The Logic of U.S. Foreign Policy

May 29th, 2018 by Swiss Propaganda Research

The following complex chart was sent to us by the Swiss Propaganda Research.

Click to enlarge 

***

How can U.S. foreign policy of the past several decades be explained rationally? The following chart – based on a model developed by political science professors David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski – reveals the imperial logic behind U.S. diplomatic and military interventions around the globe.

 Click to enlarge ?

Literature

Sylvan, David & Majeski, Stephen (2009): U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective: Clients, Enemies and Empire. Routledge, London.

Related articles

The American Empire and its Media (2017)

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Logic of U.S. Foreign Policy

Since 2001, Global Research has been delivering critical analysis to its readers as well as direction for the questions we should be asking.

If you look to our website as a resource for information and understanding, to stay current on world events or to experience diversity and transparency in your news, please consider making a donation to Global Research.

Global Research is an independent organization that is funded exclusively through the support of its readers. It does not accept public or private funding. Every contribution helps us continue to bring you the up-to-date, incisive information that you count on.

Support Global Research.

*     *     *

Trump is “Played” by Pence and Bolton, Endangering World Peace:  Attempts to Resolve Crisis in Korea and Northeast Asia, Torpedoed by Militarists in Washington

By Carla Stea, May 28 2018

Evidently, Donald Trump is a political neophyte:  perhaps he succeeds at making business deals, but he is strangely naïve regarding the viciousness of political chicanery and Machiavellian intrigue in Washington.  There is no other explanation for his appointing John Bolton, a notorious hawk, and advocate of pre-emptively attacking the DPRK, to such an influential government position as National Security Adviser.

“Peace Negotiator” Mike Pompeo: There is a CIA Plot to Assassinate Kim Jong-un?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, May 27 2018

In May 2017, the DPRK accused the CIA (headed by Mike Pompeo) and the ROK’s spy agency, of “a failed plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un. Neither the CIA nor the White House responded to these accusations. While press reports acknowledged the CIA’s “long history” of political assassinations, the DPRK’s accusations were casually dismissed.

Mike Pompeo Challenged at Senate Foreign Relations Committee with regard to North Korea, Iran, Yemen

By Renee Parsons, May 29 2018

Instead of the typically gratuitous compliments and undeserved deference, there was a display (albeit a minority) of some moral courage with a rare slice of truth on Capitol Hill, epitomizing the real-time requirements of a Senator’s job:   to be skeptical, provide oversight and demand accountability from every Federal government witness, no matter the rank – once referred to as ‘grilling the witness.”

 

The Blatant Conspiracy behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s Assassination

By Edward Curtin, May 28 2018

Robert Kennedy was a marked man. And he knew it. That he was nevertheless willing to stand up to the forces of hate and violence that were killing innocents at home and abroad is a testimony to his incredible courage and love of country. To honor him requires that we discover the truth about those who killed him.

The Art of War: Italian ‘Sovereignty’ from Brussels, but not from Washington

By Manlio Dinucci, May 29 2018

Strong pressure is exerted on Italy, in a less evident but no less intrusive way, by the United States, which fears a break in the “rules” that subordinate Italy to its economic and strategic interests. This is part of the policies Washington has adopted towards Europe, through different administrations and with different methods, pursuing the same objective: to keep Europe under U.S. influence. NATO is a key instrument of this strategy.

Iran: What Trump Is Not Telling You. What is “The Donald” Concealing?

By J. Michael Springmann, May 25 2018

But there is a dark side to things in Iran, a land with more than 80 million people and a history and culture stretching back 5,000 years. Like the now-destroyed Iraq and Syria, it is a target country. America and Israel want the nation eliminated. It does not toe the Zionist-American line.

  • Posted in English, NO READ MORE LINK
  • Comments Off on Selected Articles: Who Was Behind the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination?

Repeat after me: Canada is seldom a force for good in the world, Canada is seldom a force for good in the world.

Thomas Walkom’s “Canada should board Korean peace train” is yet another example of how the progressive end of the dominant media has been seduced by Canadian foreign policy mythology.

The leftist Toronto Star columnist offers an astute analysis of what’s driving rapprochement on the Korean Peninsula. He points out that the two Koreas are moving the process forward and that Pyongyang believes “complete denuclearization” of the Peninsula includes the US forces in the region aiming nuclear weapons at it.

But, Walkom’s column is cloaked in naivety about Canada’s role in the geopolitical hotspot. He ignores the international summit Ottawa and Washington organized in January to promote sanctions on North Korea. In a highly belligerent move, the countries invited to the conference in Vancouver were those that fought against North Korea in the early 1950s conflict. “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” General Curtis LeMay, head of US air command during the fighting, explained three decades later. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off … twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure.”

(During another dreadful chapter in Korean history Canada supplied war materials to the Japanese army that occupied Korea before World War II.)

Continuing its aggressive diplomatic posture, Chrystia Freeland brought up North Korea at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February and the next month Canada’s foreign minister agreed with her Japanese counterpart to send a “strong message” to Pyongyang at the upcoming Group of Seven meetings. In a subsequent get together, Freeland and Japanese officials pledged to maintain “maximum pressure” on North Korea. After “welcoming SouthKorea’s critical role in maintaining diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea” in March, Freeland responded gingerly to Seoul and Pyongyang’s joint announcement last month to seek a formal end to the Korean War and rid the Peninsula of nuclear weapons. “We all need to be careful and not assume anything,” said Freeland.

Walkom also ignores the Canadian Forces currently seeking to blockade North Korea. Three weeks ago Ottawa announced it was a sending a CP-140 Aurora surveillance aircraft and 40 military personnel to a US base in Japan to join British, Australian and US forces monitoring efforts to evade UN sanctions. Earlier in the year a Vancouver Island based submarine was sent across the pond partly to bolster the campaign to isolate North Korea.

Canadians are also part of the UN military mission in Korea. The first non-US general to hold the post since the command was created in 1950, Canadian Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre was recently appointed deputy commander of the UN force stationed there.

(To be fair, Walkom hints at Ottawa’s belligerence, noting that Canada is “still technically at war with North Korea” and is among countries that “traditionally take their cue from the U.S.”)

In my forthcoming book Left, Right — Marching to the Beat of Imperial CanadaI discuss how leftist intellectuals concede a great deal to the foreign policy establishment’s outlook. Laziness is a simple, though not unimportant, reason why these writers mythologize Canadian foreign policy. Buried amidst a mass of state and corporate generated apologetics, critical information about Canada’s role in the world takes more effort to uncover. And the extra work is often bad for one’s career.

A thorough investigation uncovers information tough to square with the narrow spectrum of opinion permitted in the dominant media. It’s nearly impossible to survive if you say Canadian foreign policy has always been self-serving/elite-driven or that no government has come close to reflecting their self-professed ideals on the international stage. Almost everyone with a substantial platform to comment sees little problem with Canadian power, finding it expedient to assume/imply Canada’s international aims are noble.

Rather than a story titled “Canada should board Korean peace train”, Walkom should have written about how “Canada must step off the belligerence bus”. His conscious or unconscious naivety regarding Canada’s role in Korea is part of a mainstream left trend that partly explains why Canadians overwhelmingly believe this country is a benevolent international actor despite a long history of supporting empire and advancing Canadian corporate interests abroad.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Left’s Naivety about Canada’s Role in Foreign Affairs. The Korea “Peace Train”

“Hell is Empty, and the Devils are All Here”, …. (William Shakespeare, The Tempest)

And thus I clothe my naked villany, … And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” (William Shakespeare, in the words of King Richard III)

*

A play on words from the Rolling Stones most pertinent commentary song ‘ Sympathy for the Devil’ circa 1968. The song was on their ‘ Beggars Banquet’ album , which , ironically, was released right after the murders of Martin L. King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

One stanza of the song rings so true to those of us who believe there is a Deep State which runs our traditional government: ” I shouted out who killed the Kennedys when after all it was you and me!” Now we know that Jagger and Richards, the songwriters, wrote the song from the perspective of the Devil, the narrator. So when they include ‘ it was you and me’ they are intimating that there is more than one devil out there. So it is.

There have always been cabals in perhaps every elected government throughout time in memoriam. These are simply evil and greedy human beings who are obsessed with power and control over the rest of their citizenry… plain and simple. The dictionary defines evil as ‘Morally wrong or wicked’. Well, we can sit and discuss what the extent of evil deeds is all about for hours, even days. The bottom line can be found in the biblical precept ‘ Do unto others as you would have them do unto YOU’ . Thus, when those in positions of power disregard the needs and the will of their people, or other peoples…evil is prevalent. Millions, perhaps billions of spiritual seekers follow the story and precepts  of Jesus of Nazareth. Do they remember this one:

The Rich Man

16 Someone came to Jesus with this question: “Teacher,[a] what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”

17 “Why ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. But to answer your question—if you want to receive eternal life, keep[b] the commandments.”

18 “Which ones?” the man asked.

And Jesus replied: “‘You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely.

19 Honor your father and mother. Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c]

20 “I’ve obeyed all these commandments,” the young man replied. “What else must I do?”

21 Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

22 But when the young man heard this, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 24 I’ll say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”

The late Kenneth Wapnick, a clinical psychologist and foremost teacher of  A Course in Miracles, wrote a wonderful book ‘ Forgiveness and Jesus ‘ in 1998. His book expounded on the theory that what we call ‘ The Devil ‘ is in reality NOT a being or spirit but the mechanism of our Ego, whenever we allow it to do and think evil. Wapnick expressed his feeling that we are all here in this 3rd dimension and  given ‘ free will ‘ by our creator.

We ALL have, according to his theory, the choice to live in the light of goodness and truth, or that of our ‘ lower, carnal selves, which can be defined as ‘ evil’. Regardless of one’s beliefs in the spiritual or denial of anything of that sort, Wapnick’s understanding of the power of the ego, or ‘ Devil ‘ as many call it, is real. Thus, the ‘ evil ones ‘ follow the path of their ego, or carnal self, and …..

Now here is the kicker. There are always but a few of truly, as defined earlier, evil people compared to the overwhelming majority of the populace in any given area of the world. Yet, what about those of the remaining perhaps ‘ Silent Majority’ who know that evil or wicked deeds are being done and do not really care?

You have heard it before: ” If it doesn’t affect me or my family, or my business, I really am not concerned.” Just like the wealthy out there who have great health and dental coverage, how many of them drop some sweat thinking about their fellow citizens’ healthcare?

The ‘ We are at war ‘ analogy is even better. As long as our 20 something young Americans do not have to serve in the military, many lose any sense of caring about what in the hell is going on overseas! As many should know, during the ( so called ) Vietnam War era, especially as the mood of our populace turned against our involvement, 20 something and even 30 something young men were very keen to keep abreast of things… especially if they had a low draft number.

As far as our new era of ‘ Perpetual War’ this writer has friends who invest in the stock market. Many were and are quite satisfied with our Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan because they had stocks that went up because of them. They will shed crocodile tears for the dead US soldiers and none at all for the ‘ ten times more dead’ A-rabs. Is that evil? Maybe a little bit would you say?

The old adage ( I’m lying. I just made it up ) of ” If you believe there is a devil, then you must believe there is a God too.”

PA Farruggio

May 2018

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research ,Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, 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] )

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on “No Sympathy for the Devils”, A Play on Words from the Rolling Stones

Donald Trump: Is He Too Dangerous to be Head of State?

May 29th, 2018 by Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

This article was first published by Global Research in March 2018

“We [the United States] spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. … Obviously, it was a mistake… George W. Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East…

—They [President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney] lied… They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”  Donald Trump (1946- ), during a CBS News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016.

 “Mental impairment and criminal-mindedness are not mutually exclusive; not only can they happen at the same time, when combined, these two characteristics become particularly dangerous.” Bandy X Lee (1970- ), an internationally recognized psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine and editor of the book ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,’ 2017.

An autocrat in the making is typically an elected outsider who disdains norms, questions the legitimacy of political foes, tolerates violence, and shows a willingness to curtail the free press. Steven Levitsky (1968- ) and Daniel Ziblatt (1972- ), (in their book How Democracies Die, 2018, 312 p.)

…An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President, (1797-1801), (in ‘The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections’, 2003)

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it…

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality…” George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and social critic, (in his book ‘1984’, 1949, chap. 2)

Introduction

US President Donald Trump (1946-), as a politician, has succeeded in attracting voters who are dissatisfied or partially dissatisfied with their economic or social situation, especially working class white voters without college degrees. Income inequality and wealth inequality is growing in the United States, and the balance leans toward the winners, even though the losers are more numerous and have not been compensated through job training or social services. In other words, many Americans are disillusioned regarding their chance of living the American dream and about the way the system and public policies disadvantage them. Trump attracts also single-issue voters.

All this creates a fertile ground for a populist politician. This has happened elsewhere and it is now a political reality in the United States. It is also normal that Donald Trump is strongly opposed by various establishments and attacked by those to whom his populism is repugnant.

But beyond the purely personal considerations people have to support or oppose him, what are the characteristics of this neophyte in politics that many, and not only in the United States, consider scary?

For example, some observers have drawn a parallel between the current occupant of the White House and the decadent emperor Caligula (12-41 CE) of Ancient Rome. Caligula was autocratic, unpredictable, unhinged and a self-conscious populist who lacked self-restraint. He was a sociopath who enjoyed hurting and humiliating people. Moreover, he treated politics like a show. He indulged in pornography and depravity. He was disruptive and contemptuous of existing institutions, and he was a warmonger who courted the military.

A biographer in the know has also linked Trump’s outrageous behavior, as a politician, to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the subject of his book ‘Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil’, 1998. Indeed, author Ron Rosenbaum (1946- ) explains how a constant attack on the media and the courts by Trump was also a tactic used by Hitler to gain power, in Germany. History has a way of repeating itself, and no one should think that disastrous past experiences cannot be repeated.

Whether all this is the case or not, what can be safely said is that never in its entire history has the United States faced a president in the White House of the sort that Mr. Trump represents. Persons closed to him have warmed us: Donald Trump is “deeply mentally ill” and “no longer connected to reality” and what is more, he is prone to loose his temper and act in anger, sometimes in pure madness. These are, we will all agree, very dangerous character traits for any U.S. President, if they are true.

It has been observed that the White House under Trump’s direction is often in turmoil, in disarray and sometimes, in complete chaos, and that the American president is mentally unstable and that he is prone to act impulsively, like an unmoored loose cannon, in most anything he does. It is said that Trump often acts in a bluffing and vengeful way, firing people right and left for any motive, sometimes in a most nefarious way. That should certainly be another reason for alarm and consternation.

It may be worth recalling here what the former Director of the CIA under Barack Obama, John Brennan (1955-), said, referring to Donald Trump and his mean dismissal of the FBI’s No. 2, Andrew McCabe (1968-), Friday night, March 16, 2018, a few hours before the latter was to become eligible for a pension:

 “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.”

Recently, for example, he was reported to want to launch an international trade war for the childish reason that he did not want to be “laughed at”. This is unsettling, because all this is based on faulty economic thinking and wrong facts. A protectionist U.S. President can do great harm to the world economy. —Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn had enough of that craziness, and he resigned. Trump only wants “sycophants” around him.

In the coming months, I fear that American consumers and the world stock markets will give their own assessment of Trump’s economic folly, and it won’t be pretty.

Consequently, many people have concluded that the current occupant of the White House is not mature enough and not competent enough to be president of the United States. In his book, ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’, author Michael Wolff writes that “Trump lived… as a real-life fictional character”, that he is a man detached and mostly cut off from reality, being comfortable in relying on so-called false and subjective “alternative facts”. For such a person, only appearances matter, not reality.

People who know him well have labeled him unpredictable and inconsistent. Trump is the flip-flopper par excellence. Indeed, Trump’s intellectual inconsistency is beyond comprehension. He can adopt, almost simultaneously, two opposite positions without flinching… and without apology.

And, as if this is not enough, Donald Trump is also besieged by huge conflicts of interest, not the least is a level of nepotism not seen in the White House in modern times.

Let us try to get a more complete picture of the political situation in the United States:

1. The American electoral system favors Republicans

First of all, let us say that it is one of the peculiarities of the American democratic system that it happens quite often that the winning candidate in a presidential election becomes president while receiving fewer votes than the losing candidate. It sometimes happens that the losing candidate receives even a majority of votes, but is still not elected. This happened in the 1876 election.

In fact, American presidential elections are not necessarily decided by the popular vote. According to the rules of the Electoral College, a few hundred “grand electors”, chosen in each of the 50 states, are the ones who elect the U.S. President.

Such a system tends to advantage the Republican candidates and it disadvantages the Democratic candidates, because it gives less weight to the votes in the most populated states than to those cast in the less populated states.

For example, according to the official results of the 2016 election, the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received 48.5% of the popular votes (65,953,516 votes) but received the support of only 232 “grand electors” out of a total of 538, or 45.12% of these. However, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump only collected 46.09% of the national votes (62,984 825 votes), but received 306 or 56.9% of the “grand electors” votes. Consequently, it was Donald Trump who became U.S. president and not Hillary Clinton.

Note that in 2000, Republican candidate George W. Bush also received half a million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Al Gore, but the Electoral College system resulted in electing George W. Bush president. — In 1876 and in 1888, similar results ensued, when a Republican candidate was elected U.S. President, while receiving fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. — It can be said that the system of the American Electoral College tends to favor Republican candidates, who are generally more conservative.

2. Trump is egocentric and authoritarian

The current sitting American president, Donald Trump, does not seem to have deep-seated personal principles. He seems to be egocentric and he is always on the lookout to profit personally from any event: if someone or something gives him pleasure, prestige or money, he is all for it. No American president before him has dared to express openly his feelings or his insults of others, and even state his policies, on a social medium like Twitter, so much so that Donald Trump has been called the “toddler-in-chief”.

That is why Donald Trump is not your normal American president, even for the United States where money plays a larger role than elsewhere in electing public officials. Being a real estate oligarch who owns hotels and casinos, among other properties, he has brought to the White House the authoritarian and plutocratic ethics found in some wheeler-dealer corners of that industry, an ethics of ruthlessness.

Accustomed to running his real estate empire by himself, he was badly prepared to lead a democratic government, which is, by definition, decentralized. However, his authoritarian approach seems to appeal to his supporters. In fact, Trump acts as if he were the representative of rednecks in the White House.

In a new book, with the ominous title of “How Democracies Die”, two political scientists (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University) compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

  1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules;
  2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents;
  3. He or she tolerates violence;
  4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media. According to the authors, “a politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern.” Unfortunately, in their eyes, “Donald Trump meets them all!

Regarding violence, Trump did not hesitate to name a torturer to lead the C.I.A. Torture is an immoral practice that he has personally espoused in the past.

Basically, Donald Trump is an unscrupulous demagogue, being both populist and authoritarian, of the type that has become dictator in other countries. This should be a source of preoccupation because for some time now, American presidents have been stretching the law to govern through executing edicts and to keep the United States on a permanent war footing. Donald Trump has expanded that practice and brought it to a new level. In his first year in office, indeed, Trump has issued no less than 58 executive orders and some 30 so-called “proclamations”, without any input from Congress.

Some business leaders can be expected to line up behind the Trump administration, especially if they expect to draw financial benefits from it, when they are at the receiving end of some money largesse (such as huge tax breaks financed with more public debt). The same applies to ambitious politicians who are willing to dance with the devil, if this can advance their career. However, it is another matter when the Trump White House extends its authoritarian cult of personality to American career civil servants, supposedly sworn in to work for the nation and uphold the Constitution, not to hold allegiance to the person temporarily sitting in the White House.

Also, it could be considered odd when Donald Trump applauds himself, but when he requests, in a dictator-like way, to be applauded when he speaks, whether he tells the truth or not, and pretends that it is even ‘un-American’ not to applaud him, this should raise alarm.

It is not at all surprising that there is a widespread distaste in the United States for Trump’s personality and for his obnoxious character. A majority of Americans who cherish their democracy simply cannot stand him. He is an embarrassment even for his supporters.

3. Trump acts and speaks like a sociopath who enjoys making other people miserable 

It would be comical if it were not potentially so tragic. Trump is in a permanent state of self-admiration, constantly relying on exaggerations, on overstatements and on illogical statements. No previous American president could have matched him as an adept of self-congratulation. He shows himself as a self-aggrandizing individual. He seems to be suffering from an advanced case of megalomania. In fact, Trump is an expert in erroneously declaring himself an expert in about everything. And, he does not hesitate to qualify himself a “genius”!

Trump has also confessed that he likes to “make the life of people miserable”, i.e. the life of journalists, authors, competitors and anyone who opposes him. An example, among hundreds if not thousands of frivolous and gagging lawsuits, is his meritless but expensive litigations, in time and money, against author Timothy O’Brien for writing the book “TrumpNation”. After his suit was dismissed in court, because it was a direct attack on the First Amendment, Trump stated to the Washington Post, “I did it to make O’Brien’s life miserable, which I am happy about.” Such is the modus operandi of a very sadistic and malicious person who does not hesitate to attack the free press and the right to free speech in a democracy.

4. Trump is a compulsive liar 

Numerous public allegations have also made the public aware that Trump is obsessed with sex and sex, sex, and sex again. He is also an alleged sex harasser who continually disparages women.

On Tuesday March 20, former Vice-President Joe Biden (1942- ) did not mince his words, while speaking at an anti-sexual assault rally, telling students at the University of Miami what he thought of Donald Trump and the way the latter talks about women:

If we were in high school, I’d take him [Donald Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him”, for disrespecting women.

It is well known now that Donald Trump is a pathological liar who seems to fear the truth like the pest. That is because Donald Trump is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. That is probably the main reason Trump’s lawyers are adamant in not wanting their client to testify alone and under oath, in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation about his alleged electoral collusion with Russia.

Publicly, Trump pretends to be willing to be questioned under oath by special counsel Robert Mueller, declaring: “I’m looking forward to it, actually”; “I would do it under oath.” This could be another example of a ‘good cop-bad cop’ charade by Trump, because he would never accept to be interviewed alone, without his lawyers, under oath, and he would likely blame his lawyers for another flip-flop of his own.

This is also the reason why Trump has held only one formal press conference since taking office—unlike its predecessors, who held one each month—in order to avoid being questioned by experienced journalists. He prefers partisan political rallies where no one can contradict him or steal his show.

5. Trump is a dangerous man to have control over nuclear arms

Even if it were possible to disprove half of what has been written about Trump’s eccentricities, his laughable theatrics, his twisted logic, and his lies, Donald Trump would still be a monster of a human being. We will never repeat often enough that he is a dangerous person to hold power, especially in a country like the United States, which is loaded with nuclear arms. Trump is indeed an unstable and irresponsible person; he is a person with poor judgment, besides being erratic, reckless and trigger-happy. He also employs constantly a bellicose tone in his relations with foreign leaders. This is a very bad combination for a head of state in today’s complex world.

And to add to that image, Trump would like to return to a bygone era, when well-known totalitarian leaders favored big shows of force. Trump made it known to “his generals” that he wants a large-scale, multi million dollar “beautiful” and pompous military parade, in his honor, in Washington D.C., on Veterans Day, with thousands of soldiers in tight formation, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, with planes and helicopters buzzing by the Washington Monument and with 70-ton Abrams tanks and Patriot missiles systems rolling down before the President’s stand. Trump seems to have had this idea after attending the French military deployment of July 14th, last summer. It’s a bit as if a childish Trump had seen a toy in the neighbor’s yard and said, “I want one too!

Such a powwow show would gratify Trump’s infatuation with military toys he would like to play with. It would be quite an irony if the United States, which fought fascist Germany during World War II, itself adopted fascist trappings, three quarters of a century later.

Regarding nuclear arms, Tom Collina, policy director of the anti-nuclear Ploughshares Fund, has noted that a recent poll indicates that 60 percent of Americans do not trust Trump with nuclear weapons. Consequently, he concluded: “the public is right to distrust Trump with nuclear weapons, and we all need to speak up and oppose these new, dangerous policies.” — I totally agree.

Trump has not only sociopathic tendencies, being insensitive and having no empathy for anybody else but himself; he could also be considered a would-be genocidal psychopath when he talks freely saying this is the “calm before the storm”, that it (North Korea) “will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before”, even going as far as threatening to “totally destroy North Korea”, a country of more than 25 million people! This is even more scandalous, considering that Donald Trump uttered that insane threat during a speech at the United Nations, an organization specifically created to avoid war.

Therefore, one cannot completely exclude some foul acts of savagery coming from the Trump administration in the coming months and years. The current disorganization in the Trump White House could lead to inhuman disasters, considering the instability of Trump’s character and the lack of moral fortitude and vision on the part of the current Republican leadership in both the House and the U.S. Senate.

6. Trump can be expected to rely on “wag the dog” tricks to get out of trouble

It is indeed common practice for some American presidents to “wag the dog”, i.e. distract from domestic or personal domestic problems by provoking some conflicts abroad. On this score, since Trump’s domestic problems are presently piling up, with multiple lawsuits launched by women with whom he had sexual affairs in the past, with serious allegations that foreign governments were involved in his election, and with the looming Special Prosecutor’s report possibly raising an accusation of obstruction of justice against him, he could be expected to want to distract attention from his problems and to make dangerous, possibly catastrophic, policy decisions. Indeed, it is a modus operandi for him to attempt to deflect attention from his personal problems by creating problems elsewhere.

Note that Donald Trump is the first person to be elected president of the United States without any political or military experience. Recently, he has surrounded himself with sycophants who are immoral torturers and belligerent advocates of regime change in other countries. The summum of cynicism on his part—considering that he campaigned by repeating constantly that the Bush-Cheney 2003 war of aggression against Iraq was a disaster and a dumb decision—occurred on Thursday March 22, when he named one of the very architects of the Iraq War, in the person of the extremely bellicose John Bolton, as his national security adviser. I think the United States of America has a big problem in having such a person as its president.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind what I wrote in the introduction and the rational motives that motivate his supporters to be behind him, it nevertheless remains that Donald Trump is an emperor with no clothes, and a reliance on cognitive dissonance on the part of his partisans cannot hide that simple fact.

Indeed, when all things are said and considered, it is impossible not to conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump. Many experts and observers have warned the world that his state of mind is a danger to public safety. The Republicans, in particular, who happen to control the U.S. Congress, have a great responsibility to reflect on and to act upon that information before some irreparable damage is done. If Trump were to do something catastrophic in the coming weeks or months, economically or militarily, those Republicans in Congress will have to share personal and collective responsibility in the disaster.

More than one year ago, because of Trump’s lack of seriousness and preparation, I warned that he was going to be “a threat to American democracy and an agent of chaos in the world”. Unfortunately, every day seems to bring forth new proofs of that assessment.

Therefore, as time goes on, the case for Trump’s impeachment is going to get stronger and stronger. His removal from office will become increasingly urgent and increasingly compelling. It’s a safe bet that credible steps for his impeachment as U.S. President will be taken rapidly, if the Democratic Party regains control of the House of Representatives during this fall election—and possibly faster, if enough Republicans see the light before then.

*

International economist Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” and of “The New American Empire”.  

Rodrigue Tremblay is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Dr. Tremblay’s site:

http://www.thenewamericanempire.com.

His multi-language international blog at:

http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.htm.

Who Rules America?

May 29th, 2018 by Prof. James Petras

This incisive article by Prof James Petras was first published by Global Research in September 2017

In the last few months, several competing political, economic and military sectors – linked to distinct ideological and ethnic groups – have clearly emerged at the centers of power.

We can identify some of the key competing and interlocking directorates of the power elite:

1. Free marketers, with the ubiquitous presence of the ‘Israel First’ crowd.

2. National capitalists, linked to rightwing ideologues.

3. Generals, linked to the national security and the Pentagon apparatus, as well as defense industry.

4. Business elites, linked to global capital.

This essay attempts to define the power wielders and evaluate their range of power and its impact.

The Economic Power Elite: Israel-Firsters and Wall Street CEO’s

‘Israel Firsters’ dominate the top economic and political positions within the Trump regime and, interestingly, are among the Administration’s most vociferous opponents. These include: the Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, as well as her Vice-Chair, Stanley Fischer, an Israeli citizen and former (sic) Governor of the Bank of Israel.

Jared Kushner, (image right) President Trump’s son-in-law and an Orthodox Jew, acts as his top adviser on Middle East Affairs. Kushner, a New Jersey real estate mogul, set himself up as the archenemy of the economic nationalists in the Trump inner circle. He supports every Israeli power and land grab in the Middle East and works closely with David Friedman, US Ambassador to Israel (and fanatical supporter of the illegal Jewish settlements) and Jason Greenblatt, Special Representative for International negotiations. With three Israel-Firsters determining Middle East policy, there is not even a fig leaf of balance.

The Treasury Secretary is Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who leads the neo-liberal free market wing of the Wall Street sector within the Trump regime. Gary Cohn, a longtime Wall Street influential, heads the National Economic Council. They form the core business advisers and lead the neo-liberal anti-nationalist Trump coalition committed to undermining economic nationalist policies.

An influential voice in the Attorney General’s office is Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller the chief investigator, which led to the removal of nationalists from the Trump Administration.

The fairy godfather of the anti-nationalist Mnuchin-Cohn team is Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sach’s Chairman. The ‘Three Israel First bankerteers’ are spearheading the fight to deregulate the banking sector, which had ravaged the economy, leading to the 2008 collapse and foreclosure of millions of American homeowners and businesses.

The ‘Israel-First’ free market elite is spread across the entire ruling political spectrum, including ranking Democrats in Congress, led by Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer and the Democratic Head of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. The Democratic Party Israel Firsters have allied with their free market brethren in pushing for investigations and mass media campaigns against Trump’s economic nationalist supporters and their eventual purge from the administration.

The Military Power Elite: The Generals

The military power elite has successfully taken over from the elected president in major decision-making. Where once the war powers rested with the President and the Congress, today a collection of fanatical militarists make and execute military policy, decide war zones and push for greater militarization of domestic policing. Trump has turned crucial decisions over to those he fondly calls ‘my Generals’ as he continues to dodge accusations of corruption and racism.

Trump appointed Four-Star General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis (retired USMC) – a general who led the war in Afghanistan and Iraq – as Secretary of Defense. Mattis (whose military ‘glories’ included bombing a large wedding party in Iraq) is leading the campaign to escalate US military intervention in Afghanistan – a war and occupation that Trump had openly condemned during his campaign. As Defense Secretary, General ‘Mad Dog’ pushed the under-enthusiastic Trump to announce an increase in US ground troops and air attacks throughout Afghanistan. True to his much-publicized nom-de-guerre, the general is a rabid advocate for a nuclear attack against North Korea.

Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster (an active duty Three Star General and long time proponent of expanding the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan) became National Security Adviser after the purge of Trump’s ally Lt. General Michael Flynn, who opposed the campaign of confrontation and sanctions against Russia and China. McMaster has been instrumental in removing ‘nationalists’ from Trumps administration and joins General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis in pushing for a greater build-up of US troops in Afghanistan.

Lt. General John Kelly (Retired USMC), another Iraq war veteran and Middle East regime change enthusiast, was appointed White House Chief of Staff after the ouster of Reince Priebus.

The Administration’s Troika of three generals share with the neoliberal Israel First Senior Advisors to Trump, Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner, a deep hostility toward Iran and fully endorse Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that the 2015 Nuclear Accord with Tehran be scrapped.

Trump’s military directorate guarantees that spending for overseas wars will not be affected by budget cuts, recessions or even national disasters.

The ‘Generals’, the Israel First free marketers and the Democratic Party elite lead the fight against the economic nationalists and have succeeded in ensuring that Obama Era military and economic empire building would remain in place and even expand.

The Economic Nationalist Elite

The leading strategist and ideologue of Trump’s economic nationalist allies in the White House was Steve Bannon. He had been chief political architect and Trump adviser during the electoral campaign. Bannon devised an election campaign favoring domestic manufacturers and American workers against the Wall Street and multinational corporate free marketers. He developed Trump’s attack on the global trade agreements, which had led to the export of capital and the devastation of US manufacturing labor.

Equally significant, Bannon crafted Trumps early public opposition to the generals’ 15-year trillion-dollar intervention in Afghanistan and the even more costly series of wars in the Middle East favored by the Israel-Firsters, including the ongoing proxy-mercenary war to overthrow the secular nationalist government of Syria.

Within 8 month of Trump’s administration, the combined forces of the free market economic and military elite, the Democratic Party leaders, overt militarists in the Republican Party and their allies in the mass media succeeded in purging Bannon – and marginalized the mass support base for his ‘America First’ economic nationalist and anti-‘regime change’ agenda.

The anti-Trump ‘alliance’ will now target the remaining few economic nationalists in the administration. These include: the CIA Director Mike Pompeo, (right) who favors protectionism by weakening the Asian and NAFTA trade agreements and Peter Navarro, Chairman of the White House Trade Council. Pompeo and Navarro face strong opposition from the ascendant neoliberal Zionist troika now dominating the Trump regime.

In addition, there is Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, a billionaire and former director of Rothschild Inc., who allied with Bannon in threatening import quotas to address the massive US trade deficit with China and the European Union.

Another Bannon ally is US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer a former military and intelligence analyst with ties to the newsletter Breitbart. He is a strong opponent of the neoliberal, globalizers in and out of the Trump regime.

‘Senior Adviser’ and Trump speechwriter, Stephen Miller actively promotes the travel ban on Muslims and stricter restrictions on immigration. Miller represents the Bannon wing of Trump’s zealously pro-Israel cohort.

Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s Deputy Assistant in military and intelligence affairs, was more an ideologue than analyst, who wrote for Breitbart and rode to office on Bannon’s coat tails. Right after removing Bannon, the ‘Generals’ purged Gorka in early August on accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Whoever remains among Trump’s economic nationalists are significantly handicapped by the loss of Steve Bannon who had provided leadership and direction. However, most have social and economic backgrounds, which also link them to the military power elite on some issues and with the pro-Israel free marketers on others. However, their core beliefs had been shaped and defined by Bannon.

The Business Power Elite

Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson, (left) Trump’s Secretary of State and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Energy Secretary lead the business elite. Meanwhile, the business elite associated with US manufacturing and industry have little direct influence on domestic or foreign policy. While they follow the Wall Street free marketers on domestic policy, they are subordinated to the military elite on foreign policy and are not allied with Steve Bannon’s ideological core.

Trump’s business elite, which has no link to the economic nationalists in the Trump regime, provides a friendlier face to overseas economic allies and adversaries.

Analysis and Conclusion

The power elite cuts across party affiliations, branches of government and economic strategies. It is not restricted to either political party, Republican or Democratic. It includes free marketers, some economic nationalists, Wall Street power brokers and militarists. All compete and fight for power, wealth and dominance within this administration. The correlation of forces is volatile, changing rapidly in short periods of time – reflecting the lack of cohesion and coherence in the Trump regime.

Never has the US power elite been subject to such monumental changes in composition and direction during the first year of a new regime.

During the Obama Presidency, Wall Street and the Pentagon comfortably shared power with Silicon Valley billionaires and the mass media elite. They were united in pursuing an imperial ‘globalist’ strategy, emphasizing multiple theaters of war and multilateral free trade treaties, which was in the process of reducing millions of American workers to permanent helotry.

With the inauguration of President Trump, this power elite faced challenges and the emergence of a new strategic configuration, which sought drastic changes in US political economic and military policy.

The architect of the Trump’s campaign and strategy, Steve Bannon, sought to displace the global economic and military elite with his alliance of economic nationalists, manufacturing workers and protectionist business elites. Bannon pushed for a major break from Obama’s policy of multiple permanent wars to expanding the domestic market. He proposed troop withdrawal and the end of US military operations in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, while increasing a combination of economic, political and military pressure on China. He sought to end sanctions and confrontation against Moscow and fashion economic ties between the giant energy producers in the US and Russia.

While Bannon was initially the chief strategist in the White House, he quickly found himself faced with powerful rivals inside the regime, and ardent opponents among Democratic and Republican globalists and especially from the Zionist – neoliberals who systematically maneuvered to win strategic economic and policy positions within the regime. Instead of being a coherent platform from which to formulate a new radical economic strategy, the Trump Administration was turned into a chaotic and vicious ‘terrain for struggle’. The Bannon’s economic strategy barely got off the ground.

The mass media and operatives within the state apparatus, linked to Obama’s permanent war strategy, first attacked Trump’s proposed economic reconciliation with Russia. To undermine any ‘de-escalation’, they fabricated the Russian spy and election manipulation conspiracy. Their first successful shots were fired at Lt. General Michael Flynn, Bannon’s ally and key proponent for reversing the Obama/Clinton policy of military confrontation with Russia. Flynn was quickly destroyed and openly threatened with prosecution as a ‘Russian agent’ in whipped-up hysteria that resembled the heydays of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Key economic posts in the Trump regime were split between the Israel-Firster neoliberals and the economic nationalists. The ‘Deal Maker’ President Trump attempted to harness Wall Street-affiliated neoliberal Zionists to the economic nationalists, linked to Trump’s working class electoral base, in formulating new trade relations with the EU and China, which would favor US manufacturers. Given the irreconcilable differences between these forces, Trump’s naïve ‘deal’ weakened Bannon, undermined his leadership and wrecked his nationalist economic strategy.

While Bannon had secured several important economic appointees, the Zionist neoliberals undercut their authority. The Fischer-Mnuchin-Cohn cohort successfully set a competing agenda.

The entire Congressional elite from both parties united to paralyze the TrumpBannon agenda. The giant corporate mass media served as a hysterical and rumor-laden megaphone for zealous Congressional and FBI investigators magnifying every nuance of Trump’s US Russia relations in search of conspiracy. The combined state-Congressional and Media apparatus overwhelmed the unorganized and unprepared mass base of Bannon electoral coalition which had elected Trump.

Thoroughly defeated, the toothless President Trump retreated in desperate search for a new power configuration, turning his day-to-day operations over to ‘his generals’. The elected civilian President of the United States embraced his generals’ pursuit of a new military-globalist alliance and escalation of military threats foremost against North Korea, but including Russia and China. Afghanistan was immediately targeted for an expanded intervention.

Trump effectively replaced Bannon’s economic nationalist strategy with a revival Obama’s multi-war military approach.

The Trump regime re-launched the US attacks on Afghanistan and Syria – exceeding Obama’s use of drone attacks on suspected Muslim militants. He intensified sanctions against Russia and Iran, embraced Saudi Arabia’s war against the people of Yemen and turned the entire Middle East policy over to his ultra-Zionist Political Advisor (Real Estate mogul and son-in-law) Jared Kushner and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

Trump’s retreat turned into a grotesque rout. The Generals embraced the neoliberal Zionists in Treasury and the Congressional global militarists. Communication Directory Anthony Scaramucci was fired. Trump’s Chief of Staff General Joe Kelly purged Steve Bannon. Sebastian Gorka was kicked out.

The eight months of internal struggle between the economic nationalists and the neoliberals has ended: The Zionist-globalist alliance with Trump’s Generals now dominate the Power Elite.

Trump is desperate to adapt to the new configuration, allied to his own Congressional adversaries and the rabidly anti-Trump mass media.

Having all but decimated Trump’s economic nationalists and their program, the Power Elite then mounted a series of media-magnified events centering around a local punch-out in Charlottesville, Virginia between ‘white supremacists’ and ‘anti-fascists’. After the confrontation led to death and injury, the media used Trump’s inept attempt to blame both ‘baseball bat’-wielding sides, as proof of the President’s links to neo-Nazis and the KKK. Neoliberal and Zionists, within the Trump administration and his business councils, all joined in the attack on the President, denouncing his failure to immediately and unilaterally blame rightwing extremists for the mayhem.

Trump is turning to sectors of the business and Congressional elite in a desperate attempt to hold onto waning support via promises to enact massive tax cuts and deregulate the entire private sector.

The decisive issue was no longer over one policy or another or even strategy.

Trump had already lost on all accounts. The ‘final solution’ to the problem of the election of Donald Trump is moving foreword step-by-step – his impeachment and possible arrest by any and all means.

What the rise and destruction of economic nationalism in the ‘person’ of Donald Trump tells us is that the American political system cannot tolerate any capitalist reforms that might threaten the imperial globalist power elite.

Writers and activists used to think that only democratically elected socialist regimes would be the target of systematic coup d’état. Today the political boundaries are far more restrictive. To call for ‘economic nationalism’, completely within the capitalist system, and seek reciprocal trade agreements is to invite savage political attacks, trumped up conspiracies and internal military take-overs ending in ‘regime change’.

The global-militarist elite purge of economic nationalists and anti-militarists was supported by the entire US left with a few notable exceptions. For the first time in history the left became an organizational weapon of the pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-Zionist Right in the campaign to oust President Trump. Local movements and leaders, notwithstanding, trade union functionaries, civil rights and immigration politicians, liberals and social democrats have joined in the fight for restoring the worst of all worlds: the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton policy of permanent multiple wars, escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela and Trump’s deregulation of the US economy and massive tax-cuts for big business.

We have gone a long-way backwards: from elections to purges and from peace agreements to police state investigations. Today’s economic nationalists are labeled‘fascists’; and displaced workers are ‘the deplorables’!

Americans have a lot to learn and unlearn. Our strategic advantage may reside in the fact that political life in the United States cannot get worse – we really have touched bottom and (barring a nuclear war) we can only look up.

Prof James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Featured image is from The Unz Review.

For decades Palestinians have lived on the edge of annihilation, their homeland steadily annexed until just a slither of the original remains. It’s a story that just won’t go away, even for those thousands of miles away, who try to cover their ears and eyes from the shame which has befallen the ruthless oppressor of this now tiny peninsular of land and its battle weary people.

In 1975, I worked on a kibbutz called Rosh Hanikra, in Northern Israel. It’s main income was derived from intensive commercial avocado pear production. There were maybe four hundred inhabitants. The social experiment known as kibbutziem grew up after World War Two, when thousands of European Jews,who had survived Hitler’s pogroms, moved to Israel, with the intent of making it their new home.

The kibbutziem movement was developed as a series of agricultural land-based settlements, often established on very poor land which was gradually worked into productivity. At Rosh Hanikra we all ate together in a large dining hall and slept in small houses dotted around the central area. No one ‘owned’ the land or homes, the kibbutz was established as a collective, and those who remained part of the movement for the longest acquired certain privilidges.

That is how it worked, and I was there as a volunteer for a brief period, my interest being directly connected to an exploration of alternative models of land settlement, with a view to the future of the UK country estate I had inherited on the death of my father some years earlier.

One day I left the kibbutz in order to visit a wise elder in Tel Aviv. In the course of our conversations about the land settlements, he told me something of great interest. He said that the word Israel, in the original Hebrew, means ‘to strive with God’ and that this has been covered-up by the extreme right wing Zionist element, who insist that Israel is the name of the country that had been Palestine up until the 1918 Balfour Declaration created the ‘two state’ position that – on paper – remains the reality today.

So perhaps Israel, I thought to myself, was never meant to be ‘a place’ at all, more a way of life – a commitment to ‘work with God’. And if so, what did this mean in the light of the claim that this geographical area of land at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean – is the ‘homeland’ of the Jewish tribes?

This explanation by the wise elder stuck with me; it presented a whole new understanding of – and possibly for – the resolution of the seemingly intractable Palestine/ Israel crisis.

If, by definition, the sons and daughters of Israel have mistaken a ‘material place’ for a ‘spiritual mission’ this would indeed be a profoundly significant misunderstanding. One that, should it be admitted to, could change the course of history.

Three weeks ago I read this headline to a story written by the seasoned journalist Robert Fisk foreign correspondent of The Independent: “How long after the Gaza massacre are we going to continue pretending that the Palestinians are non-people?”

Fisk, who belongs to that rare community of journalists who seek to communicate the truth, exposes the horror of the Gaza front-line massacre of Palestinians who got too close to the security fence that separates Gaza from the Israel border. Sixty men, women – and one child – shot dead in just one day and two thousand four hundred wounded. Not one Israeli suffered even a wound, as Palestinian youths threw stones and launched burning kites against live rounds of ammunition; each round targeted to kill.

As this carnage raged on the Gaza border, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was opening the new American Embassy in Jerusalem, amidst a smartly dressed entourage of Zionist evangelicals. Pronouncer’s of the view that this event was a portent and precursor of the great apocalypse and subsequent return of the Saviour. A time when Jews will return to the ‘homeland’, and those who fail to convert to Zionism will meet a fiery fate in the underworld.

Those who gathered inside the new US Embassy in Jerusalem, believe that any amount of cold blooded murders are worth it, in order for Jerusalem to be recognised as the Jewish capital of Israel, to the complete exclusion of Palestinian claims to the same end.

“It’s a great day for peace” declared Benjamin Netanyahu, as unarmed Palestinians were simultaneously being picked-off by the Israeli military on the Gaza border. And Donald Trump no doubt echoed this view, as it is ever more apparent that he walks in Netanyahu’s shoes in every way, other than literally.

It’s been seventy years now that Palestinians have been protesting their dispossession at the hands of those who refused to uphold the land resource split agreed in the Balfour Declaration; itself a compromised piece of legislation. Many Palestinians fled across the border to Lebanon during the vicious pogroms that flared-up in the post World War Two resettlement period. Some no doubt joined Hamas, which was formed to try and protect village communities against the ceaseless land grabs perpetuated by Israeli hard liners.

I remember the occasional missile flying over Rosh Hanikra kibbutz back in 1975, from the Lebanese side of the border – and how no one paid much attention – as any damage done on the Israeli side would be paid back five fold on the Lebanese side. It has been a desperately one sided struggle from the outset. Not surprisingly, when we know that the US Senate approves copious funds to bolster the military cause of the ‘One Israel’ fanatics.

After my work experience on the kibbutz, I journeyed to Jerusalem and then down into Arab Jordan. I remember gaining the distinct impression about the two cultures as, I travelled. The Israelis, being composed mostly of resettled Europeans and Americans, were culturally Westernised and mostly intellectual by disposition. Whereas the Jordanian Arabs, indigenous natives of the Middle East, were openly warm and naturally inclined to expressing emotion, by disposition.

My overriding impression was that the two cultures represent two parts of one whole; both having characteristics that – if put together – would be complementary and form a positive sense of balance. I believe that such a positive resolution would indeed have been the likely outcome if the hard-line Zionist faction had not gained a predominant position of control in Israeli politics from an early point in the history of the Country.

We are forced back into the observation that the Rothschild, Rockefeller, et al dynasties, with their strong affiliation to The Project for the New American Century, The Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers, have maintained an as yet unbroken influence on the evolution of Israeli politics. Successfully establishing the old ‘divide and conquer’ technique to ensure that the tunnel vision hard-liners remain in the top seats of power.

This inflames the whole Middle East, as the game plan of this cabal has always been to destroy the indigenous sense of unity of this region and replace it with a form of military dictatorship, funded and directed by the advocates of a totalitarian New World Order, in which the ‘elite-by-blood-line’ remain permanently in the driving seat. A direct extension of the Third Reich, with its openly stated genocidal and eugenics ambitions.

The demographic position of Israel gives it important geopolitical influence over international trade routes using the Suez Canal, as well as to surrounding countries rich in natural resources, especially oil. Keeping the Country firmly locked into serving as an outpost for these, as well as closely related Western hegemonic interests, plays a significant role in the choice of Israel’s leadership, and from where the financial support for this leadership comes.

As the Middle East crisis continues to be fanned by such die-hard despots, people are waking-up and beginning to see through the deception. The affect this is having is to trigger a clamp-down on any criticism of the Zionist cause. For it has suddenly become a weaponized subject, for which even the fundamental right to ‘freedom of speech’ must apparently be curtailed.

We have already witnessed a savage attack on the UK Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn, for supposedly harbouring anti-semitic sympathies; but in actuality, it is much more likely that certain individuals were simply telling some of the same truths as I attempt to convey in this article. The instigators of this attack were the British Association of Jews and Friends of Israel. The most astonishing aspect of it was a letter sent to Corbyn co signed by the leaders of these organisations, which demanded that he take action to weed-out the supposedly anti-semite trouble makers from his party.

