There is the famous aphorism by Karl von Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This may be true, in many cases, but it is rarely a happy outcome. Not everybody likes politics, but when given a choice between politics and war, most sane people will readily choose politics, which, even when brimming with vitriol and riddled with corruption, normally remains sublethal. In relations between countries, politics is known as diplomacy, and it is a formal art that relies on a specific set of instruments to keep countries out of war. These include maintaining channels of communication to build trust and respect, exercises to seek common ground, and efforts to define win-win scenarios to which all sides would eagerly agree, including instruments for enforcing agreements.
Diplomacy is a professional endeavor, much like medicine, engineering and law, and requires a similarly high level of specialized education.
Unlike these other professions, the successful exercise of diplomacy demands much greater attention to questions of demeanor: a diplomat must be affable, personable, approachable, decorous, scrupulous, levelheaded… in a word, diplomatic. Of course, in order to maintain good, healthy relations with a country, it is also essential that a diplomat fluently speak its language, understand its culture and know its history.
Especially important is a very detailed knowledge of the history of a country’s diplomatic relations with one’s own country, for the sake of maintaining continuity, which in turn makes it possible to build on what has been achieved previously. Complete knowledge of all treaties, conventions and agreements previously entered into is, obviously, a must.
Sane people will choose politics over war, and sane (that is, competently governed) nations will choose diplomacy over belligerence and confrontation. An exception is those nations that cannot hope to ever win the game of diplomacy due to an acute shortage of competent diplomats. They are likely to strike out in frustration, undermining the very international institutions that are designed to keep them out of trouble. It then falls upon their more competent counterparts in other nations to talk them off the ledge. This may not always be possible, especially if the incompetents in question can’t be made to appreciate the risks they are taking in blindly striking out against their diplomatic counterparts.
If we look around in search of such incompetently governed nations, two examples readily present themselves: the United States and the United Kingdom. It is rather challenging to identify the last moment in history when the US had a Secretary of State that was truly competent. To be safe, let’s set it as January 20, 1977, the day Henry Kissinger stepped down from his post.
Since then, US diplomatic history has been, to one extent or another, a history of fantastic blunders. For example, as far back as 1990 US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” in effect giving the green light to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and setting off the cascade of events that has led to the current sad state of affairs in the region. Another highlight was Hillary Clinton, whose only credentials had to do with a sort of fake noblesse, stemming from her marriage to a former president, and who used her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself using a variety of corrupt schemes.
Among the lower ranks of the diplomatic corps, most ambassadorships went to people with no diplomatic education or experience, whose only qualifications had to do with electoral fundraising on behalf of whoever happened to occupy the White House and other partisan political considerations. Few of these people are able to enter into a meaningful dialogue with their counterparts. Most are barely able to read a programmatic statement of policy from a piece of paper handed them by a staffer.
In the meantime, the UK establishment has been gradually decrepitating in its own inimitable post-imperial fashion. Its special relationship with the US has meant that it had no reason to maintain an independent foreign policy, always playing second fiddle to Washington. It has remained as a US-occupied territory ever since World War II, just like Germany, and, deprived of its full measure of sovereignty, could allow its international organs to slowly atrophy from disuse. The benefit of this arrangement is that it has allowed the collapse of the British Empire to proceed in slow motion—the slowest and longest collapse in the long history of empires.
What little competence there was left gradually drained away in the course of the UK’s temporary dalliance with the European Union, due to end next year, during which most of the rest of UK’s sovereignty was signed away by treaty, and most questions of international governance were relinquished to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. And now, at the end of this long process of degeneration and decay, we have in the person of the Foreign Minister a clown by the name of Boris Johnson. His equally incompetent boss Theresa May recently saw it fit to very loudly and publicly violate the terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which the UK is a signatory.
To recap, Theresa May claimed that a certain Russian-cum-British spy living in the UK was killed using a nerve agent made in Russia, and gave Russia 24 hours to explain this situation to her satisfaction. Russia is likewise a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and had destroyed all 39,967 metric tons of its chemical weapons by September 27, 2017. On that occasion, The Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü, stated:
“The completion of the verified destruction of Russia’s chemical weapons programme is a major milestone in the achievement of the goals of the Chemical Weapons Convention. I congratulate Russia and I commend all of their experts who were involved for their professionalism and dedication.”
The US is yet to destroy its stockpiles, preferring to squander trillions on useless ballistic defense systems instead of living up to its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Here is precisely what Theresa May did wrong. Under the terms of the CWC, the UK was obligated to provide Russia with a sample of the nerve agent used, along with all related evidence uncovered in the course of the investigation. After that, the treaty gives Russia 10 days to respond. Instead, May provided no evidence, and gave Russia 24 hours to respond. When Russia formally requested to see the evidence, this request was refused. We can only guess at why she refused, but one reasonable supposition is that there is no evidence, because:
May claimed that the nerve agent was Novichok, developed in the USSR. In order to identify it, the UK experts had to have had a sample of it. Since neither the USSR, nor Russia, have ever been known to export it, we should assume that it was synthesized within the UK. The formula and the list of precursors are in the public domain, published by the scientist who developed Novichok, who has since moved to the US. Thus, British scientists working at Porton Down could have synthesized it themselves. In any case, it is not possible to determine in what country a given sample of the substance was synthesized, and the claim that it came from Russia is not provable.
It was claimed that the victims—Mr. Skripal and his daugher—were poisoned with Novichok while at a restaurant. Yet how could this have been done? The agent in question is so powerful that a liter of it released into the atmosphere over London would kill most of its population. Breaking a vial of it open over a plate of food would kill the murderer along with everyone inside the restaurant. Anything it touched would be stained yellow, and many of those in the vicinity would have complained of a very unusual, acrid smell. Those poisoned would be instantaneously paralyzed and dead within minutes, not strolling over to a park bench where they were found. The entire town would have been evacuated, and the restaurant would have to be encased in a concrete sarcophagus by workers in space suits and destroyed with high heat. None of this has happened.
In view of the above, it seems unlikely that any of what has been described in the UK media and by May’s government has actually taken place. An alternative assumption, and one we should be ready to fully test, is that all of this is a work of fiction. No pictures of the two victims have been provided. One of them—Skripal’s daughter—is a citizen of the Russian Federation, and yet the British have refused to provide consular access to her. And now it has emerged that the entire scenario, including the Novichok nerve gas, was cribbed from a US/UK television drama “Strike Back.” If so, this was certainly efficient; why invent when you can simply plagiarize.
This is only one (and not even the last) in a series of murders and assumed but dubious suicides on former and current Russian nationals on UK soil that share certain characteristics, such the use of exotic substances as the means, no discernible motive, no credible investigation, and an immediate, concerted effort to pin the blame on Russia. You would be on safe ground if you assumed that anyone who pretends to know what exactly happened here is in fact lying. As to what might motivate such lying—that’s a question for psychiatrists to take up.
In considering all of the above, healthy skepticism is called for. All we have so far is an alleged double murder, no motive, doubtful means, over 140 million suspects (anyone who’s Russian?), and public statements that amount to political theater. As far as repercussions, there is very little that the UK government can do to Russia. They kicked out a few dozen Russian diplomats (and Russia will no doubt reciprocate); the Royal Family won’t be attempting the World Cup in Russia this summer (not a great loss, to be sure); there are also some vague threats that don’t amount to anything.
But that’s not what’s important. For the sake of the whole world, (former) great powers, especially nuclear ones, such as the US and the UK, should be governed with a modicum of competence, and this show of incompetence is most worrying. The destruction of public institutions in the US and the UK has been long in the making and probably can’t be undone. But the least we can do is refuse to accept at face value what appear to be blatant fabrications and provocations, demand compliance with international law, and keep asking questions until we obtain answers.
Back in May 2017, just prior to the British general election, I wrote a piece arguing that a victory for Theresa May would see Britain dragged further towards war with Russia. While Britain is militarily weak compared to Russia, the point was that May would continue to do the bidding of Washington by demonising that country and engaging in provocative actions.
Well, Theresa May is now prime minister and if anything supports the above view, it is the recent events surrounding the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal with the nerve agent Novichock in Salisbury, UK. In the aftermath, we have seen a tirade of accusations levelled at Russia, with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson comparing the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and the political capital made from the event by Hitler with the upcoming FIFA World Cup and Vladimir Putin. Johnson said Labour MP Ian Austin was completely right to say Russia’s president wanted to “gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime”.
The accusations about Russian state involvement in the poisoning of Skripal (and his daughter) have been repeated across the Western media and by senior politicians despite the UK government failing to provide any proper evidence for Russian culpability. However, this is nothing new. The strident anti-Russia/Putin narrative has been ongoing for many years.
In April 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin was told by the UK ambassador to the United Nations, Matthew Rycroft, that he is on the “wrong side of history” because of his support for Syria’s Bashar Assad. Rycroft added that supporting Assad would result in “shame” and “humiliation” for Russia. He said the UN Security Council had been “held to ransom by Russia’s shameless support for the Assad regime” and added that Russia’s credibility and reputation across the world would be poisoned by its toxic association with Assad.
In response to Rycroft’s statements, Russia’s UN representative, Vladimir Safronkov, said that Rycroft should stop putting forward unprofessional arguments and accusations based on lies. He warned that all Arab countries recall Britain’s colonial hypocrisy.
Many might think Rycroft lives in an alternative universe: what credibility does the US and its allies, including Britain, have given their illegal interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq? Where does the reputation of these countries lie when much of the world beyond the bubble Rycroft exists in recognises that the US has supported terror groups to destroy Syria (described in Professor Tim Anderson’s book ‘The Dirty War on Syria‘)?
Nonetheless, the anti-Russia rhetoric has been incessant. Following the US-instigated coup in Ukraine, for instance, in 2017 the then British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said that NATO must be ready for Russian aggression in “whatever form it takes.” He added that Russia is a “real and present danger.”
Now, in 2018, Theresa May and Boris Johnson accuse the Russian state of carrying out the attack in Salisbury yet provide no proper evidence to support this accusation. Other Western countries have joined in with the accusations and a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats has followed. A dangerous game of Russian roulette that seems to escalate with each passing day, all based on a campaign of disinformation.
In a series of recent articles, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has been highlighting the nature of the false accusations regarding the Skripal case and has accused Boris Johnson of being a “categorical liar”.
In the UK, over the two years or so, we have also seen British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn being ridiculed and attacked relentlessly. Corbyn has been described by prominent figures in the Conservative government as a threat to security and as a threat to Britain.
Corbyn is a target for the establishment because he swims against the Washington consensus of neoliberal capitalism, NATO-instigated wars and US imperialism. After Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, Michael Fallon stated that Labour was a serious risk to Britain’s national security.
If anything is a threat to Britain and the world, it is the underhand destabilisations and wars it participates in, the ones that the likes of Fallon support. The US thinks it and it alone has the right to act as it deems fit to maintain its global dominance: no other power will be allowed to rise to challenge the US and its client states fall in line to provide support.
As documented by historian William Blum, the US has over a period of decades created a very long list of bogeymen and bogus reasons to remove leaders and destroy sovereign states that have stood in the way of this agenda. In terms of a massive military budget, worldwide military bases, illegal wars and destabilisations, it is not ‘Russian aggression’ the world should be concerned about but US militarism which poses the greater threat to humanity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has pressed ahead in a strategic sense to the point where it believes it can win a nuclear war with preemptive strike against Russia.
Since when did Russia a target for demonisation? The answer is when Washington decided to break prior agreements with Moscow and encircle Russia with missiles. The US demands Russia accept this without complaint. But Putin is not Yeltsin. Russia has understandably reacted to events in Ukraine, in its own backyard, and has come to the aid of Syria, an ally under attack from Western-backed forces. Western leaders and the media portray any protests or military countermeasures by Putin as ‘aggression’. US strategy is to destroy Russia as a functioning state or at least replace Putin with a compliant puppet willing to acquiesce to Washington’s hegemony.
There are well over a million dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as a result of direct military intervention or covert actions by the Western powers and their allies (the death count for Iraq alone between 1990 and 2012 could be 3.3 million as a result of Western economic sanctions and illegal wars).
Many individuals, like Dick ‘Halliburton’ Cheney for one, have profited handsomely on the back of the destruction of Iraq that they helped bring about. However, Cheney, Bush, Blair, Obama and Hillary Clinton – who are all complicit in driving illegal conflicts, destabilisations or outright war and who have the blood of so many on their hands – are given a free pass and accorded a type of stately respect by the media and within establishment circles.
Outrage is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn who has consistently been against all such actions or for Vladimir Putin who has acted to protect Russia’s interests in the face of ongoing provocations. How do Cheney, Blair and the rest continue to get away with their actions, while the focus is kept on the establishment’s convenient enemies?
The intelligence agencies have for decades ensured that key political leaders and the mainstream media comply with the interests of the Anglo-US establishment and are ‘on message’. And these agencies certainly have a firm hold over media messages. A few years ago, Udo Ulfkotte, former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, claimed that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. His situation is not unique. As for the UK, scroll through the web pages of UK-based Lobster magazine and the picture will become clear.
We are currently witnessing an orchestrated campaign directed at the public to shape negative perceptions about Russia, helped along by the recent events in London. Through her inflammatory rhetoric, Theresa May is dutifully playing her part, while simultaneously distracting attention from her government’s disastrous neoliberal agenda on the home front. A good old dose of patriotic fervour always helps on that score.
Regardless of her motives, May is helping to accelerate a trajectory towards conflict with Russia that it might be impossible to escape from.
*
Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to 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
Relevant to our fight against war and truth in media is this article first crossposted on GR in August 2012.
I spoke this past weekend at the Kateri Peace Conference in upstate New York ( http://kateripeaceconference.org ) along with Kathy Kelly, John Horgan, Ellen Grady, James Ricks, Matt Southworth, Walt Chura, and many others. Watch for the video, because a terrific discussion took place around a series of questions posed by the event organizers. The following are some of the initial responses I had prepared beforehand.
Why Work Against War
War engages me because of its unique relationship to morality. Killing is a long-standing taboo. Killing is often if not always the worst thing that can be done to someone. But killing on a larger scale, organizing numerous people to kill numerous other people is often treated very differently. When a government kills its own people, that’s generally considered an outrage. But when a government kills another nation’s people, that’s not always viewed as a moral problem. In fact a government killing its own people is often used as a justification for another nation to come in and kill more of the first nation’s people. Killing in war, and lesser crimes in war, are given a moral pass or even praised. A U.S. military sniper bragged on the debut episode this week of NBC’s war reality show “Stars Earn Stripes” that he had “160 kills.” Not that he killed 160 people. The people are erased in his language. “I have 160 kills.” And the show itself is a dramatization of U.S. news coverage of U.S. wars, in which the only participants are Americans. The 95% of victims in our one-sided slaughters are rarely mentioned in U.S. news coverage, and on this new war-o-tainment show the heroic warriors attack empty fields, blow up guard towers with no guards, kick in doors of uninhabited houses, and spend so much time talking about how “real” it all is that none of them seem to notice that there are no enemies or victims to be found.
War used to get a moral pass as a sporting contest between two armies on a distant battlefield. Then it became the occupation of people’s homes and the slaughter of those people. Now our propaganda is working to restore war’s status as a sport, not against an honorable opponent but against an invisible one. Members of our government talk about wanting to make the Iranian people suffer with sanctions, but we’re not to picture the Iranian people. Members of our government talk about funding killing as a jobs program, but we’re not to see them as sociopaths.
War is becoming a sport to be approved of regardless of who dies, and with a blank spot for the piece of knowledge that tells us the leading cause of death for U.S. troops is suicide, and the second leading cause being shot by Afghan troops you are supposedly training. Real war is still hell. Human beings still suffer mental breakdowns from engaging in it, including engaging in it from a drone pilot’s desk. But drones are part of an attempt to avoid danger for the five percent of humanity that appears in our news-o-tainment. This is an attempt to strip war of morality. Muhammed Ali wouldn’t kill Vietnamese, but his daughter on the so-called reality show will blow the heads off paper targets that represent non-American humanity. We haven’t created this kind of moral exemption for anything other than war, not for rape or slavery or child abuse or cruelty to animals. We lock up football stars who hurt dogs, but not Americans who torture and kill human beings in time of war — and war is without limit in time or space. Among ourselves we’ve become less violent — still outrageously violent, but less so — and less racist, and less sexist, and less bigoted all around. But militarism is racism’s partner. The idea of making war on white people has been taboo for 65 years. Making war on non-white people draws unquestioning support of both the genocidal and the humanitarian variety.
Do we need radical love? Yes, not only of enemies, but of invisible nonentities, those distant in space and those distant in time. We must love the foreigners we are killing and the great grandchildren we are depriving of a livable environment. And we must love them as equals, as exactly as worthy as ourselves, which obliges us to take considerable risks to our own well being. If our names and our resources are being used to murder, to maim, to terrorize, and to destroy the homes of people in huge numbers, what does that oblige us to do? And if most of us do little to nothing, what does that oblige those of us who are aware to do? My answer is anything that looks most likely to succeed, an answer that results in nonviolent actions and a lot more of them.
Why Not Give Up and Whine Miserably?
I do peace activism out of habit and paid employment. But I’m miserable when I’m not doing it, so there must be something motivating me. It certainly isn’t hope that we’re about to succeed. But neither have I ever spent a moment worrying that we won’t. If we have a moral obligation to do something, we have the same moral obligation not to waste time fretting over whether we’re about to succeed.
It certainly isn’t the expectation of riches and fame and glory, which are all far more easily obtained elsewhere. But a lot of what I do is write, and I enjoy writing. I enjoy reading. I enjoy the stimulation I get from other minds through books and through discussions like this one. I enjoy the process of writing. I enjoy the praise and recognition that comes from writing and giving speeches. And yet there’s no sum of money or volume of praise that can motivate me to write or speak a view I oppose or even to address a topic that I find unimportant. I just can’t do it.
So, what drives me is not fundamentally recognition, but I do think it’s worthwhile for those of us who are always speaking on panels to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are always in the audience. Should we not give each other recognition and praise and respect regardless of whether our roles are those of spokespeople. There are equally important and more important jobs in a movement. So take a moment right now to shake the hand of someone near you and thank them for what they do. Thank them in fact for their service, because unlike soldiers they are providing a service.
What motivates the people you just shook hands with? What motivates you? And what really motivates me? I suspect the answer is the same for all of us. We want to reduce suffering and increase happiness. I’m tempted to say I’m motivated by the severity of the crisis, the likelihood that we have very little time left to avert environmental and/or nuclear catastrophe. But this isn’t true. Even a little injustice is enough. I was an activist before I knew we were destroying the atmosphere, before I knew of the level of death and trauma caused by our bombs and our billionaires, before we’d legalized baseless imprisonment, before we’d tossed out the Fourth Amendment, before we’d given presidents full war powers and personal lists of so-called nominees to be murdered. New outrages are added to old, but they weren’t required to get most of us active in the first place, and we won’t go silent if they’re undone.
Think about a small child witnessing the death by missile of his parents and crying over their bodies in hopelessness and terror. This is not an uncommon scene. We fund it with our tax dollars. But it’s in a different country far away. Were it here in this town, people would not stand for it. Undoing the policies of death would be priority number 1. But it’s somewhere else. So people accept it. And that strikes me as either incredibly stupid or incredibly greedy. Stupidity offends me deeply. I have a hard time not myself offending people by mocking their cherished beliefs when I find them stupid. So, objecting to stupidity is almost certainly part of my motivation. But it’s not clear to me that most people really are that stupid. I think most people go out of their way not to acknowledge what is happening because they feel ashamed and powerless and comfortable and greedy. We could have better lives without our empire, but most people don’t believe that. They wish they could have the world’s oil and gas and labor without killing anybody, but the next best thing is to not pay attention to the killing or the system of injustice it maintains. And that offends me. That’s dishonesty — a quality far worse than stupidity.
I’m not suggesting we worship honesty and intelligence for their own sake, but that we apply them to the basic morality of which we are all capable at close range. We can all love our loved ones. We ought to be able and willing to love, in a similar but not identical manner, everyone else as well. Everyone in some sense must be our loved one. That we don’t achieve this or even strive for it is an embarrassment to be outgrown. It ought to be part of every child’s education. Loving those we don’t know can in fact be easier than loving some of the people we do know. It’s not the same sort of love, but it has to be a kind of love if we are to find it in ourselves to take appropriate actions on their behalf and in partnership with them on behalf of us all.
What Way Forward?
I have a theory that we talk about peace and justice because we don’t want to talk about peace. We chant “No justice, no peace,” threatening to disturb the peace if we don’t get our justice. I want to disturb the war. I want to nonviolently afflict the comfortable to comfort the afflicted but I think we need to reverse the chant. I say “No peace, no justice.” You cannot begin to make justice in the middle of killing and dying. You can’t build a just nation with bombs. First the bombs have to stop. That’s the very first priority. Then the threat of bombs has to stop. That’s the second priority. Then justice and democracy can begin.
We also talk a lot about peace without meaning it. We talk about peace in our hearts and in our personal lives. We don’t mean the abolition of war and the elimination of standing armies. I’m all for peace in our hearts. And I’m all for peace in our personal lives. But I wouldn’t kick out of the peace movement people who are unpleasant and acrimonious. We need all the people we can get. What I mean by peace is first and foremost and almost entirely the absence of war. It’s popular to say “Peace must be more than just the absence of war,” was if the mere absence of war is talk to be reserved for the speeches of beauty queens. But, you know, living is more than oxygen — yet without reliable oxygen everything else falls apart. Without peace not much else matters.
Woody Allen said “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” Well I don’t want to achieve peace in my heart or in my little corner of a dying world. I want to achieve peace through putting an end to warfare.
Justice, including the redistribution of the military’s trillion dollars a year, including the liberation of nations living under our threat, including the preservation of a natural world ravaged by war making and war preparation can follow.
Now how do we make that a national priority? I’m not sure we do. I think maybe we need to make it a human priority. We have more strength in numbers and in solidarity. We need to bring the stories of others here. We need to put pressure on foreign governments that still respond to it. If we can’t close the School of the Americas, but we can help convince South American nations to stop sending students, let’s start there. If we can’t shut down our oil companies, but the people of Iraq can block their oil law, let’s help. If we can’t free Bradley Manning, but we can encourage Ecuador to protect Julian Assange, we should. We should be the U.S. arm of a global movement, with the establishment of representative government in our own country as one of our distant dreams, to be advanced perhaps by work at the state and local levels where we still have a chance.
One of our top priorities in the United States must be education, about the rest of the world, and about alternatives to war thinking. By war thinking I mean the sort of thinking that is currently asking “How can we oppose war in Syria without offering an alternative?” Now most people would oppose an individual murder even if they couldn’t offer an alternative. What is the alternative to murder? First and foremost it is not murdering. What is the alternative to supporting fanatical terrorists in Syria? It’s demilitarization. Stop arming these dictatorships for years and then turning against them. Support nonviolent uprisings like that in Bahrain rather than assisting in the brutal crackdown. Reject violent uprisings like the one our nation has helped produce in Syria. Send in nonviolent forces. Send in independent media. Not to generate propaganda for war but to generate pressure for peace. Send aid. Not weapons that are called aid.
While there may be global trends against war, our nation has empowered presidents to make wars, guaranteeing that they will, and built up a military industrial complex that generates wars at will. The top priority of civil libertarians, of opponents of poverty, of advocates for education, or environmentalists, and of everyone working for a better world ought to be the dismantlement of the military industrial complex, and if we merged these movements we could do it. Less than 10 percent of what it swallows each year could make state college free. Imagine what the other 90% could do. Imagine what all those college-educated people could imagine that other 90% could do.
What Are We Up Against?
We’re up against ignorance, including willful ignorance. We’re up against apathy, which can benefit from the fantasy that all will magically work out, that the universe has a moral arc. Things may work out or we may all die horribly. That’s why we do what we have to do. We’re up against partisanship and the widespread poisonous idea that rather than demanding representation from our government we should be cheering for one political party within our government and forgiving all its sins. But most of all we’re up against disempowerment and the ridiculous but nearly universal belief that we can’t change things.
George W. Bush’s memoirs recall top Republicans in 2006 secretly demanding withdrawal from Iraq under public and electoral pressure. Imagine how the peace movement would have grown if such responses to it had been public. But why shouldn’t it have grown exactly the same in the face of the pretence that we were having no impact? Why should we believe such a pretense? Why should we care if it’s a pretense or not? Shouldn’t we push ahead as our morality requires regardless?
I recently read some memoirs by a peace activist from this part of the country named Lawrence Wittner. He participated in his first political demonstration in 1961. The USSR was withdrawing from a moratorium on nuclear testing. A protest at the White House urged President Kennedy not to follow suit. “For decades I looked back on this venture as a trifle ridiculous,” Wittner wrote. “After all, we and other small bands of protesters couldn’t have had any impact on U.S. policy, could we? Then in the mid-1990s, while doing research at the Kennedy Library on the history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, I stumbled onto an oral history interview with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was explaining why Kennedy delayed resuming atmospheric nuclear tests until April 1962. Kennedy personally wanted to resume such tests, Fisher recalled, ‘but he also recognized that there were a lot of people that were going to be deeply offended by the United States resuming atmospheric testing. We had people picketing the White House, and there was a lot of excitement about it.'” If the picketers in 1961 had had the slightest notion that Kennedy was being influenced by them, their numbers would have multiplied 10-fold.
If you work for an online activist group you discover that people will take 10 minutes to write you letters explaining why taking 10 seconds to email their lousy bum of a Congress member would be a waste of time. We’ve advanced to the point of actively working to disempower each other.
In 1973-1974, Wittner visited GI coffee houses in Japan including in Yokusaka, where the Midway aircraft carrier was in port. The Japanese were protesting the ship’s carrying of nuclear weapons, which was illegal in Japan, and which the U.S. military, of course, lied about. But U.S. soldiers with whom Wittner and other activists had talked, brought them onto the ship and showed them the nukes. The following summer, when Wittner read in a newspaper that, “a substantial number of American GIs had refused to board the Midway for a mission to South Korea, then swept by popular protest against the U.S.-backed dictatorship, it occurred to me,” writes Wittner, “that I might have played some small role in inspiring their mutiny.”
In the late 1990s, Wittner interviewed Robert “Bud” McFarlane, President Ronald Reagan’s former national security advisor: “Other administration officials had claimed that they had barely noticed the nuclear freeze movement. But when I asked McFarlane about it, he lit up and began outlining a massive administration campaign to counter and discredit the freeze — one that he had directed. . . . A month later, I interviewed Edwin Meese, a top White House staffer and U.S. attorney general during the Reagan administration. When I asked him about the administration’s response to the freeze campaign, he followed the usual line by saying that there was little official notice taken of it. In response, I recounted what McFarlane had revealed. A sheepish grin now spread across this former government official’s face, and I knew that I had caught him.”
Let’s not wait to catch them. Let’s know they’re lying. Why do you think they’re spying on us? When someone tells you to stop imagining that you’re having an impact, ask them to please redirect their energy into getting 10 friends to join you in doing what needs to be done. If it has no impact, you’ll have gone down trying. If it has an impact, nobody will tell you for many years.
This article was first published on GR in December 2014.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not essential for feeding the world [1,2], but if they were to lead to increased productivity, did not harm the environment and did not negatively impact biodiversity and human health, would we be wise to embrace them anyhow?
The fact is that GMO technology would still be owned and controlled by certain very powerful interests. In their hands, this technology is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power, a tool to ensure profit. Beyond that, it is intended to serve US global geopolitical interests. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy.
“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports, not on industrial exports as people might think. It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.” Professor Michael Hudson [3].
The Project for a New American Century and the Wolfowitz Doctrine show that US foreign policy is about power, control and ensuring global supremacy at any cost [4,5]. Part of the plan for attaining world domination rests on the US controlling agriculture and hijacking food sovereignty and nations’ food security.
In his book ‘Seeds of Destruction’, William Engdahl traces how the oil-rich Rockefeller family translated its massive wealth into political clout and set out to capture agriculture in the US and then globally via the ‘green revolution’ [6]. Along with its big-dam, water-intensive infrastructure requirements, this form of agriculture made farmers dependent on corporate-controlled petroproducts and entrapped them and nations into dollar dependency and debt. GMOs represent more of the same due to the patenting and the increasing monopolization of seeds by a handful of mainly US companies, such as Monsanto, DuPont and Bayer.
In India, Monsanto has sucked millions from agriculture in recent years via royalties, and farmers have been compelled to spend beyond their means to purchase seeds and chemical inputs [7]. A combination of debt, economic liberalization and a shift to (GMO) cash crops (cotton) has caused hundreds of thousands of farmers to experience economic distress, while corporations have extracted huge profits [8]. Over 270,000 farmers in India have committed suicide since the mid to late nineties [9].
In South America, there are similar stories of farmers and indigenous peoples being forced from their lands and experiencing violent repression as GMOs and industrial-scale farming take hold [10]. It is similar in Africa, where Monsanto and The Gates Foundation are seeking to further transform small-scale farming into a corporate controlled model. They call it ‘investing’ in agriculture as if this were an act of benevolence.
Agriculture is the bedrock of many societies, yet it is being recast for the benefit of rich agritech, retail and food processing concerns. Small farms are under immense pressure and food security is being undermined, not least because the small farm produces most of the world’s food [11]. Whether through land grabs and takeovers, the production of (non-food) cash crops for export, greater chemical inputs or seed patenting and the eradication of seed sharing among farmers, profits are guaranteed for agritech corporations and institutional land investors.
The recasting of agriculture in the image of big agribusiness continues across the globe despite researchers saying that this chemical-intensive, high-energy consuming model means Britain only has 100 harvests left because of soil degradation [12]. In Punjab, the ‘green revolution’ model of industrial scale, corporate dominated agriculture has led to a crisis in terms of severe water shortages, increasing human cancers and falling productivity [13]. There is a global agrarian crisis. The increasingly dominant corporate-driven model is unsustainable.
More ecological forms of agriculture are being called for that, through intelligent crop management and decreased use of chemical inputs, would be able to not only feed the world but also work sustainably with the natural environment. Numerous official reports and scientific studies have suggested that such policies would be more appropriate, especially for poorer countries [14-16].
When on occasion the chemical-industrial model indicates that it does deliver better yields than more traditional methods (a generalization and often overstated [17]), even this is a misrepresentation. Better yields but only with massive chemical inputs from corporations and huge damage to health and the environment as well as ever more resource-driven conflicts to grab the oil that fuels this model. Like the erroneous belief that economic ‘growth’ (GDP) is stimulated just because there becomes greater levels of cash flows in an economy (and corporate profits are boosted), the notion of improved agricultural ‘productivity’ also stems from a set of narrowly defined criteria.
The dominant notions that underpin economic ‘growth’, modern agriculture and ‘development’ are based on a series of assumption that betray a mindset steeped in arrogance and contempt: the planet should be cast in an urban-centic, ethnocentric model whereby the rural is to be looked down on, nature must be dominated, farmers are a problem to be removed from the land and traditional ways are backward and in need of remedy.
“People are perceived as ‘poor’ if they eat food they have grown rather than commercially distributed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from ecologically well-adapted materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cinder block or cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics.” Vandana Shiva [18]
Western corporations are to implement the remedy by determining policies at the World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank (with help from compliant politicians and officials) in order to depopulate rural areas and drive folk to live in cities to then strive for a totally unsustainable, undeliverable, environment-destroying, conflict-driving, consumerist version of the American Dream [19,20].
It is interesting (and disturbing) to note that ‘developing’ nations account for more than 80% of world population, but consume only about a third of the world’s energy. US citizens constitute 5% of the world’s population, but consume 24% of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians and 370 Ethiopians [21].
Despite the environmental and social devastation caused, the outcome is regarded as successful just because business interests that benefit from this point to a growth in GDP. Chopping down an entire forest that people had made a living sustainably from for centuries and selling the timber, selling more poisons to spray on soil or selling pharmaceuticals to address the health impacts of the petrochemical food production model would indeed increase GDP, wouldn’t it? It’s all good for business. And what is good for business is good for everyone else, or so the lie goes.
“Corporations as the dominant institution shaped by capitalist patriarchy thrive on eco-apartheid. They thrive on the Cartesian legacy of dualism which puts nature against humans. It defines nature as female and passively subjugated. Corporatocentrism is thus also androcentric – a patriarchal construction. The false universalism of man as conqueror and owner of the Earth has led to the technological hubris of geo-engineering, genetic engineering, and nuclear energy. It has led to the ethical outrage of owning life forms through patents, water through privatization, the air through carbon trading. It is leading to appropriation of the biodiversity that serves the poor.” [22]
The ‘green revolution’ and now GMOs are ultimately not concerned with feeding the world, securing well-rounded nutritious diets or ensuring health and environmental safety. (In fact, India now imports foods that it used to grow but no longer does [23]; in Africa too, local diets are becoming less diverse and less healthy [24].) Such notions are based on propaganda or stem from well-meaning sentiments that have been pressed into the service of corporate interests.
Biotechnological innovations have always had a role to play in improving agriculture, but the post-1945 model of agriculture has been driven by powerful corporations like Monsanto, which are firmly linked to Pentagon and Wall Street interests [25]. Motivated by self-interest but wrapped up in trendy PR about ‘feeding the world’ or imposing austerity to ensure prosperity, the publicly stated intentions of the US state-corporate cabal should never be taken at face value [26,27].
In India, Monsanto and Walmart had a major role in drawing up the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture [28]. Monsanto now funds research in public institutions and its presence and influence compromises what should in fact be independent decision and policy making bodies [29,30]. Monsanto is a driving force behind what could eventually lead to the restructuring and subjugation of India by the US [31]. The IMF and Monsanto are also working to ensure Ukraine’s subservience to US geopolitical aims via the capture of land and agriculture [32]. The capture of agriculture (and societies) by rich interests is a global phenomenon.
Only the completely naive would believe that rich institutional investors in land and big agribusiness and its backers in the US State Department have humanity’s interests at heart. At the very least, their collective aim is profit. Beyond that and to facilitate it, the need to secure US global hegemony is paramount.
The science surrounding GMOs is becoming increasingly politicized and bogged down in detailed arguments about whose methodologies, results, conclusions and science show what and why. The bigger picture however is often in danger of being overlooked. GMO is not just about ‘science’. As an issue, GMO and the chemical-industrial model it is linked to is ultimately a geopolitical one driven by power and profit.
Russia is now the most powerful country on the planet. (…) the Russian armed forces are probably the most powerful and capable ones on earth (albeit not the largest ones) (…) Russia is the most powerful country on earth because of two things: Russia openly rejects and denounces the worldwide political, economic and ideological system the USA has imposed upon our planet since WWII and because Vladimir Putin enjoys the rock-solid support of about 80%+ of the Russian population. The biggest strength of Russia in 2017 is a moral and a political one, it is the strength of a civilization which refuses to play by the rules which the West has successfully imposed on the rest of mankind. And now that Russia has successfully “pushed back” others will inevitably follow (again, especially in Asia).
While some dismissed this as rather ridiculous hyperbole, others have asked me to explain how I came to that conclusion. I have to admit that this paragraph is somewhat ambiguous: first I make a specific claim about the capabilities of the Russian military, and then the “evidence” that I present are of a moral and political nature! No wonder that some expressed reservations about this.
Actually, the above is a good example of one of my worst weaknesses: I tend to assume that I write for people who will make the same assumptions I do, look at issues the way I look at them, and understand what is implied. My bad. So today I will try to spell out what I mean and clarify my point of view on this issue. To do this, however, there are a number of premises which I think need to be explicitly spelled out.
First, how does one measure the quality of an armed force and how can armed forces from different countries be compared?
The first thing which need to immediately get out of the way is the absolutely useless practice known as “bean counting”: counting the numbers of tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry combat vehicles, artillery pieces, aircraft, helicopters and ships for country A and country B and come to some conclusion about which of the two is “stronger”. This is utterly meaningless. Next, two more myths need to be debunked: high tech wins wars and big money wins wars. Since I discussed these two myths in some detail elsewhere (here) I won’t repeat it all here.
