. Zschäpitz, from the German “Die Welt“, quoting James Rickards, makes some good points.

The fact that Russia is stocking up on gold is not new. They have been doing this for years, especially during Mr. Putin’s leadership and more so since the imposition of the totally illegal sanctions that are based on falsehood and fabricated reasons in the first place – and continue on fabricated reasons, mostly by the US and the UK. 

And to add injury to insult, the Swiss bank Crédit Swiss has just frozen roughly 5 billion dollars of money linked to Russia to avoid falling out of favors with Washington and risking sanctions. This is of course further increasing pressure on Moscow to de-dollarize as quickly as possible. Washington must know, of course, what these “sanctions” do. They are talking to Russian Atlantists – or Fifth Columnists – of whom there are still too many in Russia. And the sanctions against Russia are also propaganda-speak “we still command the world”.

These sanctions call for de-dollarization – which is already happening, and this on a rapidly increasing scale, as Mr. Zschäpitz points out. At the same time as Russia is buying gold, Russian dollar reserves have been reduced drastically over the past years.

They were replaced by gold and the Chinese Yuan (Renminbi) – since about two years the Yuan has been an officially recognized reserve currency by the IMF. The accumulation of gold, has made Russia the world’s fifth largest gold owner. They have increased their gold holdings from less than 500 tons in 2008 to almost 2000 tons in July 2018, including the latest purchase of 26 tons in July 2918.

The Russian Ruble today is covered twice by the value of gold. The ruble is no fiat currency like the dollar-based western monetary system, including the euro. The ruble is a solid currency, despite contrary western propaganda. When the western media demonizes the Russian currency as having lost 50% of its value due to sanctions – it is a manipulated half-truth. The 50% loss of value as compared to what? – Compared to the US dollar and other western currencies? With a western de-linked economy – a 50% devaluation, or any devaluation is irrelevant.

Being decoupled from the dollar, Russia will no longer be vulnerable to western sanctions – and no longer needs the western economy – which is already almost the case today. Russia has embarked on an effective “Economy of Resistance”.

As President Putin pointed out already years ago, the sanctions are the best thing that happened to Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They forced Russia to rehabilitate and boost her agricultural production for food self-sufficiency, and likewise with the industrial sector. Today Russia is not only food-autonomous, but is by far the world’s largest wheat exporter; and Russia has developed a cutting-edge industrial park, no longer dependent on ‘sanctioned’ imports from the west.

And take this – as Mr. Putin pointed out, Russia will be supplying the world exclusively with organic food!

All of this confirms that investing in gold as a reserve currency and in Yuan, is a move away from the western dollar economy – and towards economic sovereignty. Besides, Russia has had for years a Yuan-Ruble swap agreement with the Central Bank of China, a sign of close economic and trade relations.

By the way – China has also been on a gold-buying spree for years. The Chinese Yuan is also covered by gold, plus by a solid national economy. Therefore, sanctions or ‘Trump’s tariff war’ have also only limited effect on China, if any. They serve more western anti-Yuan propaganda, alleging that tariffs and sanctions may weaken the yuan, thereby discouraging countries to buy yuans for their reserve coffers. It is a fact that the Yuan is rapidly replacing the dollar as a reserve currency.

Besides, both Russia and China are part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – the so-called SCO – and along with 6 other countries the SCO encompasses already close to 50% of the world population and controls about a third of the globes GDP. – Dependence on the west is no longer necessary.

Sputnik: The author also speaks about the growing importance of gold. What effect could its increased role have in the international financial system?

PK: It is half-secretly speculated that as a last-ditch effort to save the dollar, the US may return to some kind of a gold standard, thereby massively devaluing the dollar – and the US international debt – all those dollars currently still in many countries’ treasuries as reserves.

Having alternatives to dollars in a country’s reserve coffers, like gold and yuans, is of course a great defense mechanism. On the other hand, if such a move back to a kind of gold-standard by Washington, introduced by the FED and the US Treasury-controlled IMF, would take place – it would most likely boost the market value of gold – a good thing for those who have converted their reserves into gold. 

Those who would suffer from such a move are as always, the poor countries, those that are highly indebted by IMF and World Bank loans, and may now be asked to pay back their debt in gold-convertible dollars.

Sputnik: What will happen to the dominance of dollar? What impact could it have on the US position on the world arena?

PK: It would most likely accelerate the fall of the dollar, meaning the end of US-dollar hegemony. It would probably also trigger the fall of the US economy which depends so much on the dollar hegemony – on being able to pressure countries into their following by ‘sanctions’.

I’m not a believer in gold as a sustainable ‘currency-alike’ in the long-run – because gold is also vulnerable to high-stakes manipulation and speculation. I more believe in a country’s economy as the true backing of a country’s currency. This is already happening in China, where the currency in circulation is backed by its strong economy. It may be soon, or is already, the case in Russia. 

The use of gold, in my view, is but a temporary measure, and will last as long as the world still believes in the godly and historic and ancient powers of this precious metal. Today only about 10% of the available gold is for industrial use, the rest is “reserve money” and for pure speculation. If the world discovers that there is about 100 times more paper gold – gold derivatives – in circulation than physical gold – this miracle perception of gold may disappear. If all the derivative-paper gold would be cashed in at once – guess what would happen? 

So, gold is good for now, but a temporary solution, in the longer run to be replaced by the actual strength of a country’s economy.

Sputnik: Amid US sanction policy, there have been calls for switching to national currencies in trade and ditch dollar. How efficient is this approach?

PK: Very efficient.

This is already happening. Russia and China are for years no longer trading in dollars but in local currencies, or even in gold, or in the case of China in gold-convertible yuan, especially for trading hydrocarbons, oil and gas. So are largely India, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that are eager to escape the dollar- hegemony with sanctions.

I think one of the ways out of the nefarious neoliberal globalization, is returning to sovereign country economies, with local currencies and satisfying local market needs. External trade with friendly nations, that share similar cultural and ideological values. 

This is what China has done. China opened its borders to the west gradually in the mid-eighties, when she was self-sufficient in alimentation, health, education and shelter. And this practice is paying off until today. It is very difficult – if not impossible – to pressure China into anything – political or monetary – as Trump may soon find out – or knows already. China is fully autonomous and controls the Asian market, doesn’t really need the west in the long.

What Mr. Putin said, about the sanctions being the best thing that happened to Russia – for achieving economic sovereignty – which is really the key, goes in the same direction.

So yes, local production for local markets wit local currencies and trading with friendly nations – i.e. the SCO nations and nations participating in President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the future.

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

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Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some aspects of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed Jews and Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message relating to what is going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the reality is that there exists an “Israel Lobby” in many countries, all dedicated to advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli governments no matter what the actual interests of the host country might be. Failure to confront Israel’s crimes against humanity combined with an inability to resist its demands regarding how issues like anti-Semitism and hate speech are defined has done terrible damage to free speech in Western Europe and, most notably, in the Anglophone world.

For the United States this corruption of the media and the political process by Israel has meant endless wars in the Middle East as well of loss of civil liberties at home, but some other countries have compromised their own declared values far beyond that. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper praised Israel completely inaccurately as a light that “…burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations – freedom, democracy justice.” He has also said “I will defend Israel whatever the cost” to Canada, an assertion that some might regard as very, very odd for a Canadian head of state.

In some other cases, Israel plays hardball directly, threatening retribution against governments that do not fall in line. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently warned New Zealand that backing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements would be a “declaration of war.” He was able to do so because he had confidence in the power of the Israel Lobby in that country to mobilize and produce the desired result.

Screengrab from The Guardian

It might surprise some that the “Mother of Parliaments” in Great Britain is perhaps the legislative body most dominated by Israeli interests, more in many respects than the Congress in the United States. The ruling Conservative Party has a Friends of Israel caucus that includes more than 80% of its Parliamentary membership. BICOM , the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, is an American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) clone located in London. It is well funded and politically powerful, working through its various “Friends of Israel” proxies. Americans might be surprised to learn how that power is manifest, including that in Britain Jewish organizations uniquely are allowed to patrol heavily Jewish London neighborhoods in police-like uniforms while driving police-type vehicles. There have been reports of the patrols threatening Muslims who seek to enter the areas.

Prime Minister Theresa May is careful never to offend either Israel or the wealthy and powerful British Jewish community. After Secretary of State John Kerry described Israel’s government as “extreme right wing” on December 28, 2016, May sprang to Tel Aviv’s defense, saying

“we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically elected government of an ally.”

May’s rejoinder could have been written by Netanyahu, and maybe it was. Two weeks later, her government cited “reservations” over a French government sponsored mid-January Middle East peace conference and would not sign a joint statement calling for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Netanyahu vociferously condemned the proceedings.

This deference all takes place in spite of a recent astonishing expose by al-Jazeera, which revealed how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to “take down” parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs).

British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been under unrelenting fire due to the fact that he is the first major political party leader in many years to resist the demands that he place Israel on a pedestal. Corbyn is indeed a man of the left who has consistently opposed racism, extreme nationalism, colonialism and military interventionism. Corbyn’s crime has been that he is critical of the Jewish state and has called for an “end to the repression of the Palestinian people.” As a reward, he has been hounded mercilessly by British Jews, even those in his own party, for over two years.

The invective being spewed by some British Jews and Israel has increased of late, presumably because Theresa May’s Conservative government is perceived as being weak and there is a distinct possibility that the leader of the Labour Party will be the next Prime Minister. That a Prime Minister might be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is viewed as completely unacceptable.

Last month, rightwing Labour Parliamentarian Margaret Hodge (image on the right) raised the stakes, calling Corbyn “a fucking anti-Semite and a racist”. She then wrote in the Guardian that Labour is “a hostile environment for Jews.” The traditionally liberal Guardian has in fact been in the forefront of Jewish criticism of Corbyn, led by its senior editor Jonathan Freedland, who reportedly believes that “his Jewish identity is intimately tied to Israel, and that to attack Israel is to attack him personally… he is demanding the exclusive right to police the parameters of discussions about Israel.” Last month he featured in his paper a letter attacking Corbyn signed by 68 rabbis.

All of the invective has been more-or-less orchestrated by the Israeli government, which directly supports the gaggle of groups that have coalesced to bring down Corbyn. This effort to destroy the Labour leader has included the use of an app disseminating messages via social media accusing Corbyn of anti-Semitism. The app was developed by Israel’s strategic affairs ministry, which “directs Israel’s covert efforts to sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement around the world”.

There are two principal objectives to the “get Corbyn” campaign. The first is to remove him from the Labour Party leadership position, thereby ensuring that he will never be elected Prime Minister, while also eliminating from the party any and all members who are perceived as being “too critical” of Israel. In practice that has meant anyone who criticizes Israel at all. And second it is to establish as a legal principle that the “hate crime” offense of anti-Semitism specifically be defined to include criticism of Israel, thereby making it a criminal offense to write or speak about Israel’s racist behavior towards its Muslim and Christian minority while also making it impossible to freely discuss its war crimes.

The principal argument being made against Corbyn is that the Labour Party is awash with anti-Semitism and Corbyn has done little or nothing to oppose it. Some of the most brutal shots against Corbyn have come from the usual crowd in the United States. Andrew Sullivan recently observed in New York Magazine that

“When it emerged, that Naz Shah, a new Labour MP, had opined on Facebook before she was elected that Israel should be relocated to the U.S., and former London mayor Ken Livingstone backed her up by arguing that the Nazis initially favored Zionism, Corbyn didn’t make a big fuss.”

Sullivan then went on to write that

“It then emerged that Corbyn himself had subscribed to various pro-Palestinian Facebook groups where rank anti-Semitism flourished” and had even “…attended a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, called ‘Never Again for Anyone: Auschwitz to Gaza,’ equating Israelis with Nazis.”

In other words, Corbyn should have been responsible for policing the personal views of Shah and Livingstone, both of whom were subsequently suspended from the Labour Party with Livingstone eventually resigning. He should have also avoided Palestinian Facebook commentary because alleged anti-Semites occasionally contribute their views and ought not to acknowledge in any fashion the Israel war crimes being committed on a daily basis in Gaza.

So Corbyn must go based on the “fact” that he has to be a closet anti-Semite as discerned by the likes of Andrew Sullivan on this side of the Atlantic and a host of Israel-firsters in Britain. But the Labour leader’s worst crime that is being regarded as an “existential threat” to Jewish people everywhere is his resistance to the pressure being exerted on him to endorse and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) precise multi-faceted definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism. The IHRA basic definition of anti-Semitism is reasonable enough, including “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The Labour Party and Corbyn have accepted that definition but have balked at eleven “contemporary examples of anti-Semitism” also provided by IHRA, four of which have nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Israel. They are:

• Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

One might observe that many Jews – not all or even most – but many, do have dual loyalty in which the allegiance to Israel is dominant. I would cite as a prime example the current U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman who spends much of his time defending Israel. And there are also the American Jews who have spied for Israel, to include Jonathan Pollard and AIPAC luminaries Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman who obtained classified information from Lawrence Franklin and then passed what they had obtained to Israeli intelligence.

And yes, Israel is a “racist endeavor.” Just check out the recent nationality law passed by the Knesset declaring Israel to be a Jewish State. It grants self-determination only to those living within its borders who are Jews. And if using racial distinctions for full citizenship while also bombing hospitals and schools while lining up snipers to shoot thousands of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators is not Nazi-like behavior, then what is? Israel and its leader are sometimes compared to Nazis and to Adolf Hitler because they behave like Nazis and Adolf Hitler.

And finally there is the definition that challenges any “double standard” in demanding behavior from Israel that is not expected from any other democratic nation. Well, first of all Israel is not a democracy. It is a theocracy or ethnocracy if you prefer wrapped around a police state. Other countries that call themselves democracies have equal rights under law for all citizens. Other democracies do not have hundreds of thousands of settlers stealing land and even water resources from the indigenous population and colonizing it to the benefit of only one segment of its population. Other democracies do not regularly shoot dead unarmed protesters. How many democracies are currently practicing ethnic cleansing, as the Israeli Jews are doing to the Palestinians?

Will Corbyn give in to the IHRA demands to save his skin as party leader? One has to suspect that he will as he is already regularly conceding points and apologizing, publicly delivering the required obeisance to the holocaust as “the worst crime of the twentieth century.” And every time he tries to appease those out to get him he emerges weaker. Even if he submits completely, the Israel firsters who are hot to get him, having just like in American significant control over the media, will continue to attack until they find the precise issue that will bring him down. The Labour National Executive Council will meet in September to vote on full acceptance of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. When they, as is likely, kneel before force majeure that will be the end of free speech in Britain. Criticize Israel and you go to jail.

And the same thing is happening in the United States in precisely the same fashion. Criticism of Israel or protesting against it will sooner rather than later be criminalized. I sometimes wonder if Senator Ben Cardin and the others who are promoting the hate legislation really understand what will be lost when they sacrifice the U.S. Constitution to defend Israel. Once free speech is gone, it will never return.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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Iran opened a lawsuit on Monday demanding the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), order the suspension of renewed US sanctions which it says are devastating its economy.

The Islamic Republic says US President Donald Trump‘s decision to reimpose sanctions over its nuclear programme aims to bring it “to its knees” and is in breach of a 1955 friendship treaty.

Sanctions had been lifted under a 2015 multilateral agreement in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons. In May, Trump announced that the US would abandon the deal.

Then last month, his administration reimposed unilateral sanctions, saying they were needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb.

A second wave of sanctions are due to hit Iran in early November, targeting its banking and energy sectors, including oil exports.

The measures have added to Iran’s economic woes, helping to fuel strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

Since April, the rial has lost half of its value and a government strategy to keep the currency from sliding even further backfired. On Sunday, Iran’s parliament impeached Masoud Karbasian, the finance minister.

As the suit began, the head of the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reportedly said that the country had full control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, according to Tasnim news agency.

Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened to block the strait, a major oil shipping route, in retaliation for any hostile US action.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in July that if Iran is not permitted to export oil, no other country in the region should be allowed to.

‘Irreparable prejudice’ 

As the suit opened on Monday, the presiding judge of the UN body – informally known as the World Court – began the hearing by calling on Washington to respect its outcome.

During their decades of animosity, both the United States and Iran have ignored some rulings at the court.

“The US is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran’s economy and Iranian national companies, and therefore inevitably Iranian nationals,” said Mohsen Mohebi, representing Iran, at the start of four days of oral hearings. “This policy is plainly in violation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity.”

He said Iran had sought a diplomatic solution to the countries’ dispute but was rejected.

The United States said in an initial written reaction displayed in court that it believes the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case, and that Iran’s assertions fall outside the bounds of the treaty.

US lawyers led by State Department adviser Jennifer Newstead, appointed by Trump in 2017, are due to respond on Tuesday. A ruling is expected within a month, though no date has been set.

Tehran filed its case before the court in late July, calling on the Hague-based tribunal’s judges to order the immediate lifting of sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

It said the sanctions would cause it “irreparable prejudice”.