Corbyn was informed that he must supply proof of his complying with this demand within a month, and only after considering this evidence would they decide whether or not to black list his party.

Here we witness all the same symptoms of authoritarian despotism that are behind Netanyahu’s attempts to crush the Palestinian cause and the continued resistance which it so courageously maintains. Aside from the absurdly biased challenge on the British Labour Party, the instigators antagonistically assume the moral high ground that gives them the right to dictate the terms.

Donald Trump’s deliberately provocative decision to move the US Embassy out of Tel Aviv and into Jerusalem, is an action carried out in order to cement continued far right support for Netanyahu’s government and its policy of eradicating any and all opposition to a ‘One State’ Israel. We have thus arrived at an incendiary position of conflict which continues to drag neighbouring countries into the cauldron.

The Gaza killings have provoked the United Nations to call for an independent investigation into war crimes committed by Israeli troops. The only nations to vote against this proposal were the USA and Australia. But such investigations never seem to come to any definitive resolution, as the UN itself has strong links to the global power brokers, and is more ‘a front’ for temporarily defusing conflicts than a genuine arbitrator for justice.

I left Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra in the Summer of 1975 and returned to England to attend an important conference on organic farming methods. The conference was run by the Soil Association and its chairman was Lady Eve Balfour, the grand-daughter of Lord Arthur Balfour who established the 1918 declaration that divided Palestine into two. Although the two state system has – in principle – survived, it has been repeatedly violated by the establishment of illegal Israeli colonies on land appropriated from Arabs who had owned and lived on it for generations.

The seemingly intractable nature of this conflict seems to defy a positive and peaceful resolution. But such situations demand creative solutions – and even if one has to dig deep to find them – the effort must be made.

Could it be that the words of the wise elder I met in Tel Aviv back in 1975, might hold the key to unlocking the truth? Perhaps he was right, and that Israel is not actually a geographical place at all – but an aspiration – a ancient commitment to ‘work with God’. And if this God is the same deity as He who gave birth to the dazzling Universe, then Israel would indeed be a name that many a wise being would cherish and hold in honour. A name that would be the harbinger of peace and reconciliation instead of war and division. A message of deep meaning not just to the Middle East, but to all inhabitants of planet Earth.

Let us meditate on that. Hold that conclusion in our minds and hearts, and thereby play our role in resolving this tragic conflict.

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of organic farming, an international activist, writer and social entrepreneur. He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and is the author of two acclaimed titles ‘Changing Course for Life’ and ‘In Defence of life’ both of which are available via his website www.julianrose.info . His third book ‘Beyond the Mechanistic Mind’ will be out shortly.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Crimes against Humanity and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

When you hold a baby in your arms for the very first time, overfilled with the power of love, naturally your mind and body is focused (but mindful) on how to protect that precious and delicate living being. A civilized society must do and feel the same way about all the voiceless babies and children in her care. But in reality this rational thought is foreign to the so-called Western civilizations.

In the U.S., the unsettling news of “1500 missing immigrant children” is alarming to American families. Amy Wang of The Washington Post reports that:

“During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, testified that the federal agency had lost track of 1,475 children who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border…”. 

Already this troubling issue has turned to another talking point for the TV pundits in America which casually discuss the matter without real interest. Most “officials” are mute and some blame the children who “unaccompanied by adults” had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own! They down play the bad news and claim that their abusive behavior against asylum seekers is “legal”. However they are in contrary to International law. The Non-discrimination article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of United Nations clearly states that protection of all children without exception is the governments’ obligation. It reads:

“… every child within a State’s jurisdiction holds all CRC Rights without regard to citizenship, immigration status or any other status. Refugee children, asylum seekers, and rejected asylum seekers are entitled to all the rights of the CRC.”

The “missing” children case is not an exceptional incident, when the U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a tyrannous tone warns: “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border” signifies the dark side of fanatics who are in charge of the “Law of the Land” today.  This should be expected when a group of people constantly are demonized by the “most powerful man” in the U.S. and directly or indirectly are compared to animals. Of course the babies of these “animals” would have no human value for a fascistic minded President and his Attorney General appointee. Sadly, for the narrow-minded politicians, the innocent children of the asylum seekers simply are bargaining chips.

Over all, Mr. Sessions’ warning and the mystery of “missing children” are part of a dangerous shift in the U.S. governance toward an autocracy and undemocratic policies. The new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Gina Haspel (during her nomination hearing) was unapologetic for her role using enhanced interrogation techniques and boldly refused to acknowledge that torture is immoral. In other words, indirectly Mr. Trump’s nominee told the policymakers that their morality is outdated!

The Democrats and Republicans while are blaming each other for the “wrong” immigration policies, in fact are in agreement to slowly enforce their anti-democratic plots against the American people for the sake of “National Security”.  When it comes to the question of undocumented families and their children, both parties have horrible records. During a 2014 CNN interview, Ms. Hillary Clinton said: “We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay” , “So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey” (Greg Price, Newsweek – 9/8/2017).

We shouldn’t be surprised if the insane Internment Camps idea of  General Wesley Clark would be implemented in this fearful political environment. In 2014, General Clark in an interview with MSNBC said: “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States… it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”* Today, the undocumented immigrants, the asylum seeker and children are treated in inhuman detention centers. ACLU “obtains documents showing widespread abuse of child immigrants in U.S. custody.” Also they have reported detailed instances of holding children past the three-day maximum detainment period. CNN report “Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez traveled 1,500 miles to the United States, hoping to find a job and a better future. Shortly after she set foot in Texas, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed her …” on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018. Claudia was 20 years old and from Guatemala.

For decades, the heartless narrow-minded politicians in the “civilized” countries through their unnecessary but devastating and deadly wars have been and still are responsible for the death of thousands of children. According to the Annual Report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict, since the start of war in 2015 “In Yemen, a total of at least 1,340 children were killed or maimed.” The children in war torn cities of Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Palestine and other places suffer the same misery and some share the same frightening death toll number as children in Yemen. Now these atrocities against children are being committed closer to home, near our borders.

But history teaches us the atrocities no matter how grotesque they might be -soon or later- will end by the actions of determined and democratic-minded people. Peace and Justice Activists, Immigrant Advocacy Organizations, Teachers and Students, Workers and Farmers, Progressive Attorneys and Caring Parents must organize and demand:

– End the Inhumane Treatments of the Undocumented and Asylum Seekers and Their Children Now!

– Find Our 1500 “Missing” Children Now and Bring the High Level Responsible People to Justice!

– End the Abusive, Uncivilized Treatment of Women and Children in the Brutal ICE Detention Centers!

– Stop Breaking Up Vulnerable Undocumented Families!

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

Note:

* “General Wesley Clark Calls for Putting ‘Disloyal’ Americans in Internment Camps” by Thomas Gaist – World Socialist Web Site. Reprinted by Global Research, July 21, 2015

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Rights of “Missing” Immigrant Children in America

Criticizing Israel Unrelated to Anti-Semitism

May 29th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Calling criticism of Zionism and Israel anti-Semitic turns truth on its head. One has nothing to do with the other.

Anti-Semitism reflects hostility or discrimination against Judaism as a religion. Israel is a nation-state. Criticizing its ruthlessness is essential to challenge what’s clearly intolerable. Equating it to anti-Semitism is a bald-faced lie.

On Wednesday, proposed House legislation disgracefully conflating the two was introduced in deference to Israel and its US lobby – called the Anti-Semitism Act of 2018.

It cites Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

It says nothing about religion, but that’s not the point. What is relevant is that criticizing Israeli policies has nothing to do with discrimination of any kind.

It’s about supporting right over wrong, about challenging nation-state ruthlessness, unacceptable apartheid contempt for Palestinian rights, holding an entire population hostage under occupation harshness, blockaded Gazans harmed most.

Trump appointed Zionist zealot Kenneth Marcus to head the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. He’s awaiting Senate confirmation.

As founder and head of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Washington-based NGO, he supports Israeli policies no matter how lawless and egregious.

The group shamefully calls anti-Semitism and “anti-Israelism” on university campuses the “leading civil and human rights challenge facing North American Jewry.” What rubbish!

It’s silent about longstanding Israeli high crimes of war and against humanity, its ruthless persecution of illegally occupied Palestinians, and its own Arab citizens.

It supports Israeli policies at the expense of equity and justice. Marcus is well-known for “excessive litigation against Palestine solidarity activists,” Mondoweiss earlier explained.

He’s militantly against BDS activism, the most effective initiative to hold Israel accountable for its high crimes.

He uses Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a weapon against Israeli criticism, activism for Palestinian rights, and academic freedom.

He aims to use the Anti-Semitism Act of 2018, if enacted into law, to bully and censor Israeli critics, the legislation empowering the office he holds to enforce a law dismissive of persecuted and discriminated against Muslims and Sikhs.

The measure’s purpose is to intimidate, inhibit, and censor Israeli critics, especially on college campuses where activists urge adoption of student council resolutions to boycott Israel for its high crimes.

It’s unconstitutional, a flagrant First Amendment violation, guaranteeing free expression in all forms – no matter how offensive or at odds with the official narrative.

The proposed measure supports Israel uncritically, ignoring its high crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide.

No other nation, political entity, or group of any kind is afforded protection from criticism under US law.

Free expression is inviolable, numerous Supreme Court rulings affirming it. The Arab American Institute said the following:

“The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act masquerades as addressing anti-Semitism while shielding Israel from criticism.”

“If passed, the bill would unconstitutionally proscribe legitimate political expression with respect to criticism of foreign governments and does nothing to combat hate in our classrooms” or anywhere else.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero slammed the proposed measure, saying it “risks chilling the free speech of students on college campuses, and is unnecessary to enforce federal law’s prohibition on harassment in education,” adding:

It’ll “lead colleges to suppress speech, especially if the Department of Education launches investigations simply because students have engaged in speech critical of Israel.”

It’s similar to bills wanting BDS activism outlawed, congressional legislation failing to pass so far.

JewishVoiceForPeace rabbi Joseph Berman tweeted:

“JVP calls on Congress to oppose the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.”

“It’s not an ‘anti-Semitism awareness act’ – it’s the Silencing Students Act.”

It’s a shot across the bow to silence all justifiable criticism of Israel. Perhaps criminalizing it comes next.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Syria has taken the rotating presidency of the United Nations (UN)’s Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, prompting disruptive objection by the United States.

The chairing of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) rotates alphabetically among the body’s 65 members every four weeks, and Syria’s turn came on Monday.

Syrian Ambassador Hussam Edin Aala opened the conference’s latest round on Tuesday.

Image: Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva Hussam Edin Aala presides over the Conference on Disarmament at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, May 29, 2018. (Photo by Reuters)

American disruption

The US, opposed to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, objected to Syria’s takeover of the committee’s presidency.

“Syria’s presence here is a travesty… and it is just unacceptable for them to be leading this body,” US Ambassador Robert Wood said just before the session began on Tuesday.

The US delegation — led by Wood — then briefly left the room in protest and returned shortly afterwards.

Back on the floor, Wood voiced Washington’s displeasure.

Image: US Ambassador Robert Wood walks out in protest at Syria’s presidency of the Conference on Disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, May 29, 2018. (Photo by Reuters)

“Let me be clear: we cannot permit ‘business as usual’ in the CD while Syria presides over this body,” Wood said, referring to potential plans to disrupt upcoming meetings. “During the next four weeks, we will be present in this hall to ensure that Syria is not able to advance initiatives that run counter to the interests of the United States, but we will fundamentally alter the nature of our presence in the plenaries.”

After making that statement, the US ambassador moved to a seat usually reserved for assistants, apparently in protest.

Ahead of the session, Wood had stressed that his country did not plan to boycott the CD during the four weeks of Syrian presidency.

A number of ambassadors from other countries, including Britain, Australia, and France, echoed Wood’s remarks.

He claimed that the US sought to hold Syria to account for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

The Syrian government surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversaw the removal and destruction of the weaponry.

Western governments and their allies, however, have continued to accuse Damascus of having conducted chemical attacks on a number of occasions during the conflict in Syria.

The Syrian government has rejected all allegations of chemical attacks and has pointed to the conclusion of the UN-OPCW mission to make the case that it is no more in possession of chemical armaments.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Syria Takes Rotating Presidency of UN Disarmament Conference in Geneva, US Protests

The commemorative medal had already been cast and published. It depicts profiles of Trump and Jong Un, facing each other, at the 12th June historic meeting – at which Jong Un was supposed to disavow and discard his nuclear armament, irreversibly, and then to accept Trump’s gracious benediction. The meeting now is moot (and, since drafting, has been cancelled, blindsiding both Moon and Abe), leaving in its wake, a frustrated and angry Trump. And, as we prefigured earlier, instead of realising that Team Trump had not been listening adequately to what Jong Un was signalling, Trump now blames Xi for upsetting ‘the deal’ from being struck.

China’s Global Times makes the point:

“The US unilaterally demands prompt peninsular denuclearization before it provides compensation to Pyongyang. China will not oppose such a deal between the US and North Korea. However, can Washington achieve it? Pyongyang has just given an answer … It would be OK if Washington pressures Pyongyang to gain an edge in negotiations, but Washington should think twice about the possibility of pushing the Korean Peninsula back to fierce antagonism.

It is clear from China’s perspective that the US has overestimated its weight in forcing North Korea to accept its demands. The US has forgotten the awkward situation it was in last year when it could not stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, and the difficulty of taking military action against North Korea.

The US has always believed it was duped by North Korea, which is, in fact, far from correct. The US was responsible for the aborted peninsula resolutions, multiple times.”

Irritated too, by harsh comments made by ‘trade hawks’ on the lack of tangible result in trade negotiations with China (Steve Bannon, for example, told Bloomberg that Trump “changed the dynamic regarding China – but in one weekend, Secretary Mnuchin has given it away”), Trump now seems to be set to pivot towards a tougher China trade stance, saying that the talks had not achieved much, and that a new framework might be needed.

The Singapore summit cancellation (blamed in part, on Xi), and the disappointment with trade talks, arrives on the heels of the Pentagon revoking China’s invitation to participate in RIMPAC, ‘the world’s largest naval exercise’, because of Beijing’s “aggressive actions in the South China Sea, which have recently included reports that it quietly installed ‘defensive’ missiles in the Spratly Islands – capable of striking US territory. Undeterred however by Pentagon threats, China responded by warning that its new J-20, fifth generation, stealth fighter, will henceforth be flying patrols in Taiwan’s airspace – a clear signal that Xi wants ‘his island’ back, and plans to get it.

In short, US friction with China is on an upwards trajectory, and may spike further, were Washington now to threaten the Korean peninsula with military action of some nature.

Friction is not confined to the US relationship with China however. Trump’s conversion to full-court ‘neo-Americanism’ (see here), it seems, has put Washington at odds with the World at large: Trade wars (China, Russia, EU & Japan), sanctions (Russia, Iran, et al), currency wars (Turkey, Iran Russia), etcetera, etcetera. This level and breadth of friction is not sustainable. The psychic tension must lead either to something somehow snapping (explosively) to break the tension, or to a marked U-turn in language and behaviour that relieves pressures more gently. At the moment we are still in the updraft. Trump has provoked literally everyone (even the usually compliant Europeans), as never before. And, consequently (and inadvertently), has accelerated markedly, the arrival of the incoming new global order – and, by heightening geo-political tension nearly everywhere, has accelerated further steps towards global de-dollarisation.

Again, even the Europeans are rueing that they chose not to configure the Eurozone, as distinct and separate to the dollar hegemony – when they had the chance. Now they pay the price of their impotence in their – now ‘outlawed’ – trade with Iran. Rather too late in the day, the EU proposes to abandon the petrodollar for Euros in respect to their purchases of Iranian oil; but in all probability, it will be to no avail. EU leaders stand shocked and angered by the ruthlessness by which the US intends to strangle all EU commerce with Iran.

What is interesting here, is how China views the nature of the friction with the US, and its root cause: It – via a Global Times op-ed – starts with a clear warning: “When the second round of trade talks finished last week, a number of [US] media reports were hailing the end of the trade war threat. Some even said that China had won the first round of the negotiations with the US: This conclusion is totally wrong, and the idea that the trade friction has been resolved, is groundless. There hasn’t been a trade war yet, just a series of warnings…”(Emphasis added). The author then goes on to say that US trade deficits are not at the root of the friction between the two states: “The real culprit is the monopoly of the US dollar in the global market”, and the enforced use of the dollar to settle payments. The US must “avoid over-supply of the dollar, and allow greater use of other currencies such as the yuan and the euro to promote more balanced currency supply … [and] the US must amend its currency policy”.

President Putin is saying the same: Addressing the Russian parliament, he said that “the whole world sees the dollar monopoly is unreliable: It is dangerous for many, not only for us”. He added that sanctions, and trade actions via the WTO, are increasingly being improperly used by the US primordially, to secure competitive advantage, or to hold back competitors’ economic development (a principal Chinese complaint).

In other words, they want the ‘US-led global order’ swamp drained, just as much as Trump desires to see the Washington swamp drained.

Trump seems happy however, to use ’swamp’ tactics toward the external world in order to make America Great again (even as he decries the Establishment ’swamp’ at home), but the non-West is as thoroughly disenchanted by the ‘global order swamp’ tactics as is Trump’s base: They want the dollar hegemony gone, their own sovereignties restored – and are re-grouping politically to achieve it. Its parts, though distinct, seem to be coming together.

The mafia-like, Trump ‘shakedown’ of Chancellor Merkel (‘give up Nord Stream II, or we’ll shake you Germans down, in terms of Steel and Aluminum), firstly, is catalyzing the possibility of a major re-orientation of European policy.

The European resolve on Russia sanctions long has been shaky: German and Italian businesses have been hard hit financially, and it has been essentially Merkel who held the European ‘line’. These European sanctions are solely Ukraine-related, and the Chancellor has been talking with Putin in Sochi about Ukraine. There, in Sochi, Putin offered two ideas: a UN peace-keeping force for Ukraine, and continued transit of Russian gas through the Ukraine corridor (a major European point) – if that were to prove commercially viable.

If these thoughts prove to be fecund, it would allow Merkel to front-run ‘the inevitability of an Italian ‘no’ to renewal of Russia sanctions in September’. She could be ‘leading again’: taking forward an initiative of her own – balm to the European ego after the disappointing experience of JCPOA. Soothing the Ukraine irritant, in this way, would also allow a Germany – now, in this new US tariff era, even less open to taking a ‘hit’ on European delinquent debt, or to re–financing French infrastructure – to view Russia as a natural partner. It might also allow her to defuse somewhat the immigration ‘bomb’ by agreeing with Putin a mechanism by which the some of the one million Syrian refugees in Germany, return home. Next week, Merkel goes to China, to see how to finesse US pressure on Europe to side with America – against China. We may find, contrarily, that Germany ends up closer to China, which has been investing heavily in Germany, rather than closer to the US (though Germany cannot easily avoid being pig-in-the middle in this trade fight).

Of course, the Anglo ‘Establishment’ will do almost anything to stop the political centre of gravity shifting from the shores of the Atlantic, eastwards. The head of the British Security Service (MI5) has already been sent on a mission by Washington to hype the Russian ‘threat’ to a gathering of thirty European states; and the US envoy in Kiev, Kurt Volker, declared American military support for retaking the breakaway self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

At the same time, for Japan, the Korean peninsula has been long viewed as a buffer between it and the mainland. Its division however, and the American presence in the south, had seemed the guarantor of the buffer. But then the South gave Moon a mandate for re-unification – and Jong Un in response, dramatically began his charm offensive. The status quo of the ‘buffer’ that had been a given, evidently was no longer ‘a given’. There might be an agreement and, even potentially, over time, increased Chinese influence there. Professor Victor Teo noted that “Trump’s agreement to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, had sidestepped Abe and “cut him off at his knees”.

Even as a possibility, this was a serious problem for Japan, who would lose its buffer with China – and depending on the extent of any putative US withdrawal from the region – lose its defence umbrella too. Equally unnerving, Politico notes, was “Trump’s apparent U-turn on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In January 2017, three days into his presidency, Trump reneged on Barack Obama’s China-containing, 12-nation trade deal.” “It humiliated Abe, who 67 days earlier hustled to Trump Tower to head off Washington’s TPP exit. Twelve months later, Trump added salt to those wounds by adopting a weak dollar policy and slapping duties on steel and aluminum — 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. He doled out exemptions to Canada, Mexico and others, but none for best friend Abe. Then came Trump’s proposed $150 billion worth of taxes on goods from China, Japan’s main export market.”

So, not surprisingly then, Abe has reached out to China, both to hedge against the US on tariff worries, and to insert Japan into the strategic discussions on Korea’s future (the Chinese premier Li Keqiang made an official visit to Tokyo on 9 May to participate in trilateral talks with the Japanese and South Korean leaders).

The point here is that this trilateral re-set of relations followed high-level economic talks between China and Japan last month, and recalling China’s clear warning about the dollar problem, and the need to widen the use of the Yuan and other currencies in trade, it is not hard to guess that Chinese-Japanese trade will gradually be de-dollarised, if these talks succeed.

In the same vein, Lawrence Sellin of The Daily Caller reports that:

“Chinese efforts towards Iran-Pakistan cooperation have also borne fruit. In recent months, there has been a flurry of agreements in trade, defense, weapons development, counter-terrorism, banking, train service, parliamentary cooperation and — most recently — art and literature.

Secret security-related discussions among the Chinese, Pakistanis and Iranians military officials have been ongoing for at least a year. A major stimulus for those discussions has been the planned construction of a Chinese naval base on Pakistan’s Jiwani peninsula, immediately west of Gwadar near the Iranian border…

A China-Iran-Pakistan alliance would have sweeping ramifications for U.S. foreign policy. For starters, it would render our current efforts in Afghanistan untenable, most likely provoking an American exit under conditions dictated by the Chinese and Pakistanis. It would initiate the beginning of an anti-access, area denial strategy against the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea region, similar to what the Chinese have attempted to implement against the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the South China Sea. Even the mere contemplation of such an alliance could give the Iranians considerable leverage in the face of American sanctions.”

Iran has already joined the East Asian Economic free trade area – and on 9th June, will also be attending the Shanghai Co-operation Council 2018 summit, in China. (It seems that Iran is not exactly being ostracised post-JCPOA.)

What links these many parts to the jigsaw however, is the Chinese (and Russian and Iranian view) that the Yuan and the Euro need to be more readily available as currencies in which trade is conducted – and “that the US must amend its currency policy” (that is to end its oscillation between strong and weak dollar cycles, which has been so profitable for US financial institutions, but lethal to Emerging Markets). Virtually everyone agrees on this now.

For this to happen, China needs to widen and deepen the Yuan base, and to provide a liquid market in Chinese sovereign debt. The Shanghai oil futures market is already making its impact on deepening China’s sovereign bond market (as traders park their Yuan proceeds in it, knowing that ultimately the Yuan may be redeemed for gold). US sanctions on Iran will give this further impetus, as Iranian oil becomes sold in Shanghai. The Chinese-owned London Metal Exchange has lately announced that it will begin trading Yuan currency commodity options, too. Soon we will have Yuan-based commodity benchmarks. All in all, the use of the dollar in non-US trade, is being, step by step, progressively shrunk.

But the second Chinese requirement for resetting the trading world by the US ‘amending its currency policy’, serendipitously seems to be occurring as a result of autonomous domestic financial dynamics: Trump’s ‘weak dollar’ has been giving way to elevated dollar values (for a variety of reasons). It provides the perfect conditions for China gently to devalue the Yuan (which has been appreciating against the dollar over recent months), and for Europe to do the same, in a co-ordinated downward float against a spiking dollar. The lower exchange value of Yuan and Euro simply will partly, or wholly, reverse the impact of US sanctions on exports to the US. Might this currency co-ordination too be on the agenda for Merkel next week in China?

If these US policies are not sustainable, what then? The primal flaw to the neo-con maximum leverage doctrine is its lack of any easy ladder down which to climb that does not appear to be a national US humiliation. Usually, if pressure doesn’t work, it is assumed that it was because there was not enough of it – for example, Trump attributes the weaknesses to the JCPOA to Obama failing to let the Iranians stew in sanctions for long enough. Obama cut the pressures too early in Trump’s view – and hence got a ‘flawed agreement.’

A deeper point – and one made by the Chinese in respect to North Korea – is that others do not think in the way of President Trump. The radical utilitarianism evident when Trump says that Jong Un will be “safer, happier and richer” if he accepts Trump’s ultimatum reflects precisely the shallow materialism, on which the global political tide has turned. The so-called ‘populist’ call for a return to traditional national values precisely is a rejection of JS Mills type of utilitarian politics. It is, as it were, the wish to return to being human, in a rounder way.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Sanctioning the World, the US Inadvertently ‘Locks and Launches’ Multipolarism

Today, 21 of the 27 countries of the EU (after Brexit), with about 90 percent of the population of the Union, are part of NATO, whose “rules” have allowed the United States to maintain, since 1949, the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and all other key commands; they allow the United States to determine the political and strategic choices of the Alliance, with agreements made under the table especially with Germany, France and Great Britain, and then have them approved by the North Atlantic Council, where according to the “rules” of NATO there is no voting or majority decision, but decisions are always taken unanimously.

Steve Bannon – the former strategist of Donald Trump, theorist of national-populism — expressed his enthusiastic support for the alliance of the Lega with the 5 Star Movement for “the government of change.” In an interview he stated: “The fundamental question, in Italy in March, was the question of sovereignty. The result of the elections was to put in office those Italians who want to regain sovereignty and control over their country. Put an end to these rules coming from Brussels.” (Sky TG24, May 26)

However, it does not say “Put an end to the rules coming from Washington.”

It is not only the European Union that is exerting pressure on Italy to guide its political choices, dominated by the powerful economic and financial circles, especially in Germany and France, which fear a break in the “rules” that serve their interests.

Strong pressure is exerted on Italy, in a less evident but no less intrusive way, by the United States, which fears a break in the “rules” that subordinate Italy to its economic and strategic interests.

This is part of the policies Washington has adopted towards Europe, through different administrations and with different methods, pursuing the same objective: to keep Europe under U.S. influence.

NATO is a key instrument of this strategy. The Treaty of Maastricht establishes, in Art. 42 that the EU “shall respect the obligations of certain Member States, which see their common defense realised in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).” And Protocol 10 on cooperation states that NATO “shall remain the foundation of defense” of the European Union.

Today, 21 of the 27 countries of the EU, with about 90 percent of the population of the Union, are part of NATO, whose “rules” have allowed the United States to maintain, since 1949, the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and all other key commands; they allow the United States to determine the political and strategic choices of the Alliance, with agreements made under the table especially with Germany, France and Great Britain, and then have them approved by the North Atlantic Council, where according to the “rules” of NATO there is no voting or majority decision, but decisions are always taken unanimously.

The entry into NATO of the countries of Eastern Europe – once members of the Warsaw Pact, of the Yugoslav Federation and also of the USSR, has allowed the United States to bind these countries, to which Ukraine and Georgia are added and in fact are already in NATO, more so to Washington than to Brussels.

Washington has thus been able to push Europe into a new Cold War, making it the first line of an increasingly dangerous confrontation with Russia, which functions in the political, economic and strategic interests of the United States.

Emblematic is the fact that, just in the week in which Europe was debating the “Italian question” bitterly, the 1st Armoured Brigade of the 1st U.S. Cavalry Division, coming from Fort Hood in Texas, landed in Antwerp (Belgium), without provoking any significant reaction. Some 3,000 soldiers landed, with 87 Abrams M-1 tanks, 125 Bradley combat vehicles, 18 self-propelled Paladin cannons, 976 military vehicles and other equipment, which will be deployed at five bases in Poland and sent from there close to Russian territory.

This continues to “improve the readiness and lethality of U.S. forces in Europe,” to which $16.5 billion dollars since 2015.

Just as the tanks sent from Washington landed in Europe, Steve Bannon encouraged Italians and Europeans to “recover their sovereignty” from Brussels.

 


This article first appeared in Il Manifesto, March 29, 2018

«Sovranità» da Bruxelles, non da Washington

Translation: John Catalinotto

 

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video. The Art of War, Italian ‘Sovereignty’ from Brussels, but not from Washington

We bring to the consideration of our readers this incisive and carefully formulated analysis by Canada’s renowned philosopher Professor John McMurtry. 

The complete text published by the Journal of 9/11 Studies can be downloaded in pdf.

This article was first published by Global Research in February 2013

*          *          *

I was sceptical of the 9-11 event from the first time I saw it on television. It was on every major network within minutes. All the guilty partieswere declared before any evidence was shown.The first questions of any criminal investigation were erased.  Who had the most compelling motives for the event? Who had the means to turn two central iconic buildings in New York into a pile of steel and a cloud of dust in seconds?[i]

Other questions soon arose in the aftermath. Why was all the evidence at the crime scenes removed or confiscated?

Who was behind the continuous false information and non-stop repetition of “foreign/Arab terrorists”when no proof of guilt existed? Who was blocking all independent inquiry?

Even 11 years on these questions are still not answered.

But those immediately named guilty without any forensic proof certainly fitted the need for a plausible Enemy now that the “threat of the Soviet Union” and “communist world rule” were dead.  How else could the billion-dollar-a-day military be justified with no peace dividend amidst a corporately hollowed-out U.S. economy entering its long-term slide? While all the media and most of the people asserted the official 9-11 conspiracy theory as given fact, not all did.

A Bay Street broker with whom I was improbably discussing the event in Cuba had no problem recognising the value meaning. When I asked what he thought about the official conspiracy theory, he was frank:

“You can call it what you want, but America needs a war to pull the people together and expand into new resource rich areas. That what it has always done from Mexico on. And that is what it needs now”.  When I wondered why none in the know said so, he smirked: “It would be impolite”, adding, “It affects the entire future prosperity of America and the West”. And all the deaths? “It had to be done –far less than it could have been”. The 19 Arabs with box-cutters reducing the World Trade Center buildings to powder in a few seconds?He shrugged.

Thus everyone since 9-11 is prohibited nail-clippers on planes to confirm the absurd – including 15 of the 19alleged hijackers being from Saudi Arabia and several apparently still alive after crashing the planes into the buildings.[ii]As for the diabolical mastermind Osama bin Laden, he is never linked by credible evidence to the crime and never claims responsibility for the strike since the videos of him are fakes. “Ground Zero” is a double entendre. All doubts are erased apriori.

Decoding the U.S. Theater of Wars and the Moral Driver Behind

One already knew that suspension of belief is the first act of fiction, and that instant culture rules the U.S. One already knew that monster technical events are America’s stock in trade. And one already knew the long history of false U.S. pretexts for war – so well established that a young strategic thinker a decade after 9-11 advises the right-wing Washington Policy Institute on how to create a crisis by deadly planned incident to make war on Iran – “it is the traditional way of getting into war for what is best in America’s interests”.[iii]

One further knew from past research that the U.S.’s strategic leadership since 1945 had been Nazi-based in information and connections and the dominant Central-European figures articulating it ever after across Democrat and Republican lineshave a common cause. For over 40 years, Henry Kissinger as Republican and Zbigniew Brzezinski as Democrat have been protégés of David Rockefeller, selected as Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group leaders, and capable of any mass-homicidal plan to advance “U.S. interests”. The banker-and-oil imperial line through David Rockefeller as paradigm case goes back to the Nazi period to John Foster Dulles (an in-law) and his brother Allen Dulles (OSS and then CIA Director), who Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg called “traitors” for their support of the Nazi regime.  The Rockefeller Foundation funded and developed German eugenics programs in the pre-war years, Standard Oil supplied oil in collaboration with I.G. Farben, and so on.[iv]

The supreme moral goal and strategic methods governing U.S. covert-state performance have not only have been very similar in moral principle, but have deeply connected Rockefeller protégés Kissinger and Brzezinski, and more deeply still the theoretical godfather of U.S. covert state policy, Leo Strauss, who was funded out of Germany by David Rockefeller from the start.

The inner logic of covert and not-so-covert U.S. corporate world rule since 1945unified under Wall Street financial management and transnational corporate treaties for unhindered control of commodities and money capital flows across all borders is undeniable if seldom tracked. This architecture of the grand plan for a New World Order is evident in both strategic policy and global political and armed action over decades that have seen the objectives increasingly fulfilled with constructed deadly crises as pretexts for war the standard technique.[v]Behind them as first post-Nazi historical turn lies the 1947 National Security Act (NSA) which created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and explicitly licensesdestruction of life, truth and other societies as institutional methods.

The CIA is charged with designing, planning and executing “propaganda, economic war, direct preventive action, sabotage, anti-sabotage, destruction, subversion against hostile States, assistance to clandestine liberation movements, guerrilla murders, assistance to indigenous groups opposed to the enemy countries of the free world”. The linkage back to Nazi methods and world-rule goal as the highest moral objective is not just one of corresponding ultimate principles and strategic policy formation. It relied on Nazi SS intelligence sources and means from the beginning of the covert terror state.[vi]

There is no heinous means that is not assumed as the highest morality by this long-standing covert institutional formation linking to the presidential office.It is an explicitly secret system involving at least the Defense Department and the CIA, the former with many more operatives and offices.

The Special Activities Division (SAD) to carry out NSA criminal operations, for example, also confers the highest honors awarded in recognition of distinguished valor and excellence – as did the earlier SS prototype in Germany. What people find difficult to recognise is that these actions, whether by the SAD or other system operations,are conceived as the highest duty, however life-system destructive and mass murderous they are. All participants are super patriots in their own view, as were the Nazis. Contradiction between declared and actual values, however, is a central mode of the covert system. For example, what can be considered a high duty in the perpetual U.S.“war on drugs”, the most morally obligatory commitment of the U.S. state,is at the same time a war against and with other drug operations to transport illegal hard drugs into the U.S. itself.[vii]

We might see here a parallel between foreign mass murder and domestic mass murder in 9-11, with both regarded as high patriotism in this supreme morality. In the background of America’s Reichstag Fire and likewise disclosing the unlimited geo-strategic action that can be operationalized as necessary and good, the post-1945 U.S. control of international sea-lanes made the covert U.S. state the world’s dominant narcotics controller so as to fund secret criminal war actions from South-East Asia to Latin America, entailing the addiction of its own peoples.[viii]This woeful method has been long known by experts, but came to be public knowledge in the Reagan-state funding of the death-squad Contras of Nicaragua as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers” (a tribute he is said to have given later to the drug-running warlords and jihadists of Afghanistan).

These moral contradictions seem insane, but this is so only if one does not comprehend the underlying supreme morality of which they are all expressions.

Even U.S.-sponsored death squads torturing and killing tens of thousands of poor people across Latin America before 2000 and their return as direct covert U.S.-state method from Iraq to Syria after 9-11 – called “the Salvador option”[ix] – is regarded as necessary and obligatory to “defend the Free World and our way of life”. They entail ever more total U.S. world rule and self-maximizing position by strategic deduction from the supreme morality’s first premises.

The covert nature of the mass-murderous operationalization is never from moral embarrassment. It is solely to ensure effectiveness of execution against “soft” and “uninformed” public opinion, to terrorize people in situ from continued resistance, and to annihilate its leadership and community agency all the way down. Throughout the deciding moments of execution of the underlying supreme value program, global corporate money demand multiplication is always the ultimate value driver -as may be tested by seeking any covert U.S. action or overt war which is not so regulated beneath saturating propaganda of lawful intentions of peace and freedom.

These lines of underlying moral institution, policy, strategic plan, and massive life destruction at every level are indisputable facts of the covert and official faces of the U.S. state, but are typically not connected to the September 11, 2001 attack. Since most people cannot believe their own government or the “leader of the free world” could execute such a sabotage action as “9-11” in which thousands of American themselves died, these behavioral reminders forge the unifying meaning.

Worse still occurred in the last “war”before 9-11. In the background providing graphic example of how the covert U.S. state apparatus is structured to attack and murder U.S. citizens themselves to strategically maximize implementation of its supreme value program of transnational corporate money sequences over all barriers, there is the now known Operation Northwoods. Very familiar to the 9-11 truth movement, but unpublicized since its release under freedom of information laws, this Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff plan proposed that the CIA and other operatives covert operatives “undertake a range of atrocities” to be blamed on Cuba to provide pretext for invasion.

“Innocent civilians were to be shot on American streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba were to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism was to be launched in Washington DC, Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did commit; planes would be hijacked”.[x]

All would be blamed on Castro the Communist in place of bin Laden the Islamicist, and invasion of desired resistant territory would be achieved as a triumph of American freedom and interests over its enemies.

 Operation Northwoods was not, however, okayed by President Kennedy – perhaps another reason for his assassination and replacement by more pliant presidents to represent “America’s interests” in accord with the supreme morality. Underneath the stolen election of George Bush Jr.in contrast – whose family made its money, in part, by serving the covert financial requirements of the Nazi regime before and during the 1939-45 War – was a domestic and foreign administration which would push further than any in the past to advance “U.S. interests”to full-spectrum world rule. Its project included reversing the Roosevelt New Deal and the social state within the U.S. itself – “an anomaly” as Bush Jr. expressed the historical perspective and ethic at work.

This plan was more explicit in the published Project for the New American Century formed from 1997 on. It even supplied the need for a 9-11 event in its 2000 version, the year that Bush Jr. was elected and the year before 9-11. To indicate the “non-partisan” nature of the planning, Democrat National security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had already hinted at the usefulness of a 9-11-style domestic attack to move policy forward in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.[xi]

The Moral Compass of 9-11

As a moral philosopher with social value systems as my primary object of analysis, my first thoughts in understanding “9-11” were of the system motives,known methods, and objective interests driving the event which could coherently explain it. Whatever the immediate hold of the official conspiracy theory on the public mind,a rational explanation is required which is consistent with the suppressed facts and the organising geo-strategic plan on both sides of the event.

For over a decade before 9-11, there were three U.S.-propelled global trends that almost never come into the understanding of 9-11 itself. 9-11 truth seekers themselves have focused on the foreground technics and the transparent motive for oil. But these are undergirded by deeper sea-shifts of geopolitical and economic wars of seizure and destruction by other name against which the world’s people were rising. To compel books of analysis into one unifying frame, transnational corporate-rights treaties from NAFTA to the Maastracht Treaty to the WTO overrode all other rights across borders;the private “financialization”stripping of social sectors and welfare states had advanced across the world; and the totalizing movement of the system across all former “cold war” and cultural borders was “the new world order” in formation. Together these vast shifts towards transnational money-sequence rule of all reversed centuries of democratic evolution. And every step of the supreme value program was life blind at every step of its global operationalization.[xii]

Yet states and cultures were so sweepingly re-set into unaccountable transnational corporate and bank rule that few recognised the absolutist value program being imposed on the world.  Fewer still recognised all was unfolding according to plan.

What has been least appreciated about the long-term strategic plan unfolding on both sides of what was immediately called “9-11” – CallEmergency!–is that supreme banker and global money director David Rockefeller had summarized “the plan” to fellow money-party elites across borders at the Bildersberg meeting in Baden Baden Germany in June 1991 -exactly at the same time that the Soviet Union and its resistant barriers fell.[xiii] Bear in mind that Rockefeller among other initiatives appointed both Kissinger and Brzezinski for the lead in both the supranational Bilderberg and Trilateral strategic bodies of which he was the lead patron, not to mention financed the unemployed academic Leo Strauss out of Germany to be the godfather  “philosopher” of the “new world order”. Rockefeller speaks very precisely to his fellow “elite of the elite” of the Western world where only Americans and Europe are invited and reportage excluded:

“A supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries”, Rockefeller said.[xiv]

Observe the foundational new concepts in place of responsible government and democratic accountability. They are now consigned to “past centuries”. A “supranational sovereignty”has replaced them and is morally“preferable”. Rockefeller is not exaggerating. By 1991 a “supranational sovereignty” had already developed in the form of transnational treaties conferring override rights of “profit opportunity” on transnational corporations and private bank rule of government finances across borders – procedurally trumping any elected legislatures and their laws which are inconsistent with their thousands of treaty articles, even when the system eventually leads to world depression as now.[xv] The source of the legitimacy of governments, ultimate sovereignty, has now passed as preferable to “an intellectual elite and bankers”: more exactly, academic strategy servants and transnational money sequences overriding all human and planetary life requirements a-priori by the supreme moral goal.

Ask which function of the world’s people and means of life is not now in debt to Wall Street and the private global banking system it leads. Ask which means of life from food and water to autos and pension cheques is not thus ultimately controlled, or which commodity is not under oligopolist corporate sway. The “surely preferable” objective was already achieved by 1991 or in advanced global institutional motion. Now supreme over all else so that all else is now accountable to it, and it is not accountable to anything above it, “the plan”seemed all but accomplished by Rockefeller’s own considered words.

But what if people resist the new world rule with no life coordinate or constraint at any level of its execution? We may recall that during the death-squad rule of the Argentina generals at this time in which civilians were murdered and tortured in the thousands, National Security Adviser Kissinger congratulated the junta on their “very good results – – The quicker you succeed the better.”Kissinger also heartily approved of the earlier massacres and torture in Chile.

The resistance was in this way pre-empted long before the Soviet Union fell, and after 1990 had no block in the Middle East and Central Asia either. “The plan” has been very long term. Kissinger the geo-executer was originally appointed to high office by Rockefeller (to lead the Council on Foreign Relations back in 1954), and – to give a sense of the long-range trajectory of the plan design –was,incredibly,the U.S. administration’s first choice for an “independent 9-11 Commission”. The obviously not-independent Kissinger was still not a problem for “the free press” and official discourse. But when he was required to disclose his business connections, he withdrew to stay covert in his ongoing backroom capacities and enrichment.

The 9-11 sacrifice is better understood within the deep-structural context of the unfolding plan. Thus David Rockefeller gave special thanks to media like “the New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion” in co-operating with the plan. Rockefeller was again precise:

This plan for the world would have been impossible for us to develop if we had been subjected to the light of publicity during those years. [xvi]

The plan’s next decisive steps were in fact already in motion as Rockefeller expressed gratitude for the media black-out. A new strategic manifesto from the Pentagon was in preparation entitled “Defense Planning Guidance on Post-Cold- War Strategy,” completed on February 18, 1992.[xvii]Prepared under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy, it was disclosed in March of 1992 by the New York Times.After the first invasion of Iraq, it became known as the Project for the New American Century, publicly released from 1997 to 2000 prior to 9-11.

Again we may note the long arc of planning control, crisis and war as required. Item 6 of the strategic plan defined the agenda in general terms: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant power in the region and preserve U.S. and western access to the region’s oil.”

Oil-rich Iraq had in fact been invaded – not only to privatize its peerlessly high-quality surface oilfields but to destroy its region-leading socialist infrastructure.Iraq became accessible for invasion as the arms-bankrupted Soviet Union was in collapse. We may observe that the covertly genocidal destruction of Iraq bridged Republican and Democrat administrations over three changes of government – disclosing how the covert state operates as a moral constant across party fronts.

The actions confirm and express the one supreme moral goal identified above. They bridge from Saddam himself as CIA-payroll killer and war proxy against Iran to recapture lost Iran oilfields dating from 1980 to 1988 to the fall of the USSR in 1991 as the axis of the long-term strategic plan of global turnaround to “America’s century” still to come before and after 9-11.But between 1990 and 2003 Saddam was transmuted from former ally to aggressor against Kuwait in an invasion given an official green light from the U.S. government, to “mushroom cloud”threat with invented “weapons of mass destruction”.

In fact, National Security Adviser Wolfowitz explained after the invasion found nothing of the kind: “[We had] virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

Observe how the invasion is conceived as obligatory for a reason that expresses the supreme value goal. Observe that it occurs less than two years after 9-11, which gave the open-cheque justification for the bombing and occupation which allowed the expropriation of Iraq’s society’s oil resources.

The problem was not the evil Saddam or the “weapons of mass destruction”, the standard reverse projection.[xviii]The problem was the Iraqi people themselves and their developed oil-funded social life infrastructure between the supreme oil-fields and their U.S. corporate control and privatization. 9-11 was,thus, first the justification for invading Afghanistan – to clear the way for pipelines into the former Soviet republics from the Caspian Sea region– pipelines that prompted the U.S. representative to predictively warn the Taliban:“Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[xix]9-11 was then the necessary basis of justification for the bombing of Baghdad for the unifying supreme objective.

In fact,seldom published in the corporate media keeping the glare of publicity away from the supreme moral objective, the publicly owned and managed oil revenues of Iraq had been invested since the 1950’s in Iraq’s advanced social infrastructure, leading the Middle East with free higher education, high health standards, and near universal livelihood security. The world’s oldest civilisation was robust in organisational capacities long before the CIA-asset Saddam was installed.

Despite his murdering his way to the top in this function, even Saddam could not destroy the system because socialist government had been achieved decades earlier by a powerful oil-workers’ union base and a population glad to have all education free, an efficient low-cost foods delivery system, and the most advanced public healthcare system in the Middle East. So there was not only the “sea of oil” as a motive to assert U.S. control in the new “supranational sovereignty” of the world. Just as important in this ultimate moral cause, what the U.S. covert state always seeks to destroy by any means, isa successful social infrastructure without private big oil, bankers and transnational corporations free to control it towards higher profit opportunities.

Unravelling the Supreme Moral Doctrine behind the U.S. Covert State

JPEG - 23.1 kb  The genocide of Iraq, as the long-opposing “evil empire” was in free-fall, is the most important strategic anchoring prior to “9-11”. Covert strategic policy to forward the supreme goal is by now self-evident, but the inner moral logic is assumed not penetrated.  The most influential of Rockefeller’s protégés in this regard is the “philosopher king” of the U.S. covert state, Leo Strauss. While he never worked in a philosophy department or has any training in logic, his concept of “natural right” fits exactly to the “supranational sovereignty” of private money-sequence rule of the world – what “the intellectual elite” Rockefeller refers to invoke as “moral anchor”, “right” and “justice”.

The moral thought system is not unlike that of Mein Kampf without the racist rant, camouflaged everywhere in practice by the method of big lies – “noble lies” as Strauss exalts them.[xx] The innermost value driver is a perpetual war of dispossession of the weaker for the private transnational money-capital multiplication of the rich.

Nothing in this doctrine is too mendacious, greed-crazed and murderous if it fulfills the plan of this limitless private-capital rule as ultimate moral ground and compass. In Strauss’s canonical teaching of U.S. national security advisers and intellectual following, the ruling moral absolute is expressed by the core master idea behind the “supranational sovereignty” of an “intellectual elite and bankers”:

“limitless capital accumulation – — the highest right and moral duty”.[xxi]

This is the ethical absolute of the covert U.S. state and its strategic decision structure. And there is no internal limit within this moral universe to life means seizure from poorer societies and resource looting for the supreme goal.  It is the natural and absolute Good.

To justify its meaning, the Straussian canon adopts a potted reading of Western moral and political philosophy from Plato through Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Weber. This impresses American political operatives of the faith, but Strauss is a failed philosopher turned down by Paul Tillich for his post-doctoral Habilitation and only saved from academic ruin in Germany by Rockefeller grant money. While not taken seriously as philosophy anywhere else, it is worth decoding its talmudic involution for the borrowed ideas that drive its covert state disciples and neo-fascist public “intellectuals” in America.

The ultimately organising idea is to commend all forms of conquering and limitlessly expanding private capital as “natural right and law” with genocidal subjugations justified in glowing moral terms. For example, “noble lies” is the moral category for limitless mendacity. One may wonder how educated people can be so bent out of moral shape. So I now concisely provide what cannot be found elsewhere: the inner logic of the supreme doctrine as perversions of great thinkers.