Next, I submit that the purpose of a military force is to achieve a specific political objective. Nobody goes to war just for the sake of war and “victory” is not a military, but a political concept. So yes, war is the continuation of politics by other means.
For example, the successful deterrence of a potential aggressor should be counted as a “victory” or, at least, as a successful performance of your armed forces if their goal was to deter. The definition of “victory” can include destroying the other guy’s armed forces, of course, but it does not have to. The British did win the war in the Malvinas/Falkands even though the Argentinian forces were far from destroyed. Sometimes the purpose of war is genocide, in which case just defeating a military forces is not enough.
Let’s take a recent example: according to an official statement by Vladimir Putin, the official objectives of the Russian military intervention in Syria were to 1) stabilize the legitimate authority and 2) create conditions for a political compromise. It is undeniable that the Russian armed forces fully reached this two objectives, but they did so without the need for the kind of “victory” which implies a total destruction of your enemies forces. In fact, Russia could have used nuclear weapons and carpet bombing to wipe Daesh, but that would have resulted in a political catastrophe for Russia. Would that have been a “military victory”? You tell me!
So, if the purpose of a country’s armed forces is to achieve specific and political objectives, this directly implies that saying that some country’s armed forces can do anything, anywhere and at any time is nonsense. You cannot access a military outside a very specific set of circumstances:
1) Where: Space/geographical
2) When: Time/duration
3) What: political objective
Yet, what we see, especially in the USA, is a diametrically opposite approach. It goes something like this: we have the best trained, best equipped and best armed military on earth; no country can compete with our advanced stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, our pilots are the best trained on the planet, we have advanced network-centric warfare capabilities, global strike, space based reconnaissance and intelligence, we have aircraft carriers, our Delta Force can defeat any terrorist force, we spend more money training our special forces than any other country, we have more ships than any other nation, etc. etc. etc. This means absolutely nothing.
The reality is that the US military played a secondary role in WWII in the European theater and that after that the only “kinda victory” it achieved is outright embarrassing: Grenada (barely), Panama (almost unopposed). I would agree that the US military was successful in deterring a Soviet attack, but I would also immediately point out that the Soviets then also successfully deterred a US attack. Is that a victory?
The truth is that China also did not suffer from a Soviet or US attack, does that mean that the Chinese successfully deterred the Soviets or the Americans? If you reply ‘yes’ then you would have to accept that they did that at a fraction of the US costs, so whose military was more effective – the US or the Chinese one? Then look at all the other US military interventions, there is a decent list here, what did those military operations really achieve. If I had to pick a “least bad one” I would reluctantly pick the Desert Storm which did liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis, but at what cost and with what consequences?!
In the vast majority of cases, when the quality of the Russian armed forces is assessed, it is always in comparison to the US armed forces. But does that make sense to compare the Russian armed forces to a military which has a long record of not achieving the specific political objectives it was given? Yes, the US armed forces are huge, bloated, they are the most expensive on the planet, the most technology-intensive and their rather mediocre actual performance is systematically obfuscated by the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet. But does any of that make them effective? I submit that far from being effective, they are fantastically wasteful and amazingly ineffective, at least from a military point of view.
Still dubious?
Okay. Let’s take the “best of the best”: the US special forces. Please name me three successful operations executed by US special forces. No, small size skirmishes against poorly trained and poorly equipped 3rd world insurgents killed in a surprise attack don’t qualify. What would be the US equivalent of, say, Operation Storm-333 or the liberation of the entire Crimean Peninsula without a single person killed? In fact, there is a reason why most Hollywood blockbusters about US special forces are based on abject defeats such as Black Hawk Down or 13 hours.
As for US high-teach, I don’t think that I need to dwell too deeply on the nightmares of the F-35 or the Zumwalt-class destroyer or explain how sloppy tactics made it possible for the Serbian Air Defenses to shoot down a super-secret and putatively “invisible” F-117A in 1999 using an ancient Soviet-era S-125 missile first deployed in 1961!
There is no Schadenfreude for me in reminding everybody of these facts. My point is to try to break the mental reflex which conditions so many people to consider the US military as some kind of measuring stick of how all the other armed forces on the planet do perform.
This reflex is the result of propaganda and ignorance, not any rational reason. The same goes, by the way, for the other hyper-propagandized military – the Israeli IDF whose armored forces, pilots and infantrymen are always presented as amazingly well-trained and competent. The reality is, of course, that in 2006 the IDF could not even secure the small town of Bint Jbeil located just 2 miles from the Israeli border. For 28 days the IDF tried to wrestle the control of Bint Jbeil from second rate Hezbollah forces (Hezbollah kept its first rate forces north of the Litani river to protect Beirut) and totally failed in spite of having a huge numerical and technological superiority.
I have personally spoken to US officers who trained with the IDF and I can tell you that they were totally unimpressed. Just as Afghan guerrillas are absolutely unanimous when they say that the Soviet solider is a much better soldier than the US one.
Speaking of Afghanistan.
Do you remember that the Soviet 40th Army who was tasked with fighting the Afghan “freedom fighters” was mostly under-equipped, under-trained, and poorly supported in terms of logistics? Please read this appalling report about the sanitary conditions of the 40th Army and compare that with the 20 billion dollar per year the US spends on air-conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq! And then compare the US and Soviet occupations in terms of performance: not only did the Soviets control the entire country during the day (at night the Afghan controlled most of the country side and the roads), they also controlled all the major cities 24/7. In contrast, the US barely holds on to Kabul and entire provinces are in the hands of the insurgents. The Soviets built hospitals, damns, airports, roads, bridges, etc. whereas the Americans built exactly nothing. And, as I already mentioned, in every interview I have seen the Afghans are unanimous: the Soviets were much tougher enemies than the Americans.
I could go on for pages and pages, but let’s stop here and simply accept that the PR image of the US (and Israeli) military has nothing to do with their actual capabilities and performance. There are things which the US military does very well (long distance deployment, submarine warfare in temperate waters, carrier operations, etc.) but their overall effectiveness and efficiency is pretty low.
So what makes the Russian armed forces so good?
For one thing, their mission, to defend Russia, is commensurate with the resources of the Russian Federation. Even if Putin wanted it, Russia does not have the capabilities to built 10 aircraft carriers, deploy hundreds of overseas bases or spend more on “defense” than the rest of mankind combined. The specific political objective given to the Russian military is quite simple: to deter or repel any attack against Russia.
Second, to accomplish this mission the Russian armed forces need to be able to strike and prevail at a maxial distance of 1000km or less from the Russian border. Official Russian military doctrine places the limits of a strategic offensive operation a bit further and include the complete defeat of enemy forces and occupation of his territory to a depth of 1200km-1500km (Война и Мир в Терминах и Определениях, Дмитрий Рогозин, Москва, Вече, 2011, p.155) but in reality this distance would be much shorter, especially in the case of a defensive counter-attack. Make no mistake, this remains a formidable task due to the immense length of the Russian border (over 20’000km of border) running over almost every imaginable type of geography, from dry deserts and mountains to the North pole region. And here is the amazing thing: the Russian armed forces are currently capable of defeating any conceivable enemy all along this perimeter. Putin himself said so recently when he declared that “We can say with certainty: We are stronger now than any potential aggressor, any!” I realize that for a mostly American audience this will sound like the typical garden variety claptrap every US officer or politician has to say at every public occasion, but in the Russian context this is something quite new: Putin had never said anything like that before. If anything, the Russian prefer to whine about numerically superior their adversaries seem to be (well, they are, numerically – which every Russian military analyst knows means nothing).
Numerically, the Russian forces are, indeed, much smaller than NATO’s or China’s. In fact, one could argue for the size of the Russian Federation, the Russian armed forces are rather small. True. But they are formidable, well-balanced in terms of capabilities and they make maximal use of the unique geographical features of Russia.
[Sidebar: Russia is a far more “northern” country than, say, Canada or Norway. Look at where the vast majority of the cities and towns in Canada or Scandinavia are located. Then look at a map of Russia and the latitudes at which the Russian cities are located. The difference is quite striking. Take the example of Novosibirsk, which in Russia is considered a southern Siberian town. It is almost at the same latitude as Edinburgh, Scotland, Grande Prairie, Alberta or Malmö in Sweden]
This is why all the equipment used by the Russian Armed Forces has to be certified operational from temperatures ranging from -50C to +50C (-58F to 122F). Most western gear can’t even operate in such extremes. Of course, the same also goes for the Russian solider who is also trained to operate in this range of temperatures.
I don’t think that there is another military out there who can claim to have such capabilities, and most definitely not the American armed forces.
Another myth which must be debunked is the one of western technological superiority. While it is true that in some specific fields the Soviets were never able to catch up with the West, microchips for example, that did not prevent them from being the first ones to deploy a large list of military technologies such as phased-array radars on interceptors, helmet-mounted sights for pilots, supercavitating underwater missiles, autoloaders on tanks, parachute deployable armored vehicles, double-hulled attack submarines, road-mobile ICBMs, etc. As a rule, western weapon systems tend to be more tech-heavy, that is true, but that is not due to a lack of Russian capabilities, but to a fundamental difference in design. In the West, weapon systems are designed by engineers who cobble together the latest technologies and then design a mission around them.
In Russia, the military defines a mission and then seeks the simplest and cheapest technologies which can be used to accomplish it. This is why the Russian MiG-29 (1982) was not a “fly-by-wire” like the US F-16 (1978) but operated by “old” mechanical flight controls. I would add here that a more advanced airframe and two engines instead of one for the F-16, gave the MiG-29 a superior flight envelope. When needed, however, the Russians did use fly-by-wire, for example, on the Su-27 (1985).
Last but not least, the Russian nuclear forces are currently more modern and much more capable than the comparatively aging US nuclear triad. Even the Americans admit that.
So what does that all mean?
This means that in spite of being tasked with an immensely difficult mission, to prevail against any possible enemy along the 20’000+km of the Russian border and to a depth of 1000km, the Russian armed forces have consistently shown that they are capable of fulfilling the specific political objective of either deterring or defeating their potential enemy, be it a Wahabi insurgency (which the western pundits described as “unbeatable”), a western trained and equipped Georgian military (in spite of being numerically inferior during the crucial hours of the war and in spite of major problems and weaknesses in command and control), the disarmament of 25’000+ Ukrainian (supposedly “crack”) troops in Crimea without a single shot fired in anger and, of course, the Russian military intervention in the war in Syria were a tiny Russian force turned the tide of the war.
In conclusion, I want to come back to my statement about Russia being the only country which now openly dares to reject the western civilizational model and whose leader, Vladimir Putin, enjoys the support of 80%+ of the population.
These two factors are crucial in the assessment of the capabilities of the Russian armed forces. Why? Because they illustrate the fact that the Russian soldiers knows exactly what he fights for (or against) and that when he is deployed somewhere, he is not deployed as a tool for Gazprom, Norilsk Nickel, Sberbank or any other Russian corporation: he knows that he is fighting for his country, his people, his culture, for their freedom and safety.
Furthermore, the Russian soldier also knows that the use of military force is not the first and preferred option of his government, but the last one which is used only when all other options have been exhausted. He knows that the Russian High Command, the Kremlin and the General Staff are not hell-bent on finding some small country to beat up just to make an example and scare the others. Last but not least, the Russian solider is willing to die for his country and while executing any order. The Russians are quite aware of that and this is why the following circulated on the Runet recently:
Translation: under both photos it says “private of the US/Russian Army, under contract, deployed in a combat zone”. The bottom central text says “One of them needs to be fed, clothed, armed, paid, etc. The other one just needs to be ordered “this way” and he will execute his mission. At any cost”
At the end of the day, the outcome of any war is decided by willpower, I firmly believe that and I also believe that it is the “simple” infantry private who is the most important factor in a war, not the super-trained superman. In Russia they are sometimes called “makhra” – the young kids from the infantry, not good looking, not particularly macho, with no special gear or training. They are the ones who defeated the Wahabis in Chechnia, at a huge cost, but they did. They are the one which produce an amazing number of heroes who amaze their comrades and enemies with their tenacity and courage. They don’t look to good in parades and they are often forgotten. But they are the ones which defeated more empires than any other and who made Russia the biggest country on earth.
So yes, Russia currently does have the most capable armed forces on the planet. There are plenty of countries out there who also have excellent armed forces. But what makes the Russian ones unique is the scope of their capabilities which range from anti-terrorist operations to international nuclear war combined with the amazing resilience and willpower of the Russian soldier. There are plenty of things the Russian military cannot do, but unlike the US armed forces, the Russian military was never designed to do anything, anywhere, anytime (aka “win two and a half wars” anywhere on the planet).
For the time being, the Russians are watching how the US cannot even take a small city like Mosul, even though it had to supplement the local forces with plenty of US and NATO “support” and they are unimpressed, to say the least. But Hollywood will surely make a great blockbuster from this embarrassing failure and there will be more medals handed out than personnel involved (this is what happened after the Grenada disaster). And the TV watching crowd will be reassured that “while the Russians did make some progress, their forces are still a far cry from their western counterparts”. Who cares?
Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published in May 2015.
We’re living in some exciting yet scary times now. An unknown and uncertain future awaits us as today’s events and developments unravel revealing a myriad of warning signs spelling doom and gloom of apocalyptic End Days as many Christians believe we’ve already entered. Millions of people are living with the daily anxiety of these forewarnings that the end of the world and life as we’ve always known it is about to radically change forever not for the better. Perhaps even more people would quickly counter argue that as long as humans have inhabited this earth there’s always been the “Chicken Littles” out there reminding us that “the sky is falling” and that the end is drawing ever nearer. Many religious leaders and religions over the years have predicted the end of the world. As each year has come and gone and the world didn’t end, life goes on.
Yet in recent years we’ve gone through a similar pattern of hyped up doom and gloom over the Y2K and the 2012 Mayan calendar fiascos where life on the planet trudged albeit destructively on. Yet with the latest Jade Helm craze and disturbing worldwide developments, 2015 appears to be shaping up to be some kind of humdinger of a year like no other. And the chorus of worried Doomsdayers has only grown larger and louder, and it’s neither just the fringe elements from the Christian spectrum nor the growing crowd of internet conspiracy nuts chiming in two part disharmony.
Undoubtedly the level of both intensity and instability in recent months has been steadily rising around the world. The global economy is choking to a standstill that may be teetering on collapse. The days are numbered for the US dollar remaining the standard international currency. Other than for the war mongering profiteers in charge, any prospect of prosperity reemerging in nations throughout the West has long been dead and gone, and now interest rates and bond rates are even going negative. Even the world’s emerging number one economic power China’s economy is slowing down and beginning to falter. Behind the scenes a global power shift has been underway for some time moving with momentum from West to East. But as this transition unfolds, the world appears to be bracing for major dire changes bringing upheaval and turmoil erupting planet-wide this year.
The globalized central banking system as the Western Ponzi scheme that’s reigned supreme for centuries on earth burying and enslaving the world’s population in insurmountable debt is on the verge of collapse. The Western oligarchs’ answer of simply printing more worthless fiat money out of thin air as their go-to band-aid strategy to delay the inevitable crash, desperately trying to keep the doomed, corrosively broken system afloat, is on its deathbed with its life support plug about to be shut off by creditors like China.
This crumbling, predatory system of empiric imperialism is run by an elitist sub-species of evil psychopaths who for centuries were pathologically born devoid of any human heart, thereby never suffering even a tinge of guilty conscience for murdering in cold blood millions and billions of innocent humans over the millennium. Though braindead now, it has not stopped them from preparing for this fateful moment in time. They’ve utilized advancing technology to their full advantage in their broken corrupt system to squeeze what’s left of the global masses’ lifeblood in order to wield absolute power and authority in today’s manifesting New World Order.
With contingency plans for enduring and surviving even a nuclear holocaust on the earth’s surface, underground bunkers, cities and cross continental tunnels have been secretly built during the post-World War II decades to accommodate continued survival of the elites comprising just .025% of the world’s population – the controlling oligarchs along with their necessary errand boys and girls running the mega-corporations and national governments on the planet.
For more than a century these globalists have been promoting their NWO eugenics plan for a sustainable earth population of about a half billion people. The UN Agenda 21 spells it all out in graphic detail. This means within the next several years they plan to kill 13 out of 14 of us 7.2 billion people currently living and breathing on this planet. For decades they’ve been busily deploying both slower, “soft kill” methods as well as their faster, “hard kill” methods to drastically reduce the world population. The hard kill scenario manifests through war and both manmade induced natural disasters as well as naturally occurring natural disasters with a recent noticeable crescendo of activity of all these cataclysmic events.
2015 already is shaping up to be epic in both so called natural disasters through increased waves and magnitudes of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornados, floods, fires, blizzards, and droughts. Under black ops authority, the US military has been involved extensively in geoengineering,weather modification and climate control, playing an enormous, mostly hidden factor in all of these so called natural disasters. The HAARP technology using high frequency electromagnetic beams and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) technology are simply the latest US military weapons at their diabolical disposal.
We’re even learning that natural catastrophes are not so natural after all since these destructive human forces have increasingly been causing them, also making them more devastating and extreme as well as giving rise to their mounting frequency. The deadly earthquake and tsunami believed responsible for causing Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster actually appears to be of manmade origin through EMP technology. Between these monumental events and increasing geopolitical conflicts manifesting though skyrocketing global violence and increasing hotspot wars (Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Gaza, Ukraine) may or may not trigger nuclear detonations that will virtually end all planetary life. But very likely in the coming apocalyptic crises and tumultuous upheaval caused by human conflict and “natural” disaster, millions if not billions on earth could perish within the next few years. These are the hard kill tactics that the globalists are counting on to rapidly depopulate our only planet.
An actual military industrial complex trade website called Deagel.com comes out annually with its projection of population change of 182 nations. The most significant drop in a single nation will be the United States from its current 2014 number of near 319 million to just under 65 million by 2025. In other words, this website that tracks the earnings of the armament industry maintains that 78% of us Americans will either be dead or living elsewhere on the planet within ten years. Likewise, all the Western nations are listed to also absorb heavy losses in their national populations. Interestingly, America’s neighbor to the north Canada is expected to only reduce its population a little more than ten million to just over 24 and a half million people.
Deagel briefly explains that its projected numbers have been formulated according to current statistical public disclosures from each nation’s government offices as well as key trends analyzed over the coming years such as major human migrations to mostly Asia and South America. Some of those nations are projected to increase in population and suffer far less financial losses, a few actually increasing their Gross Domestic Product. However, according to Deagel, the vast majority of the 182 nations will suffer from both significant population loss as well as lowered GDP’s and Power Purchase Parity (PPP roughly equating to household income). This annual report obviously reflects an extremely austere global outlook for this coming decade, factoring in dramatic increase in major war, economy collapse, food shortage, disease, climate change and natural disaster.
China’s population is expected to slightly rise a little more than ten million people from its 2014 census of 3,350,000,000 with about the same purchasing power index. Russia’s population is projected to drop a small amount of about 5.5 million to just under 137 million people in 2025. But its PPP is scheduled to rise slightly from just under $25,000 to just over $27,000, the only nation with substantial regional power showing increasing purchasing power.
Recall that just after the Soviet Union Empire collapsed a quarter century ago, the Russian economy floundered for several years but eventually began coming back. Its crash was not nearly as severe as the expected US downfall will be. With far greater localized agrarian economies, Russian citizens fared making the austere adjustments far less painful than America will. Unlike Russia, the US populace relies virtually entirely on large transnational corporations for its food source. Thus, an overly dependent American population will likely suffer even worse than they did during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
According to Deagel, other national economies that are projected to grow tend to be located mostly in South America, Asia and Africa. In contrast, in the wake of the coming crash, the purchasing power of Americans will plummet from near $55,000 currently to just over $9,000 in ten years. Canada’s PPP will be lowered from $44.5 thousand to near $17.5 thousand, nearly twice that of the US. Other Western nations will also experience a parallel trend downward but not be as extreme a fall as the United States.
This presentation will examine the numerous soft kill methods that over time are most likely to play an increasing part in delivering lethal consequences to humans. They include the toxic effects from the heavy metals the globalists have been raining down on us through geoengineering aerosol spraying for decades now that include aluminum, barium, strontium, mercury among others in a slow death cocktail. Have you actually gone outside lately during daytime hours and looked up at the skies? The solid bright blue sky days we once took for granted are now nearly unheard of over much of the planet. These crisscrossed layers of fake manmade silvery clouds have been increasing and clogging up our atmosphere pretty much everywhere on earth. And we’re long past that worn-out argument that they are actually airplane contrail exhausts. They clearly are not.
The globalists are operating around both the clock and the globe to poison us under the benignly false pretense that they are simply moderating our weather patterns to allegedly decrease unhealthy effects of the buildup of greenhouse gases that the scientific dogma of political correctness would have us believe caused exclusively by the earth’s rising CO2 levels, never mind the far more lethal methane gas levels leaking as Arctic glacier ice melts. But the globalist agenda is far more sinister than this propaganda spin of selective deception. Measurements of these toxic metals in various geographic locations have been collected and publicly disclosed.
Heavy toxic metals intentionally spewing out above us from both military and civilian contractor planes are interfering with the plant kingdom’s natural photosynthesis process and killing off vast amounts of forests and trees all over the earth as well as ensuring the slow death kill of humans and wildlife. It’s also causing extreme weather events. According to the leading scientific activist Dane Wigington, the recent record heat in the West and record cold in the East can be attributed to this pink elephant called geoengineering.
Of course industrial pollution has been playing an ongoing critical role in shortening the lives and killing humans particularly in urban environments for a very long time now. The global air, soil and water pollution compounded and accelerated by the likes of Monsanto chemicals and Fukushima radiation is killing off at unprecedented rates over200 animal species each and every day, not to mention eliminating crucial pollinators like butterflies and bees that are vital for producing a third of our dietary food sources. Due to overuse of Monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate, an MIT research scientist predicts that half our children will be autistic by 2025. Fracking has even been found to inject nuclear wastes underground contaminating freshwater basins and aquifers. Of course over the years the accumulating toxicity levels from these long term sources of industrial wastes seeping into our soil, air and water supply have also been devastatingly detrimental to our physical and mental health as well. In the US big corporation profits are far more important than the public’s health and well-being, punctuated two years ago by President Obama signing Congressional legislation protecting Monsanto from litigation.
Other soft kill methods range from toxic levels of fluoride diabolically mixed in to our municipal water supply as well as a standard ingredient in most toothpaste products. It’s illegal to dump fluoride into lakes and rivers but apparently okay to dump it in most municipal water treatment systems in America. Even a chloramine ammonia mixture used to disinfect water is showing up now in our public tap water. These known poisons have been demonstrated to cause increased levels of autism, dementia and brain damage as well as cancer and cardiovascular disease. But then they’re all simply part of the elitists’ dumbing down/eugenics plan.
Another alarming global weapon being used to dumb down and kill us are the poisonous vaccines wreaking havoc and destruction by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the most defenseless human population – children. India courts are seeking legal justice for Gates’ vaccines there.
Numerous vaccines have been shown to actually cause the very illness it’s supposed to prevent. Others for instance, the measles vaccine actually kills more people than does measles itself. Indisputable evidence is mounting to prove that tainted vaccines with mercury and other known impurities are driving rates of brain damage and autism through the roof. Due to the evil powers of Big Pharma, not unlike Monsanto, many people, especially children are allowed to continue at grave risk of permanent harm and even death from toxic vaccines. Moreover, the proliferation of draconian NWO laws are at work throughout the Western world that are beginning to mandate that these highly damaging vaccines be given to all adults even against their will.
A long history of eugenic sterilization involving involuntarily forced surgery on mostly African and Native American women in numerous states across America was commonly practiced right up to the 1970’s. Elitists who believe they have the power and right to play God in determining who should live and who must die have been around for a long time. Clearly a demonic agenda to cull the human herd has been operating on this planet through all the various soft kill sources. If there ever was truly a political and economic will to collectively reduce and eventually eliminate all these dangerous poisons that increasingly pose as growing hazards to our health and well-being, it would have already taken place long ago.
But the handful of sub-humans in control right now on this planet obviously do not want the vast percentage of humans alive today to remain alive much longer, so the insidiously willful environmental degradation and destruction of our living habitat has been besieged under relentless attack throughout the modern age without any concerted global effort to stop it. As a prime political example, the three biggest planetary polluters – the United States and China, sabotaged (in US under George Bush) the Kyoto Protocol from ever going into effect by refusing to sign on. Meanwhile, the toxic air pollution is becoming so extreme in China’s major cities like Beijing that they may eventually be uninhabitable. But through the Jetstream currents their poisonous particulates are eventually scattered and dispersed to join already localized regional pollutants in the atmosphere all around the globe creating a more toxic effect for all of us earthlings.
The GMO destruction that Monsanto has caused on our planet to our altered, highly processed, poisonous foodsdevoid of virtually all nutrient value is also well documented. But just as the EPA gives federal license to industrial polluters, the FDA permits mercury and other toxins in our food and drugs. A recent study shows that just eating a diet exclusively off the McDonalds menu for just ten days straight kills off critical levels of good gut bacteria needed to metabolize nutrients and optimally maintain the immune system.
Is it any wonder that generations of humans consuming mass amounts of fast food poisons these days are so morbidly obese (one in three US adults) and dying prematurely from heart disease and cancer? Yet through billions of dollars spent on predatory advertising sugar and toxins are in large part guilty along with other soft kill methods of causing chronic health disease and the longevity of Americans to be plateauing out. Despite medical advances, the US lags behind nearly all other industrial nations now in lifespan. And the US is not alone. Even Japan known for its oldest aging population is beginning to slip due to the global onslaught of transnational killers like McDonalds proliferating the planet. Obesity is going global thanks to America’s fast food industry.
The brainwashing methods designed to dumb down the global population is also taking its toll. Subliminal mind control methods saturate today’s media airwaves from onscreen computer games to television, film and popular music especially targeting younger generations. The excessively longer hours that humans interact with their computer screens and cell phones are creating untold damage especially in children. These venues malevolentlyalter brainwave patterns in vulnerable humans to keep them addicted, unable to think critically, dumbed down and too preoccupied and distracted to realize they are being used as guinea pigs in a diabolical human experiment called social engineering. These sinister soft kill tactics are adversely affecting both the physical and mental health of billions of people around the planet.
With increasing risk of World War III involving nuclear weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the potential WMD hazards of covert biological and chemical warfare, massive sunspot flares and solar storms or even enemy launched EMP and/or cyber warfare that could instantly wipe out the necessary infrastructure to keep the economic and energy systems on the planet operating. The damage could be catastrophic where gasoline pumps and ATM’s no longer function, where the electrical power grid over a sprawling section of the US or any country could be destroyed overnight placing millions, perhaps even billions of people in the dark for months or even years on end. Yet the federal government again lacks the political will to repair the grid for a relatively low cost, infinitesimally low compared to the cost after the grid’s destroyed.
Then there’s the highly controversial, mysterious so called tenth Planet X (also sometimes known as Hircolubus or Nibiru) approaching our solar system with potential catastrophic implications. Even the Washington Post ran an article way back in 1983 chronicling the discovery of the planet estimated to be five times the size of the earth revolving around the sun in a 3600 year cycle. In 1990 researcher-author Zecharia Sitchin (The End of Days) interviewed supervising astronomer of the US Naval Observatory Robert S. Harrington to discuss Harrington’s recent discovery of the red Planet X.
As it moves closer, it’s speculated to make an oceanic splash including large sized meteoric space debris creating a strong enough force to throw the earth’s axis off kilter, causing already rising sea levels to instantly become killer tsunamis submerging underwater much of the global population that inhabits the earth’s coastlines. Nearly half the US population resides within coastal counties. A January 14, 2014 on the air early morning broadcast of a Sacramento NBC affiliate station may have inadvertently caught a partial view of Planet X silhouetted by a darkened superimposed Venus.
Researcher-activist John Moore asserts a number of his contacts have independently confirmed that a top secret meeting took place decades ago in a New Orleans briefing where a roomful of US Navy admirals were informed of the coming inevitable disaster. In response to this potential earthshaking event, emergency contingency plans have been covertly relocating the national capital from Washington DC to Denver. In preparation the financial center of New York City is also quietly moving its assets inland to higher ground. The elite has purportedly been secretly preparing for this possibility for a long time. And as usual the public always the last to know has been intentionally kept in the dark.
Foreknowledge of so many potential endgame scenarios can literally overwhelm even the healthiest and strongest among us. Then again this may also be part of the globalist agenda to intentionally leak probabilities of these disasters, using these risks emanating from science and geopolitics to saturate the public with an unlimited source of dangers that over time desensitizes us, numbing and dumbing us down so we grow complacent, passive and too docile to pay any attention to all the mounting dangers facing our troubled planet.
Just to cope with the anxiety that this harsh, sobering reality brings up, often people will utilize such defenses as denial and repression to negate and squash their overwhelming fears from consciousness in order to function daily. With survival demands only going up with each passing year as the value of our dollar only goes down, the challenge of making ends meet paying for a roof over our heads and feeding our families is becoming ever so harder to bear. Already steeped deep in debt, a shocking number of Americans (62%) are but one paycheck away from homelessness.
With daily demands becoming so frighteningly real, a majority of the US population may well be on stress overload just trying to meet the most basic of life necessities. Therefore, contemplating the current state of global alarm and danger becomes too much for them to even think about, much less take preparatory action. It’s all people can do to just financially stay afloat, much less accept the belief that end of the world is fast approaching. So by necessity, a large segment of the population cannot fathom the current dark reality descending on the earth today. The oligarchs appear to have the world population so disempowered and helpless, out of sheer fear and desperation they will simply do what their patriarchal master the federal government tells them.
I realize this depiction of the current world situation appears extremely bleak and hopeless, and that human despair and suffering on this planet are already at high levels. If an individual or national population or even the global population believes that only death and destruction are in their near future, their utter sense of powerlessness and panic will only drive people into deeper depression and anxiety.
Our belief system shapes and ultimately determines our very reality. It can be likened to the hapless deer frozen and unable to move while caught in the headlights of an approaching truck or tank. Without the belief that we can take immediate steps to avert disaster by lifesaving navigation out of this overwhelming darkness into the light of peace, security and serenity, we are all doomed. Therefore, as perilously negative as it may seem to so many of us right now who bravely ponder the dark forces moving against us, there are individual and collective actions we can take together that will empower us as citizens of the world to believe we can in fact make a difference, perhaps the difference between our life and death, and ultimately survival of the human species or its extinction.
Working on oneself spiritually can give us the strength and courage to overcome the most dangerous adversities in life. Finding your Creator, Higher Power, or your God is the greatest coping strategy and skill any of us humans can ever possess. Striving to create a balance between still finding joy and love in our daily lives with those we care most about on this earth plane while at the same time taking the necessary precautionary steps to protect and defend ourselves from any immediate or overt threats and dangers is extremely important. Granted, it’s easier said than done. But having your own contingency plan to maximally safeguard our family and homes, our neighborhoods and communities is also crucial. The human spirit and capacity to triumph even in the most despairing moments and conditions can be unbelievably resilient and powerful. And only those who know and experience pain and suffering can also embrace equal heights of joy and happiness. The art of living is living each and every single day as fully and joyously as is humanly possible. Difficult times can facilitate the gift of insight and awareness that in turn promote greater wisdom and bliss. Working toward change most often starts from within and shifts outward to one’s immediate living environment from home to the local and regional community levels.
Though it seems federal representatives virtually always give in to the special interests of the oligarchs that own them over the public’s interests, still contacting your respective congressional members to vote against renewal of the Patriot Act and other draconian laws up for vote can be one tangible way that’s still available to limit the invasive power of the NSA and the federal government. States’ rights will be the fulcrum of power against the tyranny of the feds’ criminal cabal.
Reaching out to friends and family in both our law enforcement and military communities is also imperative. These individuals may be ordered to one day soon fire upon and kill us as their fellow citizens. Emphasizing the legal and moral significance that empowers them to make the hard decision to choose to disobey their criminal commanders can possibly save lives.
Maximizing local community resourcefulness is an empowering line of defense against oppression and tyranny. As much as is possible, boycotting the giant mega-corporations and patronizing localized products and services can be another effective means of transferring power away from the globalists to local enterprises that enhance our community. Bartering and even developing local and regional currencies is actually successfully occurring in pocket communities across the nation. Utilizing locally owned banks and credit unions as opposed to the bigger centralized banking system is another key action we should take. Following North Dakota’s lead by establishing your own state bank is a seminal milestone that can be duplicated all over these United States.
Connecting with the many established organizations and unifying as activist members for peace and justice on a global scale can mobilize a collective power that can be formidable. It may not necessarily come down to who has the biggest guns if enough of us unite in unbreakable solidarity as mindful, courageous and committed citizens of the world demanding that we humans find ways to civilly resolve our conflicts and live in peace. We owe it to both ourselves and our children as well as the planet to take a bold stand and do what’s right.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.
The theme of reparations at the 2018 World Social Forum in Salvador de Bahia was treated in the workshop Repairs to Colonialism (page 113), in the World Assembly of Resistance Peoples, Movements and Territories and in the Agora of futures. In these activities participated some hundred people, many of whom representatives of other organizations. It was made a point of the situation on the reparations in recent years trying to identify actions most promising for the future.
International day for reparations: launched by the Assembly of convergence To end with racism, xenophobia and the discriminations that are the bases of colonialism of the World Social Forum 2013, it is annually celebrated on October 12. It is possible to join the call and/or organize decentralized action necessary to advance the cause of reparations all over the world (press releases, conferences, exhibitions, media campaigns, street actions, cultural festivals, radio broadcasts or television, political decisions, etc.). Its recognition at the United Nations level will give the right legitimacy to the various requests for reparations continuing the path traced by the Durban World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) and allowing to speed up the process.
Request for reparations for the genocide of the native people and the slavery started in 2013 by the members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM): in addition to the interventions during the annual General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly, expressed their support on December 14, 2014 the Bolivarian Alliance for the peoples of our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), on January 27, 2016 the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and on June 4, 2016 the Association of Caribbean States (ACS). From April 2016 it began a series of Reparations relays and rallies in collaboration with the CARICOM members that still continues, in the month of August 2016 the CARICOM Reparations Commission launched its website and on October 10, 2017 the University of the West Indies (UWI) launched the Centre for Reparation Research (CRR).
Request for reparations for the Herero and Nama Genocide launched in 2006 by Namibia: on July 1, 2015 the parliamentary group Die Linke presents the motion Reconciliation with Namibia: recognize the Genocide! that unfortunately is rejected by the German Parliament on March 17, 2016. The congress Restorative Justice after Genocidewas held in Berlin from 14 to 16 October 2016 and on January 5, 2017 the Herero and Nama have filed a class action lawsuit in the Federal court in New York to get collective reparations and the right to be present at the ongoing negotiations between the German and Namibian Government. On February 27, 2017 the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent ended a seven day visit in Germany remembering that the Herero and Nama people must be included in the negotiations currently ongoing between the German and Namibian governments. On April 24, 2017 the Evangelical Church in Germany has asked the descendants of the victims of the genocide in then South-West Africa for forgiveness.
Requests of repatriation of the remains and return of the treasures looted: on July 27, 2016 the Government of Benin asked France the return of the treasures looted looted during the conquest of November 1892 unfortunately secretly refused by the Government of France on December 12, 2016. On August 2, 2017 the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), which manages German museums, announced the launch of the investigation of the origins of about a thousand skulls looted during the colonialism to decide how to handle them, not excluding their return. On November 28, 2017 the French President Emmanuel Macron declares to want that within five years there are the conditions for temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa. On December 18, 2017 in Berlin, the capital of Germany, dozens of organizations and hundreds of personalities sent an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel asking in occasion of the centenary of the end of German colonialism the restitution of cultural objects and human remains from Africa.
To understand why the French authorities decided to hold ex-president of France Nicolas Sarkozy accountable for his election campaign of the past, one must try to find out who profits from finishing off with the “dead” politician from a ruined party? The answer to this question lies in the fate of over ten billion euros from Libya’s accounts that the UN ordered to freeze in 2011.