“The current US administration is pushing the sanctions to their maximum with the sole aim of bringing Iran to its knees,” Iran’s lawyers said in the court filing.

“The USA is besieging Iran economically, with all the dramatic consequences that a siege implies for the besieged population.”

The lawyers have also said in their filings that the sanctions threaten tens of billions of dollars’ worth of business deals with foreign companies.

International companies including France’s Total, Peugeot and Renault, and Germany’s Siemens and Daimler, have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May.

Air France and British Airways announced on Thursday that they would halt flights to Tehran next month, saying they were not commercially viable. The British carrier added however that the decision was unrelated to the fresh sanctions.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a “comprehensive and lasting solution” regarding its activities such as its “ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism”.

Khamenei this month appeared to rule out any immediate prospect of talks, saying “there will be neither war, nor negotiations”, with the US.

The ICJ was set up in 1946 to rule in disputes between countries.

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Rival Great Powers Iran and Saudi Arabia are both experiencing different degrees of pushback from certain “deep state” factions in their permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, with this dynamic being responsible for several of the latest breaking news developments in the region.

Four breaking news developments almost simultaneously emerged from the Persian Gulf region recently, and they’re all connected in one way or another to the “deep state” struggles that Iran and Saudi Arabia are presently undergoing. The first is that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s (MBS) plan to partially privatize the Aramco oil giant was indefinitely delayed after the King’s intervention, which was shortly thereafter followed by Iran’s Finance Minister being impeached. Then, on Monday, Iran claimed full control over the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, which in turn prompted Saudi Arabia to predict that the UNSC would authorize military intervention against the Islamic Republic if it prevented transit through these waterways.

Domestic Power Plays

Although seemingly disconnected to the casual observer, the common denominator between everything that just unfolded is that competing “deep state” factions in each of the two rivals’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies are vying for control of their respective state.

The rapidly redeveloping rift between Iran’s “principalists” and “reformers” (regarded in the Western Mainstream Media as “conservatives/hardliners” and “moderates”, respectively) isn’t a surprise to anyone who follows the country’s domestic political scene, but the impeachment of “reformist” President Rouhani’s Finance Minister proves that the “principalists” are on the ascendency and unafraid of making bold power plays in parliament. Their goal is manifold but mostly deals with “punishing” Rouhani’s “reformers” for their unsuccessful rapprochement with the US and consequently coercing them into implementing the “principalists’” domestic and foreign policies. Given the increasing bouts of local unrest caused by the deteriorating economic situation in the country, it’s likely that Rouhani will sooner or later have to ironically “reform” his “moderate” policies and become more “conservative”.

As for Saudi Arabia, MBS’ structurally “revolutionary” policies of progressively mitigating the influence of Wahhabism on his society in parallel with carrying out his own “deep state” coup against many of his own extended family members under an “anti-corruption” guise has earned him plenty of enemies, some of whom may have tried to overthrow or even assassinate him during a mysterious event in late-April that led to the Crown Prince’s prolonged absence from public life. It was likely during this time that his enemies took advantage of his father’s reported dementia to brainwash him into sabotaging Aramco’s planned partial privatization. Not only would this ruin MBS’ ambitious Vision 2030 strategy of socio-economic reform, but it would also stop their corrupt practices revealed to the public as part of the privatization process and therefore prevent even more of them from being purged by the Crown Prince on those grounds.

Basically, manipulating the King amounted to an act of temporary self-preservation for MBS’ “deep state” royalist foes that nevertheless undermines the country’s grand strategic interests, hence why it was wildly cheered on by the Kingdom’s Iranian-friendly Alt-Media foes.

International Drama

Sensing Saudi weakness and also eager to signal to their domestic audience that they’re calling the shots at home after successfully impeaching Rouhani’s Finance Minister, the “principalists’” “deep state” representatives in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stunningly declared that they now have full control over the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. This immediately produced a flurry of reactions across the world ranging from celebrations to condemnations, though most people neglected to realize that Tehran is unlikely to trigger a world war at this time and is simply flexing its muscles for the aforementioned symbolic reasons.

It’s important in the context of domestic Iranian politics for the “principalists” to show their people that they’re taking a strong stand against America in advance of the anticipated worsening of economic conditions at home. This helps to galvanize support for the country’s governing system during these trying times, ensuring that public opposition responsibly refrains from challenging it and instead remains safely in the realm of partisan politics. So long as the state occasionally carries out dramatic gestures of resistance against the US, then it won’t lose much legitimacy in the eyes of the people like Washington intends to happen throughout the course of the presentHybrid War.

Concerning Saudi Arabia, it skillfully (though hypocritically) resorted to speaking about international law in response to Iran’s recent military declaration, which allows the Kingdom to present itself in a better light by contrast. If Iran were to take military action to halt the transit of US naval vessels and other countries’ oil tankers through the region, then it would veritably be in violation of international law, which is another reason why this is all probably just one big virtue signaling show for the previously described reasons. In any case, the perception of an external Iranian threat strengthens “deep state” solidarity in Saudi Arabia, so Tehran’s tactics might actually be counterproductive.

Still, it can’t be disregarded that the Saudi “deep state” is indeed divided at this very moment between MBS’ loyalists who helped him almost flawlessly carry out his “anti-corruption” de-facto coup late last year and those who are opposed to the fast-moving and unprecedented full-spectrum changes that he’s presided over. The unexpected success of the Crown Prince’s enemies in convincing the King to go against one of the key pillars of his son’s Vision 2030 strategy for procuring the funds necessary to rapidly modernize the Kingdom speaks to their rising influence in the court, but it also suggests that MBS and his “deep state” backers now have an urgent reason to seek the King’s “resignation” and carry out a “regime change” before a lower-level one is undertaken against them.

The current trajectory of Iranian “deep state” developments is that the “principalists” will succeed in regaining full de-facto control over the state following the brief and strategically unsuccessful period of “reformist” rule that only delivered high and ultimately failed hopes to the country’s masses. The enormous youth population that was responsible for Rouhani’s electoral success twice in a row was predisposed by typical generational factors to favor the “reformists” over the “principalists”, though some of them might finally be coming around to realizing the fallacy of their ways after the military-intelligence faction of the “deep state” has now been vindicated for its cautionary approach towards the US. There will expectedly be some who will object to the most likely outcome of a newly emboldened “principalist” state operating behind a “reformist” face, though they’ll probably remain in the minority because most of Rouhani’s supporters might reconcile themselves with the fact that he had to “reform” his original policies due to the latest domestic and international circumstances, while his opponents will be satisfied that their faction is practically back in power.

Iran’s “deep state” transition (or “de-facto coup”, if one wants to take a cynical perspective towards this process) will more than likely be peaceful, which is more than can be said for Saudi Arabia’s. MBS and the powerful members of his country’s military-intelligence “deep state” faction that are supporting him won’t allow their “revolutionary” to be sidelined by the royalist-Wahhabi alliance (which is in essence the traditional basis of the Saudi state, especially after 1979) up to the point of possibly even being unseated from his position as Crown Prince just like his predecessor was. The proverbial writing is on the wall and both factions know it, which is why one or the other might make a dramatic move sometime in the future, which could possibly be triggered by the success of Iran’s “principalists” faction across the Gulf. Decontextualized, misportrayed, and over-amplified infowar narratives pertaining to this development – inadvertently assisted by some of Iran’s own statements such as those regarding the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz – could even be used by MBS to “justify” taking the first step.

The Iranian and Saudi “deep states” have indeed acted against their public faces guiding their countries’ affairs, and each has relatively succeeded in what they set out to do. The “principalists” have proven that they can not only twist the “reformists’” arm on the domestic front, but also showed their people that they’re in total control of Iran’s international and military affairs after their latest declaration concerning the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. Regarding Riyadh, the royal intrigue in the Saudi capital saw MBS’ foes temporarily offset one of the main policies of his and his “deep state” backers’ Vision 2030 socio-economic reform project, which works out to their temporary self-interest though at the obvious expense of long-term national ones. Whereas Iran’s “deep state” transition (“de-facto coup”) will probably be peaceful and has already pretty much succeeded, Saudi Arabia’s is still uncertain and might even lead to violence.

Another factor to be considered is that the US now has a pressing interest in supporting MBS, unlike last year when it was thought to have been cultivating some of his “deep state” enemies in order to influence him to scale back his fast-moving rapprochements with America’s Russian and Chinese multipolar rivals. Nowadays, however, the US would rather that MBS remain in power and eventually become King because the partial privatization of Aramco would preserve the complex economic interdependency between the US and Saudi Arabia in the post-oil era and contribute to countering rising Russian and Chinese influence in the Kingdom. The US also needs a strong Saudi Arabia as its “Lead From Behind” partner against Iran, especially a “principalist”-led one like it’s basically turning into nowadays, and MBS is its best bet for achieving this so long as they can retain a comfortable amount of influence over his country through strategic Vision 2030 investments.

All told, the primary takeaway is that the latest breaking news developments in the Gulf are driven by the “deep state” struggles within Iran and Saudi Arabia as each country’s aspirational power faction tries to unseat the one that’s already in charge of the state, be it formally or informally. The process underway in Iran was catalyzed by the external pressure being put on the country by the US and is intended (key word) by its participants to be to the benefit of its national interests, though the one in Saudi Arabia is entirely caused by domestic circumstances and is counter to the country’s national interests. The US is against both progressively unfolding “deep state coups” for different but interrelated reasons because the success of the one in Iran might make America’s chief regional adversary even stronger while the victory of MBS’ royalist-Wahhabi foes in Saudi Arabia would weaken the US’ main regional partner.

*

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.

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On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty Eccles

The ramifications of this little request are enormous as they cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC’s propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and of the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele “dirty dossier”. This also of course casts a strong light on more plausible motives for an attack on the Skripals.

Which is why the BBC point blank refused to answer Kirsty’s request, stating that it was subject to the Freedom of Information exemption for “Journalism”.

10th July 2018
Dear Ms Eccles
Freedom of Information request – RFI20181319
Thank you for your request to the BBC of 8th July 2018, seeking the following information under the
Freedom of Information Act 2000:
1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he
had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.
2: When did the BBC know this?
3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the
subject of Sergei Skripal.
The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of
‘journalism, art or literature.’ The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you. Part VI
of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters
is only covered by the Act if it is held for ‘purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”. The
BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or
information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.

The BBC is of course being entirely tendentious here – “journalism” does not include the deliberate suppression of vital information from the public, particularly in order to facilitate the propagation of fake news on behalf of the security services. That black propaganda is precisely what the BBC is knowingly engaged in, and here trying hard to hide.

I have today attempted to contact Mark Urban at Newsnight by phone, with no success, and sent him this email:

To: [email protected]

Dear Mark,

As you may know, I am a journalist working in alternative media, a member of the NUJ, as well as a former British Ambassador. I am researching the Skripal case.

I wish to ask you the following questions.

1) When the Skripals were first poisoned, it was the largest news story in the entire World and you were uniquely positioned having held several meetings with Sergei Skripal the previous year. Yet faced with what should have been a massive career break, you withheld that unique information on a major story from the public for four months. Why?
2) You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?
3) When you met Skripal in Salisbury, was Miller present all or part of the time, or did you meet Miller separately?
4) Was the BBC aware of your meetings with Miller and/or Skripal at the time?
5) When, four months later, you told the world about your meetings with Skripal after the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you said you had met him to research a book. Yet the only forthcoming book by you advertised is on the Skripal attack. What was the subject of your discussions with Skripal?
6) Pablo Miller worked for Orbis Intelligence. Do you know if Miller contributed to the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump/Russia?
7) Did you discuss the Trump dossier with Skripal and/or Miller?
8) Do you know whether Skripal contributed to the Trump dossier?
9) In your Newsnight piece following the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you stated that security service sources had told you that Yulia Skripal’s telephone may have been bugged. Since January 2017, how many security service briefings or discussions have you had on any of the matter above.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Craig Murray

I should very much welcome others also sending emails to Mark Urban to emphasise the public demand for an answer from the BBC to these vital questions. If you have time, write your own email, or if not copy and paste from mine.

To quote that great Scot John Paul Jones, “We have not yet begun to fight”.

Con tutti i ponti distrutti, i residenti di Novi Sad furono costretti ad attraversare il Danubio con un traghetto con pontone militare. Altre foto disponibili QUI

«L’immagine è davvero apocalittica, sembra che una bomba sia caduta sopra questa importantissima arteria»: così un giornalista ha descritto il ponte Morandi appena crollato a Genova, stroncando la vita di decine di persone.

Parole che richiamano alla mente altre immagini, quelle dei circa 40 ponti serbi distrutti dai bombardamenti NATO del 1999, tra cui il ponte sulla Morava meridionale dove due missili colpirono un treno facendo strage dei passeggeri.

Per 78 giorni, decollando soprattutto dalle basi italiane fornite dal governo D’Alema, 1100 aerei effettuarono 38 mila sortite, sganciando 23 mila bombe e missili. Furono sistematicamente smantellate le strutture e infrastrutture della Serbia, provocando migliaia di vittime tra i civili. Ai bombardamenti parteciparono 54 aerei italiani, che effettuarono 1378 sortite, attaccando gli obiettivi stabiliti dal comando statunitense.

«Per numero di aerei siamo stati secondi solo agli Usa. L’Italia è un grande paese e non ci si deve stupire dell’impegno dimostrato in questa guerra», dichiarò D’Alema.

Nello stesso anno in cui partecipava alla demolizione finale dello Stato jugoslavo, il governo D’Alema demoliva la proprietà pubblica della Società Autostrade (gestore anche del ponte Morandi), cedendone una parte a un gruppo di azionisti privati e quotando il resto in Borsa. Il ponte Morandi è crollato fondamentalmente  per responsabilità di un sistema incentrato sul profitto, lo stesso alla base dei potenti interessi rappresentati dalla NATO.

L’accostamento tra le immagini del ponte Morandi crollato e dei ponti serbi bombardati, che a prima vista può apparire forzato, è invece fondato. Anzitutto, la scena straziante delle vittime sepolte dal crollo ci dovrebbe far riflettere sulla orrenda realtà  della guerra, fatta apparire dai grandi media ai nostri occhi come una sorta di wargame, con il pilota che inquadra il ponte e la bomba teleguidata che lo fa saltare in aria.

In secondo luogo ci dovremmo ricordare che la Commissione europea ha presentato il 28 marzo un piano d’azione che prevede il potenziamento delle infrastrutture della UR, ponti compresi, non però per renderle più sicure per la mobilità civile ma più idonee alla mobilità militare (v. il manifesto, 3 aprile 2018).

Il piano è stato  deciso in realtà dal Pentagono e dalla NATO, che hanno richiesto alla UE di «migliorare le infrastrutture civili così che siano adattate alle esigenze militari», in modo da poter muovere con la massima rapidità carri armati, cannoni semoventi e altri mezzi militari pesanti da un paese europeo all’altro per fronteggiare «l’aggressione russa». Ad esempio, se un ponte non è in grado di reggere il peso di una colonna di carrarmati, dovrà essere rafforzato o ricostruito.

Qualcuno dirà che in tal modo il ponte diverrà più sicuro anche per i mezzi civili. La questione non è però così semplice. Tali modifiche verranno effettuate solo sulle tratte più importanti per la mobilità militare e l’enorme spesa sarà a carico dei singoli paesi, che dovranno sottrarre risorse al miglioramento generale delle infrastrutture.

È previsto un contributo finanziario UE per l’ammontare di 6,5 miliardi di euro, ma – ha precisato Federica Mogherini, responsabile della «politica di sicurezza» della UE – solo per «assicurare che infrastrutture di importanza strategica siano adatte alle esigenze militari». I tempi stringono: entro settembre il Consiglio europeo dovrà specificare (su indicazione NATO) quali sono le infrastrutture da potenziare per la mobilità militare. Ci sarà anche il ponte Morandi, ricostruito in modo che i carri armati USA/NATO possano transitare sicuri sulla testa dei genovesi?

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 28 agosto 2018

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President Trump recently imposed sanctions on Turkey to protest the Turkish government’s detention of an American pastor. Turkey has responded by increasing tariffs on US exports. The trade war is being blamed for the collapse of Turkey’s currency, the lira. While the sanctions may have played a role, Turkey’s currency crisis is rooted in the Turkish government’s fiscal and (especially) monetary policies.

In the past seven years, Turkey’s central bank has tripled the money supply and pushed interest rates down to 4.5 percent. While Turkey’s government did not adopt Ben Bernanke’s proposal to drop money from helicopters, Turkish politicians have taken advantage of easy money policies to increase subsidies for key voting blocs and special interests.

The results of the Turkish government’s inflation-fueled spending binge are not surprising to anyone familiar with Austrian economics or economic history. Turkey is now plagued with huge deficits, a collapsing currency, and a looming economic crisis, making it the next candidate for a European Union or Federal Reserve bailout.