Its framework of meaning and value helps us to understand why the 9-11 event could easily follow for the managers of the covert U.S. state and its Straussian planners as not at all anomalous or evil within their moral logic. 9-11 follows as a maximally rational and unique tool to achieve the objectives in fact achieved by 9-11, and the geo-strategic cabal behind it is servilely linked from the beginning to the dominant private transnational corporate and banking interests exemplified by David Rockefeller.

To understand this brutal moral universe and its connection to 9-11, the 9-11 wars and a globalizing police state, we need to understand the deformations of its basic organising ideas. Plato’s idea of “the noble lie” means, in fact, a myth or parable to communicate an underlying truth about the triadic human soul of reason, spirit and appetite which, Plato argues, should be reflected in the construction of the ideal state (in which the rulers are communist in their common property to keep them uncorrupted and true).

But through the prism of U.S. global money-party rule a la Strauss this idea becomes the principle of lying to the public to keep the vulgar herd – the people themselves – ignorant and obedient. The philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel are also grist for this mill. Hobbes argues that “man is moved by a restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death”, but this brute desire in the “State of Nature” is tamed by “the covenant of peace” ordered by the internal sovereign as absolute.

Via Strauss and the U.S. covert state this becomes right is might and the ultimate “natural right” is limitless private capital power and empire with no end of totalization across the peoples and lands of the world. Hegel too suits a fascist-capitalist reading since he argues “the State is the march of God  through the world”, and war itself is history’s test of which State is a higher realisation of “the absolute Idea”. But Hegel still envisaged a “universal state”to supersede the competitive private-property division of capitalism in the “universalization of right and law on earth”.

Once again U.S. private money-capital power with no bound, the supreme moral goal in the Rockefeller-Strauss doctrine, is opposite to the classical philosophy it invokes. Once more dialectical development of reason to more coherently inclusive conception and life is reversed into one-way private money capital sequences maximized to rule the world with the U.S. military as its instrument of force and terror.

However it conceals its meaning, all positions come down to this underlying value code – as may be tested on whatever transnational money-sequence demand, right or war is launched next. 9-11 construction in such a moral world does not violate this value code. It expresses it in self-maximizing strategic turn to achieve the ultimate goal.

Friedrich Nietzsche may provide the best fodder for the doctrine when he advises that “life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, imposing of one’s own forms, and at its mildest exploitation” in his superman vision of “beyond good and evil”. For philosophical Nietzscheans, this is code for the inner meaning of the angst of artistic creation. But this meaning is predictably lost on the U.S. covert-state school seeking the “supranational sovereignty” of “limitless capital accumulation” as the supreme good with the “intellectual elite” as servants to it. Karl Marx’s link of capitalism’s success to productive force development is the ultimate equivocation upon which this ruling doctrine depends – making no distinction between productive capital providing life goods and unproductive money sequencing hollowing out the world by money-capital multiplication. Marx, it must be acknowledged, did not made the distinction himself since this mutation of capital came a century after his death.[xxii]

Finally Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism does not ground this doctrine of “limitless capital accumulation as the highest right and duty” with the state to serve it, as Strauss again torturously suggests. In fact, Weber deplores any such perversion of public authority. His capitalist model is a young Benjamin Franklin speaking of money saved and invested as like having “a breeding sow”, not a transnational money-sequence juggernaut of eco-genocidal expansion.  Revealingly, Benjamin Franklin and “the protestant ethic” in general were most concerned about non-waste, which Strauss explicitly excludes from the meaning of “limitless capital accumulation”. For Leo Strauss and his U.S. “national security” disciples, the capitalist may waste as much as he wants by “natural right”.

Further, in complete inversion of source, the greed worship of the U.S. state, its patrons and its academy disciples reverses the model of the “spirit of capitalism” exemplified by Benjamin Franklin in proprietary claim on knowledge and inventions. He,in fact,refused to patent his famous Franklin Stove because he believed that no innovation or new knowledge from which other people could benefit should be denied them – just as he himself had benefitted from the community of knowledge and science as the distinguishing feature of being a civilised human being.

In short, it is important to recognise how twisted the covertly ruling doctrine is. No element of it is life coherent or true to the classical thinkers in which it costumes itself. In the end, only the transnational U.S. money party has any place in its rights and obligations, and any sacrifice of other life to its supreme goal is legitimate – linking back to the Nazi-U.S. corporate axis that nearly destroyed the civilised world once before.[xxiii]

Money-Capital Power UeberAlles: How Economic Rationality Leads the Plan

The U.S. culture of money-sequence “rationality” is the underlying intellectual and moral disorder which leads to “limitless money capital accumulation” as the supreme moral goal. In formal terms, the equation of rationality to atomic self-maximization is assumed a-prioriacross domains. With globalizing Wall-Street-led “financialization”, this “rationality” becomes equated to private money-sequence multiplication across all borders as the ultimate Good. This is the innermost mutation of value logic and goal, the moral DNA, from which the cancerous world system develops on both sides of 9-11.[xxiv]

This first principle itself is,in fact,built into formal economics, decision and game theory, and strategic science, as I explain step by step in “Behind Global System Collapse: The Life-Blind Structure of Economic Rationality.”[xxv] It is axiomatic but unexamined, life-blindly absolutist but not recognised as morally problematic. To make a long story short, competitive self-maximization in the market is assumed to produce “the best of possible worlds” by mathematical proof. “Pareto efficiency” is believed to demonstrate this by private money exchanges between self-maximizing atoms apriori stripped of all life properties, relations, society, conditions of choice, and all natural and civil life support systems. Pareto himself recognised outside this formula what has since been covered up.

Not only is the formula consistent with most having remaining impoverished by the “optimum” of “no-one worse off”, what none who cite “Pareto efficiency” as a standard academic mantra ever acknowledge or even recognise. Pareto himself is in no doubt of the implication. As the fascist party he belongs to rules Italy and Rockefeller creates the Council of Foreign Relations, he asserts with approval: “Very moral civilized people have destroyed and continue to destroy, without the least scruple, savage or barbarian peoples”.[xxvi]We glimpse here at the roots the supreme morality built into “economic science” itself.

Yet, as demonstrated in “Behind Global System Collapse”, even the most liberal canons of America, including John Rawls’ classic A Theory of Justice, are grounded in the same meta principle.[xxvii] Rationality and value are equated to self-maximizing gain with no limit within game-theoretic interactions as the sole limiting framework of “limitless money capital acquisition”. The generic equation defines, indeed, the dominant intellectual and economic mind-set of America and the global system in action since 1980. The cabal internal to U.S. national security strategic planning follows the moral logic to its most radical conclusions with no constraints by life or law.

The one absolute moral meaning is the spread of U.S. economic, military and political power as good for all, or, more exactly in Straussian language, limitless private transnational money-capital expansion as the highest right and moral duty. Only what is consistent with or serves this supreme morality, it follows, deserves to exist. This is the alpha and omega of the covert doctrine and state, and careful reading can find no disconfirmation beneath the rhetoric of “noble lies”.

The Iraq Paradigm:  Genocide Strategy From 1990 On

The Iraq line of the geostrategic plan from 1990 to 2001 and after is a paradigmatic articulation of the covertly ruling moral logic. It launches into the theatre of war as direct war attack when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, is instructed to green-light Saddam’s already known plan to invade Kuwait in 1990: “The US. has no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait”, she advises. To formalize the lie as official and traditional, she reports: “Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America”.[xxviii]

The dispute was, in fact, over Kuwait’s drawing out oil from reserves underlying Iraq as enabled by the colonial split of the oil-rich Kuwait province from Iraq – the classic divide-and-rule policy holding also in the division of oil-rich Kurdistan among four manufactured states. Saddam had good reason to trust the U.S., not only by the long-term official promise of neutrality but as blood-mix ally when he waged a U.S.-supported war of aggression against Iran – which still remains the target. Note the big lie to provoke the supreme crime of war has remained without any glare of publicity that might derail the plan.

When Saddam did exactly as planned by invading Kuwait, Bush Sr. raved about the Nazi-like aggression against a weaker country in the reverse projection that always defines the covert U.S. state before, through and after 9-11. So in the same name of “preventing aggression” U.S. “defense” forces invaded Iraq to destroy any life capacity it had to defend itself – always the strategy since the defeat in Vietnam. The genocide began by the massacre of many tens of thousands of fleeing soldiers. Recall the weeping young woman, the Kuwait ambassador’s daughter, planted next to baby incubators falsely claiming the monster Saddam had murdered the babies. This reverse projection was soon to be made real thousands of times over inside the victim society of Iraq.

Reverse projection of evil is the meta law of U.S. psy-ops propaganda in the deadly conflicts and wars it covertly starts. This is the supreme moral program in action as “noble lies”. In this case, the air-bombing after surrender continued from U.S. and “special ally” Britain as “sanctions of Iraq” to “prevent aggression” – again the reverse projection. In fact the bombs continually fell on the water and electricity infrastructures of the defenceless people and against all lines of repair to restore either – “the line in the sand against Iraq aggression”. We might bear in mind that Wolfowitz was Undersecretary of Defense under Secretary Cheney at this time, their positions not unlike those at the time of 9-11.

Air-bombing, as Bertrand Russell long ago pointed out, is inherently fascist in erasing the killed and maimed from sight while ensuring impunity for the bombers of defenceless people.  But all such mass murder is only collateral damage to the supreme moral goal as “natural right and law”.  The air bombing of Iraq’s water and electricity supplies dressed in one big lie after another continued in slow mass-murderous destruction of the people and their social life infrastructures years on end.

Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator for the mission finally called it “genocide” (Wikipedia calls it “the Persian Gulf War”) when he resigned in 1998 to protest against “the crimes against humanity”. But no-one knew until the U.S. Department of Defense Intelligence got out that the first sweep of Iraq was planned down to the mass killing of the infants and children. September 11 in 2001 is better understood in this wider context of strategic planning by the covert U.S. terror state. For years the non-stop bombing of the people’s central life-water support system deliberately engineered mass dying from diseases of children in the hundreds of thousands.

What was predicted by Harvard Medical School researchers from the continuous civilian infrastructure bombing by the U.S. military – the deaths of over 500,000 children- was verified by the counts scientifically taken at the risk of researchers as the bombing continued month after month with NATO support.[xxix]

Full-spectrum corporate money-sequencing through Iraq under the Comprehensive Privatization Program would only be enabled by “9-11”down the road. But first the bases of advanced social life organization needed to be destroyed. The later-leaked U.S. Defense Intelligence document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” expresses the moral DNA at work. I cite the key lines of U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reports because they reveal the character of the supreme moral goal and its strategic planning.“With no domestic sources of water treatment replacement or chemicals like chlorine”and “laden with biological pollutants and bacteria”, the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report says (italics added), “epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid” will “probably take six months before the [drinking and sewage water] system is fully degraded”.

The document continues, Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks [by the one-way air bombing] with the “most likely diseases during next sixty-ninety days of diarrheal diseases (particularly children) acute respiratory diseases (colds and influenza); typhoid; hepatitis (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis including meningococcal (particularly children), cholera”. “Medical Problems in Iraq”, dated March 15, 1991, reports that the “water is less than 5 percent of the original supply – – diarrhea is four times above normal levels – – Conditions in Baghdad remain favorable for disease outbreaks”. The fifth document in June reports “almost all medicines in critically short supply” and “Gastroenteritis killing children – – in the south, 80 percent of the deaths are children”.[xxx]

In short, no limit to covert U.S. planning of indiscriminate mass murder for the supreme goal exists. The number who died in 9-11 suddenly pales in comparison. In all cases, it lets “those inimical to U.S. interests” know that there is no limit to how far the covert terror state will go for the supreme moral code not yet decoded. Combined with wars of aggression before and after 9-11, raining fire and explosions on civilians from the air so that no defense or escape can be made, saturating the fields of public meaning with big lies civilly dangerous to unmask, and bringing vast enrichment and new powers to transnational corporate conglomerates and their past and present CEO’s of the acting U.S. state – all become clear in their ultimate meaning once decoded. As the Democrat U.S. Secretary of State responded to the question of the 500,000 killed children, “we think the price was worth it”. No price is too much to pay for fulfilment of the transcendent project of the global U.S. state and its private capital rule as “the Free World”. “Those inimical to our interests” are those who oppose or are in the way of it, and thus “hate our freedom”.

The  Strategic Logic of Value through 9-11

By 2000 it was very clear to the U.S. strategic planners that the opening up of the Middle East and Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union had to be further pursued before it was too late.The great regret for the planning personnel of the coming Bush Jr. administration such as Paul Wolfowitz was that Iraq had not been taken over on the first invasion. The need for “full spectrum dominance” across the Middle East and Central Asia was thus the essential argument of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), with the prescription that no other “regional power”was able to contest this dominance.

The PNAC more explicitly recognised the strategic necessity for what Zbigniew Brzezinski had already called for in 1998 in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – namely,“the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat” to ensure public support for “the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power”. The now once untouchable Central Asia, formerly of the USSR, was thus targeted as essential not only for its vast oil reserves, but to complete rule of the “first truly global power”.

The Project for the New American Century was more explicit than Brzezinski in 2000, the year before 9-11. As former Defence Minister of Canada, Paul Hellyer, lucidly puts it in a recent address (italics added):

“The authors of this American ‘Mein Kampf’ [the PNAC] for conquest recognized the difficulty of persuading sophisticated Americans to accept such a gigantic change in policy. So they wrote the following (subsequently removed from the record):  ‘Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary changes, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.’”[xxxi]

Excepting the Vietnam War ending in military defeat – but vastly enriched armaments and connected private bank and corporate interests – the hitherto favoured strategic-plan mode had been local death squads along with pervasive American media propaganda against the victims as “communists” and “sponsored by the USSR”. But once there was no remotely equal opponent in mass-kill capacities and transnational trade treaties now bound governments within corporate-rights law as overriding domestic laws and policies, anything became permissible. The plan for the “supranational sovereignty” of “limitless capital accumulation” in “full-spectrum power”required only 9-11 to derail world-wide peace, environmental and anti-corporate globalization movements growing into uncontrollable civilian capacity across borders and continents.

People were waking up to the one-way destruction of life systems at all levels. Iraq was not alone in the genocidal clearance of formersocialist infrastructures uniting peoples across ethnic lines. A far more democratic Yugoslavia was set up and destroyed by financial means in the same year by the 1991 U.S. Foreign Operations Appropriations Law after the 1980’s multiplication of public interest rates to over 20percent primedevoured social life support structures across the world.

This was the unseen financialization base of a global war against public and worker economic and political powers that was reaping a cumulative global civilian reaction of opposition to “the plan”. 9-11 ensured against the fightback of financially dispossessed peoples with the signature reverse operation – diversion to an external “terrorist threat” that stood in the way of more sweeping transnational corporate wars on more peoples being dispossessed. Civil war in Yugoslavia long targeted by Reagan’s secret National Security Directive 133 as early as 1984 was predicted and occurred after the underlying employment and welfare structure of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia collapsed under deliberate financial destabilization. (The villain of the piece, Slobodan Milosevic, was himself a major banker).

In oil-rich Somalia, two-thirds of its territory had been leased out to four transnational oil companies by 1993 – a condition of lost grounds of life for Somalians behind the primeval civil war ever since. These are merely expressions of the underlying logic of value and the plan for its supranational rule beneath the lights of publicity as “discretion”. The examples are myriad from Latin America to South-East Asia to sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East to Israel and Canada today. But a descriptive law of the supreme moral goal holds across all diverse instances of its expression.

Strategic planning for the destruction of social life infrastructures of peoples for private money capital gain without limit is the ultimate value program throughout from the U.S. to China.

The people of the U.S. are not exempt from their own system of covert state rule, although democratic heroism here joins with the larger world against it. This is the ultimate moral struggle on earth today. The moral politics of the disorder are the enforcement of the descriptive law.  This is the ruling meta program, and it is carcinogenic by its nature. The supreme motive force it multiplies by is privately self-maximizing money possession (individual and corporate)seeking to be limitlessly more.More = Better. Less = Militant Demand for More.

The “9-11” event is the epicentre of the supreme moral objective seated in Wall Street. Itis best understood as an ultimate strategic maximizer of the italicized formula. Exactly expressed, its ultimately regulating axiology is private money inputs through all life to maximally more private money outputs in ad infinitum progression: Money à Life as Means à More Money or, formally, $àLasMà$1,2,3,4— N.

At the highest level of anchoring moral meaning, this private money-demand rule seeks to be absolute and total across borders with no quarter. “Full spectrum dominance” is its military method. Yet what distinguishes it from the Nazi rule it connects with as prior transnational corporate partner in war making is that in the U.S. private money demand multiplication at the top is the only organising value meaning. 97% of its money command is produced by private bank notes of others’ debt to the private bank system centred in Wall Street. Yet despite this very narrow centre of control,almost no global territory or field of life is outside its rule and strategic plan.

The “Trans-Pacific Partnership” is but its latest expression – focusing on private knowledge-patent money sequencing to rule out generic pharmaceuticals and other life-and-death knowledge commons from which higher profits cannot be made. The one underlying common principle throughout all phases is transnational corporate and bank money sequencing to more. Its converse is to overrideall life requirements at all levels, and strategically planned crises and wars are the advancing lines of control and enforcement.

What is not recognized through all the genocidal wars,ecocidal results, collapsing social life support systems and falling wages, however,is that this ruling value sequence rationally leads to9-11” as maximal strategic payoff progression.“Absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event”, the Project for the New American Century declared before 9-11,

“ – – the U.S risks the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity”.

Decoded, this meant in theory and practice more transnational private money sequence progression to ever more control over all still-uncontrolled assets for more and richer returns without limit of take or life destruction. But these are unspeakable lines of value meaning, and that is likely why, for example, Wikipedia keeps altering the entry of my name with conspiracy theory attributions and smears to ensure that such deep-structural diagnosis does not gain currency. That is how this system works, and analysis will provide more variations of this gagging method on 9-11 ahead.

The strategic necessity of the 9-11 event for “global security order”can even be asserted by the principal architects of the administration under which it happened, and those who observe this can be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”. Reverse projection is, as always, the essential psychological operation. The documented but shouted-down logistics included V-P Cheney having control of the air-defence of NORAD six months before the event to manage the relocation of the stand-by fighter jets to Alaska and Canada on September 11, 2001, and more broadly, no jet intervention for almost two hours until the full operation was completed.

The tell-tale signs that it was not the “foreign act of war” which was trumpeted were that President Bush Jr. continued exposed in set-up photo ops with school children during the “attack on the U.S.” Not a wheel turned in U.S. jet intervention or homeland protection. No evident defensive action or response whatever occurred.Until strategic security from public uprising and awareness was established, the blame on foreign terrorists was repeated non-stop around the clock with no-one raising a question.

Weeks thus passed in inaction. As the future director of the 9-11 Commission said years before 9-11: “The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the ‘before’ period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen ‘after’.”[xxxii]And so one war of invasion after another was made upon entirely unproven sources of the “attack” who were, in fact,states and peoples standing in the way of vast publicly owned oil-fields. These had to be taken for control by U.S. and allied state armies for the private transnational corporations employing their leaders in and out of office. Money-sequence oil to quadruple-plus more has been the story ever since.[xxxiii]If 80% of the 19 claimed suicide agents were from oil-ally Saudi Arabia, if none of their identity paperscould have survived the destroyed buildings, and if several of these “hijackers” were apparently still alive, why did none of the vaunted “free press” ever investigate 9-11?  The “noble lie” is built into every step.

The total demolition of the buildings on 9-11 was professionally executed – impossible to manage except by a technologically sophisticated state with intelligence support, as former State Secretary for Defense of Germany, Andreas von Bülow,has concisely observed at the first-order level: “To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and doing so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatuses of state and industry”.[xxxiv]Turning huge fireproofed steel-girded buildings in the centre of New York into fuming debris in a few seconds and melting car bodies nearby extends the problem of physical impossibility by jet fires. That is why the firemen were killed by being “falsely told it was a fire, not military ordnance”.The fire-squad commander who told me this asked me not to name him because of the harm that might come to him “from the media” – the 9-11 gag again. Yet the core and deciding issue is strangely avoided by all:

Whatever the technics, every step before and after 9-11 took place in accordance with the supreme moral objective and covert-state strategic methods to execute it.The smoking gun is incinerated buildings. Every step “before” and “after” goes back to the motive, the crime syndicate, the plan, the payoffs, the seizures and dispossessions.

Reducing the Auto-Determination of Nations Requires the Plan

To reduce the “auto-determination of nations practised in past centuries” for the “supranational sovereigntyof an intellectual and banker elite”could only be made possible through “full spectrum dominance” on the groundas the Project for the New American Century had independently explained, and“the catastrophic and catalyzing event” required was “9-11”, however it was accomplished.

Nicholas Rockefeller was already speaking of “the plan”eleven months before the “9-11” call for emergency help when he said to his close friend, Aaron Russo:

“There’s going to be an event Aaron…We are going to go into Afghanistan so we can put a gas pipeline to the Caspian Sea…We are going to go into Iraq to take the oil and to establish a base in the Middle East and we’re going to go into Venezuela and try and get rid of Chávez – – -Through it, you fight the War on Terror and then you go into Iraq – – the media can convince everybody that it’s real – -”[xxxv]

Lest the reader doubt this witness, it has nowhere been disavowed any more than the patriarch’s disclosure of “the plan” itself which is also available on the right-wingCato Institute website. All express the underlying but observable moral law of motion of this ruling value system –to acquire maximally more money demand for private use and control with no public or other barrier across internal and external borders by war, trade treaty or any other means whatever the sacrifice of others’ lives.They do not count in the calculus. All life is an “externality”. There is no step of the covert U.S. state that does not obey the formula.

The legality of international treaty was and remains the transnational legal method already established in the decade before 9-11 to provide the supranational framework of private transnational money-sequence rule as the moral absolute to which all conformed. Coded as “the global free market”, it is neither free nor a market, but oligopolist corporate control of supply, demand, and inert-state policy. In fact, the supreme morality as defined overrides all economic interests themselves by absolute protection of private transnational “profit opportunity” alone -with thousands of regulations across borders governed by this moral absolute. This too is testable by examination of the articles of any transnational trade treaty in the NATO control zone.

Policy structures follow in line. Tax, financial, natural resource and investment policies are structured by law and right to ignore all destruction of social and natural life and life capital bases to grow transnational private money sequences to limitlessly more.This is why the self-multiplying money sequencing with no committed life function has expanded in accordance with this moral absolute through and after “9-11”. Observe how the ultimately regulating principles of value prescription and description all conform to one axiological syntax across controllable theoretical, economic, political, and other levels of the global system.[xxxvi]

Thus whatever the world uprisings against it and however destructive of the planet’s social and ecological life bases, this law of motion remains the ruling constant. Not even the life impoverishment of the growing majority and the collapsing of the biosphere itself are allowed to modify its supranational ruling form. Even a tenth of one percent tax on its ruinous money-sequence tides or fraction of legal tender to back them is off-limits.

Not only 9-11 itself, but global policy locks of every kind are the expressions of this ruling moral absolute as inviolable and supreme, however much they destroy people’s lives without any committed life function – the normalization of private-bank compound-interest debts bleeding peoples dry, destabilizing speculations in sovereign currencies and bonds, asset-stripping buyouts and disemploying mergers, predatory repossessions of homes and loan-shark rates on poor debtors including college students with no limit, endless takeovers of productive firms by foreign multinationals with only banknotes, ecologically devastating mega-projects and loot-mining with no environmental or social criteria, lethal armaments manufacture led by bribery for sales to despots, Wall Street intermediations in every project with no life commitment, huge hauls of financial lifeblood from public privatizations to equity capital multiplying outside of securities regulations, stock-market derivatives exploiting fabricated money-sequence tides and futures at the cost of hundreds of millions more hungry people, and- in general – limitless corporate predation of societies’ domestic resources, home markets, worker pay and benefits, and public tax revenues. 

With all regulating life standards thus erased and repelled,a direct question arises: Why would the sacrifice of a few thousand mixed-nation people and two iconic buildings count against this covert value calculus if it reaped the world in payoff to the under one percent  and could always be blamed on the Enemy to achieve even more full-spectrum dominance of the ultimate objective over all life and life systems that limit its growth and universalization?

Conversely, and in particular at the geostrategic armed force level, if any society does not yet fit into the world system as function of it, armed invasion can now follow as “defense against the terrorists” who have “attacked America” in 9-11. As U.S. General Wesley Clark has also reported for the public record,this strategic line of war has been explicit in “U.S. defense” strategic planning for Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, and Syria since 9-11.

The second part of this essay is forthcoming on Global Research.

The complete text published by the Journal of 9/11 Studies can be downloaded in pdf

Professor John McMurtry is a moral philosopher specializing in social value systems and life-value analysis. His many articles and books have been internationally published and translated, and include multi-volume work for UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Notes

[i]Understandably, the improbable physics of the official account of the destruction of the WTC buildings by jet-plane impact and office fires has drawn increasing interest. The ejection outwards of steel columns and assemblies, the severing of fireproofed steel columns, the evidence of molten metal in the building remains, the acceleration rates of the descending buildings, the presence of nanothermite in the dust and the statements of numerous eyewitnesses are some of the obvious signs of controlled demolition. Detailed discussion of these and other difficulties with the official account can be found in the Journal of 9/11 Studies and on the website of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/

http://www.ae911truth.org/

My analysis of the official U.S.National Institute of Technology and Standards (NIST) accounts goes further: I argue that we have been given non-explanationby erasure.

[ii] One of the best sources of critical information about the 9/11 crimes is The 9/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, edited by James Gourley (International Center for 9/11 Studies, 2012)

 [iii]http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-26/guest-post-globalist-think-tank-suggests-using-engineered-event-excuse-war-iran//

 [iv] See Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 ( New York: Dell Publishing Co , 1983), the classic documentation and historical account. Transnational corporations involved after war was declared in 1942 included IBM (concentration camp identification system), Dupont (chemical gases), General Motors, Ford (armoured vehicles) and Union Banking (in which George Bush Jr.’s grandfather was a Director, making the family’s fortune). All ended up not only with their property intact or returned, but most with reparations for damages caused to it.

[v] An anonymous reviewer of this journal has kindly pointed out that the concept of “New World Order,” was known in Nazi-occupied Europe as “l’ordre nouveau,” (France and Belgium), “nieuweorde” (Dutch), and “nyordre” (Norwegian) in collaborationist discourses during the early 1940’s.

 [vi] After the massive defeat of the German armed forces in the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, Martin Bormann, the Deputy Fuhrer and the main linkage of the Nazi party with the industrial and financial cartels that ran the German economy, conceived a plan for post-War organization of German Nazis in Latin America, South Africa, Egypt and Indonesia called the “Organization of Veterans of the S.S.,” or Odessa by acronym. A main element of the Odessa was led by General ReinhardGehlen who was head of the Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters. He was responsible for all intelligence operations through East Europe and the Soviet Union, and in the remaining months of the war deposited the extensive files in a hiding place in the Bavarian Alps. After the war was over, he negotiated a secret treaty to work “jointly with the Americans” on the basis of the detailed files and the services of some 4000 agents. “By one estimate, some 70 per cent of the total intelligence flowing into NATO’s military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe and indeed the rest of the world was generated [from this source].” (Carl Oglesby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt”. Covert Action Bulletin, 35, Fall 1990, pp. 8–16.) Corroborating this heavily researched account, Lake Sagaris reports in her detailed study of Pinochet’s Chile (Sagaris, op. cit.) that Nazi activity and influence in Chile was particularly widespread during Pinochet’s military dictatorship from 1973–90 (cited in Graeme Mount, “The Long Shadow of Chile’s Fascism”, Literary Review of Canada, October 1996, pp. 8–10).  Pinochet’s coup occurred on September 11, 1973.

[vii]See note 8, and for ongoing exposure of the moving nexus of narco-terrorist-covert-U.S.-state operations across continents, see continual reports by globalresearch.ca.

[viii]McCoy, Alfred W.; Cathleen B. Read, Leonard P. Adams II.The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.CIA complicity in the global drug trade. New York: Harper & Row. 1972 and Jonathan Quitny, The Crimes of PatriotsA True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA.New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986.

[ix] See Michel Chossudovsky, “Terrorism with a ‘Human Face’: The History of America’s Death Squads/Death Squads in Iraq and Syria. /The Historical Roots of US-NATO’s Covert War on Syria, http://www.globalresearch.ca/terrorism-with-a-human-face-the-history-of-americas-death-squads/5317564

[x]US Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba (Top Secret), US Department of Defense, 13 March 1962, published online in a more comprehensive form by the national Security Archive on 30 April 2001, months before 9-11. (I am indebted to James Bamford, Body of Secrets. New York: Doubleday from which the text quotation comes, and to Jeremy Keenan, “How the U.S. Has been sponsoring terrorism in the Sahara”, New Internationalist, December 12, 2013, p. 35). Lest one wonder why this mass-murderous plot to terrorize and kill American and other citizens was not kept secret by the covert U.S. state, and indeed released just before 9-11, one needs to bear in mind that Rockefeller and the Right do not object to elite knowledge of “the plan” to liquidate national sovereignty and self-determination for private banker world rule with the collaboration of the U.S. corporate media in not reporting it. Supreme arrogance and helplessness of opponents to do anything about it are part of the supreme morality, and freedom of information at the top long after the action of seems internal to the design of U.S. supreme power. It validates it as de facto reality.

[xi]Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1998 :“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211). On the international front, Democrat national security adviser Brzezinski advised : “The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” (p. xiii) and“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”(p.40). The 9-11 event managed to fulfil all these objectives at once. 

[xii] I document and diagnose these world trends and their economic value doctrine and its bases in depth in Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System, Toronto: Garamond/ University of Toronto Press, 1998.

[xiii] While this analysis does track the David Rockefeller thread of “the plan”, it by no means restricts explanation to this dominant thread of moral meaning.  Many other dominant money-sequence interests are in interlocked involvement with the supreme value purpose and its system enactment. In this interlock, for example, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo own Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco along with Deutsche Bank, BNP, and Barclays, these corporations in turn having heavy involvement in supranational armaments and media systems. We may observe the wider interlocking system of transnational money-sequence control of global industry across domains in the Rockefeller portfolio of Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods. (See concise summary at http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-federal-reserve-cartel-the-eight-families/2508). Wherever the U.S. state goes in demand, crime and  war it is to enforce this private transnational money sequence system. 

 [xiv] Cited by <http://freedom Cited by <http://freedomlaw.com/coffee.html> which lists among its sponsors the Cato Institute, the Heritage, and the Mackinac Centre for Public Policy.

 [xv] This complex point is spelled out in the second edition of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/ From Crisis to Cure. London: Pluto and Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013.

[xvi] The most developed account of this and the above citation and their context is by Daniel Estulin, The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. Walterville:Trine Day. 2007 (also translated in Spanish).  Estulin’s grandfather was a senior KGB agent and his father was expelled from the Soviet Union for his activities on behalf of free speech.

[xvii] I am indebted to Paul Hellyer, former Minister of Defence of Canada, for this fact and its disclosure.

[xviii] I define reverse projection as attributing to others what you are doing yourself as the reason for attacking them.  U.S. foreign policy is defined by this generic reversal operation.  The reversals have five standard operations: i. claiming humanitarian assistance to victims of a regime when in fact bombing or attacking them; ii. standing up to terrorism when by far the greater terrorism is perpetrated by doing so; iii. covertly supporting the very terrorist organisations as a justification for these dominant terrorist activities; iv. imposing the extremest form of terror, torture, to “stop the terrorists”; v. planning, organising and waging the supreme crime of humanity, a war of aggression, to compel the other society to “comply with the laws and norms  of the community of nations”.

[xix] Cited in archive.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5166United States.

[xx] Social science report of the Leo Strauss school of thought and its national security disciples is provided by Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

 [xxi] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 60.

[xxii]Cancer Stage, ibid, spells out this great aporia in Marx’s theory at both life capital and money capital ends.

[xxiii]Rich introductory overview of these connections is provided by physician Dr. Jim Macgregor, “Fascism in America” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Neo-fascism_America.html.  I originally spelled out the principles and behaviours in common in “Fascism and Neo-Conservatism: Is There a Difference?” (1983) Praxis International  (1983) 1, 86-102.

[xxiv] This historical pathogenesis is tracked in depth in McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure. Ibid, in both first and second editions, 1999/2013.

[xxv] I spell this meaning out in formal depth in “Behind Global System Collapse: The Life-Blind Structure of Economic Rationality”, Journal of Business Ethics (2012), 108:1, 49-61.

[xxvi] Pareto, Vilfredo, (1971 [1906]), Manual of Political Economy, New York: A.M. Kelley, p. 12.

[xxvii] John Rawls assumes the self-maximizing principle as the ultimately regulating principle of rationality in A Theory of Justice when he says: “From the standpoint of the original position, it is rational for parties to suppose that they do want a larger share – – The concept of rationality invoked here – – is the standard one familiar in social theory” – –  (A Theory of Justice . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p 143).  As to how this first premise shared by “social theory” as “standard” leads to entailments that are not tracked is spelled out step by step in John McMurtry, “Human Rights v. Corporate Rights: Understanding Life-Value, the Civil Commons, and Social Justice,” Studies in Social Justice, 5(1) (Summer, 2011), 11-61.

[xxviii]NYT, Sept 23 1990.

[xxix] The fuller description and documentation of the war crimes and crimes against humanity by the U.S. in Iraq from 1990 on can be found in Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy . London: Pluto, 2002, pp. 30-36.

[xxx] Originally available on <www.gulflink.osd.mil>, but the information has been since removed from this site since it was cited in Value Wars.   See also:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/mcs/2004/00000020/00000002/art00002

[xxxi] “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.  A report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000.”  The description of this “new Mein Kampf” is from Hon. Paul Hellyer, “The G20 Fiddles While The Planet Burns”, Global Breakthrough Energy Conference, Sunday, November 11, 2012.

 [xxxii] See note 47 and page context for the bright idea from the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission” long before 9-11.

 [xxxiii] The average price of oil was $24.08 per barrel in August 2001, $28.27 in 2000, and  $10.20 in 1998.

[xxxiv]Tagesspiegel, 13. Jan. 2002.  Andreas von Bulow is an especially relevant analyst on this score as almost uniquely a renowned scholar in covert-state activities and a former minister of defence.

[xxxv]<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGF6DDd8Uto>.  I am indebted to software engineer Kip Warner for this reference.

[xxxvi] This framework of diagnosis of the system 9-11 expresses is spelled out in systematic depth in The Cancer  Stage of Capitalism / From Crisis to Cure forthcoming April 2013, the second edition of the original 1999 study. 

 

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State, The Grand Plan for a New World Order

Iran’s radical pseudo-Marxist cult Mohajedeen e Khalq, better known by its acronym MEK, is somewhat reminiscent of the Israel Lobby’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in that it operates somewhat in the shadows and is nevertheless able to punch well beyond its weight by manipulating politicians and understanding how American government functions on its dark side. MEK promotes itself by openly supporting a very popular hardline policy of “democratic opposition” advocating “regime change” for Iran while also successfully selling its reform credentials, i.e. that it is no longer a terrorist group. This latter effort apparently convinced then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 2013 as she and President Barack responded to the group’s affability campaign by delisting MEK from the government list of terrorist organizations.

This shift in attitude towards MEK was a result of several factors. First, everyone in Washington and the Establishment hates Iran. And second, the Executive Order 13224, which designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, ipso facto defines any group fighting against it as one of the good guys, justifying the change

MEK is best described as a cult rather than as a political movement because of its internal discipline. Its members are, according to the testimony of those who have somehow escaped, subjected to considerable indoctrination best described as brainwashing. Though not exactly imprisoned, adherents are kept isolated and separated insofar as possible and cannot contact their families. Their possessions are collectivized so they have no money or other resources. If they are in contravention of the numerous rules that guide the organization they are punished, including physically, and there are reports of members being executed for trying to escape.

The current head of the group is Maryam Rajavi, the wife of the deceased co-founder of MEK, Massoud. She is reported to be politically savvy and speaks excellent English learned in part to enable her to communicate with adoring American politicians. The group itself was founded in 1965. Its name means “People’s Holy Warriors,” derived from its Marxist/populist roots and its religiosity. It was not unlike the Taliban which developed in adjacent Afghanistan. During the 1970’s it rebelled against the Shah and was involved in bombing and shooting American targets. It executed U.S. Army Lt. Col. Lewis Hawkins in 1973 as he was walking home from the U.S. Embassy and in 1975 it killed two American Air Force officers in their chauffer driven car, an incident that was studied and used in CIA training subsequently as an example of how not to get caught and killed by terrorists. Between 1976 and 1978 the group bombed American commercial targets and killed three Rockwell defense contractors and one Texaco executive.

MEK welcomed the Iranian revolution and also the occupation of the U.S. Embassy but soon fell afoul of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. It eventually moved to join Iran’s enemy Saddam Hussein in Iraq and participated on the Iraqi side in the bloodletting that followed when the two countries went to war in 1980-8. For that reason alone, MEK is particularly hated by most Iranians and the repeated assertion that it is some kind of “Iranian democracy” alternative is ridiculous as the people in Iran would never accept it. In terms of the duplicity surrounding its marketing, it is reminiscent of Iraqi con artist Ahmed Chalabi, who also had little following inside Iraq but was able to convince Pentagon geniuses like Paul Wolfowitz that he represented some kind of democratic movement. At the time Chalabi was also secretly working for Iran.

MEK was protected by Saddam and later by the U.S. invaders who found a weapon to use against Iran useful. They were housed in Camp Ashraf near Baghdad, and later, after Ashraf was closed, at so-called Camp Liberty. In 2013, when the Iraqis insisted that they go elsewhere the President Barack Obama facilitated their removal to Albania under the auspices of the United Nations refugee program, with the $20 million dollar bill being footed by Washington. The organization’s political arm, the National Council of Resistance or Iran (NCRI), meanwhile established itself in Paris under the control of Maryam Rajavi, in part to place it closer to the American and European sources of its political legitimacy and financing. In 2001, to make itself more palatable, the group had renounced violence.

The MEK folks in Albania have become a bit of a problem. Through various additional migrations they have multiplied and now number around 3,000 and have largely adhered to their cultish ways even though one of the original objectives of the move into Europe was to somehow deprogram and “deradicalize” them in an environment far removed from Iran-Iraq. Part of the problem is that the Albanian government likes the U.N. subsidies used to support the MEK associates, but it will not let them work as they have no legal status and they cannot resettle or lead normal lives. So they resort to criminal activity that includes promotion of fraudulent charities, drug trafficking and even a form of slavery in which their own people are sold and traded as laborers. The temporary solution has been to move the MEK out of a rundown university property in the capital Tirana to a more remote site in northern Albania dubbed Ashraf-3, but local people believe that that is just kicking the can down the road and that MEK should be forced to go somewhere else, preferably in the United States, which seems to like them so much.

Also, Albania is majority Muslim and has been subjected to the same Saudi Arabian ultra-conservative wahhabi promotion backed by lots of money that has plagued many states in the Middle East. Albanians accustomed to the mild form of Turkish Islam suddenly found themselves confronting the Sunni-Shia divide and also the MEK as agents of both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Many outraged Albanians see the unreformed MEK in their midst as a terror time bomb waiting to go off, but the government, under pressure from the U.S. Embassy has not sought their removal.

Meanwhile back in the United States everything involving the non-deradicalized MEK is just hunky dory. MEK and the NCRI are enemies of Iran and also seem to have plenty of money to spend, so they buy high ranking American speakers to appear at their events. Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton have appeared regularly, as have Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Jeanne Shaheen. At a 2015 appearance in Paris, Giuliani brought the crowd to its feet by calling for “Regime change!” after shouting out that the “Ayatollah must go!” In August 2017, Senators Roy Blunt, John Cornyn, Thom Tillis and Carl Levin met with Rajavi in Paris. Newt Gingrich also considers himself a friend of the Iranian resistance while Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor and wife of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell spoke in Paris for five minutes in 2015 and was paid $50,000. The payments made to the other politicians have not been revealed.

And then there is the Saudi and Israeli angle. Saudi Arabia is now the major funder of MEK/NCRI. It’s intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal spoke before the group in 2017. Israel funded the group in its early days and its external spy service Mossad continues to use MEK stay-behinds in Iran to assassinate scientists and tamper with computer systems. The CIA, which recently expanded its anti-Iran task force, it also working closely with MEK. And Giuliani, Bolton, Chao are all in the White House inner circle, which, not coincidentally, is baying for Iranian blood.

Lost in all of the above is any conceivable American interest. It is difficult to even make the claim that Iran threatens the United States or any vital interest and the drive to decapitate the Mullahs, both literally and figuratively, really comes from Riyadh and Tel Aviv. And there is potential collateral damage where it really might matter as MEK cultists continues to sit and fester in a holding pattern maintained by Washington in the heart of Europe. What comes next? War of some kind with Iran is appearing to be increasingly likely given recent remarks by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, threating to crush the Iranians. Is Washington intending to send the MEK warriors on sabotage missions inside Iran, something like the resistance to the Germans in World War 2? Maybe Giuliani and Bolton know the answer to that question.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Iran’s Mohajedeen e Khalq: MEK Money Sure Can’t Buy Love

«Soberania» de Bruxelas, não de Washington?

May 29th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

Hoje, 21 dos 27 países da União Europeia (depois da Brexit), com cerca de 90% da população da União, fazem parte da NATO, cujas “normas” permitem que os EUA mantenham, desde 1949, a posição de Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa e de todos os outros comandos-chave; eles permitem que os Estados Unidos determinem as escolhas políticas e estratégicas da Aliança, concordando, em segredo, especialmente com a Alemanha, França e Grã-Bretanha, tornando-as aprovadas pelo Conselho do Atlântico Norte, no qual, de acordo com as “regras” da NATO, não há voto ou decisão maioritária, mas as decisões são sempre tomadas por unanimidade.


Steve Bannon – o antigo estratéga de Donald Trump, teórico do nacional-populismo – exprimiu o seu apoio entusiástico à aliança Lega-Movimento 5 Stelle para «o governo da mudança». Numa entrevista (Sky TG24, 26 maggio)  declarou:«Durante Março, a questão fundamental, em Itália foi a questão da soberania. O resultado das eleições foi ver estes italianos que queriam recuperar a soberania, controlar o seu país. Basta de regras que chegam de Bruxelas».

No entanto, não diz «basta de ordens que chegam de Washington».

Não é apenas a União Europeia que exerce pressão sobre a Itália para orientar as suas escolhas políticas, dominada pelos poderosos círculos económicos e financeiros, especialmente os alemães e os franceses, que temem uma rotura das “normas”, úteis aos seus interesses.

É exercida uma forte pressão  sobre a Itália, pelos Estados Unidos, de maneira menos evidente, mas não menos agressiva, que temem uma ruptura dos “preceitos” que subordinam a Itália aos seus interesses económicos e estratégicos.

Isto faz parte das políticas que Washington adopta para a Europa, através de diversas administrações e com métodos diferentes, perseguindo sempre o mesmo objectivo: manter a Europa sob a influência dos EUA.

A ferramenta fundamental desta estratégia é a NATO. O Tratado de Maastricht estabelece, no art. 42,   que “a União respeita as obrigações de alguns Estados membros, que acreditam que a sua defesa comum é conseguida através da NATO”. E o protocolo n. 10 sobre a cooperação, estabelece que a NATO “continua a ser a base da defesa” da União Europeia.

Hoje, 21 dos 27 países da União Europeia, com cerca de 90% da população da União, fazem parte da NATO, cujas “normas” permitem que os EUA mantenham, desde 1949, a posição de Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa e de todos os outros comandos-chave; eles permitem que os Estados Unidos determinem as escolhas políticas e estratégicas da Aliança, concordando, em segredo, especialmente com a Alemanha, França e Grã-Bretanha, tornando-as aprovadas pelo Conselho do Atlântico Norte, no qual, de acordo com as “regras” da NATO, não há voto ou decisão maioritária, mas as decisões são sempre tomadas por unanimidade.

A adesão dos países de Leste à NATO – anteriormente membros do Pacto de Varsóvia, da Federação Jugoslava e mesmo da URSS – permitiu aos Estados Unidos ligar esses países (além da Ucrânia e da Geórgia, de facto, já na NATO), mais a Washington do que a Bruxelas.

Washington conseguiu, assim, empurrar a Europa para uma nova Guerra Fria, colocando-a  na primeira linha da frente, de um confronto cada vez mais perigoso com a Rússia, útil aos interesses políticos, económicos e estratégicos dos Estados Unidos.

Típico é o facto de que, na semana em que a Europa se debatia arduamente sobre a “questão italiana”,desembarcava em Antuérpia (Bélgica), a 1ª Brigada Blindada da 1ª Divisão de Cavalaria dos EUA,proveniente de Fort Hood, no Texas, sem causar qualquer reacção significativa. Desembarcaram 3.000 soldados, com 87 tanques Abrams M-1, 125 veículos de combate Bradley, 18 canhões móveis Paladin, 976 veículos militares e outros equipamentos, que serão posicionados em cinco bases na Polónia e enviados daí para contornar o território russo.

Continua-se a “melhorar a prontidão e a letalidade das forças USA na Europa”, destinando 16,5 biliões de dólares  desde 2015.

Assim, enquanto desembarcavam na Europa os tanques enviados por Washington, Steve Bannon incitava os italianos e os europeus a “reconquistar a sua soberania” que se encontra na posse de Bruxelas.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original em italiano :

«Sovranità» da Bruxelles, non da Washington

Il manifesto, 29 de Maio de 2018

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

 

VIDEO por PandoraTV :

 

 

Links:

https://tg24.sky.it/politica/2018/05/26/maria-latella-intervista-steve-bannon.html

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:9e8d52e1-2c70-11e6-b497-01aa75ed71a1.0019.01/DOC_2&format=PDF

https://taskandpurpose.com/army-ironhorse-brigade-deployment-russia/

  • Posted in Português
  • Comments Off on «Soberania» de Bruxelas, não de Washington?

[1]

Podemos bombardear o mundo e desfazê-lo em pedaços, mas não podemos bombardear o mundo e construir a paz” (Michael Franti)[2]

 David e Golias num mundo às avessas

O Presidente Donald Trump não parece partilhar da opinião de Georges Clémenceau de que “a guerra é um assunto demasiado sério para ser deixado nas mãos dos militares”. Esta frase talvez adquira um peso ainda maior quando cruzada com o comentário acerbo cunhado pelo mesmo estadista francês, segundo o qual “na História, milagrosamente, a América é a única nação que passou directamente da barbárie para a decadência sem percorrer a habitual etapa da civilização.”

Com efeito, pouco depois da sua tomada de posse enquanto 45º Presidente dos Estados Unidos, em Janeiro de 2017, Trump concedeu poderes acrescidos ao Pentágono e à CIA. Ao fazê-lo, cedeu à pressão militar na esperança de que este acréscimo de poder ajudasse a derrotar mais rapidamente o chamado Estado Islâmico e a enfrentar os seus outros inimigos de forma mais eficiente.

A decisão de Trump depressa se traduziu num aumento dramático de ataques teleguiados com drones levados a cabo no Yemen, no Afeganistão, no Paquistão e na Somália – países com os quais os EUA não estão oficialmente em guerra – e apenas veio exacerbar a devastadora “Guerra contra o Terror”. Segundo o grupo de controlo sem fins lucrativos Airwars[3]não é, assim, surpreendente que Trump apenas precisasse de sete meses para ultrapassar o número de mortes de civis ocorridas ao longo dos oito anos da presidência de Obama. Uma série de documentos fornecidos por um informador e publicados pelo The Intercept[4],, revelou, por sua vez,os mecanismos internos deste programa no Afeganistão, concluindo que perto de nove em cada dez ataques teleguiados com drones causaram a morte de alvos não intencionais. Heather Linebaugh, uma analista do exército americano que trabalhou no âmbito do referido programa, fez um depoimento condenatório[5]neste sentido.