The money disappeared from the accounts at Euroclear Bank in Belgium in 2013-2017, the Belgian weekly Le Vif reported on March 20. There were just over five billion euros left on four accounts. At the same time, according to the Ministry of Finance, Belgium did not make decisions to unfreeze those assets.
No one knows the amount of the Libyan assets that was frozen in 2011. Sarkozy said that as many as 63 countries took part in the plundering of Libya. In the USA alone, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Carlyle Group froze 34 billion dollars, according to the AP. The money was placed on deposits, invested in shares and was bringing profit, but it disappeared anyway. In 2016, the UN Security Council rejected Libya’s request to let the country manage frozen accounts and assets. Most likely, there is nothing to unfreeze.
Why Sarkozy is facing jail
Coincidence or not, it was immediately after the leak from Le Vif when Sarkozy was detained and charged with obtaining 50 million euros from the Libyan leader to illegally finance his 2007 election campaign.
It would seem that the ex-president has been stymied by numerous investigations, his political career is over, and the trial over him can only cause damage to the reputation of France. Why would the French authorities want to put him in jail with a specific term of up to ten years? What if Sarkozy, considering the material difficulties of his “Republicans” party (he lost both presidential and parliamentary elections), decided to take a slice of the sweet pie of frozen Libyan assets?
Sarkozy’s arrest made it clear that he should not open his mouth for that pie. In addition, it is very tempting for President Macron to make Sarkozy responsible both for the collapse of Libya and the influx of refugees to Europe. Yet, why would Sarkozy kill the golden goose?
It was France that unleashed the war against Libya before the United Kingdom and the United States supported it. The reasons for the aggression can be found in the leaked correspondence of Sidney Blumenthal and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to the US officials, Gaddafi’s long-term plan was to replace France as the dominant power in West Africa.
It turns out that Gaddafi had saved 143 tons of gold and about the same amount of silver that he intended to use to form a Pan-African currency based on the Libyan gold dinar. As Blumenthal wrote, the plan was to offer French-speaking African countries an alternative to the CFA franc. That was one of the factors that pushed then-President Sarkozy towards a decision to launch military operations in Libya. Noteworthy, the CFA franc was pegged to the French franc.
Of course, Sarkozy could not lose such a lever of control of ex-colonies. Most likely he had discussed the freezing of Libya’s assets with allies. Western countries thus obtained nearly $60 billion and the control over Libya’s oil deposits.
Gaddafi’s lessons for Russia
There are several lessons that Russia needs to learn from this story. The first lesson is for president. Gaddafi had been demonised for long before the West destroyed him and plundered Libya’s wealth. What was the need to explode the Pan American Boeing over Scotland? What was the point to explode another Boeing over the Donbass? In both cases, it was the president was accused of the crime. All high-profile terrorist attacks that the West was ascribing to Gaddafi had never been proved, even though he had paid generous compensations to victims to avoid sanctions. This is how the West behaves now with the Russian president.
The second lesson is for people. What did the Libyans need if their incomes during the Gaddafi era exceeded those of most Russian people twice? They wanted what Russian liberals have been up to recently – to topple the “dictator” and everything else can go to hell.
The third lesson is for everyone who “keeps money.” One should not keep money in Western banks, no matter whether it is the money of private investors or national reserves. The West will not hesitate to freeze those assets disregarding all sorts of international norms.
Narrative-building is an art and former US President Barack Obama was a master charmer. Hence, maintaining the image of the United States as the exceptional and indispensable nation that promotes freedom and equality, particularly after eight long years of George W Bush (since rehabilitated by the liberal media), was not the most challenging of labours.
The Western corporate media – and state-owned outlets – had the somewhat undemanding task of “Making America Feel Good Again”. No more Bushisms, Dick Cheneys, Abu Ghraibs, John Boltons, CIA black sites, Princes of Darkness, extraordinary renditions, fake dossiers, and Guantanamo Bays, among other things.
This was the post-racial America, where black lives mattered and where the president received a Nobel peace prize – like Yitzhak Rabin, FW de Klerk, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Aung San Suu Kyi, Shimon Peres, and other “luminaries” – even though he had barely entered the Oval Office.
The Obama era
True, Guantanamo Bay remained open for business, drone strikes were all the rage, Libya was shattered, Obama funded “moderates” in Syria (which Biden said were non-existent), “managed” the Islamic State (IS) advance on Damascus, helped Saudi Arabia starve out Yemen, facilitated the siege on Gaza, imposed “crippling” sanctions on ordinary Iranians, and justified the Saudi occupation of Bahrain, among other reprehensible deeds.
Yet somehow, Obama was TV gold. He was great with teleprompters, seduced talk show audiences nationwide, did an awesome mic drop, and even agreed to a nuclear deal with Iran. He was like Teflon Tony before Tony lost his Teflon.
For many it was the same old America, but under Obama, US soft power reached new heights. Coalition building was no longer the coalition of the willing. The European Union conformed to his will, while a rising China and re-emerging Russia worked to avoid any serious confrontation.
Capitalising on unfounded allegations of electoral fraud in 2009, Obama stealthily enhanced Iranophobia, securitised Iran, and manufactured a sense of crisis and urgency – despite Iran’s adherence to International Atomic Energy Agency regulations. Life was not easy for Iranian strategists and foreign policymakers, as sanctions continued to stack up on an unprepared Iranian public.
Seismic shifts
Then came Trump, who aligned himself with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a veritable Three Stooges in the world of Mideast geopolitics. One was an unsavoury prime minister who enforces apartheid, is disliked by allies and faces corruption charges at home.
The other was heralded as a true reformer – albeit one who kidnaps Lebanese prime ministers, supports coups, imposes sieges on old allies, starves children, funds Wahhabi extremists, arrests and tortures family members, and spends billions on yachts, portraits, foreign castles and chateaus.
Trump attacked minorities, Africans, Latinos, China, Muslims, the European Union, neighbouring countries and exited the Paris Climate Accord – all while his political opponents did their best to wreck American-Russian relations.
At times, even Trump-skeptical Iranian diplomats must have secretly felt overwhelmed by the abundance of gifts the US president was presenting to them.
While from the get-go Obama, the Treasury Department and the US Congress repeatedly violated the terms of the JCPOA, the former president’s constant public and verbal commitment to the JCPOA lulled much of the international community and drowned out Iranian protests that their commitments had not been reciprocated.
Almost immediately after his inauguration, Trump ramped up the violations – and began threatening to exit the nuclear agreement altogether.
Suddenly the tables were turned, as even close US allies felt belittled and insulted that, by ignoring US international commitments, Trump was also exposing Germany, Britain, and France as geopolitical lightweights who have little impact on major international agreements.
Russia and China increasingly viewed the United States as an unreliable partner, thus accelerating their strategic interest in their relationship with the Islamic Republic. Unreliability and unpredictability, combined with a host of new tariffs, sanctions, dubious alliances and military threats, are creating seismic shifts that push Washington toward deeper isolation.
Extreme and irrational
In the absence of Saruman’s or King Salman’s orb, it is unwise to make predictions of the future. However, it seems clear that by firing Secretary of State Tillerson and installing John Bolton as national security advisor, Trump has reinforced the widespread belief that the United States is growing more extreme and irrational and becoming increasingly antagonistic toward the rest of the world.
The spectacle of domestic US political strife combined with the emergence of Trump’s fanatical foreign policy team has demolished US soft power capabilities and made the United States under George W Bush look utopian.
Nevertheless, the US government must realise that Iran is not Iraq and this is not 2003. Iran’s strategic alliances are extensive and deep, and US regional allies today look increasingly fragile and erratic.
Moreover, Iran’s interests increasingly converge with global powers such as Russia and China, while the appointment of Bolton alarms even America’s staunchest allies. The extensive violations of the JCPOA has left most of the sanctions regime intact, thus limiting Iran’s losses subsequent to a potential US withdrawal from the agreement.
At home and abroad, Iran’s leaders will be vindicated for their skepticism of US intentions, and the Iranian public will expect an immediate normalisation of its peaceful nuclear programme.
Despite his well-founded skepticism, Ayatollah Khamenei once stated that if the US changes its behaviour regarding the nuclear dossier, the two sides may be able to negotiate over other matters as well.
When the US cannot be trusted over existing agreements, further negotiations are simply a fool’s quest.
Samuel Johnson once said:
“A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.”
The emperor has no clothes and has revealed himself to be clueless about the Art of the Deal.
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Seyed Mohammad Marandi isa Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran.
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.
Why a new Cold War? Why now? This morning, Americans awoke to news that the supposedly Russia-supplicant Trump administration, along with 14 other EU nations, will expel scores of Russian diplomats. The announcement, which Russia called a “provocative gesture,” and vowed to retaliate against, constitutes the largest collective expulsion of Russian Intel officers in history.
This very serious action follows on the heels of Russian intelligence’s alleged role in the nerve-agent-attack – which Russia denies – on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, on UK soil. Maybe Russia was behind the attack, maybe it wasn’t; but, it seems, we’d want to be sure and have indisputable evidence before embarking on what the Russian foreign ministry correctly labeled “a confrontational path.”
More alarmingly, Russia’s neighbors, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, withdrew their ambassadors from Moscow on Monday – a move all but tantamount to breaking off diplomatic relations. With US and NATO troops now forward deployed in these former Warsaw Pact states, Russian and US military personnel staring each other down across the Euphrates River, and US airstrikes having recently killed scores of Russian mercenaries in Syria, are we now on a path to Cold (or Hot!) War?
Look, maybe Russia is behind these attacks, maybe all the MSNBC-Russia-Gate-Hysteria is all justified. But isn’t this hasty, serious action a bit premature? Don’t we want to be sure? As for the 2016 elections, Mueller’s investigation is not yet complete and when it comes to “collusion” there’s plenty of smoke, maybe, but very little fire. As for the UK poisoning attack, despite Britain’s consistent, confident allegations of Russian guilt, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) won’t even have the substance test results back for some 2-3 weeks.
It seems likely that rather than prudently, patiently (you know…diplomatically!) waiting for definitive, corroborating chemical and intelligence evidence before further escalating tensions with the Russian bear, what we’re seeing is President Trump’s team making a political move. Embattled and scandal-ridden – who else saw 60 Minutes last night – this administration likely feels compelled to take some drastic action to prove (again) that they’re not in cahoots with Putin. Is that any way to run foreign policy? Well, it is, in this era of hyper-partisan, role-swapping (wait the Dems are Russia hawks now?!?), battle stations politicization!
I watch the news (CNN and MSNBC are the worst culprits) enough to know that it is currently all-Russia, all the time. The American public is led to believe, by those outside, and in some cases – like the National Defense Strategy (NDS) – inside, the administration, that Russia is a born again Soviet Union and Putin the new Stalin incarnate. The Russkies are out for world domination again, a “revisionist power” as the NDS labels them. Hold on though; take a breath. Is that actually true?
As I’ve written in these pages, the threat and supposedly malign intentions of Russia and China have been highly inflated by hawks on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, Russia has recently announced plans to cut military spending over the next five years. As it stands, Russia is in many ways punching above its weight to begin with. With an economy comparable in size to that of Spain or Italy, military spending just a fraction of the US, and facing a demographic “perfect storm” of high mortality and low fertility, Russia has neither the means nor motivation to conquer Central Europe.
The United States, on the other hand, spends more on its military than the next several nations – China, Russia, India, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Japan and France – combined. Furthermore, a majority of the recent $1.3 trillion US omnibus spending bill goes straight to the warfare (welfare) state – the military and VA. Who exactly holds the aggressive cards here?
None of that proves Russia is innocent. None of this means the US and EU should appease every Russian move or irredentist motive. None of it implies the Russians shouldn’t be monitored, balanced, and carefully watched in Europe and the Caucasus. However, before unilaterally escalating an already alarmingly tense situation between NATO and Russia, shouldn’t we at least wait until all the evidence is in?
Prudence not politics should be the name of the game.
*
Major Danny Sjursen, a regular AntiWar.com contributor, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris ‘Henri’ Henrikson.
March 27th, 2018 by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Request to Withdraw Nomination of Gina Haspel
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago, she has disqualified herself.
In 2002 Haspel supervised the first CIA “black site” for interrogation, where cruel and bizarre forms of torture were applied to suspected terrorists. And when the existence of 92 videotapes of those torture sessions was revealed, Haspel signed a cable ordering their destruction, against the advice of legal counsel at CIA and the White House.
Does Torture ‘Work?’
We are confident that if you set aside some time to read the unredacted portions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2014 on the torture ordered and supervised by Haspel and other CIA managers, you will change your mind about her nomination. The five-year Senate investigation was based primarily on original CIA cables and other sensitive documents.
In addition to revealing clear violations of the UN Convention Against Torture, the Senate investigation shows that claims by senior CIA officials that torture is effective are far from true. The US Army — in which many of us have served — has been aware of the ineffectiveness of torture for decades.
General John Kimmons, head of Army Intelligence, drove home that point on September 6, 2006 — approximately an hour before President George W. Bush publicly extolled the virtues of torture methods that became known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Gen. Kimmons stated: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years — tell us that.”
We believe that Defense Secretary James Mattis’ lack of enthusiasm for torture reflects lessons drawn from the historical experience of the Marine Corps, as well. Not to mention the twin reality that torture brutalizes the brutalizer, and that US use of torture puts our own troops in serious jeopardy when captured. Moreover, there is no more effective recruitment tool than torture to attract more terrorists.
International and Domestic Law
Please also be aware that many signatories to the UN Convention Against Torture take seriously their obligations under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which applies when those who authorize or practice torture are not brought to justice by authorities in their home countries.
George W. Bush experienced a precarious brush with this reality in 2011, when he had to abruptly cancel a visit to Geneva, Switzerland, after discovering that plans were in place to arrest him as soon as he stepped onto Swiss soil. [See “America’s Stay-at-Home Ex-President”] The widely respected European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights already has made no secret of its intention to proceed quickly against Haspel, should she set foot in Europe.
We believe that CIA’s activities and general focus have become severely unbalanced, with the lion’s share of funding and energy going to the paramilitary-prone operational side — where the potential for human rights abuses is not given sufficient consideration.
That trend has gone on steroids in more recent decades, and it is a safe bet that Gina Haspel would accelerate it. We would also observe that if most of the talent and funding goes to CIA paramilitary operations, then the by-products will necessarily include a tendency to engage in politically motivated — and therefore shabby — analysis. That means that senior policymakers like you will be poorly informed, particularly with respect to complex world issues — including biased perspectives on Russia and its newly re-elected president, Vladimir Putin.
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We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) are extremely concerned at the possibility that Gina Haspel might become the next Director of the CIA. Haspel actually supervised a CIA “black site” codenamed “Cat’s Eye” in Thailand where a number of suspected terrorists were tortured. She subsequently collaborated in destroying all 92 videotapes of the torture sessions, effectively covering up what were likely serious war crimes.
There should be no question about the illegality of torture. It has been universally condemned and banned by both the Geneva Conventions and United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the Senate in 1994.
The UN Convention defines torture “as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession…” and makes clear that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
The Convention’s Article 2 requires signatories to take effective measures to prevent torture in any territory under their jurisdiction. The complete prohibition of torture is absolute. Under international law, officials cannot receive immunity in cases involving torture and governments that have signed the Convention are obligated to bring torturers to justice. US domestic law was brought in line with the Convention once the US became a signatory and ratified it.
A prisoner is tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. The detainee “GUS” has a strap around his neck and is being pulled from his cell as a form of intimidation. US Army Reserve Soldier Lynndie England is holding the leash while soldier Megan Ambuhl watches. Specialist Charles A. Graner is taking the picture. (Wikipedia)
In the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations, torture, to include its variations that have been euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT), is now explicitly banned by the US military in its training manuals. A number of soldiers were tried and imprisoned in the wake of Abu Ghraib, although the “upper ranks” — in civilian as well as military spheres — who approved torture managed to escape serious consequences.
Some in the Pentagon clearly took seriously allegations of torture and were willing to file criminal charges against those involved, though Department of Defense leadership never saw fit to assume responsibility for having set up a policy environment that quite clearly condoned EIT.
There is also another significant historical and legal precedent that demonstrates that the United States government has by its own actions agreed that what is today being called “enhanced interrogation” is a war crime. In 1946-1948, Japanese officers who tortured Allied soldiers — including what is now referred to as waterboarding — were tried at the Tokyo post-war tribunals for that crime, found guilty, and executed.
Heinous
More recently, the meticulously documented unclassified 528 page Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the CIA’s secret Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program is remarkable for its candor. That five-year investigation was based on original CIA cables and other documents.
In blunt language, the Senate report describes the horrors of the black site secret prisons and the efforts that were made to get terrorist suspects to talk. It demonstrates that the interrogations were brutal — worse than anyone had been led to believe — and also that they did not produce any information that might not have been developed otherwise or, in many cases, any actionable intelligence whatsoever. The full classified text of the report — which names names of the actual torture perpetrators redacted in the summary — runs to almost 7,000 pages.
Moreover, coercive interrogation frequently produced misleading or fabricated intelligence that wasted resources by having to be meticulously checked before being used. This conclusion was also arrived at by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan — who deplored CIA methods — as well as by a review conducted by CIA’s then-Inspector General (IG), John Helgerson, in 2004. The “Helgerson Report” condemned both CIA leadership and Langley’s on-the-ground management of questionable programs driven by “analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — programs which quickly became abusive.
It is our collective judgment that the loathsome physical abuses that included beatings, repeated waterboardings and anal violations referred to as “rectal feeding” — as well as physical threats to family members — cannot be whitewashed with the convenient euphemism of “enhanced interrogation.” All of those are acts of torture — plain and simple.
And while there are undoubtedly many good moral arguments against torture, there are practical considerations as well. Despite what the media would have Americans believe, torture does not work.
We recall the unambiguous remarks of then-commander of Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, who held a Pentagon press conference on Sept. 6, 2006 — the same day President George W. Bush announced what he called “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation (which later morphed into the term “enhanced interrogation techniques”). Anticipating that Bush would claim the EITS to be necessary and effective, Gen. Kimmons told the media: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years —tells us that.”
Colin Powell Mousetrapped by ‘Intelligence’ From Torture
Worse still, intelligence officials have used information, which they knew was gained from torture, to mislead the most senior US officials on issues of war and peace. One of the signatories below was eyewitness to how CIA Director George Tenet persuaded Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the UN of a “sinister nexus” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite photos which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but the evidence proved bogus.
Tenet did not tell Powell that this “intelligence” came from a source, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been “rendered” to, and waterboarded by, Egyptian intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency had deemed this intelligence unreliable, but Tenet chose to ignore DIA and never informed Powell. Al-Libi recanted less than a year later, admitting that he fabricated the story about Saddam and al-Qaeda in order to stop his torture.
Moreover, when you wink at torture, you motivate enemies of the United States to do the same to captured US soldiers, diplomats and travelers while also providing a propaganda bonanza for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Indeed, the only reason why CIA torturers have not been tried and sentenced to prison for the damage they have done to the nation is that an intimidated President Barack Obama — who once proclaimed that “nobody is above the law” — balked at allowing the judicial process to run its course, thereby whitewashing the Bush Administration’s many crimes related to the so-called “global war on terror.” Obama attempted to justify his inaction as looking forward rather than backward, but it is more likely that he feared opening up a Pandora’s Box of shameful government secrets that no doubt would have emerged.
Promoting Haspel in spite of her tainted record would send a message to both intelligence and military personnel that embracing practices like torture — indisputably a war crime — can be a path to promotion.
Haspel’s involvement with torture began when she accepted the assignment to go to Thailand — which she could have turned down — to run the “black site” where the interrogations were being conducted. She was, at the time, the deputy in CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC), working for Jose Rodriguez.
She was in charge of the secret Thailand base in late 2002 while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and possibly more suspects were being tortured in a process that included slamming victims’ heads against walls, subjecting them to painful stress positions, regularly depriving them of sleep, confining them to small, coffin-like boxes, and waterboarding.
The “confinement boxes” were of two types; one was coffin-sized, and the other was smaller and less than waist-high. Both had strong claustrophobic effects. A prisoner would be forced into the smaller box as an extreme form of stress positioning, creating excruciating pain. To maximize psychological distress and exploit phobias, insects were sometimes placed in the pitch-black “coffin” alongside the victim.
Destroying the Evidence
In 2005, after returning to CIA headquarters at Langley, she acted on instructions from Rodriguez and drafted the order to destroy the 92 videotapes that had been made of the interrogations. It has been reported that she was a “strong advocate” for the destruction. This was contrary to instructions provided by CIA Counsel John Rizzo and the White House. Thus, her act may have constituted destruction of evidence — a felony.
Jose Rodriguez was investigated for destruction of evidence by a Special Prosecutor who eventually ruled against charging him. An aide to CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo later revealed Rodriguez’s rationale for shredding the tapes, writing in an email that “the heat from destroying [them] is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain – he [Rodriguez] said that they would make us look terrible; it would be devastating to us.” Gina Haspel ensured that these tapes — important, damning evidence of US government torture — would never see the light of day.
Haspel’s defenders claim that she was not the creator of the torture program and only served as a willing executor of a government initiative that she believed to be legal. That may be true as no one has access to the CTC documents that might prove otherwise. Nevertheless, it does not provide her a free pass under international law, where it is generally referred to as the “Nuremberg Defense” — a thoroughly discredited “defense” that harkens back to the era of Nazi atrocities and those who attempted to justify them by claiming perpetrators were “just following orders.”
‘Nuremberg Defense’ Didn’t Work at Nuremberg
Several former CIA leaders have supported her, saying that she was “implementing the legal orders of the president,” but many of them may be concerned about their own reputations or questionable decisions they may have made in the name of the “war on terror.” And the UN’s International Law Commission says something quite different in its codification of the legal options surrounding torture, writing that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
High-ranking Nazis on trial at Nuremberg
It is also claimed that Gina Haspel was working for the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Bangkok and acting under the COS’s orders, but those of us who have worked in and led CIA bases would dispute that that type of tight control was common, particularly since in this case, she was reporting directly to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley. Haspel would have been the boss and would have had independence in the field in executing directives from CIA Headquarters and the Counterterrorism Center — some of which she herself had a hand in drafting.
If Haspel is confirmed and wishes to travel abroad, she may have to restrict herself to countries not party to the UN Convention Against Torture because of her widely known involvement in the “black site” in Thailand. The 42 countries that have signed and ratified the Convention include the US and most of its allies. All take on a legal obligation to enforce the prohibition against torture, based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” when necessary. In other words, they are empowered to act when the accused’s home country refuses to do so.
Not Too Late to Do the Right Thing
If you do not withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel and she is confirmed, this will cast a moral stain on the vast numbers of patriotic and ethically upright Americans who serve their country in the field of national security. It will also be a continuation of the steady erosion of human rights standards and rule of law post-9/11.
Apparent widespread support for torture among the US public — enabled largely by the false message of Hollywood, the media and the Cheney family that it “works” — is deplorable. It might have been headed off by the prosecutions of Haspel, Rodriguez and others by former President Obama, together with graphic exposure of the evidence. You have an opportunity to reverse this wrong.
Withdrawing Haspel’s nomination now would be a step in the right direction. Confirming her as Director of CIA would signal that Washington embraces what then-Vice President Dick Cheney referred to as the “dark side.” Regrettably, torture was once part of US policy. Indeed, one of this Memorandum’s signatories spent nearly two years in federal prison because he revealed that. But torture cannot be relied upon to yield accurate intelligence. It remains an internationally condemned malignancy that must be excised, never to return.
* * *
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
George Hunsinger, Professor, Princeton Theological Seminary; Founder, National Religious Campaign Against Torture (associate VIPS)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (ret.), Intelligence Officer & ex-Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.)
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Valerie Plame, former operations officer, CIA (associate VIPS)
Diane Roark, Republican Professional Staff, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 1985-2002 (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Greg Thielmann, former Director, Office of Strategic, Political, and Military Affairs, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department; Former staff member, Senate Intelligence Committee
Peter Van Buren, US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (ret.), former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State; Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (ret.); also Foreign Service Officer who resigned in opposition to the US war on Iraq
The situation is rapidly developing in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta where the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies are on the verge of liberating the entire area from militants.
Following the evacuation agreement in Harasta, government forces have liberated Ayn Tarma and have forced militants in Jobar, Zamalka, Hazeh and Irbin to accept another evacuation agreement. The implementation of this agreement started on March 24. More than 7,000 civilians and members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Faylaq al-Rahman are set to leave the area under the deal.
Separately, negotiations are ongoing in the area of Douma controlled by Jaish al-Islam. According to pro-government experts, the key issue preventing the group from accepting the deal is that its leadership seeks to prevent the evacuation to the militant-held area of Idlib, mostly controlled by its competitors, like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. According to some reports, the group is willing to be evacuated to Eastern Qalamoun area.
In any case, the SAA has de-facto won the battle for Eastern Ghouta. Gaining a full control over the area is just the matter of time.
On March 24, the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) released a statement claiming that the Afrin area is under “complete” control of Tukey-led force and efforts to help civilians return their homes securely are underway.
Chief of General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar announced that there are still few villages, which Turkey seeks to capture south of the city of Afrin.
“There are 3-5 villages left in the west. We will arrive in the suburb of Aleppo called Nubl-Zahra and Afrin will be completely secured soon,” Akar said at a conference in the capital Ankara.
On the same day, units of Syrian government forces, mostly members of the National Defense Forces (NDF), deployed in the villages of Bashmra, Zoq al-Kabir, Buurj al-Qas. Miyasa, Aqiba and Ziyara as well as the nearby high points south of the city of Afrin. The deployment was aimed at preventing further advances by the TAF and its proxies.
Turkish forces captured the city of Afrin from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) on March 18. Since then, the TAF and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have made a series of limited advances south of the city expanding a buffer zone between the Turkish-occupied area and the government-held countryside of Aleppo.
On March 25, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that 3,747 so-called “terrorists” had been neutralized since the start of Operation Olive Branch in Afrin. The presided said that 302 members of FSA died during the same period. Erdogan also vowed that Turksih forces will capture Tal Rifaat before ending the operation.
The advance on Tal Rifaat may trigger a confrontation between Turkish forces and the Syrian government because a number of NDF units have established checkpoints near the city under an agreement with the YPG.
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The jihadists had been trained and received instructions from regular soldiers from Britain and France. These were not arrested; they were evacuated separately in a “humanitarian” convoy organized for them by the UN.
Over the past week, nearly a year after he tried to have Robert Muellerfired, Donald Trump went on a tweeting rampage against the special counsel. Trump’s escalating Twitter attacks may be a harbinger of Mueller’s impending dismissal — or the president could be trying to preemptively discredit and delegitimize Mueller’s eventual findings against him.
On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush.
On March 22, 2018 the former Mayor of New York and adviser to President Trump, Rudy Giuliani was in Tirana. He was invited to Albania’s capital by Maryam Rajavi, the head of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization, to celebrate the Iranian festival of Nowruz with the Iranian jihadist organization which Albania has hosted since 2013.
Even when many Americans can clearly see that the United States is funding extremists in order to destroy Assad, it is difficult for them to grasp that the most frightening enemy of all, ISIS itself, is also being directed by Western intelligence, the GCC, and Israel.
«Putin userà il Mondiale di calcio come Hitler usò l’Olimpiade del 1936, cioè per dissimulare il brutale, corrotto regime di cui è responsabile»: questa dichiarazione ufficiale del ministro degli esteri britannico Boris Johnson dimostra a quale livello sia giunta la campagna propagandistica contro la Russia.
In una vignetta sul giornale britannico The Guardian, ricalcata da un manifesto nazista degli anni Quaranta, la Russia viene rappresentata come un gigantesco ragno, con la testa di Putin, che ghermisce il mondo.
È la Russia accusata di aver avvelenato in Inghilterra un suo ex ufficiale, arrestato per spionaggio 12 anni fa e rilasciato 8 anni fa (quindi non più in possesso di informazioni sensibili), usando per avvelenare lui e sua figlia l’agente nervino Novichok di produzione sovietica (così da lasciare volutamente l’impronta di Mosca sul luogo del delitto).
La Russia accusata di penetrare con eccezionale abilità nelle reti informatiche, manipolando perfino le elezioni presidenziali negli Stati uniti («un atto di guerra» lo ha definito John Bolton, nuovo consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale).
Accusata ora ufficialmente dal Dipartimento Usa per la sicurezza della patria e dall’Fbi di prepararsi a sabotare con i suoi hacker le centrali elettriche comprese quelle nucleari, gli impianti idrici e gli aeroporti negli Stati uniti e in Europa, così da paralizzare interi paesi.
Si fabbrica in tal modo l’immagine di un nemico sempre più aggressivo, da cui occorre difendersi.
In una conferenza stampa con Johnson, il segretario generale della Nato Stoltenberg accusa la Russia del «primo uso di un agente nervino sul territorio dell’Alleanza», ossia di un vero e proprio atto di guerra; di «minare le nostre istituzioni democratiche», ossia di condurre una azione sovversiva all’interno delle democrazie occidentali; di «violare l’integrità territoriale dell’Ucraina», ossia di aver iniziato l’invasione dell’Europa. Di fronte al «comportamento irresponsabile della Russia», annuncia Stoltenberg, «la Nato sta rispondendo».
Si prepara in tal modo l’opinione pubblica a un ulteriore rafforzamento della macchina bellica dell’Alleanza sotto comando Usa, compreso lo schieramento delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12 e probabilmente anche di nuovi missili nucleari statunitensi in Europa.
Obiettivo prioritario della Strategia di difesa nazionale degli Stati uniti, annuncia il Pentagono, è «migliorare la prontezza e letalità delle forze Usa in Europa». A tal fine vengono stanziati 6,5 miliardi di dollari nell’anno fiscale 2019, portando a 16,5 miliardi il totale del quinquennio 2015-2019. Tale stanziamento costituisce solo una parte di quello complessivo dell’operazione Atlantic Resolve, lanciata nel 2014 per «dimostrare l’impegno Usa per la sicurezza degli alleati europei». Impegno dimostrato dal continuo trasferimento di forze terrestri, aeree e navali dagli Stati uniti nell’Europa orientale, dove sono affiancate da quelle dei maggiori alleati europei, Italia compresa.
Viene allo stesso tempo potenziata la Nato con un nuovo Comando congiunto per l’Atlantico, inventando lo scenario di sottomarini russi pronti ad affondare i mercantili sulle rotte transatlantiche, e con un nuovo Comando logistico, inventando lo scenario di una Nato costretta a spostare rapidamente le sue forze ad est per fronteggiare una aggressione russa.
Si cerca così di giustificare l’escalation Usa/Nato contro la Russia, sottovalutando la sua capacità di reagire quando viene messa alle corde. Johnson, che paragona Putin a Hitler, dovrebbe ricordarsi che fine fecero le armate di Hitler quando invasero la Russia.
“Eastern Ghouta was sheltering “400 000 moderate rebels””. This is what the press and Western governments asserted.
However, the military operation of the Syrian forces undertaken with the support of Russian military units, in the context of the cessation of hostilities with the Syrian Rebels (Resolution 2401), produces a completely different result.
As of Saturday 24 March, 94 % of the territory is freed and it seems hardly probable that huge throngs of persons will emerge from the ruins. Thus the stats are as follows:
105 000 Syrians faithful to the Syrian Arab Republic have been liberated from the yoke of the jihadists;
another 7 000 persons, probably foreign jihadists and their families have been evacuated under escorted to Idleb. Around 1,500 were hoplites.
This produces, on Saturday 24 March, a total 113 000 persons. This is a figure far smaller than the 400 000, which is the figure that the NATO member states gave to the UN Security Council.
Not one of them presented themselves as a “moderate rebel”; nor has anyone requested protection from Russia.
Freed Syrians testify that that the jihadists had enslaved boys that were able to build fortifications and dig tunnels. They also denounced the atrocious living conditions that they had been submitted to.
The jihadists had been trained and received instructions from regular soldiers from Britain and France. These were not arrested; they were evacuated separately in a “humanitarian” convoy organized for them by the UN.
The same type of observation was made in Aleppo in December 2016. Syria never imploded in civil war. Instead it was made to explode. This was through an attack emanating from outside Syria; an attack that had been planned and sponsored by the West [1].
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The newly appointed US National Security Adviser, John Bolton, tried to persuade Israel to conduct a pre-emptive strike against Iran before it achieved nuclear weapons capability, Israel’s ex-Defense Minister has revealed.
“I got to know John Bolton when he was the US ambassador to the United Nations,”Shaul Mofazsaid at a conference of former IDF chiefs. “He tried to convince me that Israel should attack Iran.”
Mofaz, an Iranian-born Israeli who served as the defense minister at the time when Bolton headed the US mission at the UN, in turn advised the ultra-hawkish Republican against attacking Tehran. The former defense chief explained that he did not believe that a military strike on Iran would be a “wise” decision, for either Tel Aviv or Washington DC.
Bolton, an Iraq war apologist and an advocate of ‘military options’ in many other conflicts, is set to replace outgoing National Security Adviser Gen. HR McMaster on April 9, just days after CIA chief Mike Pompeo will supplant Rex Tillerson as head of US State Department. With these new key foreign policy leaders in place at the helm of the Trump administration, many politicians on Capitol Hill have raised concerns that Trump would be fully ready for war.
Trump announced Bolton’s appointment last Thursday, amid rising tensions between Tehran and Washington DC over the future of the 2015 nuclear agreement signed between P5+1 and the Islamic Republic. Unlike his predecessor Tillerson, Pompeo seems better aligned with Trump’s confrontational foreign policy when it comes to Iran. Bolton, for his part, looks like a perfect fit to pursue Trump’s maximum pressure agenda.
During the early months of the Trump administration, Bolton was approached by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to outline his plans to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, known as a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The five-page memo, which allegedly never made it to Trump’s desk, was published in National Review after Bannon departed the White House. In short, Bolton outlined a strategic public relations campaign to convince the world that the US has a justified case for pulling out of the deal.
A harsh critic of Tehran, in 2015 Bolton wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times with the flashy title ‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,’ arguing for a regime change in the central Asian country.
“The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran,” he wrote at the time.
While the top Iranian leadership has yet to issue a comment on Bolton’s appointment, some of the country’s officials have already expressed apprehension over Bolton’s “shameful” return to power politics.
“The use of hardline anti-Iran elements indicates that Americans are pushing for more pressure on Iran,”Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said on Saturday.
“For a seemingly superpower country, it is shameful that its national security official would be receiving a salary from a terrorist sect,” Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, noted on Sunday, referring to Bolton’s support of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (People’s Mujahideen) group, which Iran considers a terrorist group.
John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran and conducting a first strike on North Korea without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to the American people and a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is gearing up for military conflict.
In response to an avalanche of criticism on social-media outlining the danger of his appointment, Bolton told Fox News that he remains committed to “articulate” his many views to the president.
This is dangerous news for the country and the world. John Bolton was easily one of the most extreme, pro-war members of the Bush Administration.
Imagine what havoc he could wreak whispering in Donald Trump’s ear…I hear the drumbeats of war. https://t.co/A6ZIyORAM7
“I’ve said what I’ve said about the Iran deal before,” said Bolton. “Look, I have my views, I’m sure I’ll have a chance to articulate them to the president… If the government can’t have a free interchange of ideas among the president’s advisors, then I think the president is not well served.”
1. As a Member of the British (or American/Canadian) Jewish community, do you support the actions of the Israel government including the illegal settlement of over 600,000 of its own citizens in the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights plus the 11 year blockade of essential goods against 1.8m civilians in Gaza, intended to effect regime change: actions that deliberately violate both UN Security Council Resolution 2334 and the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights?
2. Do you appreciate the level of global opposition to the repressive and oppressive policies of the Likud government?
3. Do you agree that UN Security Council Resolutions should be complied with as a mandatory duty by every UN Member, including the United Kingdom, the US and Israel?
4. Do you really believe that there is no correlation or linkage between Israeli government policy towards the indigenous peoples of the region, and the dangerous increase in global antisemitism?