Turkey’s combination of low interest rates, money creation, and massive government spending to “stimulate” the economy parallels the policies the US government has pursued for the past ten years. Without drastic changes in fiscal and monetary policies, economic trouble in America is around the corner.

The very large and growing federal debt will cause a major crisis as the government’s debt burden will be unsustainable. Instead of cutting spending or raising taxes, politicians can be expected to pressure the Federal Reserve to do their dirty work for them via inflation. We may even see the Fed “experiment” with negative interest rates, which would punish Americans for saving. The monetization of the federal debt will erode the dollar’s purchasing power and decimate middle-and-working-class Americans who are already seeing any gains in their incomes eaten away by inflation.

If we are lucky, the next Fed-caused downturn will cause only a resurgence of 1970s-style stagflation. The more likely scenario is the type of widespread economic chaos not seen in America since the Great Depression. The growth of cultural Marxism, the widespread entitlement mentality, and the willingness of partisans of various sides to use force against their political opponents suggests that this economic crisis will result in civil unrest that will be used to justify new crackdowns on individual liberty.

Those who understand the causes of, and cures for, our current predicament have two responsibilities. First, prepare a plan to protect your family when the crisis occurs. Second, do all you can to spread the truth in hopes the liberty movement reaches critical mass so it can force Congress to make the changes necessary to avert disaster.

Since the crisis will result in a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status, individuals should consider alternatives such as gold and other precious metals. Restoring a free-market monetary system should be a priority for the liberty movement. Other priorities include ending our interventionist foreign policy, cutting spending in all areas, rolling back the surveillance state, protecting all civil liberties, and auditing (and ending) the Federal Reserve. If we do our jobs, we can build a society of peace, prosperity, and liberty atop the ashes of the welfare-warfare state.

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Medicare for all has had majority support in the United States for more than a decade. As more people become aware of the details, support is growing. An August 23rd poll, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos, found 70% of the public now supports Medicare for all. We see the potential for winning National Improved Medicare for All in the early 2020s if people continue to build the movement necessary to demand it.

Support Moves From Majority to Super-Majority, On the Way to National Consensus

This widespread support is occurring because health care is in a crisis in the United States that touches every family. A growing majority of doctors and medical students are urging Medicare for all because they are experiencing the negative impacts of a health insurance-dominated healthcare.

There is a large enough percentage of the population who understands the issue sufficiently that they are educating others about it. People know that national improved Medicare for all is a publicly-financed, privately-delivered system in which all people are enrolled and all medically necessary services are covered.

As a result of this spreading understanding, despite the media failing to tell the truth about Medicare for all, health profiteers lying about it and big business interests doing their best to stop progress toward a national consensus, people are not falling for the misinformation campaign. Efforts to mislead the public, as coverage of a recent Koch-funded research effort showed, are backfiring. People are pushing back against the false narrative and are forcing the media, in some instances, to tell the truth.

Now, majorities of voters in both major parties support Medicare for all. According to the new poll, support among Democrats is 84.5%, 4.8% percent do not know and only 10.7% oppose. It will be difficult to win the Democratic presidential nomination without supporting National Improved Medicare for All. Indeed, most of the serious contenders for the nomination are already co-sponsors of S 1804, the Medicare for All Act, in the Senate and two-thirds of Democrats in the House, are co-sponsors of HR 676, the gold standard bill called “The Expanded and Improved Medicare for all Act.” In many states, to win the Democratic nomination for US Senate or governor, as well as in many House districts, it is becoming essential for candidates to support National Improved Medicare for All.

On the Republican side, for the first time, a poll shows majority support for Medicare for all, 50.9%, 10.7% do not know and only 37.4% oppose.  If a Republican begins to champion the issue and explains it in terms that Republican voters can relate to, i.e. Medicare is US-invented healthcare that has worked for seniors since 1965 and has been copied around the world by countries to provide health care to all their citizens, that support will grow.

Medicare is the most cost-effective way to provide health care; one-payer reduces the bureaucracy and administrative costs of paying for health care and saves the nation trillions of dollars. Medicare is good for business as the cost of healthcare is set and businesses are no longer victims of unanticipated premium increases each year. A national single payer health care program allows US corporations to compete with corporations in other countries that have universal healthcare systems. Even the most capitalist countries around the world have national health plans that provide health care to everyone in their country because they recognize the efficiencies of a public system and the benefit of health security for workers and their families.

Democrats support 84.5%, do not know 4.8% and oppose 10.7%. Republicans support 50.9%, do not know 10.7%, and oppose 37.4%. All support 70.1%, do not know 9.3% and oppose 20.6%. Reuters/Ipsos, June and July 2018.  

The Tasks of the Movement to Win National Improved Medicare for All

The United States is currently in the phase of “Majority Times” for making national improved Medicare for all a reality. Our task right now is to build national political consensus, where the near-universal view is so strong that no politician of any party can oppose Medicare for all. Our second task is to build the power of the movement so it cannot be ignored. There needs to be a small percentage of the public who will be vibrant, aggressive and strategic in their advocacy so that people in power fear they will be called out in public for opposing the national consensus.

The job of the single-payer movement is not to elect Democrats or Republicans, it is to continue to change the political culture so no matter who is in office, they must enact National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA). We do that by educating ourselves and others about NIMA and showing our support visibly in media, such as letters to the editor, in community or activist groups to which we belong and through demonstrations.

The movement must be well educated on the essentials of National Improved Medicare for All so it cannot be taken off track by false non-solutions, a type of bait and switch that sounds like what we want but preserve the current problems. This includes plans like “Medicare Extra for All,” a public option, or proposals that protect the insurance industry in the disguise of Medicare Advantage or some other marketing name that they think can fool people.

Both parties have put in place policies that undermine current Medicare and Medicaid. That’s why we need to emphasize that the movement is working for national IMPROVED Medicare for all. Senior citizens and those with Medicare and Medicaid will have better healthcare, that costs them less when NIMA is put in place. National improved Medicare for all will cover all body parts, e.g. eyes, ears, teeth and mental health. It also means that long-term care will be coveredwith a priority on home or community-based care.

Businesses are an important part of building the movement. Unpredictable healthcare costs are one of the biggest problems that businesses of all sizes have to deal with. Each year, they are required to pay more for their employee’s health benefits and provide less coverage. The cost of premiums is consistently rising in unpredictable ways as are out-of-pocket costs, such as co-pays and deductibles. At the same time, insurance companies are narrowing their coverage and reducing the providers included in their networks. Business owners need to understand that national improved Medicare for all will be less expensive and more predictable for them.

The same is true for federal, state and local governments that pay the cost of health care for their workers. This is currently an uncontrollable expense for government at all levels. The recent teacher strikes had as a root problem the cost of healthcare. The same is true for police, firefighters, and all government workers. Single payer solves these healthcare costs for local governmentscreating a much-needed windfall of resources that could be used for other underfunded necessities.

If people who support National Improved Medicare for All work on these issues in a consistent, uncompromising and strategic way, we will achieve a national health program that will improve the lives of all people. Single payer health care would provide the same standard of care to all people, regardless of income or wealth. This will help to eliminate the great health disparities that exist now. Putting in place national improved Medicare for all will also do a great deal to decrease the unfairness of wealth inequality by providing every person the same opportunity for health and ending bankruptcies and loss of housing due to medical illness and debt.

For our health and for our economy, this is the time to put in place National Improved Medicare for All.

*

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from M-molly Adams from Flickr.

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During its 5,000 years in existence as a nation, China has created a cultural and technological legacy of global significance. Within the past century alone, China valiantly resisted and overcame the assaults of both Japan and the United States, taking a course free from the shackles of self-serving imperialism.

Yet unfortunately, in recent times, China has been inflicting increasing harm upon the planetary environment – playing a major role in the rapidly worsening climate situation. Since 2006, China has been the number one releaser of greenhouse gases that have irrevocably skewed the planet’s weather systems, inflicting widespread harm, with far worse forecasts lying ahead.

Indeed, no other country now comes close in its contribution to planet-altering climate change. Not even America, the second largest carbon producer in the world, and on an increasingly destructive environmental path under the Donald Trump administration. China releases over twice as much greenhouse gases as the US, the most powerful country in history. Indeed, China discharges more fossil fuel emissions than the US, India and Russia combined, the latter two being the third and fourth biggest carbon emitters.

In the past few decades, China has endured massive, self-inflicted environmental deterioration in government attempts to raise the population’s living standards. Since the “land reform” campaigns of the late 1970s, about 700 million rural Chinese have indeed been lifted from grinding poverty. This has been achieved, however, through sustained attacks upon the country’s vast ecosystems – accelerating industrialization – a critical turning point in the planet’s lifespan. China has witnessed great declines in its grasslands, wetlands, lakes, coral reefs, mangrove forests, etc., while over a quarter of the entire Chinese landmass has succumbed to desertification.

Improvements in the Chinese quality of life could have instead been formulated on more sustainable, eco-friendly means benefiting humans while greatly reducing damage to the environment. Even as reports of worsening climate change were mounting – tracing back at least two decades – little has been done to address the root causes of China’s climate crisis, its fossil fuel dependence which continues apace. The country has in recent times been paying a severe price for its environmental degradation.

China has the worst air quality of any country, containing the majority of the world’s most polluted cities. It is estimated that up to two million Chinese die each year as a result of consistent exposure to poisonous aerial fumes. Furthermore, China has significant water contamination problems with about 40% of the nation’s rivers suffering extensive pollution, due to agricultural and industrial waste.

China is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, last year burning over four times as much coal as second-place India, and more than five-fold that of the US. China is also clear in the distance as the world’s greatest coal producer. In addition, the Chinese are the biggest oil importers on earth and are the second largest consumers of oil (behind the US), while the country is the fourth greatest guzzler of gas. As we enter the end of the second decade of the 21st century, it is astonishing that China continues relying so heavily upon fossil fuels – tendencies which should have been seriously addressed and reduced many years before.

Trends so far in 2018 reveal China’s rising consumption of a variety of fossil fuels. Three months ago, the non-governmental organization Greenpeace outlined that,

“China’s carbon emissions have accelerated since the beginning of the year [2018]… Led by increased demand for coal, oil and gas, China’s carbon emissions for the first three months of 2018 were 4% higher than they were for the same period in 2017… Big spending on energy intensive industries persisted through 2017, meaning China has been backsliding on the climate progress it made earlier this decade, and the rest of the world must redouble efforts simply to ensure global carbon emissions don’t climb dramatically”.

Some admirable attempts in recent years by China, in leading the way with renewable energy investments and reforestation efforts, will be negated if the country does not tackle its fossil fuel dependence. This is above all crucial. A signatory of the Paris Climate Agreement, China’s full emissions for 2018 are forecast to rise by 5% on the previous year, the largest annual increase since 2011.

The Greenpeace report recognizes that, “For the decade up to 2013, China’s CO2 emissions were the dominant driver of global emissions growth, making it nearly impossible for global emissions to peak” and fall. With emissions again taking off at this critical juncture, Greenpeace pins the blame on the Chinese government for “running an aggressive stimulus program that has breathed life to smokestack industries, and set the clock back on the economic transformation and clean energy transition that are so crucial for the country’s future”.

By 2025 another colossus, neighboring India, will overtake China as the world’s most populous country. As mentioned, India is the planet’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, and its fossil fuel imprint is steadily increasing, even after the nation recently signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement. Within the past two years alone, India’s greenhouse gases have increased by almost 10%. Indeed, since 1971 India’s carbon emissions have risen by over 1,000%.

Like China, India is unwilling to separate fossil fuel reliance from its economy, with the country being the second biggest coal burner in the world (behind China). Moreover, India is the planet’s third greatest oil consumer and third biggest importer of oil, being topped only by China and the US in both cases. With regard oil and coal, India’s trend for consumption of the lethal substances is rising. At this pivotal phase, it is again truly amazing to see that the major powers are actively accelerating the race to disaster.

India’s failures, along with that of the other major powers, are already impacting its people. Extreme weather events in the country are increasing. Earlier this month, after “once a century” monsoon rains, hundreds of people died in the southern Indian state of Kerala, with 1.3 million people displaced. Two-and-a-half times the normal level of rainfall fell, which matched the forecast of climate scientists predicting such a calamity. In reality, the “once a century” rains will likely be witnessed on numerous occasions, and in rising severity, during the years to come.

With India already among the hottest countries in the world, its general population is increasingly suffering from soaring heat and drought. A national record temperature of 123 degrees Fahrenheit (51 Celsius) was noted in May 2016 in the northern state of Rajasthan, a heat wave which killed over 1,600 people across India. This list of destructive side effects can be linked to India’s rising industrialization occurring in the second half of the 20th century, resulting in inevitable deterioration of its environment – loss of wetlands and lakes, deforestation, pollution of rivers and atmosphere, etc., which led to significant losses with regard the country’s globally important biodiversity.

The environmental decline is in many ways encapsulated by the travails of India’s majestic Bengal tiger, which numbered between 40,000 to 50,000 in the year 1900, but then fell to less than 2,000 tigers by 1972 (today, numbers are slightly more than 2,000 after extensive conservation efforts). An adult male tiger requires a territory covering 60 to 100 square kilometers, yet there have been no qualms confining these animals to zoos, when by all moral accounts such actions should long ago have been banned.

The issue of climate change itself has been in the public domain for six decades or more. In 1957 the American scientists, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, co-authored a paper signalling the planet’s oceans would not absorb all the human-generated carbon emissions, as previously thought. The Revelle-Suess study instead suggested that the artificial carbon dioxide levels might create a “greenhouse effect” resulting in further global warming as the decades progressed.

These findings added weight to the opinions of Guy Stewart Callendar, an English inventor and steam engineer. As early as 1938 Callendar provided evidence that, over the previous half century, the world’s land temperatures had risen due to the ongoing human-driven emissions of carbon dioxide, dating to the Industrial Revolution. Callendar’s views at the time were met with skepticism and ridicule, but were later proved accurate.

The above assertions were further bolstered in 1961, when the American scientist Charles Keeling amassed evidence-based data proving that carbon emissions were considerably rising, due to human consumption of fossil fuels. The “Keeling Curve” had already been created in the late 1950s, a graph outlining the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, showing an upward curve ever since. In 1963, America’s National Science Foundation issued the first public warnings with regard the planet’s heating, and were delivered to president Lyndon B. Johnson that very year. As one can see, these critical warnings were well known by government leaders from an early stage.

Less than a decade later, in 1972, the eminent English meteorologist John Sawyer published his study titled, Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the ‘Greenhouse’ effect. In his work Sawyer predicted, accurately as time would prove, that:

“The increase of 25% CO2 expected by the end of the [20th] century therefore corresponds to an increase of 0.6 Celsius in the world temperature – an amount somewhat greater than the climatic variation of recent centuries”.

Now, it will be impossible to limit the globe’s heating to 2 Celsius, with global greenhouse gas levels having shot up by over 60% since 1990. Sawyer’s work was published in the long-running British scientific journal, Nature, so his findings were surely well known.

The above scientific studies provided clear warnings of what was to come if government strategies were not altered, and shifted away from the destructive influence of multinational corporations. This evidence-based data should have been inserted into government policy from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, reducing a threat that today has evolved into a proverbial monster. Instead, such works by Revelle, Suess and Sawyer were cast into obscurity, overlooked and forgotten, as the world’s carbon emissions continued their rise.

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

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Nepal’s anti-conversion law just came into effect.

The new restrictions were originally promulgated late last year and outlaw proselytization practices that are understood as implicitly targeting the historically Hindu country’s rapidly growing community of Christian evangelicals despite ostensibly being aimed at protecting the feelings of religious believers. A key component of the legislation decrees that

“No one should convert a person from one religion to another religion or profess their own religion and belief with similar intention by using or not using any means of attraction and by disturbing the religion or belief of any ethnic groups or community that’s been practiced since ancient times.”

In other words, it’s meant to preserve Hinduism in the face of aggressive Christian campaigning that has seen the country’s believers in Christ triple over the past decade as religious NGOs flooded into Nepal and allegedly took advantage of its socio-economically vulnerable population to spread the Gospel. The foreign-backed spread of Christianity has always been a sensitive issue in some Asian countries because of the legacy of imperialism and reliance on religious figures as “fifth columnists”, especially because of the potential that they have for disrupting the status quo in traditional societies and exploiting Christian tenets for “revolutionary” purposes.

What’s interesting about all of this is that Nepal’s present government isn’t comprised of Hindu traditionalists but of secular communists, though they understand the long-term challenge that foreign-backed religious minority organizations can pose to national stability. The claims that this amounts to religious favoritism and “going back to a Hindu Kingdom” are inaccurate because the ruling Chinese-friendly authorities aren’t by any stretch of the imagination biased towards India and its interests but are trying to delicately “balance” relations between their two Great Power neighbors. This law should therefore be understood as being driven by national security considerations instead of anything else.