Mais ainda, no dia 13 de Abril de 2017, a força aérea americana largou a bomba convencional mais potente do arsenal dos EUA, alcunhada de “A mãe de todas as bombas” (MOAB), em cima de um complexo de caves do Daesh situado na província afegã de Nangarhar, numa área remota da fronteira com o Paquistão. Enquanto o Presidente Trump se referia ao ataque como a “mais uma missão muito, muito bem sucedida”, o ex-Presidente do Afeganistão e aliado americano, Hamid Karzai, declarou que “isto não é guerra contra o terror, mas o abuso mais desumano e brutal do nosso país enquanto terra para testar armas novas e perigosas”. Em idêntica reacção contra este bombardeamento, Dennis Kucinich, que foi duas vezes candidato à presidência e é representante democrático da Câmara dos Deputados americana, perguntava: “Como é que o Presidente Trump, depois de uma campanha durante a qual questionou repetidamente as aventuras americanas no Iraque e na Líbia e até alertou o Presidente Obama para que não bombardeasse a Síria depois do uso alegado de gás venenoso por parte do governo sírio, caiu na armadilha destas guerras? Como é que Trump, depois de ter questionado os modos de agir do Pentágono e da CIA e tendo ele próprio sido vítima de fugas ao nível do governo, permitiu que fugas de informação e a desinformação nos conduzissem até ao limiar da guerra?” Kucinich alertou ainda para o facto de “os bombardeamentos estarem a aumentar nos vários países e de o número de mortes de civis inocentes continuar a crescer ampliando o ressentimento contra a América. Se não invertermos rapidamente a marcha, haverá um desencadeamento global de forças que poderá ser irremediável.”[6]

Vale a pena sublinhar que esta super bomba foi usada contra uma das milícias mais pequenas que os EUA enfrentam um pouco por todo o lado. Com efeito, estima-se que o ISIS-Khorasan conte 700 combatentes no Afeganistão contra os 8.500 elementos das tropas terrestres dos EUA e os 180.000 elementos das tropas terrestres afegãs que à data combatem no país. Anteriormente a este novo inimigo, 430.000 membros das tropas afegãs e coligadas já se tinham mostrado incapazes de subjugar o inimigo comum mais antigo, os Taliban, cuja força pouco mais representava do que um dozeavo das forças coligadas. E isto sem referir, claro, o imenso desequilíbrio existente entre os adversários em termos de poder de fogo, de tecnologia e dos respectivos comandos.

Assim, após 16 anos de presença americana no Afeganistão – o “túmulo dos impérios” -e nove meses depois de Trump ter inaugurado a presidência, o New York Timesanunciava na primeira página que “dentro em breve, os empregados da Embaixada americana em Cabul deixarão de se deslocar em helicópteros Chinook para atravessarem a estrada que conduz à base aérea situada a menos de 100 jardas fora da actual zona de segurança da Green Zone”[7], dura constatação de que se tornara demasiado difícil defender até mesmo as zonas mais protegidas da cidade, dos ataques dos Taliban.

Na realidade, existem muitos estudos sérios sobre a al-Qaeda e as suas diferentes emanações, incluindo o Daesh, que demonstram que os Estados Unidos e os seus aliados têm seguido cegamente o plano estratégico que estas organizações terroristas desenharam a nível mundial. Ficou claramente provado, sobretudo no livro atribuído a Abu Bakr Naji, intitulado “Gestão da selvajaria: o estado mais crítico pelo qual a nação islâmica deverá passar”, de que o objectivo é “atrair o Ocidente até ao pântano e deixar que se atole nele o mais profunda e activamente possível” e “enervar e envolver duradoiramente os Estados Unidos e o Ocidente numa série de empreendimentos além-mar de longa duração”, que os levam a minar as suas próprias sociedades, a despender os seus recursos e a aumentar o nível de violência. A dinâmica implementada foi amplamente revisitada num dos seus livros[8por William Roe Polk, um especialista americano muito afamado da história das revoltas no Médio Oriente. Polk revelou um padrão constantemente replicado ao longo da história recente. Os invasores são, naturalmente, rejeitados pelas populações invadidas, que lhes desobedecem, primeiro em pequena escala. A desobediência suscita uma resposta vigorosa da parte do invasor e esta, por sua vez, aumenta a oposição e o apoio popular à resistência. O ciclo de violência que se segue começa a escalar até as forças invasoras se verem obrigadas a retirar-se ou a recorrer a métodos e meios equivalentes ao genocídio, para atingirem os seus fins.

Esta dinâmica de violência extrema, em que os EUA e os seus aliados foram inteiramente apanhados, envolveu custos particularmente avultados. Scott Atran, especialista famoso em organizações terroristas, calculou que a execução “dos ataques do 11 de Setembro custaram entre $400,000 e $500,000 ao passo que a resposta militar e as operações de segurança dos EUA e dos aliados representam 10 milhões de vezes mais”. Atran chegou à conclusão evidente de que “se considerarmos exclusivamente o custo-benefício, este movimento violento teve um sucesso enorme, muito superior até àquele que inicialmente havia sido imaginado por Bin Laden, e foi sempre aumentando. Por aqui se mede o arsenal bélico assimétrico do estilo Jujitsu. No fim de contas, quem pode afirmar que hoje estamos melhor do que ontem ou que o perigo generalizado está em declínio?” Este recorde, avisa Atran, “deveria inspirar uma mudança radical ao nível das nossas contra estratégias”.

A razão pela qual a América deixou de ser grande

A postura dos Estados Unidos no mundo não é a mesma de há uns tempos atrás. A sua longa ingerência política e constantes aventuras militares no mundo árabe e muçulmano, bem como o seu suporte cego a Israel[9], em nada a favoreceram. Bem pelo contrário, esta atitude contribuiu, em boa medida, para provocar danos irremediáveis no tocante à supremacia geral dos Estados Unidos no pós-Guerra Fria.

O antigo embaixador dos EUA na Arábia Saudita, Chas W. Freeman Jr.,  relatava em 2014, que “em tempos, os Estados Unidos empenharam-se em reconfigurar o Médio Oriente. Consequentemente, tanto a região como a nossa posição naquela zona estão hoje em ruínas. Se quisermos ser honestos, temos de admitir que o estado deplorável do Médio Oriente não é apenas um produto das dinâmicas da região, mas que também resulta da nossa incapacidade de pensar e agir estrategicamente.”[10]Para Freeman, esta situação decorre, no essencial, do facto de os EUA terem respondido ao fim da era bipolar com um misto de negação, de incoerência estratégica e de inconstância. E “tanto os falsos pressupostos como os objectivos irrealistas dos EUA contribuíram para criar o caos actual no Médio Oriente.”

Mais recentemente[11], Chas Freeman reiterou a sua opinião ao afirmar que “estas guerras infrutíferas e contraproducentes até agora custaram aos Estados Unidos pelo menos $5.6 triliões (…). Pagámos por acompanharmos a nossa intervenção militar no mundo muçulmano com uma combinação de dinheiro emprestado e de desinvestimento nas infra-estruturas locais, físicas e humanas. Daqui não só resulta a imposição de um fardo esmagador da dívida[12]à nossa posteridadecomo também a falta de crescimento e o declínio da competitividade económica dos EUA.” Freeman lamentava ainda o facto de os americanos se terem acostumado à vida sob vigilância e ao estado de apreensão permanente no tocante a possíveis actos de terrorismo. Era previsível que as suas liberdades acabassem por sofrer com esta condição inabitual, que a presidência aumentasse o seu poder, o “Congresso viesse a reforçar instintos cobardes de manada” e a classe média americana empobrecesse “ao mesmo tempo que enriquecia o complexo militar-industrial”. Trata-se, concluía, de “modificações estruturais da república e do modo de vida americanos que afectarão ambos durante décadas”.

De acordo com Philip Alston[13], o relator especial da pobreza extrema e dos direitos humanos das Nações Unidas, “o sonho americano tem vindo a transformar-se rapidamente na ilusão americana” e “em vez de implementarem os compromissos admiráveis dos seus fundadores, os Estados Unidos de hoje têm provado serem excepcionais de um modo problemático que contrasta chocantemente com a sua imensa riqueza e o seu compromisso inicial para com os direitos humanos.” São estas algumas das principais conclusões enunciadas por Ph. Alston em Dezembro de 2017, após uma missão de averiguação de duas semanas nos EUA. O seu relatório final estará disponível na Primavera de 2018 e será apresentado no Conselho dos Direitos Humanos em Genebra, em Junho de 2018.

A América de hoje é de facto uma pálida imagem do modelo de república constitucional com que os pais fundadores sonharam e que implementaram. A 4 de Julho de 1900, dia aniversário da adopção da Declaração de Independência, os representantes do partido democrático dos Estados Unidos reuniram-se em convenção nacional. Criaram uma plataforma[14]através da qual reafirmavam a sua fé na “proclamação imortal dos direitos humanos inalienáveis” e o seu “compromisso para com a Constituição, em harmonia com os pais da República”. Entre vários princípios reiteraram: “Declaramos mais uma vez que os poderes de todos os governos instituídos entre os homens assentam no consentimento dos governados” e “impor a um povo um governo à força, significa substituir métodos republicanos por métodos imperialistas”. “Somos a favor da extensão da influência da república junto de outras nações, mas acreditamos que essa influência não deveria ser exercida através da força e da violência, mas através do poder de persuasão de um exemplo mais nobre e honroso”. “Opomo-nos ao militarismo. Este significa conquista além-fronteiras e intimidação e opressão intra-fronteiras. Significa o braço forte que sempre foi fatal às instituições livres. Foi dele que fugiram milhões de cidadãos na Europa. Ele imporá aos nossos povos amantes da paz um exército armado permanente, impostos que representam um fardo desnecessário e constituirá uma ameaça constante para as suas liberdades.” E “garantimos que nenhuma nação consegue suportar um sistema meio republicano e meio imperialista. Alertamos o povo americano para o facto de que o imperialismo além-fronteiras rapidamente e inevitavelmente  conduzirá ao despotismo intra-fronteiras.” Quem, no mundo e na própria América, acreditaria numa reafirmação desta natureza, mesmo que hoje fosse proclamada pelo Presidente Trump, baseada em metade do povo americano?

Ninguém explicou tão este estado de coisas de forma tão elegante quanto a personagem fictícia da série de televisão HBO chamada “The Newsroom”. Na sequência de abertura aparece um pivô, que participa num painel sobre jornalismo. Quando um estudante lhe pergunta “Pode dizer porque motivo a América é o maior país do mundo?”, o pivô dispara dizendo que “A América não é o maior país do mundo” e inicia um discurso em que explica porque não o é. Indica ao estudante que “caso um dia participe acidentalmente num escrutínio, há certas coisas que deveria saber. Uma delas é: não existem absolutamente provas nenhumas que confirmem que somos o maior país do mundo. Ocupamos o 7º lugar em literacia, o 27º em matemática, o 22º em ciência, o 49º em esperança de vida, o 178º em mortalidade infantil, o 3º em rendimento médio do agregado familiar, o 4º em força de trabalho e o 4º em exportações. Apenas somos líderes mundiais em 3 categorias: no número de cidadãos encarcerados per capita; no número de adultos que acreditam que os anjos são reais; e nos custos de defesa, onde despendemos mais do que os 26 países seguintes todos juntos e dos quais 25 são aliados. Ora, nada disto é culpa de um jovem estudante de 20 anos, embora o senhor pertença, sem sombra de dúvida, a uma das piores gerações de todos os tempos.”

Depois de uma pausa, o pivô acrescenta “Já fomos (o maior país do mundo). Defendemos aquilo que estava certo. Combatemos por razões de ordem moral. Promulgámos leis, anulámos leis, por motivos de ordem moral. Travámos guerras contra a pobreza, não contra os pobres. Sacrificámo(-nos), preocupámo-nos com os vizinhos, cumprimos aquilo que defendíamos e nunca nos vangloriámos disso. Construímos coisas grandes, importantes, conseguimos avanços tecnológicos impensáveis, explorámos o universo, curámos doenças, acarinhámos os maiores artistas a nível mundial e criámos a maior economia do mundo. Chegámos às estrelas, actuámos como homens. Aspirámos à inteligência, não a menosprezámos. Ela não fez sentirmo-nos inferiores. Não nos identificámos com quem elegemos nas últimas eleições e não nos deixámos assustar facilmente. Fomos capazes de ser todas estas coisas e de as fazer porque éramos pessoas informadas… por grandes homens, que eram venerados. O primeiro passo para a resolução de um problema é reconhecer que o mesmo existe. A América já não é o maior país do mundo.”.[15]

Tanto não o é que o inquérito WIN/Gallup International levado a cabo em 65 países apurou que, para as 66.000 pessoas inquiridas, “os EUA representam a maior ameaça para a paz no mundo”.[16]

O Pentágono responde à velha questão “Estará a América em declínio?

Desde que Ibn Khaldun, o grande historiógrafo e historiador[17]– precursor das disciplinas modernas da historiografia, da sociologia, das ciências económicas e da demografia –  criou as bases para este tipo de estudos, a questão do triunfo e da queda de civilizações, impérios e nações tornou-se o tema favorito dos historiadores, passados e contemporâneos. As nações passaram a ter ciclos de vida como os humanos, evoluindo da juventude para a maturidade e da velhice para a morte. Não houve, até à data, nenhuma excepção à regra.

O Secretário de Estado dos EUA, Dean Gooderham Acheson, era conhecido por ter desempenhado um papel fulcral ao redigir a doutrina de Truman, cujo objectivo declarado era contrariar a expansão geopolítica soviética durante a Guerra Fria. Esta doutrina tornou-se depois o fundamento da política externa dos EUA e conduziu, em 4 de Abril de 1949, à criação da OTAN, uma aliança militar de 29 estados, que se mantém activa até hoje. Acheson também é conhecido por ter dito em 1962, que “A Grã Bretanha perdeu um Império e ainda não encontrou outro papel para desempenhar”.

Talvez se possa, hoje, dizer o mesmo dos Estados Unidos, à luz da política externa incoerente, senão caótica, da administração Trump. Paradoxalmente, o uso do slogan “Make America great again” durante a campanha para as eleições presidenciais de 2016 reforça este propósito, uma vez que a frase – regularmente utilizada, tanto por políticos republicanos como democratas, depois de ter sido inicialmente cunhada por Ronald Reagan em 1980 – é uma prima afastada do slogan “Make Britain great again”, utilizado pelo político conservador britânico Disraeli, no século XIX. Claramente, tanto a versão britânica como o seu equivalente contemporâneo americano referem-se à noção de uma “grandeza” perdida ou por recuperar.

De acordo com The American Conservative[18], desde início de 2000 tem havido um diálogo permanente entre académicos, decisores políticos e membros do meio mais abrangente dos negócios estrangeiros americano, no sentido de perceber se o poder americano está em declínio. Na realidade, porém, a questão remonta aos anos 1980, com a edição do livro do historiador da Universidade de Yale, Paul Kennedy, intitulado The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,e a publicação de outros livros importantes sobre o mesmo tema, da autoria dos académicos David Calleo e Robert Gilpin. Muito embora a controvérsia em torno do declínio se dissipasse quando a União Soviética implodiu e a bolha económica do Japão rebentou, ela “manteve-se dormente durante o ‘momento unipolar’ da década de 1990, tornando a reacender com a rápida emergência da China enquanto grande potência, no início de 2000”, e a consequente deslocação do poder geopolítico e económico do Ocidente para o Oriente.

Contudo, se atendermos ao historiador francês Pierre Melandri[19], o declínio começou muito antes da publicação do livro de  Paul Kennedy, que granjeou um imenso sucesso em 1987, ano em que, pela primeira vez desde 1917, os EUA perderam o estatuto de maior nação credora do mundo. Melandri escreve que o Primeiro ministro japonês já havia diagnosticado o processo de declínio em 1973, comentando que “os Estados Unidos deixaram de ser o Sol rodeado por planetas para passarem a ser apenas um planeta entre outros”.

Em 2002, Andrew J. Bacevich concluiu o seu livro[20], escrito após o 11 de Setembro, com uma observação fundamental. O autor assinalava que a questão que exigia uma atenção imediata e à qual os americanos não podiam continuar a furtar-se, não era saber se os Estados Unidos se tinham tornado um poder imperial, mas que tipo de império pretendiam ser. Porque o facto de os actores políticos persistirem em ocultar esta questão, ou seja “entregarem-se ao mito da inocência americana ou a fantasias quanto ao desbloqueamento dos segredos da história” aumenta a possibilidade de receberem respostas erradas. Assim sendo, “não só se coloca a questão do desaparecimento do império americano, mas também a do grande perigo que paira por cima daquilo que é conhecido como sendo a república americana”.

Em 2011, a blogger chamada Danios[21]inscreveu, ano a ano, as guerras americanas numa linha do tempo revelando assim que, desde a sua fundação, em 1776, os Estados Unidos estiveram em guerra durante 214 dos seus 235 anos de existência. Por outras palavras, só durante 21 anos civis é que os Estados Unidos não estiveram em guerra e o período isolacionista da Grande Depressão foi o único em que o país esteve cinco anos sem guerra (1935-1940)!

À parte a blogoesfera, um editorial do New York Times[22]afirmava que os Estados Unidos estão continuamente em guerra desde o 11 de Setembro e que neste momento têm 240.000 tropas no activo e na reserva, em pelos menos 172 países e territórios. O editorial terminava dizendo que “senadores relutantes em pagar despesas de saúde e de missões diplomáticas básicas do Departamento de Estado tinham aprovado um orçamento da defesa de 700 bilhões de $, para 2017-2018, um valor muito superior ao montante pedido por Trump. Não é certo esta largueza manter-se. Mas aquilo que, na realidade, importa saber é quantas aventuras militares mais o público americano está disposto a tolerar.”

Dentro da mesma veia, Richard N. Haas, presidente do Conselho das Relações Externas – frequentemente descrito como sendo o think tank mais influente dos Estados Unidos em matéria de negócios estrangeiros – argumenta no seu livro mais vendido[23], que as regras, as políticas e as instituições que prevaleceram e dirigiram o mundo desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial se esgotaram no quadro de um mundo “desorientado” que os Estados Unidos não conseguem moldar à sua imagem e aos seus interesses. Haas pensa que os EUA continuam a ser o maior país neste mundo, mas que a sua política externa por vezes o tornou pior – tanto por aquilo que a América fez como por aquilo que não conseguiu fazer.

O mesmo conselho ou antes, alerta, foi dado por Robert Kagan, uma das vozes conservadoras americanas mais poderosas. Num artigo publicado na Brookings[24], afirmou que “a ordem do mundo liberal estabelecida após a Segunda Guerra Mundial poderá estar a chegar ao fim, sendo disputada por outras forças, tanto no interior como no exterior”. Concluiu escrevendo que “se o próximo presidente seguir uma via  destinada a preservar apenas os estritos interesses da América; se se focalizar essencialmente no terrorismo internacional  – o último desafio para a ordem mundial actual (…) – então poderá não estar muito longe o colapso da ordem mundial, com todas as suas implicações”.

Muito significativamente, em Junho de 2017 foi publicado um estudo do Pentágono[25], que fez correr rios de tinta, tanto nos EUA como além-Oceano. Vale a pensa realçar que a encomenda e a preparação deste relatório datam de Junho de 2016 ou seja, seis meses antes do fim da administração Obama, e que o mesmo foi completado em Abril de 2017 ou seja, após quatro meses de administração Trump. No seu âmbito, foram feitas consultas alargadas a vários representantes do Pentágono e a um punhado de think-tanks americanos de tendência mais neoconservadora.

Entre as conclusões mais surpreendentes figura a constatação de que “o statuo quoacalentado e alimentado por estrategas americanos após a Segunda Guerra Mundial e que durante décadas constituiu a ‘batida’ principal do Departamento de Defesa, não só fracassou como está, na verdade, a colapsar. Consequentemente, tanto o papel dos Estados Unidos no mundo como a sua percepção do mesmo também poderão estar a mudar de forma substancial.” Aos olhos da “incontestada liderança americana, a restruturação volátil da segurança internacional aparece cada vez mais como insustentável”. Outra conclusão importante é que os autores do relatório concordam com a declaração da Primeira ministra britânica Theresa May proferida durante o seu discurso em Filadélfia[26], seis dias após a tomada de posse de Donald Trump: “Acabaram-se os dias em que a Grã Bretanha e a América intervinham em países soberanos na esperança de moldarem o mundo à sua própria imagem (…), (doravante) a Grã Bretanha apenas intervirá onde estiverem em jogo os interesses nacionais britânicos”.

Este relatório extraordinário parece soar a toque de finados das duvidosas “coligações dos empenhados” dirigidas pelos EUA e conduzir-nos para uma era irreversível de pós-império.

Depois do império: a caminho de uma grande estratégia colectiva de “Grande Convergência”?

Se formos realistas, é impossível negar os factos, os porquês e as razões que orientam o nosso mundo em transformação acelerada. Já não existem antigos e novos impérios globais, erguem-se nações jovens e os cidadãos comuns cada vez obtêm mais poder.

Mas como se forjou esta realidade sem precedentes? Por que motivos se torna cada vez mais difícil para estados outrora poderosos, instituições, corporações, grupos de interesses, partidos e dirigentes políticos, defender os seus redutos ou impor as suas agendas? E se o mundo actual se afasta, de facto, inexoravelmente da tutela da única super potência – a América – e que nenhuma outra super potência deseja ou se mostra capaz de o dirigir, então que mundo é este? E, acima de tudo, de que modo pode esta “aldeia global” sui generisatender-lhe e gerir não só ameaças e mudanças transnacionais nascentes, mas também as novas oportunidades? Joseph Nye escreveu uma análise abrangente[27]sobre o poder e o seu exercício no decurso dos últimos quinhentos anos. Realçou que, até à data, os tradicionais marcadores do poder estavam conotados com o eixo conquistado por grandes impérios e nações, essencialmente graças a factores como o controlo das colónias, do comércio, da finança e de vastas populações, a primazia na Revolução Industrial, o domínio das rotas de navegação, de armas nucleares e convencionais, e o número de homens armados. Mas, escreve Nye, a idade da informação global do século XXI está a tornar estes parâmetros rapidamente obsoletos e a redesenhar o mapa das relações de poder. Verificam-se principalmente duas deslocações do poder: uma transição do poder entre estados e uma difusão do poder entre actores não estatais. Nye concluiu o seu estudo afirmando que os Estados Unidos precisarão de uma estratégia para lidar com a “ascensão do resto” – tanto entre estados como entre actores não estatais. Para tal, vão necessitar de “uma estratégia de poder inteligente e de uma narrativa que destaque alianças, instituições e redes que respondam ao novo contexto da era da informação global. Em poucas palavras, para terem sucesso no século XXI, os Estados Unidos precisam de descobrir como ser um poder inteligente”.

Examinando mais profundamente as mudanças da natureza do poder neste século, Moisés Naím[28]observa que o poder  está a perder valor desde que “começou a ser mais fácil obtê-lo, mais difícil utilizá-lo e mais fácil perdê-lo.” Hoje já não se compra tanta coisa com o poder como no passado e as batalhas para a sua obtenção compensam cada vez menos. Daqui resulta que o poder se está a espalhar e que os grandes actores há muito estabelecidos tendem a perder cada vez mais terreno a favor de poderes novos e mais pequenos. O poder está a passar “da força bruta para o cérebro, de norte para sul e do ocidente para oriente, de antigos mastodontes corporativos para start-ups ágeis, de ditadores entrincheirados para as pessoas nas praças das cidades e no ciberespaço”. Na realidade, insiste Naím, o poder está a decair. Um dos argumentos mais convincentes que o autor apresenta para demonstrar o quanto o exercício do poder se transformou, prende-se com os conflitos armados. Adaptando uma frase de Churchill, Naím escreve que “nunca no campo do conflito humano houve a possibilidade de fazer tanto contra tantos e a um custo tão baixo”. Contudo, os “micropoderes, embora raramente vençam, tornam a vida mais difícil aos grandes jogadores” negando-lhes a “vitória” na maior parte dos conflitos assimétricos, também conhecidos por guerras da quarta geração.

Pelo seu lado, desafiando a visão partilhada pela maior parte dos estrategas ocidentais – que reconhecem que o domínio do Ocidente tem vindo a diminuir, mas continuam confiantes de que as suas ideias fundadoras como a democracia, o capitalismo e o nacionalismo secular continuarão a expandir-se garantindo que a ordem ocidental prevaleça  – Charles Kupchan[29]argumenta que o mundo está preparado para a diversidade política e ideológica.  Assim, os poderes emergentes “não esperarão pela liderança ocidental nem convergirão para o modo ocidental”. Kupchan sustém que “a ascensão do Ocidente foi o produto de condições sociais e económicas específicas da Europa e dos Estados Unidos”. Explica também que à medida que nascem outras nações, estas “seguem o seu próprio caminho para a modernidade e abraçam as suas próprias concepções quanto à ordem interna e internacional”. O autor termina concluindo que a ordem ocidental não será substituída por um novo grande poder ou por outro modelo político dominante, e que o século XXI não pertencerá à América, à China, à Ásia, nem a nenhum outro país. Ele será o “mundo de ninguém (e), pela primeira vez na História, existirá um mundo interdependente sem centro de gravidade ou guardião global”. Esta situação exigirá uma estratégia para desenhar um acordo histórico entre o Ocidente e o resto emergente “criando novos consensos em matérias como a legitimidade, a soberania e a governança”.

A perspectiva de Kupchan é amplamente partilhada por Kishore Mahbubani, um escritor singapuriano muito respeitado, professor e diplomata. Num dos seus livros[30]afirma que estamos a tornar-nos mais integrados e interconectados e que “o potencial para uma nova civilização global pacífica tem vindo a desenvolver-se debaixo dos nossos olhos sem nos apercebermos disso”. Porém, os desafios mantêm-se e está por resolver um certo número de falhas geopolíticas importantes. Para a sua materialização, Mahbubani é da opinião de que: os políticos devem, ao nível mundial, modificar os seus preconceitos e aceitar que vivemos num só mundo; os interesses nacionais devem ser contrabalançados com os interesses globais; os EUA e a Europa devem ceder algum poder (incluindo no seio do FMI, do Banco Mundial e no Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas); a China e a Índia, a África e o mundo islâmico devem ser integrados; e a ordem mundial precisa de ser reconstruída. Para estes e muitos outros autores e comentadores eminentes, a “comunidade internacional” não tem alternativa melhor e mais sábia senão embarcar numa viagem de salvação do “império à comunidade”. Amitai Etzioni[31]advogava ao argumentar que um “choque de civilizações” pode ser evitado e que a nova ordem mundial não precisa de se parecer com a América. Porque, sustenta, “os valores orientais, incluindo a espiritualidade e o Islão moderado, têm um lugar legítimo na filosofia pública global em evolução”.

Ao abordar esta questão numa palestra[32], o Professor Edward Saïd observava que “a parte verdadeiramente mais fraca da tese do choque de culturas e de civilizações é a separação rígida assumida entre elas, contra a evidência avassaladora de que o mundo de hoje é, de facto, um mundo de misturas, de migrações e de cruzamentos, de fronteiras atravessadas. Uma das maiores crises que afectam países como a França, a Grã Bretanha e os EUA deriva da tomada de consciência, que se vem verificando por todo o lado, de que nenhuma cultura ou sociedade é apenas uma coisa. Minorias consideráveis, africanos do Norte em França, afro-caribenhos e populações oriundas da Índia na Grã Bretanha, elementos asiáticos e africanos neste país (isto é, na América), contestam a ideia da persistência de uma civilização que se orgulhava de ser homogénea. Não existem culturas nem civilizações isoladas. Qualquer tentativa feita no sentido de as separar em compartimentos estanques, na perspectiva de Huntington e dos seus congéneres, atenta à sua variedade, diversidade, complexidade de elementos, hibridez radical. Quanto mais insistirmos na separação das culturas, mais imprecisos nos tornamos em relação a nós próprios e aos outros. A noção de uma civilização excludente é, na minha maneira de pensar, uma civilização impossível.”

O professor Saïd depois colocou aquela que considera ser uma “verdadeira questão”: “quer trabalhemos em prol de civilizações separadas, quer trabalhemos no sentido de uma via mais integrativa, e talvez mais difícil, tentando encarar as diferentes civilizações como um todo, nenhum de nós conseguirá compreender os seus contornos exactos, mas podemos intuir, sentir, estudar a sua existência”. Concluiu a sua palestra citando algumas linhas do grande poeta, autor e político da Martinica, Aimé Césaire: “ o trabalho do homem apenas começou restando vencer toda a violência enraizada nas pregas da nossa paixão, nenhuma raça possui o monopólio da beleza, da inteligência, da força e há espaço para todos no momento do nosso encontro com a vitória”.

 

Amir Nour

Notas

  1. Investigador argelino, em relações internacionais, autor do livro “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (“The Orient and the Occident in time of a new Sykes-Picot”), Edições Alem El Afkar, Argel, 2014: pode ser descarregado gratuitamente em: http://algerienetwork.com/blog/lorient-et-loccident-a-lheure-dun-nouveau-sykes-picot-par-amir-nour/(French)
    http://algerienetwork.com/blog/العالم-العربي-على-موعد-مع-سايكس-بيكو-ج/ (Arabic) 
  2. Canção de Michael Franti & Spearhead, “Bomb the World”: http://youtu.be/ICL-40nkOPA
  3. Ler o artigo de Newsweekhttp://www.newsweek.com/trump-has-already-killed-more-civilians-obama-us-fight-against-isis-653564
  4. Ler The Intercept, “The Drone Papers”: http://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
  5. Heather Linebaugh, “I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes onThe Guardian, 29 Dez. 2013:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military
  6. Ler o artigo de opinião intitulado “Dennis Kucinich: The ‘Mother of All Bombs’ is actually the mother of all warmongering”, Fox News, 14 Abril, 2017. 
  7. Rod Nordland, “S. Expands Kabul Security Zone, Digging In For Next Decade”, The NYT, 16 Set., 2017. 
  8. William R. Polk, “Violent politics: A history of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq”, Harper Perennial, 2008. 
  9. Além de um voto da Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas (128 a favor, 9 contra, 35 abstenções), que considerou “nula e sem efeito” a declaração deDonald Trumprelativa a Jerusalém como capital de Israel (ler o artigo no The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/21/united-nations-un-vote-donald-trump-jerusalem-israel), um inquérito de opinião da  Gallup International Association (GIA) , realizado em Dezembro de 2017 em 24 países, revelou o desacordo generalizado no tocante à decisão do presidente dos EUA: mais de dois terços (71%) discordam do objectivo (59% firmemente). Comentando o inquérito, o presidente do GIA, Kancho Stoychev, declarou: “É raro um inquérito registar uma tal unanimidade relativamente a um único tema, o que revela uma dor profunda no seio do mundo muçulmano, do Médio Oriente à Ásia. Porém, a reacção geral à decisão de Trump também é maioritariamente negativa na Europa. Parece que se evaporaram décadas de confiança no papel equilibrador da diplomacia dos EUA.”
  10. Ver “Obama’s Foreign Policy and the Future of the Middle East”, 21 Julho 2014. 
  11. Chas W. Freeman, “The Middle East in the New World Disorder”, 11 Dezembro, 2017. 
  12. A partir de Novembro de 2017, a dívida pública americana rondava os $20.59 triliões. Os EUA ocupam o primeiro lugar nesta classificação. 
  13. Ler http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22546&LangID=E
  14. Ler a platforma: http://www.presidency.uscb.edu/edu/ws/?pid=29587.Home
  15. Ver o video intitulado “A Great Speech About Why America Isn’t Great Anymore”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=q49NOyJ8fNA&app=desktop
  16. Ler no New York Post, 5 Janeiro 2014. 
  17. O autor britânico  Arnold J. Toynbeedisse da obra de Ibn Khaldun “Muqaddimah” ou “Prolegomena” (Introdução)— que abrange a história mundial da humanidade até aos dias do autor e levanta a questão das razões que fazem com que nações ascendam ao poder e daquelas que causam a sua queda —: “uma filosofia da história que, até à data, é indubitavelmente a maior obra desta natureza alguma vez criada por uma mente em qualquer momento e num qualquer lugar.” [FonteEncyclopædia Britannica, 15ª ed., vol. 9, p. 148]. 
  18. Christopher Layne, “Is the United States in Decline?”, The American Conservative, Agosto 8, 2017.
  19. Pierre Melandri, “La fin de l’empire américain ? ” (The end of the American Empire?), in “La fin des empires” (The end of Empires), Patrice Guenniffey & Thierry Lentz (dir.), Le Figaro Histoire/Perrin, Paris, 2016. 
  20. Andrew J. BacevichAmerican Empire: The Realities and the Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy”, Harvard University Press, 2002. 
  21. Ver “America Has Been At War 93% of the Time”: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/america-war-93-time-222-239-years-since-1776.html
  22. Ler “America’s Forever Wars”, The New York Times, Outubro 22, 2017. 
  23. Richard Haas, “A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order”, Penguin Press, 2017. Ver: https://www.cfr.org/book/world-disarray
  24. Robert Kagan, “The Twilight of the Liberal World Order”, Brookings, Janeiro 24, 2017. 
  25. Ler “At Our Own Peril : DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World”: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1358
  26. Ler a transcrição official da palestra em: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-to-the-republican-party-conference-2017, 26 January, 2017. 
  27. Joseph S. Nye, “The Future of Power”, PublicAffairs, New York, 2011. 
  28. Moisés Naím , “The End of Power”, Basic Books, New York, 2013. 
  29. Charles A. Kupchan, “No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest and the Coming Global Turn”, Oxford University Books, 2012. 
  30. Kishore Mahbubani, “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World”, PublicAffairs, 2013. 
  31. Amitai Etzioni, “From Empire to Community”, Pelgrave Macmillan, 2004. 
  32. Edward Said, “ The Myth of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’”, Media Education Foundation, 1999; Ler a transcrição: http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-The-Myth-of-Clash-Civilizations-Transcript.pdf 

[1]Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the book “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot”(“The Orient and the Occident in time of a new Sykes-Picot”), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014: downloadable free of charge, by clicking on the following links:

http://algerienetwork.com/blog/lorient-et-loccident-a-lheure-dun-nouveau-sykes-picot-par-amir-nour/  (French)
http://algerienetwork.com/blog/العالم-العربي-على-موعد-مع-سايكس-بيكو-ج/(Arabic)

  • Posted in Português
  • Comments Off on O crepúsculo da Idade do Império: de quem será este mundo?

Memorial Day Is Based on a Lie

May 29th, 2018 by Jacob G. Hornberger

Today, Memorial Day, Americans across the land will hear the same message: that U.S. soldiers who have died in America’s foreign wars and foreign interventions have done so in the defense of our rights and freedoms. It is a message that will be heard in sporting events, memorial services, airports, churches, and everywhere else that Memorial Day is being commemorated.

There is one big thing wrong, however. It’s a lie. None of those soldiers died protecting our rights and freedoms. That’s because our rights and freedoms were never being threatened by the enemy forces that killed those soldiers.

Let’s work our way backwards.

Syria. The Syrian government has never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who has died in Syria was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Niger. The Niger government has never invaded the United States and tried to take away our freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who has died in Niger was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Iraq. The Iraq government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who has died in Iraq was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Afghanistan. The Afghan government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who has died in Afghanistan was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms. Even al-Qaeda never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Its terrorist attacks, including the one on 9/11, were retaliation for U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.

Panama. The Panama government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in Panama was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Grenada. The Grenada government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in Grenada was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Vietnam. The North Vietnam government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in Vietnam was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

Korea. The North Korean government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in Korea was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

World War II.

The Japanese government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in the Pacific theater in World War II was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms. The Japanese attack on U.S. Naval forces on Hawaii was intended solely to prevent the U.S. Navy from interfering with Japanese attempts to acquire oil in the Dutch East Indies in response to President Roosevelt’s oil embargo, whose aim was to provoke the Japanese into attacking the United States so that the U.S. could get into the European part of war.

The German government never invaded the United States and try to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in the European theater in World War II was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms. Germany wasn’t even able to cross the English Channel to invade England, much less the Atlantic Ocean to invade the United States. In fact, the last thing that Germany wanted was war with the United States, as reflected by Germany’s refusal to react to President Roosevelt’s repeated provocations to get Germany to attack the United States. Germany only declared war on the United States after FDR successfully provoked the Japanese into attacking the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor, in the hope that this would provide a back door to entry into the war in Europe.

World War I. The German government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any U.S. soldier who died in World War I was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms, especially given the ridiculous aims of U.S. intervention into the war: to “end all wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy,” a word that isn’t even in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, it is perversely ironic that it was U.S. interventionism into the conflict that contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II.

The Spanish-American War. The Spanish government never invaded the United States and tried to take away our rights and freedoms. Therefore, any soldier who died in the Spanish-American War was not killed protecting our rights and freedoms.

So, why the lie? Why keep saying that U.S. soldiers have died protecting our rights and freedoms?

Because the truth is too embarrassing and too shameful, especially when one is an ardent supporter of all or some of these foreign wars and interventions. It’s easier to salve one’s conscience by simply buying into the lie, a lie, needless to say, that is advanced in every public (i.e., government) school across the land.

The idea is that if everyone is made to believe the lie, then everything is fine.

That’s one big reason why statists resent us libertarians. We don’t countenance the lie. We speak the truth. None of those U.S. soldiers who are being honored today died protecting our rights and freedoms because the forces that killed them were never trying to take away our rights and freedoms.

Libertarians are much like therapists. We cause people to face truth and reality. But the problem is that all too many people don’t want truth and reality. They like living the life of the lie. It’s comfortable. It’s safe. It enables them to continue supporting the foreign wars and interventions and thanking the troops for protecting our rights and freedoms, even if it isn’t so.

Oftentimes, people go a real therapist to figure out why they are feeling depressed, despondent, or anxious. After one or two visits, however, many of them quit and run for the hills. That’s because the therapist is causing them to confront the truth and reality regarding their personal situation. But that’s not what they want. They want to be healed without having to confront their life of the lie and their denial of reality.

It’s the same with so many Americans who continue to support foreign wars and foreign interventions. You can see it especially at big sporting events, where the public-address announcer asks everyone to stand up and honor the troops who are protecting our rights and freedoms. Most everyone immediately rises and, practically with tears in his eyes, begins cheering. The same lie is repeated in church pulpits across the land. The congregation dutifully recites, “Let us pray for the troops, who are protecting our rights and freedoms.”

Meanwhile, there is mass drug addiction and alcoholism across the land. Ever-rising suicide rates. Mass murders for unexplained reasons. All this mostly by people who spent 12 years of their lives, six hours a day, five days a week, being molded and formed by government officials in public schools.

Add to all that the loss of liberty that Americans have suffered at the hands of their own government, which now wields the omnipotent power to assassinate them, incarcerate them without trial, torture them, and secretly spy on them, all with the aim of protecting their rights and freedoms. And with hardly anyone noticing how perversely ironic all this is, especially on Memorial Day, when so many Americans are honoring the troops who, they are convinced, died protecting our rights and freedoms.

It’s what a life of the lie — a life that denies reality — does to a society.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Memorial Day Is Based on a Lie

America’s Incredible Shrinking Influence

May 29th, 2018 by Rep. Ron Paul

Just two weeks after President Trump pulled the US from the Iran nuclear agreement, his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, issued 12 demands to Iran that could never be satisfied. Pompeo knew his demands would be impossible to meet. They were designed that way. Just like Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia in July, 1914, that led to the beginning of World War I. And just like the impossible demands made of Milosevic in 1999 and of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003, and so many other times when Washington wanted war. These impossible demands are tools of war rather than steps toward peace.

Secretary Pompeo raged at Iran. The mainstream news media raged at Iran. Trump raged at Iran. But then a strange thing happened: nothing. The Iranians announced that they remained committed to diplomacy and would continue to uphold their end of the nuclear agreement if the Europeans and other partners were willing to do the same. Iranian and European officials then sought out contacts in defiance of Washington in hopes of preserving mutually-beneficial emerging commercial relations.

Washington responded to the European snub by threatening secondary sanctions on European companies that continued doing business with an Iran that had repeatedly been found in compliance with its end of the bargain. Any independent European relationship with Iran would be punished, Washington threatened. But then, again, very little happened.

Rather than jump on Washington’s bandwagon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made two trips to Russia in May seeking closer ties and a way forward on Iran.

Russia and China were named as our prime enemies in the latest National Security Strategy for the United States, but both countries stand to benefit from the unilateral US withdrawal from the Iran deal. When the French oil company Total got spooked by Washington threats and pulled out of Iran, a Chinese firm eagerly took its place.

It seems the world has grown tired of neocon threats from Washington. Ironically the “communist” Chinese seem to understand better than the US that in capitalism you do not threaten your customers. While the US is threatening and sanctioning and forbidding economic relations, its adversaries overseas are busy reaping the benefits of America’s real isolationism.

If President Trump’s canceled meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un remains canceled, North and South Korea have shown that they will continue with their peacemaking efforts. As if Washington was no longer relevant.

I’ve often spoken of the unintended consequences of our aggressive foreign policy. For example, President Bush’s invasion of Iraq only helped Iran – our “enemy” – become more dominant in the Middle East. But it seems new consequences are emerging, and for the neocons they must be very unintended: for all of its bellicosity, threats, demands, sanctions, and even bombs, the rest of the world is increasingly simply ignoring the demands of Washington and getting on with its own business.

While I am slightly surprised at this development, as a libertarian and a non-interventionist I welcome the growing irrelevance of Washington’s interventionists. We have a far better philosophy and we must work hard to promote it so that it can finally be tried after neocon failure becomes obvious to everyone. This is our big opportunity!

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on America’s Incredible Shrinking Influence

Venezuela has warned that neighbouring Colombia’s partnership with NATO represents “a serious threat to peace and regional stability.”

President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Friday that Colombia would be working with the West’s military alliance as a “global partner” from this week, becoming the first Latin American country to do so.

In a statement, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said: “Venezuela denounces once more before the international community the intention of Colombian authorities to introduce, in Latin America and the Caribbean, a foreign military alliance with nuclear capacity, which in every way constitutes a serious threat for peace and regional stability.”

Caracas confirmed the historical position of the region in distancing itself from the politics and wars of Nato and from “any other army or military organisation that desires to apply forces to the suffering of the people, to impose and guarantee the hegemony of a particular political and economic model.”

Venezuela has come under intense pressure from foreign powers seeking regime change with a range of sanctions imposed by the US and European Union.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Colombia’s New NATO Partnership ‘a Threat to Peace,’ Venezuela Warns

Trump’s Crude and Idiotic Letter to Kim Jong-un

May 29th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Below is the text of president Trump’s somewhat crude and idiotic letter to Chairman Kim Jong-un dated May 24, 2018. (It also has some grammatical errors.)

In the word’s of Senator Ed Markey at the Mike Pompeo Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearings:

The Libya model, as Kim Jong Un has been interpreting it, is that the leader of the country surrenders their nuclear capability only to then be overthrown and killed”.

That is the unspoken agenda of US foreign policy. And that is precisely what Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton had in mind in relation to North Korea.

Moreover, last October, (former) CIA chief Mike Pompeo (now Secretary of State) intimated the issue of CIA political assassinations with regard to Kim Jong-un.

In the days following the sending of this letter, Trump rectified his position with regard to the Singapore Summit.

At the time of writing, it is still uncertain as to whether the summit will take place.

 

 

«Sovranità» da Bruxelles, non da Washington

May 29th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

Oggi 21 dei 27 paesi della Ue (dopo la Brexit), con circa il 90% della popolazione dell’Unione, fanno parte della Nato, le cui «regole» permettono agli Stati uniti di mantenere, sin dal 1949, la carica di Comandante supremo alleato in Europa e tutti gli altri comandi chiave; permettono agli Stati uniti di determinare le scelte politiche e strategiche dell’Alleanza, concordandole sottobanco soprattutto con Germania, Francia e Gran Bretagna, facendole quindi  approvare dal Consiglio Nord Atlantico, in cui secondo le «regole» Nato non vi è votazione né decisione a maggioranza, ma le decisioni vengono prese sempre all’unanimità.


Steve Bannon –  ex stratega di Donald Trump, teorico del nazional-populismo – ha espresso il suo entusiastico sostegno all’alleanza Lega-Movimento 5 Stelle per «il governo del cambiamemto». In una intervista (Sky TG24, 26 maggio) ha dichiarato: «La questione fondamentale, in Italia a marzo, è stata la questione della sovranità. Il risultato delle elezioni è stato quello di vedere questi italiani che volevano riprendersi  la sovranità, il controllo sul loro paese. Basta con queste regole che arrivano da Bruxelles».

Non dice però «basta con queste regole che arrivano da Washington».

Ad esercitare pressione sull’Italia per orientarne le scelte politiche non è solo l’Unione europea, dominata dai potenti circoli economici e finanziari soprattutto tedeschi e francesi, che temono una rottura delle «regole» funzionali ai loro interessi.

Forte pressione viene esercitata sull’Italia, in modo meno evidente ma non meno invadente, dagli Stati uniti, che temono una rottura delle «regole» che subordinano l’Italia ai loro interessi economici e strategici.

Ciò rientra nelle politiche che Washington adotta verso l’Europa, attraverso diverse amministrazioni e con metodi diversi, perseguendo lo stesso obiettivo: mantenere l’Europa sotto l’influenza statunitense.

Strumento fondamentale di tale strategia è la Nato. Il Trattato di Maastricht stabilisce, all’Art. 42, che «l’Unione rispetta gli obblighi di alcuni Stati membri, i quali ritengono che la loro difesa comune si realizzi tramite la Nato». E il protocollo n. 10 sulla cooperazione stabilisce che la Nato «resta il fondamento della difesa» dell’Unione europea.

Oggi 21 dei 27 paesi della Ue, con circa il 90% della popolazione dell’Unione, fanno parte della Nato, le cui «regole» permettono agli Stati uniti di mantenere, sin dal 1949, la carica di Comandante supremo alleato in Europa e tutti gli altri comandi chiave; permettono agli Stati uniti di determinare le scelte politiche e strategiche dell’Alleanza, concordandole sottobanco soprattutto con Germania, Francia e Gran Bretagna, facendole quindi approvare dal Consiglio Nord Atlantico, in cui secondo le «regole»  Nato non vi è votazione né decisione a maggioranza, ma le decisioni vengono prese sempre all’unanimità.

L’ingresso nella Nato dei paesi dell’Est – un tempo membri del Patto di Varsavia, della Federazione Jugoslava e anche dell’Urss – ha permesso agli Stati uniti di legare questi paesi, cui si aggiungono Ucraina e Georgia di fatto già nella Nato, più a Washington che a Bruxelles.

Washington ha potuto così spingere l’Europa in una nuova guerra fredda, facendone la prima linea di un sempre più pericoloso confronto con la Russia, funzionale agli interessi politici, economici e strategici degli Stati uniti.

Emblematico il fatto che, proprio nella settimana in cui in Europa si dibatteva aspramente sulla «questione italiana», è sbarcata ad Anversa (Belgio), senza provocare alcuna significativa reazione, la 1a Brigata corazzata della 1a Divisione statunitense di cavalleria, proveniente da Fort Hood in Texas. Sono sbarcati 3.000 soldati, con 87 carri armati Abrams M-1, 125 veicoli da combattimento Bradley, 18 cannoni semoventi Paladin, 976 veicoli militari e altri equipaggiamenti, che saranno dislocati in cinque basi in Polonia e da qui inviati a ridosso del territorio russo.

Si continua in tal modo a «migliorare la prontezza e letalità delle forze Usa in Europa», stanziando dal 2015 16,5 miliardi di dollari.