5. Do you agree with the proposition that although the state of Israel has an inalienable right to exist, that right does not extend to the destruction or removal of millions of those who have been the majority indigenous people of the region continuously for over a thousand years?
6. Do you believe in the sanctity of human life, freedom of expression and the importance of human and civil rights regardless of race, religion or colour – and do you believe in democratic government?
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Hans Stehling (pen-name) is an author based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
‘Evil’ Vladimir Putin suddenly gets the bright idea to get rid of a Russian former MI6 double agent who was pardoned by the Russian state and involved in a Russia-West spy swap deal.
He tells his FSB henchmen to use a generic form of nerve gas associated with Russia. He is aware that assassinating Sergei Skripal would upset future agreements relating to spy exchanges, because of the convention that those who form part of such transactions are not made subject to retributive measures.
Putin carries out the death sentence before an impending presidential election in Russia and only months away from the Russian-hosted World Cup Football tournament.
He also accepts that his execution order will justify the propagation of anti-Russian sentiment and perhaps eat away at the goodwill that Russia has generated globally by its actions in aiding the destruction of the fanatical Islamist militias let loose in Syria by the Western powers and their Middle Eastern allies.
Putin acknowledges all of this and accepts that he will be labelled as a ‘new Hitler’.
He might even have anticipated that Western ‘journals of record’ and bastions of ‘impartial’ reportage, some charged with the awesome responsibility for ‘speaking truth and peace to other nations’, would fail to ask the simple, yet tried and tested question in the aftermath of a crime:
Over the past week, nearly a year after he tried to have Robert Mueller fired, Donald Trump went on a tweeting rampage against the special counsel. Trump’s escalating Twitter attacks may be a harbinger of Mueller’s impending dismissal — or the president could be trying to preemptively discredit and delegitimize Mueller’s eventual findings against him.
Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017. The following month, Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn refused and threatened to resign. Trump backed down but has been champing at the bit to end Mueller’s investigation, apparently restrained by his lawyers’ promises that the probe is coming to an end. In addition, GOP heavyweights like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) warned that firing Mueller would spell “the beginning of the end of [Trump’s] presidency.”
But Mueller’s investigation shows no signs of abating. He continues to secure grand jury indictments, as well as plea bargains that make those pleading guilty into cooperating witnesses. And now he has subpoenaed financial records of the Trump Organization.
Mueller’s Charge
Although the Department of Justice regulation empowers the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel, that task fell to Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last year, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Rosenstein appointed Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
The Justice Department regulation allows for discipline or removal of the special counsel only in the event of “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies.”
Rosenstein recently told USA Today that he sees no justification for terminating Mueller as special counsel, stating, “The special counsel is not an unguided missile.”
Trump cannot personally fire Mueller. He could order Rosenstein to do it, and if Rosenstein refuses, Trump could fire Rosenstein or force his resignation. Since Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand is about to retire, the next person in line who could fire Mueller would be Solicitor General Noel Francisco, a right-winger with ties to the conservative Federalist Society. Francisco may be amenable to giving Mueller the axe.
Mueller Team Subpoenas Trump Organization, Meets With Trump Lawyers
Last week, the special counsel issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization for financial documents, some of which relate to Russia. NBC News reported that the subpoena seeks emails, work papers, text messages, telephone logs “and other documents going back to Nov. 1, 2015, 4½ months after Trump launched his campaign.” According to The New York Times, “The order is the first known instance of the special counsel demanding records directly related to President Trump’s businesses, bringing the investigation closer to the president.”
Last July, Trump told the Times that Mueller would cross a “red line” if he investigated any Trump business unrelated to Russia.
A few days after the subpoenas were served, Trump’s lawyers met with Mueller’s team “and received more details about how the special counsel is approaching the investigation, including the scope of his interest in the Trump Organization,” the Times reported.
First, it is seeking information as to whether Trump or his campaign worked with Russia to help Trump win the election. Second, it is looking into whether Trump or his advisers engaged in obstruction of justice to end the investigation. And third, it is investigating a possible quid pro quo that Trump and family members, particularly son-in-law Jared Kushner, may have sought in return for political favors, such as lifting sanctions on Russia or altering US policy on the Ukraine.
Trump’s Tweet Storm Targets Mueller
After the meeting between the special counsel’s team and his lawyers, Trump let loose with his tweet storm, calling out Mueller by name for the first time on Twitter since the special counsel was appointed. According to CNN, the meeting “unleashed a new level of Trump’s public hostility toward Mueller, even while some of the President’s advisers show a willingness to negotiate Trump’s testimony.”
On March 17, Trump tweeted,
“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”
On March 18, Trump tweeted,
“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added . . . does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!”
Trump apparently forgot that Mueller, the head of the team, is a long-time Republican.
Trump is evidently aware that conflict of interest is a ground for firing a special counsel. Having laid the foundation for that alleged conflict with his tweet about “hardened Democrats,” Trump followed up the next day with a tweet:
“A total witch hunt with massive conflicts of interest!”
On March 21, Trump invoked the opinion of Fox News legal analyst and emeritus Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who opposed the appointment of Mueller in the first place. Trump paraphrased Dershowitz’s statements, tweeting,
“I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council (sic) appointed because there was no probable cause for believing that there was any crime, collusion or otherwise, or obstruction of justice.”
Dershowitz apparently failed to read the regulation, which does not require probable cause of criminal activity at the time a special counsel is appointed. After appointment, the counsel’s investigation may or may not uncover evidence amounting to probable cause, which is the standard for the filing of criminal charges.
Trump’s lawyers have sent conflicting signals about the fate of the Mueller investigation. On March 16, attorney John Dowdwrote in an email to the Daily Beast,
“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will . . . bring an end to alleged Russian Collusion investigation.”
Dowd first said he was speaking on behalf of the president, but later backtracked and said he was speaking for himself. He resigned a few days later, saying the president wasn’t following his advice.
Ty Cobb, another Trump lawyer, tried to defuse the growing fear that Mueller’s days are numbered, stating on March 18,
“The White House yet again confirms that the president is not considering or discussing the firing of the special counsel, Robert Mueller.”
But Trump just hired attorney Joseph diGenova, who has publicly accused the FBI and Justice Department of “trying to frame” the president, a claim that likely endears him to Trump.
Democrats fear that Trump might set the wheels in motion to fire Mueller during the forthcoming two-week congressional spring break.
Some Republicans Support Mueller but Won’t Codify It With Legislation
Eight months ago, legislators introduced two bipartisan bills to subject a president’s order to fire a special counsel to judicial review. But Republican lawmakers are not promoting the legislation, which is now stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Although some Republicans have questioned the constitutionality of the legislation, those concerns are without merit, and are more likely motivated by political considerations.
GOP lawmakers know that any bill they pass to protect Mueller would require Trump’s signature and they would have to override his veto. Republicans are more likely “making a counterintuitive, all-in bet that Donald Trump will save their 51-49 majority” in the Senate, according to Politico. They expect Trump to actively campaign for Republican incumbents as well as challengers.
“If they’re going to run with him, how are they also going to stand up to him when he precipitates a constitutional crisis? The answer is that they’re not,” Michael Tomasky wrote in the Daily Beast.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Mueller “ought to be allowed to finish his job,” adding, “I think he was an excellent appointment.” McConnell told reporters,
“I think he will go wherever the facts lead him and I think he will have great credibility with the American people when he reaches the conclusion of his investigation. So, I have a lot of confidence in him.”
The senator called Mueller “a thoroughly credible individual.”
But when pressed about legislation to protect Mueller, McConnell demurred, saying,
“I don’t think that’s necessary. I don’t think Bob Mueller is going anywhere. I think there is widespread feeling, and the president’s lawyers obviously agree, that he ought to be allowed to finish the job.”
Other GOP senators expressed confidence in Mueller. Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) said he told the White House to allow Mueller “to continue his investigation unimpeded,” adding,
“I know Mueller well and believe him to be a straight shooter, and I continue to believe that giving Mueller the time and support necessary to get to the bottom of things is in the best interest of all parties involved.”
But Hatch didn’t think legislation to protect Mueller was necessary at this point, saying,
“I do not believe the president would take such a foolish action.”
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (Texas) said he doubted Trump would terminate Mueller’s appointment because “the consequences would be so overwhelming.”
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) stated on CNN’s “State of the Union” that some of his GOP colleagues told him they would consider the firing of Mueller to be a “massive red line that can’t be crossed.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) told reporters,
“I received assurances that [Mueller’s] firing is not even under consideration,” adding, “The special counsel should be free to follow through his investigation to its completion without interference, absolutely. I am confident he will be able to do that.”
A special counsel cannot be removed absent good cause under the Justice Department regulation. But without protective legislation, there could be no review of a meritless decision by Trump to dismiss Mueller.
Can Mueller Indict Trump?
What consequences, if any, could Trump face if the special counsel finds evidence of criminal activity by the president?
Mueller could deliver his findings to the House of Representatives for consideration of impeachment. But that body, with its Republican majority, will not likely entertain any discussion of impeachment, particularly because Trump is dutifully fulfilling their agenda of tax cuts for the rich and the appointment of a right-wing Supreme Court justice and lower federal court judges.
Whether or not a sitting president can be criminally indicted is a matter of controversy.
“It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties. In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.”
Moreover, diGenova once argued in a Wall Street Journal column that a president could be constitutionally indicted. “It would teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law,” diGenova wrote during the Clinton investigation.
Jonathan Turley, writing in The Washington Post, examined the arguments for and against indicting a sitting president and concluded he could be indicted. It is unclear whether a president can pardon himself, but Turley thinks Trump would be impeached if he were to pardon himself.
A Preemptive Strike by Trump?
Trump is notorious for relying on his own instincts rather than the advice of counsel, such as whether to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin on his election victory. But Trump is apparently aware of the risks entailed by engineering Mueller’s departure.
As the special counsel zeroes in on him, Trump may instead be mounting a preemptive strike against Mueller’s findings, should they incriminate him. Recall that Trump didn’t expect to be elected president, so he waged a campaign to discredit the election results in advance, repeatedly claiming the election was “rigged.”
The bottom line is that we may never see Mueller’s findings unless he persuades a grand jury to return an indictment against Trump.
If Mueller’s conclusions do become public, Trump is likely counting on his preemptive campaign of delegitimization in order to escape criminal accountability.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. The second, updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was published in November. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MarjorieCohn.
Among Western political leaders there is not an ounce of integrity or morality. The Western print and TV media is dishonest and corrupt beyond repair. Yet the Russian government persists in its fantasy of “working with Russia’s Western partners.” The only way Russia can work with crooks is to become a crook. Is that what the Russian government wants?
Finian Cunningham notes the absurdity in the political and media uproar over Trump (belatedly) telephoning Putin to congratulate him on his reelection with 77 percent of the vote, a show of public approval that no Western political leader could possibly attain.The crazed US senator from Arizona called the person with the largest majority vote of our time “a dictator.”Yet a real blood-soaked dictator from Saudi Arabia is feted at the White House and fawned over by the president of the United States. (Source)
The Western politicians and presstitutes are morally outraged over an alleged poisoning, unsupported by any evidence, of a former spy of no consequence on orders by the president of Russia himself. These kind of insane insults thrown at the leader of the world’s most powerful military nation—and Russia is a nation, unlike the mongrel Western countries—raise the chances of nuclear Armageddon beyond the risks during the 20th century’s Cold War. The insane fools making these unsupported accusations show total disregard for all life on earth. Yet they regard themselves as the salt of the earth and as “exceptional, indispensable” people.
Think about the alleged poisoning of Skirpal by Russia. What can this be other than an orchestrated effort to demonize the president of Russia? How can the West be so outraged over the death of a former double-agent, that is, a deceptive person, and completely indifferent to the millions of peoples destroyed by the West in the 21st century alone. Where is the outrage among Western peoples over the massive deaths for which the West, acting through its Saudi agent, is responsible in Yemen? Where is the Western outrage among Western peoples over the deaths in Syria? The deaths in Libya, in Somalia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Afghanistan? Where is the outrage in the West over the constant Western interference in the internal affairs of other countries? How many times has Washington overthrown a democratically-elected government in Honduras and reinstalled a Washington puppet?
The corruption in the West extends beyond politicians, presstitutes, and an insouciant public to experts. When the ridiculous Condi Rice, national security adviser to president George W. Bush, spoke of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction sending up a nuclear cloud over an American city, experts did not laugh her out of court. The chance of any such event was precisely zero and every expert knew it, but the corrupt experts held their tongues. If they spoke the truth, they knew that they would not get on TV, would not get a government grant, would be out of the running for a government appointment. So they accepted the absurd lie designed to justify an American invasion that destroyed a country.
This is the West. There is nothing but lies and indifference to the deaths of others. The only outrage is orchestrated and directed against a target: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Iran, Assad, Russia and Putin, and against reformist leaders in Latin America. The targets for Western outrage are always those who act independently of Washington or who are no longer useful to Washington’s purposes.
The quality of people in Western governments has collapsed to the very bottom of the barrel. The British actually have a person, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, who is so low-down that a former British ambassador has no compunction in calling him a categorical liar. (Source) The British lab Porton Down, contrary to Johnson’s claim, has not identified the agent associated with the attack on Skripal as a Russian novichok agent. Note also that if the British lab is able to identify a novichok agent, it also has the capability of producing it, a capability that many countries have as the formulas were published years ago in a book.
That the novichok poisoning of Skripal is an orchestration is obvious. The minute the event occurred the story was ready. With no evidence in hand, the British government and presstitute media were screaming “the Russians did it.” Not content with that, Boris Johnson screamed “Putin did it.” In order to institutionalize fear and hatred of Russia into British consciousness, British school children are being taught that Putin is like Hitler. (Source)
Orchestrations this blatant demonstrate that Western governments have no respect for the intelligence of their peoples. That Western governments get away with these fantastic lies indicates that the governments are immune to accountability. Even if accountability were possible, there is no sign that Western peoples are capable of holding their governments accountable. As Washington drives the world to nuclear war, where are the protests? The only protest is brainwashed school children protesting the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment.
Western democracy is a hoax. Consider Catalonia. The people voted for independence and were denounced for doing so by European politicians. The Spanish government invaded Catalonia alleging that the popular referendum, in which people expressed their opinion about their own future, was illegal. Catalonian leaders are in prison awaiting trial, except for Carles Puigdemont who escaped to Belgium. Now Germany has captured him on his return to Belgium from Finland where he lectured at the University of Helsinki and is holding him in jail for a Spanish government that bears more resemblance to Francisco Franco than to democracy. (Source) The European Union itself is a conspiracy against democracy.
The success of Western propaganda in creating non-existent virtues for itself is the greatest public relations success in history.
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This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush. The image of leading Congressional Democrats Pelosi and Schumer grinning and gloating over getting everything they wanted — and then some — will likely come back to haunt Republicans at the midterm elections. If so, they will deserve it.
Even President Trump admitted the bill was horrible. As he said in the signing ceremony,
“there are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced — if we want to build our military…”
This is why I often say: forget about needing a third political party – we need a second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare state.
But no one “forced” President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost.
And about the militarism funded by the bill? Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference that,
“As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding.”
He’s right and wrong at the same time. Yes it is another big increase in military spending. In fact the US continues to spend more than at least the next seven or so largest countries combined. But his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we weren’t looking?
Of course not.
On militarism, the Obama Administration was just an extension of the Bush Administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton Administration. And so on. The military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. Enemies must be created to keep Washington rich, even as the rest of the country suffers from the destruction of the dollar. That is why the neocons continue to do very well in this Administration.
While Trump and Mattis were celebrating big military spending increases, the president announced that John Bolton, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war debacle, would become his national security advisor. As former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has written, this is a man who, while at the State Department, demanded that intelligence analysts reach pre-determined conclusions about Iraq and WMDs. He cooked the books for war.
Bolton is on the record calling for war with Iran, North Korea, even Cuba! His return to a senior position in government is a return to the unconstitutional, immoral, and failed policies of pre-emptive war.
Make no mistake: the neocons are back and looking for another war. They’ve got the president’s ear. Iran? North Korea? Russia? China? Who’s next for the warmongers?
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.
In mid-1934, Hitler’s night and day of the long knives, Operation Hummingbird purge, eliminated regime enemies, executing them to solidify power, Ernst Rohm the best known victim, longtime SA leader.
On March 26, Washington, 21 European nations, Canada and Australia expelled over 135 Russian diplomats as of Monday, a coordinated political conspiracy, including Britain ordering 23 Russian diplomats out of the country days earlier.
More Russophobic Western shoes are likely to drop ahead, anti-Russia political and economic war raging.
Each hostile action piled on previous ones risks heading things toward something much more serious.
Hostility by the West against the world’s dominant superpower is madness. If current actions lead to military ones, an increasing possibility, Russian super-weapons can turn Western nations to smoldering rubble overnight – easily penetrating defenses against them.
It remains to be seen what if any actions Moscow takes other than responding tit-for-tat against nations expelling its diplomats.
Hostile Monday actions require strong Russian resolve to hit back hard. Weakness or indecisiveness will encourage further unacceptable Western actions, a slippery slope toward greater trouble than already.
A statement by Russia’s Foreign Ministry isn’t enough – tough, but not tough enough, saying:
“We express our strong protest in the wake of the decision taken by a number of EU and NATO member countries to expel Russian diplomats.”
“We consider this as an unfriendly step that is not consistent with the goals and interests of establishing the underlying reasons and searching for the perpetrators of the incident that occurred in the town of Salisbury on March 4.”
“The provocative gesture of the so-called solidarity of these countries with London, which blindly followed the British authorities in the so-called ‘Skripal case’ and which never got around to sort out the circumstances of the incident, is a continuation of the confrontational policy to escalate the situation.”
“Presenting unfounded charges against Russia in the absence of explanations of what happened and refusing to engage in meaningful interaction, the British authorities have de facto adopted a prejudiced, biased as well as hypocritical stance.”
“This is an attempt on the lives of Russian citizens on the territory of Great Britain.”
“Despite our repeated requests for information addressed to London, Russia does not have any information in this regard.”
“British allies (sic) don’t have any objective and exhaustive data and blindly follow the principle of Euro-Atlantic unity at the expense of common sense, the rules of civilized state-to-state dialogue and the principles of international law.”
“It goes without saying that this unfriendly move by this group of countries will not go unnoticed, and we will respond to it.”
It “goes without saying” that it’s time for resolve and toughness, diplomacy a waste of time.
Outreach by Russia to the West while being politically and economically assaulted is a sign of weakness in the face of deep-seated hostility toward its government and leadership, encouraging more if not confronted forcefully enough to show Moscow won’t take it any more.
The Kremlin has lots of options. A good first one would be to expel US and UK ambassadors, scores of their diplomatic staff, and recall Russian ambassadors to these countries – along with a message to other Western nations explaining they’re next if unacceptable actions continue escalating.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.
On March 22, 2018 the former Mayor of New York and adviser to President Trump, Rudy Giuliani was in Tirana. He was invited to Albania’s capital by Maryam Rajavi, the head of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization, to celebrate the Iranian festival of Nowruz with the Iranian jihadist organization which Albania has hosted since 2013. In this meeting, which was secretly organized by the Mojahedin, Giuliani showed his support for some 3.000 Iranian radicals that Albania hosts. In his speech Giuliani encouraged the Mojahedin to continue their fight against the government of Iran and called for regime change in Tehran.
The gathering of the Mojahedin was also attended by three Albanian politicians. They were Pandeli Majko, Minister for the Diaspora in the present Albanian government. Majko served as Minister of the Interior during the era of secret CIA renditions in Eastern Europe when Albania was used by the CIA to rendition and torture people. Majko who has never denied his cooperation with the CIA or the existence of secret prisons in Albania, has defended the illegal renditions and torture and has criticized those who spoke against the torture chambers of the CIA.
The second politician was Fatmir Mediu, a former disgraced Minister of Defense, who is blamed in Albania for weapon trafficking to Afghanistan and the Gerdec explosion and killings. The Gerdec explosion which killed 26 Albanians, injured hundreds, and damaged or destroyed over two thousand homes was part of an operation by Fatmir Mediu and American contractors to fake old Albanian ammunition and sell them as new to Afghanistan.
The third politician was Elona Gjebrea, who served as deputy Minister of the Interior for Albania’s infamous Minister of Interior Saimir Tahiri (2013-2017) and is now under investigation for possible links with a notorious Albanian mafia gang known as the Habilaj brothers.
Giuliani told to the Mojahedin that the US and the Albanian government see them as the only future for Iran, and the necessary thing to do at this moment is regime change. Pandeli Majko, the Minister of Diaspora in the Edi Rama’s government supported Giuliani’s claim and told the Mojahedin that his dream is to return to Tehran with the Mojahedin. Elona Gjebrea and Fatmir Mediu did the same. They supported the Mojahedin in their violent mission for regime change in Iran. Rudi Giuliani emboldened the Mojahedin by telling them that changes are coming to Washington. John Bolton, their fierce supporter is going to become President Trump’s National Security Advisor and he wants a regime change in Iran.
The threats of Giuliani against Iran have been instrumentalized in recent months with mass surveillance and attacks on Iranian and Shiia Muslim institutions in Albania and Kosovo. The Israelis are very vigilant against the Iranian influence in the Balkans too. They instruct their Albanian partners to target Iran and its institutions, even though Iran has never had any problem with any Balkan country. With the arrival of the Mojahedin in Albania, the anti-Iran and anti-Shiia hysteria is becoming more and more public. The Mojahedin, who act as a proxy army for the US and Israel, claim that Iran is very influential in Albania and is working with its agents to discredit their fight for regime change. In recent months they have launched a number of smear attacks against Iranian institutions and the embassy in Tirana. On March 15 they attacked a group of Albanian intellectuals headed by the ex-president of Albania, Rexhep Mejdani who participated in a scientific conference in Tehran, claiming that they were part of a plot by Tehran to discredit them. The Mojahedin, who are having many of their members abandon the organization in Albania, attack the defectors by insulting them as Iranian agents and threaten to assassinate them. The UNHCR which is supposed to help all war refugees has sided with the Mojahedin and refuses to support the defectors financially and asks them to go back to their Mojahedin camp if they want to get financial support. When local Albanian TV stations dare to present the claims of the defectors who show how they are abused, enslaved and radicalized by MEK, the Mojahedin attack the Albanian media claiming that they have been bought by Iran.
In face of the threats that MEK makes against Albanian intellectuals, media and its defectors, the Albanian government keeps silent, even though a recent police report claims that the Mojahedin might assassinate some of the defectors who have abandoned the organization. While the Albanian government and its courts are very vigilant to jail any Albanian Salafi as a terrorist if they make calls for regime change in Syria or praise ISIS, so far no actions have been taken against the Iranian Mojahedin, Albanian or US politicians who support the MEK jihad and make calls for regime change in Iran, even though the Albanian the criminal code punishes such calls with imprisonment from four up to ten years. The Albanian government and its courts have not taken any action even against those Mojahedin who have threatened to assassinate their defectors in Albania.
The Albanian government who is ordered by people like John Bolton, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani to do all they can to support the Mojahedin, have finally started to attack even Shiia and Sufi religious institutions in Albania. On March 22, 2018 the anti-terror police disrupted the ceremony of Novruz that the World Headquarters of Bektashism organized in Tirana. The ceremony of the liberal Muslim Sufi sect was disrupted when anti-terrorism police detained two retired Iranian journalists and an Iraqi-German citizen who were celebrating the Novruz in the Grand Sufi Teqe. The invitees were officially invited to the ceremony by Baba Mondi, the Grand Dervish of the Bektashis. However the Albanian anti-terror units who take note of complains by MEK about Iranian influence and conspiracy against them, detained and interrogated as terrorists for 7 hours the two retired Iranian journalists who were covering the Bektashi festival. Even though the journalists were later released, this event shocked the Bektashi community and the Iranian cultural NGO-s who operate in Albania.
The attacks that the Mojahedin are launching against local Muslim communities, academics and intellectuals, journalists and media are shocking the Albanian public. Until now they have seen the Mojahedin as some foreign terrorist leftovers that the USA wanted to dump in Albania after they were expelled from Iraq. However, the recent media and police attacks are showing to the Albanian public that the Mojahedin are a threat not only to Iran, but to Albania too. On the other hand, the calls from US senators like Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and John McCain on the Mojahedin who are based in Albania to go and wage jihad in Iran, make many Albanians worried and upset. Many ask: if the USA wants to use the Mojahedin to fight Iran, why don’t they host them in the USA instead of Albania? The Albanian public has not and has never had any problem with Iran. Why is the American government blackmailing Albania and using it as a launchpad for its next terrorist war against another Middle Eastern country? Was it not enough for the US administration to allow the Saudis to radicalize the Muslim youths in the Balkans and send them to Syria for jihad, but now they are creating another jihad and the Muslims of the Balkans are again to pay the price?
Mr. Rudy Giuliani! Mr. John Bolton! Can you please take your Mojahedin to the USA and from there do anything you want! We do not want to fight another Middle Eastern war for you. Leave us alone, please!
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Below is a selection of articles on the complicity of the US and the UK in the war in Yemen, negotiating further arms deal with the royal family that only fans the flames of the onslaught in the starving nation. Please share this selection far and wide.
Three years of an implacable and murderous military campaign that witnessed the death of over 15,000 people – of which mostly unarmed civilians; saw the destruction of civilian infrastructures to the point where Yemen’s health and sanitation systems have all but collapsed; and architected a humanitarian blockade that led to a grand famine and the spread of diseases.
The situation has been described by UN agencies as ‘the worst humanitarian crisis in the world’ with over 22 million people in need of assistance. The last year has seen the humanitarian catastrophe getting worse: Save the Children estimates that 50,000 children died in 2017 alone as a result of the crisis.
Following a failed attempt by three senators to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war against Yemen, the State Department announced a sale of 6,700 missiles to Saudi Arabia, Ann Wright reports.
Already the region’s poorest country, years of war caused the world’s severest humanitarian crisis, over 80% of Yemenis dependent on way inadequate amounts of aid to survive.
US-backed Saudi air, sea and land blockades prevent enough essentials to life from entering the country.
From former Secretary of State John Kerry to his successor, Rex Tillerson, U.S. officials have insisted “this is not our war” and emphasize that a political settlement is the only way to end it. However, U.S. actions – consisting of continuous, unchecked U.S. political and military support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are leading bombing missions that indiscriminately target Yemeni civilians already struggling under Houthi rebel rule – hardly support this position.
To many Americans who pay only a small portion of their time to what is happening in Syria, the claim that the United States is funding and supporting ISIS sounds like absolute insanity. After all, the corporations who feed them their news incessantly inform them of the threat of ISIS at home and abroad and remind them how hard their government is working in order to keep them safe. Even when many Americans can clearly see that the United States is funding extremists in order to destroy Assad, it is difficult for them to grasp that the most frightening enemy of all, ISIS itself, is also being directed by Western intelligence, the GCC, and Israel.
It is important to point out that the Islamic State is not some shadowy force that emerged from the caves of Afghanistan to form an effective military force that is funded by Twitter donations and murky secretive finance deals. IS is entirely the creation of NATO and the West and it remains in control of the organization.
Beginning in 2011 – and actually even as early as 2007 – the United States has been arming, funding, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and a myriad of armed terrorist organizations to overthrow the government of Syria, fight Hezbollah in Lebanon, and undermine the power and influence of Iran, which of course includes any other government or group in the MENA region friendly toward Tehran.
Billions in cash have been funneled into the hands of terrorist groups including Al Nusra, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and what is now being called “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or ISIS. One can see clearly by any map of ISIS held territory that it butts up directly against Turkey’s borders with defined corridors ISIS uses to invade southward – this is because it is precisely from NATO territory this terrorist scourge originated.
ISIS was harbored on NATO territory, armed and funded by US CIA agents with cash and weapons brought in from the Saudis, Qataris, and NATO members themselves. The “non-lethal aid” the US and British sent including the vehicles we now see ISIS driving around in.
They didn’t “take” this gear from “moderates.” There were never any moderates to begin with. The deadly sectarian genocide we now see unfolding was long ago predicted by those in the Pentagon – current and former officials – interviewed in 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh’s 9-page 2007 report, “The Redirection” states explicitly:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
“Extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam” and are “sympathetic to Al Qaeda” – is a verbatim definition of what ISIS is today. Clearly the words of Hersh were as prophetic as they were factually informed, grounded in the reality of a regional conflict already engineered and taking shape as early as 2007. Hersh’s report would also forewarn the sectarian nature of the coming conflict, and in particular mention the region’s Christians who were admittedly being protected by Hezbollah.
While Hersh’s report was written in 2007, knowledge of the plan to use death squads to target Middle Eastern countries, particularly Syria, had been reported on even as far back as 2005 by Michael Hirsh and John Barry for Newsweek in an article entitled “The Salvador Option.”
In actuality, ISIS is the product of a joint NATO-GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] conspiracy stretching back as far as 2007 where US-Saudi policymakers sought to ignite a region-wide sectarian war to purge the Middle East of Iran’s arch of influence stretching from its borders, across Syria and Iraq, and as far west as Lebanon and the coast of the Mediterranean. ISIS has been harbored, trained, armed, and extensively funded by a coalition of NATO and Persian Gulf states within Turkey’s (NATO territory) borders and has launched invasions into northern Syria with, at times, both Turkish artillery and air cover. The most recent example of this was the cross-border invasion by Al Qaeda into Kasab village, Latikia province in northwest Syria.
Keep in mind also that, prior to the rapid appearance and seizure of territory by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, European media outlets like Der Spiegel reported that hundreds of fighters were being trained in Jordan by Western intelligence and military personnel for the purpose of deployment in Syria to fight against Assad. The numbers were said to be expected to reach about 10,000 fighters when the reports were issued in March, 2013. Although Western and European media outlets would try to spin the operation as the training of “moderate rebels,” subsequent reports revealed that these fighters were actually ISIS fighters.
Western media outlets have also gone to great lengths to spin the fact that ISIS is operating in both Syria and Iraq with an alarming number of American weapons and equipment. As Business Insider stated,
The report [study by the London-based small arms research organization Conflict Armament Research] said the jihadists disposed of ‘significant quantities’ of US-made small arms including M16 assault rifles and included photos showing the markings ‘Property of US Govt.’
The article also acknowledged that a large number of the weapons used by ISIS were provided by Saudi Arabia, a close American ally.
As Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer Report has documented on numerous occasions, the plan to invade and destabilize Syria by using hordes of al-Qaeda terrorists and mercenaries has been in existence since at least 2007. Cartalucci writes,
A 2007 New Yorker article written by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a plan under the Bush Administration to organize, arm, train, and deploy a regional army of terrorists, many with ties directly to Al Qaeda, in a bid to destabilize and overthrow both Syria and Iran. The plan consisted of US and Israeli backing, covertly funneled through Saudi proxies to conceal Washington and Tel Aviv’s role, in building the sectarian extremist front.
According to Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?,” Saudi Arabia, a more credible candidate for openly interfacing with the militants, openly admitted that it was a danger, but that they “created it,” and therefore could “control it,” in meetings with Washington. The plan called for not only setting up terrorist enclaves in nations neighboring Syria, including Lebanon, Jordan, and US-occupied Iraq, but also for building up the Muslim Brotherhood, both inside Syria’s borders and beyond – including in Egypt.[1] [2]
Hersh also pointed out the long history between the Saudi Royals and their funding of religious fanatics for the purposes of destabilization since the 1970s proxy war against the Soviet Union, the Iranians, and to the more recent (in terms of the writing of the article) possibilities of using such types of fighters in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, and Syria. He wrote,
Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”
The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.
Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.[3]
In a more telling passage, however, Hersh describes the connection between the Saudis, Jihadists, and the U.S. government. He wrote,
This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”[4]
Hersh continued by stating that the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Americans have “developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction.” In addition to the security of Israel, the weakening of Hamas, and the countering of “Shiite ascendance in the region,” there was also a fourth goal of the three entities. Hersh wrote,
Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)[5]
Hersh also quoted Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and adamant Assad opponent who stated to Hersh that he had actually traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with then Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the possibility of weakening and destabilizing the Assad government in Syria. Hersh stated,
Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”
There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.[6]
Hersh also spoke with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who told Hersh that he believed that the United States wished to cause the partitioning of both Lebanon and Syria. Hersh states that, “In Syria, he [Nasrallah] said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.”[7]
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi who joined Al-Qaeda to fight against President Saddam Hussein. During the U.S. invasion, he distinguished himself by engaging in several actions against Shiites and Christians (including the taking of the Baghdad Cathedral) and by ushering in an Islamist reign of terror (he presided over an Islamic court which sentenced many Iraqis to be slaughtered in public). After the departure of Paul Bremer III, al-Baghdadi was arrested and incarcerated at Camp Bucca from 2005 to 2009. This period saw the dissolution of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose fighters merged into a group of tribal resistance, the Islamic Emirate of Iraq.
On 16 May 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named emir of the IEI, which was in the process of disintegration. After the departure of U.S. troops, he staged operations against the government al-Maliki, accused of being at the service of Iran. In 2013, after vowing allegiance to Al-Qaeda, he took off with his group to continue the jihad in Syria, rebaptizing it Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant. In doing so, he challenged the privileges that Ayman al-Zawahiri had previously granted, on behalf of Al-Qaeda, to the Al-Nusra Front in Syria, which was originally nothing more than an extension of the IEI.
Regardless, false assumptions surrounding the true leadership of ISIS would be called into question in January of 2014 when Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned and operated news agency, published an article as well as a video of an interrogation of an ISIS fighter who had been captured while operating inside Syria.
When asked why ISIS was following the movement of the Free Syrian Army and who had given him the orders to do so, the fighter stated that he did not know why he was ordered to monitor the FSA’s movement but that the orders had come from Abu Faisal, also known as Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal of the Saudi Royal Family.
Even tired mainstream media organizations such as Newsweek (aka The Daily Beast) can no longer ignore the facts surrounding the Saudis’ involvement with the organization of terrorist groups across the world.
Note also that Voltaire Net describes al-Nusra, a documented al-Qaeda connected group, as merely an extension of the IEI (Islamic Emirate of Iraq) which itself was nothing more than a version of Al-Qaeda In Iraq. Thus, from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, came the IEI, which then became the Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant. IEIL then became ISIS/ISIL which is now often referred to as IS.
In other words, Nusra=Al-Qaeda-IEI=IEIL=ISIL=ISIS=IS.
With the information presented above regarding the nature of the Free Syrian Army and the so-called “moderate rebels,” it would be entirely fair to add these “moderate” groups to the list as well.
The fact that ISIS is nothing more than a name change for al-Qaeda is significant as well since the terror organization was the open creation of the United States with the help of Saudi Arabia as far back as the late 1970s. It is recommended that the reader access Washington’s Blog’s article , “Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. And Saudi Backing Of Al-Qaeda Led Directly To 9/11,” for an in-depth discussion of America’s support of terrorism from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Washington’s Blog writes:
Perhaps one of the most vaunted sources for documenting America’s support of terrorism comes from the man who could be considered the architect of al-Qaeda, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser and was instrumental in creating the organization and helping steer policy that would direct it against the Afghan government and the Soviet Union.
Easily accessed on YouTube, a researcher with five minutes to spare can watch Brzezinski standing in front of his terrorist brigades and encouraging them in their jihad. At one point in the footage, Brzezisnki tells the Mujahadin fighters,
We know of their deep belief in god – that they’re confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over – there is yours – and you’ll go back to it some day, because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes, your mosques, back again, because your cause is right, and god is on your side.
Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the United States organized and supported the Mujahadin at the time, including Osama Bin Laden. He said,
We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Council prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again – for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujaheddin from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.[8]
Later, in 2001, it was admitted by Brzezinski in an interview with Le Nouvel Observatour, that the United States had funded al-Qaeda/Mujahadin six months before the Soviets invaded.