Nevertheless, because it does indeed aim to counter the growing influence of foreign Christian NGOs in the country, it’s probably going to lead to more of an intensified infowar against the authorities that’s actually fueled by the government’s unprecedented Silk Road and military partnerships with China, not its supposed support of potentially Indian-influenced Hindus. The perception management gimmick is that a genuinely Chinese-friendly government is being attacked for supposedly being pro-Hindu in order to destabilize it and lead to political concessions that are actually in India’s interests, with Christians just being used as bait to attract as much international attention – and possibly, condemnation – as possible.

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This article was originally published on Oriental Review.

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 author.

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In terms of human development potential, Morocco is a nation of immense promise. It is where gifted fortunes of nature (including agricultural) come together with dynamic social development Frameworks that could launch the country into a bottom-up haven in Africa and the Near East of community-managed projects and change.

Sadly, however, for the majority of people, the application of the country’s combined initiatives for development is not seeming consequential. The problem is that Morocco’s programs for national growth and development through people’s participation are not being orchestrated together. Integrating these programs would enable their mutual reinforcement to promote accelerated growth and success of development initiatives.

Commenting on the calls in Morocco, publicly by King Mohammed VI, that the nation must now reconsider its development model: I submit that it is specifically the model to implement the nation’s development model that requires the major reevaluation and overhaul.

These Moroccan Frameworks–among others, including those that intend to advance women’s and youth empowerment–set out to structurally guide local and national growth:

1) The Municipal Charter, amended in 2010, requires the creation of multi-year community development plans that are formed by people’s participation;

2) The National Initiative for Human Development was launched in 2005 to provide access to sub-nationally managed funding for multidimensional development projects; and

3) The Decentralization Roadmap, first unveiled in 2008, innovatively synthesizes three pathways–delegation, deconcentration, and devolution–to empower regions in development;

How can the three Frameworks better fulfill their individual purposes, and how can they relate with each other to create human development that is sustained by the local beneficiaries?

The first Framework, the Municipal Charter, requires locally elected representatives to assist participatory community planning in the determination of projects. This could and should be a major pathway for sustainable development to take hold, due to the fact that people’s participation (along with finance) is the key factor of sustainability.

Further, people-driven projects, instituted in the Municipal Charter, are necessary for sustainable development and actualization of the other Frameworks that compose the Moroccan model. However, in Morocco there is a constant challenge: elected members to municipal councils are typically not trained in facilitating participatory methods.

Catalyzing widespread, inclusive development projects, means first implementing experiential training programs for university students, school teachers, technicians, civil society members, elected officials, and local people, for example, to be active agents of participatory development. Through training-by-doing, the aforementioned municipal development plans can then reflect the actual will of the people in regards to the projects and future they most want.

The second Framework, Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development, is a national fund for infrastructure projects, capacity-building, social and cultural revitalization, and job generating activities on sub-national levels. This fund should include a multi-billion-dollar budget over five years for participatory planning training and community-identified projects.

The NIHD should primarily help actualize the development projects designed according to the Municipal Charter. Indeed, the NIHD and the Municipal Charter can only be successful if they work in tandem. NIHD should help fund the participatory development plans embodied in the Charter, and finance projects that local people expressed they most need and want to implement.

A project planning meeting in Marrakech, with visiting community representatives from the nearby Al Haouz province (Photo by the High Atlas Foundation, 2018).

Third, the “Roadmap” of Moroccan decentralization–taken from the public statements of the King of Morocco since 2008–aims to utilize ongoing national level engagement (devolution) along with sub-national partnerships (deconcentration), to help implement community projects (delegation). In other words, the Moroccan pathway aims to rally national resources and partnerships for local development, which in principle is good for the sake of sustainability.

Without the Municipal Charter and the NIHD working together, however, adequate decentralized arrangements of public administrations will not be enduring. Overall in Morocco, decentralization is not significantly taking hold, which further adds to the suppression of new local development. The national level still generally decides the parameters, terms, cases, and situations for sub-regional actions.

As far as destabilizing political outcomes that may be a concern and caused by decentralization, as described in international cases, the following seems clear in regards to the Moroccan case, certainly based on my experience: the entire emphasis of people during community-based discussions centers on livelihoods and meeting immediate human needs. I have observed no basis for concerns that stem beyond these developmental factors.

Understandably, executing decentralization, particularly in regards to its pace, is a delicate process. The local level is stratified socio-economically, environmentally, and in regards to gender just as it is on the societal level and globally. Advancing decentralization quickly can be fraught with unhelpful consequences, such as entrenching further the locally affluent and political classes. However, genuine implementation of the Municipal Charter in close conjunction with the NIHD could create the needed participatory democratic conditions which would enable Morocco to eventually opt for an emerging form of communalization–or decentralized management to the municipal level.

The Moroccan Frameworks for development bear essentially what are needed in order for sustainable development for marginalized areas and groups to be catalyzed with enduring results. The Municipal Charter could provide the plans for projects that the NIHD may then help accomplish. Decentralized arrangements are subsequently built in that wake of community project implementation that involves multi-sectoral partnership.

Moroccan agriculture, with its enormous income-generating and environmental-enhancing potential, can and should be the engine for self-reliant financing of the people’s projects. Agriculture projects may also become identified and determined through the process of implementing the mandates of the Municipal Charter.

It is not the insufficiency of these Frameworks that accounts for the hardships that afflict Moroccan people, especially in rural areas. It is their inadequate implementation stemming from a considerable lack of their popular understanding and the skills that are needed in order to translate them into reality. I have found that all that is needed is to give men and women of all ages the chance to come together for community workshops that if followed through can ultimately deliver the projects that they and their families have hoped for far too long.

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This article was originally published on High Atlas Foundation.

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustainable development in Morocco.

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The United States Donald Trump administration will announce a suspension of funding to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and the rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

According to Hebrew-language news outlets, the US administration is expected to announce its new policy early September, which would effectively cancel the right of return for Palestinians through several steps.

The US administration will start enforcing its new policy with recognizing the existence of only half a million Palestinian refugees, who are legitimately considered refugees, out of the total of 5.3 million Palestinian refugees, which were estimated by UNRWA, demanding the right of return.The US administration intends to form a plan in which it rejects the United Nations designation under which millions of descendants of the original refugees are also considered refugees. Sources also reported that the US administration’s new policy would “from its point of view, essentially cancels the right of return.”

Israeli MK, Israel Katz, commended on the reports of the US administration’s future announcement by saying “this measure joins the historic decision to transfer the US embassy to Jerusalem and as such annuls two UN resolutions.”

Israel rejects the Palestinian demand, fearing that Palestinians would destroy Israel’s “Jewish-majority” state after the arrival of millions of non-Jewish individuals.

Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the UN created UNWRA, to help resettle nearly 600,000 Palestinians after the war; UNRWA says that there are 5.3 million Palestinian refugees in the world.

UNRWA included descendants of the original Palestinian refugees in its total sum of refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes after the 1948 war, as well as those refugees who fled during the 1967 Six Day war.

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Featured image is from Ma’an News Agency.

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On October 21, 2015 the United Nations General  Assembly adopted Resolution 70/1:  The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, declaring that “We are determined to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions, and to ensure that all human beings can fulfil their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment.”  These 17 Goals, if achieved, and, indeed they can and should be achieved, would create an ideal world, essentially a paradise on earth.  However, in the past three years, 20% of the time allotted for achievement of these goals, not only are prospects for the achievement of these goals grim, as acknowledged by both the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, but no one willingly admits that the dismal prospect for reaching these goals is the result of a failure of courage by the United Nations Establishment, which, in kowtowing to the “interests” and dictates of its most powerful Western capitalist states, the USA, the UK and their allies, is betraying its mandate, betraying the majority of its member states, and  betraying the majority of the peoples of the world. 

In view of the fact that within this same United Nations the Security Council has authorized the military actions that have obliterated Iraq, Libya, and between 1950-1953 totally annihilated the DPRK, it is reasonable to assert that for the United Nations to even speak of “Sustainable Development Goals” while the United Nations Security Council is notorious for “destroying the infrastructure necessary to support human life” in the countries devastated by the military actions and sanctions the UN has authorized, is the worst form of hypocrisy and duplicity. At best, this is a form of schizoid policy making.  One can only consider that the United Nations’ aggressive public promotion of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals” is a figleaf, covering up the horrific damage inflicted by the UN Security Council, potentially one of the most dangerous organizations on the planet.  

The Security Council sanctions on Iraq were responsible for the deaths by starvation of 500,000 children in Iraq.  The resignation of Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, who characterized the sanction program as “genocide” exposes the deadly agenda masked by the very public promotion of the SDG’s as a fabrication of concern for human rights.

The Security Council sanctions inflicted on the DPRK since 2006 are an increasingly genocidal attempt to force regime change and collapse the socialistic system that has, since the birth of the DPRK,  been delivering those benefits promised by the SDG’s, and which the Security Council sanctions are eviscerating, in one of the most criminal actions in United Nations history.

One demonstration of the fact that the UN is not serious about reaching the “Sustainable Development Goals” by 2030 is the fact that, though there have been innumerable searches for ways to fund these SDG’s, at no point was there any serious consideration – or any consideration at all, given to transferring the exorbitant sums of money spent on the military, the trillions of dollars spent – or more accurately put, squandered – on development of nuclear weapons, and investing this money, instead, on human development, and fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals

Between July 16-18 the United Nations held the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, and in her opening speech on July 16, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed acknowledged that: 

“For the first time in a decade, the number of people who are undernourished has increased – from 777 million people in 2015 to 815 million in 2016 – fundamentally undermining our commitment to leaving no one behind….Poverty is becoming increasingly urban, with most of the world’s extreme poor projected to live in urban settings by 2035;  250 million more people in Africa have no access to clean fuels for cooking compared to 2015!!  We are seeing alarming decline in biodiversity, rising sea levels, coastal erosion, extreme weather conditions and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases….At the same time we have not yet managed to unlock and direct the scale of the resources needed, towards the financing of the sustainable development agenda.”

On July 18 Secretary-General Guterres’ concluding remarks declared: 

“Your discussions have made clear that we are lagging or even backtracking in other areas that are fundamental to our shared pledge to leave no one behind…Investment in critical sustainable infrastructure remains entirely inadequate…At the same time, we face mounting challenges.  Runaway climate change.  A growing number of conflicts and inequality.  An erosion of human rights.  An unprecedented global humanitarian crisis and persistent pockets of poverty and hunger.”

On cannot be surprised by the downward trajectory for attainment of the SDG’s by 2030, since the United Nations has not been willing to risk those actions that would have unlocked the funds necessary for attainment of the 17 SDG’s, and at the same time, the barbaric Security Council sanctions on the DPRK are criminally obstructing that nation’s attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, although, if the truth be told, that heroic nation has already attained many of the 17 SDG goals, despite the heinous sanctions inflicted to weaken their people and degrade their socialist infrastructure which has delivered so many humanitarian benefits to their people.   

The cowardice of the UN in failing to require that the resources squandered in bloated military budgets be instead redirected and productively devoted to humanitarian achievements is the more perplexing, now that even within the US government itself, Senator Ed Markey has introduced the SANE Act to drastically cut nuclear weapons programs and curtail nuclear modernization. 

“It is time we inserted some desperately-needed sanity into America’s budget priorities,” stated Senator Markey.  “We should fund education, not annihilation.” 

If the United Nations is serious about attaining the Sustainable Development Goals, they have a powerful source of support and alliance within the U.S. Senate itself.  Markey further stated: 

“If the United States wants other countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals and restrain their nuclear war plans, we must take the lead.  Instead of wasting billions of dollars on this dangerous new nuclear weapon that will do nothing to keep our nation safe, we should preserve America’s resources and pursue a global ban on nuclear cruise missiles.” 

One of the most truthful and moving addresses at the High-Level SDG Debate was delivered the afternoon of July 16, by Professor Jose Antonio Ocampo, Chairperson of the Committee for Development Policy.  The Report of the Committee states: 

“Extreme inequality persists within countries and cities as well as among countries….A generalized shift towards development that leaves no one behind requires the transformation of deeply rooted systems – economic and political systems, governance structures and business models – that are often based on unequal distributions of wealth and of decision-making power. ..It is also necessary to address the concentration of wealth, income and decision-making power at the top and break the link between economic and social exclusion and decision-making power.”

Professor Ocampo stated: 

“Too often, economic and political systems, governance structures and business models are based on extremely unequal distributions of wealth and decision-making power and this stands in the way of transformation to sustainable and resilient societies.  On the one hand segments of society that are excluded from the benefits of development are often also excluded from meaningful participation in decision-making, and are thus unlikely to see their interests safeguarded in policy and investment decisions.  On the other, the most influential groups can resist changes when they represent a threat or perceived threat to their interests.  Leaving no one behind requires breaking the link between economic and social exclusion and decision-making power.  This involves, among other measures, ensuring the respect, protection and fulfilment of human rights and reorienting institutions so that policy is driven from the bottom up by the needs of those who are deprived and disadvantaged.  ….At the international level, the deep inequalities that persist among countries are not sustainable….With the important goal of fighting poverty, development cooperation policies should also contribute to guaranteeing minimum social standards for all people, reducing international inequality and providing international public goods.”

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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at the United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.

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Accusations of fake news across the political spectrum have transformed a very concerning issue into a weapon of delegitimization. A recent report published by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) titled Who Said What? The Security Challenges of Modern Disinformation have conflated anti-globalization activists, who oppose military intervention, environmental destruction and global labour exploitation with conspiracy theorists and “foreign nationals” in the sharing of disinformation.

The report, which emerged out of a workshop organized by CSIS for the purposes of academic outreach, reflects a common attitude that state security and intelligence agencies have towards social and environmental justice activists—that of flippant dismissal and demonization. Though the spy agency claims that this report does not reflect an official position, it does reveal some logics underlying the surveillance of political activists. The report had obscured any of the workshops participants or the reports authors under the Chatham House Rule.

The immense popularity of social media and its omnipresence in how we communicate and share information has transformed the social and political landscape in ways that are only now being unveiled.

As a controversial experiment conducted by psychologists has demonstrated, people’s emotions can be remotely shaped through computer algorithms over social media platforms. Called “moral contagion,” psychologists working with Facebook secretly manipulated the news feeds of close to 700 000 Facebook users and silently influenced how they express emotions online. The idea of mass manipulation has recently overtaken the news cycle with the Cambridge Analytica leaks, revealing the role of socially hacking user’s political sensibilities to aid Trump’s election win. Clearly, there is a case for concern with how social media landscapes can be used as tools of surveillance and manipulation, this is especially concerning when groups use a combination of bots, social media exploits, and fake news to manipulate people on mass for political gain.

Edward Snowden aptly framed the situation in a recent tweet, “Business that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as “surveillance companies.” Their rebranding as “social media” it the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense”. In other words, we’ve been duped. The tools we use to organize our social life are being used against us for profit, surveillance, and policing.

In the CSIS report, the authors collapse any distinction between activists, conspiracy theorists, and hostile foreign nationals into the category of “independent emergent activists” who are understood as “agents of disinformation”. This report asserts that activists distrustful of Western governments engage in the amplification of conspiracy theorists from the political left and right and are susceptible to being hijacked by foreign state disinformation organizations.

Instead of providing a nuanced approach to understanding emerging digital threats in our social media landscape, the report conflates the political lefts opposition to violent military interventions and the exploitation of the global south to online conspiracy theories. There is a big difference between asserting that foreign nationals are able to influence how activists share news stories and activists also being implicit in producing disinformation.

Political and military violence overseas are hardly half baked conspiracies, for an instance, there have been legitimate concerns with unceremonious killing of innocent civilians overseas via US drone strikes. According to an investigation run by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in a staggering 4,737 strikes to date, there have been between 737-1,551 civilians killed and barely any media coverage. Opposition to such violence inflicted by the Western World through the “war on terror” isn’t merely ideological activist “propaganda”, it is the expression of legitimate concerns that non-Western human life can so easily be rendered disposable by Western nation-states.

CSIS has muddied the water of the very issues it sought to address. At best, it provides vague and ambiguous background information that is unable to distinguish between activists and trolls. At worse, they have contributed to their own campaign of misinformation by not providing sober nuances of complex issues in social and environmental justice.

This is not surprising. It’s within the interests of Canadian state security and intelligence agencies to slander and dismantle the legitimacy of claims from activists. Both CSIS and the RCMP have a long history of spying on activists who are viewed as a threat to either the government or “critical infrastructure.”

With that said we can’t minimize the impacts of disinformation and fake news on our media landscape. These concerns signal the emergence of forms of media manipulation that can be deployed on mass while targeting an individual’s specific tastes and dispositions.

According to a report published by the Data & Society Research Institute, there is still no legal or political consensus on a definition for fake news or how to approach the issue. There are also concerns around the question of who gets to draw the distinctions around what is true and false, acceptable or propaganda. They offer a nuanced approach to understanding the context from which fake news emerges, and how we might collectively approach mediating its negative impacts. And most importantly, the do so in a way that is careful not to throw activists under the bus.