Proprio mentre sbarcavano in Europa i carri armati inviati da Washington, Steve Bannon incitava gli italiani e gli europei a «riprendersi  la sovranità» da Bruxelles.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto,  29 maggio 2018

  • Posted in Italiano
  • Comments Off on «Sovranità» da Bruxelles, non da Washington

Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had every reason to expect that his first official appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be the usual slam-dunk as mostly obedient, respectful Senators aligned with his testimony.   

Instead of the typically gratuitous compliments and undeserved deference, there was a display (albeit a minority) of some moral courage with a rare slice of truth on Capitol Hill, epitomizing the real-time requirements of a Senator’s job:   to be skeptical, provide oversight and demand accountability from every Federal government witness, no matter the rank – once referred to as ‘grilling the witness.”

Besides fraternizing with America’s most privileged citizens, endless rounds of lavish Capitol Hill receptions, wide ranging international travel opportunities (aka junkets), a liberal vacation  policy and exorbitant benefits out of step for the minimal accomplishments actually achieved, the current Senate paradigm has allowed too many Members to degenerate into a protuberance of greedy, sniveling, weak-minded buffoons with no genuine regard for their constituents or what was once the greatest democracy on the planet.

Days earlier, as the nation’s top diplomat, Pompeo delivered the Trump Administration’s controversial “After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy”  in a decidedly undiplomatic speech to a less than enthusiastic audience at the Heritage Foundation.   That aggressive strategy included a dozen doomed-to-fail, untenable demands  that were little more than a precursor for military intervention and regime change.

Before the hearing began, Pompeo unexpectedly read a crude letter from President Trump to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un cancelling the June 12th summit citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” and concluded with the moronic “If you change your mind …, please do not hesitate to call or write me.”   To date, Trump has softened his stance against a meeting and hints the June summit may occur on schedule.

As the hearing began, most Senators expended their allotted time by steadfastly avoiding the massive foreign policy blunder that had just been dropped in their laps.  The following excerpts focus on two Members, Sen. Rand Paul (R-SC) (1:58) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) (2:19/3:27) since they had the most extensive dialogue with Pompeo and because they gave Pompeo the most grief.   Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Or) (3:34) and Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) (3:15) questioned implications of the upcoming Authority for Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Sen. Paul launched into a rapid-fire critique exposing the inadequacies of Pompeo’s Iran Plan  with a much needed dose of reality as he methodically decimated the strategy, beginning with the requirement that Iran reveal the ‘military dimensions’ of its nuclear program:

Let’s substitute Israel for Iran.  Does anyone believe that Israel is going to reveal the military dimensions of their nuclear program? ”   Paul inquired whether the Saudi’s would be willing to discuss “anything they’ve done to develop nuclear weapons or reveal the military dimensions of their nuclear program.  So really what you’re asking for is something they (Iranians) are never going to agree to.”

Regarding the requirement that Iran end its proliferation of ballistic missiles , Paul explained that

“.. when we supply weapons, the Saudis buy weapons, the Saudis have a ballistic weapon program, they (Iran) respond to that.   The Saudis and their allies …spend more than eight times Iran so when you tell Iran that you have to give up your ballistic missile program but you don’t say anything to the Saudis, you think they are ever going to sign?”

If you leave Saudi Arabia and Israel out of it and look at Iran in isolation, that’s not how they (Iran) perceive it.   We want Iran to do things that we’re not willing to ask anybody else to do and that we would never do.”

Regarding Pompeo’s demand to end military support for the Houthi rebels:

Once again, you’re asking them to end it but you’re not asking the Saudis to end their bombardment of Yemen.  If you look at the humanitarian disaster that is Yemen, it is squarely on the shoulders of the Saudis.”

Paul then drew attention to the demand for Iran to withdraw all its forces from Syria noting that

ISIS is getting weapons from Qatar and Saudi Arabia” and that “Saudi Arabia and Qatar are ten times the problem.  The people who attacked us came from Saudi Arabia. We ignore all that and lavish them with bombs.”

“It was naïve to pull out of the Iran Agreement and in the end, we’ll be worse off for it.”

Pompeo was Stunned and the Silence was Deafening.   Pompeo had absolutely no reaction to Paul’s devastating analysis of US foreign policy in the Middle East, offering no explanation, no excuse, no correction or thoughtful response; nor did any other Senator present dare step into the swamp.

Next up was Sen. Markey citing Trump’s reference to North Korea’s ‘tremendous anger and open hostility” and inquiring:

How did you expect North Korea to react to comparisons between Libya and North Korea, between the fates of Kim Jong Un and Qaddafi.  Why would you expect anything other than anger and hostility in reaction to these comparisons?”

Markey was referring to Vice President Mike Pence’s  comment that “Kim Jong Un will end up like Qaddafi if he does not make a deal”  and National Security Advisor John Bolton’s  “we have very much in mind the Libya model of 2003-2004.”

As background, in 2003 Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi relinquished his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons allowing inspectors to oversee and verify the process.  By 2011, with US and NATO instigation, Libya experienced a violent overthrow of its government with Qaddafi brutally murdered.   And who can ever forget former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s macabre glee “we came, we saw, he died.”

Pompeo expressed “misunderstanding taking place with this idea of a Libya model” and that he “hadn’t done the work to find out what that was…when Libyans chose to give up their nuclear weapons in 2003.  That’s the Libya model.”

Markey explained:

The Libya model, as Kim Jong Un has been interpreting it, is that the leader of the country surrenders their nuclear capability only to then be overthrown and killed.  Why would you not think that Kim would not interpret it that way as it continued to escalate with Bolton and Vice President talking about the Qaddafi model? .…why would you think there would be any other interpretation at what happened to Qaddafi at the end of his denuclearization which is that he wound up dead?  Why would that not elicit hostility from a negotiating partner three weeks prior to sitting down..”

From there Markey and Pompeo bantered back and forth with Pompeo consistently failing to grasp the connection between Qaddafi’s 2003 disarmament agreement and US military interference in Libya in 2011 that resulted in Qaddafi’s death as sufficient reason for North Korea to feel threatened.   No matter how precise the clarification, Pompeo continued to respond as a dense, one-dimensional thinker unable to wrap his mind around logic that challenged his view of a simulated reality, as if looking at the same object through a different lens.

Committee chair Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn) agreed with Markey.

“I opposed so strongly what the Obama administration did in Libya was exactly the argument you are laying out right now…to have someone like Qaddafi who gave up their nuclear weapons and then go kill him to me sent exactly the signal that you are laying out right now.”

Corker then announced that he

just had discussion with Secretary’s staff and he is now 15 minutes late for a meeting.  I’m going to allow a couple of comments but going to stop it in five minutes.”

 Markey immediately inquired

Who is the meeting with Mr. Secretary.. if you are not going to stay here and answer questions from us.. can you not push that meeting back another 15 minutes…

Corker:

this is getting a little bit, this type of discourse, I’m sorry, I’m the one doing this. I’ve been very generous”

Markey:

“…but  we agreed to two seven- minute question periods and it is being ended here for two members..”

Markey continued until Sen. Corker gaveled his time had expired.

As the Foreign Relations Committee contemplates an upcoming markup and vote on a Forever  AUMF next week, it will be a time for other Committee Senators to step outside the Matrix and dig deep to find their own moral fortitude.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Mike Pompeo Challenged at Senate Foreign Relations Committee with regard to North Korea, Iran, Yemen

The Kim-Trump Singapore Summit, Will it Take Place?

May 29th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

What is unfolding is a process whereby US intelligence is playing a key “behind the scenes” role in setting the stage for the Singapore Summit, with a view to ultimately enforcing and sustaining US hegemony in North East Asia.

The North Koreans are astute strategists. Will they abandon their nuclear weapons program in exchange for  empty “American promises”? 

What the U.S. seeks is to establish a Worldwide hegemony (monopoly) in the ownership and use of nuclear weapons, supported by a 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program.

Under these circumstances, the unilateral denuclearization of the Korean peninsula does not ensure the security of the Korean nation. Quite the opposite. The power of deterrence has been lost. The US can continue to threaten Korea, it can launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack directed against the Korean peninsula from naval and well as land-based military facilities in different part of the World.

The “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula concept is being used by Washington to enforce the unilateral abandonment of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program without any meaningful counterpart obligations by the US including the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea.

Press TV Interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Kim-Trump Singapore Summit, Will it Take Place?

Evidently, Donald Trump is a political neophyte:  perhaps he succeeds at making business deals, but he is strangely naïve regarding the viciousness of political chicanery and Machiavellian intrigue in Washington.  There is no other explanation for his appointing John Bolton, a notorious hawk, and advocate of pre-emptively attacking the DPRK, to such an influential government position as National Security Adviser.

Although many consider Trump a hawk and a militarist, is seems more likely that he is mesmerized by the possibility of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.  Of course, the possibility also exists that Trump was compelled by certain “interests” to appoint Bolton, and Trump, himself is no more than a puppet, appearances to the contrary.

It cannot have been stupidity by Bolton – even a high school student, by now, realizes that the gruesome death  of Libya’s leader Muammar Gadaffi , and the brazenly violated promises made to him, in exchange for his relinquishing his incipient nuclear program, ( promises  criminally violated by NATO allies, with the endorsement of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973),  led to the destruction of the entire Libyan state, a “model” which perpetually terrorizes the people of the DPRK and its President Kim Jong Un.  In recent history, North Korea was attacked and pulverized during the 1950-1953 Korean War, almost three million North Koreans were massacred by the US command of United Nations collaborating states.  The DPRK has undergone a devastating trauma which it is determined never again to endure, much as the decendants of the Holocaust are determined that “Never Again” will they be so vulnerable to annihilation.  It is obvious that mentioning “The Libya Model” to a North Korean has the same impact as mentioning Nazism to a Holocaust survivor.

The Libya Model

According to the Wall Street Journal, as soon as Bolton assumed his office of National Security Adviser to Trump, he cunningly fired the staff he did not like, and added his cronies to his office.   It is impossible that Bolton would have appeared on major primetime national television, including Sunday’s CBS’s Face the Nation, (and later on Fox News Sunday), stating publicly that the we plan to follow the “Libyan model” in our dealings with North Korea, and not have known that his statements were unendurable provocations to the people and government of the DPRK, which would be forced to respond with outrage.  Perhaps he was also warning the DPRK of the incipient plans of the US and UN,  but without doubt, he recognized that his remarks would intolerably enrage the DPRK, and jeopardize the June 12 summit which appeared to be proceeding swiftly and smoothly to, at the very least, a handshake between Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un.

And, of course, Trump coveted the probably ensuing Nobel Peace Prize, which would eclipse all his other problems, actual or fabricated.  And, perhaps, he would have been just as comfortable with a realistic arrangement, suitable to the DPRK, as well.   According to CNBC, Trump was so eager for the Summit that “the U.S. reportedly canceled a B-52 bomber exercise with South Korea amid threats from North Korea to withdraw from upcoming talks with President Trump, according to a WSJ report citing U.S. officials.  The DPRK had just released a statement that:

“At a time when the DPRK-U.S. summit is approaching the U.S. has launched the largest-ever drill involving B-52 strategic nuclear bomber, F-22 Raptor stealth fighters and other nuclear strategic assets.  This is an extremely provocative and ill-boding act of going against the trend for peace and security in the Korean peninsula and dialogue atmosphere….The U.S. continued introduction of nuclear strategic assets has exposed the process for détente on the peninsula to vulnerability and clouded the prospect of the upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit.”

Obviously, the DPRK’s concerns were being taken seriously by Trump –and at least by those not attempting to undermine him.  The DPRK explicitly repudiated Bolton’s remarks regarding similarity between the situation in the DPRK and Libya, and the DPRK stated that Bolton was “manifesting an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq, which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers,” adding:  “We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.”

Trump was,  by now, evidently so focused on the prospect of being awarded the Nobel Prize, and speaking of the great accomplishment of achieving world peace, that he actively disputed the inflammatory remarks of his own henchman, Bolton.  While reportedly confusing events in 2003 with events in 2011, Trump probably knew exactly what he was doing, and insisted that he had never intended to use the “Libyan model,” and it was all a mistake.  He was publicly contradicting Bolton, who was poisoning his attempt to pave the way for an amicable summit meeting, and backpedaling desperately, attempting to undercut Bolton’s damning intrusion into the summit process.  Perhaps Trump was awakening to reality.

And on May 23, The New York Times reported:  “Trump backs off Demand that Kim Disarm Instantly:  US Works to Preserve June Meeting For Nuclear Talks.”

Trump had, to a certain degree, publicly “neutralized” the toxic effect of Bolton’s calculated disruption of the peace process,  while, at the same time, in an interview on Fox News, Vice-President Pence again raised the deadly threat of the “Libya model,” though at this point it was glaringly obvious that any reference to the “Libya model” was guaranteed to torpedo the peace process and the forthcoming June 12 Summit between Trump and Kim Jung Un.  As stated in the New York Times, and as is known worldwide,

“Mr. Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program in the apparent hope of staving off Western intervention and sanctions, and of negotiating economic integration with the West.  But little of that happened, and years later he was tortured and killed by rebels after he was weakened in a military action by the United States and European allies.”  (The Times neglected to mention UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which authorized “all necessary means” for that criminal attack.)

DPRK Vice-Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui  then referred to “unlawful and outrageous acts by top American officials” and said that Mr. Pence had made “unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya.”

Trump is apparently unable to control “All the President’s Men,” who are forcing on the DPRK a vicious agenda which North Korea repudiates with great courage and dignity.  It is almost impossible to determine whether Bolton and Pence are simply trumpeting Trump’s intent, or if Trump is now enthralled by the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize, and a noble historic legacy, a hope which his so-called “advisers” are sabotaging, along with the hope for peace between North Korea, South Korea and the United States.  Inevitably, on May 24, Trump wrote to Kim Jung Un, cancelling the June 12 summit, and reiterating the deadly nuclear threat.

This recalls the analysis by the DPRK’s brilliant former Deputy-Ambassador Ri Tong il, who stated, repeatedly that the US would torpedo every attempt at peaceful reconciliation between North and South Korea, and every effort at reconciliation between the US and the DPRK, because the US is determined to maintain a powerful military presence in South Korea, since their target is, in reality, in the words of Ri Tong il, “The big country in Asia.”  Ambassador Ri never explicitly mentioned China, but the implication was obvious.  According to the New York Times, May 25, “China has much to gain from a peace deal that would prevent a potentially disastrous conflict with the United States on its border, and could ultimately result in the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea… Blaming the Chinese for the change in tone from North Korea strikes me as trying to find a Chinese scapegoat for a summit failure, ‘ said Douglas H. Paal, a vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”

Ambassador Ri Tong Il’s elucidation of the complexity of the situation is confirmed by the fact that during the Korean war from 1950-1953  the Chinese thought that the Americans were attempting to use Korea as a springboard for the invasion of China to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power.  China’s most revered leader, the Honorary Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, the politically sophisticated and brilliant Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) according to her biographer Jung Chang,“fiercely attacked the US intervention in Korea and was prominently involved in the international peace campaign.  She won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 (which was duly recorded in her FBI dossier).”  I have it confirmed from one of the most distinguished and impeccable sources in China that during the 1950s the United States was bombing the Northeast of China, which provoked China to enter the Korean war.

Further, the United States was using germ warfare against both China and North Korea, as confirmed, in detail in the 600 page report by the International Scientific Commission, headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Sir Joseph Needham.  The ISC included scientists from Sweden, France, Italy and Brazil.  The U.S. obtained control of the Japanese biological warfare laboratory, Unit 731, in 1945, in exchange for granting amnesty to Japanese General Shiro Ishii, Chief of unit 731.  General Ishii should have been tried as a war criminal:  Unit 731 had been experimenting on the use of biological weapons, involving the use of human vivisection and barbaric torture of thousands of human beings, including U.S. prisoners of war.

According to her biographer, in Soong Ching-ling’s office in Shanghai in 1952, “she had up on one wall a caricature of US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ‘as a tentacle bug holding a parchment of peace in one hand and hugging a container of bacterial bugs in the other.’”

Currently, in addition to disputes over trade and the South China Sea, the US has been biting larger and larger chunks of China:  flirting with Taiwan, encouraging separatists in Tibet, and most execrable of all, encouraging the Uighur radical Islamic terrorists and separatists in Xinjiang.  United States’ close ally  Saudi Arabia, during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, invites and sponsors 5,000 Islamists from Xinjjang, hosting them for an entire month longer than other pilgrams, and returns them to Xinjiang as indoctrinated Jihadists.  Of course, the “Mother of the Uighurs,” the millionaire Rebiya Kadeer lives in the USA, in Virginia, and is a recipient of support by the NED.

On Friday, May 25, the New York Times published a remarkable letter stating:  “the deliberately insulting remarks by Vice-President Pence and the national security adviser, John Bolton, doomed a trump-Kim summit.  By touting the Libyan model (nuclear disarmament, then United States-backed regime change) they stoked fears that they should have been working to assuage.  This administration has also snached war from the jaws of peace by renouncing the nuclear deal with Iran…Nuclear disarmament will occur not through the caprice of an egocentric president, but through a renewed grass-roots global movement to halt a gratuitous nuclear arms race and to rid the Earth of nuclear weapons before we suffer an actual nuclear catastrophe.”  (David Keppel)

The United Nations is doing nothing effective to promote a sane resolution of this crisis, and could have appointed the Secretary-General’s Envoy for Peace in North Korea, for which former President Jimmy Carter is uniquely, eminently and enthusiastically qualified.  The Secretary-General has Stefan Mistura helping to negotiate a resolution of the crisis in Syria.  Why is he so passive regarding the DPRK?  And if Russia or China would veto the egregious Security Council sanctions against the DPRK, sanctions which now constitute crimes against humanity, the United States’ arrogance would be undercut, and Washington would be compelled to actually negotiate with the DPRK, instead of merely dictating to North Korea, as it currently does.

Kim Jung Un has spectacularly demonstrated his sincere commitment to peace by releasing three political prisoners who were confirmed to be spies hostile to the DPRK, and by publicly and permanently destroying the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, as witnessed by journalists worldwide, and Kim has taken these actions prior to any concessions by the United States.  On the contrary, Trump cancelled the summit after Kim made these dramatic concessions.

Perhaps the most realistic and sanest advice was offered by James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, whose article:  “Ending the Dead End in North Korea was published in the New York Times on May 20.  Clapper states:

“I told President Obama in private that our stance on North Korea was flawed.  Our policy was never to discuss what the United States might do for the North Korean government until it first agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions.  That was a dead end, I told him, and merely ensured that no progress would be made….I believed, and I told President Obama that North Korea won’t budge on its nuclear program because they see us as an existential threat…..    We should set aside for a minute our demand that they disarm before any other negotiation.  We should meet their demand to sign a peace treaty and establish a physical presence in Pyongyang, an office staffed by Americans who can interact with North Korean citizens.  We could model it on the ‘interests section’ we maintained in Havana for decades…which would enhance our understanding and enable the flow of information from the rest of the world.  We would, of course, reciprocate by allowing North Korea to establish a similar mission in Washington.  …Eventually, we would hope to offer a road map to withdrawing many of our forces from the peninsula, while the North Koreans reduced the forces they have along the DMZ, including the artillery and rocketry forces that are poised to fire on Seoul.  If we can figure out a way to lead North Korea’s leaders to a place where they don’t feel so threatened, we could move away from the cusp of a cataclysmic war.  All of this would benefit us, whether we eliminated their nuclear capacity or not.”

As of this writing, attempts are being made to resuscitate the June 12 summit in Singapore.  The United Nations should be more constructively involved.  Instead of supporting the UN Security Council’s strangling sanctions on North Korea, the country which is the least dangerous among all the nuclear states, the UN Secretary General should appoint Peace Envoys similar to appointments which have been made throughout the United Nation’s history, and beginning now with those who have shown respect for the dignity and legitimate needs and concerns of the DPRK:  Jimmy Carter and James Clapper would be the most promising appointments of all.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Trump is “Played” by Pence and Bolton, Endangering World Peace:  Attempts to Resolve Crisis in Korea and Northeast Asia, Torpedoed by Militarists in Washington

Global Research endorses the courageous and relentless stance of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Their carefully documented analysis refutes the official 9/11 narrative. The WTC buildings were brought down through controlled demolition.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.

September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.

Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion. 

9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.

Today on Memorial Day we remember the countless victims of  America’s post-9/11 led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. 

Read the AEA911 statement below

Michel Chossudovsky, Memorial Day, May 28, 2018

***

6,952 U.S. Soldiers and 1.2 Million Others Dead,

$5.6 Trillion Spent
 

On Memorial Day 2018, we at AE911Truth pause to remember the 6,952 U.S. soldiers who have died in the endless wars since the events of September 11, 2001.

We also recognize the 1.2 million civilians and non-civilians of all countries who have been killed in these senseless campaigns of violence, which have now cost more than $5.6 trillion — or $23,386 to the average American taxpayer.

In reflecting upon this harrowing loss of life and colossal looting of public resources — all predicated on the official account of 9/11 — let us find within ourselves even greater determination to continue fighting for truth and justice concerning the events of that horrible day.

The next time someone tries to tell you that 9/11 is a thing of the past, you can point out any number of ways it affects us to this day, including the thousands of dollars we will each be forced to spend on the “War on Terror” until the truth of 9/11 is exposed.

And while you’re at it, you might remind that person of the thousands of military families, 9/11 families, and first responder families whose loved ones would still be with them today were it not for 9/11.

Our heartfelt sympathy goes out to these families and to everyone who has been harmed, directly or indirectly, by 9/11 and the actions taken in its aftermath.

Support the Truth

Thank you for your support of AE911Truth.

Without you, we wouldn’t exist.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Today We Remember Those Who Died in the Ongoing 9/11 Wars

“The Palestinians face the last bastion of legalized racial rule on the planet.”

.

The great nakba, or “catastrophe,”began in 1492, when Christopher Columbus proclaimed the lands of the “Indies” for Spain. Within half a century of his voyage, 95 percent of the inhabitants of the America’s had been killed by European-borne diseases, war, famine and enslavement: 100 million dead , or one out of every five human beings on the planet, the most catastrophic loss of life in recorded history.

But, the nakba had just begun. For the next half a millennium, Europeans would inflict countless “catastrophes” on the world’s darker peoples. As Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria document in Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny, the Europeans killed or enslaved 60 million Africans, depopulating one continent, repopulating two others with captive peoples, and fantastically enriching the third, from which emerged “the white man,” an amalgam of “all the races of Europe” (The Melting Pot, 1908 .) Columbus’ voyage began a 500-year western European war against the rest of humanity, known more politely as “colonialism,” in which all other people’s economies and cultures were made subordinate to the master powers headquartered in London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid – and later, Washington.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on 500 Years of Nakbas. The Legacy of European Colonialism, Famine and Enslavement

Exporting Golan oil is problematic under international law but, were the U.S. to unilaterally recognize the Golan as Israel’s, that oil could potentially be exported to the U.S. Major U.S. oil investors and lobbyists are therefore pushing hard for Trump to make that move.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Trump Set to Recognize Israel’s Claim to Occupied Golan Heights and Its Sizable Oil Reserves

Four Russian military advisers have been killed and three others have been injured in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor in a shelling carried out by militants, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on May 27.

According to the statement, militants attacked an artillery battery of pro-government forces assisted by Russian military advisers. Two Russians were killed on the scene. Two others died from wounds in hospital. 43 ISIS members were killed and 6 vehicles belonging to the terrorist group were destroyed during the clashes.

The Russian Defense Ministry provided no details on the location and date of the incident.

It should be noted that on May 23 ISIS attacked a group of pro-government forces near the city of al-Mayadin. After the attack, the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq claimed that ISIS members had killed 23 “Syrian and Russian” troops and captured 5 others. However, Amaq provided no evidence to confirm any captured or killed servicemen of pro-government forces.

Pro-opposition media used the May 27 statement by the Russian military to spread own speculations. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 26 members of government troops and 9 Russians were killed last week in eastern Syria. The Russian opposition media added that at least two Russian private military contractors were killed in the May 23 clashes with ISIS. No photo or video evidence or official sources for the claims were provided.

A Russian fifth-generation Su-57 stealth fighter jet carried out strikes on militant targets in Syria in February 2018, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on May 25. According to Shoigu, the Su-57 fighter jet used advanced air-launched cruise missiles to target militants.

Two Su-57 fighter jets were temporarily deployed in Syria in February 2018 where they successfully passed combat tests.

Israel has notified Russia of its decision to redraw its Iran “red lines” and to expand its operations across Syria, the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported on May 26. According to the report, Israel is going to expand its operations to the entirety of its northern neighbor’s territory rather than just the southern portion of Syria.

The report came just a few days after another round of Israeli strikes on Syria. On May 24, the al-Dabaa airbase in southwestern Homs came under a missile attack. According to Sky News, at least 9 Iranians were killed in the strike. The Iranian state-run media denies this. Local sources also reported no casualties in the attack.

According to Syrian experts, the May 26 report by Asharq Al-Awsat is another step in a longstanding Saudi-Israeli campaign aimed at undermining the Iranian-Russian cooperation over the Syrian conflict. Israel and Saudi media have released multiple reports and speculations alleging that the Iranian-Russian alliance is shrinking or is about to collapse.

Contrary to these allegations, in reality the both countries have been successfully cooperating en rotue to reach their joint goals: to defeat radical groups, to strengthen the central government and to set a foothold for restoring a territorial integrity of Syria.

The recent series of propaganda claims and Israeli strikes are likely linked to the ongoing preparations of the Syrian Army to launch a military operation to regain the southern part of the country from militants.

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] 

or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ 

or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront,

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Renewed ISIS Attacks in Syria. Russian SU-57 Stealth Fighter Carries out Strikes against “Militants”

They’re days of shame, dishonoring countless US men and women who died needlessly in wars that never should have been waged – so bankers, war profiteers, other corporate predators, and high-net-worth individuals could benefit from the slaughter of countless millions, along with vast destruction from all wars.

US servicemen and women gave their lives in vain, advancing the nation’s imperium since the mid-19th century – from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli to today’s ongoing wars of aggression, raping and destroying one country after another on the phony pretexts of democracy building, combating terrorism Washington supports, humanitarian intervention, and whatever other false reasons are given.

America is a warrior state, devoting an inordinate amount of its resources for militarism, its global empire of bases, and endless war on humanity at home and abroad.

Its so-called war of independence substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same.

Civil war had nothing to do with freeing slaves, everything to do with keeping the nation intact, maintaining dirty business as usual.

From inception to today, America’s history reflects a nation dedicated to endless wars, disdaining peace and stability, extermination its native people, enslaving Black Africans, colonizing and/or otherwise controlling lands belonging to others, seeking dominion over planet earth, its resources and people.

It’s longstanding US tradition, the shame of the nation, an insatiable quest for conquest and dominance, risking eventual catastrophic war to end all future ones with super-weapons able to destroy planet earth and its people – victims of mushroom-shaped cloud madness if things go this far.

Memorial and Veterans Days warrant condemnation, not celebration – symbols of national depravity for committing the highest of high crimes.

The dead died in vain. A new birth of freedom never came. Government of, by and for the people is just a figure of speech belied by reality – a nation dedicated to exploiting the many worldwide to benefit the privileged few.

The horror of endless wars, the stench of mass slaughter and destruction, the suffering of living survivors bear testimony to US rage for conquest and control at the expense of peace on earth, good will toward all – a nation dedicated to might makes right, not right over wrong.

A Peace Day should replace Memorial and Veterans Day, honoring the living “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which (endlessly) in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to” countless millions worldwide.

Survival may depend on it!

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Memorial and Veterans Day Reality: Glorifying War, Deploring Peace

Upon returning to the United States from Venezuela and reading the terrible media reporting of the election, it was evident that the people of the United States are being lied to. The Intrepid News Fund and Venezuela Analysis invited me and others to come to Venezuela for the election to see first hand what actually happened so we could report what we saw and break the media blockade against Venezuela.

The US is leading an economic war against Venezuela that is causing tremendous damage, but there is also a media blockade preventing the truth from being told. Mayor Carlos Alcala Cordones of Vargas, speaking to foreign delegations, told us the media blockade was more damaging than the economic blockade.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) summarized the biased and inaccurate media coverage, writing,

“Western media have taken an entirely different outlook to the [elections], unanimously presenting them as seriously flawed, at best, and at worst a complete sham presided over by a dictator. The New York Times (5/20/18) presented the election as ‘a contest that critics said was heavily rigged in his favor,’ Huffington Post (5/21/18) christened it ‘a vote denounced as a farce cementing autocracy in the crisis-stricken OPEC nation,’ while NPR (5/21/18) stated: ‘Nicholas [sic] Maduro has easily won a second term, but his main rivals have refused to accept the results, calling the polling fraudulent—a view shared by the United States and many independent observers.’” [Emphasis in original]

In reality, Venezuela had free, fair and transparent elections and manages the most sophisticated and accurate voting system in the world. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center has a Democracy Program, said, “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” This is consistent with others who have monitored Venezuelan elections. In the recent election, there were 150 international observers from over 30 countries who also noted the advanced nature of the election system and validated the results.

The opposition and the United States faced two choices in this election: (1) run against President Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution, or (2) seek to undermine the election by not participating. The US decided the latter approach was the best alternative and directed its vassals in Venezuela to boycott. Henri Falcon, the leading opposition candidate, did poorly, falsely declaring the election a fraud. Not only did the boycott hurt him, but he also advocated succumbing to the United States, e.g. dollarize the economy and seek loans from the IMF and western financiers. This was not popular because such loans end up being a disaster for national sovereignty as the financiers dictate neoliberal policies that send money to the capitalists while cutting essential services for the people

Despite the boycott, Maduro received the vote of 28% of the eligible electorate, around the same as Barack Obama received in 2008 and more than he got in 2012 or Trump in 2016. The 46% turnout is similar to US turnout and much higher than countries like Chile and Switzerland.

The economic punishment is not related to democracy. There is no economic blockade of Honduras, where a coup was followed by questionable elections, or Brazil, where there was a coup, or Saudi Arabia, a monarchy without national elections. Granma, the official voice of Cuba, which has a lot of experience with US economic war, describes ten examples of efforts to destabilize the government since the election.

Graffiti opposing US imperialism in Venezuela. Photo credit: Aljazeera.com

Why Maduro was supported by the electorate in the midst of an economic crisis

The people of Venezuela are suffering from serious impacts of the economic war being fought against them. The US sanctions combined with the drop in oil prices has sent the Venezuelan economy reeling. This election was important because Venezuela withstood the attack of the US and western powers, who refused to accept the election and tried to oust Maduro.

The Venezuelan people are well aware of who is causing their problems. When we took a tour of the Metro Cable, a Chavez-built gondola that brings people in poor neighborhoods down the hillside, we were stopped by a grandmother who had a message she wanted us to share with people in the United States. She said, “We know you want our oil, but stop punishing the people of Venezuela.”

When the Bolivarian Revolution had money from high oil prices, it was used to improve the lives of the poor. The results were marked decreases in poverty and illiteracy and increased access to health care and housing. The economic war has put stress on all of these programs, but Maduro persists despite it.

One of the great successes of the Maduro era is the Housing Mission, which built two million homes for the poor. Each home houses four to five people, meaning eight to ten million people received housing, which included furniture. This is quite an accomplishment in a nation of 32 million people. The program began in 2011 after there were devastating mudslides and hopes to reach 3 million homes by 2019.

Compare this to the United States, which is in a housing crisis, where the 2,461 people are evicted every day, and poor and middle-class families are housing-insecure. Consider the US response to the storms in Puerto Rico, where nine months later the island is still in crisis, or cities like my hometown of Baltimore, where we have thousands of homeless and 16,000 abandoned homes.

The economic sanctions are creating food shortages in Venezuela with blockades of food and medicine purchases and with some wealthy Venezuelans adding to the problem by hiding food or sending it to Colombia.  In response, Maduro announced an expansion of the Local Provision and Production Committees (CLAPs), to distribute food to six million people.

The Bolivarian Revolution is seeking food sovereignty in response to the injustices of the global food supply system, a goal made more difficult but also more essential due to the economic war. Food production is a long-term problem in Venezuela due to its oil-based economy, which caused farmers to move to urban areas in the 20th Century.

Maduro has also fought off agribusiness by banning GMO’s and the privatizing of seeds, protecting indigenous food knowledge from corporate capture and seeking to create a democratic food system.  Venezuela is an example of ecosocialism, where food systems are socialized and developed in an economically sensible and sustainable way.

These are just some of the social programs that Venezuela has sought to expand under Maduro. Maduro has also tried to break the financial blockade with oil-backed cryptocurrency.

US sanctions have had the effect of causing the people to blame the United States and unify around Maduro and the current government.

Deep Democracy Not Dictatorship

US leaders and the media describe Maduro as a dictator. It is absurd on its face when the election history of Venezuela is examined. Not only does Venezuela have lots of elections, but it is seeking to develop participatory democracy at the local level.

The Chavistas have won almost all elections since 1998, but lost two national elections. In 2007, the opposition defeated Chavez-supported constitutional amendments. In 2015, the opposition won the national assembly. In the last presidential election, Maduro narrowly defeated Henrique Capriles by 1.49%. This history shows consistently free and fair elections, not a dictatorship.

The National Constituent Assembly is pointed to as an example of dictatorship. When the opposition won a large majority, they showed their true colorsby removing portraits of Hugo Chavez and Simon Bolivar. Then they passed an amnesty law for themselves where they listed all 17 years of crimes in seeking to overthrow the government. This law was found unconstitutional by the court.

The opposition promised removal of Maduro within six months and incarceration of Chavista leaders when they took power. Violent opposition protests followed that led to over 125 deaths. The Supreme Court found that three of the right wing legislators were elected by fraud and until they left, the Assembly could not act. The Assembly refused the court’s decision and in the midst of a stalemate, Maduro used his constitutional power to activate the National Constituent Assembly. The opposition tried to block the vote and 200 polling stations were besieged on election day, but it went forward. Chavistas were elected but the opposition claimed the turnout of over eight million voters was “too high” to be credible.

The National Constituent Assembly has an interesting democratic makeup. Two-thirds of the members are geographically based and one-third represent different constituencies, including trade unions, communal councils, indigenous groups, farmers, students, disabled people, and pensioners. They are currently writing amendments to the constitution, which will be voted on.

The communal councils show the participatory nature of Venezuelan democracy. The 2006 law on Community Councils allowed groups of citizens to form Citizen Assemblies that represent 150 to 400 families in urban areas, 20 families in rural areas, and 10 in indigenous communities. More than  19,000 councils have been registered. They elect their leadership, meet and decide on projects needed for the community.  They have received $1 billion in funding for various projects and have established nearly 300 communal banks, which provide micro-loans. Communes are combinations of local councils that work on larger projects.

These councils are the frontline of participatory democracy, but are ignored by the western media, as they are inconsistent with the claims of ‘dictatorship.’ For the Bolivarian Revolution, the councils are intended to ultimately replace the democratic liberal state by bringing together citizens, social movements, and community organizations, to practice direct participatory self-governance. They are a main pillar in the transition to an ecosocialist, communal state. They are a work in progress, striving toward these goals based on a belief in the sovereignty of the people, which take on more functions of the public sector as they demonstrate competence. Maduro recognizes Venezuela is still a capitalist-based economy and has identified the commune as the centerpiece of democratic socialist governance.

The example of creating real democracy, working to break from capitalism and moving to a socialized economy by and for the people, is what the United States and oligarchs fear. That is why Maduro is called a dictator and the US calls for a military coup “to restore democracy”, which really means restore the pre-1998 oligarchy and protect capitalism.

The presidential election, originally scheduled for the end of 2018, was moved up to April when the US State Department, OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, other regional conservative governments and opposition parties called for 2018 presidential elections to be brought forward. Then, they claimed April was too soon. To appease the opposition, the government agreed to move the elections to May 20, signing an agreement with right-wing candidates Henri Falcon and Javier Bertucci that included a host of electoral guarantees. Despite this, the US and its allies said the elections were illegitimate. In the end, the elections went forward and Maduro won an easy victory.

Source ANSWER Coalition

Maduro Takes First Steps After Election

While Maduro won the election against Venezuelan candidates, he was really running against US imperialsim. Maduro overcame great challenges to win a mandate to continue the Bolivarian Revolution. After the election, he urged dialogue with the opposition, seeking to move Venezuela to peace. Maduro also ordered the US Charge d’Affaires Todd Robinson and head of political affairs (who he described as the head of the CIA), Brian Naranjo, to leave Venezuela.  He accused them of being involved in “a military conspiracy” against Venezuela. This is consistent with calls for a military coup by former Secretary of State Tillerson and Senator Rubio as well as Trump’s claims of a military option for Venezuela.

Maduro must confront the economic war and build an independent economy, alongside and often led by the communes. Grassroots activists are calling for a National Emergency Plan on food, the electric system and Internet, health care and education. China and Russia recognized Maduro’s victory. He needs their support for major projects.

Maduro and the Venezuelans still face significant obstacles. The internal traitors, who seek a return to the pre-Chavez era, have been exposed as more loyal to the US and international finance than to Venezuela will need to be held accountable. The problems of corruption and crime will continue. And, Maduro will be under threat of attacks from US-allied Colombia and Brazil.

To show solidarity, people in the US should call for an end to sanctions and threats of regime change in Venezuela. Let Venezuela be independent and pursue its Bolivarian revolutionary path. We may learn something about democracy from them.

 

This article was first published by Popular Resistance

Kevin Zeese is a frequent contributor to Global Research

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Venezuela “Defeats U.S.” in the Election, Now Must Build Independent Economy

The US is warning Syria  against attempting to recover lands lost to rebels south of Damascus.

Some of those rebels are ISIL or affiliated in some way to al-Qaeda. That is, the US is now doing the opposite of what it said it was going in to Syria to do.

It is often alleged that US military presence in Syria is illegal in international law, and that it is not even constitutional.

The Obama administration sent special operations forces into northeast Syria to help leftist Kurds take on ISIL. ISIL has largely been defeated, but the troops (some 2,000 plus a rumored further few thousand mercenaries) are still there.

Obama’s lawyers maintained that the US has a right to go into Syria in self-defense, to defeat ISIL, which was plotting attacks in the United States.

The standing congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is looking pretty long in the tooth. That authorization spoke of hunting down the people responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks. ISIL was formed in 2012 and it is a little unlikely that virtually any of its members were involved in 9/11.

So the US has now helped create a very large eastern and northeastern Kurdish enclave in Syria (Kurds are about 10 percent of the national population).

Apparently, the US special forces and the US Air Force are committed to now protecting the territory taken by the Kurds (much of it inhabited by Sunni Arabs). To that end, they have fought Syrian government troops, and even a small Russian mercenary battalion.

But how is fighting Syrian government troops part of the US mission in Syria? Only by virtue of mission creep. You had to stand up the Kurdish force to fight ISIL, now you feel the need to defend newly Kurdish-dominated territory.

The Pentagon is saying that since the US was part of the negotiations leading to the deconfliction zone south of the capital, it has the right to intervene there to maintain the cease-fire.

Some observers suspect that the US is simply running interference for the Israelis, who have occupied part of the Golan Heights and the permanent annexation of which the US is preparing to recognize. The Israeli government does not want Syria going south because they don’t trust Damascus to keep the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hizbullah, away from the Israeli border. The de facto Syrian side of the Golan is largely held by the a group (formerly known as Nusra Front) with ties to al-Qaeda.

That doesn’t sound like self-defense.

So de facto, the US and Israel are protecting some al-Qaeda fighters (among a large number of non-extremists).

Mission creep can go very wrong very quickly, as the US discovered in Vietnam.

Bonus video:

Wochit News: U.S. Warns Syria That Ceasefire Violations Will Be Met With ‘Firm’ Measures

U.S. Warns Syria That Ceasefire Violations Will Be Met With ‘Firm’ Measures

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment and Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Follow him at @jricole

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Legal? Despite Withdrawal Pledge, Trump’s Massive Mission Creep in Syria

Sana’a (GPA) — For the past three years, the United States has attempted to disguise, manipulate, or outright deny its involvement in Yemen. Nonetheless, new facts come to light every so often that indicate Washington’s participation in the Saudi-led war is much more hands-on than officials let on.

The Covert Role of the US in Yemen

The recent news about Green Berets deployed along the Saudi border highlights the ever-growing U.S. role. So, what else is Washington not disclosing about the US in Yemen?

The United States regime has consistently downplayed its role in Yemen while news emerges that counters this narrative. Let’s take a look at everything the United States has done while insisting its role in Yemen is passive.

Green Berets Deployed Along the Saudi-Yemen Border

News emerged last week that Green Berets are stationed along the Saudi-Yemen border to assist Saudi troops. A report from the New York Times says 12 commandos arrived back in December. The NYT received this information from American officials and European diplomats who claim the Green Berets’ only mission is to destroy weapons caches belonging to Yemeni forces.

This timing coincides with a high-profile long-range missile launch by Yemeni forces targeting Riyadh in response to the ongoing airstrikes. The missile launch in question took place in early November. This is the same missile launch U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, used fragments from to suggest a U.S. war against Iran.

The NYT’s sources said that the Green Berets have not and will not participate in direct combat with Yemeni forces. Ansarullah (aka “the Houthis”) troops known as Yemen’s Army and Popular Committees have not shared any photos or reports indicating direct combat either. At this point, the “no direct combat” claim seems to stand.

It’s worth mentioning that the US deployed these Green Berets in December yet Yemen’s resistance forces have launched countless retaliatory missile attacks on Saudi targets since.

A U.S. Army Lieutenant Now Serves for the United Arab Emirates in Yemen — Seriously

This week, Buzzfeed reported that a former U.S. Army lieutenant now serves for the United Arab Emirates. Prior to joining the Emiratis, Stephen Toumajan served as a lieutenant colonel for the United States throughout most of his career.

But murdering Arabs in their own country isn’t Toumajan’s only passion — he also ran a breast enhancement company in Tennessee called “Breast Wishes.”

Although Buzzfeed broke the story, this information comes from Toumajan’s own admissions as well as an Emirati’s government website. The U.A.E. speaks highly of Toumajan as “his excellency” and promoted him from his previous U.S. Army lieutenant position. He now serves as a commander for the U.A.E. Joint Aviation Command manning helicopters.

Depending on who’s asking, Toumajan may deny his official status — it is, after all, a very gray area legality-wise. When it came to a recent child custody hearing, the American Emirati commander quickly back-peddled on his official involvement in the foreign military.

Speaking to Buzzfeed via WhatsApp, Toumajan called himself a “civilian contractor.”

This highlights the growing instances of using for-profit hires (bluntly: contract killers) to bypass standard military norms and international law. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates both utilize Blackwater mercenaries for boosting their military ranks.

These countries have flooded Yemen with foreign fighters to kill indigenous Yemenis on their own soil. Fighters often hail from Sudan and many Latin American countries like Columbia and Mexico.

The U.A.E. takes particular advantage of this market and it’s very common for foreigners to serve under the Emirati banner. Mike Hindmarsh, for example, is a retired Australian senior officer who now serves on the U.A.E. Presidential Guard.

This strategy allows the United States and western countries to station troops in Yemen without stationing troops in Yemen.

UAE and US in Yemen Establish 18 Black-site Torture Centers

Last year, reports emerged that the US in Yemen helped the United Arab Emirates establish a series of black-site detention centers throughout territory under their control.

Inmates at these 18 detention centers cited unspeakable torture. One device, known as “the grill,” roasted victims for interrogation. Guards smeared detainees with feces and crammed them into what looks like shipping containers in Yemen’s intense heat for indefinite amounts of time. Beatings and electrocutions are commonplace.

Conditions look similar — if not much worse — to the infamous Abu Graihb U.S.-run detention center in Iraq.

According to the Associated Press, U.S. and Emirati troops rounded up civilians without any justification as part of sweeps to flush out suspected al-Qaeda militants. It appears as though the prisons still function.

Low-key Raids by the US in Yemen

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Yemen made headlines. But the war-torn nation didn’t break news because of the genocidal bombing campaign. No, Yemen made headlines because a Navy Seal died in a disastrous raid against suspected al-Qaeda militants — the Trump regime’s first official military action.

Not satisfied with the result, Washington ordered a similar raid just months later.

The first raid left 25 civilians dead while the second killed at least five. Many readers may not know that a very young girl died during one of these low-key raids — she was an eight-year-old American citizen named Nawar al-Awlaki. A 70-year-old partially blind man also died.

Again, Navy Seals did not leave the scene unscathed. In fact, conflicting reports cast doubt on Washington’s official story. According to local Yemeni sources, tribal fighters (not aligned to any group) killed or injured at least 30 U.S. and Gulf troops during the second raid which took place in May.

Yemeni sources also say that al-Qaeda fighters were not present in this particular area of Marib province during the attack.

So, why did the U.S. conduct the raid if al-Qaeda wasn’t even in the area? This particular blunder may be attributed to a number of factors including

  • Securing oil-rich land from rogue (anti-U.S. but not “terrorist”) indigenous tribal groups.
  • Bad intelligence — highly likely considering the U.S.-Saudi coalition’s general military failures in Yemen and on other battlefronts.
  • Something else that Washington hasn’t (and probably won’t) disclose.

Considering that Yemen is known as the “secret war,” whatever the true goal of the mission was is anyone’s guess.

Occupying Socotra

Yemen is isolated: the blockade restricts access to both foreign and domestic journalists. As a result, detailed reporting about U.S. involvement is hard to find — especially in regards to remote Yemeni islands like Socotra and the Bab el Mandeb. Socotra is a small island between Yemen and Somalia and its territory belongs to Yemen.

Abu Dhabi has used their war in Yemen as a springboard to challenge regional Saudi hegemony — with remarkable success. For just about every Saudi failure in Yemen, you’ll find a success from the Emirates. The United Arab Emirates began occupying Yemen’s Socotra — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — early on during the war.

Residents aren’t fond of their presence and have no desire to participate in the mainland’s war. Emirati troops recently bribed Socotris during a private door-to-door census: future cash and benefits for a possible vote to secede and become part of the U.A.E. Abu Dhabi’s assertiveness in Yemen has certainly rubbed their allies in Riyadh the wrong way.

Considering Washington’s close relationship with the Emirates, it’s hard to imagine that the U.S. is sitting on the sidelines during this land grab. This activity would require extreme stealth to avoid angering Washington’s allies in Riyadh.

Selling Internationally Banned Weapons to the Saudi Coalition

Saudi Arabia and the US in Yemen have used the war as a testing grounds for military action and weapons. Despite the United States condemning Syria for suspected chemical weapons, the US has no problem selling chemical weapons like white phosphorous to the Saudi coalition to use in Yemen.

In the war’s early days, Yemeni forces detained a large number of trucks in Marib province. The trucks contained materials which militants could use to manufacture sarin gas. Yemeni sources believed the weapons came from Turkish planes under the cover of humanitarian aid.

The United States also sold cluster munitions to the Saudi coalition before coming under international pressure from rights groups. Cluster bombs — previously manufactured in the United States until very recently — are internationally banned.

Even recent reports suggest the Saudis still use cluster bombs in Yemen. It’s unclear whether the United States or the United Kingdom provide the supply or if Riyadh is working through an old stockpile.

Occupying Oil Fields

The United States isn’t supposed to have any troops stationed in Yemen. Washington maintains that its role in Yemen involves two key goals: supporting the Saudi coalition and countering al-Qaeda influence.

Last summer, Emirati troops greeted U.S. soldiers in Yemen at a remote airport in eastern Yemen. Together, they conducted a special mission to push AQAP militants out of key oil fields. Now, the Emiratis and U.S. occupy some of Yemen’s vital oil supplies.

Fighting al-Qaeda in Yemen poses a significant challenge for the United States because their Saudi-allied fighters consider the terror group an ally against Ansarullah. For one thing, AQAP leader Qasim al-Raymi openly admits his men fight alongside U.S.-backed troops.