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
***
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Similar admissions, although much less willing to accept the results as Brzezinski, came from former CIA Director Robert Gates and even President Jimmy Carter himself. As Eric Alterman wrote for The Nation,
First revealed by former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, the $500 million in nonlethal aid was designed to counter the billions the Soviets were pouring into the puppet regime they had installed in Kabul. Some on the American side were willing–perhaps even eager–to lure the Soviets into a Vietnam-like entanglement. Others viewed the program as a way of destabilizing the puppet government and countering the Soviets, whose undeniable aggression in the area was helping to reheat the cold war to a dangerous boil.
According to Gates’s recounting, a key meeting took place on March 30, 1979. Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe wondered aloud whether “there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, ‘sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.’” Arnold Horelick, CIA Soviet expert, warned that this was just what we could expect. In a 1998 conversation with Le Nouvel Observateur, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted, “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
Yet Carter, who signed the finding authorizing the covert program on July 3, 1979, today explains that it was definitely “not my intention” to inspire a Soviet invasion. Cyrus Vance, who was then Secretary of State, is not well enough to be interviewed, but his close aide Marshall Shulman insists that the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it, though he says he was unaware of the covert program at the time. Indeed, Vance hardly seems to be represented at all in Gates’s recounting, although Brzezinski doubts that Carter would have approved the aid unless Vance “approved, however unenthusiastically.”[9]
Gates added a similar admission in his book, From The Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story Of Five Presidents And How They Won The Cold War.[10]
One major terrorist supporter during her bloody tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, also admitted that the United States created al-Qaeda. Clinton stated,
“Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union.
“They invaded Afghanistan… and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work… and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea… let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahideen.
“And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.
“And guess what … they (Soviets) retreated … they lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“So there is a very strong argument which is… it wasn’t a bad investment in terms of Soviet Union but let’s be careful with what we sow… because we will harvest.
“So we then left Pakistan … We said okay fine you deal with the Stingers that we left all over your country… you deal with the mines that are along the border and… by the way we don’t want to have anything to do with you… in fact we’re sanctioning you… So we stopped dealing with the Pakistani military and with ISI and we now are making up for a lot of lost time.”[11]
But the fact that the United States created and funded both Bin Laden and al-Qaeda is not revealed only through a few statements by retired officials. It is fully part of American mainstream history. As the 1998 article by Michael Moran, “Bin Laden Comes Home To Roost,” for MSNBC states,
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar – the MAK – which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.
***
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
***
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.[12]
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
The Council on Foreign Relations also addressed the issue of Saudi and CIA-funded madrassas and the fact that these schools serve as an intentional breeding ground for extremism. The article, “Pakistan’s Education System And Links To Extremism,” states,
The 9/11 Commission report (PDF) released in 2004 said some of Pakistan’s religious schools or madrassas served as “incubators for violent extremism.” Since then, there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to militancy.
For almost one thousand years, madrassas have been centers of Islamic learning that produce the next generation of Islamic scholars and clerics. In Pakistan in the 1980s they underwent a complete change under Zia’s Islamization efforts, but it was Pakistan’s leading role in the anti-Soviet campaign in neighboring Afghanistan during this time that radicalized some of these madrassas. New madrassas sprouted, funded and supported by Saudi Arabia and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, where students were encouraged to join the Afghan resistance. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and reports that many of the group’s leaders were educated in Pakistan’s madrassas, fueled concern regarding these schools.
In an article by Jason Burke of the Guardian entitled, “Frankenstein The CIA Created,” Burke writes about the network of terrorists spawned by the CIA’s al-Qaeda operation in Afghanistan in the late 70s. Burke writes,
When Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a hospital technician from Brooklyn, New Jersey, returned home from the war in Afghanistan in 1989, he told friends his only desire was to return. Though he had been wounded in the arm and leg by a Russian shell, he said he had failed. He had not achieved martyrdom in the name of Islam.
So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.
He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in 1979, aged 22. Though he saw a considerable amount of combat – around the eastern city of Jalalabad in March 1989 and, earlier, around the border town of Khost – his speciality was logistics.
From his base in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, he used his experience of the construction trade, and his money, to build a series of bases where the mujahideen could be trained by their Pakistani, American and, if some recent press reports are to be believed, British advisers.
One of the camps bin Laden built, known as Al-Badr, was the target of the American missile strikes against him last summer. Now it is used by Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based organisation that trains volunteers to fight in Kashmir.
Some of their recruits kidnapped and almost certainly killed a group of Western hostages a few years ago. The bases are still full of new volunteers, many Pakistanis. Most of those who were killed in last August’s strikes were Pakistani.
A Harkut-ul-Mujahideen official said last week that it had Germans and Britons fighting for the cause, as well as Egyptians, Palestinians and Saudis. Muslims from the West as well as from the Middle East and North Africa are regularly stopped by Pakistani police on the road up the Khyber Pass heading for the camps. Hundreds get through. Afghan veterans have now joined bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group.
Some have returned to former battlegrounds, like the university-educated Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a key figure in the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group. Al-Zawahiri ran his own operation during the Afghan war, bringing in and training volunteers from the Middle East. Some of the $500 million the CIA poured into Afghanistan reached his group. Al-Zawahiri has become a close aide of bin Laden and has now returned to Afghanistan to work with him. His al-Jihad group has been linked to the Yemeni kidnappers.
One Saudi journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1989 remembers three of his close associates going under the names of Abu Mohammed, Abu Hafz and Abu Ahmed. All three fought with bin Laden in the early Eighties, travelled with him to the Sudan and have come back to Afghanistan. Afghan veterans, believed to include men who fought the Americans in Somalia, have also returned.
Other members of al-Quaeda remain overseas. Afghan veterans now linked to bin Laden have been traced by investigators to Pakistan, East Africa, Albania, Chechnya, Algeria, France, the US and Britain.
At least one of the kidnappers in Yemen was reported to have fought in Afghanistan and to be linked to al-Quaeda. Despite reports that bin Laden was effectively funded by the Americans, it is impossible to gauge how much American aid he received. He was not a major figure in the Afghan war. Most American weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, were channelled by the Pakistanis to the Hezb-i-Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Bin Laden was only loosely connected with the group, serving under another Hezb-i-Islami commander known as Engineer Machmud. However, bin Laden’s Office of Services, set up to recruit overseas for the war, received some US cash.
Robert Dreyfuss also succintly describes the geo-political situation surrounding the creation of al-Qaeda and the organization and funding of terrorists since the late 1970s. Notably, he also mentions that the late 1970s were not the beginning of Western support for terrorism. Dreyfuss takes the timeline back to the 1960s. He writes,
For half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.
***
In the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.
***
By the end of the 1950s, rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions. Choosing Saudi Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the United States has ever made in the Middle East.
A second big mistake … occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And … Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.
Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But … America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.
Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.
Pakistani nuclear scientist and peace activist, Perez Hoodbhoy, also wrote about the role of both the West and Pakistan in the creation of global jihad and the control those countries had over the movement. He wrote,
The bleeders [leaders who advocated the idea of “bleeding” the Soviet Union, by Hoodbhoy’s own definition] soon organized and armed the Great Global Jihad, funded by Saudi Arabia, and executed by Pakistan. A powerful magnet for militant Sunni activists was created by the US. The most hardened and ideologically dedicated men were sought on the logic that they would be the best fighters. Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad.
American universities produced books for Afghan children that extolled the virtues of jihad and of killing communists. Readers browsing through book bazaars in Rawalpindi and Peshawar can, even today, sometimes find textbooks produced as part of the series underwritten by a USAID $50 million grant to the University of Nebraska in the 1980’s . These textbooks sought to counterbalance Marxism through creating enthusiasm in Islamic militancy. They exhorted Afghan children to “pluck out the eyes of the Soviet enemy and cut off his legs”. Years after the books were first printed they were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas – a stamp of their ideological correctness and they are still widely available in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At the international level, Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally, the United States, funneled support to the mujahideen. Ronald Reagan feted jihadist leaders on the White House lawn, and the U.S. press lionized them.
Washington’s Blog also adds that, Michael J. Springmann, chief of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, claims that the CIA insisted that the consulate approve visas for Afghanis so that they could travel to the United States and be trained in terrorism so that they could then be sent back to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. This would later play a role in the questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks.
Funding Terror Domestically – 1993 World Trade Center Bombing
Without attempting to trace every movement of the Western-backed terror apparatus, it is important to note a number of flashpoints in its history. The 1993 WTC bombing was one of these flashpoints, since it ushered in an era of greater police state, shredding of civil rights, and a government/media-induced hysteria over “domestic terrorism” and terror attacks committed by foreigners against American targets at home.
Ample evidence exists to show that the attacks were committed with help from the FBI. Most notably, FBI informant, Emad Salem, who was attempting to help the FBI infiltrate and prevent the attacks (or so he thought) revealed that the FBI insisted that the terrorists be given real explosives against Salem’s own advice.
Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.
The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.
Thankfully for Salem, he was smart enough to smell a rat and taped his conversations with intelligence and law enforcement agents in secret, which he then released. Many, however, appear to remain secret by order of the court. The Blumenthal article continues,
The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court in that attack.
Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian army officer, was used by the Government to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the trade center blast, he was feuding with the F.B.I. Supervisor ‘Messed It Up’
After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, “came and messed it up.”
“He requested to meet me in the hotel,” Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. “He requested to make me to testify and if he didn’t push for that, we’ll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn’t do that.”
The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau’s failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.
“He said, I don’t think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him.
Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem’s account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the New York people: “Well, of course not, because they don’t want to get their butts chewed.”
Mary Jo White, who, as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting defendants in two related bombing cases, declined yesterday to comment on the Salem allegations or any other aspect of the cases. An investigator close to the case who refused to be identified further said, “We wish he would have saved the world,” but called Mr. Salem’s claims “figments of his imagination.”
The transcripts, which are stamped “draft” and compiled from 70 tapes recorded secretly during the last two years by Mr. Salem, were turned over to defense lawyers in the second bombing case by the Government on Tuesday under a judge’s order barring lawyers from disseminating them. A large portion of the material was made available to The New York Times.
In a letter to Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Andrew C. McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney, said that he had learned of the tapes while debriefing Mr. Salem and that the informer had then voluntarily turned them over. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of “security and other issues,” Mr. McCarthy said.
William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, “were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct.” But citing the judge’s order, he said he could not provide any details.
The transcripts do not make clear the extent to which Federal authorities knew that there was a plan to bomb the World Trade Center, merely that they knew that a bombing of some sort was being discussed. But Mr. Salem’s evident anguish at not being able to thwart the trade center blast is a recurrent theme in the transcripts. In one of the first numbered tapes, Mr. Salem is quoted as telling agent Floyd: “Since the bomb went off I feel terrible. I feel bad. I feel here is people who don’t listen.”
Ms. Floyd seems to commiserate, saying, “hey, I mean it wasn’t like you didn’t try and I didn’t try.”
In an apparent reference to Mr. Salem’s complaints about the supervisor, Agent Floyd adds, “You can’t force people to do the right thing.”
The investigator involved in the case who would not be quoted by name said that Mr. Salem may have been led to believe by the agents that they were blameless for any mistakes. It was a classic agent’s tactic, he said, to “blame the boss for all that’s bad and take credit for all the good things.”
In another point in the transcripts, Mr. Salem recounts a conversation he said he had with Mr. Anticev, saying, “I said, ‘Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both know that we could avoid that.’ ” At another point, Mr. Salem says, “You get paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening.”
Mr. Salem talks of the plan to substitute harmless powder for explosives during another conversation with agent Floyd. In that conversation, he recalls a previous discussion with Mr. Anticev.
“Do you deny,” Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, “your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?” Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. “We was handling the case perfectly well until the supervisor came and messed it up, upside down.”
The transcripts reflect an effort to keep Mr. Salem as an intelligence asset who would not have to go public or testify.
A police detective working with the F.B.I., Louis Napoli, assures Mr. Salem in one conversation, “We can give you total immunity towards prosecution, towards, ah, ah, testifying.” But he adds: “I still have to tell you that if you’re the only game in town in regards to the information,” then, he says, “you’ll have to testify.”
. . . . .
The transcripts are being closely studied by lawyers looking for signs that Mr. Salem and the law enforcement officials, in their zeal to gather evidence, may have crossed the legal line into entrapment, a charge that defense counsel have already raised.
But the transcripts show that the officials were concerned that by associating with bombing defendants awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Mr. Salem might have been accused of spying on the defense.
In an undated conversation, Mr. Anticev tries to explain the perils.
“We’re not allowed to have any information regarding that,” he tells Mr. Salem. “That could jeopardize, you know, if you go see a lawyer, ah, you know, with the defendant’s friend or whatever like that, and you’re talking about things we’re not suppose to, ah, condone that. We’re not supposed to make people do that for us. That’s like sacred ground. You can’t be privileged, ah, you can’t know what’s being talked about at all.”
Mr. Salem seems to bridle. “I, I, I don’t think that’s right,” he says.
The agent insists: “Yeah, but that’s just a guideline. If that ever happened, ah, you can back and reported on the meeting between, ah, you know, Kunstler and Mohammad A. Elgabrown. Forget about it. I mean a lot of people ah the case can get thrown out. You understand?” The references were to the defense lawyer, Mr. Kunstler, and his client in the second bomb case, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny.
Mr. Salem seems to reluctantly agree.
“They want you to have a hand in it,” Mr. Anticev goes on, “but they’re afraid that when you get that kind of, ah, too deep, like me, it’s almost like, especially with all this legal stuff going on right now.”
If it were just intelligence gathering, the agent says, “You can do anything you want. You could go crazy over there and have a good time. Do you know what I mean?”
The agent goes on: “But now that everything is going to court and there is legal stuff and it’s just, it’s just too hard. It’s just too tricky, if, this, you know. And then there’s the fact if you come by with the big information, he did this, ah, let me talk about this with the other people again.”
“O.K.,” Mr. Salem says. “All right. O.K.”
In an article for the New York Magazine entitled “The CIA’s Jihad,” Robert I. Friedman, wrote in 1995 (March 27) on another questionable facet of the bombing. He wrote,
Shiekh Omar Abdel Rahman commands an almost deified adoration and respect in certain Islamic circles. It was his 1980 fatwa – religious decree – condemning Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel that is widely believed to be responsible for Sadat’s assassination a year later. (Rahman was subsequently tried but acquitted.)
***
The CIA paid to send Abdel Rahman to Peshawar ‘to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime,’ according to Professor Rubin. By all accounts, Rahman was brilliant at inspiring the faithful.
As a reward for his services, the CIA gave the sheikh a one-year visa to the United States in May, 1990 – even though he was on a State Department terrorism watch list that should have barred him from the country.
After a public outcry in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombing, a State Department representative discovered that Rahman had, in fact, received four United States visas dating back to December 15, 1986. All were given to him by CIA agents acting as consular officers at American embassies in Khartoum and Cairo. The CIA officers claimed they didn’t know the sheikh was one of the most notorious political figures in the Middle East and a militant on the State Department’s list of undesirables. The agent in Khartoum said that when the sheikh walked in the computers were down and the Sudanese clerk didn’t bother to check the microfiche file.
Says one top New York investigator: ‘Left with the choice between pleading stupidity or else admitting deceit, the CIA went with stupidity.’
***
The sheikh arrived in Brooklyn at a fortuitous time for the CIA. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan, Congress had slashed the amount of covert aid going to the mujaheddin. The international network of Arab-financed support groups became even more vital to the CIA, including the string of jihad offices that had been set up across America with the help of Saudi and American intelligence. To drum up support, the agency paved the way for veterans of the Afghan conflict to visit the centres and tell their inspirational war stories; in return, the centres collected millions of dollars for the rebels at a time when they needed it most.
There were jihad offices in Jersey City, Atlanta and Dallas, but the most important was the one in Brooklyn, called Alkifah – Arabic for ‘the struggle.’ That storefront became the de facto headquarters of the sheikh.
***
On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultra-right-wing Zionist militant, was shot in the throat with a .357 magnum in a Manhattan hotel; El-Sayyid Nosair was gunned down by an off-duty postal inspector outside the hotel, and the murder weapon was found a few feet from his hand.
A subsequent search of Nosair’s Cliffside Park, New Jersey home turned up forty boxes of evidence – evidence that, had the D.A.’s office and the FBI looked at it more carefully, would have revealed an active terrorist conspiracy about to boil over in New York.
***
In addition to discovering thousands of rounds of ammunition and hit lists with the names of New York judges and prosecutors, investigators found amongst the Nosair evidence classified U.S. military-training manuals.
***
Also found amongst Nosair’s effects were several documents, letters and notebooks in Arabic, which when eventually translated would point to e terror conspiracy against the United States. The D.A.’s office shipped these, along with the other evidence, to the FBI’s office at 26 Federal Plaza. ‘We gave all this stuff to the bureau, thinking that they were well equipped,’ says one source close to the D.A.’s office. ‘After the World Trade Centre, we discovered they never translated the material.’
According to other sources familiar with the case, the FBI told District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy; the prosecution took this position at trial and lost, only convicting Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau speculated the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads, these sources say. ‘The FBI lied to me,’ Morgenthau has told colleagues. ‘They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.’
Three years later, on the day the FBI arrested four Arabs for the World Trade Centre bombing, saying it had all of the suspects, Morgenthau’s ears pricked up. He didn’t believe the four were ‘self-starters,’ and speculated that there was probably a larger network as well as a foreign sponsor. He also had a hunch that the suspects would lead back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But he worried that the dots might not be connected because the U.S. government was protecting the sheikh for his help in Afghanistan.
***
Nevertheless, some in the D.A.’s office believe that until the Ryder van exploded underneath New York’s tallest building, the sheikh and his men were being protected by the CIA. Morgenthau reportedly believes the CIA brought the sheikh to Brooklyn in the first place….
As far as can be determined, no American agency is investigating leads suggesting foreign-government involvement in the New York terror conspiracy. For example, Saudi intelligence has contributed to Sheikh Rahman’s legal-defence fund, according to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former first secretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.
Friedman also points out that intelligence agencies had notes in their possession that by all reason should have connected these terrorists but these agencies did not connect the dots before 1993.
Some Afghan groups that have had close affiliation with Pakistani Intelligence are believed to have been involved in the [1993] New York World Trade Center bombings.
***
Pro-Western afghan officials … officially warned the U.S. government about Hekmatyar no fewer than four times. The last warning delivered just days before the [1993] Trade Center attack.” Speaking to former CIA Director Robert Gates, about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Peter Arnett reports, “The Pakistanis showered Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with U.S. provided weapons and sang his praises to the CIA. They had close ties with Hakmatyar going back to the mid-1970’s.”
Washington’s Blog adds,
This is interesting because it is widely-acknowledged that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was enthusiastically backed by the U.S. For example, U.S. News and World Report says:
[He was] once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.
As the New York Times, CBS News and others reported, an FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler somehow let real explosives be used.
Kosovo
The United States would once again use al-Qaeda in the late 90s in Kosovo under the name Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which would, much like the Libyan war, provoke a response from the Yugoslav government used to justify a “humanitarian war” which resulted in thousands of deaths of innocent people. As Michel Chossudovsky wrote in his Global Research article, “Bill Clinton Worked Hand in Glove with Al Qaeda: “Helped Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base,”
The “Bosnian pattern” described in the 1997 Congressional RPC report was then replicated in Kosovo. Among the foreign mercenaries fighting in Kosovo (and Macedonia in 2001) were Mujahideen from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union as well as “soldiers of fortune” from several NATO countries including Britain, Holland and Germany.
Confirmed by British military sources, the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6, together with “former and serving members of 22 SAS [Britain’s 22nd Special Air Services Regiment], as well as three British and American private security companies”. (The Scotsman, Glasgow, 29 August 1999)
The US DIA approached MI6 to arrange a training programme for the KLA, said a senior British military source. `MI6 then sub-contracted the operation to two British security companies, who in turn approached a number of former members of the (22 SAS) regiment. Lists were then drawn up of weapons and equipment needed by the KLA.’ While these covert operations were continuing, serving members of 22 SAS Regiment, mostly from the unit’s D Squadron, were first deployed in Kosovo before the beginning of the bombing campaign in March. (ibid)
While British SAS Special Forces in bases in Northern Albania were training the KLA, military instructors from Turkey and Afghanistan financed by the “Islamic jihad” were collaborating in training the KLA in guerilla and diversion tactics. (Truth in Media, April 2, 1999)
Bin Laden had visited Albania himself. He was one of several fundamentalist groups that had sent units to fight in Kosovo, … Bin Laden is believed to have established an operation in Albania in 1994 … Albanian sources say Sali Berisha, who was then president, had links with some groups that later proved to be extreme fundamentalists. (Sunday Times, London, 29 November 1998, emphasis added).
. . . . of the RPC congressional document, . . . . confirms that the Clinton administration was collaborating with Al Qaeda. The actions taken by the Clinton administration were intended to create ethnic and factional divisions which eventually were conducive to the fracturing of the Yugoslav Federation.
In retrospect, the Obama Administration’s covert support of the ISIS in Syria and Iraq bears a canny resemblance to the Clinton administration’s support of the Militant Islamic Base in Bosnia and Kosovo. What this suggests is that US intelligence rather than the White House and the State Department determine the main thrust of US foreign policy, which consists in supporting and financing “Jihadist” terrorist organizations with a view to destabilizing sovereign countries.
The Plot To Assassinate Ghaddafi In The ’90s
Former MI5 agent David Shayler caused a massive controversy in Britain after revealing a failed plot by MI6 to assassinate Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya in 1996. The plan centered around paying and working closely with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qaeda terrorist organization that would later surface again during the course of the Western backed war to overthrow Ghaddafi in 2011. The plot, which centered around planting a bomb in Ghaddafi’s car, failed to kill Ghaddafi as the device was planted in the wrong vehicle. It did, however, kill a number of innocent civilians. The goal, according to Shayler, was to kill Ghaddafi, which would send Libya into absolute chaos, possibly allowing al-Qaeda to seize power. This would allow Britain and most likely the United States to invade and seize control of the oild fields, pipelines, and the coast, all while seeing the leader who had long resisted Western machinations eliminated.
After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi’s government “an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty” and declaring its overthrow to be “the foremost duty after faith in God.” [3] This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain (often after being rejected by continental European governments), where anti-Qadhafi sentiments stemming from the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, remained at a fever pitch. The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG’s next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-M15 officer David Shayler. [4] While Shayler’s allegations have not been independently confirmed, it is clear that Britain allowed LIFG to develop a base of logistical support and fundraising on its soil. At any rate, financing by bin Laden appears to have been much more important. According to one report, LIFG received up to $50,000 from the Saudi terrorist mastermind for each of its militants killed on the battlefield.
While not the United States government proper, the UK and US intelligence agencies often function as one unit as a result of the so-called “special relationship” that saw the intelligence communities of both countries merged during the second World War. Regardless, the incident, at the very least, shows Western governments working hand in hand with al-Qaeda in an effort to kill the leader of a sovereign state.
Libya
The war against Ghaddafi in Libya worked in much the same way as the attempted killing of Ghaddafi was supposed to work in the ’90s. Indeed, it also followed the same trend as the war in Syria, the difference being the fact that Syria has not only been able to hold on for seven years but also seems to be on the cusp of defeating Western the Western agenda.
During the course of the war against Libya, the United States openly supported al-Qaeda terrorists as a proxy army to overthrow the Libyan government.
Among the Libyan “rebels” being supported by the United States was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist organization that, as was mentioned above, is nothing more than another regional division and nomenclature for al-Qaeda itself. As Webster Tarpley wrote in his article, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists Who Killed US, NATO Troops In Iraq,”
The specific institutional basis for the recruitment of guerrilla fighters in northeastern Libya is associated with an organization which previously called itself the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). During the course of 2007, the LIFG declared itself an official subsidiary of al Qaeda, later assuming the name of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). As a result of this 2007 merger, an increased number of guerrilla fighters arrived in Iraq from Libya. According to Felter and Fishman, “The apparent surge in Libyan recruits traveling to Iraq may be linked the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007.” This merger is confirmed by other sources: A 2008 statement attributed to Ayman al-Zawahiri claimed that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group has joined al-Qaeda.
. . .
The West Point study [ Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, “Al Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighter in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records,” (West Point, NY: Harmony Project, Combating Terrorism Center, Department of Social Sciences, US Military Academy, December 2007).] makes clear that the main bulwarks of the LIFG and of the later AQIM were the twin cities of Benghazi and Darnah. This is documented in a statement by Abu Layth al-Libi, the self-styled “Emir” of the LIFG, who later became a top official of al Qaeda. At the time of the 2007 merger, “Abu Layth al-Libi, LIFG’s Emir, reinforced Benghazi and Darnah’s importance to Libyan jihadis in his announcement that LIFG had joined al-Qa’ida, saying: ‘It is with the grace of God that we were hoisting the banner of jihad against this apostate regime under the leadership of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which sacrificed the elite of its sons and commanders in combating this regime whose blood was spilled on the mountains of Darnah, the streets of Benghazi, the outskirts of Tripoli, the desert of Sabha, and the sands of the beach.’”This 2007 merger meant that the Libyan recruits for Al Qaeda became an increasingly important part of the activity of this organization as a whole, shifting the center of gravity to some degree away from the Saudis and Egyptians who had previously been most conspicuous. As Felter and Fishman comment, “Libyan factions (primarily the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group) are increasingly important in al-Qa’ida. The Sinjar Records offer some evidence that Libyans began surging into Iraq in larger numbers beginning in May 2007. Most of the Libyan recruits came from cities in northeast Libya, an area long known for jihadi-linked militancy.”
. . . . .
Looking back at the tragic experience of US efforts to incite the population of Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation in the years after 1979, it should be clear that the policy of the Reagan White House to arm the Afghan mujahedin with Stinger missiles and other modern weapons turned out to be highly destructive for the United States. As current Defense Secretary Robert Gates comes close to admitting in his memoirs, Al Qaeda was created during those years by the United States as a form of Arab Legion against the Soviet presence, with long-term results which have been highly lamented.
Today, it is clear that the United States is providing modern weapons for the Libyan rebels through Saudi Arabia and across the Egyptian border with the active assistance of the Egyptian army and of the newly installed pro-US Egyptian military junta. This is a direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 1973, which calls for a complete arms embargo on Libya. The assumption is that these weapons will be used against Gaddafi in the coming weeks. But, given the violently anti-American nature of the population of northeast Libya that is now being armed, there is no certainty that these weapons will not be soon turned against those who have provided them.
. . . . .
For those who attempt to follow the ins and outs of the CIA’s management of its various patsy organizations inside the realm of presumed Islamic terrorism, it may be useful to trace the transformation of the LIFG-AQIM from deadly enemy to close ally. This phenomenon is closely linked to the general reversal of the ideological fronts of US imperialism that marks the divide between the Bush-Cheney-neocon administrations and the current Obama-Brzezinski-International Crisis Group regime. The Bush approach was to use the alleged presence of Al Qaeda as a reason for direct military attack. The Obama method is to use Al Qaeda to overthrow independent governments, and then either Balkanize and partition the countries in question, or else use them as kamikaze puppets against larger enemies like Russia, China, or Iran. This approach implies a more or less open fraternization with terrorist groups, which was signaled in a general way in Obamas famous Cairo speech of 2009. The links of the Obama campaign to the terrorist organizations deployed by the CIA against Russia were already a matter of public record three years ago.But such a reversal
of field cannot be improvised overnight; it took several years of preparation. On July 10, 2009, The London Daily Telegraph reported that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had split with Al Qaeda. This was when the United States had decided to de-emphasize the Iraq war, and also to prepare to use the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood and its Sunni Al Qaeda offshoot for the destabilization of the leading Arab states preparatory to turning them against Shiite Iran. Paul Cruikshank wrote at that time in the New York Daily News about one top LIFG honcho who wanted to dial back the relation to al Qaeda and the infamous Osama Bin Laden; this was “Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. While mainstream Muslim leaders have long criticized Al Qaeda, these critics have the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite.” But by this time some LIFG bosses had moved up into al Qaeda: the London Daily Telegraph reported that senior Al Qaeda members Abu Yahya al-Libi and Abu Laith al-Libi were LIFG members. Around this time, Qaddafi released some LIFG fighters in an ill-advsided humanitarian gesture.
Later, in 2016, as the United States and Britain used the presence of “extremists” in Libya to justify military action in the country yet again, Tony Cartalucci wrote in his article, “US-NATO Invade Libya To Fight Terrorists Of Own Creation,”
As has been explained by geopolitical analysts since 2011, terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and their various rebrandings are far from being the West’s true adversaries. Besides being funded, armed, and backed by the West’s closest and oldest Middle Eastern allies – particularly the Saudis and Qataris – these terrorist organizations serve a two-fold purpose. First, they serve as a mercenary army with which the West fights targeted nations by proxy. Second, they serve as a pretext for direct Western military intervention when proxy war fails or is not an option.
This was first illustrated with the very inception of Al Qaeda in the 1980’s where it was used as a proxy force by the US and Saudis to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 2001, the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was used as a pretext for a US invasion and occupation that endures to this very day.
As of 2011, literally these very same terrorists were organized, armed, funded, and provided with NATO aircover to overthrow the government of Libya. From there, they were rearmed and shipped to NATO-member Turkey where they then invaded northern Syria, and more specifically Idlib and the pivotal city of Aleppo.
The administration has said that the previously hidden CIA operation in Benghazi involved finding, repurchasing and destroying heavy weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, but in October we reported evidence indicating that U.S. agents — particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens — were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.
There have been several possible SA-7 spottings in Syria dating as far back as early summer 2012, and there are indications that at least some of Gaddafi’s 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles were shipped before now.
On Sept. 6 a Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of weapons for Syrian rebels docked in southern Turkey. The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi” who worked for the new Libyan government. The man who organized that shipment, Tripoli Military Council head Abdelhakim Belhadj, worked directly with Stevens during the Libyan revolution.
The Business Insider’s mention of Abdelhakim Belhaj working directly with Ambassador Stevens is particularly important. Belhaj was quite literally the leader of US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – Al Qaeda in Libya. Despite his obvious ties to Al Qaeda, he was openly backed by the US during the 2011 Libyan War, and afterward, was posing for pictures with US senators including Arizona senator John McCain in the aftermath of NATO’s regime change operations. LIFG’s leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, is now reportedly also a senior leader of ISIS in Libya.
Herridge reported that one of the alleged leaders of ISIS in North Africa is Libyan Abdelhakim Belhadj, who was seen by the U.S. as a willing partner in the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
“Now, it’s alleged he is firmly aligned with ISIS and supports the training camps in eastern Libya,” Herridge said.
It is clear that the West is not fighting ISIS, but instead, has clearly both created it and is intentionally perpetuating it to help justify its military and geopolitical maneuvering across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and advance its aspirations toward regional and global political, military, and economic hegemony.
The very same technicals – armed trucks used in combat – bearing the Libyan “rebel” insignia, have literally just been painted over by images of ISIS’ flag, like props on a Hollywood set being used in a bad sequel. With the US-British and European intervention in a destroyed Libya overrun by terrorists – a Libya we were promised by NATO was bringing brought peace, stability, “freedom,” and “democracy” with its 2011 intervention, we see fully the danger of entrusting other nations to a similar fate wrought by Western intervention – most notably Syria.
9/11
Books, documentaries, articles, and lectures abound regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks and who was ultimately responsible for them. Needless to say, an attempt to prove that 9/11 was an inside job is beyond the scope of this article. One aspect that is not up for debate, however, is whether or not the official story regarding 9/11 is true. The official story is demonstrably false.
With this in mind, I highly access reading and/or viewing the following materials in order to gain a better understanding of the link between al-Qaeda and the United States government as it relates to 9/11.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi who joined Al-Qaeda to fight against President Saddam Hussein. During the U.S. invasion, he distinguished himself by engaging in several actions against Shiites and Christians (including the taking of the Baghdad Cathedral) and by ushering in an Islamist reign of terror (he presided over an Islamic court which sentenced many Iraqis to be slaughtered in public). After the departure of Paul Bremer III, al-Baghdadi was arrested and incarcerated at Camp Bucca from 2005 to 2009. This period saw the dissolution of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose fighters merged into a group of tribal resistance, the Islamic Emirate of Iraq.
On 16 May 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named emir of the IEI, which was in the process of disintegration. After the departure of U.S. troops, he staged operations against the government al-Maliki, accused of being at the service of Iran. In 2013, after vowing allegiance to Al-Qaeda, he took off with his group to continue the jihad in Syria, rebaptizing it Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant. In doing so, he challenged the privileges that Ayman al-Zawahiri had previously granted, on behalf of Al-Qaeda, to the Al-Nusra Front in Syria, which was originally nothing more than an extension of the IEI.
Regardless, false assumptions surrounding the true leadership of ISIS would be called into question in January of 2014 when Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned and operated news agency, published an article as well as a video of an interrogation of an ISIS fighter who had been captured while operating inside Syria.
When asked why ISIS was following the movement of the Free Syrian Army and who had given him the orders to do so, the fighter stated that he did not know why he was ordered to monitor the FSA’s movement but that the orders had come from Abu Faisal, also known as Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal of the Saudi Royal Family.
Even tired mainstream media organizations such as Newsweek (aka The Daily Beast) can no longer ignore the facts surrounding the Saudis’ involvement with the organization of terrorist groups across the world.
Note also that Voltaire Net describes al-Nusra, a documented al-Qaeda connected group, as merely an extension of the IEI (Islamic Emirate of Iraq) which itself was nothing more than a version of Al-Qaeda In Iraq. Thus, from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, came the IEI, which then became the Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant. IEIL then became ISIS/ISIL which is now often referred to as IS.
In other words, Nusra=Al-Qaeda-IEI=IEIL=ISIL=ISIS=IS.
With the information presented above regarding the nature of the Free Syrian Army and the so-called “moderate rebels,” it would be entirely fair to add these “moderate” groups to the list as well.
Conclusion
The United States not only openly uses extremist groups in Syria for the purpose of destroying the secular government of Bashar al-Assad, it continues to use the terrorist proxy army either for the purpose of mass destabilizations or “isolated” terror attacks by which to put target governments under pressure and/or justify American invasion based upon the invented threat.
The use of terrorist proxy armies did not begin with Syria and it will not end with Syria.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand the level to which the U.S. has used these organizations for its own geopolitical and domestic purposes in order to understand current affairs and thus effect change. From Afghanistan in the 1980s to Syria in 2018, the United States has found a useful army of terrorists that has been used to great effect over nearly four decades. This article has only scratched the surface of the incidents discussed as well as American funding and use of terrorism in general.
However, these incidents are well-known and American support for extremists is not something that is grossly hidden. Until Americans understand that the domestic and foreign bogeyman they have been trained to hate and fear is a creation working at the behest of their own government, they will continue to be passed back and forth between loss of liberty at home and war abroad.
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Brandon Turbeville writes for Activist Post. He has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.
Likely cooked up by dark forces in London and Washington, the Skripal incident escalated a long-running campaign to politically and economically marginalize, weaken, contain and isolate Russia.
The scheme recklessly heads things toward possible East/West military confrontation – especially after Trump’s capitulation to extremist neocons in charge of US foreign policy.
Bipartisan Russophobic hardliners in Washington want tougher tactics used against the Kremlin – including full implementation of the so-called “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATS).
Enacted last August, it calls for imposing tough sanctions on Russia relating to cyber security, its energy and defense sectors, its operation in Syria, and other activities.
It directs the US Treasury and National Security Council to develop a strategy for countering Russia. The measure targets Iran and North Korea the same way.
Within 180 days of enactment, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, the Director of National Intelligence and National Security Advisor are required to submit a detailed report to Congress to include “identification of the most significant senior foreign political figures and oligarchs in the Russian Federation, as determined by their closeness to the (Kremlin) and their net worth” – along with an assessment of their relationship to Putin and other top Russian officials.
Last summer, Trump went along with the measure reluctantly, saying:
“While I favor tough measures to punish and deter aggressive and destabilizing behavior by Iran, North Korea, and Russia, this legislation is significantly flawed,” adding:
“In its haste to pass this legislation, the Congress included a number of clearly unconstitutional provisions,” including restrictions on executive branch authority over foreign policy.
“My Administration will give careful and respectful consideration to the preferences expressed by the Congress in these various provisions and will implement them in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations.”