As the report observes,

“With ‘fake news,’ the risk is not necessarily that it will overtake real news, but that democracy itself might drown in information.”

If we are to approach this issue, we need to be careful not to fall into a state policing bias that privileges security concerns over the ability to engage in political dissent, whistleblowing, and holding the power to account.

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Abigail Curlew is a PhD student of the sociology of surveillance at Carleton University, a freelance and independent journalist, and an feminist activist. She writes about (trans)feminism, surveillance, security, and the cultural politics of the Internet. Follow me on Medium: https://medium.com/@abigail.curlew

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The mass media and political leaders of the US have resorted to denouncing competitors and adversaries as spies engaged in criminal theft of vital political, economic and military know-how.

The spy-mania has spread every place and all the time, it has become an essential element in driving national criminal hearings, global economic warfare and military budgets.

In this paper we will analyze and discuss the use and abuse of spy-mongering by (1) identifying the accused countries which are targeted; (2) the instruments of the spy conspiracy; (3) the purpose of the ‘spy attacks’.

Spies, Spies Everywhere:  A Multi-Purpose Strategy

Washington’s ‘spy-strategy’ resorts to multiple targets, focusing on different sectors of activities.

Russia has been accused of poisoning adversaries, using overseas operatives in England.  The evidence is non-existent.  The accusation revolves around an instant lethal poison which in fact did not lead to death. 

No Russian operative was identified.  The only ‘evidence’ was that Russia possessed the poison- as did the US and other countries.  The events took place in England and the British government played a major role in pointing the finger toward Russia and in launching a global media campaign which was amplified in the US and in the EU.

The UK expelled Russian diplomats and threatened sanctions.  The Trump regime picked up the cudgels, increasing economic sanctions and demanding that Russia ‘confess’ to its ‘homicidal behavior’.  The poison plot resonated with the Democratic Party campaign against Trump , accusing Russia of meddling in the Presidential election, on Trump’s behalf. No evidence was presented.  But the less the evidence, the longer the investigation and the wider the conspiratorial net; it now includes overseas business people, students and diplomats.

US conspiracy officials targeted China, accusing the Chinese government of stealing US technology, scientific research and patents.  China’s billion dollar “Belt and Road” agreement with over sixty countries was presented as a  communist plot to dominate countries, grab their resources, generate debt dependency and to recruit overseas networks of covert operatives.  In fact, China’s plans were public, accepted by most of the US allies and …membership was even offered to the US.

Iran was accused of plotting to establish overseas terrorist military operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria – targeting the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.  No evidence was ever presented. In fact, massive US and EU supplied arms and advisors to  Saudi Arabia’s overt terror bombing of Houthi-led Yemen cities and populations.  Iran backed the Syrian government in opposition to the US backed armed mercenaries.  Iranian advisers in Syria were bombed by Israel – and never retaliated.

The US policy elite resort to conspiratorial plots and spying depends heavily on the mass media to repeat and elaborate on the charges endlessly, depending on self-identified experts and ex-pats from the targeted country.  In effect the media is the message.  Media-state collaboration is reinforced by the application of sanctions— the punishment proves guilt!

In the case of Russia, the conspirators demonize President Putin; he is ‘guilty’ because he was an ex-official of the police; he was accused of ‘seizing’ Crimea which voted to rejoin Russia.  In other words, plots are linked to unrelated activity, personality disorders and to US self-inflicted defeats! 

Labeling is another tool common to conspiracy plotters;  China is a ‘dictatorship’ intent on taking over the world— therefore, it could only defeat the US through spying and stealing secrets and assets from the US.

Iran is labelled a ‘terrorist state’ which allows the US to violate the international nuclear agreement and to support Israeli demands for economic sanctions.  No evidence is ever presented that Iran invaded or terrorized any state.

The Political Strategy Behind Conspiracy Terrorists

There are several important motives for the US government to resort to conspiracy plots.

By accusing countries of crimes, it hopes that the accused will respond by revealing their inability or unwillingness to engage in the action falsely attributed to them.  Pentagon plots put  adversaries on the defensive – spending time and energy answering to the US agenda rather than pursuing and advancing their own.

For example, the US claims that China is stealing economic technology to promote its superiority, is designed to pressure China to downplay or modify its long-term plan for strategic growth.  While China will not give general credence to US conspiracy practitioners, it has downplayed the slogans designed to motivate its scientists to “Make China Great’.

Likewise, the US conspiracy practitioners accusation that Iran is ‘meddling’ in Yemen and Syria is designed to distract world opinion from the US military support for Saudi Arabia’s terror bombing in Yemen and Israel’s missile attacks in Syria.

Plot accusations have had some effect in Syria.  Russia has demanded or asked Iran to withdraw fifty miles from the Israeli border.  Apparently Iran has lowered its support for Yemen.

Russia has been blanketed with unsubstantiated accusations of intervening in the Ukraine, which distracts attention from Washington’s support for the mob-led coup.

The UK claim that Russia planted a deadly poison, was concocted in order to distract attention from the Brexit fiasco and Prime Minister May’s effort to entice the US to sign a major trade agreement.

How Successful are Conspiratorial Politics?

The greatest success of the US conspiracy practitioners has been in convincing the US mass media to act as an arm of the CIA-Pentagon-Congressional and Presidential interventionist agenda.

Secondly, the conspiracy has had an impact on both political parties – especially the Democratic leadership, which has waged a political war accusing Trump of  plotting with Russia, to defeat Clinton in the presidential elections.  However, Democratic conspiracy advocates have sacrificed their popular electorate who are more interested in economic issues then in regime plots – and may lose to the Republicans in the fall 2018 Congressional elections.

Thirdly, the plot and spy line has some impact on the EU but not on their public.  Moreover, the EU is more concerned with President Trump’s trade war and  made overtures to Russia. 

Fourthly, China , Iran and Russia have moved closer economically in response to the conspiracy plots and trade wars.

Conclusion:  The Perils of Power Grabbers

Conspiratorial plots have a narrow audience, mostly the US mass media and elite . They seem to have a short-term impact in justifying sanctions and trade wars.  The media plotters having called wolf and proved nothing ,have lost credibility among a wide swath of the public.

Moreover, the conspiracy has not resulted in any basic shifts in the orientation of their adversaries, nor has it shaped the electoral agenda for the majority of US voters. 

The conspiracy advocates have discredited themselves by the transparency of their fabrications and the flimsiness of their evidence.  In the long-run, historians will provide a footnote on the bankruptcy of US foreign and domestic policy based on plots and conspiracies.

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

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British Airways announced Thursday it plans to stop service to Tehran after its last scheduled flight on September 22. 

A British Airways (BA) spokesperson announced the move, which comes after the latest round US sanctions went into effect against Iran this month:

“We are suspending our London to Tehran service as the operation is currently not commercially viable.”

“We are sorry for any disruption this may cause to our customers’ travel plans and we are in discussions with our partner airlines to offer customers rebooking options,” the airline said further. “Alternatively, they will be offered a full refund or the opportunity to bring their flights forward,” the BA representative said.

Meanwhile Air France and KLM have also announced the cancellation all flights to Tehran, with the last Air France flight on Sept. 18. Air France had already drastically cut its operations to Iran as it transferred all connections to its low-cost airline Joon this summer, and was down to one flight per week from the prior usual of three.

And Dutch airline KLM had previously announced last month the suspension of all flights from Amsterdam, set to also take place in September.

They join a growing list of other major firms that have recently curbed or halted business in Iran include French energy giant Total, Germany’s Siemens, French and German automotive manufacturers PSA and Daimler, the world’s largest shipping firm Maersk, French aircraft manufacturer Airbus, Germany’s engineering and rail consortium Deutsche Bank, as well as the German insurer Allianz..

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On August 7 the US imposed Phase 1 of a series of sanctions against Iran.

At a glance, these cover:

• Auto industry: Carmakers who also operate in the US market must pull out of Iran, currently the world’s 12th-largest car market.
• Gold and precious metals: Ban on selling these substances to Iran, which will cause difficulty for the country’s investors looking to safeguard their wealth against the falling rial.
• US banknotes: Stepping up pressure on Iran’s central bank as it attempts to stabilise its currency.
• Aviation: Cancellation of US sales of civil aviation planes and parts to upgrade Iran’s ageing commercial fleet.
• Other key industries: Ban on US imports of Iranian carpets, pistachios and farmed caviar.

And on November 7th phase 2 takes effect, mainly targeting Iran’s oil exports, which could prove the final death blow to Iran’s already downward spiraling economy.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge.

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Global Research is a small team that believes in the power of information and analysis to bring about far-reaching societal change including a world without war.

Truth in media is a powerful instrument. As long as we keep probing, asking questions, challenging media disinformation to find real understanding, then we are in a better position to participate in creating a better world in which truth and accountability trump greed and corruption.

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Imperialism and Its Accomplices: The Question of Dictatorship and Democracy at Home and Abroad

By Prof. James Petras, August 27, 2018

One of the most striking world historic advances of western imperialism (in the US and the European Union) is the demise, disappearance and dissolution of large scale long-term anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist movements (AIM).

Israeli Spying on Trump? Interference in US Elections?

By Philip Giraldi, August 27, 2018

It is ironic that the Robert Mueller investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Donald Trump campaign continues to turn up nothing while the evidence of Israeli interference in the U.S. political system continues to surface without any outrage being expressed by either the media or American politicians.

Quick America – Take Over Africa Before China Does!

By Phil Butler, August 27, 2018

The Donald Trump administration has finally appointed a State Department undersecretary to head up Africa policy. Tibor Nagy, the new assistant secretary of state, inherits an American imperialist attitude and big business dominated mess that can only get worse for Africans. While America and the world are busy with information overload, American lawmakers are about to take over Africa before the Chinese do.

Trump Regime Planning Another Chemical Weapons Attack False Flag in Syria

By Stephen Lendman, August 27, 2018

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said a false flag attack is coming to “imped(e) a normal settlement of the…fight against terrorism in Idlib.”

Samir Amin Is No More. But His Ideals Are Marching On

By Andre Vltchek and Said Mohammad, August 27, 2018

Venezuela’s Maduro has started a counter economical attack that changes the rule of the game for the global financial system. He was one of the few leaders who mourned Samir Amin in public. Do you think Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution was influenced by Amin’s ideas, especially his de-linking theory? Do you think that experiment will be allowed to succeed?

Corbyn Is Being Destroyed – Like Blowing Up a Bridge to Stop an Advancing Army

By Jonathan Cook, August 27, 2018

The latest “scandal” gripping Britain – or to be more accurate, British elites – is over the use of the term “Zionist” by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country’s next prime minister.

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Once again I return to Theresa May’s statement of 26^th May, in which she stated the following:

“In conclusion, as I have set out, no other country has a combination of the capability, the intent and the motive to carry out such an act.”

She then went on to claim:

“We have been led by evidence not by speculation.”

However, as I showed in Part 1 and Part 2, her statement to the Commons contained no actual evidence of motive or intent. Claims and assertions, but nothing more.

But what of capability? Looking through the statement, here are the key passages that might be said to fall into this category:

“As I set out for the House in my statements earlier this month, our world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down positively identified the chemical used for this act as a Novichok – a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by the Soviet Union.”

“And we have information indicating that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents probably for assassination – and as part of this programme has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichoks.”

Her evidence, such that it is, therefore falls into two categories: firstly, capability with regard to the weapon allegedly used to poison the Skripals; secondly, capability with regard to method of delivery of the weapon.

There are three things to say with regard to the first category. To begin with, it is not quite the case that Porton Down scientists had “positively identified the chemical” as a “Novichok”. In the evidence presented to the High Court between 20^th – 22^nd March, here is how the Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst described the substance:

“Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent[my emphasis].”

As you will notice, there is a degree of ambiguity in this statement which is not present in Mrs May’s statement made a few days later. Ought she not to have recognised this?

Secondly, it has been conclusively shown that a number of other countries either have produced, or know how to produce substances within the class of nerve agents that Mrs May referred to as “Novichoks”. The Czech Government has admitted producing a small quantity of the closely related substance, A-230; Iran has produced it, in compliance with the OPCW in 2016; The German Intelligence Agency, BND, was given the formula back in the 1990s, and they shared it with a number of other NATO countries, including the US and UK. The Edgewood Chemical and Biological Defense Command in Maryland, USA, recorded the formula back in 1998.

The point of this is not to point the finger at any of those countries. Merely to say that knowledge of and production of “Novichok” is by no means confined to one country. And in any case, according to one of the world’s leading experts in organic chemistry, David Collum, Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cornell University, it doesn’t even require a State party. He asserts that “any credible organic chemist could make Novichok nerve agents.”

The fact that other countries know how to produce “Novichoks”, and in some cases have produced it, shows the claim that its apparent use in Salisbury proves Russian culpability to be complete nonsense. It’s as silly as saying that a poisoning using VX points to Britain because VX is a type of nerve agent developed by Britain.

And thirdly, if the British Government did indeed have information that the Russian Government had a secret programme investigating ways of delivering nerve agents, and had produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichoks, then it had an obligation to inform the OPCW under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which it apparently failed to do. Furthermore, as a State Party to the Convention, it should have raised objections in 2017, when the OPCW’s Director-General, Ahmet Üzümcü, declared the following:

“The completion of the verified destruction of Russia’s chemical weapons programme is a major milestone in the achievement of the goals of the Chemical Weapons Convention. I congratulate Russia and I commend all of their experts who were involved for their professionalism and dedication. I also express my appreciation to the States Parties that assisted the Russian Federation with its destruction program and thank the OPCW staff who verified the destruction.”

So much for Mrs May’s evidence of capability regarding the weapon, what of her evidence regarding the delivery?

When she stated that her Government had information that the Russian Government had investigated ways of delivering nerve agents, she was, I believe, referring to the alleged “assassin’s manual”, which the Government says it possesses, but will not show because it is classified, and which apparently contains information showing that Russian agents were trained in putting poison on door handles.

Three brief points about this:

1. It really is utter nonsense. Smearing poison on a door handle would be a frankly ludicrous way to target someone for assassination, since you could never be sure that your target would actually touch it (you never know, maybe a postman or a milkman or the man from Amazon might get there first).

2. Salisbury was treated to dozens of guys in Hazmat gear decontaminating certain parts of the city, since the substance in question was apparently so lethal that, according to Alastair Hay, Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds:

“A few millilitres would be sufficient to probably kill a good number of people.”

Are we really supposed to believe that the Russians have either:

a) Developed ways of putting this stuff on door handles without the requisite chemical protection and perhaps just a pair of Marigolds, or

b) Have people stupid enough to try.

3. But the biggest problem is this: The British Government was starting to pointing the finger at the Russian Government within a few days of the poisoning, and it was later stated that one of the reasons for this was the manual that they apparently possessed. But if they did indeed have this manual, and it was the reason for their apportioning of blame as early as 12th March:

a) Why was the door handle not the focus of the investigation from the very start?

b) When are those police officers who stood within feet of that door, and those who no doubt went in and out of the house using the door handle, going to sue Her Majesty’s Government for negligence and their failure to act on the intelligence they apparently had?

If there is indeed such a manual, my guess is that it was put together by a chap named Steele.

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While there was much fanfare and attention given to the July 3^rd launch of two Type 055 guided missile destroyers at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. (DISC) shipyard in Dalian, very little mention has been made of the many other warships that the PLAN has launched or commissioned since the beginning of the year.

Although the Type 055 DDG is the PLAN’s most powerful surface combatant, and the largest such vessel constructed by an Asian nation since World War II, they are one component in a steadily growing naval force structure. While the addition of three Type 055 DDGs this year, added to the first vessel in class which rolled into the water from Dalian just over a year ago in June of 2017, showcase China’s growing capabilities not only in producing powerful and modern warships, they also illustrate the maturity and  stunning capacity of the Chinese ship building industry. This industry has launched and/or commissioned 15 modern warships in just the first seven months of 2018.

Three More Type 055 Destroyers

This year is proving to be a big year for the PLAN. Of the fifteen vessels built so far in 2018, three have been the newest and most powerful surface warfare vessel in the Chinese arsenal, the Type 055 DDG. The world was stunned when China was able to complete the first of this new class in June of 2017. Sections of a second in this class were clearly visible in satellite imagery at the time. That vessel was launched in May of this year, but two more Type 055 destroyers were launched simultaneously on July 3^rd, just two months later. The 5^th and 6^th vessels in class are already in varying stages of construction.

Although initial reports had suggested that a total of six vessels had been ordered, it has been hinted that this number has been increased to eight. This number will most likely grow to at least 12 vessels by 2025, when the PLAN will be looking to expand its aircraft carrier program with the introduction of at least one carrier of the Type 002 class. It has yet to be determined if this new carrier (CV-18) will employ steam or electromagnetic catapults, but it will definitely be a CATOBAR carrier. PLAN aviators continue to practice CATOBAR take-off and landings at the Huangdicun Airbase in southern China. Chinese naval engineers have had a great deal of success in developing an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS) that requires much less energy than the system currently utilized aboard the U.S. Navy’s Gerald Ford Class carrier. It remains to be decided if the Type 002 will be conventionally powered, or will make use of a nuclear reactor.