Terror attacks are common in territory controlled by U.S. allies. AQAP and ISIS militants frequently target Emirati-backed politicians and officials with car bombs or assassination attempts. When the UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen visited the war-torn country, he could not visit specific areas controlled by the US-Saudi coalition due to the threat posed by terror groups. The UN Special Envoy did not have this same experience in Sana’a and territory under Ansarullah control.

What Else is Washington Not Telling Us About the US in Yemen?

U.S. support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign has produced over 36,000 casualties between killed and injured. The airstrikes typically target homes, schools, businesses, farms, fishing boats, water treatment facilities and just about anything else you can imagine.

Washington also helps enforce the Saudi-led blockade which restricts imports, exports, and the flow of movement. This has put roughly 22 million Yemenis into either food insecurity or direct famine. Medical supplies are scarce and thousands of patients suffer the consequences — cancer patients, those requiring kidney dialysis, and pregnant women are most at risk.

On top of this, the United States has carried out covert military actions in Yemen for over the past three years. From deploying Green Berets and occupying oil fields to running black-site torture centers, the US in Yemen has ignored all international laws and norms.

What else is Washington not telling the public about the US in Yemen?

Featured photo: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Cain S. Claxton, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Green Berets and Mercenaries in Yemen: What Else is Washington Not Telling Us About US Participation in Yemen?

Fathi Harb should have had something to live for, not least the imminent arrival of a new baby. But last week the 21-year-old extinguished his life in an inferno of flames in central Gaza. 

It is believed to be the first example of a public act of self-immolation in the enclave. Harb doused himself in petrol and set himself alight on a street in Gaza City shortly before dawn prayers during the holy month of Ramadan. 

In part, Harb was driven to this terrible act of self-destruction out of despair. 

After a savage, decade-long Israeli blockade by land, sea and air, Gaza is like a car running on fumes. The United Nations has repeatedly warned that the enclave will be uninhabitable within a few years. 

Over that same decade, Israel has intermittently pounded Gaza into ruins, in line with the Israeli army’s Dahiya doctrine. The goal is to decimate the targeted area, turning life back to the Stone Age so that the population is too preoccupied with making ends meet to care about the struggle for freedom.

Both of these kinds of assault have had a devastating impact on inhabitants’ psychological health.
Harb would have barely remembered a time before Gaza was an open-air prison and one where a 1,000kg Israeli bomb might land near his home. 

In an enclave where two-thirds of young men are unemployed, he had no hope of finding work. He could not afford a home for his young family and he was about to have another mouth to feed. 

Doubtless, all of this contributed to his decision to burn himself to death. 

But self-immolation is more than suicide. That can be done quietly, out of sight, less gruesomely. In fact, figures suggest that suicide rates in Gaza have rocketed in recent years. 

But public self-immolation is associated with protest. 

A Buddhist monk famously turned himself into a human fireball in Vietnam in 1963 in protest at the persecution of his co-religionists. Tibetans have used self-immolation to highlight Chinese oppression, Indians to decry the caste system, and Poles, Ukrainians and Czechs once used it to protest Soviet rule. 

But more likely for Harb, the model was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in late 2010 after officials humiliated him once too often. His public death triggered a wave of protests across the Middle East that became the Arab Spring. 

Bouazizi’s self-immolation suggests its power to set our consciences on fire. It is the ultimate act of individual self-sacrifice, one that is entirely non-violent except to the victim himself, performed altruistically in a greater, collective cause.

Who did Harb hope to speak to with his shocking act?
In part, according to his family, he was angry with the Palestinian leadership. His family was trapped in the unresolved feud between Gaza’s rulers, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. That dispute has led the PA to cut the salaries of its workers in Gaza, including Harb’s father. 

But Harb undoubtedly had a larger audience in mind too. 

Until a few years ago, Hamas regularly fired rockets out of the enclave in a struggle both to end Israel’s continuing colonisation of Palestinian land and to liberate the people of Gaza from their Israeli-made prison. 

But the world rejected the Palestinians’ right to resist violently and condemned Hamas as “terrorists”. Israel’s series of military rampages in Gaza to silence Hamas were meekly criticised in the West as “disproportionate”. 

The Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where there is still direct contact with Israeli Jews, usually as settlers or soldiers, watched as Gaza’s armed resistance failed to prick the world’s conscience. 

So some took up the struggle as individuals, targeting Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints. They grabbed a kitchen knife to attack Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints, or rammed them with a car, bus or bulldozer. 

Again, the world sided with Israel. Resistance was not only futile, it was denounced as illegitimate. 

Since late March, the struggle for liberation has shifted back to Gaza. Tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians have massed weekly close to Israel’s fence encaging them. 

The protests are intended as confrontational civil disobedience, a cry to the world for help and a reminder that Palestinians are being slowly choked to death. 

Israel has responded repeatedly by spraying the demonstrators with live ammunition, seriously wounding many thousands and killing more than 100. Yet again, the world has remained largely impassive. 

In fact, worse still, the demonstrators have been cast as Hamas stooges. The United States ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, blamed the victims under occupation, saying Israel had a right to “defend its border”, while the British government claimed the protests were “hijacked by terrorists”. 

None of this can have passed Harb by. 

When Palestinians are told they can “protest peacefully”, western governments mean quietly, in ways that Israel can ignore, in ways that will not trouble consciences or require any action. 

In Gaza, the Israeli army is renewing the Dahiya doctrine, this time by shattering thousands of Palestinian bodies rather than infrastructure. 

Harb understood only too well the West’s hypocrisy in denying Palestinians any right to meaningfully resist Israel’s campaign of destruction. 

The flames that engulfed him were intended also to consume us with guilt and shame. And doubtless more in Gaza will follow his example. 

Will Harb be proved right? Can the West be shamed into action? 

Or will we continue blaming the victims to excuse our complicity in seven decades of outrages committed against the Palestinian people? 

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

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Fathi Harb Burnt himself to Death in Gaza. Will the World Notice?

US President Trump told the world his government rejects negotiations on the highly controversial TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Citizen groups and EU opponents of the Obama comprehensive trade agreement breathed a sigh of relief. Too little attention has been given to the agreement reached between Canada and CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (German: Umfassendes Wirtschafts- und Handelsabkommen), sometimes called the Canada-EU Trade Agreement. Secretly and behind any public open discussion, the largest global multinational corporations are moving the world closer to a top-down corporate dictatorship, a 21st Century version of Mussolini’s Corporativism. A major potential roadblock to CETA approval has now fallen in Austria under a new populist coalition government of Sebastian Kurz.

Legally the CETA must be approved by the national parliaments in a majority of the 28 EU member states before becoming operative. Now it comes out that Sebastian Kurz’s populist Austrian coalition, after campaigning on a platform of NO to CETA and TTIP, secretly agreed late in 2017 to renege on their election campaign promises opposing CETA as a precondition for the refugee-critical conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) of Sebastian Kurz as Chancellor, to be able to form a coalition government with the right populist FPÖ. It represents a major betrayal of Austrian voters as well as of the future of EU sovereign national laws on environment, health and safety. But it gets worse.

In terms of the legitimacy of the Austrian elections in October 2017, the coalition FPÖ party campaigned hard against any acceptance of the multinational CETA trade deal. It promised a Swiss-style “direct democracy” referendum process of citizen vote on issues where a substantial number of citizen petitions warranted such. In their election campaign the FPÖ promised repeatedly such slogans as ”with us no CETA” and “…CETA only with a peoples’ referendum.”

Pre-election polls showed that 72% of Austrians opposed both the TTIP and the closely-related CETA on grounds it would damage Austrian small and mid-size businesses to the advantage of global multinationals. Citizen groups gathered an impressive 562,000 signatures opposing both CETA and TTIP before the election.

Only days following the election, on November 21, 2017, the FPÖ showed signs of retracting that opposition when they surprised voters and voted in Parliament in favor of the CETA’s most controversial proviso, the so-called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism (German: Investitionsschiedsgerichten). That ISDS proviso allows Canadian corporations sue any EU government over any new law or policy that might reduce their profits in future such as a new German minimum wage law or stricter laws prohibiting toxic chemicals such as glyphosate or neonicotinoids. However, the Canadian company or investor in say, Germany, does not sue in a German court. They rather go to a special secret arbitration tribunal over which the EU state has no control. Opposition to the ISDS was a central platform of the Austrian FPÖ campaign before October 15. Most USA large corporations have subsidiary companies in Canada meaning CETA is a backdoor for the now-frozen TTIP with the USA.

Forcing EU states to dilute laws

Among its provisions, under CETA as under TTIP if there is a difference in rigor for example in the environmental or safety and health standards for EU states and the Canadian rules, the lowest standard (North American) applies. The Canadian government has largely followed US loose corporate regulations in recent years and this under CETA now would threaten a diminishing of EU strict regulations. According to an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

and Greenpeace-Holland study, “Canada has weaker food safety and labelling standards than the EU, and industrial agriculture more heavily dependent on pesticides and GMO crops. CETA gives Canadian and US multinationals the tools to undermine rules concerning cloning, GMO crops, growth hormones and country of origin labelling, among others.”

According to the September, 2017 joint study, CETA will “promote the harmonization of food safety standards to the lowest common denominator, and the weakening of the EU’s risk assessment standards for food products.” A horrifying example is the decision in March 2016, by the Canadian authorities to approve AquAdvantage Salmon, the first genetically modified animal to be approved for human consumption in the country. Canada did not require labelling. Under CETA now, unlabeled GMO salmon will be sold across the EU. That holds for other unlabeled Canadian GMO foods as well as industrial agribusiness products such as beef.

Giant Agribusiness Threatens EU Family Farm

With CETA, for example, current EU laws requiring Country of Origin Labeling for meat and fish could be challenged by Canadian agribusiness whose meat exports will now come almost tariff-free to compete with carefully-controlled EU meat products.

Another proviso of CETA relates to reducing business costs and limiting regulation. This sounds , or? In reality it will mean stronger EU food and agricultural policies will be weakened under pressure from large Canadian-US agribusiness companies such as IBP or Cargill Foods. To date the EU agriculture associations have largely contained the economic cost-reduction pressure that has destroyed family farming smaller units in North America since the 1980’s and replaced it with cartel formations of giant food industry.

Driven by US agribusiness lobbying at the USDA and Canadian Department of Agriculture, economies of scale in meat processing as an example have created documented horrendous sanitary conditions in giant processing operations that slaughter up to 1,000,000 cattle a year at a plant. Now with CETA, EU small farmers will simply be driven into bankruptcy as was done since the 1980s in North America. There the giant meat processing firms had 25-30% lower costs than smaller meat packing firms that were driven out of business.

The creation of North American agribusiness, a major focus of the TIPP as of the CETA, involves the dramatic reduction of labor costs and speedup of the meat processing portions that are not automated. Work is not protected by trade union agreements, labor is mostly immigrant and largely illegal meaning they are vulnerable to threat from employers demanding longer hours and lessened safety conditions.

North American slaughterhouse workers face conditions of speedup on the meat chains that they must cut and process that they have abnormally high rate of work-related injuries or nerve damage but the Government regulators turn a blind eye and the workers are mostly sub-minimum wage illegal workers from Mexico or Central America who have little recourse to change it.

As I account in my book, Seeds of Destruction, the cartelization and vertical integration of agriculture in North America after World War II was a brainchild of the Rockefeller Standard Oil family, notably Nelson Rockefeller and a project they financed at Harvard Business School that created the term “agribusiness.” The countries of the European Union until today have largely defended more small-scale meat and food production by way of safety, health, environment and labor laws. With the flood of far cheaper Canadian (North American in reality) beef and other foods into the EU under CETA, European small scale, high quality agriculture producers will be literally slaughtered to the gain of mass agribusiness cartels that can now globalize in the all-important EU market as well.

Austria is a Warning Bell

Now on May 16 the Austrian coalition parties, FPÖ and the ÖVP of Sebastian Kurz, turned on the voters and voted in the Council of Ministers in favor of approving CETA including with the controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. It will now come to the full Parliament before Summer for a final vote where passage looks certain.

The European Commission proposed the signature of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and despite need for national parliaments to ratify,

CETA entered into force provisionally on 21 September 2017. National parliaments in EU countries have still to approve it before it can take full effect.

With an Austrian coalition government, one that owes its existence to vigorous opposition to CETA and defense of the right of citizens to hold a referendum on it and other issues, now betraying that voter pledge and backing CETA, implications for not just Austrian citizens—farmers and all consumers—but as well for the quality of world food exports, the health of world eaters (I mean us all) is to undergo a dramatic decline at a time we can ill afford.

Under CETA now the world food chain will face over the coming decade or so an overwhelming concentration of corporate agribusiness control that will combine the two great agriculture production regions—North America and the EU. That, if it is allowed, will be devastating.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” where this article was originally published. 

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Austria’s New Coalition Betrays on CETA Trade Agreement. Giant Agribusiness Threatens EU Family Farm

Cover Ups and Confessions: Pope Francis and Child Abuse

May 28th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

It is the season for exposures and exposes, and the Catholic Church has been making regular ripples of the wrong and undeniably crude sort.  Globally, the church is finding itself being picked bare in terms of institutional malfeasance, not merely on the issue of having harboured abusive priests, but of placing a dark, impenetrable cover over them.

No area of influence has been spared.  In Guam, the disruptive efforts of former Archbishop Anthony S. Apuron made it into public eye with G. R. Pafumi’s work citing attempts to invalidate a 2016 statute lifting limitations for child sex abuse.  In Pafumi’s grave words, “The Church believes it is never wrong because it has been guided by the Holy Spirit for nearly 2,000 years.”

The Holy Spirit has not being doing much work of late, and seemed to have deserted Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson last week when he was found guilty of concealing acts of child abuse by a priest.  Australia’s media cognoscenti claimed this to be a globally significant move, as it made Wilson the most senior Catholic in the world to be found guilty of such a charge. The legal argument for Wilson had been one of ignorance: he had not known that a priest by the name of James Fletcher had abused a boy back in the 1970s.

Magistrate Robert Stone did not find much to merit that version, rejecting Wilson’s frail memory on a conversation in 1976 in which the then 15-year-old victim described the abuse by Fletcher, who was working in the Maitland/Newcastle diocese in New South Wales.

Would there be immediate effect upon his office?  Certainly no resignation, a move deemed arrogant by former NSW police detective chief inspector Peter Fox.  The Church, as ever, remains an obstinately self-policing institution at logger heads with secular institutions.  Wilson was hoping for a soft landing, a reprieve from “the people of the archdiocese of Adelaide” to whom he urged to “continue to pray for me.”   In the meantime, he would continue his “prayers and best wishes” for the faithful in the archdiocese.

There would, at best, be a temporary standing down, but hardly a genuine resignation.  Spokeswoman for the archdiocese Jenny Brinkworth seemed to undo the seriousness of the conviction with bureaucratic numbing.  “Standing aside doesn’t necessarily mean it’s forever.  He’s standing aside until process has run its course.”

Pope Francis has found himself reeling in managing the child abuse crisis, and more specifically the machinery of deception and concealment.  For all the claims of his supposedly more progressive streak, he has been traditionally resistant on the Church’s sclerosis in dealing with the culpable management of abusive priests.

Chile has proven to be particularly problematic, a veritable crown of thorns.  The Pope had, for instance, gone as far as accusing child abuse victims, notably those associated with the infamous Rev. Fernando Karadima, of calumny.  An exchange with a reporter at the gate of the Iquique venue, the site of Mass on the last day of his Chile visit, sent the press and commentators into a spin of dizzied alarm.

Central to the exchange was the pontiff’s 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan Barros.  The appointee to the diocese of Osorno had been a Karadima protégé, who survivors say bore witness and covered-up abuses in Chile.  In a more moderate tone, the Pope decided to sober up matters on returning to Rome.  “You [reporters],” went Francis, “in all good will, tell me that there are victims, but I haven’t seen any, because they haven’t come forward.”  This was a far-fetched assertion, given that Barros has been lighting up matters on the abuse trail since 2012.

Since then, victims have been furnishing Chilean prosecutors with a bounty of testimony.  Former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Marie Collins, was significantly riled, having delivered a letter of 8 pages to the Pope outlining her own accounts of abuse.

Collins’ own resignation from the body was prompted by a seemingly incurable bureaucratic inertia.  “The most significant problem,” she penned in her resignation in March 2017, “has been reluctance of some members of the Vatican Curia to implement the recommendations of the Commission despite their approval by the pope.”

In his January 31, 2015 letter to the executive committee of the Chilean bishops’ conference, it became clear that Francis was entirely cognisant of the problems. “Thank you for having openly demonstrated the concern that you have about the appointment of Monsignor Juan Barros.  I understand what you are telling me and I’m aware that the situation of the church in Chile is difficult due to the trials you’ve had to undergo.”

Having rounded up on critics of those accused of child abuse, he has been pushed into an act of near grovelling contrition, suggesting last month that there has been “serious errors of assessment and perception”.  The question lurking amidst the frocks was who had supplied the supposedly infallible Francis with the unreliable information. He had claimed to have precipitated the errors of assessment “due to lack of truthful and balanced information.”  Cardinals Francisco Javier Errázuriz and Ricardo Ezzati, both archbishops of Santiago, have denied being involved in that defective information loop.

By the end of April, the pontiff had met three victims of Karadima in Rome.  One of the survivors, Juan Carlos Cruz, claimed that the Pope had sorrowfully relented.  “I was part of the problem,” he is reported to have said.  “I caused this and I apologize to you.”

The Vatican Curia’s response to the dimension of shuffling, moving and redirecting errant and abusive priests supplies a general, global blue print.  Dioceses have duly complied, taking their lead from the top.  All in all, responses by the Church have been irregular and often soft.  Sabbaticals and exit strategies have been promised to those in the higher realms of the church food chain.

Those constructively guilty of abuse – through denial and administrative dissimulation – are merely moved on.  Individuals like Apuron have not been defrocked, nor restrictions placed on his continued ministry.  Wilson, despite his conviction, remains defiant.  Given the Vatican’s previous form, he has every reason to do so.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Cover Ups and Confessions: Pope Francis and Child Abuse

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson was influential in Trump’s controversial decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and he also lobbied Trump on the Iran nuclear deal. Turns out Adelson also has a connection to former PM Stephen Harper. The CBC’s Wendy Mesley interviews Ken Vogel, who writes about money and politics for the New York Times.

“Adelson, the tenth richest man in the world and the GOP’s largest donor, is known to use his money to influence policies on behalf of Israel.

After Trump tore up the Iran agreement, Adelson donated an additional $30 million to the Republican party, possibly the single largest single donation in U.S. history.”

Original CBC’s news program “The Weekly with Wendy Mesley” broadcast on May 20, 2018.

“Adelson also influenced former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who endorsed Trump’s embassy action and anti-Iran move.

Mesley interviews New York Times reporter Ken Vogel, who says that Adelson has private meetings at the White House with Trump, Vice President Pence, John Bolton, and others.

Israel is at the heart of Adelson’s donations, who has been influenced by his Israeli wife. Vogel explains that Adelson is “the enforcer” for Jewish American donors who give a lot of money to Republican politicians. People are afraid to cross him.”  (America Knew)

 

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Godfather. Billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Influence on Donald Trump

“Wir fliegen mit der F-35über den ganzen Nahen Osten und haben bereits zweimal an zwei verschiedenen Fronten angegriffen“, verkündete der Kommandant der israelischen Luftwaffe, General Amikam Norkin, am 22. Mai bei der Konferenz über „Luftüberlegenheit“ in Herzliya (einem Vorort von Tel Aviv), an der die höchsten Vertreter der Luftstreitkräfte aus 20 Ländern, einschließlich Italien, teilnahmen.

Der General gab nicht konkret an, wo die F-35 eingesetzt wurden, aber er machte klar, dass einer der Angriffe in Syrien stattfanden. Er zeigte auch das Bild von israelischen F-35, die über Beirut in den Libanon fliegen, aber mit ziemlicher Sicherheit wurden sie bereits für Nichtangriffs-Missionen im Iran eingesetzt.

Israel, einer der 12 “globalen Partner” des F-35-Programms unter der Leitung des amerikanischen Unternehmens Lockheed Martin, kaufte als erstes den neuen Kampfjet der fünften Generation, den es in „Adir“ (Mächtig) umbenannte. Bis jetzt erhielt Israel neun der 50 betellten F-35, alle der Modellreihe A (konventionelles Starten und Landen) und es wird wahrscheinlich 75 kaufen. Ein realistisches Ziel, da Israel jedes Jahr 4 Milliarden Dollar Millitärhilfe von den Vereinigten Staaten erhält.

Im Juli 2016 begann die Ausbildung der ersten israelischen F-35-Piloten auf der Luke-Air-Base in Arizona. Nach einem dreimonatigen Kurs in USA, um für den Einsatz zertifiziert zu sein, müssen sie einige Monate Ausbildung für den „realen Flug“ in Israel absolvieren. Bisher wurden ca. 30 F-35-Piloten ausgebildet. Am 6. Dezember erklärte die israelische Luftwaffe ihre erste F-35-Flotte einsatzbereit.

Israel beteiligt sich an dem F-35-Programm auch mit seiner Rüstungsindustrie. Die Israel Aerospace Industries produziert die F-35A-Tragflächen; Elbit Systems-Cyclone produziert Komponenten für den F-35-Rumpf; Elbit Systems Ldt. arbeitet an einem Display für den Helm der dritten Generation, den alle Piloten der F-35-Flotte tragen werden.

General Norkins Ankündigung, dass die F-35 endlich “kampferprobt“ ist, hat daher einen ersten faktischen Effekt: Das Aufstocken des F-35-Programms, das zahlreiche technische Probleme beinhaltete und ständige Nachbesserungen mit zusätzlichen Kosten fordert, die die bereits enormen Kosten des Programms zusätzlich erhöhen. Die komplexe Software der Kampfflugzeuge wurde über 30mal modifiziert und erfordert weitere Updates.

General Norkins Ankündigung wurde daher besonders von Marillyn Hewson, CEO von Lockheed Martin und eine der Rednerinnen der Konferenz über „Luftüberlegenheit“, begrüßt.

Die Ankündigung, dass Israel die F-35 bereits in realen Kriegshandlungen eingesetzt hat, dient gleichzeitig als Warnung für den Iran. Die F-35A, die an Israel geliefert wurden, sind vorrangig für den Einsatz atomarer Waffen angelegt, insbesondere für die neue B61-12 präzisionsgesteuerte Bombe. Die B61-12, derzeit in der Endphase der Entwicklung, wird von den Vereinigten Staaten in Italien und anderen europäischen Staaten stationiert. Sie wird mit ziemlicher Sicherheit an Israel geliefert, der einzigen Atommacht im Nahen Osten, dessen Arsenal auf 100-400 Atomwaffen geschätzt wird.

Die israelischen Nuklearstreitkräfte sind im Rahmen des „Individual Cooperation Program“ in das elektronische System der NATO eingebunden. Israel, ein Land, das, obwohl kein Mitglied des Bündnisses, eine ständige Vertretung im NATO-Hauptquartier in Brüssel unterhält.

Italien, Deutschland, Frankreich, Griechenland und Polen nahmen, mit den USA, an der Blue Flag 2017 teil, der größten internationalen Luftkriegsübung in der Geschichte Israels, bei der auch Atomtest durchgeführt wurden.

Manlio Dinucci

(il manifesto, 23. Mai 2018)

Übersetzung: K.R.

  • Posted in Deutsch
  • Comments Off on VIDEO – Die Kunst des Krieges. Israelische F-35 sind bereits im Krieg.

«Stiamo volando con gli F-35 su tutto il Medio Oriente e abbiamo già attaccato due volte su due differenti fronti»: lo ha annunciato il 22 maggio il generale Amikam Norkin, comandante della Forza aerea israeliana, alla conferenza sulla «superiorità aerea» in svolgimento a Herzliya (un sobborgo di Tel Aviv) con la partecipazione dei massimi rappresentanti delle aeronautiche di 20 paesi, Italia compresa.

  • Posted in Italiano
  • Comments Off on VIDEO – L’Arte della Guerra – Già in guerra gli F-35 israeliani

More than 300 international representatives from organisations such as the African Union, the Caribbean Community and the Electoral Experts Council of Latin America, as well as former heads of states, parliamentarians, trade unionists and solidarity activists, were present for Venezuela’s May 20 presidential vote. Among them was Eulalia Reyes de Whitney, a Venezuelan-born activist with the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN). She spoke to Federico Fuentes about her experience.

You were present in Venezuela for the entire election campaign and as an accredited international observer for the vote on May 20. What were your impressions of the elections?

I had a great experience during the campaign and on polling day. Not only did I get a chance to feel, see and live through the many challenges that Venezuelans live through, I also had the opportunity to participate as an official observer representing AVSN.

What I saw was Venezuelans doing what they have been doing since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution [kick-started by the election of former president Hugo Chavez in 1998]. Every time an election is called, they go out to vote even though it is not compulsory. This time was no different.

I visited six different voting centres on May 20 in the state of Anzoátegui: one was an Indigenous voting centre; another was a voting centre in a rural town; and the other four were in urban areas of varying characteristics. At every centre I visited, I saw the people’s enthusiasm and determination to vote and be part of deciding the fate of the country.

During the whole campaign there was a great atmosphere. It seems to me that Venezuelans love elections and that they are keen to share their process with the world. They were very appreciative of the visitors who came to witness the evolution of this process.

In the rural areas, there seemed to be even more engagement with the process. Given that transportation was difficult, I noticed how many people refused to be held back by these obstacles and instead sought innovative ways to resolve this difficulty. For instance, many people were happy to travel standing up and in great numbers on the back of big trucks to be able to get to the voting centre.

Inside the voting centre, they were very appreciative and thankful to the international observers. They wanted to make sure the observers understood the meaning of the revolution to the country.

During the campaign, there was a call from the opposition to boycott the vote to delegitimise the results. In the end, Nicolas Maduro was re-elected for the presidential term of 2019-25 with more than 6.2 million votes (67.8%).

The election process was a journey of participation, and a clear signal that the majority have chosen the path they want their country to go down — and that is socialism.

From what you observed, how credible is the Venezuelan voting system? What do you say to claims outside Venezuela that the elections were fraudulent? Has any evidence of fraud been presented?

Venezuela’s voting system has been classified as one of, if not the most, secure and transparent in the world, including by former United States president Jimmy Carter, who is the founder of the Carter Center, an institution that monitors electoral processes in many regions of the world.

It is also important to remember that this was the 25th election held during the 19 years of the Bolivarian Revolution and the fourth election in the past 9 months. The process was open to numerous observers that came from every latitude of the globe.

It was very interesting to see the whole process of how the voting centres and machines were installed and put into action on the day. As an international observer, we were provided with an induction course on all the procedures that are followed through the whole process and the contingency plans in case of any problems arising.

There are no doubts about the transparency of the system. I witnessed the voting process in all the centres I visited and can give faith to the credibility, transparency and security of the system.

In terms of those people who have cried fraud: for Venezuela this nothing new. The same thing has happened after almost every election — except when the opposition has won. In these cases, there has never been any doubt cast about the results, and they have been accepted by all parties, including the government.

On the night of the elections, opposition candidate Henri Falcon surprised many when he appeared on TV half an hour before the results were announced and produced a list of complaints and accusations regarding the way the vote had been conducted.

He accused the National Electoral Council (CNE) of not fulfilling accords that had been agreed to by all parties during the election campaign, in particular focusing on the location of “Red Points” that should have been more than 200 metres away from the perimeter of voting centres. He also accused the CNE of favouring the re-election of Maduro and called for another election to be held before the end of the year.

However, Falcon did not produce any proof for these allegations, nor did he talk of any fraud in terms of the actual vote or result.

The other main candidate from the Hope for Change Party, Javier Bertucci, who won 10.8% of the votes, has recognised the results.

In the end, no one has come forward with evidence of fraud or even called for an audit of the vote.

Despite this, the vote is being audited, as this is a normal part of the electoral system. Every election in Venezuela obligatorily involves a series of audits during and after the election, always in the presence of witnesses from all parties contesting the elections and international observers.

On top of this, Maduro, in his speech after the results were announced, requested a complete audit of every single vote, not just the random sample of 53% of voting machines that is normally required in the auditing process.

The auditing process is open for all to view and can be followed on the CNE website.

What was the sentiment like the day after the elections, in light of the results and the international response? What impact has the result had on the mood of the people and their hopes for the future in light of the extremely difficult situation in Venezuela today?

People in the country are mostly happy, relieved and empowered by the results. The sense of accomplishment and of being on the right path exists across the whole of the country.

The Venezuelan people are today more conscious of their historic role, of the need to defend the legacy of Hugo Chavez and to work together to defy the criminal attacks the country has suffered from the enemies of their revolution.

Venezuelans from all corners of the country have spoken and given their president a mandate. Venezuelans want peace for everyone. The hopes and desires for a better future exist. The country and its people are looking forward to better times. They are also clear on who are the country’s enemies.

The international response has made its presence felt. Plenty of governments, allies and friends of Venezuela have recognised the results of the elections.

There was an international contingent of about 300 political leaders, journalists, academics, analysts, activists and representatives from different institutions and organisations, along with 2000 national and international observers, who were present in the country to express their support for the electoral process.

Organisations such as the Non-Aligned Movement, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), the African Union, and countries such as Palestine, Russia, China, India, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc. have recognised the vote.Others, however, such as the United States, the European Union, and the Lima Group [which included 13 right-wing Latin American countries and Canada] have refused to accept it and threaten more sanctions.

The day after Maduro was re-elected, the US administration implemented new, more severe sanctions. In response, Maduro expelled two leading diplomats from the US Embassy, Chargé d’Affaires Todd Robinson and head of political affairs Brian Naranjo, on May 22.

The president is calling on everyone to contribute their ideas and to come together for change. Maduro has also called on those Venezuelan youth that have left the country and that today are suffering from xenophobia in many places around the region to return and help move the country forward.

Venezuelans expect the government to move quickly to start changing the situation in the country. The hope for a genuine economic revolution exists.

*

Featured image is from the authors.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Venezuela Election Observer: ‘The Majority Have Chosen the Path They Want for Venezuela’

The Saudi coalition blockade of Yemen continues to starve the civilian population of essential food and fuel. The U.N. warns that an additional 10 million Yemenis could be brought to the brink of famine beyond the eight and a half million already there:

The United Nations aid chief urged the Saudi-led military coalition that controls Yemen’s ports to expedite imports of vital food and fuel supplies, warning that a further 10 million Yemenis could face starvation by year-end.

After three years of conflict in which the Yemeni government, backed by Riyadh’s coalition, has fought against Iran-aligned Houthi fighters, Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with some 8.4 million people severely short of food and at risk of starvation.

“I am particularly concerned about the recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports,” Mark Lowcock, UN emergency relief co-ordinator, said in a statement read out to a Geneva briefing on Friday.

There are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, and if things stay as they are almost two-thirds of that population will soon be at risk of starving to death. The Saudi coalition bears the largest share of responsibility for Yemen’s humanitarian catastrophe. They are the ones impeding the delivery of commercial goods and aid, and they have it within their power to alleviate the worst effects of the crisis if they would lift the blockade. If the coalition presses ahead with an assault on Hodeidah, the crisis is certain to worsen and those additional 10 million people will be driven into famine that much sooner.

The coalition governments are also the ones engaged in a deliberate and systematic campaign of attacking the country’s food production and distribution. Just the other day, coalition planes bombed a group of mango farmers with horrific results:

These are deliberate coalition attacks on civilians made possible by our government’s support, and they happen on a regular basis. The claim that U.S. assistance to the coalition reduces civilian casualties is false, and it is obvious after more than three years of the bombing campaign that the only thing U.S. support has done is make it that much easier for the Saudi coalition to slaughter Yemeni civilians with impunity. That assistance must end, and the U.S. must demand the lifting of the blockade. If the administration does not do these things, it will be responsible for the continued enabling of the killing of countless Yemenis through bombing and starvation.

*

Featured image is from Felton Davis | CC BY 2.0.

Featured image: 16-year-old Mohamed Wahdan hit by IDF sniper fire – Bahaa Salman from Gaza (Source: NEO)

Gaza is all in the news since protesters were fired upon by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from inside perimeter fence dividing peoples and ideas. As complex as the situation in Palestine is though, there are only four concrete sides to the crisis. Here are those four sides framed and simplified in the hopes that sanity and humaneness can prevail henceforth.

Western media takes the side of Israel. This is plain to see whether you watch TV, or if you read newspapers on or offline. It is a fact. No matter how conciliatory or understanding mainstream outlets and writers may seem, the Israeli narrative ends up dominating. Hamas becomes the villain no matter how many men. Women and children vaporize in front of or beneath IDF guns, cannons, missiles, and bombs. In the end, it all looks like honest reporting. The Washington Post piece today by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro is a Xerox copy of a now familiar style that boils down to “those poor Palestinians, victims of the dastardly Hamas henchmen.” The story always goes like this, sweet and cuddly and defenseless Israel forced to shoot. In short, our media depends on stupid and gullible readership and viewers. It does not matter “why” our media sides with Israel, they simply do. This brings us to the next side of the situation.

The American people as a whole could care less about suffering Palestinians or anybody else for that matter. Sure, there are a scattered few raising their voices, but most people just accept the narrative and move on with their lives. You see, connecting the dots in between world crises and average daily lives is just too huge a leap. This is especially true since American media is more or less owned by Israel sympathizers and influentials. In defense of my people, there is really no other narrative to adopt. And there’s certainly no politician to turn to for Americans defending human rights. Furthermore, if we turn to NGOs and other support mechanisms involved in the Israel-Palestine situation, the Israelis eclipse and activism that might defend the people of Gaza. To make matters worse, the Israelis now ban members of more than 20 peaceful activist organizations worldwide from entering their country including the American NGO Jewish Voice for Peace. So, the American people are insulated from any narrative but the Israeli one – and so are the Israelis. This brings us to side three of the justice box Gazan’s are trapped inside.

Last week we had a visit from an extraordinary man from Tel Aviv. I’ll not mention his name out of professionalism, and because his identity is fairly irrelevant. I can tell you he is a typical conservative Israeli while being unique in his expertise in Israel’s business, education, and defense sectors. Kind and brilliant at the same time, this gentleman reflects the best Israel has to offer. ,But during out conversations my Israeli friend also demonstrated the hardheadedness of core Israeli dogma. Any argument of this nature always reverts to “We’re defending ourselves, what would you have us do?” And naturally, all conversations in this vein lead to the Holocaust, the Nazis, and natural hatred of Germany. My point here being, Israel’s “Iron Dome” not only prevents missiles from coming in, it prevents alternative views reaching anybody there too. The sad part is, the Israelis are generally wonderful and intelligent people. But this hardheadedness and unshakeable rhetoric is the fact even given clear evidence of wrongdoing like I am about to show you.

The last “side” of this whole Israel-Palestinian conflict belongs to innocent Palestinians, not the Hamas radicals Israel says it targets. In my discussion above with the Israeli professional and friend, I brought to his attention the unwarranted shootings use of disproportionate force human rights organizations and some world leaders now demand answers for. And again, the average Israeli withdraws to assume the victim role. But my friends, many of the real victims of the recent sniper shots from across the fence were not even close enough to the border fence to be any possible threat. I had suspected this all along, given my own expertise with long-range rifles, etc. You see, snipers to not cheer 50-yard hits like the IDF soldiers in that now famous video. Snipers are not deployed to set up 200-yard kill zones. Snipers are trained for very long range engagement, and with the notion of “one shot – one kill” beaten into their brains. It takes a special mentality and ability to be a sniper, and Israel has some of the best. That’s why I asked my friend Bahaa Salman about an image of a young boy named he sent me from Gaza of 16-year-old Mohamed Wahdan, a young boy just treated for a splintered leg as a result of sniper fire. As you can see in the feature image of this report, the boy had a very bad day at the hands of an IDF expert marksman. And I can tell he is expert because Bahaa tells me the boy was hit just East of the Jabalya refugee camp. According to my friend Bahaa (who’s never misled me before), Mohamed was hit at a range of 700 meters from the fence while walking with his dad. I’ll let this soak in.

A 700+ meter hit to the fibula of a skinny Palestinian boy is not a defensive action. My guess is the “shot” was some kind of wager in between the members of an Israeli team at a position set up pretty far behind the Israel-Gaza fence. But my points here are all well made now. The only thing that remains is determining solutions based on facts. And it’s damn sure sniping kids one klick off from the demonstrations are not part of the solution. Nor is inaccurate media or political coverage. And Israelis refusing to accept truth and compromise will NEVER moderate this situation. The solution is a compromise that takes everyone into consideration. The solution is justice, and not “might makes right” – which is another typical notion many Israelis share. I know, I talk to them as often as I do to my Palestinian friends. “Follow the blood,” I always say. And to the best of my knowledge, Israel is not doing the bleeding in this conflict. Let’s look for truth, Hamas is Hamas and an entirely different aspect of this crisis.

*

Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

On Thursday, President Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to former SEAL Team 6 officer Britt Slabinski. There are well documented allegations of war crimes committed by Slabinski in Afghanistan, including the killing, torture and dismemberment of unarmed Afghan men. Slabinski is the 12th living person to be granted a Medal of Honor in relation to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The establishment press has completely sidestepped the war crime allegations against Slabinski, focusing instead on the controversy generated by an internecine battle between the Air Force and Naval Command over a poorly executed operation that Slabinski led in 2003.

That operation resulted in five American deaths. One of the men killed, an Air Force officer named John Chapman, was left behind to fight alone after Slabinski ordered troops to evacuate their position on Takur Ghar, a mountain near the Pakistan border. Slabinski claims he believed Chapman to be dead when he evacuated the troops. Drone footage, however, suggests that Chapman survived and was left to fight off attacks on his own.

Days after the Takur Ghar operation, many SEAL Team 6 troops, including Slabinski, reportedly began mutilating the bodies of the men they killed in raids. These acts were purportedly done as revenge for the Taliban’s mutilation of SEAL Neil Roberts on Takur Ghar.

Slabinski himself admitted that he led an ambush against what he claimed were Al Qaeda fighters attempting to enter Pakistan. Slabinski and his subordinates killed all of the men and subsequently fired “security shots” into the dead.

In a recorded interview with writer Malcolm MacPherson, Slabinski said of the ambush:

“I mean, talk about the funny stuff we do. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves. I shot him about 20 times in the legs, and every time you’d kick him, er, shoot him, he would kick up, you could see his body twitching and all that. It was like a game. Like, ‘hey look at this dude,’ and the guy would just twitch again. It was just good therapy. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.”

Slabinski’s perverse form of “therapy” led the SEAL Team 6 leadership to remove him from combat for four years. Yet in 2007, Slabinski was made squadron master of the team’s Blue Squadron.

The Blue Squadron was investigated by Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice in 2007 for multiple complaints—from Afghan allies to SEAL Team 6 troops—about incidents of unlawful combat and abuse of the dead. Tales of orders to kill all male Afghans on raids, regardless of combat status, as well as reports of Afghan casualties being scalped or otherwise mutilated began to circulate almost immediately upon Slabinski’s reentry to combat.

SEALS were reported to have used specially made hatchets to brutally attack and then dismember Afghan troops. The grisly act of “canoeing,” in which SEALS would fire close-range upon the skulls of dead or dying men in order to expose their brain matter, was widely mentioned.

Both NCIS and the Joint Chiefs chose to ignore these allegations for as long as they could. NCIS investigated only after a SEAL secretly reported that another SEAL had attempted to behead an alleged Taliban fighter after Slabinski told his troops that he wanted “a head on a platter.”

Slabinski denied the accusations, claiming that he had neither ordered a beheading nor witnessed one. NCIS concluded that no war crimes had occurred.

Speaking of the investigation, an anonymous Naval officer told the Intercept,

“We knew we’d been called in to give them the result they wanted—that everyone was clean.”

Slabinski continued with SEAL Team 6 for three years after these investigations. He was investigated again, this time for killing unarmed combatants, including school boys, only to be cleared of wrongdoing.

It was not until 2010, when Slabinski’s own admissions of killing unarmed males imperiled the SEALs’ privileged status in the military, that he was dismissed. His career was saved by Rear Admiral Timothy Szymanski, then commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, who tapped him as his command master chief. Szymanski was instrumental in Slabinski’s nomination for the Medal of Honor.

In 2012, Slabinski, still enraged at the SEALs for dismissing him, told the New York Times that far from being the originator of war crimes, he had actually helped rein in bloodthirsty SEALs. Of the beheading incident, he said that he had caught one of his men attempting to cut a man’s throat and that he had ordered him to stop. The SEALs, outraged at the negative publicity, added Slabinski’s name to the “stone of shame,” a list of former SEALs who are barred from ever visiting command again.

The glorification of war criminals is by no means peculiar to the Trump White House. The Obama administration paid homage to CIA operative Johnny Spann, who was killed in 2001 when prisoners at the Qala-i-Janghi prison fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif in northwest Afghanistan rebelled against Spann’s brutal interrogation methods.

Video filmed just prior to the rebellion shows Spann tormenting and threatening John Walker Lindh, the US citizen who had joined the Taliban and was imprisoned in the fortress. Lindh was among a handful of prisoners who survived the US bombing of the fortress, carried out in response to the prisoners’ uprising. Some 800 unarmed prisoners were slaughtered.

The CIA carved Spann’s name into its Memorial Wall and listed him in the agency’s Book of Honor. In an extraordinary press conference at CIA headquarters in December of 2014, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, denounced the just-released Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture while paying tribute to Spann.

Thanks no doubt to his bellicose national security adviser John Bolton, President Donald Trump has now lost control of the movement toward peace between the two Koreas.  Trump has put himself in a corner; he must now either reject — or, better, fire — Bolton, or face the prospect of wide war in the Far East, including the Chinese, with whom a mutual defense treaty with North Korea is still on the books.

The visuals of the surprise meeting late yesterday (local time) between the top leaders of South Korea and North Korea pretty much tell the story.  South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in drove into the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and Seoul quickly released a one-minute video of what, by all appearances, was an extremely warm encounter with Kim Jong-un. It amounted to a smiling, thumbing of two noses at Bolton and the rest of the “crazies” who follow his advice, such as Vice President Mike Pence who echoed Bolton’s insane evocation of the “Libya model” for North Korea, which caused Pyongyang to go ballistic. Their angry response was the reason Trump cited for cancelling the June 12 summit with Kim.

But Trump almost immediately afterward began to waffle. At their meeting on Friday the two Korean leaders made it clear their main purpose was to make “the successful holding of the North Korea-U.S. Summit” happen. Moon is expected to announce the outcome of his talks with Kim Sunday morning (Korean time).

Why is Trump Waffling?

One cannot rule out the possibility that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has some cojones beneath his girth. He has a personal, as well as a diplomatic stake in whether or not Bolton succeeds in wrecking the summit. (Trump, after all, deputized Pompeo, while he was still CIA director, to set it up.)  It’s also possible some non-crazy advisers are warning Trump about Bolton’s next “March of Folly.” Other advisers may be appealing to Trump’s legendary vanity by dangling the prospect that he may blow his only shot at a Nobel Peace Prize.

The two Korean leaders have made abundantly clear their determination to continue on the path of reconciliation despite the artificial divide created by the U.S. 70 years ago. Now, a lot depends on the unpredictable Trump. If enough people talk sense to him and help him see the dangerous consequences of letting himself be led by Bolton, peace on the Korean peninsula may be within reach.

It is no longer a fantasy to suggest that the DMZ could evaporate just as unexpectedly and quickly as that other artifact of the Cold War did — the Berlin Wall almost three decades ago.

*

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  In 1963, when he began his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he was responsible for evaluating Soviet policy toward China and the Far East.  Later, he prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, delivering it one-on-one to Reagans five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.

The government has already prepared some scripts to use on the terrified public should the United States ever be attacked with a nuclear weapon. The US government prepares for all sorts of threats, but none match the pomp and circumstance they’ll display in the event of a nuclear explosion.

Prepared scripts for many disaster scenarios are already written ranging from biowarfare and chemical weapons to volcanoes and wildfires.  The good news is that the Cold War is over and a limited nuclear strike or a terrorist attack can be survivable (a direct hit notwithstanding). The bad news is that the government’s plans for survival don’t really include you anyway. Couple that with a new arms race which is already underway, albeit shrouded in secrecy, and one that may add small, portable nuclear weapons to the global stockpile. Lawmakers and experts fear such “tactical” or battlefield-ready devices (and their parts) may be easier for terrorists to obtain via theft or sale.

And even a small nuclear weapon on the ground can create a stadium-size fireball, unleash a city-crippling blastwave, and sprinkle radioactive fallout hundreds of miles away. In this case, it’s important to be prepared for this scenario, even if it’s unlikely to play out.

According to Business Insider, a nuclear terrorist attack of this magnitude is one of 15 major disaster scenarios planned for by FEMA and other US agencies. (The same scenario also includes a dirty bomb explosion, though such an event would be dramatically less harmful.)

As part of the planning effort, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a series of manuals about how state and local governments should respond. A companion document anticipates 99 likely questions during a radiation emergency and scripted messages that officials can copy or adapt.

 “Ideally, these messages never will be needed,” the EPA says in its messaging document. “[N]evertheless, we have a responsibility to be prepared to empower the public by effectively communicating how people can protect themselves and their families in the event of a radiological or nuclear emergency.”

Here’s an example of what the government will tell people to try to prevent widespread panic:

Lives have been lost, people have been injured, and homes and businesses have been destroyed. All levels of government are coordinating their efforts to do everything possible to help the people affected by this emergency. As lifesaving activities continue, follow the instructions from emergency responders… The instructions are based on the best information we have right now; the instructions will be updated as more information becomes available.”

So basically, they demand you follow their orders.  Nothing out of the ordinary for the government. Comply and do what we say. This is why so many prepare in advance for a wide array of scenarios.  That way, they don’t have to “obey” and “comply with orders” or go to a FEMA camp just to survive.


Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

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

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

On May 26, the US Department of State released an official statement, in which it warned the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) from launching a military operation in southern Syria. The US claimed that such operation will be a violation of the US-Russian de-escalation zone, which was imposed in July of 2017.

“The United States remains committed to maintaining the stability of the southwest de-escalation zone and to the ceasefire underpinning it. We also caution the Syrian regime against any actions that risk broadening the conflict or jeopardize the ceasefire,” the department of State said in its statement.

The US also vowed to take “firm and appropriate measures” in response to any attack of the SAA in southern Syria and accused Russia, the SAA and Iran of violating several de-escalation zones and stonewalling the Geneva process.

“Assad regime, with the support of Russia and Iran, has repeatedly violated these de-escalation zones, most recently in its brutal assault on East Ghouta. The Assad regime and its allies continue to prolong the conflict by ignoring their own de-escalation agreements and stonewalling the Geneva process,” said the Department of State.

US Officially Warns Syrian Army From Attacking Militants In Southern Syria

During the last few weeks, the SAA and Russia began their preparations to launch a large-scale military operation against the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in southern Syria. From its side, Iran announced that it will not participate in such operation.

Local observers believe that the upcoming military operation will cause significant tension between the US and the SAA and could lead to a limited military confrontation similar to the skirmishes we saw in al-Tanaf and Deir Ezzor.

Palestinians: 70 Years of Suffering

May 27th, 2018 by Eric Margolis

To date, 62 Palestinians have been shot dead in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army and over 5,500 wounded by gunfire.  Their crime: protesting the loss of their ancestral homes in the West Bank.

Here was an example of Gandhi-style passive resistance that failed.  Israeli sniper teams just fired at will at the protesters, some of who were throwing rocks or firing sling shots.  High concentration tear gas was dumped by drones on the demonstrators.  Israel claimed it was killing ‘terrorists.’