Appointing Mike Pompeo for State and John Bolton as new national security advisor showed Trump’s capitulation to hardliners in Washington wanting toughness imposed on Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and other countries targeted for regime change.
The orchestrated Skripal false flag provides greater ammunition for hardline neocons to pursue their hostile Russophobic agenda – in Washington, the UK and other EU countries.
Britain began the latest toughness on Russia by expelling 23 of its diplomats. At least 10 other EU countries are expected to take similar action, perhaps as early as Monday – along with further anti-Russia steps by UK Tories.
Trump is expected to expel Russian diplomats, along with perhaps additional anti-Kremlin actions this week.
According to State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, the Trump administration is considering a “range of options to respond to Russia’s outrageous actions in the UK, both to demonstrate our solidarity with our ally and to hold Russia accountable for its clear breach of international norms and agreements” – with no further elaboration, hostile outrageous remarks.
On Sunday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted what she called unacceptable global “mud-slinging and adverse publicity” against the Kremlin, adding:
“What do we see? A colossal failure from the point of view of evidence. London simply has no evidentiary basis to hide behind.”
‘(T)he only thing that can save Theresa May, and the United Kingdom in principle, I mean the political establishment, is global support, first of all from the European Union and NATO partners” – especially from Washington.
Moscow intends responding in kind to hostile actions against its government.
Russophobia is at a fever pitch, likely to escalate ahead, not subside, risking unknown consequences.
Clearly Moscow had nothing to do with the Skripal incident, nor is any falsely claimed “Russian aggression” ongoing in Syria, Ukraine or anywhere else.
Western sentiment is almost entirely Russophobic. Escalating anti-Russia actions risks heading things toward something much more serious.
Lessons from two world wars weren’t learned. A third one with today’s super weapons could doom us all.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.
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
One wonders if this latest extremely provocative and hostile accusation against Russia, supported by Washington’s empire, is the prelude to war. There is no basis whatsoever for the statement of the US Department of State that “on March 4, Russia used a military-grade nerve agent to attempt to murder a British citizen and his daughter in Salisbury.” (Source)
Considering the fact that no evidence has been presented that any nerve agent was involved, no evidence that it was a Russian nerve agent, and no evidence that Russia, or Putin himself according to the crazed British foreign secretary, is responsible, this accusation is the most reckless and irresponsible charge imaginable.
It the Russians do not now realize that the only terms on which they are acceptable to the West is as a vassal state of the West, they are beyond all hope and will be destroyed. If the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists continue to paralyze the Russian government, Russia is finished. There is no greater threat to Russia than its own Atlanticist Integrationists.
What will be Washington’s next orchestration through one of its vassal states, such as “Great” Britain? Can it get any worse? If the Russian government is realistic, it will expect an incoming nuclear ICBM strike. There is no other reason for the long collection of false charges against Russia except to prepare the insouciant Western peoples for war. If the Russian government does not realize that Washington is bringing war to Russia, the Russian government is endangering Russia’s survival.
If the Russian government continues to believe that “the door to dialogue is open,” the Russian government is deluded beyond repair.
The insouciant Western people, concerned with things of no consequence, sit in their stupidity while their corrupt politicians tell them lies. The populations of the West are so stupid that they do not have a clue as to the consequences of the lies that they are fed.
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This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to 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
A 65-year-old New York City cab driver from Queens, Nicanor Ochisor, hanged himself in his garage March 16, saying in a note he left behind that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft had made it impossible for him to make a living. It was the fourth suicide by a cab driver in New York in the last four months, including one Feb. 5 in which livery driver Douglas Schifter, 61, killed himself with a shotgun outside City Hall.
“Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.”
He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.
Schifter and Ochisor were two of the millions of victims of the new economy. Corporate capitalism is establishing a neofeudal serfdom in numerous occupations, a condition in which there are no labor laws, no minimum wage, no benefits, no job security and no regulations. Desperate and impoverished workers, forced to endure 16-hour days, are viciously pitted against each other. Uber drivers make about $13.25 an hour. In cities like Detroit this falls to $8.77. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber and one of the founders, has a net worth of $4.8 billion. Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million.
The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane labor conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. When workers at General Motors carried out a 44-day sit-down strike in 1936, many were living in shacks that lacked heating and indoor plumbing; they could be laid off for weeks without compensation, had no medical or retirement benefits and often were fired without explanation. When they turned 40 their employment could be terminated. The average wage was about $900 a year at a time when the government determined that a family of four needed a minimum of $1,600 to live above the poverty line.
The managers at General Motors relentlessly persecuted union organizers. The company spent $839,000 on detective work in 1934 to spy on union organizers and infiltrate union meetings. GM employed the white terrorist group the Black Legion—the police chief of Detroit was suspected of being a member—to threaten and physically assault labor activists and assassinate union leaders including George Marchuk and John Bielak, both shot to death.
The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists. There are some 13,000 licensed cabs in New York City and 40,000 livery or town cars. The drivers should, as farmers did in 2015 with tractors in Paris, shut down the center of the city. And drivers in other cities should do the same. This is the only language our corporate masters understand.
The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obscene wealth. Consumed by greed, rendered numb to human suffering by a life of hedonism and extravagance, devoid of empathy, incapable of self-criticism or self-sacrifice, surrounded by sycophants and leeches who cater to their wishes, appetites and demands, able to use their wealth to ignore the law and destroy critics and opponents, they are among the most repugnant of the human species. Don’t be fooled by the elites’ skillful public relations campaigns—we are watching Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $64.1 billion, mount a massive propaganda effort against charges that he and Facebook are focused on exploiting and selling our personal information—or by the fawning news celebrities on corporate media who act as courtiers and apologists for the oligarchs. These people are the enemy.
Ochisor, a Romanian immigrant, owned a New York City taxi medallion. (Medallions were once coveted by cab drivers because having them allowed the drivers to own their own cabs or lease the cabs to other drivers.) Ochisor drove the night shift, lasting 10 to 12 hours. His wife drove the day shift. But after Uber and Lyft flooded the city with cars and underpaid drivers about three years ago, the couple could barely meet expenses. Ochisor’s home was about to go into foreclosure. His medallion, once worth $1.1 million, had plummeted in value to $180,000. The dramatic drop in the value of the medallion, which he had hoped to lease for $3,000 a month or sell to finance his retirement, wiped out his economic security. He faced financial ruin and poverty. And he was not alone.
The corporate architects of the new economy have no intention of halting the assault. They intend to turn everyone into temp workers trapped in demeaning, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs without job security or benefits, a reality they plaster over by inventing hip terms like “the gig economy.”
John McDonagh began driving a New York City cab 40 years ago. He, like most drivers, worked out of garages owned and operated by businesses. He was paid a percentage of what he earned each night.
“You could make a living [then],” he told me. “But everyone shared the burden. The garage shared it. The driver shared it. If you had a good night, the garage made money. If you had a bad night, you split it. That’s not the case anymore. Right now we’re leasing [cabs at the garages].”
Leasing requires a driver to pay $120 a day for the car and $30 for the gas. The drivers begin a shift $150 in debt. Because of Uber, Lyft and other smartphone ride apps, drivers’ incomes have been cut by half in many cases. Cab drivers can finish their 12-hour shifts owing the garages money. Drivers are facing bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. Some are homeless.
“The TLC [New York City Transportation and Limousine Commission] wanted to limit yellow cab drivers to 12 hours a day,” he said, referring to the distinctive yellow cabs that have medallions and can pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. “There was a protest. Yellow cab drivers were protesting that they have to work a 16-hour day in order to make a living. It’s cut everything. Everybody’s fighting for that extra fare. You would be at a light with two or three other yellow cabs. You saw someone up the street with luggage you would run the lights to get to them. Because that might be an airport job. You’re risking your own life, risking getting tickets, you’re doing things you would never have done before.”
“We don’t have any health care,” he said. “Sitting for those 12 to 16 hours a day, you are getting diabetes. There’s no blood circulation. You’re putting on weight. And then there’s that added stress you’re not making any money.”
Uber and Lyft in 2016 had 370 active lobbyists in 44 states, “dwarfing some of the largest business and technology companies,” according to the National Employment Law Project. “Together, Uber and Lyft lobbyists outnumbered Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” The two companies, like many lobbying firms, also hire former government regulators. The former head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, is now on the board of Uber. The companies have used their money and their lobbyists, most of whom are members of the Democratic Party, to free themselves from the regulations and oversight imposed on the taxi industry. The companies using ride-hail apps have flooded New York City with about 100,000 unregulated cars in the past two years.
“The yellow cab has to be a certain vehicle,” said McDonagh. “It’s a Nissan. [Nissan won the bid to supply the city’s cabs.] Every yellow cab has to charge a certain price. When that drop goes down, that’s regulated by the city. They added on all these extra taxes, for the MTA and for the wheelchair [half of all yellow cabs are required to be wheelchair-accessible by 2020], a rush-hour tax. Uber comes in. No regulations at all. They could pick whatever type of car they want. Whatever color of car. They could change prices when it’s slow. They can lower the prices. When it’s busy they can do price surging. It can be two or three times. Whereas the yellow cab is just plowing along at the same rate at the same time. Going to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan is $52. No matter what the traffic is like, no matter how many hours it takes you to get there. Uber will jack up its prices two or three times. You might have to pay $100 to get to Kennedy Airport. While the yellow cab industry is almost regulated to death, Uber is coming in with new technology, figuring out different ways how [it is] going to make money. … It’s finished, with the yellow cabs.”
Life for Uber and Lyft drivers is as difficult. Uber and Lyft use bonuses to lure drivers into the business. Once the bonuses are gone, these drivers sink to the same economic desperation as those driving yellow cabs.
“Uber is leasing cars,” McDonagh said. “They have car dealerships that will sell. They advertise as, ‘Listen, you can have bad credit. Come down to Uber. We’ll get you the money or loan to buy this car.’ And what they do is they’ll take the money directly out of what you’re making that day to pay for the loan. They can’t lose. And if you go under, they’ll sell the car back to the dealership and then redo it for the next immigrant driver. There’s a whole scam going on.”
“As a yellow cab driver, you don’t see the world vision,” he said. “But there’s that famous term ‘the race to the bottom.’ You’re working more and more hours for less and less wages. This is the new gig economy. Someone will use an Uber to go to an Airbnb and get on his phone to order something from Amazon to eat in his house. All those shops are now gone. From cashiers to cab drivers. I feel like I’m a blacksmith or a typesetter at a newspaper business trying to explain to you what the yellow cab industry used to be. We’re becoming obsolete.”
“Guys are sleeping in the cab,” McDonagh said. “They’ll go out to Kennedy at 2 or 3 in the morning. They pull into the lot and go to sleep to catch [passengers off] the first flight that’s coming in from California a couple of hours later. You have guys who won’t go home for a couple of days. They’ll just stay out on the street. They roam the street to try to make money. It’s dangerous for the passenger. The amount of accidents will be going up because drivers are drowsy.”
McDonagh said Uber and Lyft cars must be regulated. All cars should have meters to guarantee an adequate income for drivers. And drivers should have health care and benefits. None of this will happen, he warned, as long as we live under a system of government where our political elites are dependent on campaign contributions from corporations and those who should be regulating the industry look to these corporations for future employment.
“We have to limit the amount of cabs, particularly here in New York City,” McDonagh said. “If we did it in the yellow cab industry for 50 years, why can’t we do it with Uber? They’re adding 100 cars a week through the streets of New York. This is insane. When you call an Uber, the biggest complaint people have now is, ‘The car is here too quick.’ They’re there within two or three minutes. I can’t even get dressed. … They’re rolling empty throughout the city, waiting for that hit.”
“Horses in Central Park are regulated,” he pointed out. “There’s 150 of them. They make a great living there, the guys on the horse and buggies. Say Uber comes in and says, ‘We want to bring in Uber horses. And we want to add 100,000.’ And let’s see how the market will handle it. We know what’s going to happen. No one will make money. They’re all around Central Park. And now no one can go anywhere because there are now 100,000 horses in Central Park. It would be considered madness to do that. They wouldn’t do it. Yet when it comes to the yellow cab industry, for 50 years all we could have was 13,000 cabs, and then within a year or two we’re going to add 100,000. Let’s see how the market works on that! We know how the market works.”
“They [the horses] work less hours [than cab drivers],” he said. “They don’t work in hot and cold temperatures. If you believe in reincarnation, you should come back as a horse in Central Park. And they all live on the West Side of Manhattan. We live in basements in Brooklyn and Queens. We haven’t upped our status in life, that’s for sure.”
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.
Tuesday’s debate and vote in the U.S. Senate on whether to end (technically whether or not to vote on whether to end) U.S. participation in the war on Yemen can certainly be presented as a step forward. While 55 U.S. Senators voted to keep the war rolling along, 44 voted not to table the resolution to end it. Of those 44, some, including “leaders” like Senator Chuck Schumer, said not a word in the debate and only voted the right way once the wrong way had won. And conceivably some could say they were voting in favor of having a vote, upon which they would have voted for more war. But it’s safe to say that at least most of the 44 were voting to end a war — and many of them explicitly said so.
I use the phrase “end a war,” despite the fact that Saudi Arabia could continue its war without U.S. participation — in part, because it’s easier, and in part because experts have suggested that Saudi Arabia could not do anything like what it is doing without the participation of the U.S. military in identifying targets and refueling planes. It is of course also true that were the United States to go beyond what was under consideration on Tuesday and cease providing Saudi Arabia with planes and bombs, and use its influence as an oil customer and general war partner to pressure Saudi Arabia to end the war and lift the blockade, the war might end entirely. And millions of human lives might be spared.
Virginia Senator Tim Kaine has for years been a leading proponent of getting Congress to authorize wars, making clear that he wanted to keep those wars going but with Congressional authorization. This time was different. Kaine pushed publicly for votes to end U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. He and even his colleague from Virginia Mark Warner (!) voted to end the U.S. war. I’m not sure any senator from Virginia had ever done such a thing before. And, in fact, no senator from anywhere had ever voted on a resolution raised under the War Powers Act before, because this was the first time any senator had bothered to try such a thing. Kaine tweeted:
“Millions in Yemen may starve and 10,000-plus are dead because of a war with no end in sight, that the U.S. has stumbled into. Proud to support this proposal to direct the removal of U.S. armed forces.”
“Stumbled into”? Forget it, he’s rolling.
And Kaine was the least of it. To watch Dianne Feinstein argue for ending a war had a very Twilight Zone aspect to it. Look through the list of who voted “Nay” and re-define them in your mind as people who under just the right conditions (possibly including guaranteed failure to reach a majority) will sometimes vote to end a war. I’d call that progress.
But if you watch the debate via C-Span, the top question in your mind might not be “What incredible activism, information, accident, or luck got 44 people to vote the right way?” but rather “Why did 55 cheerful, well-fed, safe people in suits just vote for mass-murder?” Why did they? Why did they take a break for political party meetings in the middle of the debate, and debate other legislation just before and after this resolution, and walk around and chat with each other exactly as if all were normal, while voting for genocide?
The facts of the matter were presented very clearly in the debate by numerous U.S. senators from both parties. They denounced war lies as “lies.” They pointed out the horrendous damage, the deaths, the injuries, the starvation, the cholera. They cited Saudi Arabia’s explicit and intentional use of starvation as a weapon. They noted the blockade against humanitarian aid imposed by Saudi Arabia. They endlessly discussed the biggest cholera epidemic ever known. Here’s a tweet from Senator Chris Murphy:
“Gut check moment for the Senate today: we will vote on whether to continue the U.S./Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen which has killed over 10,000 civilians and created the largest cholera outbreak in history.”
Senator Jeff Merkley asked if partnering with a government trying to starve millions of people to death squared with the principles of the United States of America. I tweeted a response:
“Should I tell him or wait and let his colleagues do it?”
In the end, 55 of his colleagues answered his question as well as any history book could have done.
The ridiculousness of arguments for continuing the war was called out by senators on the floor. Senator Mitch McConnell and others made the claim made to them by Secretary of War (“Defense”) James Mattis, that ending U.S. participation in bombing civilians in Yemen would mean more civilian deaths in Yemen, not fewer. Others trotted out the claim made by Trump’s lawyers, parroting Obama’s lawyer Harold Koh, that bombing a nation flat is neither “war” nor “hostilities” if U.S. troops are not on the ground being shot.
Senator Bernie Sanders put a stop to such nonsense. He recommended trying telling the people of Yemen being bombed with U.S. bombs and U.S. targeting and U.S.-fueled planes that the United States is not really involved.
The idea that the full Senate should leave to a committee a matter the committee had not bothered to touch in years was also appropriately laughed out of court.
Senator Mike Lee reassured his colleagues that ending the U.S. war on Yemen on grounds of illegality wouldn’t slow or halt any other illegal US wars. (I’m sure you’re relieved to hear that!)
To their credit, Senators Murphy and Lee and Sanders were very clear that a vote to table, rather than directly vote on, their resolution to end the war, would be a cowardly vote not to have a debate and not to obey the U.S. Constitution. And to their greater credit, they went ahead and had the substantive debate prior to the vote to table. In the past on at least one occasion of the many times that we’ve seen such resolutions brought forward in the House, the war-proponents talked substance while the opponents talked only procedure. This change, too, was progress.
So, why? Why did the Senate vote for genocide? And why is nobody surprised by it?
Well, the arguments made by the Senators on the right side of the debate certainly left something to be desired. Sanders spoke of the dead in the wars on Vietnam and Iraq, and they were all Americans. He said the war on Vietnam almost destroyed an entire generation of Americans. This was a war that killed 6 million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, plus 50,000 from the United States. How can people come to think about one-sided slaughters if we pretend they don’t really exist?
Senator Tom Udall said that from WWII until the presidency of Donald Trump the United States was a noble, law-abiding, altruistic leader of spreading democracy, although not quite perfectly. In so saying, Udall bestows on Trump a sort of magical power, as well as rewriting U.S. history. The U.S. public was allowed no vote on Tuesday. Neither was Trump.
The resolution itself was limited, marred by loopholes, and not truly whipped for by many of those who voted against tabling it. Perhaps a stronger resolution would have failed even more badly. Or perhaps a more coherent case against war would have been more persuasive. I do not know. But the notion that you should arm and assist the Saudi dictatorship in bombing people when it’s called anti-ISIS and not when it’s called anti-Houthi seems a trickier case to make than the one that you should stop arming and assisting in the slaughter of human beings, generating more enemies, impoverishing the public, draining funds from human needs, damaging the environment, eroding the rule of law, imperializing the presidency, militarizing your culture and schools and police, and aligning your government with a brutal monarchy.
Perhaps that’s a case that has to be made to the public first and then to the senators, but many senators made clear how they were thinking. Lee was not off in trying to reassure them about the setting of precedents. One of them openly worried that if refueling bombers that were blowing up people’s homes in one country was counted as “hostilities,” then refueling bombers that were blowing up people’s homes in any country could be counted as “hostilities.” And then what kind of a world would we have?!
So, a vote against one war is never just a vote against one war. It’s a vote to challenge, if ever so slightly, the power of the war machine. These Senators are paid not to do that.
Here is a list of Senators and their 2018 bribes (excuse me, campaign contributions) from dealers of death (excuse me, defense companies). I’ve indicated how they voted on tabling Tuesday’s resolution with a Y or N. A pro-war vote is a Y:
Nelson, Bill (D-FL)
$184,675
Y
Strange, Luther (R-AL)
$140,450
not in senate
Kaine, Tim (D-VA)
$129,109
N
McSally, Martha (R-AZ)
$125,245
not in senate
Heinrich, Martin (D-NM)
$109,731
N
Wicker, Roger (R-MS)
$109,625
Y
Graham, Lindsey (R-SC)
$89,900
Y
Donnelly, Joe (D-IN)
$89,156
Y
King, Angus (I-ME)
$86,100
N
Fischer, Deb (R-NE)
$74,850
Y
Hatch, Orrin G (R-UT)
$74,375
Y
McCaskill, Claire (D-MO)
$65,518
N
Cardin, Ben (D-MD)
$61,905
N
Manchin, Joe (D-WV)
$61,050
Y
Cruz, Ted (R-TX)
$55,315
Y
Jones, Doug (D-AL)
$55,151
Y
Tester, Jon (D-MT)
$53,438
N
Hirono, Mazie K (D-HI)
$47,100
N
Cramer, Kevin (R-ND)
$46,000
not in Senate
Murphy, Christopher S (D-CT)
$44,596
N
Sinema, Kyrsten (D-AZ)
$44,140
not in Senate
Shaheen, Jeanne (D-NH)
$41,013
N
Cantwell, Maria (D-WA)
$40,010
N
Reed, Jack (D-RI)
$37,277
Y
Inhofe, James M (R-OK)
$36,500
Y
Stabenow, Debbie (D-MI)
$36,140
N
Gillibrand, Kirsten (D-NY)
$33,210
N
Rubio, Marco (R-FL)
$32,700
Y
McConnell, Mitch (R-KY)
$31,500
Y
Flake, Jeff (R-AZ)
$29,570
Y
Perdue, David (R-GA)
$29,300
Y
Heitkamp, Heidi (D-ND)
$28,124
Y
Barrasso, John A (R-WY)
$27,500
Y
Corker, Bob (R-TN)
$27,125
Y
Warner, Mark (D-VA)
$26,178
N
Sullivan, Dan (R-AK)
$26,000
Y
Heller, Dean (R-NV)
$25,200
Y
Schatz, Brian (D-HI)
$23,865
N
Blackburn, Marsha (R-TN)
$22,906
not in Senate
Brown, Sherrod (D-OH)
$21,373
N
Cochran, Thad (R-MS)
$21,050
Y
Baldwin, Tammy (D-WI)
$20,580
N
Casey, Bob (D-PA)
$19,247
N
Peters, Gary (D-MI)
$19,000
N
Feinstein, Dianne (D-CA)
$18,350
N
Moore, Roy (R-AL)
$18,250
not in Senate
Jenkins, Evan (R-WV)
$17,500
not in Senate
Tillis, Thom (R-NC)
$17,000
Y
Blunt, Roy (R-MO)
$16,500
Y
Moran, Jerry (R-KS)
$14,500
N
Collins, Susan M (R-ME)
$14,000
N
Hoeven, John (R-ND)
$13,000
Y
Durbin, Dick (D-IL)
$12,786
N
Whitehouse, Sheldon (D-RI)
$12,721
Y
Messer, Luke (R-IN)
$12,000
not in Senate
Cornyn, John (R-TX)
$11,000
Y
Cotton, Tom (R-AR)
$11,000
Y
Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK)
$11,000
Y
O’Rourke, Beto (D-TX)
$10,564
not in Senate
Rounds, Mike (R-SD)
$10,000
Y
Warren, Elizabeth (D-MA)
$9,766
N
Rosen, Jacky (D-NV)
$9,655
not in Senate
Sasse, Ben (R-NE)
$9,350
Y
Portman, Rob (R-OH)
$8,500
Y
Nicholson, Kevin (R-WI)
$8,350
not in Senate
Rosendale, Matt (R-MT)
$8,100
not in Senate
Menendez, Robert (D-NJ)
$8,005
Y
Boozman, John (R-AR)
$8,000
Y
Toomey, Pat (R-PA)
$7,550
Y
Carper, Tom (D-DE)
$7,500
N
Crapo, Mike (R-ID)
$7,000
Y
Daines, Steven (R-MT)
$6,500
N
Ernst, Joni (R-IA)
$6,500
Y
Kennedy, John (R-LA)
$6,000
Y
Sanders, Bernie (I-VT)
$5,989
N
Scott, Tim (R-SC)
$5,500
Y
Ward, Kelli (R-AZ)
$5,125
not in Senate
Enzi, Mike (R-WY)
$5,000
Y
Fincher, Steve (R-TN)
$5,000
not in Senate
Isakson, Johnny (R-GA)
$5,000
Y
Lankford, James (R-OK)
$5,000
Y
Shelby, Richard C (R-AL)
$5,000
Y
Duckworth, Tammy (D-IL)
$4,535
N
Burr, Richard (R-NC)
$4,000
Y
Capito, Shelley Moore (R-WV)
$4,000
Y
Gardner, Cory (R-CO)
$4,000
Y
Mandel, Josh (R-OH)
$3,550
not in Senate
Hassan, Maggie (D-NH)
$3,217
N
Hartson, Alison (D-CA)
$3,029
not in Senate
Brakey, Eric (R-ME)
$3,000
not in Senate
Diehl, Geoff (R-MA)
$3,000
not in Senate
Downing, Troy (R-MT)
$2,700
not in Senate
Klobuchar, Amy (D-MN)
$2,498
N
Blumenthal, Richard (D-CT)
$2,090
N
Coons, Chris (D-DE)
$2,027
Y
Leahy, Patrick (D-VT)
$2,002
N
Alexander, Lamar (R-TN)
$2,000
Y
Bennet, Michael F (D-CO)
$2,000
N
Johnson, Ron (R-WI)
$2,000
Y
Renacci, Jim (R-OH)
$2,000
not in Senate
Rokita, Todd (R-IN)
$1,500
not in Senate
Masto, Catherine Cortez (D-NV)
$1,435
not in Senate
Booker, Cory (D-NJ)
$1,380
N
Harris, Kamala D (D-CA)
$1,313
N
Van Hollen, Chris (D-MD)
$1,036
N
Thune, John (R-SD)
$1,035
Y
Lee, Mike (R-UT)
$1,000
N
Morrisey, Patrick (R-WV)
$1,000
not in Senate
Petersen, Austin (R-MO)
$1,000
not in Senate
Stewart, Corey (R-VA)
$1,000
not in Senate
Young, Bob (R-MI)
$1,000
not in Senate
Young, Todd (R-IN)
$1,000
Y
Udall, Tom (D-NM)
$707
N
Lindstrom, Beth (R-MA)
$700
not in Senate
Murray, Patty (D-WA)
$635
N
Mackler, James (D-TN)
$625
not in Senate
Merkley, Jeff (D-OR)
$555
N
Barletta, Lou (R-PA)
$500
not in Senate
Monetti, Tony (R-MO)
$500
not in Senate
Olszewski, Al (R-MT)
$500
not in Senate
Paul, Rand (R-KY)
$500
N
Faddis, Sam (R-MD)
$350
not in Senate
Paula Jean Swearengin (D-WV)
$263
not in Senate
Vukmir, Leah (R-WI)
$250
not in Senate
Wilson, Jenny (D-UT)
$250
not in Senate
Ross, Deborah (D-NC)
$205
not in Senate
Hildebrand, David (D-CA)
$100
not in Senate
Wyden, Ron (D-OR)
$75
N
Singer, James (D-UT)
$50
not in Senate
Schumer, Charles E (D-NY)
$16
N
Sbaih, Jesse (D-NV)
$5
not in Senate
Roberts, Pat (R-KS)
$-1,000
Y
Franken, Al (D-MN)
$-1,064
not in Senate
Kander, Jason (D-MO)
$-1,598
not in Senate
Edwards, Donna (D-MD)
$-2,700
not in Senate
Obviously one must look at numerous votes and other actions, and at bribes from previous years, and at the relative cost of running in each state, etc., but we do see here 51 of the 55 yes votes receiving weapons profits, and most of them near the top or middle of this list. And we see 42 of 44 no votes receiving weapons profits, and most of them near the middle or bottom of this list. Of the top 70 recipients, 43 voted yes. Of the bottom 20 recipients, 14 voted no.
A bigger factor would seem to be political party, since 45 of the 55 yes votes were Republican (plus 10 Democrats), and 37 of the 44 no votes were Democratic (plus 2 Independents and 5 Republicans). But this can hardly be separated from funding, as the amounts above are dwarfed by the money brought in and distributed to candidates by parties, with the “defense” profiteers giving the Republican party $1.2 million, and the Democratic Party $0.82 million. One can be very confident that neither party’s “leadership” privately asked its members to vote to end the war on Yemen. Publicly, the Republican party leadership urged a vote for continued genocide. If we look at party and money combined, we see that all of the Republicans who voted no are pretty low in the list, while the relevance of bribes is less clear with Democrats who voted yes. But a no vote as part of a majority — had such a thing happened — would have been unlikely to have pleased either party.
Then there’s the media problem. The Democratic Party-promoting MSNBC was silent, while NPR told its listeners that poor innocent Saudi Arabia was surrounded and under attack by the demonic Iran. The New York Times editorial board did better than its reporters. But if any coverage of the U.S. role in Yemen had made it onto television, then I would be able to find people when I travel around the United States who are aware that there is a war in Yemen. As it is, I can find few who can name any current U.S. wars. If Senator Sanders had opposed this war when he was running for president, instead of urging Saudi Arabia to spend more and get its blood-soaked hands dirty, progressives would have heard that — and I would have backed Sanders for president.
Or what if Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ACLU and other groups claiming to support human rights had helped oppose the war on Yemen? Or what if pundits stopped referring to such groups as human rights groups and called them, instead, Pro-U.S.-War/Human Rights groups? Would that have made a difference?
What about the rest of us? I work for two groups that tried: RootsAction.org and World Beyond War. So did many others. Many formed big coalitions to try to have a bigger impact. Could we have done more? Of course. What about people who didn’t sign anything, go to anything, phone or email any Senators? It’s hard to say that any of us have clean hands.
I happened to read a column on Wednesday that proposed that everyone cease honoring any former U.S. president who owned people as slaves. I’m all for it. But the same column proposed as a noble and honorable factor being a decorated and “successful” (German) soldier. This gives me pause in denouncing slave-owners as “monsters.” Of course slavery is monstrous and those who do it are responsible for it. Their statues should all come down and be replaced by worthy ones, including ones of slavery-abolitionists and civil-rights activists, ideally memorials for movements rather than individuals.
But what if we come someday to understand that war is monstrous? Then what should we make of war supporters, including columnists? And what am I to make of things I myself thought a decade or three ago and now no longer think? Isn’t there something a shade monstrous about praising war on the anniversary of the 2003 attack on Iraq and at the same moment that the U.S. Senate is voting to kill the (non-“white”) people of Yemen? And yet, isn’t such behavior found in a column opposing racism, written by an anti-racism activist the work of something other than a monster? Perhaps senators aren’t monsters either. Perhaps we can bring them around yet. We have to try.
Enquanto nunca importou que a Venezuela sofre boicote econômico e invasão de capangas colombianos devidamente pagos, atual tragédia brasilera traz contra si o fato de ter contado com amplo apoio popular desde as raízes, nanificado moralmente na ridícula “Ponte para o Futuro”. Mas em terras tupiniquins, cinismo ilimitado é sempre a ordem do dia
Não sem razão, não há páreo contra ele entre uma oposição, lá, semelhante à direita brasileira no que diz respeito à baixeza intelectual e moral, e à agressividade exagerada.
Enquanto isso, ao longo desse tempo todo foi impossível dialogar, tentar levar aos reacionários brasileiros uma outra narrativa envolvendo essa questão: a da artificialidade comprovada da crise econômica – não tão grave quanto se diz, mas uma crise, sim -, e de uma violência em grande parte programada, e completamente invertida pelos meios de comunicação – tanto quanto têm sido difundidas diversas imagens de supermercados vazios que não são venezuelanos, sendo um deles até nova-iorquino travestido pela mídia, sabidamente manipuladora, de venezuelano.
Diante do boicote econômico, por algum período chegou a faltar papel higiênico porém não em escala alardeada pela grande mídia: foi o suficiente para seres sequer capazes de localizar no mapa o país caribenho, apresentarem mais um festival da ignorância e do ódio, sem aceitação de nenhuma vírgula que fugisse do que lhes impõe meios como Rede Globo, Veja, Estadão etc.
Se quando, recentemente, faltou papel no Brasil por razoavemente longo perído a fim de se emitir passaportes este autor questionou esses setores da sociedade brasileira (calada), e agora que o Brasil, insatisfeito com as taxas anuais de 60 mil mortes violentas além da polícia mais violenta do mundo, tem ido além e assassinado semanalmente políticos como Marielle, a resposta que se recebe dos conservadores em geral é que se trata de “mais um(a), vítima da violência”, nada mais que isso. Indiferença com o objetivo claro de se “deixar passar…”. Por quê?
Enfim, acusavam e acusam equivocadamente a Venezuela de viver sob ditadura, algo não dito por todo o país caribenho sequer entre cidadãos que não votam no PSUV, enquanto advogam para dentro de casa (Brasil).. exatamente um regime ditatorial! Isso vai muito além da contradição: é idiotice ou até mesmo problema patológico de alto grau, enquanto acusa (equivocadamente e sem margem ao contraditório) o outro, daquilo que aprova para si. Há algo mais enfermante?
Nem a oposição venezuelana, fundamentada em acusações mentirosas, acusa Maduro e Chávez de abusarem do erário e de casos de corrupção diversos, a não ser alguns factóides sem nenhum sentido que acabaram se perdendo nas próprias contradições e boatos. Se entre opositores comuns, não-eleitores do PSUV por toda a Venezuela costumam negar que se vive ditadura quando perguntados – “a liberdade é tanta ue chega a ser até libertinagem”, chegou a ouvir este autor -, entre eleitores bolivarianos é muito comum chorar de emoção ao se referir à Revolução Bolivariana, como pode ser visto nesta série de videoentrevistas.
Que dizer, pois, do Planalto e Congresso brasileiros nestes sentidos, corrupção e excesso de arbitrariedades? Vale ressaltar que esta pergunta, como todas as demais, não são direcionadas a cidadãos venezuelanos, em geral não entremetidos em assuntos alheios a fim de não ferir soberanias nacionais, mas a brasileiros alegadamente incomodados com ditadura, corruppção, violência e falta de dinheiro no bolso… do outro. Ainda que um outro ilustremente deconhecido – e nem se queira conhecê-lo bem. Que dizer, pois, deste Brasil de hoje entregue às dessa gente – Temer, MBL, Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Maia, João Doria “gestor, não político”, Alckmin -, escolhida a dedo pela mídia e por grande parte da sociedade?
Há sete dias da morte da Marielle no Rio, em uma missa de “Ipanema” o padre tentou lembrar e rezar por esta que foi brutalmente assassinada, tendo sido interrompido e xingado por dois “católicos” que tiveram que ser retirados por seguranças do encontro de “paz” e “oração”.
Aliás, e se seguranças não tivessem retirado nossos “democráticos” reaas tupiniquins da missa da riquíssima Ipanema, teriam agredido fisicamente ou até mesmo assassinado o sacerdote? Neste caso, tampouco mereceria a indignação do setor brasileiro em questão,pois seria algo que confrontaria suas patologias e interesses, certamente.
Além da severa crise econômica, e crescente (o buraco será ainda mais fundo) pós-Ponte para o Futuro de Temer e das classes média e alta cujoo presidente da República, com meia dúzia de palavras de péssimo gosto capazes de enganar apenas um perfeito ignorante, nunca aceitou contra-argumentação de que, inevitavelemente, dar-se-ia com os burros n’água como todos sentimos diariamente no bolso e na geladeira de nossas casas. E nas próprias ruas, cada vez mais violentas.
Até porque, atualmente, mesmo organismos como FMI condenam políticas econômicas neoliberais, que andam na contra-mão das políticas da grande maioria dos governos internacionais, baseadas em invetimentos sociais, em maior ou menor grau dependendo de cada caso, para sair da crise: tomemos como exemplo de rotundo fracasso das mesmas políticas adotadas pela marionete Temer hoje, nos casos de Espanha, Portugal e Grécia – além de uma breve espiadinha na própria história do século XX.
Contudo, essa discussão toda sem dúvidas foge das habilidades dos nervosos miolos dos teólogos do livre-mercado irrestrito, outros tantos milhões de fantoches nas mãos da mídia predominante deste país – este setor sequer se interessa por isso… Folha de S. Paulo, Silvio Santos, Rede Record etc, são extremamente eficientes na arte de alienar (= emburrecer) as massas.