Regardless of the next generation carrier’s specific design specifications and capabilities, powerful surface warfare ships will be required to escort them in a larger aircraft carrier battle group formation. The Type 055 DDG will likely serve a similar role as the Ticonderoga Class CG of the U.S. Navy within the carrier strike groups (CSG), and will also be utilized as a command ship or heavy AAW and ASW platform in PLAN naval task forces or while supporting amphibious ready groups (ARG). The Type 055’s significant weapons payload, multifaceted offensive and defensive capabilities, and great range and endurance will aid Chinese efforts to protect and expand its maritime territories, protect its shipping lanes, and maintain its naval lines of communication.

Type 052D DDG Continued Growth

A number of photos that appeared both online and in the print media exhibiting the two newest Type 055 DDGs to be launched at the DISC shipyard in Dalian failed to mention that three brand new Type 052D destroyers also appeared in these same images. The Type 052D is a powerful guided missile destroyer in its own right, rivaling the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke Class DDG. China launched the first Type 052D, the Kunming DDG-172 in 2014. There are currently 9 ships of the class in service, 2 undergoing sea trials, and a further two being fitted out. Three Type 052D DDGs have been commissioned in the first half of this year.

No less than five destroyers in various stages of fitting out are docked at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. (DISC) shipyard on July 3rd; three Type 052D and two Type 055 DDGs.

Although original rumors had hinted at 16 vessels being ordered, some inside sources now claim that the number has been increased significantly. It would seem reasonable that a total of 18 to 26 vessels may end up being built, dependent upon how ambitious the PLAN aircraft carrier program becomes. IHS Janes Defense Weekly reported on May 2^nd of this year that satellite imagery appeared to show a Type 052D under construction at the Jiangnan Changxingdao shipyard in Shanghai that had approximately 4 meters (13.1ft) added to its LOA. The after flight deck may have been lengthened to accommodate larger helicopters which would aid the vessel in its ASW role.

It remains to be seen if the above mentioned modification will enter serial production under a different designation, or will prove to be a concept testbed for fielding larger rotary wing assets at sea. It is important to note that China produced six Type052C Class DDGs from 2004 to 2015, and has produced thirteen of the much improved Type 052D Class DDGs in just four years, a six fold increase in annual production.

A Type 055D DDG docking with the aid of a tug at a PLAN naval base. The deck gun and forward 32 cell VLS are clearly visible. Although bearing some similarity to the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke Class DDG, the Type 052D is more streamlined and esthetically pleasing. Its good looks likely equate to a much smaller radar signature.

More Frigates and Corvettes

While smaller warships do not enjoy the limelight of their larger peers, they can teach the observer a great deal about a nation’s maritime defense posture and priorities. While the Chinese shipbuilding industry has constructed and launched nineteen Type 052 DDGs of both variants, and four Type 055 DDGs from 2014 to the present, they have also turned out fourteen Type 054A Class guided missile frigates (total of 32 of all variants) and a no less than twenty Type 056A Class corvettes (total of 42 in class of all variants) over the same period of time.

The smaller warships traditionally perform a number of different roles in naval warfare. Firstly, they serve as coastal patrol craft. They are nimble and fast, heavily armed for their diminutive size, and are outfitted to be flexible enough to perform a multitude of different missions. Their small size equates to limited firepower and shorter range, but they are well suited to serve as picket ships and screening forces to task forces fielding larger and more powerful vessels when those fleets are operating within close range of home ports and naval facilities.

Three Type 056A Class corvettes tied-up alongside one another. The vessel in the middle is conducting a crew muster on the aft flight deck. Approximately half of the 42 vessels in the Type 056 class are of the upgraded Type 056A variant.

The Type 056A Class corvette is ideally suited to patrol China’s coasts, the maritime territories within China’s EEZ, as well as the island archipelagos of the Paracel and Spratly Islands. They will most likely begin patrol operations from the key island bases at Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, and Mischief Reef as the maritime logistics facilities on these islands are improved.

The Type 054A frigate is a well balance and powerful naval surface combatant for its size, and carries an ample arsenal of anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and anti-submarine weapons. It is an ideal escort vessel with a range of over 8,000 nautical miles. It is a traditional multi-purpose frigate, possessing the inherent ability to attack other surface ships, engage aircraft, and track and destroy submarines. It is this class of warship that the PLAN first sent to the Gulf of Aden in 2009 to serve in international anti-piracy duties. Eleven Type 05A frigates have served on anti-piracy duties in this region since that time.

The Type 054A Class Frigate is a flexible, yet powerful surface warfare asset that possesses significant range and the ability to engage in a multitude of operations. It is equipped with an aft hangar and flight deck, and carries either a Ka-28 or Harbin Z-9 helicopter depending on mission requirements. Type 054A FFGs will likely be deployed as part of naval flotillas stationed on a rotational basis at the PLAN naval base in Djibouti, and eventually at Gwadar, Pakistan. They will also be used to police the long maritime supply lines to and from China to strategic waterways near the Horn of Africa and the Straits of Hormuz, as well as continuing patrols in the South China and East China Seas.

Type 054A Yiyang, FFG-548. This vessel was constructed in 2010 and was the seventh vessel in class to be built. Note the 32 cell VLS forward of the superstructure, 76mm dual-purpose deck gun, and Type 87 anti-submarine rocket (ASROC) launchers just forward of the deck gun. Amidships are the twin 4 cell launchers for the C-803 anti-ship/land attack cruise missiles.

New Nuclear Submarines

Without a doubt one of the segments of Chinese defense strategy most shrouded in mystery are the attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines of the PLAN. They are very rarely a topic of discussion by government officials, either on or off the record. What is known is that the PLAN has a newer SSN and SSBN in service. China’s submarine technology has run behind that of both the United States and Russia for decades, but China has been rapidly closing the gap in recent years. It is no secret that Chinese espionage efforts to acquire U.S. submarine warfare technology have been very active, and quite successful over the past decade in particular.

The most capable nuclear attack submarine (SSN) in service with the PLAN is the Type 093B. A notable improvement over the Type 093, it has the capability to fire submarine launched cruise missiles (SLCM) while submerged via a dorsal mounted VLS. Like its predecessor, the Type 093, it retains the ability to fire SLCMs from its bow torpedo tubes. This is accomplished by using a specifically designed torpedo tube missile canister. It is not known how many Type 093B SSNs are currently in service, but most analysts, including those at the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, put the number at six. Of greater interest is the newer SSN that is either currently being fitted out or is undergoing sea trials later this year, the Type 095.

A pair of Type 093B SSNs. Of particular interest in this image are the improved hydrodynamics of the conning tower and the slight dorsal hump denoting the presence of a VLS for launching anti-ship and land attack cruise missiles.

The Type 095 is an SSN, but reportedly has a sizeable VLS (12-16 cells) which can fire a multitude of PLAN missiles including anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM) and land attack cruise missiles (LACM). The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence has classified the Type 095 as a nuclear attack guided missile submarine (SSGN) due to its large missile capacity. The Type 095 is thought to utilize pump-jet propulsion, make use of noise reducing technologies, and a hybrid pressure hull design.

The Type 095 is being constructed at the new Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Company (BSHIC) submarine manufacturing facility located in Huludao, in the Liaoning province. It is the largest submarine manufacturing facility in the world, with an assembly building measuring some 430,000 square feet (39,948 sq. meters). Completed in 2017, the main assembly hall can accommodate four submarines at any given time. The facility is totally enclosed, and operations cannot be viewed from the air or via satellite surveillance. This also allows manufacturing operations to continue year round regardless of weather conditions. The facility will be used to build all Type 095 SSN and Type 096 SSBN class submarines.

A satellite image of the BSHIC submarine manufacturing facility in Huludao in the province of Liaoning, China.

The Type 094 Jin Class nuclear ballistic missile submarine has also undergone a noticeable transformation, resulting in what has been renamed the Type 094A. Improvements to the new variant include a larger VLS aft of the conning tower, a more streamlined shape which produces less noise and cavitation while submerged, likely greater speed submerged (less hydrodynamic drag), and a new ballistic missile armament. The Type 094A is most likely equipped with the next generation JL-2A submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The JL-2A is based on the DF-31, and has an estimated maximum range of 11,200 kilometers (6,960 miles). The JL-2A is likely equipped with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warhead. The PLAN likely has between four and six Type 094/094A class SSBNs in service. These SSBNs serve as the third leg of the nuclear deterrent triad that China lacked for so many years, and the 094A offers China a viable second strike capability. The Type 096 SSBN currently being designed will offer notable improvements over the 094A SSBN, yet little is known about the project.

This rare image shows not only a Type 094A Class SSBN in the foreground, but also a Type 093B Class SSN in the background. The improved hydrodynamics of both vessels can be seen, especially in the conning towers that now lack windows. The large dorsal hump of the Type 094A houses the powerful JL-2A submarine launched ballistic missiles that have a range in excess of 11,200 kilometers.

The Sixth and Final Type 071 LPD?

The final Type 071 Class LPD of the original order of six vessels was launched at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard on January 20^th of this year. The fifth vessel was launched just 7 months prior. It remains unknown if the PLAN will decide to order additional LPDs of this class, or will concentrate instead on the larger Type 075 LHDs currently under construction at the same shipyard which constructed all six Type 071 LPDs.

It is logical to conclude that China may decide to build additional Type 071 LPDs, but this will depend perhaps on how long it takes to construct, launch and commission the first of the new class of LHDs. With six LPDs in service, after the final two vessels are finally commissioned, the PLAN will always have at least two of them ready to deploy as the backbone of a small Amphibious Ready Group (ARG). A PLAN ARG would likely consist of at least one Type 071 LPD, 2 Type 072 LSTs and a surface warfare escort of a mix of DDGs and FFGs.

These smaller amphibious warfare vessels lack the size and capability of bringing their own aviation strike element with them. The Type 071 can accommodate two helicopters on its large aft flight deck, and is equipped to house four helicopters in the adjacent hangar. The Type 072 LST can also accommodate one helicopter on its after flight deck. Lacking a VSTOL attack aircraft, the PLAN will most likely modify the Z-10 attack helicopter for naval use, with it serving a similar purpose as the U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper and Russian Ka-52k naval attack helicopters. China has already conducted take-off and landing tests with Z-10s on both the Type 071 LPD and 072A LST. The Type 075 LHD will undoubtedly have an attack element of at least eight to ten modified Z-10s.

It is clear that a larger amphibious warfare platform is a requirement for the PLAN in the immediate future. If the time it took China to design, build, launch and fit-out its first indigenous aircraft carrier is an indicator, we are likely looking at the first Type 075 to be launched sometime in 2020. Fitting out and sea trails will take an additional two years before the first vessel is commissioned. The LHD is without a doubt the most flexible and capable of all amphibious warfare platforms and the PLAN will need these vessels to be able to field viable ARGs to respond to challenges within its maritime territories and to project power at greater ranges along the full length and breadth of the Maritime Silk Road.

The All Important Support Vessels

China signaled to the world that it fully intended to field aircraft carrier battle groups (CBG) in the near future when it launched the first Type 901 Fast Combat Support Ship in December of 2015. Built by Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Ltd. (GSI), the first vessel in this class Hulun Hu (hull # 965), commissioned in September of 2017 after successful sea trials and UNREP trails, bears the distinction of being the only fast combat support ship fielded by a nation other than the United States, which operates the Sacramento and Supply Class vessels. These massive underway replenishment ships are designed to be able to meet the logistics needs of fast moving carrier battle/strike groups.

The Type 901 is a massive vessel, with a fully loaded displacement of 48,000 tons. It is equipped with five liquid bulk cargo transfer stations, three on the port side and two on the starboard side, and is also equipped for liquid transfers astern. They can refuel an aircraft carrier with fuel oil and aviation fuel to starboard while supplying fuel oil to surface warfare escorts to port. The disclosed cruising speed is in excess of 25 knots, which is likely understated. It is equipped with a large aircraft hangar and flight deck that can accommodate large Z-8 heavy transport helicopters which are well suited to aerial replenishment duties. A second Type 901 is currently in an advanced state of construction.

The massive size of the Type 901 is clearly on display in this image. The vessel tied up alongside Hulun Hu is a Type 640 Class auxiliary tanker.

The PLAN also operates the Type 903 and Type 903A Class fleet replenishment vessels. The Type 903 was greatly improved and took on the designation Type 903A with the first two examples commissioned in the summer of 2013. There are six Type 903A replenishment ships on active service, and a seventh currently in an advanced state of construction. These vessels have a fully loaded displacement of approximately 24,000 tons and can carry 10,500 tons of bunkers (fuel), 250 tons of potable water, and roughly 700 tons of dry cargo.

Type 903A Honghu, commissioned in July of 2016. The PLAN should take delivery of the seventh such vessel sometime in the middle of 2019. The PLAN increased production of this class of vessel since the first was commissioned in 2013. Four were commissioned in a span of just 8 months from December 2015 to July 2016.

Fleet replenishment vessels are a vital component of a blue water navy. They allow fleet task forces, carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups to engage in complex missions thousands of miles from home ports and over extended periods of duration. They replenish fuel, food stores, fresh water and munitions to warships while underway, and can provide a rapid logistics solution to both naval and land forces deployed to far flung bases and garrisons. These vessels are indispensable to aircraft carrier battle groups engaged in long deployments.

The Big Picture, PLAN 2025

The rapid pace of warship construction by China is impressive from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint, but of greater interest is in understanding the motivation behind such an ambitious program. Why has the Chinese leadership decided that the PLAN must expand and acquire a full spectrum of naval warfare capabilities that it has previously lacked, and in such a short space of time? The answer to this question becomes clear after a short analysis of China’s geopolitical, economic and national security goals in the twenty-first century.

In many ways, China is engaged in a concerted effort to redefine the economic realities that have established the way the world exchanges goods and services, and distributes the product of human endeavors globally. The New Silk Road/Maritime Silk Road project seeks to once again make China the center of the economic world. China is already the largest economy in the world in terms of economic production, and is on pace to usurp the U.S. as the world’s largest economic consumer as well. Continued growth and prosperity depend upon cheap and efficient movement of energy resources and raw materials to China, and the cheap and efficient movement of finished goods from China. The overwhelming majority of these influxes and outflows transit the international waterways of the world. Continued prosperity and stability depend upon the security of these maritime lanes of trade. In strategic terms, these naval lines of communication must remain open. In times of strife and natural or man-made disaster, China must have the capacity to secure these lines of communication and to keep them open. The great naval strategist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing in 1893, then just a Captain, stated this concept very succinctly:

“Let us start from the fundamental truth, warranted by history, that the control of the seas, and especially along the great lines drawn by national interest or national commerce, is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations. It is so because the sea is the world’s great medium of circulation. From this necessarily follows the principal that, as subsidiary to such control, it is imperative to take possession, when it can be done righteously, of such maritime positions as contribute to secure command.”

Although China has been the first and most determined nation to move in this direction, it is not alone. As China moves to build a new logistics system that aims to redirect the movement of information, energy, and economic goods that competes with the current established system dominated by the United States, the United States and its allies are determined to maintain the status quo. Some of these allies, such as India, are allies of necessity and are also attempting to maintain their independence. China has accepted the wisdom of long standing naval strategy, and has proven the most decisive in embracing these centuries old concepts.

This map illustrates established and potential naval bases of rivals in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea and Asia Pacific regions. The U.S. bases were established through imperialist expansion, war and the long running U.S.-U.K. alliance. India has moved to leverage its own cooperative relationship with the U.S.-U.K. alliance and also maintain a level of independence. China has moved to secure the maritime lines of communication to and from Africa and the Middle East. Bases in Gwadar and Kyaukpyu will prove indispensable if either the Straits of Malacca or Aden become impassable.

If China does not alter its current building projects by increasing or reducing orders, the PLAN will still be a highly transformed fighting force by 2025. The year 2025 will prove to be a milestone for the PLAN for many reasons. By 2025, China will likely be declaring its first Type 002 Class aircraft carrier operational. The Type 002 will be an EMALs assisted CATOBAR capable carrier that may likely be nuclear powered. At the same time, two other aircraft carriers, although recognized as developmental steps along the way to the Type 002, will also be in service. Based on the pace of pilot training and the procurement of aircraft over the past decade, the PLAN will have at least one more regiment of carrier strike aircraft in service, bringing the total to two regiments. China is already seeking to develop and field a carrier borne strike aircraft superior to the J-15, even though many of the J-15’s shortcoming will be rectified by the improved CATOBAR system of the new Type 002 carrier.

Liaoning CV-16 with its air wing of J-15s and rotary wing ASW and support aircraft, and a Type 054A frigate escort. A modest yet impressive start in carrier borne naval aviation, and definitely just the beginning.