The United States, Israel’s patron and financier, reveled in the move of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move seen by Bible Belt religious fundamentalists as a key step to the return of the Christian Messiah and Armageddon.  The rest of us, Jews included, are fated to be burned alive.  The American Republicans, who have become a far-right theocratic party, cheered this good news.  The Trump administration, by now an extension of Israel’s hard right Likud Party, was cock-a-hoop.

There was no joy in Gaza.  This miserable, squalid human garbage dump is a giant open-air prison packed with 2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948.  Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders.  Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore. Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.

Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation. Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation.  Chemicals to treat water are banned. Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s US-supplied air force.  Hospitals have almost no medicines.  In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison. Even the wretched animals in Gaza zoo are starving.

The intensive punishment of Gaza, a crime under international law, began after its people voted in a free election for the Hamas movement over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which is more or less run by Israel and the United States.  Israel helped found Hamas in 1987, but then sought, with the US, to destroy the organization, branding it ‘terrorist.’

Israel has extensively used US-supplied arms and money to fight Hamas in Gaza, a clear violation of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 that bars the use of American weapons against civilian populations.

The question remains, where did all the Palestinians come from?  Israel long claimed there were no such people, or a made-up nationality. This was a pretty rich claim coming from Israelis, many of whom hailed from Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe and who had assumed biblical identities and asserted a direct link to the Hebrews who had lived two thousand years earlier in the Levant.

When Israel was created by the US and UN (with Soviet support) in 1948, from 750,000 to one million native Palestinians were driven from their ancestral home at gunpoint or panicked to flight by massacres and ethnic cleansing.   Their villages were bulldozed.

When Israel conquered and annexed the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, another 500,000 Palestinians were made refugees.   Some 50,000-250,000 Syrians were driven by Israel from the strategic Golan Heights.  Bedouins were driven from Israel’s Negev Desert.

By our era, the number of homeless Palestinians has grown to 5 million refugees helped by the UN and at least another million scattered about the Mideast.  The actual number could reach as high as 8-9 million thanks to the Palestinian’s high birth rate and strong family values.

Half of Jordan’s people are Palestinian refugees.  Kuwait had 400,000 Palestinians until they were expelled in 1990-1991 after their leader, Yasser Arafat, foolishly backed claims by Saddam Hussein that he was occupying Kuwait in order to trade it for a Palestinian state.  This was the biggest Palestinian expulsion since 1948.  Egypt’s brutal dictator, Gen. al-Sisi, is now the biggest persecutor of Palestinians after Israel, keeping them locked away in the Gaza prison.

The Arab states have done very little for the Palestinians save slogans and hot air.  The Saudis are now in cahoots with Israel to repress the Palestinians lest they spread modern secular ideas in the medieval Mideast.  Interestingly, some of the most extreme Palestinians, like George Habash, were Arab Christians.   Palestinians remain some of the best educated and most commercial of the Mideast’s peoples.  For a long while they ran most of the Gulf Emirates until replaced by Indians.

‘Sand in the eye of the Mideast’ is what I called this oppressed people without a home.   Their plight could be greatly eased by the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank.  But this would interfere with plans for Israel’s right-wing government for planned expansion.  So, the future for Palestinians is bleak.

The annulment of the Iran nuclear deal framework could not be fended off by the visits or entreaties of Merkel, Macron or May. Donald Trump has refused to renew the agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), removing the United States from the deal. In reality, it changes little for Washington, as the US never really removed any sanctions against Iran in 2015, and mutual trust has never risen above minimal levels. The American move, which was never surprising, arises from four fundamental factors, namely: the link (especially vis-à-vis electoral financing) between the Trump administration and the Israeli government of Netanyahu; the agreement between Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) and Donald Trump to acquire hundreds of billions of dollars worth of arms as well as investments in the United States; directly targeting European allies like Germany, France and England; and, finally, the wish to please the anti-Iranian hawks Trump surrounded himself with in his administration.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman are united against Iran and are now publicly cementing their alliance that has hitherto been shrouded in secrecy. The political rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been constant over the last 12 months, converging over anti-Iranian interests. Trump’s anti-Iran tilt enjoys support from the Netanyahu and bin Salman clans, representing a 180-degree change in US policy direction away from the one forged through the nuclear agreements reached by the previous administration.

Saudi money and Israel’s political support (and neoconservative pressure within the United States) are factors important to the Trump administration, particularly as it is besieged by domestic politics and has to deal with the Mueller investigation that buzzes annoyingly around the president of the United States.

Trump’s need to surround himself with the likes of Pompeo, Haspel and Bolton betrays an acquiescing desire to appease the deep state rather than fight it. Whatever fight might have been present in Donald Trump upon assuming his office has given way to a fruitful collaboration with the deep state. Donald Trump seems to have concluded that it is better to negotiate and find agreements with the deep state than to try, as he promised during his election campaign, to drain the swamp.

The decision on the JCPOA follows in the wake of other incendiary policies that can be labeled anti-Obama or pro-Israeli and pro-Saudi Arabia, and even anti-European. Washington has been struggling over several years with its medium-term strategic thinking, with decisions often being made suddenly on the basis of emotions or against the backdrop of a constant internal struggle between more or less conflicting elites.

The most recent example concerns the JCPOA, which seems to confirm a fairly evident trend over the last two years. Washington is starting to think first and foremost about America, focusing more on domestic matters rather than worrying about maintaining the liberal world order and sustaining the global status quo. Trump seems not to operate according to any particular logic or strategy — here renewing sanctions on Russia, there imposing trade tariffs on China, now breaking the agreement on the JCPOA, then bombing Syria, or even seeking an unprecedented rapprochement with North Korea. It is useless to search for any logical train of thought in all this, even less a grand strategy explaining Washington’s ultimate objectives. Policymakers in the US capital act on the basis of very short-term objective, namely: seeking to please Netanyahu and the moneybags that is MBS; punishing Russia; waving the specter of a trade war; asking allies to pay more for defense (NATO); or preventing European companies from working with important partners in Iran and even Russia (Nord Stream 2).

All this leads to a rifts even amongst European allies themselves, with France and England ready to bomb Syria and threaten Iran, while Germany and Italy oppose such moves on the basis of international law and the need for diplomacy.

With the undoing of the JCPOA and renewed sanctions on Russia, it seems that European countries finally intend to assert their own sovereignty by legislating against these harmful American actions. The European Parliament intends to adopt a new law that blocks the payment of fines to US authorities by any European company sanctioned for its relations with Tehran. Washington wants to force its European allies to choose between working with Tehran or Washington. It is mafia-like blackmail which even Brussels seems to have had a gutful of and intends to push back against with concrete actions. A similar situation in 1996 involving Brussels led Bill Clinton to suspend such destructive actions among allies in favor of diplomacy.

Trump seems to worry little about the medium- and long-term effects of his actions, seeming not to have any interest in harmonizing relations with allies, especially Merkel’s Germany, against which Washington has a negative trade balance only exceeded by Beijing. The only point of continuity between Obama and Trump concerns the objection to sabotaging Nord Stream 2 (the pipeline connecting Russia and Germany).

If the strategic thinking on Trump’s part is non-existent and concerns only very short-term objectives linked to the image that he likes to project of himself (of a tough guy who keeps his electoral promises, such as that regarding the Iranian agreement), the practical effect is that of a strategy that makes little sense from an American point of view. Policy-makers in American think-tanks have seeded many of Trump’s resulting actions, and the blame for the last fifteen years of failed policies can be laid at their feet. They are the true, if unintended, architects of the emerging multipolar world, and have inadvertently served to accelerate the ending of the American unipolar moment.

Once again, these policy-makers delude themselves into thinking that Trump’s moves — placing sanctions on Russia, a reanimated and bellicose presence and attitude in the Middle East, and the breaking up of the JCPOA – are a great opportunity to achieve some strategic objectives that have been lost over the last few years.

The calculation of these strategists is wrong and the consequences are quite the opposite to those intended, yet these self-proclaimed experts, blinded by money from dozens of lobbies (the Israel-based lobbyists, for example), become the victims of their own propaganda, insisting on many strategies that directly harm US interests globally and in the Middle Eastern region in particular.

The policy-makers belonging to such think-tanks as the Brookings Institute or the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) are more than convinced that strong pressure placed on Iran will arrest the expansion of the Shia Crescent over the Middle East and Iran’s general influence over the region (from Tehran to Beirut via Baghdad and Damascus). The sanctions on Russia and Iran serve, in their mind, to block European energy independence that would otherwise be achieved through cooperating with both countries. The rediscovered bellicosity in the region tends to counter the Russian presence, even if only psychologically, and reaffirms Washington’s willingness to remain committed to the region and defend its interests there (the Saudi dictatorship, above all, thanks to its pricing of oil in US dollars).

This last point is of enormous importance in terms of global strategy, and Saudi Arabia is a key partner in this regard, the American presence in the region, together with anti-Iranian policies, also serving to reassure the valuable Saudi ally, increasingly courted by Beijing through its petro-yuan convertible into gold.

Washington finds itself increasingly isolated in its economic and military policies. Merkel’s visit to Russia reaffirms the desire to create an alternative axis to the one between Brussels and Washington. The victory in Italy of two parties strongly opposed to new wars and the annulment of the JCPOA, and especially the sanctions against Russia, serves to form a new alliance, accentuating internal divisions within Europe. Macron, Merkel and May are all grappling with a strong crisis of popularity at home, which does not aid them in their decision-making.

Exactly the same problems affect MbS, Trump, and Netanyahu in their respective countries. These leaders find themselves adopting aggressive policies in order to alleviate internal problems. They also struggle to find a common strategy, often displaying schizophrenic behavior that belies the fact that they are meant to be on the same side of the barricades in terms of the desired world order.

In direct contrast, China, Russia, Iran, and now India, are trying to respond to Western madness in a rational, moderate, and mutually beneficial way. And as a result, Europeans may perhaps begin to understand that the future lies not in piggybacking on Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Trump seems to have offered the perfect occasion for European leaders to assert their sovereignty and start to move away from their traditional servility shown towards Washington.

While it is difficult to imagine a schism taking place overnight, the chances that Europe’s capitals will clash with Washington are no longer so remote, much to the pleasure of Moscow and Beijing, who aim to incorporate Europe into their mega-Eurasian project as the fourth major component after Asia, the Eurasian Union and the Middle East/Persian Gulf.

*

Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In the book Gold Warriors by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave the authors reveal one of the most shocking secrets of the 20th century the amazing story of a vast treasure that Japan managed to loot across Asia which is today worth hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars, the concealment of this treasure in hundreds of sites, and the secret recovery of much of this treasure by what would become the CIA.

America would help Japan cover up this vast fortune fooling the world into believing that Japan was bankrupt after the war and was unable to pay reparations for their mass murder of tens of millions of civilians or the massive profits they generated from slave labor and the global heroin trade.

The treasure much of it buried in the Philippines would fuel the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos. Most of this vast fortune would remain in the hands of fascist Japanese war criminals and would for decades be used to prop up Japan’s corrupt one party democracy ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party with the CIA and the Yakuza pulling the strings behind the scenes. It would be controlled by men like Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy through their Black Eagle Trust which managed both Japanese and Nazi War loot. The Gold would be deposited in the Federal Reserve, The Bank of England, Union Banque Suisse (UBS) in Switzerland, Citibank, HSBC and other major banks who often stole it for themselves.  The gold was also used to manipulate the entire global economy , finance assassinations and covert ops bribe politicians and finance right wing political movements like the John Birch Society domestically.

Indeed after reading this book one may well wonder how much of this gold is involved today in financing charlatans like Alex Jones and the rest of the patriot movement since as everyone knows these “Patriot Radio” stations are heavily involved in selling gold and silver. The vast treasure was also one of the largely unknown aspects of the Iran/Contra scandal and was  used to fund WACL The World Anti-Communist League two of my favorite obsessions.

The book offers a window to the vast and mysterious world of offshore banking and the Gold Cartel. The authors estimate that today the ultra-rich are hoarding over 23 trillion dollars mostly in offshore bank accounts while around the world health and education are being cut poverty and homelessness are on the rise, and the rest of us are constantly told to tighten our belts. Gold Warriors tells a compelling tale of secrecy, greed, treachery, murder and lies.

The Seagraves destroy the myth that America reformed Japan after the war revealing the shocking story of the MacArthur occupation and it’s alliance with Japanese Fascists and Gangsters along with Japan’s ruthless imperial family and their huge corporate backers like Mitsui, Mitsubushi, Kawasaki and Sumitomo. They used this loot to finance Japan’s Postwar recovery and meteoric rise. Companies that have since become household names made their fortunes through looting Asia and employing slave labor including American POWS. When the survivors tried to sue for reparations State department officials like Tom Foley with corrupt ties to these Japanese corporations compared the victims to terrorists. Foley’s wife worked for Sumitomo and Foley later became a lobbyist for Mitsubishi.

Okhoru Pavilion in Geoncheongjeon, Gyeongbokgung where the Empress (Queen Min) was killed. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Seagraves begin their book with the brutal assassination of the Korean Queen Min on October 7 1895 by the Japanese. She was murdered along with two of her ladies in waiting and then her body was doused in gasoline and burned. To carry it out the Japanese used a so called “Patriotic Society” which were part secret society, part fascist paramilitary, part gangsters and were the favored tool by which the Japanese empire carried out destabilization, assassinations, provocations, and other standard tactics of what would later come to be called psychological warfare. The two main patriotic societies were the Black Dragon (who were obsessed with halting Russian expansion and conquering China) and the Black Ocean which was focused on conquering Korea.

In Japan like in America big business, organized crime, and intelligence were strongly inter-related. The Japanese like all empires were cynical liars and claimed that Queen Min had been murdered by Koreans. With the Strong willed Queen Min out of the way her weak husband King Kojong quickly became a Japanese Puppet and soon Korea was a Japanese Colony while Korea’s ally China suffered a humiliating defeat at Japans hands when it tried to intervene. Japan seized Taiwan and a piece of Manchuria from China. The Korean language was outlawed, Koreans were even forced to adopt Japanese names.

The entire Korean peninsula became Japanese property and they began to loot the accumulated wealth of centuries including gold silver and their prized celadon porcelains worth a fortune to collectors. Japan employed an army of antiquarians to seize and catalog hundreds of ancient Korean manuscripts sending them to Japan or burning them to destroy Korea’s cultural heritage.  The Japanese even resorted to grave robbery on a massive scale of Korean Imperial tombs. Korean rice was shipped off to Japan while the locals had to eat millet. Koreans were sent to Japan as slave laborers. initially Ito Hirobumi was appointed viceroy who ironically was head of the clique that opposed the more aggressive militarists of the Yamagata clique but his enemies made sure his staff included the head of the Black Dragon patriotic society Uchida Ryohei. Ryohei’s thugs killed 18,000 Koreans and when Ito resigned in disgust he was assassinated and his death was blamed on Koreans and used as an excuse to annex Korea. False flag terror (Or provocations as they were called at the time) were a favorite Japanese tactic. Six million Korean men were forced into slave labor one million were sent to Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Korean women were forced into prostitution as Comfort Women for the Japanese army a practice that would be adopted by the Americans when they Occupied Korea (and other Asian countries) in the decades that followed.

At the same time Japan targeted Formosa what is today known as Taiwan colonizing the island and setting up massive heroin laboratories Taiwan would for decades become a center of the global drug trade. Japan launched a sneak attack on the Russian empire at Vladivostok in 1904  then smashed the Baltic fleet the Tsar sent in revenge. Russia was forced to sign a humiliating peace deal giving Japan control of it’s possessions in northern China Manchuria like the South Manchurian Railway it had built.

Unlike Korea Manchuria was mostly a wilderness it’s wealth was in timber and minerals. To turn a quick profit Japan later in alliance with the nationalist chinese set up a massive opium growing operation  allying with the green gang. They bribed warlords and began buying up chinese industries and land. The Chinese KMT and their triad allies the Green Gang were similar to the Japanese in that they were fascist gangsters who used secret societies to carry out their dirty work. Of course the Japanese with their greed and ruthlessness often terrorized the chinese to get their hands on their wealth. Manchuria became the center of what the Japanese called the Tairiku Ronin or in the authors words “carpetbaggers, spies, secret policemen, financial conspirators, fanatical gangsters, drug dealers and eccentric army officers.” Japan set up a puppet state called Manchuko with former chinese emperor Pu Yi as a figurehead.

The true rulers were the so called Manchuria Quartet Colonel Doihara, his sidekick Major Tanaka, Future minister of war Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, finally there was future war time Prime Minister Colonel Tojo Hideki. It was Doihara of Military intelligence who recruited the fascist gangster Yoshio Kodama who was in prison back in Japan for a series of attempted assassinations of government officials (Japanese fascists murdered anyone who became an obstacle to their schemes) Kodama who was on friendly terms with many in the imperial family would go on to manipulate Japanese politics for decades as the CIA’s most valuable agent.

Manchuria was the base of the Kwangtung Army which generated so much wealth through various criminal schemes that it was practically independent of Tokyo anyone back in Japan who opposed it was in danger of assassination while it bought the loyalty of others with a cut of the profits from the looting and heroin trade. Behind the scenes the emperor Hirohito and the Mitsui and Mitsubushi Corporations ran everything making a fortune from their cut of the illegal drug trade. China was flooded with cheap heroin and to hook the populace the Japanese laced patent medicines with heroin, gave out free heroin laced cigarettes under the brand name Golden Bat, and also deluged the chinese with heroin tablets. The Japanese planned to turn Manchuria into an industrial powerhouse but the process was so expensive that in hopes of turning a profit they began to look towards conquering the rest of China.

Japanese Bombarded Wanping.gif

Japanese forces bombarding Wanping, 1937 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Through a series of provocations involving the patriotic societies and Japanese intelligence Japan was whipped into a war frenzy and more Chinese land was stolen. Finally after the 1937 Marco Polo bridge incident full scale war began. Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek offered little resistance mounting a long retreat with his own massive hoard of stolen treasure. The KMT had cut a secret deal with the Japanese years before to share profits from the heroin trade. The KMT had even been re-selling American lend lease supplies to the Japanese. Nanking was left defenseless and Emperor Hirohito sent his Uncle Prince Asaka a brutal fascist drunk to oversee the infamous rape of Nanking to terrorize China into surrender. In a couple months 300,000 people were killed shot beheaded, or used for bayonet practice. The Japanese claimed all Chinese civilians whether men women or children were “plainclothes soldiers” and between 20,000-80,000 women were raped. However this was more then just a war crime at the same time as Japan invaded China emperor Hirohito ordered the creation of the Golden Lily to insure that China’s loot remained under the control of the imperial family. The eccentric Prince Chichibu was put in charge of Golden Lily and Prince Takeda would also play a key role in this operation. For centuries China’s emperors had claimed a monopoly on trade meaning that the merchant class operated a huge black market that they concealed by bribing local officials. For centuries these merchants had wisely mistrusted banks hiding their fortunes in gems and gold. The chinese had also been collecting art and valuable manuscripts for over 3,000 years.

While the massacres at Nanking were raging the golden Lily were terrorizing these wealthy merchants through kidnapping, torture, and threatening to kill their families to seize these massive fortunes which were completely off the books. Their other strategy was to trade heroin for gold to chinese gangsters to get them to do much of the dirty work. Yoshio Kodama was the Japanese liaison to the Chinese underworld making deals with the Ku brothers in Shanghai one of which headed the Green Gang while the other was a KMT General. The Golden Lily operation was fantastically successfully 6,000 tons of gold were stolen in Nanking alone. Japan unleashed an army of experts to steal as much art and priceless manuscripts as they could.

However Japan was soon bogged down in a long war against China’s communist Guerrillas and the American backed nationalist KMT. With the typical logic of empires when bogged down in one disaster they launch an attack some place else. First they attacked the Soviet Union but were badly beaten by General Zhukov so they turned their attention to their American rivals who were cutting off their flow of supplies because America hoped to rule China through the KMT after the war. In any case Japan launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and in a matter of months had seized all of south-east asia from the British, French, Americans and Dutch. French Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, and the Philippines were soon theirs. They looted these areas by seizing the banks and going through the records to track down the wealthy colonists. The locals were only too happy to revenge themselves on the colonists  by tipping off the Japanese to their hidden loot. The Japanese used a massive currency scheme in all their holdings printing scrip and outlawing the local currency. Above all they terrorized the Chinese merchants across asia engaging in what were called the Sook Ching massacres of overseas chinese. Tens of thousands of Chinese were brutally killed in these massacres. In China itself the Japanese would kill 23 million people.

Around the same time Japan had been conquering Korea America had conquered the Philippines while claiming they wanted to liberate it from Spain. With it’s usual cynical  hypocrisy once Spain surrendered America crushed the Filipino independence movement with the brutal tactics it would later employ in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, Iraq and a long list of other countries. Of course it had been America itself which had forced Japan to end it’s long isolation setting into motion the chain of events that had lead to Japan’s rapid modernization and imperialist adventures in the first place. General Douglas MacArthur’s father had been one of the invaders and occupiers of the Philippines. Japan hoped it could make a deal to keep the Philippines after the war which it had been preparing to seize for decades. Hirohito had bought the friendship of Pope Pius XII (who had also been instrumental in the rise of fascists to power in Italy, Spain, Germany, Croatia, and other countries see Karlheinz Deschner’s classic God and the Fascists) with a huge deposit in the Vatican bank just one of the scandalous chapters in the banks history. He hoped Pius XII would be able to broker a peace deal with the Americans that would allow Japan to keep some of it’s conquests after the war a scheme that never bore fruit. In any case Japan managed to seize the Philippines from MacArthur forcing him into a humiliating retreat. When the war began to go very badly by 1943 Japan was no longer able to ship it’s loot back to Japan and so began to hide it all over the Philippines and Indonesia. Prisoners of war and the local Filipinos were forced to dig massive tunnels.

These slave laborers were often massacred or buried alive to keep the tunnels secret. The Japanese often buried their loot near historical landmarks and hospitals because they were less likely to be bombed. They smuggled gold into the Philippines on phony hospital ships since they would be less likely to be sunk by American submarines. They hid some of the Gold by loading ships full of treasure and then sinking them for later recovery. They managed to hide a mind blowing amount of loot. Huge underground chambers were filled with thousands of tons of gold. The Japanese were masters at camouflaging the entrances to these chambers and in creating coded treasure maps. The Americans managed to discover this gold was being hidden during the war thanks to one of their spies.

Yamashita (second from right) at his trial in Manila, November 1945 (Source: US National Archives and Records Administration)

Once America recaptured the Philippines they captured General Yamashita who had been sent to the Philippines late in the war to oversee the defense of the island and to help oversee the Golden Lily operation to hide the gold. This is where two later infamous characters entered the the story Filipino spy Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana was ordered to torture Yamashita’s driver major Kojima to get him to reveal the locations of the Gold. Ed Lansdale who had been a lowly OSS propaganda writer got the lucky break of a lifetime when he was sent out to the Philippines to supervise Santa Romana and got major Kojima to talk by promising him a cut of the loot. There were at least 176 treasure sites in the Philippines but recovering a dozen was enough to launch Edward Lansdale and Santa Romana’s careers for decades. Lansdale would have a long career stretching from the Philippines to Vietnam, to the secret war on Cuba. According to the authors he was also instrumental in the creation of the “Enterprise” of ex-CIA men that would be exposed during the Iran-Contra scandal. Santa Romana would for decades serve as a front man for hundreds of billions of CIA black money. His huge personal fortune worth 55 Billions would later be stolen by Ed Lansdale and John Reed of Citibank in the 1970’s  when Santa Romana outlived his usefulness. Ed Lansdale flew to Japan to tell General MacArthur of his discovery and then to Washington to inform Truman. They had found so much gold that if it became publicly known it would have destroyed the Bretton woods system which relied on gold being valued at 35 dollars an ounce. The Bretton Woods system was itself backed with the huge sums in Nazi gold the US had managed to seize and hide the authors suggest.

Back in Washington there was already a group dedicated to stealing and hiding Nazi gold the Black Eagle Trust run by Secretary of War Stimson, John J. McCloy, Robert B. Anderson and Robert Lovett who would all have long careers in foreign affairs and banking. With their massive off the books money they would bribe politicians, finance coups, covert operations and psychological warfare. Soon the Golden Lily loot was being managed by the same people. It was being moved across the world being used to prop up banks around the world UBS in Switzerland, HSBC in Hong Kong, The Bank of England, Chase Manhattan. It was hidden in 42 countries between 1945-47. The gold was used to make huge loans to Britain, Egypt, and the KMT in China.

Politicians around the world were bribed with gold certificates. The intersection between wall street and intelligence involved vast sums completely unknown to the public. The notion that the CIA could ever be held in check once it had control of this vast fortune was a joke leading to events like the assassination of JFK and the nearly 60 years of cover up which have ensued not surprising when one remembers that the entire mainstream american media was controlled by former OSS men (See the Science of Coercion by Christopher Simpson) While the CIA and OPC controlled the Media worldwide as part of Frank Wisner’s infamous “Mighty Wurlitzer” churning out cold war propaganda nonstop.

Back in Japan the emperor and his friends who controlled the big Zaibatsu corporations Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo plus of course his gangster friends like Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa had managed to survive the war with their fortunes intact. Kodama made a deal with MacArthurs aide General Willoughby “the lovable fascist” to turn over $100 million to the CIA for his immunity (worth 1 billion dollars today) which they put into the M-Fund. He had managed to save 13 billion dollars during the war stored in the emperors private vaults in the form of gold, platinum, diamonds and other loot. America had not bombed Japanese industries instead targeting the workers homes doubtless because American corporations were heavily invested in Japan just as they were in Nazi Germany where American owned factories supplying the German war machine were spared during the war.

In Germany Denazification was a complete scam and so it was in Japan. Trials targeting Japanese war criminals were fixed to prevent the emperor’s role from being known. The US set up a special fund to bribe the witnesses. Kodama was put on the CIA payroll and behind the scenes he created the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party headed by corrupt politicians like Kishi Nobosuke, Yoshida Shigeru, and Tanaka Kakuei that would rule Japan for the next 70 years looting the economy through a massive system of bribery and kickbacks. MacArthur oversaw the creation of massive funds financed with a portion of the war loot although the Emperor and his cronies were allowed to hold onto the bulk of their loot. The Yatsuya fund was used to  control the Japanese underworld. The Keenan fund named after Joseph Keenan the chief war crimes prosecutor was used to bribe witnesses to protect the emperor and his cronies. In a darkly comedic touch his right hand man was the same General Tanaka who was General Doihara’s right hand man in Manchuria and a major war criminal in his own right. It was Tanaka who escorted Keenan around to bars and brothels and made sure he made it home when he was drunk.

The M-Fund was named after General William Frederic Marquat who was in charge of restructuring the Japanese economy. Marquat was also supposed to disband Japan’s infamous Unit 731 that ran biowarfare research using prisoners as guinea pigs during the war. Instead of disbanding the unit they were recruited by the pentagon and I believe used to wage germ warfare on China and North Korea. The M-Fund was used to bribe politicians and evolved into one of the most scandalous financial scams in history. The Showa fund was used to hide the emperors loot. Soon the M-Fund would corrupt American politicians as well and Nixon turned over the M-Fund which had been run by MacArthurs cronies like General Marquat, along with the CIA and the corrupt Liberal Democratic Party over to the full control of Japan in exchange for illegal kickbacks funneled into the 1960 presidential Campaign which he lost to Kennedy. Part of the deal was for Nixon to return Okinawa which he later did once he finally got elected. MacArthur was a key figure in the American far right as were his cronies Bonner Fellers and General Willoughby. Golden Lily loot was funneled back to far right movements in the US and would help finance McCarthy’s witch hunts. Another source of wealth was the global drug trade which the CIA would run along with KMT and Japanese and Korean Gangsters.

Together these sources of wealth would be used to fund WACL a global network of fascists drug dealers and terrorists much loved by Ronald Reagan. In the final chapter of their book the authors provide a brilliant summary of the Politics of Heroin relying heavily on Doug Valentine’s classic “The Strength of the Wolf.” In Japan McCarthyism took a much bloodier course with a massive assassination program combined with a cointelpro style war on anyone who dared to dissent. The assassinations were carried out by the Cannon agency run by Jack Cannon (who always acted like a movie gangster) and funded with profits from the Japanese underworld including Ted Lewin’s infamous Mandarin club. Even American and British officials could be targeted for assassination if they threatened to expose MacArthurs alliance with war criminals and gangsters. For assassinations that were even more sensitive KOTOH was employed an acronym formed from the name of 5 Japanese army officers who performed surgical assassinations.

At the same time Ed Lansdale was traveling all over Asia with a Filipino hit team run by Napoleon Valeriano carrying out gangland style assassinations of the CIA’s enemies in a dozen countries. He was working for Allen Dulles and for Frank Wisner’s OPC which had recruited the infamous OSS “China Cowboys” who were deeply connected with the global KMT drug trade and who set up shop in Taiwan, Korea and Japan after Mao liberated china. Men like Desmond Fitzgerald who would mentor Ted Shackley of Iran/Contra fame.

Much of the book describes the hunt for treasure in the Philippines. The Japanese were the masters of this quietly returning for decades to recover their loot. Future president Ferdinand Marcos learned of the gold befriending Santa Romana and making deals with the Japanese to recover gold. It tells many tales that could be turned into movies. (so many tales of treachery and paranoia remind one of the classic Humphrey Bogart film “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) For example there was Filipino peasant Ben Valmores who became a servant to the lonely Japanese Prince Tanaka who was a key Golden Lily member. Ben lived his whole life poor despite knowing the secrets of where much of the treasure was buried and having 176 coded treasure maps showing their locations. The one time he successfully found some gold including a priceless miniature gold cathedral Marcos had it confiscated and Ben was lucky to survive.

Another Filipino treasure hunter Roger Roxas managed to recover a massive 1 ton Golden Buddha which Marcos then confiscated Roxas ended up tortured permanently disfigured and nearly dead. There was the tale of mining engineer Robert Curtis recruited by Marcos and the John Birch Society (JBS) to unearth the treasure and to re-smelt it. The JBS had learned of the treasure in the 1940’s since MacArthurs cronies like Bonner Fellers were top members. Curtis was double crossed by both Marcos and the JBS his business was destroyed and he was nearly murdered. However in the process he obtained copies of the treasure maps and was later recruited by WACL head General John Singlaub and his partner General Robert Schweitzer to recover the gold to fund a massive privatized version of the FBI (Of course such an organization already existed in the 1980’s called Western Goals and the American Security Council had once served the same purpose in the 1950’s) Amusingly despite Singlaub’s decades of experience in covert war and his strong political connections to the new president Aquino and to Reagan back home his plot was foiled at the last minute when after finding the gold using high tech equipment before they could dig it up Filipino army helicopters descended on the site because they had obtained their permit from the wrong government official. This solves the mystery of why John Singlaub was in the Philippines when the Iran/Contra scandal broke in the fall of 1986.

Marcos became one of the richest men in the world through his discoveries. In one surprising episode it was Marcos Gold that paved the way for Nixons visit to China with Marcos agreeing to deposit 72 billion in Gold in China’s Bank accounts. Marcos had long been used by the CIA to bribe asian governments into supporting American policy in return they allowed him to get rich selling his gold to saudi princes or trading it for drugs from asian or latin american cartels. The China story might be unbelievable if there were not proof that Marcos widow later tried to access the accounts. Unfortunately for Imelda Marcos once her husband fell the banks stole all his gold for themselves just as happened to Santa Romana’s heirs a recurring pattern in the book. The golden Lily loot that lead to his rise also lead to his downfall when he bargained too forcefully with the Reagan White House and the CIA who wanted him to use his fortune to back Reagan’s scheme to create Rainbow dollars. Marcos became one of the first victims of a CIA color revolution. As CIA backed NGO’s flooded the streets with angry protestors his American sponsors kidnapped him and his wife to Hawaii by helicopter and airlifted his fortune out of the country. He would later choke to death on a Big Mac. This solves the cold war mystery of why the CIA would overthrow a right wing dictator who had served them well for decades.

Gold Warriors is a fantastic book that anyone with an interest in the CIA, drugs, or Fascism  should read it offers a window into the shadowy world of offshore banking where one trillion dollars a day is transferred around the world. It names the names of some of the most powerful families in the world the Krupps, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warburgs and Rockefellers that are tied into banking and the Gold Cartel and who’s fortunes are incalculable. The Gold and Diamond cartels are still looting the world today with the same greed and brutality as imperial Japan. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone 10 million people have been killed in a brutal war to loot the country of Gold, Diamonds, Uranium, and rare earth elements.

Meanwhile the enormous off the books fortune is still floating around the banks of the world and still being used to fund off the books covert operations. Most of the worlds Gold is today hoarded in secret bunkers in the Swiss alps (designed to survive a nuclear war) and in underground tunnels. The Hunt for Yamashita’s gold is still going on the most recent episode was during the summer of 2001 When George W. Bush sent navy seals on a secret mission to recover some gold. His father George H.W. Bush of course was long tied to the gold both through the CIA and through his web of shadowy businesses interests.

The M-Fund lead to the creation of strange financial instruments called 57’s Tanaka and his cronies had been looting Japanese Banks and bondholders were forced to trade their bonds for the 57’s or face murder. Only those with the right connections could redeem the 57’e the Japanese Government claimed they were counterfeit. Alexander Haig was hired to negotiate for the fascist Paraguayan Government to redeem some 57s they had managed to obtain and thanks to his friend then vice president George H.W. Bush who wrote a letter on his behalf he was able to blackmail Japan into a deal. At the same time Norbert Schlei who had written the civil rights act when he was Assistant attorney general was framed and entrapped by the American when he investigated the 57’s and nearly had his career destroyed. After clearing his name he was assassinated another strange chapter in the saga of the Golden Lily. Swiss and American banks are just as crooked behaving like thieves and Conmen. Gold Warriors reveals that from the underworld to the military and intelligence agencies, to the corrupt politicians to the titans of finance we are ruled at every level by gangsters.

*

Sources

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave is a must read. It’s packed with information while written in a very exciting and entertaining manner.

Doug Valentine’s Review of Gold Warriors

https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/25/gold-warriors/

Dave Emory Interviews Peggy Seagrave on Gold Warriors

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-428-gold-warriors-an-interview-with-peggy-seagrave/

Dave Emory Interviews Sterling & Peggy Seagrave

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-689-interview-with-sterling-and-peggy-seagrave/

Dave Emory on the Yamato Dynasty

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-426-the-return-of-the-rising-sun-part-2/

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-427-guilding-the-lily-the-japanese-looting-of-asia-in-world-war-ii/

How America adopted the Japanese system of “Comfort Women” in Korea a practice that continues to our own day

https://n0p3.net/2015/09/15/us-military-trade-in-trafficked-persons-and-sexual-servitude-part-2/

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Washington has been waging political, propaganda, and economic war on Iran for nearly 40 years – regime change the goal, regaining a subservient client state, eliminating Israel’s main regional rival, a nonbelligerent one threatening no one left unexplained.

Iran seek normal relations with all countries, wanting its sovereign independence respected, protected and preserved.

It threatens no other nations, not Israel, America or any others. History shows it never engaged in conflict with another country except in justifiable self-defense – during US orchestrated, Saddam Hussein aggression on the Islamic Republic the only time.

Tehran displayed good faith in agreeing to curtail its legitimate non-military nuclear program – its goal to have unjustifiable sanctions removed, to have normalized relations with the world community, what all nations deserve.

US/Israeli claims about Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions, and Iranian “aggression” as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” are bald-faced lies – demanding world community denunciation in the strongest terms not forthcoming in a clearly acceptable form.

Saving the JCPOA nuclear deal hangs by a thread because of Trump’s unconscionable pullout, along with US pressure on other countries to go along with what’s clearly unacceptable and illegal.

On May 25, a JCPOA commission met in Vienna for the 9th time – attended by Iranian, EU, Russian, and Chinese officials, along with IAEA chief Yukiya Amano.

According to Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minster for Political Affairs Seyed Abbas Araghchi, JCPOA signatories (minus America) want the agreement preserved.

Talks continue at the ministerial and expert levels. Iran called on Britain, France and Germany to provide firmly guaranteed legal and political commitments to assure Tehran receives JCPOA benefits promised under its terms.

It’s up to the Joint Commission, responsible for overseeing implementation of the agreement. Russia and China are firmly on board, wanting benefits afforded Iran preserved and protected.

Where EU countries stand is uncertain, saying they want the deal preserved not good enough without firm guarantees not forthcoming so far.

Lifting and not reimposing nuclear-related sanctions, permitting normalized economic and trade relations with Iran, is essential to preserve the JCPOA.

The Joint Commission continues discussing the following key issues without resolution so far:

  • sale of Iranian oil, gas condensate petroleum products, petrochemicals, and related transfers;
  • banking and other financial transactions with Tehran;
  • land, sea, air, and rail transportation relations with the Islamic Republic; and
  • export credits, insurance, and related financial transactions – related to cooperative economic, trade and investment activities, along with related issues.

Iran wants a firm Joint Commission proposal to resolve outstanding issues by end of May, a senior official saying:

“(W)e are not confident…We expect (a) package to be given to us by the end of May…(W)e haven’t seen Plan B yet. Plan B has just started to be figured out” with no assurance it’ll be forthcoming in acceptable form.

According to Araghchi,

“(w)e have not come to a decision whether or not to remain in the” JCPOA.

It depends on “European countries…tell(ing) us how they would be able to secure Iran’s interests in the” agreement without US participation.

History shows EU countries most always go along with US policies – even when harming their own interests.

Will this time be different? It’s hard being optimistic based on often Brussels yields to US demands.

EU failure to guarantee Iranian benefits it justifiably expects and deserves from the JCPOA may doom the agreement. The fullness of time will tell one way or the other.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

The U.S. government constantly vilifies Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and other governments it opposes, claiming that they are not democracies. Republicans and Democrats alike warn of “oppressive regimes” while telling us that the U.S. is a true democracy, and everyone here has a say through voting.

But a closer look reveals that the deciding factor in U.S. “democracy” is not the vote at all, but the dollar bill. Policies are made and unmade not because of the number of votes they get, but because corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ‘lobbying,’ and other ways of paying off law makers to pass the laws they want.

Take the pharmaceutical industry.

Virtually everyone takes medication at one time or another, and access to medicine can mean life or death. Many people cannot afford medication. In a recent poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80 percent of people in the U.S.  believe drug costs are unreasonably high. If we voted on lowering the cost of essential drugs, there is no doubt that the vote would overwhelmingly be in favor of keeping the price of medications as low as possible.

During his State of the Union address in January, and again in New Hampshire in March, Donald Trump actually spoke to this sentiment. He loudly proclaimed that drug prices will drop “very substantially in the not-too-distant future.”  He said he was for the federal government negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare (currently Big Pharma charges what it wants) and that consumers should be allowed to import prescription drugs from Canada and other countries, at lower prices than in the U.S.

But this was just rhetoric.  On May 11, when push came to shove, Trump backed down on both these measures.  Why?  Because the giant pharmaceutical companies are against decreasing the payments they receives from Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs  because this cuts into their profits.

The $171 million lobby

“Big Pharma has made a huge investment in Congress, with extensive lobbying and massive campaign contributions,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that drugmakers spent $171.5 million lobbying the federal government last year alone. This is more than any other industry including oil and insurance. And they are spending even more on lobbying this year, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the largest lobbying firm representing the drug industry

Drug companies and their trade associations sent out a small army of 882 lobbyists last year to line the pockets of both Republican and Democratic law makers with dollars, and to them promise  funds for their next election campaigns should they pass laws favorable to pharmaceutical profit margins. With 535 members of Congress at present, Big Pharma lobbyists outnumber them almost two-to-one!  And they are aggressive. Congressional aides say Big Pharma can send 10 or 15 lobbyists to meetwith two congressional aides.

Lobbying isn’t the only way the pharmaceutical industry and those on its payroll attempt to influence legislatures. They spend multi-millions on advertising and donate to patient advocacy groups whose members rely on the drugs they produce.

According to Kantar Media, an ad tracking company, drug companies spent $6.1 billion on advertising aimed at U.S. consumers last year. This is more than twice as much as the largest corporate advertiser in the U.S., Procter & Gamble.

The government- drug company revolving door

Another major issue in the government’s relationship with the drug industry is the “revolving door” that exists between the two. On every level, executives in the biggest drug companies and U.S. officials are constantly changing places.

For example, Alex M. Azar II, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is the former presidentof global pharmaceutical Eli Lilly and company, and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, worked for the government, then as a consultant to drug companies, and now is back in government.

Can Azar be counted on to work in the public interests, and lower drug costs? During his decade at Lilly, the company tripled the price of its insulin and was fined for colluding to keep its prices high in Mexico.

The FDA is supposed to test the efficacy of drugs and medical devices before they hit the market.  Gottleib, its new head, “has consistently pushed for faster approvals of under-tested products—accepting millions of dollars from drug and device makers along the way—even when it means skipping the critical clinical trials that uncover serious problems” according to the National Womens Health Network.

But Donald Trump knew this when he appointed Azar And Gottlieb to these highest of health positions.  Their ‘job’ is not really to look out for the public interests. It’s to look out for the interests of the very companies the agencies they head claim to regulate.

The drug company-government revolving door goes down the ranks of government.  For example, John D. Dingell, longtime aide to former Michigan Democratic Representative, now works for PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical lobbying group.

For six years, Gary Andres was the Republican staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles legislation that affects prescription drugs and the F.D.A. In February 2017, he became a senior executive vice president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group that lobbies for biotech companies. Andres returned to Congress last month to become the Republican staff director of the Ways and Means Committee, which has some power over Medicare, including its payments for prescription drugs.

Lobbyists are former Congress employees

More than two-thirds of Big Pharma lobbyists are former employees of Congress or federal agencies For example, an aide to Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), former chairman of the Senate health committee, is now a lead lobbyist for the multi-million dollar drug company Merck.

Of course, all, of those going through this revolving door will give lip service to health being a human right, and that every American, regardless of socioeconomic status, should be able to access the medicine they need.  But the real “need” these people serve is the “need’ for ever-increasing profits.

This is why five out of the six top-profiting businesses were pharmaceuticals. It is why spending on prescription medications is higher in the U.S., per capita, than in any other country in the world. It is why paying for medicine can be the most expensive out-of-pocket health cost for Americans.  It is why people are dying because they can’t afford medications. It is why 1 in 7 don’t fill their prescriptions because they cost too much.

It is not just the pharmaceutical companies that do this.  Every major industry, from fast food to for-profit prisons, has its own lobby, and does the same thing. The  U.S. is the best ‘democracy’ the giant corporations can buy.

*

Featured image is from Consumerreports.org.

Israel Owns U.S. Foreign Policy

May 27th, 2018 by Philip Giraldi

President Trump’s “emotional” decision to denounce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action involving Iran, based on known falsehoods fed to him by Bibi Netanyahu, is not making America great again in the Middle East. Who is really making the decisions on U.S. foreign policy?

There should be no remaining doubt over whether Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu working through their billionaire proxies in the U.S. own President Donald Trump. Last Tuesday’s [May 8, 2018] presidential full-bore denunciation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limits Iran’s nuclear program followed a script that could have easily been written by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs or by National Security Advisor John Bolton, which amounts to the same thing. A truly American foreign policy, which is supposed to be designed to support genuine national interests, was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps the most absurd segment in what was an emotional rather than rational call to arms was Trump’s citation of “definitive proof” that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program.

It went like this:

At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: that a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program. Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie. Last week, Israel published intelligence documents—long concealed by Iran—conclusively showing the Iranian regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.

Trump was referring to the previous week’s theatrical performance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, complete with PowerPoint slides, delivered in English to reach the desired audience, which was the “decider” in the White House. It was not Netanyahu’s first attempt to employ simple graphics to make his point about the alleged Iranian threat. His famous ticking-bomb montage presented at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly is still recalled fondly in diplomatic circles.

The provenance and meaning of the documents that Netanyahu produced have been debunked almost everywhere in the media, even in outlets that are normally strongly supportive of Israel and all its works. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has written a book entitled Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. In it he describes how many of the documents on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program were forged by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service before being placed on a laptop and delivered by the terrorist group Mujaheddin e-Khalq, which the Israelis use to carry out assassinations inside Iran. The latest batch of documents mostly date back 15 years, and many of them were already known to the International Atomic Energy Agency as forgeries. Only the president of the United States was seemingly unaware of what kind of material he was actually endorsing.

In truth, Bibi is a serial liar who has been beating on the Iran-nuclear drum since 1996 if not earlier in an attempt to get the United States involved in a program to use its own military resources to take out Iran’s government.

Netanyahu is aware that his own military does not have the capability to destroy Iran singlehandedly unless it uses its secret nukes. It has therefore taken on the task of convincing the Americans to do the heavy lifting and to also suffer the casualties and other costs.

Ironically, in spite of Bibi’s bleating, even his own intelligence chiefs have gone on record recently saying that keeping the JCPOA is good for Israel. Here in the U.S. the verdict has been somewhat the same, with Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and also then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a hardliner on Iran, both stating recently that Tehran is in compliance with all the restrictions placed on it by the agreement. Opinion polls also indicate that two out of three Americans support sticking with the JCPOA because it is clearly working and avoids American entanglement in yet another quagmire in the Middle East.

Trump, who attracted many voters due to his campaign promises to avoid unnecessary military interventions, coupled with his pledge to get out of foreign wars, has become Israel’s poodle. He has surrounded himself with Zionist Jewish advisers David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, and his own son-in-law Jared Kushner to craft some kind of plan for the Middle East region, the details of which remain notably obscure.

The recent move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and the recognition of the city as Israel’s capital was a typical gesture to satisfy an impossible to satisfy Netanyahu. There was no gain for the United States and the American people; quite the contrary, as it will inspire numerous terrorists and make U.S. travelers targets. And Israel has inevitably taken advantage of the opportunity to make more demands, recently expanding the size of Jerusalem to include large chunks of the West Bank while also considering obtaining U.S. consent to the full annexation of the Golan Heights.

So far the game plan, if there is one, has been to allow Israel to do everything it wants in a bid to make the Palestinians so desperate that they will leave or surrender completely to become Israel’s serfs, thereby allowing the creation of a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It would be an Israel ethnically cleansed of Arabs if some of Netanyahu’s ministers have their way. Conceding all to Israel has also meant an ominous silence as Israeli war criminals continue to use army snipers to shoot dead unarmed protesting Gazans. The death toll is currently close to 50 with as many as 5,000 more injured by gunshots and tear gas.

Others who marvel at the ability of Israeli interests to preempt American interests in the White House have come to believe that it is all about money. Tying large dollops of Jewish money to political power is often cited as some kind of “libel,” but there should be no question that Jews have been the money men for the candidates of both major parties in the last electoral cycle. And their money has been provided conditionally based on what the candidates were willing to do to make Israel happy. Both Hillary Clinton and Trump understood the deal and were prepared to deliver.

In the upcoming midterm electoral cycle, control of the Senate is up for grabs and the Democrats are also eyeing major gains in the House. Key to the Republican maintenance of the status quo of control of both legislative bodies is money. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot’s Bernard Marcus, and hedge fund manager Paul Singer are all reportedly prepared to hand over whatever it will take to the party making the most promises. And it will all be for Israel.

*

This article was originally published on American Free Press.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.

Featured image is from American Free Press.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, Summits and Cancellations

May 27th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

It was the sort of party you would be reluctant to turn up to, and its cancellation would have caused a sigh of relief. But when the US president replicates the feigned hurt of a guest who has been impugned, the puzzlement deepens.  A mix of crankiness and promise, Trump’s letter announcing the cancellation of the Singapore meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was another etching on what is becoming an increasingly scrawled tablet of unpredictable manoeuvres. More importantly, it shows a sense that Kim is ahead of the game, cunning beyond capture, difficult to box.