Na elitizada Santa Catarina brasileira (não por acaso, o estado em que menos se lê no Sul-Sudeste nacional), este jornalista tentou argumentar isso mesmo, que a imoral Ponte para o Futuro seria um rotundo fracasso – em 2016 já dizia que este 2018 seria o pior ano da história do Brasil -, e terminou ameaçado de agressão para, semanas depois, acabar agredido verbal e fisicamente na mesma época em que capas da revista Caros Amigos, para a qual este comunicador escrevia à época, eram atacadas diariamente nas bancas de jornal da cidade de São Paulo, em julho do ano passado.
Tudo isso, para nem mencionar a corrupção indiscriminada, encrustrada na política brasileira a qual, até antes de ontem, era motivo do profundamente histérico berreiro entre brazucas mais “moralistas”… hoje substituído por coisas como vídeos de Ronald Golias nas redes sociais (exatamente como se deu nas primeiras horas pós-assassinato da Marielle por este setor doentio), e nenhuma manifestação popular desde que esta cumpriu, em 2013 e 2016, a agenda claramente politiqueira.
Pois não é que o Brasil tornou-se a “Venezuela” do imagináio midiático e reacionário tupiniquim?
A diferença é que se na Venezuela o grosso da população, cerca de 90% constantemente se opõe ao jogo violento da direita e à sua (falta de) proposta econômica ao país, enquanto no Brasil desavergonhado essa tragédia tem se dado exatamente sob a Presidência de um fantoche conclamado pelo segmento reacionário nacional – a autoconsiderada “nata intelectual e moral”, elite econômica e nada mais que isso incapaz de algo mais que escolher a marca do papel higiêncio, por falar nisso -, e todo esse cenário tem também o apoio, ou ao menos a cumplicidade, de uma das sociedades mais ignorantes do planeta.
Outra gritante diferença é que a violência de Roraima para baixo, até o Rio Grande do Sul, em enorme medida possui raízes na incompetência local, sobretudo na repressão estatal histericamente defendidas pelas classes dominantes.
E agora, onde está a indignação contra o próprio umbigo? O pedestal imaginário era hiperdimensionado para si mesmo, de maneira que agora não há condição de se fazer auto-crítica neste sentido.
É estranho que durante todos esses anos tenha-se apontado canhões tão agressivos contra um país que, repita-se, o grosso dessa gente mal sabe localizar em um mapa, nação pela qual nunca se houve o menor interesse anteriormente, enquanto essa mesma gente esteja, agora, em silêncio diante do que o Brasil acabou sendo transformado – e transformado por eles mesmos, os quais sabem bem disso.
Sociedade que, em geral, insiste em não tomar lições da história – e bem antes da Venezuela, muitos sequer são capazes de localizar no mapa nacional a própria capital Brasília. Alguma dúvida?
Exactly four years ago, the United States and its allies were bitterly rebuked by Vladimir Putin when he said, “They have cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our backs, presenting us with completed facts”. The Russian president’s comments were accurate, which one can presume is why the remarks were so universally derided in the West.
Putin had been defending his March 2014 reintegration of the Crimea to Russia. The peninsula had been part of Russian territory from 1783 to 1917, then later under the sphere of the USSR for seven decades. The Crimea’s reunification to Russia was a direct response to the American-led toppling of a democratic government in the Ukraine, a country along Russia’s border.
Russia had a far stronger case to incorporate the Crimea than America had, for example, in its seizure of Guantanamo from Cuba in 1903. Following the 1959 Cuban revolution, which deposed the US-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, repeated demands for Guantanamo’s return have been rejected.
The US has no discernible right to continue holding Guantanamo, except through use of its unmatched force. There are no historical or social connections between the area that contains one of Cuba’s major ports, and the superpower to the north.
Detainees upon arrival at Camp X-Ray, January 2002 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
What’s more, at the Guantanamo military prison, opened by George W. Bush in 2002, the US has overseen some of the worst human rights violations in the Western hemisphere.
Scratch the surface and other things become apparent. American control over Guantanamo, which is on Cuba’s south coast, hampers the island’s development. It further allows the US easy access not just to the Caribbean Sea, but also to the North Atlantic Ocean, with its huge riches.
Unlike Guantanamo’s non-relationship to the US, the Crimea has extensive historical ties to Russia, including significant local support and cultural links. During the middle of World War II, many thousands of Russian soldiers gave up their lives defending the Crimea’s largest city, Sevastopol, from a huge Nazi-led onslaught (Siege of Sevastopol, October 1941-July 1942). The city was later retaken by the Red Army during the spring 1944 Crimean offensive.
Over three quarters of Crimeans speak Russian as their native language, and were largely supportive of the peninsula’s return to Russian territory. Little of this is part of Western accounts, however. The French minister of defense at the time, Jean-Yves Le Drian, condemned the 2014 Crimea takeover by saying that,
“Challenging borders by force is contrary to international law”.
France had previously been a long-time imperial power.
Between 1954 and 1962, for example, over a million Algerians were killed by France during the north African country’s war of independence. Algerian nationalists were attempting to at last rid themselves of a French colonial empire that took control in 1830.
Meanwhile, when Russia reintegrates a past territory (the Crimea) to its control, which saw three people lose their lives, it counts as a major international crime in the Western playbook. When the US and its NATO allies invade Iraq or Libya, killing countless thousands, the consequences are quickly consigned to history.
Continuing his attack on the West, Putin further denounced the US-led “expansion of NATO in the east, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing, ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you’.”
NATO enlargement has indeed moved to Russia’s borders: Latvia and Estonia, both situated along Russia’s frontiers, joined NATO in 2004. The northern section of Estonia’s border is less than a hundred miles from St Petersburg, one of Russia’s landmark cities.
Putin’s assertion that the West has “cheated us again and again”, may refer partly to president Mikhail Gorbachev‘s generous concession as the USSR was collapsing. In 1990, Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to join NATO. In return, he was given verbal guarantees by president George Bush senior, and his Secretary of State James Baker, that NATO would not move “as much as a thumb’s width further to the east”, in other words onto East Germany.
Immediately, Bush violated his word by expanding NATO to Germany’s eastern half – explaining to an irate Gorbachev that the agreement was only a spoken one, and not written on paper. In 1999, Bill Clinton accelerated NATO membership with the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, all former members of the USSR-led Warsaw Pact.
Clinton undertook such policies despite repeated warnings from the likes of George Kennan (image on the right), one of the most highly regarded of America’s post-World War II strategic planners.
In 1998 Kennan, who had always opposed NATO’s existence, described the organization’s impending further expansion as “the beginning of a new Cold War… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves”.
A former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kennan also lamented the West’s lack of “understanding of Russian history and Soviet history”. Russia has indeed something of a troubled past. The country was not only invaded by Adolf Hitler, in the early 1940s – but over a century before Napoleon Bonaparte had attacked Russia too, even capturing a burnt out Moscow in September 1812. A century later, during the First World War, Russia had also suffered major damage at the hands of the Imperial German Army.
Kennan himself would live to see president Bush add a further seven countries to NATO in 2004 – the aforementioned Estonia and Latvia, but also Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. All except one of these nations (Slovenia) were former members of NATO’s old rival, the Warsaw Pact.
Indeed, the official pretext for NATO’s existence, to counter Soviet influence, had ended with the USSR’s demise in the early 1990s. Regardless, over the past two decades NATO has repeatedly expanded, proving again how little can be believed of Western government assurances.
NATO further performs the function of an intervention force under the guidance of US command. This can be seen with NATO’s illegal bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (including the killing of journalists), and later murderous attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.
NATO has been attempting to provoke and intimidate Russia for years, in doing so posing a global security threat. In November 1983, during the late Cold War era, NATO conducted aggressive military exercises designed to penetrate Russia’s defenses – mimicking naval and air attacks, and even a nuclear alert.
According to Israeli historian Dmitry Adamsky, these maneuvers “almost became a prelude to a preventative [Russian] nuclear strike” that was “the moment of maximum danger of the late Cold War”. This was more serious than historians had previously believed, with the NATO actions already coming at a time of major tension.
In December 1983, fulfilling a promise from months before, the Reagan administration began deploying 16,000 pound Pershing II ballistic missiles to West Germany – which sparked major protests in the US and Europe, mostly organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Over a million people poured into the streets of West Germany to remonstrate against the missiles’ impending installment, the largest such gathering recorded in postwar Germany.
President Ronald Reagan had recently announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), a ballistic missile system, which coincided with his denouncement of the USSR as “the evil empire” in March 1983. Any such missile “defense” systems were interpreted on all sides as a first-strike weapon, in reality an attack system. All of these actions caused serious concern in Russia, which was vulnerable and lacked the security enjoyed by the US.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. Shane is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Israel has been brilliant over the years in shaping and misdirecting the public discourse on the future of Palestine. Among its earliest achievement along these lines was the crucial propaganda victory by having the 1948 War known internationally as the ‘War of Independence.’ Such a designation erases the Palestinians from political consciousness, and distorts the deeper human and political consequences of the war. Language matters, especially in vital circumstances where there are winners and losers, a reality that applies above all to a war of displacement.
It took decades for the Palestinians to elevate their experience of the 1948 war to even the consciousness of those on an international level who supported the Palestinian national struggle for self-determination. Even now more than 50 years after the war, the ‘Nakba’ by which the 1948 war is known to Palestinians remains internationally obscure. The word signifies ‘catastrophe,’ which is associated principally with the dispossession of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of Palestine, what became the state of Israel after 1948, and subsequently, with the denial by Israel of any right of return for those Palestinians who abandoned their homes and villages out of fear or as a result of Israeli coercion. This double process of dispossession and erasure was reinforced powerfully by the bulldozing and utter destruction of 400-600 Palestinian villages in the new state of Israel.
Even those who have this revisionist awareness rarely convey a sense of the Nakba as a process, not just a calamitous event. For those Palestinians dispossessed of home, property, community, employment, and dignity, their life, that of their families, and that of subsequent generations has been generally ‘a living hell’ as a consequence of either enduring the misery and humiliation of long-term residence in refugee camps or experiencing the various vulnerabilities and rootlessness of involuntary and permanent exile. In other words, the tragedy of the Nakba began and did not end with the traumas of dispossession, but rather continued in the ordeals that followed, which must be considered as inseparable from the originating catastrophe.
The UN Partition Resolution
For many reflective Palestinians, the decades since 1948 have intensified the ordeal that followed from the struggle for control of territory and elemental rights that followed from GA Resolution 181 adopted by a vote of 33-13 (with ten abstentions, one absent), in November 29, 1947. The Israeli mastery of the public international discourse was expressed by dramatizing the Zionist acceptance (as represented by the Jewish Agency for Palestine) of the proposed partition of historic Palestine while the Palestinians, their Arab neighbors, as well as India and Pakistan, rejected it declaring above all that partition without the consent of the inhabitants of Palestine was a flagrant violation of the UN Charter promise of the right of self-determination, entailing peoples choosing their own political destiny.
This clash of attitudes was then interpreted in the West as demonstrating the reasonableness of the Zionist approach to the complexities associated with two contradictory claims of right regarding self-determination and territorial sovereignty. The Zionist/Israeli spin claimed a readiness to resolve the conflict by way of political compromise while contrasting and denigrating the Palestinian approach to the future of the country as exclusivist and rejectionist, even as genocidal, implying an alleged Arab resolve to throw Jews into the sea, a contention that naturally agitated an extremely sensitive post-Holocaust Western liberal political consciousness. A more objective rendering of the opposed viewpoints of the two sides supports a set of conclusions almost totally the opposite of what has been sold to the world by an Israeli narrative of the UN partition initiative and its aftermath that despite these contrary considerations remains dominant.
After an understandable initial Palestinian reflex to repel Jewish intruders intent on occupying and dividing their homeland of centuries, it has been the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have been proposing a comprensive compromise and it is the Israelis who, by and large, subscribe to the view that the Jewish ‘promised land’ incorporates the West Bank and the unified city of Jerusalem, and any dilution of these goals would be a fundamental betrayal of the Zionist project to restore fully a mythic ‘biblical Israel’ in the form of a sovereign state. The more ideological Israelis, including Menachem Begin, (commander of the Zvai Leumi Irgun, 6th prime minister of Israel, 1977-83) were outspoken critics of partition in 1947, anticipating correctly that it would produce violence, and believing that Israel would only achieve its security and complete the Zionist Project by engaging in military operations with the object of territorial expansion. David Ben-Gurion, the master Zionist tactician and the first and foremost Israeli leader, shared Begin’s skepticism about partition, but favored it for pragmatic reasons as a step toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project, but not the end of it. Partition was provisional, to be followed by seeking to complete the Zionist agenda, which is precisely what unfolded ever since 1947.
Partition was a familiar British colonial tactic that complemented their ‘divide and rule’ strategy of occupation was proposed for Palestine as early as 1937 in the report of the Peel Commission, but in view of the desire for Arab cooperation in World War II, the UK uncharacteristically backed away from their advocacy of partition for Palestine. In a later white paper the British declared partition to be ‘impractical’ as applied to Palestine, and somewhat surprisingly abstained from the vote on GA Res. 181.
Prolonging the Palestinian Ordeal
At least since the PLO decision in 1988 to accept Israel as a legitimate state and offer normalization of relations if Israel followed the prescriptive provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 242, that is, withdrawing to the 1967 green line borders and agreeing on arrangements for an effective resolution of the refugee issue. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 added regional inducements to the PLO offer of political compromise, and this too was met by Israeli silence and a lackluster response in the West. The Oslo diplomacy was a one-sided failure. It never produced proposals on the disputed issues in ways that contained any reasonable prospect of bringing the conflict to a sustainable end while allowing Israel valuable time to keep expanding their network of unlawful settlements, a form of creeping annexation that served, as well, to make the two-state mantra more and more of a cruel chimera, useful to pacify international public opinion that sought a sustainable peace for both peoples and an end to the conflict..
More objectively considered, these dual reactions to the partition solution can be deconstructed. The Zionist movement at every stage took what it could get, and then went about creating conditions on the ground and diplomatically for getting more, by expanding their political demands and expectations, or as sometimes observed, ‘shifting the goalposts.’ Reliance on such ‘salami tactics’ can be traced back at least as far as the Balfour Declaration when Zionists accepted the terminology of ’national home’ despite their aspirations from the outset to establish a Jewish state that disregarded Palestinian moral, legal, and political rights. Recent archival research has made it increasingly clear that the real Zionist goal all along was the imagined Israel of biblical tradition, ‘the promised land’ that deemed to encompass all of the city of Jerusalem, as well as the area known internationally as ‘the West Bank’ and in Israel as ‘Judea and Samaria.’
And with respect to the Palestinian response, initially ardently supported by the entire Arab world, as well as most countries with majority Muslim populations, rejection of the UN approach was based on the extent to which partition bisected Palestine without any process of consent by, or even consultation with, the majority resident population. It was an arrogant effort by the UN, then under Western control, to dictate a solution that was not sensitive to Palestinian concerns or in keeping with the spirit or letter of its own Charter. To treat Palestinian rejection of GA Res. 181 as indicative of anti-Semitism or even rejectionism is to accept an explanation of the disastrous legacy of partition that conforms to the Israeli narrative that misses the real dynamic at work that has kept the conflict alive all these decades. To this day Israel continues to create conditions that diminish Palestinian prospects while subtly depicting the Zionist Project as in reasonable pursuit of previously undisclosed ambitions with greater clarity.
This leads to the central question that also includes reasons why the Israelis did also not want partition, but felt correctly that its provisional and temporary acceptance was a way of gaining more political space both for maneuvering and for showing the world its reasonable face that included a commitment to peace. In contract, the Palestinians felt shut out and humiliated by the way the future of their society was treated by the UN and the West, and yet didn’t want to alienate the international community, especially Washington. This kind of attitude meant lending credence to the 1993 Oslo Framework of Principles, and acting as if the ‘peace process’ had something to do with ‘peace.’ This accommodationist mode of diplomacy practiced by the Palestinian Authority over the course of the last 25 years while Israel annexed and Judaized East Jerusalem and penetrated more and deeply into the West Bank created the impression in many circles, including Palestinian and others, that the Palestinian Authority was not nearly rejectionist enough, and either naively playing a losing hand or completely failing to understand the real Zionist game plan.
‘The Partition War’
To circle back to the contention that language is itself a site of struggle, it become desirable, even now, more than 70 years later, to call the 1948 War by a name that reveals more clearly its essential and flawed character, and this name is The Partition War. Only by such a linguistic move can we begin to understand the extent to which the international community, as embodied in the UN, was guilty of original sin with respect to the Palestinian people, and their natural rights, as well as their legal entitlements and reasonable political expectations. Endorsing the partition of Palestine was what I would describe as a ‘geopolitical crime.’
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Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Coming March 26, 2018 Saudi Arabia will have been at war with impoverished Yemen for a punitive 3 years.
Three years of an implacable and murderous military campaign that witnessed the death of over 15,000 people – of which mostly unarmed civilians; saw the destruction of civilian infrastructures to the point where Yemen’s health and sanitation systems have all but collapsed; and architected a humanitarian blockade that led to a grand famine and the spread of diseases.
Yemen’s 26 million people are in a race against time for powers greater and richer than their own seek to impose their will, and their design onto a nation whose only ambition has been to stand free, sovereign and independent.
Yemen has become a terrible statistic – one of death, misery, hopelessness and devastation.
Yemen one would argue exists beyond all manners of contention … when an entire nation sits on the verge of famine, plagued by pestilence, it skies darkened by warplanes, politics quickly becomes irrelevant. And yet, politics we have been told has demanded that more violence still be spent on a people whose lives are but hanging by a thin thread.
When the infamous 1 percent discharges lead and chemicals onto the weakest of the weak, one wonders what point exactly that 1 percent is trying to impress on those it labelled as enemies beside absolute devastation. It seems western liberalism has found its match in the towering ambition of Saudi Arabia’s reactionary theocracy.
For western capitals to argue in the one breath human rights, democracy-building and nation-wasting by military desolation is a paradox we have all learn to dissociate from.
But guilt cannot be rationalised by arguing sociopolitical cognitive dissonance – not if we consider the implications of our disinterest. When hunger becomes a reasonable asymmetrical weapon of war, and political self-determination the privilege of an elite, we might as well consider hanging Democracy and Civil Liberties on the public square and be done with it.
What value can we put on Freedom if we are not committed to it on principle?
If controversy indeed exists, it has more to do with survival than political preferences, or even ideological inclinations. Political debates have become a luxury Yemenis have lost all taste for … it is death after all which has breached the sanctity of their homes.
Death still, that threatens to steal the very future a people once imagined to be its own to formulate.
Yemen’s war, if once a complicated affair of overlapping and contradictory ambitions, has been reduced to a very simple reality indeed. Millions stand to die … No! millions will die unless war is brought to an end.
The only question left to ask really is: how long before we intervene in favour of peace? If yesterday should have been our first choice, several tomorrows away will do little by way of assuaging our collective guilt.
World Health Organization established that of the 1 million people affected by cholera 600,000 are children.
When it comes to Yemen numbers and statistics are euphemisms hiding an unpalatable reality.
And so it goes: over 2 million children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and will not live to see their next birthday, 100,000s have been made homeless, over 15,000 have been killed, 10,000s have been injured with no hope of adequate medical care and millions of civilians are awaiting death by starvation, diseases or war.
“The situation in Yemen – today, right now, to the population of the country – looks like the apocalypse,” Mark Lowcock, the head of the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told media in early 2018.
To put it bluntly we all have been lied to. Yemen’s war is not a military exercise aiming to restore constitutional legitimacy; civilian casualties are not involuntary victims of war – they are the targets.
Saudi Arabia we ought to learn is not at war with Yemen but rather its people. Saudi Arabia in all its theocratic might intends to make Yemenis bow to its will just as if they were its subjects.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia you see is not like any other … the kingdom is a breathing institutional anachronism which firmly belongs to the past. Unless of course we regard feudal tribalism and theocratic absolutism as desirable traits in a system of governance. Don’t answer that …
Peace we have been told is a complicated affair … Let’s not reinvent the wheel shall we and let’s begin where it mostly hurts – rather literally in fact.
Let’s start with the proverbial elephant in the room and call for our glorious and liberal western democracies to call back their hounds and stop all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia.
If the kingdom had less lead to dispense maybe Yemen would have enough of a breath left in its beaten and starved body to formulate a peace plan.
Peace is really not THAT complicated! But it will certainly cost war profiteers millions of dollars in lost revenues.
For weapons to be laid down and guns to be silenced, weapon sales need to be halted.
If indeed it would be folly to consider arming criminals in our streets for it would put the innocent in harm’s way, then it stands to reason to refrain from arming those who have no qualms targeting women and children to score military points.
Most western nations, might it be Canada, the United Nations, France or even Germany prohibit the sale of arms to countries with a persistent record of serious human rights violations or war crimes.
And yet those same governments have sanctioned the sale of weapons of war to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – a country which holds an abysmal human rights track record, and proved feral in its military ways.
The onus is now on those governments to abide by their respective rule of law and hold those principles they say to represent and carry.
If the old adage still holds that:He who kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed the whole of humanity … what should we say of silence?
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Catherine Shakdam is the Director of Programs of the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies and a political analyst specializing in radical movements, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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.
It has been three years since the Saudi-led coalition began its brutal bombardment of Yemen.
The situation has been described by UN agencies as ‘the worst humanitarian crisis in the world’ with over 22 million people in need of assistance. The last year has seen the humanitarian catastrophe getting worse: Save the Children estimates that 50,000 children died in 2017 alone as a result of the crisis.
Despite this, the Saudi military is the world’s largest buyer of UK arms. The UK has licensed over £4.6 billion of UK arms in the three years since the bombing campaign began. These include:
£2.7 billion worth of ML10 licences (Aircraft, helicopters, drones)
£1.9 billion worth of ML4 licences (Grenades, bombs, missiles, countermeasures)
Earlier this month, the Ministry of Defence announced that it was close to confirming a new deal to sell the regime 48 more Typhoon jets. This followed a controversial visit by the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, who was met outside Downing Street with large protests.
Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said:
“Yemen has endured three years of destruction, but the arms sales haven’t stopped. The war is entering its fourth year, and the humanitarian crisis is only getting worse.
Theresa May and her colleagues must end their shameful complicity in the destruction. If the government wants to do the right thing for the people of Yemen then it must stop arming and supporting the brutal Saudi regime.”
A recent poll by Populus for Campaign Against Arms Trade found that only 6% of UK adults support arms sales to the Saudi regime.
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.
About 5,500 members of Faylaq ar-Rahman and their family members left the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta on March 25 and were taken to the Idlib province, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The militants left the settlement of Ebreen was carried out under the agreement between the group’s leaders and the Syrian government with help of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Warring Parties in Syria.
“Some 5,453 militants and their family members were evacuated via a humanitarian corridor on March 25 in 81 buses to the Idlib province,” the Russian military said.
In total, 6,441 militants and their family members have been evacuated from Ebreen to Idlib.
Separately, 4,979 militants [Ahrar al-Sham members] and their family members were evacuated from the area of Harasta to Idlib on March 25.
The Russian military added that a total of 103,606 people have been evacuated from Eastern Ghouta with the assistance of the Russian reconciliation center since the implementation of the daily humanitarian pause in Eastern Ghouta.
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Featured image is from Farsnews.
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Search engine and advertising monolith Google continued to press its offensive against alternative media this week with an announcement unveiling a new $300 million project called the Google News Initiative.
The initiative encompasses a range of new projects announced by the tech giant, which has long been accused of enjoying a monopoly position and of siphoning off digital advertising revenue from traditional news publishers.
Google sees it differently, however, and asserted in a press statement announcing the initiative that it “paid $12.6 billion to partners” while driving “10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.” The company is now promising to continue working “with publishers to elevate accurate, quality content and stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation.”
The move will likely drive the stake further into the heart of independent media while merging Silicon Valley with mainstream publishers traded on Wall Street and aligned with the agendas of beltway politicians in Washington.
Marginalizing dissident voices en masse
According to Google:
The commitments we’re making through the Google News Initiative demonstrate that news and quality journalism is [sic] a top priority for Google. We know that success can only be achieved by working together, and we look forward to collaborating with the news industry to build a stronger future for journalism.”
Launched in a partnership with a range of traditional corporate media giants – including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Financial Times, and U.S. newspaper giant Gannett – the project promises to combat so-called “fake news” and misinformation. Many reasonably fear, based on recent trends, that this will mean the further marginalization of non-hegemonic left-wing and conservative media — as well as a sort of “death by algorithm” for already-struggling publishers who once flourished, prior to the hysteria over alleged “Russian interference” and propaganda in the 2016 elections.
The initiative will include a new lab to analyze and parse out what is deemed “mis- and disinformation during elections and breaking news moments;” a fact-checking partnership with Stanford University and corporate media non-profit groups like the Local Media Association and the Poynter Institute; and a new service meant to expedite reader subscriptions to pay-gated news websites, among other new projects.
In the past decade, companies that enjoyed a monopoly in the U.S. media market — such as Gannett, Hearst, and The Times — saw their readership base, as well as the advertising revenue on which they depend, largely evaporate in the face of the rise in online news outlets. Such new competition included state-funded broadcasters like Al-Jazeera, PressTV and RT, as well as dissident voices at smaller news sites offering original journalism, like MintPress News, Truthout, Monthly Review, the World Socialist Website, and a range of alternative and volunteer-based journalism outfits across the globe.
Last April, Google clamped down on alternative media with new structural changes to its algorithms — accompanying the change with an announcement tarring alternative media with the broad black brush of “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories” as opposed to what it called “authoritative content.”
As a result, organic search-engine traffic to these sites uniformly plummeted to less than half of what it had previously been, devastating many publishers.
Staving off regulation
Google parent company, Alphabet Inc., has seen its stock dive this week amid a broader selloff of tech stocks resulting from the Cambridge Analytica controversy embroiling Facebook.
While former Google and Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt once argued that “policymakers should work with the grain of the internet rather than against it [and] allow innovation to flourish,” tech platforms have faced mounting pressure from governments across the globe, which are constant threats to step in and regulate the lawlessness that once reigned across the world wide web.
Indeed, companies from the same corporate-media roster with which Google is now partnering have been leading the charge calling for regulation, arguing that the tech giant failed to protect users from alleged abuse in the form of false information spread by Russian operatives.
By last November, Schmidt was already caving in to pressure on the company resulting from the hue and cry over “Kremlin meddling” in the U.S. electoral process.
Arguing that he was opposed to censorship, the Google leader nonetheless announced that the company would begin to purposefully reduce the presence of “misinformation” sites, like Russian government-owned Sputnik and RT, on Google News by “deranking” the sites in news search results and “trying to engineer the systems” to prevent the classification of “propaganda” as legitimate news.
Facebook, which is witnessing a PR meltdown after the revelation that it allowed the data of 50 million users to be misused by right-wing political operatives, is also undertaking measures to prioritize content from mainstream outlets like The Times while using the fact-checking services of corporate nonprofits and wire agencies like Associated Press.
An algorithmic gag to silence the people
As the share prices of corporate media outlets and Silicon Valley alike begin to tumble and the rise of anti-systemic social movements, anti-capitalist perspectives and opposition voices continues unabated, it’s become a matter of consensus for politicians, billionaire tech geeks and media moguls alike that the internet must be policed in a stricter manner.
The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”
This new model overwhelmingly favors those who see information and journalism as an article of commerce alone. It poses a stark threat not only to internet users’ ability to access information, but to the ability of citizens and social movements that hope to interact with, participate in, and wield influence over the political and economic activities that determine our lives and the fate of communities across the world.
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Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and the state’s Central Coast.
Featured image: Kestrel. Attracting birds and bats to farms and orchards help reduce pests and increase yields. (Credit: Megan Shave)
Farmers around the world are turning to nature to help them reduce pesticide use, environmental impact and, subsequently, and in some cases, increasing yields.
Specifically, they’re attracting birds and other vertebrates, which keep pests and other invasive species away from their crops. The study, led by Michigan State University and appearing in the current issue of the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, showcases some of the best global examples.
“Our review of research shows that vertebrates consume numerous crop pests and reduce crop damage, which is a key ecosystem service,” said Catherine Lindell, MSU integrative biologist who led the study. “These pest-consuming vertebrates can be attracted to agricultural areas through several landscape enhancements.”
For example, Lindell and graduate student Megan Shave led earlier research to bring more American kestrels to Michigan orchards. Installing nest boxes attracted the small falcons, the most-common predatory bird in the U.S., to cherry orchards and blueberry fields. The feathered hunters consume many species that cause damage to crops, including grasshoppers, rodents and European starlings. In cherry orchards, kestrels significantly reduced the abundance of birds that eat fruit. (Results from blueberry fields are pending.)
In Indonesia, birds and bats provide multi-million pest-prevention services. This isn’t anecdotal, either. Indonesian cacao plantations have documented 290 pounds per acre increased yields — equaling nearly $300 per acre — from having birds and bats in their fields.
In Jamaica, birds eating a nuisance coffee pest saved an estimated $18 to $126 per acre annually. In Spain, constructing roosts near rice paddies increased bat population and reduced local pests.
In New Zealand, grape growers were able to, ahem, kill many birds with a single stone. The New Zealand falcon, the country’s sole falcon species, is at risk. Grape growers helped reestablish the birds in lowland grape-growing regions. By working with the Marlborough Falcon Trust, they’re helping conserve the declining population through education, advocacy and fundraising, while protecting their vineyards.
“These scientists have demonstrated a win-win situation for farmers and birds,” said Betsy Von Holle, a program director for the National Science Foundation Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program, which funded the research. “Increasing native predatory birds in agricultural areas can help control insect pests that damage crops, potentially reducing costly pesticide use.
For declining bird species, these efforts can increase the birds’ reproductive success while producing fruit crops attractive to consumers.”
The next steps for Lindell and other scientists are to hone in on the best practices and better measure the overall impact of specific improvements. Nest boxes, perches and making landscape enhancements that attract vertebrates work better than attracting birds through providing food resources. However, can these initiatives be scaled up for commercial farming? What’s the human cost?
“Addressing these questions will increase understanding of the interactions of vertebrate predators and their prey, the ways in which these interactions provide ecosystem services and the roles of humans in protecting and encouraging these interactions,” Lindell said. “Now that we’ve bundled these studies, we really need to set a research agenda to quantify best practices and make the results accessible to key stakeholders, such as farmers and environmentalists.
“My hope is that there’s broad interest in this,” she added.
“There’s a strong economic aspect to this as well. In our next paper, we will share the results on how these investments can improve Michigan’s gross domestic product as well as affect job creation.”
Following the February 14, 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman High School a seemingly spontaneous student movement against gun control emerged from Broward County Florida. The students involved in this movement received widespread coverage via major US media outlets. A March 14 “National School Walkout” received national news coverage as school districts across the US effectively compelled their student constituencies to demonstrate for gun control. None of the overwhelmingly positive reportage hinted at the fact that this “movement” has been cultivated and steered by the highest ranking Democratic Party operatives.
On March 21 independent journalist Laura Loomer obtained further confirmation of the astro-turf roots of “Parkland Strong” when leaked audio of a meeting emerged where Broward public school teacher Laura Miller can be heard jovially coaching MarchForOurLives student participants on Democratic Party gun control “talking points”, planned secret meetings with Democratic Party leaders Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, encouraging the students to “raise hell” with President Donald Trump.
As this author noted weeks ago, from the start the allegedly spontaneous student movement that arose shortly after the tragic Parkland shooting appeared to be influenced by powerful Democratic Party operatives, including Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, in addition to lower-ranking Dems like Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who advocated for gun control in a February 22 “Town Hall” event televised by CNN.
I am closely monitoring the developing situation at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. The victims are weighing heavy in my heart as is the courage of the first responders on the scene. This senseless violence must end.
Loomer’s story reveals how a public school district and their employees are directly involved in coaching their students to partake in political lobbying and public demonstrations for one of the Democratic Party’s foremost campaign issues. Parents entrust their children to teachers who are expected to have expertise in their fields. Parents further expect all educators to be role models for their children.
With the above in mind the revelation of a major school district and their teachers inculcating students with political beliefs and motivating them to advocate on policies they have limited understanding of constitutes a major scandal–indeed one that any competent journalist would recognize and report on as widely as her editors would allow.
Yet web searches reveal the exact opposite: a far-reaching blackout of Loomer’s March 21 story, the circulation of which was limited to the alternative news media, regularly disparaged as “fake news” by their mainstream commercial counterparts.
On the other hand, as of this writing there is an abundance of coverage on the March 24, 2018 “March For Our Lives” event coordinated by Democratic Party operatives and enthusiasts, including Broward County school teachers. [This article was first published prior to the March 24 March for Our Lives
Web searches conducted on March 24, 2018, 8:40AM EST
By blacking out Loomer’s bombshell story major US news media further prove their censorial nature and continued decline as mere functionaries carrying out promotional maneuvers that comport with their owners’ political projects and whims.
Such media simply cannot be trusted to report objectively on a variety of political issues. These include not only US foreign policy, but also domestic and public safety concerns involving terrorism and mass shootings.
How much more slaughter in Yemen is the United State government willing to help with?
We found out when State Department announced on March 23 the sale of 6,700 anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to discuss the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen on March 23 and the missile deal was announced a few hours later. The State Department notified Congress of the proposed sale which is a part of a $1 billion weapons sales deal.
The State Department on Thursday announced the sale of 6,700 anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia, hours after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to discuss the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen.
Coming almost three years to the day that Saudi Arabia, supported by the U.S., began a campaign of airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, the State Department ironically and sarcastically wrote:
“This proposed sale will support U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives by improving the security of a friendly country which has been, and continues to be, an important force for political stability and economic growth in the Middle East… and will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”
The U.S. increased its air strikes in Yemen in 2017 by having six times more airstrikes that in 2016.
Secretary of Defense Mattis was unconcerned about civilian casualties in Yemen:
“We have been working very hard with the new U.N. envoy to end the fight in Yemen. And we believe that Saudi Arabia is part of the solution. They have stood by the United Nations recognized government. And we are going to end this war. That’s the bottom line.”
The U.S. is not the only country whose weapons manufacturers are making a killing out of killing Yemeni kids. The U.K., France, Spain and Italy, have sold billions of dollars of weaponry to countries around the world, with Saudi Arabia being one of the biggest weapons purchaser.
A war powers resolution for Yemen that represented an attempt to insert congressional oversight into U.S. military operations in the deadly civil war there was defeated by a vote of 55-44 by the U.S. Senate on March 21. Co-sponsored by three members of the Senate — Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn), the resolution called for the end of the U.S. role in the war.
Under the proposed massive weapons sale, Saudi Arabia will buy 6,696 TOW 2B missiles and associated training materials worth $670 million; parts and repairs support worth $300 million for its Abrams tanks and fighting vehicles, and maintenance equipment worth $100 million for its fleet of AH-64D/E, UH-60L, Schweizer 333 and Bell 406CS helicopters.
Congress now has 30 days to block the whole or parts of the sale through a privileged resolution under the AECA.
To save the lives of innocent women and children in Yemen, let’s hope Congress says no more sales to Saudi Arabia.
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Ann Wright was in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a Colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to Bush’s war on Iraq and since then has been very active in anti-war and social justice issues. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”
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.
In the British Labour Party’s 2017 election manifesto, the pledges to abolish university tuition fees and reintroduce maintenance grants were widely seen as vote winners, but that was the extent of the party’s policy commitments toward the sector. Since the election, Labour has supported staff and students in challenging the yawning gap between highly-paid vice-chancellors and principals on the one hand, and part-time academic staff whose work is extremely insecure and poorly paid; and it has supported the industrial action that academic and administrative staff in UCU have taken in defence of their pension rights.
Important though these issues are, Labour’s policies need to be based on a much more comprehensive analysis of the problems in the sector, framed by the ways in which higher education fits in to our wider economy and society. In short, Labour needs a new strategy for higher education. In what follows, I set out key elements of such a strategy, looking in turn at:
the overall purpose of higher education (HE);
management control and the erosion of collegial culture;
growing differentials in pay and job security; and
the withering away of part-time and adult education in HE.
What is Higher Education For?