The Plan will have 30 Type 054A Frigates, 18 Type 052D and 8 or more Type 055 Destroyers in service. Improvements upon the destroyers will likely occur in the intervening years. A total of 50 Type 056 Corvettes (28 of the Type 056A improved variant) will be policing the coastal waterways of China and its outlying island territories. These modern and capable surface warfare vessels will be supplemented by older vessels that China has been actively modernizing.

The PLAN will be able to transport an enlarged PLA Marine Corps to battle in its first Amphibious Ready Group, albeit with limited capabilities. The First Type 075 LHD will be undergoing operational training to test the capabilities of the vessel and familiarize sailors, marines and airmen with amphibious and air assault missions from such a complex and powerful platform. There will be six Type 071 LPDs in service, as well as 15 Type 072A LSTs. The majority of an additional 17 Type 072 LSTs of an earlier, yet sound design will still be in service. The recently expanded PLAMC, numbering approximately 100,000 men, a five-fold increase from 2017, will finally have the modern amphibious sealift capacity that it currently lacks. PLAMC marines will serve in duties deployed at sea and stationed at a growing number of Chinese sovereign island bases, or abroad at naval bases in foreign countries such as Pakistan and Djibouti.

By 2025, the PLAN will have a robust naval logistics arm available to support naval operations across the length and breadth of the Maritime Silk Road. Two Type 901 fast combat supports ships, and 9 Type 903A replenishment ships will be available at a minimum. Four Type 904 general stores issue vessels are currently in service to resupply island garrisons and offshore bases. This number may be increased in the intervening years.

Of equal interest is the question of just how the U.S. Navy will look in 2025. It will still be the largest and most powerful navy in terms of global reach and power projection; however, it is a military branch that seems to be without focus or direction. The PLAN has increasingly invested in high tech, powerful and flexible conventional warships that are also cost effective when compared to the new designs pursued by the U.S. Navy. Even the Type 002 aircraft carrier is a conservative design, with a limited mission foreseen for it, one which will minimize its weaknesses and make use of its strengths. It is telling that China has built the largest surface warfare ship since the U.S. commissioned the last Ticonderoga Class cruiser Port Royal CG-73 in 1994. The U.S. has no plans to replace the 22 Ticonderoga Class cruisers anytime soon, nor is there a replacement design to consider. The Gerald R. FordClass CVN-78 has proven to be a costly and disappointing investment so far. It will use the F-35 JSF and F-18 Super Hornet which lack the range to be a threat to peer adversaries. The Zumwalt Class DDG is a dead end failure and the troubled LCS program has proven to be less capable than the traditional multi-purpose frigate designs of other major navies.

Ticonderoga Class cruiser USS Lake Champlain CG-57. Decommissioning of these vessels will begin in 2019, with no viable replacement. The U.S. Navy command has proposed keeping half of the 22 vessels in service. Despite the largest defense budget of any nation in the world, and larger than that of Russia and China combined, the U.S. Navy cited budget constraints as a key factor in being unable of replacing the vessels.

While the U.S. has wasted its great wealth on failed designs, whose sole aim is to earn profits for a defense industry more interested in profit-generating waste than in producing weapons systems that balance capability, efficiency and cost effectiveness, China has done something quite different. China has produced cutting edge warships and aircraft for its navy that are largely improvements upon proven designs and technology. China has made major progress in missile technology, surpassing the U.S. in many respects. It has also reaped rewards from years of investment in research and development of advanced radar and even photon detection technologies. There is no doubt that China has gotten far more return on its investments in terms of its defense industry in comparison to the United States. For the military defense complex that rules the United States the goal is profit, not the defense and security of the nation.

From 2001 to the present, the United States military has morphed into a force obsessed with counterinsurgency and occupation, leaving it woefully unprepared for a conventional conflict with peer adversaries, such as Russia or China. The U.S. Navy has transformed into a global police force meant to be used as a stick to bludgeon any small nation that dares to disobey the diktats of Washington. Its powerful aircraft carrier strike groups (CSG) lack the air wing capable of striking the shores of powerful adversaries, rendering these great symbols of U.S. power impotent against any capable foe in a major conflict. The U.S. Navy is powerless to change the strategic situation in the South China Sea through military means, as China has already “crossed the Rubicon”. Imperial hubris, corruption and arrogance have done greater damage to the U.S. military than any foreign adversary has over the past 17 years.

The year 2025 will witness a PLAN in ascent and a U.S. Navy in decline. This is not to say that the U.S. Navy will not still be the preeminent naval power globally, but it will continue to be mired in a lack of strategic direction, focus and budgetary crisis. The PLAN will be guided by a clear strategic focus, increasing capabilities, and a robust shipbuilding and weapons acquisition program. There is no doubt that the PLAN will emerge as the second most powerful navy in the world, and will exert significant influence in both military and geostrategic terms.

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This timely article was first published by Oriental Review and Global Research in April 2016

Do Russians want another war?

If you are Russian, you would be surprised by the question. Why would anyone want war (hot or cold)?

But if you are an American, and grew up fearing ‘bad Russians’ such question does not surprise you a bit. After all, the whole Cold War was based on the main assumption – Russians/Soviets want war!

Despite being allies during the World War II, the friendship between the Soviet Union and the United States was quickly replaced with an intense rivalry. Just one year after the victory over Nazi Germany, a new face of the Soviets was painted in the West – the ‘evil Russians’, who wanted one thing – world domination.

It would be absurd if it didn’t have such dire consequences – years of fear on the both sides of the Atlantic, and wasted resources, which could have been spent on normalizing people’s lives. 

After losing more than 20 million people in the World War II, and experiencing hunger and devastation of ruined industries and infrastructure, the last thing the Soviets wanted after the WWII was another war. It took the Soviet Union decades to rebuild the country. People lived in deep poverty and everyone was longing for a normal life. Yes, U.S.S.R. was building up defense industry – because it didn’t want to be attacked again. Offense was never the purpose!

How did the former allies become the adversaries?

The fear of the Soviet Union was initiated by Kennan’s ‘Long telegram’, sent on February 22 1946 from Moscow to James Byrnes in State Department, Washington D.C. The telegram was later reprinted as an article in Foreign Affairs, called ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, where he pictured Russians as too “insecure and untrusting and too obsessed with protecting their borders.” A portion of Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ was selectively quoted to the public to make an image of evil Russia that is looking to take over the world.

Another part of telegram, stating that the Soviet Union is actually much weaker than the US and doesn’t pose a danger to America was omitted: “Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force.” Not just “weaker” – the economy of Soviet Union after the war was a fraction of American economy. But that part got ignored – the telegram was enough to send Pentagon, and propaganda machine into motion. Building weapons is a profitable business, after all.

Ex British PM Winston Churchill delivering his Fulton speech on March 5, 1946.

On March 5, 1946, shortly after Kenan’s ‘Long Telegram’, Winston Churchill made his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill proposed coordination of the Anglo-American military to halting the spread of Russian Communism, which he warned has become a “growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.”

The former British Prime Minister, standing on the platform beside President Truman, warned that only through a military alliance of English-speaking nations can a clash of ideologies be prevented from bursting into a third world war. Despite agreeing in 1945 at Yalta Conference to post-war settlement, Churchill characterized Russia as dropping an ‘Iron Curtain’ in the middle of Europe in order to create ‘Spheres of Influence’.

The catchy phrases of the speech became the new language of the Cold War and created an image of Russia as an enemy of the West. Churchill insisted that the Soviets want war and they plan to conquer all of Europe. Former British Prime Minister warned that Moscow understands only force and that in order to stop Soviet ‘expansion’, the West has to unite around the United States, who has the necessary force (nuclear bomb).

Shortly after the United States demonstrated convincingly its nuclear capability in August 1945, the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear weapon, and the gloomy era of the arms race and fear-mongering on both sides would begin. The “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton would turn former allies into enemies for many years to come.

Formation of NATO and Warsaw Pact

A year after Stalin died in 1953, the Kremlin asked to join NATO. In the declassified ‘note (Click to Download)’, dated April 1 1954, the Soviet government, asked Western leaders to “examine the matter of having the Soviet Union participate in the North Atlantic Treaty“, for which it received an answer that ‘the unrealistic nature of the proposal does not warrant discussion’.

Why did Soviets asked to join NATO? Naturally, Kremlin leaders believed that the alliance, uniting US and the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany could become a true security alliance. After the refusal, Russia had no choice but to establish its own security alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which was established in 1955.

In 2001, Kremlin’s request to join NATO once again was met with refusal from the alliance. Moscow again expected too much from so-called ‘strategic partnership’, which ended up to be in name only.

 Why are we fighting the new Cold War?

The period of time since Vladimir Putin’s first presidency till now has been marked by a slow buildup of tension between the United States and Russia to the point when the Cold War II became a new reality. The media is complicit in heightening the tension by deliberately omitting or distorting the information and creating an image of ‘totalitarian regime’ in Russia.

Instead of tracing the true source of events in Ukraine and Syria, the major Western news sources blame the responsibility on Kremlin, taking it as far as claiming that Russia is fueling the instability in the Middle East and Ukraine in order to spread chaos to Europe. Such claims are unfounded and the opposite is true: the instability on Russia’s borders can harm Russia more than Europe.

There are several reasons for the return of confrontation, but the main reason is that United States had failed to understand Russia’s willingness to cooperate with the West in the early 1990s. The U.S. continued to treat Russia with mistrust. Russia was treated as a looser, and an attempt for cooperation with the West was perceived as a sign of economic weakness. Russia was treated as a beggar, who was asking to be liked, to join “gentlemen’s clubs”. And it was accepted, with much condescension from those “civilized gentlemen” to sit at some of the fine tables, as long as awkward Russian bear was on a leash.

A typical primitive propaganda cartoon depicting “aggressive Russia” for Western public.

When bear started showing some teeth, and growling once in a while, gentlemen started to worry and wonder if they haven’t made a mistake of dealing with such an unrefined creature? They didn’t care that the bear meant no harm – beast is a beast and should be dealt with accordingly! So, the taming of the beast began.

Slowly, but surely, the image of ‘aggressive Russia’ started to emerge. And thanks to misinformation about real causes of war in Georgia and Ukraine we got a total culmination, what CNN, Washington Post and the New York Times were “predicting” all along – ‘resurgent Russia’.

How can we avoid a confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers when Washington is determined to continue its information warfare, in which it determined to portray Russia in bad light, no matter what Russia does?

Just like the Cold War I, the Cold War II has its ideological underpinning, except, now it is not about communism versus capitalism, it is about multipolarity versus unipolarity. It just happened Russia was not willing to be a part of unipolar world. It just happened to be against Russian national character to be serving a “higher master”. How did it dare to disobey? Well, the nuclear weapons came handy for standing up to protect its national pride and its national interest in face of America bluntly stepping into Russia’s spheres of interest.

Is current U.S. – Russia state of relations a result of the U.S. blindly following its own grand strategy at any cost? According to Wolfowitz doctrine states are not allowed to have their own national interests, and no one can stay in the way of US global preeminence:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.”

In respect to the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Wolfowitz doctrine does not hide its objective: “our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”

The Wolfowitz doctrine clearly states that “We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Russia is definitely a stumbling block to American goal of “dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

Like generations of Cold War fighters before him, Wolfowitz warned against the possible threat posed by a resurgent Russia:

“We continue to recognize that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others….’We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.”

Despite the two decades of Russia’s attempts at assuring the United States that strategic partnership between the two states is possible and desirable, American leadership never took these assurances seriously. The Cold War mentality never left the U.S. foreign policy. NATO expansion and the wave of Color revolutions in the former Soviet Union only consolidated a mistrust of the United States in Russia.

John Pilger wrote:

“How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.”

“In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.  Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority. In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the U.S. military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West. “

We are back to fear and mistrust of each other as we were back in 1946. We already been at the brink of the nuclear war once, do we want to take another chance?

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In a move that was entirely predictable, the US administration is once again threatening to bomb Syria if there is a “chemical weapons attack”.

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It is ironic that the Robert Mueller investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Donald Trump campaign continues to turn up nothing while the evidence of Israeli interference in the U.S. political system continues to surface without any outrage being expressed by either the media or American politicians.

The most recent revelation concerns a payment of $10,000 given to former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos in an Israeli hotel room in July 2017. A self-described Israeli businessman named Charles Tawil provided the money at the meeting, which was set up after Tawil flew to the Greek island Mykonos, where he met Papadopoulos and invited him to come to Israel to discuss some possible business relating to an oil and gas project in the Aegean Sea. Papadopoulos had met Tawil through an Israeli “political strategist” David Ha’ivri, who is a hard-line Israeli settler with close ties to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Papadopoulos agree to do so, leaving his wife Simona in Greece.

Screenshot the Daily Caller, August 20, 2018

Papadopoulos took the money as a retainer and signed a contract for additional consulting services at $10,000 per month before he returned to Greece, where he gave the money to an attorney friend to hold. He shortly thereafter flew to Dulles International Airport near Washington, where he was arrested on May 27th and charged with giving false statements to the FBI. He was convicted in October and is due to be sentenced next week.

In an email, Ha’ivri explained how

“We discussed potential consultancy work for business in the Aegean, Cyprus and Middle East focusing on business related to gas and petroleum infrastructure because of Charles’ network of contacts and George’s specialization. The retainer would go firstly to cover [George’s] needs as he said that he had financial problems.”

Ha’ivri also described how the agreement quickly fell apart due to Papadopoulos’ “immaturity.” He concluded that “After that the whole story fell apart. Charles left back to Washington and the story was over.”

In an interview, Simona Papadopoulos identified several “shady characters” who she said approached her husband during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. She mentioned “someone we met in Mykonos, an Israeli person who flew to Mykonos to discuss business.” Papadopoulos was also approached by a number of other suspicious individuals who clearly were seeking to establish some kind of relationship with him, to include a Maltese named Joseph Mifsud, who might have had a Russian energy company connection; Sergei Millian, an alleged source for the notorious Steele dossier; and an FBI informant named Stefan Halper.

Tawil, who does not come up on normal records searches, is on Linkedin with zero biographical information. He claims to be the consultant for a company called Gestomar located in Silver Spring Maryland, which does not appear to exist. Papadopoulos reportedly believed him to be an Israeli spy and revealed the details of the contact to Robert Mueller, who appears to have done nothing with the information.

The approach to George Papadopoulos was typical spy tradecraft for recruiting a source. Papadopoulos was in financial difficulties, the agreement was to serve as a consultant for an unknown company by an individual using a cover name, and it was apparently presumed that the new spy would be able to report on details coming from inside the still-forming Trump government. Papadopoulos was introduced to the Mossad officer Tawil by Ha’ivri, who is well known in political circles and therefore credible and non-threatening. This is, of course, largely speculation but one has to wonder why the possible Israeli attempt to spy on the new Trump Administration has been so ignored.

In an earlier manifestation of Israelgate, former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn also was eventually forced to admit that he had lied to the FBI about what was said during two telephone conversations with then Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.

The two phone calls in question include absolutely nothing about possible collusion with Russia to change the outcome of the U.S. election, which allegedly was the raison d’etre behind the creation of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office in the first place. Both took place more than a month after the election and both were initiated by the Americans involved.

The first phone call to Kislyak, on December 22nd, was made by Flynn at the direction of Jared Kushner, who in turn had been approached by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had learned that the Obama Administration was going to abstain on a United Nations vote condemning the Israeli settlements policy, meaning that for the first time in years a U.N. resolution critical of Israel would pass without drawing a U.S. veto. Kushner, acting for Netanyahu, asked Flynn to contact each delegate from the various countries on the Security Council to delay or kill the resolution. Flynn agreed to do so, which included a call to the Russians. Kislyak took the call but did not agree to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed unanimously on December 23rd.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner the White House’s point man on the Middle East. He and his family have extensive ties both to Israel and to Netanyahu personally, to include Netanyahu’s staying at the Kushner family home in New York. The Kushner Family Foundation has funded some of Israel’s illegal settlements and also a number of conservative political groups in that country. Jared has served as a director of that foundation and it is reported that he failed to disclose the relationship when he filled out his background investigation sheet for a security clearance. All of which suggests that if you are looking for possible foreign government collusion with the Trumpsters, look no further.

Kushner was, in fact, trying to clandestinely reverse a decision made by the legally constituted American government and he was doing so on behalf of Netanyahu. He asked the soon-to-be National Security Advisor to get the Russians to undermine and subvert what was being done by the still-in-power U.S. government in Washington headed by President Barack Obama. In legal terms, this could be construed as a “conspiracy against the United States” that the Mueller investigation has exploited against former Trump associate Paul Manafort.

Together the Papadopoulos and Flynn tales suggest that it was Israel, not Russia, that sought to both collude with and even spy on the Trump Administration, which should surprise no one. Unfortunately, in spite of the evidence, the possibility that the “interference” will ever be subject to any Congressional investigation remains extremely unlikely.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

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

Featured image is from the author.