It is instructive to see how blame was attributed in this latest act of diplomatic befuddlement.  Everything is, of course, saddled on the North Korean leader.  But the feeling that Trump has somehow been left out is unmistakable.  Whether it is the babble of the usual chicken hawks or not is hard to say, any peace treaty and durable arrangement on the Korean peninsula will and can never be attributed to the pioneering efforts of the North Korean regime.  Should they win this, the US will be left out to dry by yet another inscrutable power, outwitted and, even worse, seduced.

“Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.  Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.”

The letter shows traditional Trumpist dysfunction, a mix of fulmination, regret and tempered promise.  Predictably, the issue of this abrupt act is not considered his doing, but that of his counterpart.  He wants to be ascendant, and to that end, demands a degree of self-accepted inferiority on the part of his opponent. 

That Kim spoke about the DPRK’s nuclear capability was taken as a slight, suggesting that Little Rocket Man was getting a bit ahead of himself. 

“You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.” 

The disparity of positions there is evident: the US nuclear stockpile is neutralised by its sheer enormity.  To have such weapons on such a scale suggests redundancy rather than value. North Korea, in contrast, need only possess a few murderous weapons for political insurance. 

Hawkish North Korea watchers long sceptical of any bona fide considerations that might accompany such talks suggest that Trump was ambushed.  He was, ventured The Economist, unaware “of North Korea’s long history of seeking direct talks with America, or of its past promises to abandon its nuclear weapons, or the bad faith and broken promises that have at all times characterised its nuclear diplomacy.”

Such a position remains traditionally constipated, one keen to keep up the squeeze in an effort to extract reliable concessions.  It also ignores the dogma of US policy towards the DPRK, refusing to accede to the regime’s desire to obtain a non-aggression guarantee and, to that end, seek ultimate denuclearisation only if and when its own security can be assured.

The Economist could still admit, despite the prospect of a “bad deal”, or “narrow agreement to protect America” made in exchange for retaining nuclear weapons, “the summit still seemed like a gamble worth taking. 

A day before the cancellation letter was issued, Pyongyang invited a gaggle of international journalists to Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site to note the destruction of tunnels and buildings at the facility.  Instead of seeing this as a gesture to allay mistrust and build confidence for negotiations with Seoul and Washington, fears abound that this is nothing more than an act of wilful destruction of valuable evidence and site sanitisation. 

Frank V. Pabian, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., and Jack Liu offer a different take on this for 38 North:

“forensic evidence will outlast any explosions that may be used to collapse or seal the test tunnels.” 

Besides, deeming such an exercise a wanton act of destroying evidence suggests that

“Pyongyang is under some kind of obligation to open its doors to foreign investigators looking into its nuclear program.  Unfortunately, it is not.”

The response from Pyongyang was far from blood curdling.  In a statement from the first vice minister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye Gwan, delivered via the Korean Central News Agency,

“We have inwardly highly appreciated President Trump for having made the bold decision, which any other US president dared not, and made effort for such a crucial event at the summit.” 

Giving the appropriate signals and touching the right buttons, the statement seemed to capture Trump expertly: speak to ego and laud current and future effort. 

“We would like make known to the US side once again that we have the intent to sit with the US side to solve problem regardless of ways at any time.”

The statement had its wanted effect, stirring the president like a well planted caress and tickle.

“Very good news to receive the warm and productive statement from North Korea,” he cooed on Twitter.  “We will soon see where it will lead, hopefully to a long and enduring prosperity and peace.  Only time (and talent) will tell!” 

All this goes to show that Kim has had a good run thus far, dragging Trump to near historic proportions in seeking dialogue.  The US president has been shown up out witted, and, even with egg on his face, he can only offer a hope that his opponent might change course. 

“If you change your mind having to do this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write.” 

*

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

California has over $700 billion parked in private banks earning minimal interest, private equity funds that contributed to the affordable housing crisis, or shadow banks of the sort that caused the banking collapse of 2008. These funds, or some of them, could be transferred to an infrastructure bank that generated credit for the state – while the funds remained safely on deposit in the bank.

California needs over $700 billion in infrastructure during the next decade. Where will this money come from? The $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative unveiled by President Trump in February 2018 includes only $200 billion in federal funding, and less than that after factoring in the billions in tax cuts in infrastructure-related projects. The rest is to come from cities, states, private investors and public-private partnerships (PPPs) one. And since city and state coffers are depleted, that chiefly means private investors and PPPs, which have a shady history at best.

A 2011 report by the Brookings Institution found that “in practice [PPPs] have been dogged by contract design problems, waste, and unrealistic expectations.” In their 2015 report “Why Public-Private Partnerships Don’t Work,” Public Services International stated that “experience over the last 15 years shows that PPPs are an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and divert government spending away from other public services. They conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies.” They also divert public money away from the neediest infrastructure projects, which may not deliver sizable returns, in favor of those big-ticket items that will deliver hefty profits to investors. A March 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute titled “No Free Bridge” also highlighted the substantial costs and risks involved in public-private partnerships and other “innovative” financing of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, California is far from broke. It has over well over $700 billion in funds of various sorts tucked around the state, including $500 billion in CalPERS and CalSTRS, the state’s massive public pension funds. These pools of money are restricted in how they can be spent and are either sitting in banks drawing a modest interest or invested with Wall Street asset managers and private equity funds that are not obligated to invest the money in California and are not safe. For fiscal year 2009, CalPERS and CalSTRS reported almost $100 billion in losses from investments gone awry.

In 2017, CalSTRS allocated $6.1 billion to private equity funds, real estate managers, and co-investments, including $400 million to a real estate fund managed by Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, and $200 million to BlackRock, the world’s largest “shadow bank.” CalPERS is now in talks with BlackRock over management of its $26 billion private equity fund, with discretion to invest that money as it sees fit.

“Private equity” is a rebranding of the term “leveraged buyout,” the purchase of companies with loans which then must be paid back by the company, typically at the expense of jobs and pensions. Private equity investments may include real estate, energy, and investment in public infrastructure projects as part of a privatization initiative. Blackstone is notorious for buying up distressed properties after the housing market collapsed. It is now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the US. Its rental practices have drawn fire from tenant advocates in San Francisco and elsewhere, who have called it a Wall Street absentee slumlord that charges excessive rents, contributing to the affordable housing crisis; and pension funds largely contributed the money for Blackstone’s purchases.

BlackRock, an offshoot of Blackstone, now has $6 trillion in assets under management, making it larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China). Die Zeit journalist Heike Buchter, who has written a book in German on it, calls BlackRock the “most powerful institution in the financial system” and “the most powerful company in the world” – the “secret power.” Yet despite its size and global power, BlackRock, along with Blackstone and other shadow banking institutions, managed to escape regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act. Blackstone CEO Larry Fink, who has cozy relationships with government officials according to journalist David Dayen, pushed hard to successfully resist the designation of asset managers as systemically important financial institutions, which would have subjected them to additional regulation such as larger capital requirements.

The proposed move to hand CalPERS’ private equity fund to BlackRock is highly controversial, since it would cost the state substantial sums in fees (management fees took 14% of private equity profits in 2016), and BlackRock gives no guarantees. In 2009, it defaulted on a New York real estate project that left CalPERS $500 million in the hole. There are also potential conflicts of interest, since BlackRock or its managers have controlling interests in companies that could be steered into deals with the state. In 2015, the company was fined $12 million by the SEC for that sort of conflict; and in 2015, it was fined $3.5 million for providing flawed data to German regulators. BlackRock also puts clients’ money into equities, investing it in companies like oil company Exxon and food and beverage company Nestle, companies which have been criticized for not serving California’s interests and exploiting state resources.

California public entities also have $2.8 billion in CalTRUST, a fund managed by BlackRock. The CalTRUST government fund is a money market fund, of the sort that triggered the 2008 market collapse when the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck” on September 15, 2008. The CalTRUST website states:

You could lose money by investing in the Fund. Although the Fund seeks to preserve the value of your investment at $1.00 per share, it cannot guarantee it will do so. An investment in the Fund is not insured or guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other government agency. The Fund’s sponsor has no legal obligation to provide financial support to the Fund, and you should not expect that the sponsor will provide financial support to the Fund at any time.

CalTRUST is billed as providing local agencies with “a safe, convenient means of maintaining liquidity,” but billionaire investor Carl Icahn says this liquidity is a myth. In a July 2015 debate with Larry Fink on FOX Business Network, Icahn called BlackRock “an extremely dangerous company” because of the prevalence of its exchange-traded fund (ETF) products, which Icahn deemed illiquid.

“They sell liquidity,” he said. “There is no liquidity. . . . And that’s what’s going to blow this up.”

His concern was the amount of money BlackRock had invested in high-yield ETFs, which he called overpriced. When the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, investors are likely to rush to sell these ETFs; but there will be no market for them, he said. The result could be a run like that triggering the 2008 market collapse.

The Infrastructure Bank Option

There is another alternative. California’s pools of idle funds cannot be spent on infrastructure, but they could be deposited or invested in a publicly-owned bank, where they could form the deposit base for infrastructure loans. California is now the fifth largest economy in the world, trailing only Germany, Japan, China and the United States. Germany, China and other Asian countries are addressing their infrastructure challenges through public infrastructure banks that leverage pools of funds into loans for needed construction.

Besides the China Infrastructure Bank, China has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), whose members include many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative.

Germany has an infrastructure bank called KfW which is larger than the World Bank, with assets of $600 billion in 2016. Along with the public Sparkassen banks, KfW has funded Germany’s green energy revolution. Renewables generated 41% of the country’s electricity in 2017, up from 6% in 2000, earning the country the title “the world’s first major green energy economy.” Public banks provided over 72% of the financing for this transition.

As for California, it already has an infrastructure bank – the California Infrastructure and Development Bank (IBank), established in 1994. But the IBank is a “bank” in name only. It cannot take deposits or leverage capital into loans. It is also seriously underfunded, since the California Department of Finance returned over half of its allotted funds to the General Fund to repair the state’s budget after the dot.com market collapse. However, the IBank has 20 years’ experience in making prudent infrastructure loans at below municipal bond rates, and its clients are limited to municipal governments and other public entities, making them safe bets underwritten by their local tax bases. The IBank could be expanded to address California’s infrastructure needs, drawing deposits and capital from its many pools of idle funds across the state.

A Better Use for Pension Money

In an illuminating 2017 paper for UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute titled “Funding Public Pensions,” policy consultant Tom Sgouros showed that the push to put pension fund money into risky high-yield investments comes from a misguided application of the accounting rules. The error results from treating governments like private companies that can be liquidated out of existence. He argues that public pension funds can be safely operated on a pay-as-you-go basis, just as they were for 50 years before the 1980s. That accounting change would take the pressure off the pension boards and free up hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Some portion of that money could then be deposited in publicly-owned banks, which in turn could generate the low-cost credit needed to fund the infrastructure and services that taxpayers expect from their governments.

Note that these deposits would not be spent. Pension funds, rainy day funds and other pools of government money can provide the liquidity for loans while remaining on deposit in the bank, available for withdrawal on demand by the government depositor. Even mainstream economists now acknowledge that banks do not lend their deposits but actually create deposits when they make loans. The bank borrows as needed to cover withdrawals, but not all funds are withdrawn at once; and a government bank can borrow its own deposits much more cheaply than local governments can borrow on the bond market. Through their own public banks, government entities can thus effectively borrow at bankers’ rates plus operating costs, cutting out middlemen. And unlike borrowing through bonds, which merely recirculate existing funds, borrowing from banks creates new money, which will stimulate economic growth and come back to the state in the form of new taxes and pension premiums. A working paper published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve in 2012 found that one dollar invested in infrastructure generates at least two dollars in GSP (state GDP), and roughly four times more than average during economic downturns.

*

This article was originally published on Truthdig.com.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Malaysian Airlines MH17 Downing Big Lie Resurfaces

May 27th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Russia had nothing to do with downing Malaysian Airlines MH17 on July 17, 2014 in eastern Ukraine airspace.

The incident happened months after the US-staged February 2014 coup, replacing democracy in Ukraine with an illegitimate putschist rule integrated by two Neo-Nazi parites

The so-called Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was no impartial body – comprised of the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Malaysia and Ukraine, Russia conspicuously denied involvement.

Its mandate all along was not to let clear evidence interfere with its intention to blame Russia and Donbass freedom fighters for what they had nothing to do with.

Instead of doing its job responsibly, it came up with an implausible scenario, wrongfully claiming a Buk surface-to-air missile, not used by Russia for many years, part of Ukraine’s arsenal, was delivered by Moscow to Donbass freedom fighters ahead of MH17’s downing.

On May 24, Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop falsely claimed JIT findings “provide further evidence of Russia’s pivotal role” in the downing of MH17, adding:

A missile “belonging to the Russian Army was dispatched and used to shoot down a civilian aircraft.”

Not a shred of evidence supports her fabricated accusation. Hours earlier, Dutch prosector Fred Westerbeke claimed MH17 was downed by a Russian-made Buk missile fired from Donbass, adding dozens of people are suspected of involvement in the incident, no further details given.

Russia’s Defense Ministry denounced the phony JIT claims, saying:

“The Russian Defense Ministry, both in the first hours after the tragedy, and in the future, officially denied the insinuations of the Ukrainian side about the alleged involvement of Russian servicemen in the skies of Ukraine and brought the relevant evidence to the Dutch investigation team,” adding:

“Not a single anti-aircraft missile system of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border.”

“Within the framework of cooperation with Dutch law enforcement agencies, the Russian side presented exhaustive evidence…including field tests that clearly indicate the involvement of the Ukrainian Buk systems in the destruction of” MH17.

“No airborne targets approaching the Boeing passenger plane from the eastern side, including from the direction of Snezhnoye or Pervomayskoye were detected by this radar.”

JIT investigators “completely ignore(d) and reject(ed) testimon(ies) of eyewitnesses from the nearby Ukrainian communities.”

They provided essential information, “indicating (a missile launch at MH17) was carried out from a territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

So-called JIT evidence (sic) came anti-Russia Kiev putschists, along with fake computer-generated images on social media – a scheme to falsely blame Russia and Donbass freedom fighters for the downing they had nothing to do with.

Russian firm Almaz-Antley once produced the type Buk missile claimed to have downed MH17. It was long ago discontinued, replaced by more sophisticated models.

Almaz-Antley conducted extensive analysis into MH17’s downing, its findings proving the missile came from Ukrainian military-controlled territory, not Donbass as falsely claimed.

MH17 fuselage damage didn’t match clearly fabricated JIT evidence (sic) – including the angle of impact, showing the missile couldn’t have come from Donbass.

Ukrainian forces bear responsibility for what happened, Washington surely responsible for orchestrating the ugly incident.

JIT investigators buried evidence incriminating them, falsely blaming Russia and Donbass freedom fighters for their high crime.

Nearly four years later, the Big Lie persists – media scoundrels supporting the false scenario instead of denouncing it.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

“Coloured Revolutions” and Populist Uprisings

May 27th, 2018 by Michael Welch

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

– Allen Weinstein, co-founder of National Endowment for Democracy (1991) [1]

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

-George Orwell, 1984 [2]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

A number of populist uprisings in modern history, captured by major media, have inspired the world with their depictions of mass numbers of people taking to the streets to demand freedom and democracy.

In the 1980s, the Solidarity movement in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, succeeded in mobilizing millions, eventually overthrowing the country’s communist government, triggering the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately the Soviet Union.

In 1989, defying authoritarian Chinese rulers, over a million people joined thousands of hunger striking students in Tiananmen Square, demanding more democratic government.

In the fall of 2004, a sea of demonstrators decked in orange flooded Kiev’s Independence Square, and sparked uprisings across Ukraine, determined to thwart perceived corruption which robbed presidential candidate Victor Yushenko of a clear victory. In the follow-up recall election, Yushenko was declared winner with 52 percent of votes cast.

In late 2010 and early 2011, we saw the beginnings of what would be termed the ‘Arab Spring‘ in which protesters from Middle East and North African countries defied crackdowns from authoritarian regimes with mass demonstrations. This outpouring of popular dissent resulted in the removal from power of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and of Egyptian strongman Ḥosnī Mubārak.

In the last month, popular uprisings in Armenia forced the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. Also last month, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega backed away from reforms to the country’s social security system in the face of anti-government protests which had turned violent.

One small problem. Far from being testaments to the potential of ‘people power,’ these incidents were strongly influenced, and arguably orchestrated by the United States.

So argues geopolitical analyst and researcher F. William Engdahl. In his latest book, entitled Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance, Engdahl notes the emergence of what he describes in the book’s introduction as “one of the most destructive and one of the most effective operations by the intelligence services of any modern state, including of that of Stalin’s Soviet Union or even Hitler’s Goebbels-steered Third Reich.”

Effective CIA fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a network of pro-democracy NGOs have been extra-ordinarily effective at manipulating political movements in such a way as to advance the hegemonic ambitions of the United States without the involvement of Vietnam-style interventions, and with the assistance of massive numbers of earnest citizens not aware of these cynical foreign ambitions.

Understanding this relatively new weapon of warfare is essential for any true advocate for peace, democracy and social justice not willing to play into the less than noble agenda of corporate controlled governments and institutions.

In this week’s Global Research News Hour broadcast, we examine some of the history of these NED crafted ‘fake democracy’ movements and their status today.

Our first guest, F. William Engdahl, expands on the thesis of his latest book, probing the origins of the NED, and elaborating on the mechanics of orchestrating these soft coups, including the looting and ‘raping’ of the Russian Federation.

In the second half hour, we examine the case of Nicaragua in the wake of protests that have rocked the Central American country for the past several weeks. Managua-based journalist Stephen Sefton provides some background on the unrest, shares information on the source of the violence, and rationales on who actually benefits from this ‘pro-democracy’ activism.

William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst, strategic risk consultant, author, professor and lecturer. He has been researching and writing about the world political scene for more than thirty years. He has authored eight books on geopolitics, including Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (2007), The Lost Hegemon: Whom The Gods Would Destroy ( 2016), and his most recent Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance (2018). William is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization and a member of the editorial board of Eurasia magazine. He is based in Germany. His website is williamengdahl.com

Stephen Sefton is a journalist with the anti-imperialist Tortilla Con Sal collective and a frequent commentator on Latin American politics. He appears regularly on the Community Public Radio News broadcast with Don DeBar.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

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

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes: 

  1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-ned-is-now-officially-undesirable-in-russia/5468215
  2. George Orwell, 1984, cited in https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgeorwe141783.html

The history of the US Central Intelligence Agency is replete with numerous examples of political assassinations, not only in the US, but also of leaders of countries Washington disagrees with. So today, the CIA has actively begun developing various methods for the deliberate elimination of the US’s newest political opponent, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, involving not only special forces in this task, but also the special services of countries that cooperate closely with the CIA.

Evidence of this, in particular, can be found in the  the country’s defense budget for 2018, officially laid out by the South Korean government; the cost of eliminating North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. These funds will be spent on training and equipping a special “decapitation unit” dedicated to the North Korean leadership, the creation of which became known on December 1. The squad will include about one thousand commandos, whose task in the event of a war will be to find and kill Kim Jong-un and other top leaders of the neighboring state.

As a source in the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Korea told the newspaper Korea Herald, the squad’s special equipment will include drones, suicide bombers, reconnaissance drones and even heavy grenade launchers. The structure and training plans of the squad are classified, but according to the information of the South Korean media, the soldiers of the new squad will train according to methodology used by the US special purpose team SEAL Team Six, which [allegedly] assassinated Osama bin Laden.

At the same time, it should be remembered that an attempt to create a special squad in South Korea in 1968 with similar goals ended in tragedy. At the time, 31 South Korean criminals were promised a pardon if the squad they formed killed Kim Il-sung. The group underwent intensive training, during which three people were killed, and in the end they were sent on rubber boats to the DPRK, but halfway were recalled. The prisoners were not released, the exhausting training continued, and the date of the new operation was set. In 1971, members of the squad rebelled, killed their instructors, tried to get to Seoul and, when they were blocked by the army, blew themselves up with grenades. The four survivors were later executed. In 2003 the South Korean film “Silmido” was made about this tragic episode.

Such radical plans to get rid of political opponents are hardly surprising, especially when these plans are developed and supervised by the CIA, which is adept in these matters. And it’s no wonder that even the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, spoke in October at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies forum in Washington, saying that if the CIA liquidates the leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, he would not acknowledge involvement of American agents in the assassination.

The Independent, screenshot, October 21, 2017

Everyone knows that in order to maintain their dominance, the US stops at nothing, including the murders of undesirables. During the 50s and 60s, they killed the largest number of foreign leaders and public figures who were fighting not for communism, but for their countries’ national independence. Then came a certain lull, connected both with the policy of “detente” and with scandalous exposures of the CIA’s activities by the Senate Commission of F. Church in 1975. The committee’s conclusions about the illegal activities of American intelligence services (in particular, evidence of murders and numerous attempts on the lives of foreign statesmen) led to the adoption by US President J. Ford of an order banning “officially sanctioned” murders of foreign leaders. However, in 1981 this presidential decree was overturned by Reagan, and the list of victims began to grow rapidly once again.

After numerous media discussions, longstanding interest is not letting up in the secret of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s fast-developing infection and subsequent death with a new form of biological weapon: a cancer virus and the American special services’ involvement in this.

However, another highly strange and inexplicable fact (other than the special operation of the US special services), is that, besides Hugo Chavez, a number of other Latin American leaders, clearly disliked by Washington, “unexpectedly” fell ill with cancer all at the same time. Among them were Argentine President Nestor Kirchner (succeeded by Christine Kirchner), Brazilian President I. Lula da Silva (after whom Dilma Roussef came to power), and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo (who was overthrown during the CIA’s coup d’état in 2012; shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with cancer). It is also curious that after the conservative and pro-American president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, began peace talks with the partisans of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), he also “unexpectedly” contracted cancer.

Venezuelan writer Luis Brito Garcia counted more than 900 attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro organized by the CIA. And in the last years of his life, Castro also suffered a mysterious oncological bowel disease, which struck him after the 2006 “People’s Summit” in the Argentine city of Cordoba.

We also recall the very strange death of former Palestinian President (PLO) Yasser Arafat, who suffered … leukemia in 2004.

It is also not unreasonable to cite WikiLeaks’ revelations that in 2008 the CIA asked its embassy in Paraguay to collect biometric data, including DNA, of all four presidential candidates. With knowledge of a person’s DNA code, it is easy to develop an oncogene for each individual. And if we assume that such data were obtained on the eve of the elections in Brazil, then Dilma Roussef’s cancer, contracted in 2009, fits perfectly into this theory.

So, in addition to forceful options for eliminating political opponents (as, in particular, happened with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein or Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi), it is unlikely that the CIA would be above infecting them with cancer viruses. Moreover, similar experiments have been conducted for a long time in the secret laboratories of the CIA, where they became a “military trophy of the American special services” based on the brutal concentration camp human experimentation of Josef Mengele, and before that “on the experience” of the American, Cornelius “Doctor Death” Rhoads. This pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research started work in Puerto Rico and became a “pioneer” in virtually all areas of the creation of new technologies for killing people, from chemical and biological methods to radiation. With funding from the Rockefeller Institute, he conducted experiments in Puerto Rico in the early 30s infecting people with cancer cells, which work was conducted inside a secret “Building No. 439″.

Is cancer the effect of a new weapon of the American intelligence agencies, fitting in well with the “modus vivendi” of the agonizing North American empire? We note only that the disease affected only those politicians whose political direction was contrary to the dominant position of the United States.

The US is on the edge of economic collapse and remains afloat only because it can launch a printing press to re-credit its economy, constantly growing its military budget and secret CIA operations. Therefore, it is entirely logical to assume that “the craftsmen of Langley” found new quick and inexpensive methods of effectively eliminating opponents. The most important advantage of these methods is that they leave no traces, are disguised as cancer or a heart attack and eliminate the possibility of exposure and direct liability.

*

Vladimir Platov is an expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The CIA’s Plan to Assassinate Kim Jong-un, History of CIA Sponsored Assassinations

Does Trump Regime Intend Full-Scale War on Syria?

May 26th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

In 2007 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, former NATO commander General Wesley Clark (image below) said America underwent a post-9/11 transformation – his address on YouTube deleted.

A “policy coup” occurred, he said. With no public debate or acknowledgement, hardliners usurped power.

From Pentagon commanders, Clark learned about plans to “destroy the governments in seven countries,” he said. Besides Afghanistan – Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Iran would be targeted.

As a one-star general in 1991, then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told him Washington intended multiple premeditated wars.

US policymakers wanted the Middle East destabilized, its map redrawn. Clark explained their plan was “to start wars and change governments…not deter conflicts” – unrelated to eliminating despotic regimes and so-called democracy-building, a notion Washington abhors at home and abroad.

Wolfowitz told Clark

“(w)e can use our military anywhere in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us,” adding:

“(W)e’ve got about five or 10 years to clean out those old Soviet client regimes.”

He named Syria, Iran, and Iraq, suggesting other countries – a permanent war policy to replace all sovereign independent governments with pro-Western puppet regimes.

In his book titled “Winning Modern Wars,” Clark discussed what’s explained above. Did Congress debate it, he asked?

Did presidents explain it? Did America’s media report it? “Was there a full-fledged (public discussion)? Absolutely not, and there still isn’t,” he said.

Imperial war OF terror is being waged on the phony pretext of combating the scourge Washington created and supports.

It’s ongoing endlessly in multiple theaters, major media complicit in what’s going on, supporting what demands denunciation – war on humanity for global hegemonic control.

Syria is in the eye of the storm – US-orchestrated aggression raging in its 8th year. According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA):

“The (so-called) US-led ‘international coalition aircrafts have carried out an aggression on some of the Syrian Arab Army’s positions in the south-eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor on Thursday at dawn,” adding:

“Some of our military positions between al-Bukamal and Hmeimea were hit this morning in an aggression by ‘American coalition’ warplanes,” causing material damage, a military source cited.

Tass so far reported nothing about the incident. AP News reported it. Sputnik News cited Reuters and AFP, saying strikes targeted Syria’s T2 oil facility near the Iraqi border – the attack first reported by Hezbollah’s press office.

Last week, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said Pentagon-led Syria airstrikes in May so far were 80% greater than the comparable period last year – on the phony pretext of combating ISIS Washington supports left unexplained.

RT quoted a US military source, saying reports of the above-explained airstrikes are not “consistent with the reality” – after first saying it had no information on the incident.

Washington and its coalition partners have been terror-bombing Syria since September 2014 – including the rape and destruction of Raqqa, massacring countless thousands of civilians, along with targeting the country’s infrastructure.

Several times its military sites were struck, notably its Shayrat airbase last year, and April attacks on multiple targets in response to the false flag Douma CW incident.

Was the above-discussed attack the latest example of US-led aggression? Was Israel involved? By its own admission, it’s conducted countless airstrikes on Syrian targets throughout much of the war.

Longstanding US policy calls for regime change in Syria, Obama administration-orchestrated aggression on the country launched to achieve it – unsuccessful following Russia’s September 2015 intervention at the behest of Damascus.

Hardline neocon extremists are in charge of Trump administration geopolitical policymaking, notably John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.

Do they intend full-scale war on Syria to try accomplishing what US strategy so far failed to achieve?

Washington didn’t launch war on the country to quit. Trump escalated what Obama began. Is far greater escalation coming, risking possible direct confrontation with Russia?

Syria is the world’s top hotspot. Greater escalation could risk unthinkable global conflict. Will Washington go all-out for regime change anyway?

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

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.

The Pawns of War. Remembering 1968

May 26th, 2018 by Philip A Farruggio

She would always have the brightest smile as she stood at the intersection of Avenue T and Ocean Ave in Brooklyn, N.Y. circa 1968.

She was our crossing guard and we all loved Mrs. Lombardo.

Each morning and afternoon during school days she would greet each and every kid who passed by her post. On Sundays, before and after each Catholic Mass at St. Edmunds church, she would be there, again with that contagious smile.

The young kids loved her as one would love a favorite aunt, and the seniors, who seemed to make up a majority of each Sunday mass, enjoyed the special care Mrs. Lombardo offered them.

Then, perhaps sometime in 1968, her son Tommy joined the Marines along with his childhood buddy Pete Haros, of the Haros Coffee shop on Avenue U.

A year later Pete returned to the coffee shop from his tour of duty in Vietnam unscathed. Tommy returned in a box!

Mrs. Lombardo still took up her post on that corner, but the sparkling smile was replaced by what this writer remembers as a ‘Mona Lisa smile’ or half frown. As with the lady in the famous portrait, Mrs. Lombardo had too much to say without saying a thing.

Memorial Day is around the corner once again, and it seems ‘The Dogs of War’ are at it as always. Fifty plus years ago there were 58, 220 Tommy Lombardos who would never see the smiles of their Moms ever again.

Factor that in with approximately 2 million Vietnamese who lost their lives, and one can deduce what our empire’s imperial presence meant. For what? For whom? Yet, each and every year spanning these decades, our empire’s handlers and their compliant, embedded media sell us this fake and false bill of goods. They honor those dead as ‘fallen heroes’ when they should be apologizing for using them as pawns for the geopolitical game they play.

Fast forward to 2002 until the present and see how the scam continues. Phony wars following the dictates of what Zbigniew Brzezinski labeled ‘The Grand Chessboard’ for the key Eurasian region were in play… then and NOW! What George Bush Sr. made famous as ‘The New World Order’ has our empire as the only one needed to assure the ‘safety of humanity’. And I have this great bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Imagine the gall of the movers and shakers of this Military Industrial Empire to keep playing that fear card on a mostly subservient and apathetic populace. It worked during the ‘Red Scare’ 50s and 60s, with a Cold War that was mostly predicated on continuous ‘Fake News’. Eisenhower, through his ‘handlers’ the two Dulles brothers, knew that the Russians were much weaker than us militarily. The Russians knew it as well. Check out the great 1989 Andrew Davis film ‘The Package’ to see how these scams work.

They will lower the flag, the flag that this empire has hijacked from us, on Memorial Day. They will have somber ceremonies to ‘honor the dead , fallen heroes’. What they should always have done is honor those dead US servicemen and women by acknowledging the criminal acts of sending them to those hornets nests overseas to kill and be killed… or maimed for life with lost limbs, eyes, and fatal diseases from Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium. After that is done, to give just a ‘teaspoon of comfort’ to the dead and their families, the war criminals still breathing among us should be tried and convicted for high treason. Let justice be done though the heavens may fall!

*

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, 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].

Late on May 24, Israeli warplanes carried out several strikes on the al-Dabaa airbase in the southwestern Homs countryside, according to pro-government sources. The Syrian Air Defense Forces (SADF) responded to the attack by launching at least 2 S-200 surface-to-air missiles, according to local activists.

The General Command of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) said in an official statement that the Israeli Air Force had targeted an airbase in central Syria. It added that the SADF had repelled the Israeli attack.

At the same time, reports appeared that the missiles launch were allegedly caused by a false alarm. However, this version is still unconfirmed.

The al-Dabaa airbase is well known for being one of the key HQs of Hezbollah in Syria.

Early on May 24, the Syrian state-run media and the Hezbolalh media wing in Syria reported that US-led coalition aircraft had carried out strikes on positions of the pro-government forces near al-Bukamal, al-Mayadin and the T2 pumping station.

The reports noted that the strikes had taken place amid the continued attacks by ISIS on government positions in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert, de-facto, accusing the US-led coalition of supporting the ISIS attacks.

The US-led coalition denied any knowledge about these attacks. Then, the Russian state-run media outlets, RT and Sputniknews, reported citing some Russian military sources that no US-led coalition strikes had targeted government forces positions.

The situation over the incident remains unclear.

Later on the same day, ISIS ambushed a group of National Defense Forces (NDF) members in the area of al-Faidah. According to unconfirmed reports, about 30 fighters, members of Nazar al-Khafran, which is a part of the NDF, were killed in the incident.

Previously, ISIS carried out large attacks on the SAA, the NDF and their allies on May 22, near the T3 pumping station, and on May 23, near al-Mayadin.

The SAA reacted to the increased by deploying reinforcements to the area and starting preparations for an anti-ISIS operation in the Homs desert, according to pro-government sources.

However, this operation may be delayed if the SAA and local militants in the province of Daraa reach no reconciliation agreement. In this case, the SAA will likely deal with Daraa militants first and then will focus on the Homs desert again.

*

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront,

BTC: 13iYp9CDYZwgSnFXNtpEKgRRqaoxHPr2MH,

BCH:1NE49pQW8yCegnFCMvKuhLUnuxvTnxNUhf, 

ETH: 0x962b312a9d41620f9aa0d286f9d7f8b1769bfae6

When War Games Go Live? “Simulating World War III”

May 26th, 2018 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

The World is at a Dangerous Crossroads.

Previously dismissed, the  dangers of a Third World War are now the object of serious debate. What must be understood is that World War III has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years. 

The contours of global warfare are unfolding:

  • Military escalation in the Middle East: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Palestine;
  • Extended military involvement of Saudi Arabia, military buildup in the Persian Gulf;
  • Deployment of US-NATO weapons systems and troops in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States on Russia’s doorstep;
  • The War in Ukraine, The Separatist Movement in Donbass, Dangers of Escalation;
  • Economic Sanctions directed against Russia;
  • US-China Confrontations in the South China Sea, the militarization of strategic waterways;
  • US-Israeli Threats directed against Iran;
  • Ongoing US Threats directed against North Korea;
  • Extended US and allied military involvement in Afghanistan
  • The US-led drone war in sub-Saharan Africa under USAFRICOM

In the wake of the Cold War, the Pentagon has been routinely involved in conducting World War III war games as well as simulations of World War III. 

Most of these routine and numerous WW III simulations are classified. The presumption is that a US-led war against Iran would trigger a broader regional war which could evolve towards a Third World War. This scenario was envisaged under a war scenario codenamed: Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT). The war planning scenario identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a “Shock and Awe” Blitzkrieg.

Trump’s annulment of the Iran nuclear deal has a bearing on US threats directed against North Korea. It is part of a global war agenda. 

The Trump administration is currently threatening four non-compliant countries (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) within the framework of  what is best described as “Global Warfare”.

In 2006, under the “Vigilant Shield 07″ war games, the Pentagon simulated a World War III scenario involving four fictitious countries, enemies of America:  Churya, Ruekbek, Irmingham, and Nemazee. (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea)

The following article first published in January 2008, revised in 2012 outlines the nature of  US war games and WW III simulations, focussing on Vigilant Shield 2007 and the declassified war scenario entitled: Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT).

The analysis is also contained in my 2011 book entitled. Towards a World War III Scenarion: The Dangers of Nuclear War

Michel Chossudovsky, April 28, 2016, May 2018

*      *     *

With ongoing war games on both sides [2007-2008], armed hostilities between the US-Israel led coalition and Iran are, according to Israeli military analysts, “dangerously close”.

There has been a massive deployment of troops which have been dispatched to the Middle East, not to mention the redeployment of US and allied troops previously stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Nine thousand US troops have been dispatched to Israel to participate in what is described by the Israeli press as the largest joint air defense war exercise in Israeli history.

The drill, called “Austere Challenge 12,” is scheduled to take place within the next few weeks. Its stated purpose “is to test multiple Israeli and US air defense systems, especially the “Arrow” system, which the country specifically developed with help from the US to intercept Iranian missiles.”

In the course of December, Iran conducted its own war games with a major ten days naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz, (December 24, 2011- January 2, 2012). 

Missile defense and naval war games are being conducted simultaneously.  While Israel  and the US are preparing to launch major naval exercises in the Persian Gulf, Tehran has announced that it plans to conduct major naval exercises in February.

An impressive deployment of troops and advanced military hardware is unfolding.

Meanwhile, Israel has become a de facto US military outpost. US and Israeli command structures are being integrated, with close consultations between the Pentagon and Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

A large number of US troops will be stationed in Israel once the war games are completed.

The assumption of this military deployment is the staging of a joint US-Israeli air attack on Iran. Military escalation towards a regional war is part of the military scenario.  

Ultimately Israel is an American pawn. 

The people of Israel are the unspoken victims of US military ambitions, which consist in the conquest and “recolonization” –under a US mandate– of the Anglo-Persian oil empire.

The History of War Planning: “Theater Iran Near Term” (TIRANNT)

A review of the history of war planning –including war games and simulations– directed against Iran is essential to an understanding of recent developments in the Persian Gulf.

Active war preparations directed against Iran (with the involvement of Israel and NATO) were initiated in May 2003, one month after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It should be understood that from the outset of these war preparations, a World War III scenario was envisaged by US war planners.

The assumption of escalation was embedded in the simulations and the war games.

Moreover, the war on Iran was formulated as a “Global Strike” plan involving centralized military decision-making and coordination by US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). A “Concept Plan” entitled CONPLAN 8022 was established in 2003. The operational CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022 is described as “an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers.”

A simulated scenario of an all out bombing campaign against Iran entitled “Theater Iran Near Term” was implemented in May 2003.  (To be noted, there have been numerous simulations and war games which have remained classified). .

Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT,  “Theater Iran Near Term” had identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a “Shock and Awe” Blitzkrieg. (The analysis contained in this section is based on my earlier 2007 article entitled Theater Iran Near Term, Global Research, February 21, 2007)

“In early 2003, even as U.S. forces were on the brink of war with Iraq, the Army had already begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran. The analysis, called TIRANNT, for “theater Iran near term,” was coupled with a mock scenario for a Marine Corps invasion and a simulation of the Iranian missile force. U.S. and British planners conducted a Caspian Sea war game around the same time. And Bush directed the U.S. Strategic Command to draw up a global strike war plan for an attack against Iranian weapons of mass destruction. All of this will ultimately feed into a new war plan for “major combat operations” against Iran that military sources confirm now exists in draft form.

… Under TIRANNT, Army and U.S. Central Command planners have been examining both near-term and out-year scenarios for war with Iran, including all aspects of a major combat operation, from mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change.” (William Arkin, The Pentagon Preps for Iran  Washington Post, 16 April 2006, emphasis added)

What distinguishes the TIRANNT simulations in relation to previous (pre-2003) war game scenarios, is that a) they were conducted in the wake of the Iraq war and b) the Blitzkrieg assumptions behind TIRANNT are similar to those used in the intense March 2003 bombing campaign directed against Iraq.

In other words, the bombing campaign scenarios under TIRANNT are not limited to surgical strikes directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities. They also involve an “invasion scenario”, the deployment of Marines Corps, as well as “the mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change.”

The assessment of these war games is crucial in evaluating recent developments in the Persian Gulf because it suggests that if an attack on Iran is implemented it will inevitably evolve towards an all out bombing campaign as well as a ground war.

Confirmed by Arkin, the active component of the Iran military agenda was launched in May 2003 “when modelers and intelligence specialists pulled together the data needed for theater-level (meaning large-scale) scenario analysis for Iran.” (Arkin, op cit). In October 2003, different theater scenarios for an Iran war were contemplated:

“The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for “Operation Iranian Freedom”. Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerized plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near Term).” (New Statesman, 19 February 2007)

It is worth noting that following the implementation of TIRANNT, starting in 2004, there was a stepped up delivery of weapons systems to Israel.

Military Alliances. Simulating World War III

A World War III scenario has been the object of numerous simulations and war games, going back to the Cold War era.

We have no details regarding the geopolitical assumptions underlying the TIRANNT war scenarios, –i.e. regarding analysis of major military actors, alliances, etc. From the available information, the simulations pertained to an all out war (bombing campaign and ground war) directed against Iran, without taking into account possible responses by Iran’s allies, namely China and Russia.

In 2006, The Pentagon launched another set of war simulations entitled Vigilant Shield 07  (conducted from September through December 2006). These war simulations were not limited to a single Middle East war theater as in the case of TIRANNT (e.g. Iran), they also included Russia, China and North Korea.

The core assumption behind Vigilant Shield 07 is “Global Warfare”. In the light of recent war preparations directed against Iran, the Road to Conflict in the Vigilant Shield 07 war games should be examined very carefully. They anticipate the “New Cold War”. They reflect US foreign policy and military doctrine during both the Bush and Obama administrations. The declared enemies of America under Vigilant Shield are Irmingham [Iran], Nemazee [North Korea], Ruebek [Russia], Churya [China]

Vigilant Shield 07 is a World War III Scenario which also includes an active and aggressive role for North Korea.

The simulations are predicated on the assumption that Iran constitutes a nuclear threat and that Russia and North Korea –which are allies of Iran– will attack America and that America and its allies will wage a pre-emptive (defensive) war.

While China is included in the simulations as a threat as well as an enemy of America, it is not directly involved, in the simulaitons, in attacking America.

The war simulations commence with Iran and Russia conducting joint air defense exercises, followed by nuclear testing by North Korea.

A terrorist attack on America is also contemplated in Vigilant Shield 07 based on the assumption that the “axis of evil” “rogue states” are supporting “non-State” terrorist organizations.

The diplomatic agenda is also envisaged as well as a media campaign to discredit Russia and Iran.

It should be understood that the conduct of these war scenarios with America under attack is also intended as an instrument of internal propaganda within the upper the echelons of Military, Intelligence and participating government agencies, with a view to developing a an unbending consensus pertaining to the preemptive war doctrine, –i.e that the threat against the “American Homeland” is “real” and that a pre-emptive attack –including the use of US nuclear weapons–  against rogue enemies is justified. And that premeptive warfare is an instrument of peacemaking which contributes to global security.

Irmingham [Iran], Nemazee [North Korea], Ruebek [Russia], Churya [China]

Details and Sequencing: [emphasis added]

“• Road to Conflict (RTC): 11 Sep – 15 Oct 06

 – Initial Irmingham Enrichment I&W [indications and warning]
– Initial Ruebeki & Irmingham Involvement
 – Ruebek I&W, PACFLT [U.S. Pacific Fleet] Sub Deployments
– Initial Nemazee ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] I&W
– Initial MHLD [homeland defense?] I&W
 – Strategic IO [information operations (cyber warfare)] operations (Ruebek & Churya)
– Ruebek & Irmingham Conduct Joint AD [air defense] Exercise

• Phase 1 / Deployment: 4 – 8 Dec 06

 – Rogue LRA [Russian long-range aviation] w/CALCM [conventional air launched cruise missile] Launch
– Continue Monitoring Strategic Situation
– Continue Monitoring Nemazee Situation

  • Possible Nuclear Testing
  • Probable ICBM Preparation

– Continue Monitoring MHLD Situation

• Five VOIs [vessels of interest]
  • Churya Flagged VOI into Dutch Harbor Supports BMDS [ballistic missile defense system] Threat to Ft Greely

 – Continue Monitoring IO Activities
 – Nemazee Conducts SLV [space launch vehicle] Launch – 8 Dec 06

• Phase 2 Minus 42 Days:

 • Additional Nemazee ICBM Shipments to Launch Facilities
• RMOB [Russian main operating bases] Acft Conduct LR Navigation Flights
• AS-15 [nuclear armed cruise missile] Handling at RMOBs

 – Minus 41 Days:
 • Additional Nemazee ICBM Preps at Launch Pad # 2
– Minus 40 Days:
  • Activity at Nemazee Nuclear Test Facilities
– Minus 35 Days:
  • DOS [Department of State] Travel Warning
 – Minus 30 Days:
• Ruebek LRA Deploys Acft to Anadyr & Vorkuta

• Phase 2 Minus 30 Days:

 • Growing International Condemnation of Ruebek
• Ruebek Deploys Submarines

 – Minus 20 Days:
  • Nemazee Recalls Reservists
 – Minus 14 Days:
• DOS Draw-down Sequencing
– Minus 13 Days:
  • Ruebek Closes US Embassy in Washington DC
 – Minus 11 Days:
• Nemazee Conducts Fueling of Additional ICBMs
  • Ruebeki Presidential Statement on Possible US Attack

• Phase 2 Minus 10 Days:

 • POTUS Addresses Congress on War Powers Act

– Minus 6 Days:
  • Ruebek President Calls “Situation Grave”
 – Minus 5 Days:
• CALCM Activity at Anadyr, Vorkuta, and Tiksi
• Ruebeki SS-25 [nuclear armed mobile ICBMs] Conduct out of Garrison Deployments
• Nemazee Assembling ICBM for Probable Launch
– Minus 4 Days:
  • Ruebek Closes US Embassy in Washington DC
  • Ruebek Acft Conduct Outer ADIZ [air defense identification zone] Pentrations
• Mid-Air Collison w/NORAD Acft During ADIZ Penetration

• Phase 2 Minus 4 Days:

 • Nemazee ICBM Launch Azimuth Threatens US

 – Minus 3 Days:
 • NATO Diplomatic Efforts Fail to Diffuse Crisis
 • USAMB to Ruebek Recalled for Consultation
 • POTUS Addresses Nation
 – Minus 2 Days:
 • Nemazee Leadership Movement
 – Minus 1 Day:
 • Ruebek Expels US Mission

• Phase 2 / Execution: 10 – 14 Dec 06

 – Pre-Attack I & W
 – Imminent Terrorist Attack on Pentagon Suggests Pentagon COOP [continuity of operations plan]
– Nemazee Conducts 2 x ICBM Combat Launches Against United States

– Ruebek Conducts Limited Strategic Attack on United States
• Wave 1 – 8 x Bear H Defense Suppression w/CALCM
• Wave 2 – Limited ICBM & SLBM Attack
– 2 x ICBM Launched (1 impacts CMOC [Cheyenne Mountain], 1 malfunctions)
– 2 x SLBM Launched Pierside (1 impacts SITE-R [“Raven Rock” bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border], 1 malfunctions)
– 3 x Bear H from Dispersal Bases w/ALCM (Eielson AFB, CANR, Cold Lake)
– US Conducts Limited Retaliatory Attack on Ruebek
• 1 x ICBM C2 Facility
• 1 x ICBM Against ICBM Launch Location
• Phase 2 / Execution:
 – Ruebek Prepares Additional Attack on United States
• Wave 3 – Prepares for Additional Strategic Attacks
  – 1 x ICBM Movement, NO Launch
– 3 x SLBM PACFLT Pierside Missile Handling Activity (NO Launch)
– 6 x BEAR H (launch & RTB [return to base]) w/6 x ALCM (NO launch)”  [source Northern Command and William Arkin] emphasis added

 

Complacency of Western Public Opinion

The complacency of Western public opinion (including segments of the US anti-war movement) is disturbing.

No concern has been expressed at the political level as to the likely consequences of  a US-NATO-Israel attack on Iran using US and/or Israeli nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.

Moreover, public opinion is led to believe that the war will be limited to surgical strikes directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities and that neither Russia nor China will intervene.

The war on Iran and the dangers of escalation are not considered “front page news.” The mainstream media has excluded in-depth analysis and debate on the implications of these war plans.

The absence of public awareness, the complacency of the antiwar movement as well as the weakness of organized social movements indelibly contribute to the real possibility that this war could be carried out, leading to the unthinkable: a nuclear holocaust over a large part of the Middle East and Central Asia involving millions of civilian casualties.

It should be noted that a nuclear nightmare would occur even if nuclear weapons are not used.

The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities using conventional weapons would contribute to unleashing a Chernobyl-Fukushima type disaster with extensive radioactive fallout.

For further details on the history of war preparations directed against Iran, see my earlier 2007 article


“Theater Iran Near Term” (TIRANNT)
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2007-02-21

“Theater Iran Near Term” (TIRANNT) has identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a “Shock and Awe” Blitzkrieg, which is now in its final planning stages.

 

Towards a World War III Scenario

Order Michel Chossudovsky’s book, directly from Global Research.

Also available in E-book pdf form 

by Michel Chossudovsky

 

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca  website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He has taught as Visiting Professor at universities in Western Europe, South East Asia and Latin America, acted as an adviser to governments of developing countries and as a consultant for the several international organizations. Prof. Chossudovsky is a signatory of the Kuala Lumpur declaration to criminalize war and recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, Germany. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.