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The Syrian Arab News Agency reported on an impending false flag CW incident in Idlib province to be wrongfully blamed on government forces.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said a false flag attack is coming to “imped(e) a normal settlement of the…fight against terrorism in Idlib.”

On Saturday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov explained what’s coming, what happened several times before, most recently last April in the Douma – a fake US/UK false flag incident, wrongfully blamed on Damascus, followed by US/UK/French warplanes terror-bombing Syrian targets, naked aggression based on a Big Lie.

Konashenkov said another provocation is imminent with “active participation of (US and UK) foreign specialists…to serve as a new pretext for missile and bomb strikes by the United States, Great Britain and France against Syria’s government and economic facilities,” adding:

Ahead of the US/UK-orchestrated false flag, Pentagon warships were deployed in the Persian Gulf, carrying cruise missiles, along with a B-1B strategic bomber sent from Udei airbase in Qatar, armed with AGM-158 JASSM air-to-surface missiles.

Hostile statements by senior US, UK and French officials warned of “their intention to respond in the most resolute way to the alleged chemical weapons use by the Syrian government” – signaling they intend terror-bombing Syrian targets in response to their planned false flag, complicit with al-Nusra and White Helmets terrorists they support on the ground.

These countries intend “another dramatic escalation of the situation in the Middle East, (aimed) at disrupting the peace process on the territory of Syria,” said Konashenkov, adding:

“According to information confirmed…by several independent sources,” US-supported al-Nusra terrorists intend conducting a false flag CW attack, wrongfully blamed on government forces.

Large amounts of chlorine gas delivered to the town of Jisr ash-Shugur in Idlib province apparently is the CW of choice for the latest planned incident.

According to AMN News, Russian warships were deployed off Syria’s coast ahead of likely US, UK, French terror-bombing following an expected CW false flag incident, wrongfully blamed on Damascus.

“This latest move by the Russian Navy comes just 24 hours after they sent three ships en route to the Port of Tartous in western Syria,” AMN News reported.

Large numbers of elite and other Syrian forces were deployed to Idlib province ahead of the upcoming offensive to free the territory of US-supported terrorists.

Separately, US State Department official William Roebuck met with Kurdish YPG fighters, infesting the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, and US troops illegally occupying northeast Syrian territory.

“We are prepared to stay here” indefinitely (supporting Israel), he said – even after ISIS is defeated.

Syria’s Foreign Ministry blasted what it called Washington’s attempt “to fragmentize the region and impose Zionist hegemony on all its countries.”

Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia said

“(w)e have amassed evidence that (heavy) weapons are being smuggled from outside (to ISIS and other terrorists), including through semi-legal organizations or even under protection of security agencies from other countries.”

Konashenkov explained that the imminent false flag incident will be filmed for distribution to Western and regional media – to show civilians allegedly suffering from exposure to “chemical munitions.”

What’s going on is further proof of  the Trump regime’s intention to continue waging endless war on Syria for regime change – obstructing all-out Russian conflict resolution efforts.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

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Said Mohammad, London-based journalist interviews Andre Vltchek for Al-Akhbar about Samir Amin and his legacy.

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Said Mohammad: Thanks for accepting to do this interview on Samir Amin. I knew you two had met on different occasions and that you gave lectures with him. Can you tell us something about the person behind the ideas and how you remember him?

Andre Vltchek: Pleasure to be able to address your readers. The first time I met Samir Amin was in Beijing, during the First World Cultural Forum in 2015. Both of us were keynote speakers. The event was huge and strongly anti-imperialist; extremely exciting and intellectually refreshing. Samir was greatly respected by the Chinese hosts; his quiet voice shot intellectual missiles against capitalism and imperialism. When he spoke, there was total silence. Samir Amin, as a person? He was brilliant, quiet but determined, always true to his convictions, intellectually brave, warm to his comrades, merciless towards his enemies.

SM: Samir’s analysis of world capitalism, of a rich North maintaining its global hegemony through monopolising technology, access to natural resources, finance, global media and the means of mass destruction. Doesn’t that mean a challenge to the anti-imperialism activists in the North who may have to lose some of their societies’ privileges if the hegemony is to be broken?

AV: You are absolutely correct here. And that is perhaps why both Samir and I are so ‘unpopular’ in many so-called Western left-wing circles. Samir was born in Egypt but spent many years of his life in France. He knew, he understood perfectly well that in the West, there is almost no desire to give up privileges and strive for an egalitarian and just world. Many ‘progressive’ Western intellectuals are denouncing global injustice and Western (North) imperialism but are unwilling to struggle or even vote for an egalitarian planet. In a way, there is no real left in the West, anymore. The real left is internationalist. The Western left is only interested and struggles for privileges for its people (shorter working hours, better medical care, higher wages, etc.), mostly at the expense of the poor and semi-colonized world or call it the ‘South’.

SM: Venezuela’s Maduro has started a counter economical attack that changes the rule of the game for the global financial system. He was one of the few leaders who mourned Samir Amin in public. Do you think Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution was influenced by Amin’s ideas, especially his de-linking theory? Do you think that experiment will be allowed to succeed?

AV: Yes, the Venezuelan revolution – El Proceso – was definitely influenced by Samir Amin. President Maduro admitted it openly. But I have reasons to believe that other countries, including Iran, Bolivia, but even Russia, have been looking carefully at the de-linking theory as well. In today’s world, it is actually a necessity, for many, if not for all non-Western nations. In his academic paper, A.K. Anwar summarized de-linking as: “…in the simplest sense of the term, demands a nationalist system that minimizes the dominance of external constraints on Third World economies and helps the exploited nations to implement their auto-centric development policies for the betterment of indigenous economy.” Of course, this is just a simplification. In reality, Samir Amin offered a way forward, a comprehensible blueprint for economically oppressed nations to liberate themselves and to use their resources for the most important goal: improving the lives of their people.

SM: Turkey is facing a major currency issue that is threatening the world economy with a new financial crisis. Once more, the neoliberal economies are broken beyond repair. Why do you think major countries in the South are not learning from the repeated lessons and try the de-linking approach?

AV: I think they are. I am very optimistic that they are. Turkey is of course one example, Iran another. Venezuela, Bolivia… Then there is Russia. I am sure we will now see great changes in Mexico, once the new administration is sworn in. In Brazil, the most important Latin American country, the left (PT) is poised to win, with Lula or, if the fascist elites will manage to keep him in jail, without him. The Latin American left is ‘real’, and it will not make the same mistakes as before. I work all over the world. Soon I will be making a documentary film in Mexico. I’m extremely optimistic. As far as
I am concerned, this is the end of Western hegemony. Look at Syria; look at Aleppo, which I call the ‘Arab Stalingrad’! Western imperialism can be stopped and it is being stopped. And all Arab countries are watching, some with hope, some (in the Gulf) in horror. Of course, Syria will be ‘de-linking’. It is already de-linked.

SM: How did Samir Amin see the populist wave taking over the West recently and the resurgence of fascism in less than 100 years from the wars that killed millions in the West in particular?

AV: Well, the Western wars actually killed many more people in non-Western countries than in the West itself, it is just not being discussed in Paris or London or Berlin. Just in the 20^th century, look at Congo, Namibia, sub-Continent or Southeast Asia, look at the Middle East. You see, here is a small disagreement that Samir and I had, and we discussed it, openly and publicly, in Moscow, at the end of 2015, when we addressed Russian left-wing intellectuals at the Mayakovski Theatre. Samir believed that all the evil comes from global capitalism. That it is direct result, a bi-product of capitalism. I have been arguing that it is what Carl Gustav Jung called the ‘pathological culture of the West’, that the Western culture is essentially sick, and that both imperialism and extreme forms of capitalism are the direct and logical result of such a culture. 

Samir Amin and I at Mayakovski Theatre in Moscow

SM: Despite all the capitalist measures taken by China and its deep integration in the global economy, Amin kept arguing about an incredibly significant experiment in that country. How do you explain that?

AV: You are right; that is what he kept arguing about, and I absolutely agree with him. China is an extremely successful Communist country, which has been experimenting with and pragmatically implementing some capitalist practices. However, it is what several thinkers that I trust, describe as “Communist ends, capitalist means”. Whilst in the West, big business controls the government, in China, the government dictates to the companies what, and how, should be produced for the good of the nation. Amin and I spent hours discussing China. What I just wrote is a simplification. There could be (and already are) huge books written on the Chinese system. Both of us were immensely impressed by this system. Both of us also understood how it is smeared, in the West (North) by both the mainstream and often by the left (which just cannot accept that an Asian, non-Western country, is capable of building a much better society than anything that was ever created in Europe and North America… and without plundering the rest of the world).

SM: Some say the Dubai model is a challenge to Amin’s theories. There is a city that has managed to force itself into the global economy via deeper integration vs. de-linking. How did Amin see this experiment and what lessons could be learned?

AV: We never discussed Dubai. But isn’t it clear that the Gulf is an anomaly? Its economy is built on oil and on cheap foreign labour, coming from the Indian sub-continent, the Philippines, Africa. This labour has very few rights. If some parts of the Gulf have no oil, they function as ‘service’ or banking centres for those who have it. I’m not sure it is a model applicable in other parts of the world.

SM: Many leading economies in the South like Russia, Iran and even China are forced in a way by the rich centre, to move into de-linking and alternatives. Yet, countries like that remain reluctant on going fully in that direction and they seem happy to resume integrating with the global system whenever given the chance. Did Amin offer an explanation?

Image on the right: Samir Amin in Moscow

AV: I think this was happening in the past, when there seemed to be no choice. Now there is a choice, and many countries are deciding to go down the path of de-linking. Now there are the BRICS, there is trading in local currencies like the Yuan and Rouble, there is the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, New Development Bank (NDB). Amin used to believe in possible a Paris – Berlin – Moscow alliance against Washington. I think, before he passed away, he saw that both North America and Europe form one imperialist entity. And he recognized that there is growing resistance to the Western control of the world forming around the Beijing – Moscow alliance.

SM: Amin had criticized heavily, not only political Islam (Muslim Brotherhood), but also political Hinduism and Political Buddhism. It seems though in certain situations, political religion (Hezbollah and a few Latin American examples) was at the front foot in facing up to the imperialist forces. What was Samir’s thinking on this front.

AV: Amin criticized political Islam, full stop. And yes, he also criticized other religions. I believe that his ‘iconic’ definition is that: “Islamist militants are not actually interested in the discussion of dogmas which form religion, but on the contrary, are concerned about the ritual assertion of membership in the community. Such a world view is therefore not only distressing, as it conceals an immense poverty of thought, but it also justifies Imperialism’s strategy of substituting a “conflict of cultures” for a conflict between the liberal, imperialist centers and the backward, dominated peripheries.” I believe this is quite legitimate criticism, considering that the West was mainly to blame for this state of Islam. London particularly has been supporting and spreading Wahhabism. Both Washington and London kept overthrowing one socialist Muslim government after another, from Iran to Indonesia and Afghanistan, putting on throne the most regressive, brutal and greedy rulers, who have been using Islam as a cover for their collaboration with the West. That is what Samir criticized. That is also what I criticize. In my presence, he never lashed at Hezbollah, or Iran or Al-Sadr. Historically and culturally, Islam is a socialist religion. In many countries, in almost all of them, because of the West and its Saudi allies, Islam has been derailed, kidnapped and used against the people. I see it clearly in places such as Indonesia, or in the Gulf. One important point: Samir never criticized the essence of Islam, and he was terrified by the insane and hypocritical Islamophobia in the West. His criticism of “political Islam” and his respect for Muslim culture have to be emphasized.

SM: You have been to Iran recently, and wrote how the country is nothing like what we see in the mainstream media. What is your assessment of the Iranian regime’s ability to continue despite the hostilities of the West and would they one day be self-sufficient enough to turn their eyes away from the capitalist system?

AV: Iran is already a semi-socialist country, which has been greatly influenced by Venezuela and other progressive Latin American nations. That is something that we are not supposed to know. Iran is also putting great emphasis on social services, like healthcare, culture, education, public transportation. Teheran is shockingly elegant, clean and an impressive city, full of arts and culture. The people are educated and knowledgeable, and very open. Even now, Iran is moving closer and closer to Russia, left-wing Latin American countries, and China. The visa regime for Russian citizens has been abolished, and Iranians can travel visa-free to the Russian Federation. Many are now fascinated with China; when I was in Teheran, there was a Chinese film festival. Together with Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela, Iran has become an important bastion of anti-imperialism.That is why it is hated in the West, of course.

Samir Amin and I preparing to give speeches in Moscow, 2015

SM: There was some hope that the working class in the West (Corbyn, Varoufakis …) might be able to challenge the neoliberal elites in their countries and thus create the conditions for more balanced relations with the South. Had Amin considered that to be a possibility?

AV: We discussed it in Moscow. Both of us agreed, at least there, that people like Varoufakis and Corbyn could improve the lives of the Brits or Greeks, but not necessarily lives of the Congolese and Afghans. 

SM: Amin considered himself a “Creative Marxist”. Very few in the left are still having illusions about the rigid Soviet Marxism, but how can one be a creative Marxist these days where classes are not clearly defined and the horizontal struggles (Race, feminism, Faith,….) are at the centre stage.

AV: The West ‘kidnapped’ ‘left-wing’, as it kidnapped Islam. ‘Interest groups’ and individualism fully infiltrated what used to be an internationalist and highly disciplined movement. In the West, what is called ‘left’, is now some kind of anarcho-syndicalism (a totally Western concept which could never be supported in such places as Asia), sprinkled with sexual orientation and gender identity. It is not a revolutionary block, very far from it. It is a ‘selfie-Left’ – total toothless nonsense. Creative Marxism is now in China, Latin America, and in other non-Western countries. Communism is definitely not dead, as they want you to believe in London, Paris or New York. It evolved, it is evolving. But its essence is the same – Internationalism, the mortal fight against Western imperialism, and equality for all. Amin clearly saw hope in Beijing and Moscow, and that is why he liked being there, and so do I.

SM: Amin hailing from the Third World but highly educated in the West, yet he did not fall into the trap of losing his skin and turn into a mouth-piece for the West, as many intellectuals have done. What qualities in the man were there, that helped him be that strong?

AV: Integrity, courage and love for humanity. A love much stronger than his self-interests!

SM: Do you believe the legacy of Amin has the staying power to remain influential for years to some?

AV: Yes, definitely. He was a great thinker, a true comrade, a Communist even in those years when the Western so-called ‘left’ opportunistically betrayed Communism. People like him, or Eduardo Galeano in Latin America, are the symbols of tremendous integrity and rock-solid revolutionary determination. Amin’s legacy will be revisited, sooner rather than later. Maybe not in the West: because the West and its horrific control over the planet will be soon over. But it will be visited by grateful billions, in all the other parts of the world, including his native Egypt, where they should erect his statue in the middle of Tahrir Square.

*

This article was originally published on Al-Akhbar in Arabic.

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. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

All images in this article are from Andre Vltchek.

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President Mahmoud Abbas‘s spokesperson has said that recent US aid cuts to the West Bank and Gaza are designed to end his country’s claims to the disputed city of Jerusalem.

It comes a day after the US announced that it would end $200 million in aid to Palestinians, which Ramallah believes is an attempt to pile political pressure on the Palestinian Authority to cave-in to Israel and Washington’s demands.

Abbas’s spokesperson, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, told AP that the financial pressure is politically motivated, and that the US is fully aware that there can be no peace, if east Jerusalem does not become the capital of a future Palestinian state.

The US sparked outrage in the occupied Palestinian territories, when it broke with international diplomatic norms and moved its embassy to Jerusalem, thus backing Israel’s illegal claims to the disputed city as its capital.

The US sent a brief three paragraph notice first to lawmakers and then the media about its intentions to cut $200 million in desperately needed funding to the West Bank and Gaza.

It has been suggested the aid cuts were due to Hamas’ running of Gaza and payments by Ramallah to the Palestinian family members of those killed, injured or detained by Israel.

President Donald Trump‘s administration has claimed these payments “encourage terrorism” and demanded Abbas cancel the stipends, something the Palestinian president has refused to do.

It comes as the US government prepares to roll out a peace plan, which recent actions suggest will be heavily favourable to Israel.

Some is the US administration have said Trump’s recent aid cuts will be counter-productive.

“The US is ceding space to Hamas in Gaza,” tweeted Dave Harden, until recently the USAID director in the Palestinian territories.

“No security professional recommends an aid cut off in Gaza. None.”

Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian Legislative Council member, told the agency that recent US moves are tantamount to blackmail.

“Well, very clearly the US cutting of aid to Palestine is a form of cheap blackmail and it shows a certain degree of moral and political bankruptcy,” he said.

“It is a way in which the US is further complicit in the Israeli occupation and is further punishing the Palestinians who are under occupation, and carrying out the wishes of Israel… So it is a form of political blackmail. And it is a form of implementing the Israeli plan to punish the Palestinians and to reward the occupier, Israel.”