Ever since the 1963 Robbins Report, two principles have remained unchanged: making HE available to all who can benefit from it; and meeting the needs of the economy for skilled labour and knowledge. However, from the 1980s onwards these principles were pursued in the context of a renewed liberal economic philosophy, centred on individual achievement and national competitiveness. As a result, the expansion of student numbers came to be increasingly driven by the allure of a “graduate premium” in life-time earnings, while research was oriented toward improving UK competitiveness in an increasingly global economy, especially through closer links to the private and public sectors.
Labour’s policy through 1997-2010 continued in this vein. The government expanded HE participation toward 50% of the 18-24 age group, and sought to shape the patterns of teaching and research to the needs of the economy primarily through financial incentives. Since the crisis of 2008, there has been a radical acceleration in the role of money and markets, with a major shift in the funding of teaching from central government grants to student fees, and of research from public grants to commercial contracts.
Despite the undeniable successes of UK HE in conventional economic terms, the increasing role of markets has led to significant debate about the wider societal purpose of the sector. Critics have gone back to the concerns of Mill and Arnold (echoed by Robbins) – universities as bearers of public culture and core values, focused on improving the lives of all rather than the profits of the few. While such criticisms cut little ice with committed supporters of the free market model, there is now mounting evidence that they cannot ignore concerning the actual outcomes for students and society. The Economist reported recently1 that the size of the graduate premium has been widely overstated, and that degrees are often used mainly as a way of simplifying recruitment processes to jobs for which graduate skills are not really required. The report argues further that from the point of view of society, the actual premiums accruing to individual graduates are significantly offset by the loss of earnings among displaced non-graduates.
More broadly, universities need to address the ever-deepening educational divide in our society, which many believe has been a key factor in the rise of the new populism, both in the UK and across the developed world. As the research of Diane Reay and others has shown,2 HE remains a major factor in reproducing social inequalities of class, race and gender. In this view, universities should be genuinely universal, as educators of all and as repositories of knowledge for society as a whole.
Markets, Management and Metrics
We are all familiar with the central role of the privatisation of state enterprises in our economy since 1979, but equally important was the ‘new public management’ model which has transformed governance in those parts of the public sector which traditionally did not directly sell their services for money. The HE sector adopted this model in the 1990s, seeking to incentivise both teaching and research through performance measurement (initially Teaching Quality Assessment and the Research Assessment Exercise).
Already by 1997 Michael Power’s study The Audit Society showed how the ‘carrot-and-stick’ private-sector model of top-down management control had spread to the public sector, transforming the culture of an increasing range of organisations. In HE, this new model has seen a major shift in decision powers from academic staff to executive managers. While academics still take part in senior management, the methods and culture of governing bodies have increasingly been shaped by professional executives, partly as a result of the co-option of external members largely drawn from the private sector.
Put simply, the carrot-and-stick approach is based firmly on the assumption that subordinates are motivated solely by a calculus of individual effort and reward, seeking to maximise their financial gain in competition with all others. Such an approach is intrinsically dehumanising in any context, but with the complex nature of teaching and research outputs, relying on ‘metrics’ to assess performance is especially hard to justify.
This top-down and reductionist approach to management has been experienced by many HE staff as profoundly disempowering and oppressive. Both teaching and research are collective activities, motivated by the desire to understand the world and to transform it for the better, rather than by money. The traditional culture of ‘collegiality’ could indeed conceal inefficiencies, but trust and mutual aid were nurtured within it, and these have been greatly eroded.
Labour’s HE strategy should promote governance processes and cultures that build effective management upon a renewal of collegiality and democratic participation.3 Some degree of protection from both immediate market forces and top-down managerial control should be part of this.
The Effects of Financial Uncertainty On Pay and Conditions of Employment
Following the 2011 Higher Education White Paper, the Coalition government introduced major changes in the financing of HE and in the regulation of student numbers.4 The shift from block grants to student fees for meeting the costs of teaching, coupled with the removal of caps on recruitment, appeared to ‘free’ providers from direct state control, and instead subordinate them to market competition. This was intended to lead to more diverse provision, with a wide range of fee levels and a greater responsiveness to changes in the patterns of demand for highly-educated labour. Seven years later, the vast majority of ‘home’ undergraduate students pay £9,000 a year, and the sector seems to fare no better than before in terms of addressing skill shortages.
More importantly, the shift from a largely planned model of governance to one of regulated competition has exposed the utter failure – of both the government sector leaders – to appreciate the obstacles that market competition inevitably faces in HE. These difficulties arise not from any opposition among staff and students, but because modern free-market economics has very largely forgotten to take into account the structural conditions that the newly-freed market faced. For a hundred years, orthodox economics taught that efficient market outcomes required easy access for new entrants, and resource inputs readily to hand and flexible in use: these conditions have never applied in HE, and indeed provided a mainstream (pro-market) rationale for putting the provision of a wide range of such goods and services within the public sector.
Developing new capacity in HE – new courses, new staff, new infrastructure such as housing and learning resources (IT, libraries) – requires substantial up-front investments and takes a significant amount of time. Universities have responded in part by seeking external finance based on future revenue streams, taking advantage of historically low interest rates, but still increasing their debt levels substantially. But the unexpectedly slow pace of recovery since the 2008 crisis, accentuated more recently by Brexit, has led to deepening concerns over the stability of the new system. This has given rise to a range of precautionary responses that are affecting staff at all levels.
First, the shift in power from academics to managers has accelerated. This is partly seen in the centralisation of actual decision-making processes, and the prescriptive imposition of a corporate financial mind-set at all levels of management. It is also seen in the sector’s adoption of pay relativities that increasingly resemble the private sector, with vice-chancellors and principals earning far more than heads of NHS Trusts or chief executives of large local authorities. Typically, strategic decision-making in a university is now exclusively reserved for the Council, with Senate’s role limited to strictly academic matters. Governance arrangements increasingly lack external transparency and accountability, e.g. in relation to remuneration committees for vice-chancellors.
Second, the financial risks associated with a competitive market environment have been offset by reducing the cost and increasing the flexibility of the labour force, through the growing use of fixed-term and/or part-time teaching staff. Any suggestion that this is morally equivalent to the employment practices of Sports Direct, Amazon or Uber is of course greeted with howls of outrage.
Third, universities have sought to cut the costs of full-time academic staff through re-writing university statutes in order to reduce employee protection, and now through a coordinated attack on the pension rights of permanent staff; in both cases, the result has been unprecedented levels of industrial action by those staff, with growing support from students.
Access to Higher Education
Thirty years ago, most universities offered schemes for mature entry, and at least some part-time provision of their degree-level programmes. They also provided a wide variety of extra-mural or continuing education opportunities: not only vocational and professional courses leading to qualifications (including many designed for trade unionists), but also traditional ‘liberal arts’ courses taken by local citizens motivated only by a desire to learn.
Since the 1990s, the scope of such ‘non-traditional’ programmes has narrowed almost completely to vocational provision, related to specific job needs or state-accredited return-to-work programmes. This approach has displaced the extra-mural educational purpose which originated in the late 19th century world of Mill, Arnold and Ruskin, and which for a hundred years or more helped to ground universities in the communities surrounding them.
More recently, the sharp rise in student fees since 2011 – albeit deferred in the form of student loans – has been accompanied by sharp falls in the numbers of mature students (defined as those over 21 who have not undertaken any HE already) and part-time students. In this case, the relentless process of marketisation has revealed a serious flaw in the debt-based fee model: older entrants are likely to be already indebted through mortgages or consumer debt, and will have fewer years in which to repay the loans. Not surprisingly, universities prefer to avoid the costs of attracting and preparing such reluctant customers, and focus instead on poaching 18-year-olds from each other.
The role of HE in reproducing social and economic inequalities has already been noted, but we need to see this in relation to the deepening social divisions revealed by the rise of populist politics, and particularly by the EU referendum campaign and its aftermath. Support for Brexit was greatest in towns and counties which either had no HE institutions, or the lowest levels of HE participation by 18-21-year-olds.
It is often argued that the over 50% of our population who do not go into HE should not be expected to shoulder its cost in public support through their taxes. The traditional liberal answer to this is that they do benefit, albeit indirectly through economic growth, better-quality goods and services and improvements in productivity.
But perhaps a more telling response is to argue that a truly universal university system would be designed to meet the life-long educational needs of all our adult citizens. This idea lies behind the recent proposal for a National Learning Entitlement (NLE), providing each person with a fund on which they could draw at any time in their life to meet part of the cost of whatever studies they found appropriate to their needs. An NLE would naturally fit in to a strategy of making HE an integral part of Labour’s proposed National Education Service, bringing the universities firmly under public control. Ideally, this would be accompanied by a devolved system of governance in which HE provision would be tailored to local and regional needs.
Conclusions
The Labour Party’s policies on higher education need to be based on a thorough critical appraisal of the UK’s current market-driven approach, building an alternative strategy based on reducing social and economic inequalities through making knowledge available to all. One element should certainly be the abolition of tuition fees, coupled with the reinstatement of means-tested maintenance grants. Four strategic purposes are suggested here:
a genuinely universal role for universities in the service of the public interest, not individual gain;
the governance of HE institutions to be rebuilt around their public purpose and democratic control, not market competition and financial metrics alone;
staff pay in HE based on greatly-reduced differentials, with security of employment for all;
HE as an integral part of Labour’s proposed National Education Service, providing direct benefits, both material and cultural, to all citizens.
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Hugo Radice is Life Fellow at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His recent columns on the crisis in the Yorkshire Post are available via his webpage.
Notes
1. See “All must have degrees,” The Economist, February 3rd 2018, p.56-7.
2. For the latest research see Richard Waller, Nicola Ingram and Michael Ward (eds), Higher Education and Social Inequalities (Routledge, 2018).
3. A pioneer of the modern management system in HE was Warwick University in the late 1960s: see E P Thompson (ed.), Warwick University Ltd.: Industry, Management and the Universities (Penguin, 1970).
4. See Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble (Pluto Press, 2013).
The scandal surrounding Facebook’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica, the election data company previously associated with former Trump campaign Chairman Steve Bannon, dominates the media in the US and Britain.
The serious privacy concerns involved in the harvesting of the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users was underscored by Britain’s Channel 4 News. An undercover investigation filmed Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix boasting of dirty tricks operations to ensnare politicians and subvert elections.
But while the disclosures are being used to bolster hysterical claims of “Russian meddling,” a closer examination reveals that the real and far more fundamental threat to democratic rights involves psy-ops programmes run by elements of the British and US deep state.
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company is British-based SCL. Formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories, it is a private behavioural research and strategic communication company, founded in 1993 by Nigel Oakes. The son of Major John Waddington Oakes and a former boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor, Oakes was formerly employed by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, before establishing SCL.
As with Oakes, SCL’s board members include scions of the British ruling class, from former military officers and defence contractors to major Conservative Party donors.
Lord Ivar Mountbatten, third cousin to Queen Elizabeth, is on the board, while CEO Roger Gabb is a millionaire wine merchant, a former British special forces officer and major contributor to the Tory Party. SCL President Sir Geoffrey Pattie was a defence minister under Thatcher. SCL chairman is the venture capitalist Julian Wheatland, also chairman of Oxfordshire Conservatives Association. Former Conservative Party Treasurer Jonathan Marland, trade envoy under Prime Minister David Cameron, is a shareholder.
Others associated, past or present, with SCL include property billionaire and Tory Party donor Vincent Tchenguiz; Sir James Allen Mitchell, privy counsellor since 1985; Rear Admiral John Tolhurst, a former assistant director of naval warfare in the Ministry of Defence and aide de camp to the Queen; and Gavin McNicoll, creator of the Eden Intelligence firm, which has run projects for the British government.
SCL boasts of providing “data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide,” notably the British Ministry of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. It states that it has carried out “behavioural change programs” in more than 60 countries. One of its first contracts in 1999 was promoting Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. It has worked to influence elections in Afghanistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Nigeria and Kenya among others.
Cambridge Analytica was launched in 2012 by SCL to extend its operations to the US. In partnership with hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, this included the Republican primaries for the 2016 election, where it worked to support Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump.
There is nothing new in this. Similar activities were known of, facilitated and endorsed by the political and military establishment in Britain and the US for years.
According to Liam O’Hare at Bella Caladonia, SCL went public in 2005 at the DSEI conference, a global arms fair in London, promoting itself as the first private company to provide psychological warfare services to the British military:
“Its ‘hard sell’ was a demonstration of how the UK government could use a sophisticated media campaign of mass deception to fool the British people into the thinking an accident at a chemical plant had occurred and threatened central London.”
Such a sales pitch is even more chilling given the recent events in Salisbury, where the alleged attempted assassination of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia—victims of a still unidentified nerve agent—is being used by the government to stage provocations against Russia.
A Freedom of Information request from August 2016 showed the MoD took out a £40,000 contract with SCL for the “provision of external training” in 2010/11 and £150,000 for the “procurement of target audience analysis” in 2014/15.
“In addition, SCL also carries a secret clearance as a ‘list X’ contractor for the MOD. A List X site is a commercial site on British soil that is approved to hold UK government information marked as ‘confidential’ and above. Essentially, SCL got the green light to hold British government secrets on its premises.”
Revelations of the British military’s connections with SCL forced Prime Minister Theresa May to declare in Parliament Wednesday,
“As far as I’m aware the government has no current contracts with Cambridge Analytica or with the SCL Group.”
A spokesperson admitted that the government had held three previous contracts with SCL Group, but said these had now ended.
According to the Guardian, in 2014 “MoD officials worked with SCL Group on ‘Project Duco’ to analyse how people would interact with certain government messaging.”
The project was carried out by the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), which is focused on maximising “the impact of science and technology for the defence and security of the UK.”
Project Duco was part of the government’s “human and social influence” work, and SCL was paid £150,000. It assessed how Target Audience Analysis (TAA) could “contribute to the government’s strategic communications.”
The Guardian has been in the forefront of the campaign over Russian fake news in the UK. But it was forced to acknowledge that SCL’s work on Project Duco and its “list X” ranking “is likely to raise concerns that government officials were aware of Cambridge Analytica and SCL’s operations, and intended to use them to promote government messages.”
In other words, Cambridge Analytica and SCL were not acting as proxies for the Russian state but rather for significant sections of the US/UK military and intelligence apparatus. A link to the heavily redacted report on Project Duco is here. Note that intellectual copyright is held by the government’s science and technology laboratory at Porton Down, just eight miles from Salisbury.
Nafeez Ahmed at INSURGE intelligence elaborated on the connections between SCL, the British foreign office and “other elements of the UK political and financial establishment.” These are so close that “last year the Foreign Office executive agency, Wilton Park, invited SCL Group subsidiary, SCL Elections, to speak about how the use of data in the 2016 Presidential election could be applied in the British government’s diplomatic and foreign policy agenda.”
The SCL Group executives were Mark Turnbull, managing director of SCL Elections, and David Wilkinson, then lead data scientist, who addressed the FCO in February 2017 on the subject of “examining the application of data in the recent US Presidential election.”
“The meeting was attended and opened by Jonathan Allen — then the FCO’s Acting Director General for Defence and Intelligence. Allen is now Theresa May’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations.”
O’Hare explains that the TAA “evolved during the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan.”
A SCL whistle-blower has charged that techniques used by the SCL Group has traced TAA back to the methods used by the US and UK militaries in Iraq. IR.net reports the whistle-blower stating that
“some of this technology was actually owned by the UK Ministry of Defence and/or the US Military, and now they don’t want people to know that it was their weapon that’s currently in the wild, being used privately to manipulate elections worldwide.”
SCL received £548,000 for delivering training to NATO that included providing an eight-week course for its staff. This was “subsequently passed on to Georgian, Ukrainian and Moldovan government officials.”
Turnbull is also head of Cambridge Analytica Political Global. He was previously employed for 18 years at Bell Pottinger where, O’Hare reports, he headed up “the Pentagon funded PR drive in occupied Iraq which included the production of fake al-Qaeda videos.”
The US State Department has a contract for $500,000 with SLC to provide “research and analytical support in connection with our mission to counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation overseas.”
An offshoot, SCL Defense, received $775,000 “to support NATO operations in Eastern Europe targeting Russia.”
O’Hare reports,
“The company delivered a three-month course in Riga which taught ‘advanced counter-propaganda techniques designed to help member states assess and counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe.’
“The NATO website said the ‘revolutionary’ training would ‘help Ukrainians better defend themselves against the Russian threat’.”
SCL has also had contracts with the Pentagon for psy-ops in Iran and Yemen.
Whatever the exact beginnings of the TAA programme, the real news story being buried by the official media is that the covert operations and subversion techniques deployed in US and British imperialism’s neo-colonial adventures are now being used on their domestic populations.
Featured image: Ahed Tamimi in Ofer military court on 15 January. (Source: Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)
An Israeli military court has approved a plea deal which will see Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimiserve an eight-month prison sentence on top of a fine of nearly $1,500.
Ahed, who turned 17 in January, was charged with assaulting soldiers and incitement after a video recorded by her mother Nariman circulated, showing Ahed and her cousin Nour slapping and shoving two heavily armed Israeli soldiers on 15 December.
The military court dropped several of its initial charges against Ahed, for which she faced up to 10 years in prison, according to the prisoners solidarity group Samidoun.
An Israeli military court ruled on Sunday that proceedings in Ahed’s case were to be held behind closed doors, rejecting her appeal for a public trial on the basis that it was for “the minor’s benefit.”
“It seems like it finally dawned on them that there’s something shameful about the proceedings against [Ahed], and that it is better to hold a secret trial rather than make public this legal farce,” Ahed’s lawyer Gaby Lasky told The Electronic Intifada prior to the ruling.
Concerned by these abuses, 21 members of US Congress are backing legislation to bar Israel from using American aid for the imprisonment and abuse of Palestinian children like Ahed Tamimi.
There are currently more than 300 Palestinian children in Israeli military detention.
Muhammad was also arrested by Israeli soldiers on 26 January along with several other members of the Tamimi family, most of them children. Muhammad was released after being interrogated.
The Tamimi family is known for its unarmed resistance to Israel’s encroachment on their village of Nabi Saleh.
Ahed’s arrest made international headlines and rallied global support for her freedom, causing major embarrassment for Israel.
Israeli officials made bizarre and absurd claims about her family, with deputy minister Michael Orenpositing that the Tamimis were a group of “blond, blue-eyed and light-skinned” actors hired to “make Israel look bad.”
Yoav Mordechai, the general who oversees COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, claimed that the injury to Muhammad Tamimi’s head was caused not by an Israeli soldier’s bullet, but by the child falling off his bike – an outlandish story soon debunked by journalists and human rights defenders.
Discrimination
While Ahed Tamimi was sentenced to eight months for slapping and shoving occupation soldiers, Israeli army medic Elor Azarya will be released from prison in May after serving only nine months for executing a prone Palestinian who lay incapacitated on a Hebron street.
Azarya’s 18-month sentence was shortened to 14 months in September. This week a military parole board ordered Azarya’s release after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
Elor Azaria – Israeli soldier convicted of killing a wounded Palestinian by shooting him in the head. He'll be out in May, having served 9 months.
Ahed Tamimi – Palestinian teenager arrested after slapping a heavily-armed Israeli soldier in her backyard. She's getting 8 months. pic.twitter.com/H6dTm2lbrp
The chief prosecutor in the case stated Azarya has shown no remorse and taken no responsibility for his actions but poses no danger to the public, according to Haaretz.
Zarhum, 29, was severely beaten and shot to death by a mob of Israeli soldiers, prison officers and police after they mistook him for the gunman who had opened fire moments earlier at the central bus station in Beer Sheva, a city in southern Israel.
Israel refused to recognize Zarhum as a “terror victim” on grounds that he had entered Israel illegally, preventing his family from claiming compensation.
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Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada.
On Thursday, President Trump moved one step closer to completing his preferred cabinet. General H.R. McMaster, whom Trump called boring, was replaced as national security advisor by ultra-hawk John Bolton. This is the same John Bolton who wrote the forward for Pamela Geller’s hate-filled book about President Obama, called on Israel to nuke Iran, urged the United States to bomb Iran and North Korea, abused a female USAID employee, advocated on behalf of the NRA for more gun rights for Russian citizens, and still defends the Iraq war. I could go on.
Trump’s other appointments have similar attributes. Mike Pompeo, set to take over in Foggy Bottom, compared Iran to the ISIS and called it a “thuggish police state” that is “intent [on] destroying America.” Lastly, Gina Haspel, set to take over the CIA, has a history of torturing detainees under the Bush administration. She even destroyed the recordings taken of the torture years later. Meanwhile, John Kelley remains in a precarious position as chief of staff.
This team constitutes a gang of evil. The anti-diplomacy, pro-torture, pro-war initiatives they have supported have cost lives and created instability in the Middle East to the detriment of U.S. national security and international standing. Additionally, Bolton and Pompeo have ties to hate groups that promote division at home (no wonder Trump likes them). Also, some of the initial appointments belong to the same gang, including UN AmbassadorNikki Haleyand Michael D’Andrea, the head of the CIA’s Iran operations.
Three upcoming dates likely encouraged Trump to make these rapid changes.
North Korea and Iran
Trump is slated to meet directly with Kim Jong Un by this coming May. The changes in Trump’s cabinet have put a damper on the preparations as the deadline approaches. However, the changes are no accident. Trump has used bellicose language towards North Korea from early on in his presidency. By having a like-minded secretary of state and national security advisor in place, he is sending a deliberate signal to Kim Jong Un. If Trump is going to play lead diplomat, he still has threatening cabinet members in place as a counterforce. But with such a high-level start to the talks, as many analysts have repeated, there’s little room for diplomatic recourse should the Trump-Kim discussions fail. Bolton would be the ideal person to game the next move in such a situation and show an aggressive posture. That some in the president’s own party don’t seem to care about the consequences of war or even the consequences of a limited strike does not bode well should the talks fail (or fail to happen).
The Iran nuclear deal is another worrying case. On May 12, Trump must decide whether the deal should be recertified. The International Atomic Energy Agency, assigned to overlook the implementation of the deal, has said that Iran has complied to the benefit of the international community. Meanwhile, the Europeans and the Iranians have grown frustrated regarding Washington’s threats to tear up the deal. The Europeans have proposed adding an addendum regarding Iran’s ballistic missiles, but the Iranians are not having it. Iran remains irritated by the lack of investment from foreign businesses and banks, which they blame on Trump’s bellicose language.
The recent hiring of Bolton sends a major signal to Iran’s leadership that the United States is doubling down on its aggressive posture. Again, this is by design. Trump wants either to provoke Iran to withdraw from the deal first—thus shifting blame away from Washington—or to add sanctions in May in direct violation of the deal and thereby killing it. Either way, Bolton’s presence increases the chance of a conflict that already has concerned U.S. allies.
Several regional enemies of Iran would support an American intervention. The overlap of the Bolton announcement with the visit to Washington of hawkish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, responsible for the deadly Yemen intervention, is likely no coincidence.
The Blue Wave
Everything points toward November. The president and the Republican Party know that they are likely to suffer a “blue wave” on election night. This is the third date likely inspiring Trump’s recent moves. The president is a showman at heart. He is more timing and appearance than substance. Trump is likely to ratchet up tensions with Iran and North Korea in reaction to, or in prevention of, a blue wave. Of course, Trump would need the unlikely approval of Congress for any major intervention, but the intervention does not have to be on a regular armed conflict. It could also be in the cyber realm. Or it could be clandestine, which requires less congressional oversight.
During the campaign, Trump loved to say that he was against the Iraq war, which he called a “disaster.” Apparently during negotiations with Bolton, Trump had him promise that he “wouldn’t start any wars.” However, this is the same Trump who has continued America’s war for the Greater Middle East despite lamenting the “trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost” in the region.
The president has many attributes, but consistency is not one of them. Putting Pompeo and Bolton in such major positions of power suggests that Trump and his gang of evil are preparing for the very conflicts that he promised to avoid.
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Shahed Ghoreishi is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
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
Mass protests have erupted against the arrest by German police of Catalonia’s former regional premier Carles Puigdemont.
The arrest warrant was requested by the Popular Party (PP) government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. But the PP’s repression has the full support of the Socialist Party (PSOE) opposition. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez said of Puigdemont’s arrest,
“We live in a social and democratic state governed by the rule of law in Spain and in Europe. Nobody is above the law. [We] Respect judicial decisions and support our security forces.”
Puigdemont’s arrest, carried out on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant issued Friday by Spain’s Supreme Court, saw tens of thousands assemble in the centre of Barcelona, Sunday. Between cries of “Puigdemont, our president”, “This Europe is a shame” and calls for a general strike, the protesters cut the traffic lane for vehicles going down the city’s main avenue in Las Ramblas and four other highways.
The Catalan National Assembly convened a demonstration in front of the EU headquarters in Barcelona to march to the German consulate. Protests have also been called in Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. Protesters clashed with riot police, leading to numerous injuries.
Puigdemont has been living in exile since October, when he fled to Belgium along with four other regional ministers after declaring Catalan independence. In response, Spain’s right-wing Popular Party government invoked Article 155 of the Constitution, dissolving the Catalan government, implementing direct rule from Madrid and imposing snap elections.
Fearing sedition and rebellion charges that led to the imprisonment of three deputies, including vice-premier Oriol Junqueras (Republican Left of Catalonia, ERC), Puigdemont remained in self-imposed exile in Belgium.
Last Friday, Spanish Supreme Court Judge Pablo Llarena reactivated an international arrest warrant for Puigdemont when he was visiting Finland for talks with lawmakers. He also jailed five leaders of Puigdemont’s deposed government without bail as they await trial.
In total, 25 Catalan leaders are to be tried for rebellion, misuse of public funds or disobeying the state. Convictions could result in up to 30 years in prison.
The whole case is built around spurious grounds that the Catalan secessionist movement has used violence to achieve independence, therefore justifying the charge of rebellion, which according to Spain’s penal code may apply only to those who “violently and publicly” try to “abrogate, suspend or modify the Constitution, either totally or partially”.
According to sources of online newspaper, eldiario.es, the police operation resulting in the detention of Puigdemont was led by Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), in coordination with the General Information Office of the National Police. According to the same sources, Puigdemont’s movements have been controlled at all times since he left Belgium.
Puigdemont was heading to Belgium to surrender to the judicial authorities, according to his lawyer in Spain, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, when he was intercepted. According to German news magazine Focus, the Spanish intelligence services informed the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA)—responsible for national and international terrorism—that Puigdemont was moving towards the German border. The BKA then informed the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) of Schleswig-Holstein which arrested Puigdemont.
The decision to arrest Puigdemont in Germany is significant. The German Criminal Code punishes the alteration of the constitutional order and attempts to secede from Germany with a sentence of up to life imprisonment. This is indicated in Article 81 of the German Criminal Code, in the section, “High treason against the Federation,” which states, “Whosoever undertakes, by force or through threat of force, to undermine the continued existence of the Federal Republic of Germany; or to change the constitutional order based on the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, shall be liable to imprisonment for life or for not less than ten years.”
German law is closer to Spanish law than the existing statutes in Belgium, facilitating Puigdemont’s transfer to Spain.
According to sources of El País, the police had assessed whether to call for his arrest in Finland or Denmark, but this “was ruled out having the conviction that the former regional premier was going to continue his journey by land into Germany. This country is considered by Spain one of the EU states with which there are better relations of police collaboration.”
Last November, the German government expressed its full support for Madrid following the detention of eight former Catalan ministers over their role in the region’s independence drive.
Government spokesperson Steffen Seibert told reporters,
“From the federal government’s point of view, Spain is of course a state governed by the rule of law and as government spokesman I see no reason at all to comment on decisions made by Spanish courts. We continue to support the clear position of the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy”, adding that “What’s important to us is that the unity and constitutional order of Spain are maintained.”
The role played by the German government again exposes the politically bankrupt efforts of the Catalan nationalists to promote the illusion that the European Union and its members states would intervene in the Catalan crisis to preserve “democratic values” by brokering a deal with the Popular Party government in Madrid. Instead, the EU and government leaders in Germany, Britain and France have repeatedly backed PP Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and insisted he is the only person with whom they will negotiate.
If anyone channel surfed yesterday, well into the evening, ALL the channels covered the massive demonstrations by our youth for gun control. For my activist eyes this was impressive, with tens of thousands of good and decent young folks, in many cities throughout America, taking to the streets.
Oh how I wish their parents and grandparents were out there with us after this empire illegally and immorally invaded and occupied Iraq. For years we anti empire and anti war advocates stood on the street corners of many cities and towns, almost in a vacuum! At least this new generation is getting back to the basics of our First Amendment right of free speech. One recalls how the Bush/Cheney cabal made many of us actually stand in ‘caged in areas’ relabeled Free Speech Zones, always far away from the target of our protests.
This writer has never even fired a gun in my baby boomer years of existence. Although I do agree with most of the demands of these gun control advocates, a part of me doesn’t want eligible fellow citizens to be totally forbidden from owning any such weapon. Background checks, both for criminal and mental problems, are a necessity, as is not allowing many of the crazy sort of ‘Overkill’ weapons to be sold.
So, all in all, seeing those caring and committed young folks out there did bring some level of joy to me. However, we need them out there for a far greater demand: The pullback of this Military Empire before it bankrupts us all economically, morally and spiritually!
We have military personnel, many of them but a year or two older than many of yesterday’s marchers, who are occupying areas of the world we have NO business being in! Some of them have been or will be killed over there, while many more innocent civilians of those countries have been or will be killed by them. Enough already!
Do yesterday’s young marchers realize (along with their teachers, parents and relatives) that over half of their federal taxes goes down the rabbit hole of military spending? Do they realize that the cost of keeping one soldier in the Arab desert for one year (over $ one million) could pay for 20 teachers or school psychologists for one year at $50k each? Imagine if young Mr. Cruz had gotten the care he needed years ago, when he was screaming out to the system for mental help? Proper gun control may have hindered his search for a weapon, and may have not. Food for thought. Do yesterday’s caring and dedicated young folks understand that we have over 800+ military bases in close to 100 different countries, and enough nukes to destroy the world a thousand times over? Have these young kids gotten the proper teaching about 9/11 alternative theories (with a myriad of facts) to question the story that our government’s commission gave out? Ditto for our pre-emptive illegal invasion of Iraq?
Source: Daily Aftab
The mainstream , and even many alternative media feels safe to cover events like yesterdays.
Why? Well, it is of NO concern to this empire, so long as the focus of the protests is NOT directed at taking away the many lethal weaponry that our empire possesses and uses.
Gun control will do nothing regarding the hundreds of billions (more like a trillion) of dollars that is being spent by the Pentagon… and of course delegated to them by a compliant ‘bought and paid for’ Two Party political con job. Meanwhile, many of yesterday’s kids will have problems paying for their higher education in a year of two or three. Many of those same kids will, as adults, realize that they cannot get the proper health care coverage, or other parts of the once cherished safety net, because their localities just don’t have the financial funding that Uncle Sam used to send along to them… NO MONEY!!!
This writer for one would love to be able to reach out to those young demonstrators and offer them the facts they will need to grasp what is happening. Perhaps others of my mindset will do the same. Just imagine if we had those numbers out there to show the empire’s handlers and the ’embedded media’ how our young patriots feel about what is needed to save our great nation from the greedy warmongers.
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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 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].
It is impossible to grasp the historical ramification of the youth march to the U.S. political stage in 2018 without an overall view of the world political situation.
The American youth with their impressive “March for our Lives” in millions- in 800 cities throughout the United States- broke the barrier for “CHANGE” that their parents had been struggling with for decades. Politicians in Washington were surprised and scared (at the same time) of the genuine and powerful messages that they heard from the young speakers (as young as 9) at the march – just a few feet away from their offices! The immense waves of ENERGY and POLITICAL MILITANCY of the youth felt like a tsunami to these old, corrupt politicians. For these ladies and gentlemen in Washington, the chant of “Vote Them Out!” was too real to ignore.
It seems the world was waiting for the American Youth to shout: “Enough Is Enough”. This march divided Americans into two distinctive forces; one that seeks an end to Violence and the other which promotes War and more Violence. This clear division already has become a major problem for the 1% in the U.S.
Before we get to the real challenge of the American Youth Leadership, let’s talk about the “MEDIA”. For the sake of time, let’s see how CNN (the official Warmonger Channel) has covered this march. Well they did their best; they covered the march “live” -unlike Fox News- but at the same time through their robot Pentagon reporter Barbara Star- they “assured” us that the U.S. generals in their deep bunkers are ready to fight Russians at any time and moment!
The challenge for the American youth today is to stay away from the Democratic Party – in any form and shape. A force independent of Democrats, Republicans and other 1% representatives is the only path for change. It is important to realize that today; “Dems” (as they are called) in general -more than ever- are the main political hurdle for progress and change.
Featured image: An aerial photo shows deforestation associated with a roadway in Colombia’s Amazon. Photo courtesy of CDA
Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos declared earlier this month that a controversial highway project that would cut through the Amazon will not be completed. Santos pointed at rampant deforestation and potentially irreversible environmental impacts to a sensitive ecological corridor near three national parks if the highway project were followed through to completion.
The Marginal de la Selva highway is part of $1 billion infrastructure project that would have opened a trade route for heavy land cargo to pass from Venezuela to Ecuador through Colombia without having to enter the treacherous Andes mountains.
Santos told local newspaper El Tiempo that the highway project “is not going to be done because it would be completely counterproductive from the environmental point of view.”
Image on the right: A jaguar on the prowl in Colombia. (Photo by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay)
Following a historic 2016 peace agreement with Colombia’s former largest guerrilla group the FARC, the power vacuum left by the demobilized rebels exacerbated deforestation as land speculators flooded into the area to clear tracts of forest for speculative cattle ranching and palm oil projects. According to environmental government agency Corporation for Sustainable Development of the North-East Amazon (CDA), many of these speculators are connected to illegal armed groups.
Wilfredo Pachón, local CDA Director in San Jose de Guaviare, said property values can increase up to three times over when the forest is cleared. He told Mongabay that much of this land sits empty after being cleared, with investors betting that the titles will be formalized later on down the line.
Deforestation caused by land investors for speculative cattle and other agricultural projects is threatening the last remaining forest corridors in the Amazonian piedmont region that connects three of Colombia’s five regions: the Amazon, the Andes and the eastern plains.
Rodrigo Botero, director of the organization Fundación para la Conservación y Desarrollo Sostenible (FDCS), who has been working in the northwestern Colombian Amazon frontier for the past six years, called the President’s announcement “extraordinary news for deforestation mitigation and restoration efforts” to restore the region’s ecological integrity.
Botero noted that the president’s declaration hadn’t been codified by the Ministry of Transportation, which is needed formally withdraw the Marginal de la Selva plans. He said work must also be done on the departmental and municipal levels to align local development policies with the nation’s environmental agenda.
Without the highway, heavy truck cargo will not be able to pass through the region. Botero said closing the road to heavy truck cargo is “highly important” because it will “close some of the expectations for large-scale development.”
In particular, Botero pointed toward palm oil expansion and petroleum extraction as potential threats to the region’s long-term ecological integrity.
At the same time, Botero pointed out that there is still a navigable river, which means large-scale development in the northwestern Colombian Amazon is “still very much a possibility.”
In addition to closing the Marginal de la Selva project, Santos recently announced a 1.5 million hectare expansion of the Chiribiquete Natural National Park. However, at the same time as the park’s expansion was announced, at least 40 fires were reported raging in and around the park.
Image on the left: The Colombian Amazon provides important habitat for many rainforest species, such as the red howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus).
FCDS recorded 160,000 hectares of Amazon forest cover loss from the beginning of January 2017 until February 2018. The country’s climate and environmental monitoring agency IDEAM said that 70 percent of the country’s deforestation alerts are now happening in the Amazon. From December 2017 until March 2018, the Tinigua National Park alone lost of approximately 5,600 hectares of forest cover, according to government analysis.
To address the deepening deforestation crisis, Botero said it’s critical that Colombia definitively closes the agricultural frontier in the Amazon to ensure the region is not further colonized or developed and to prevent land speculators from generating profits on rainforest destruction.
Bill Laurance, a distinguished research professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Australia, has been studying the deforestation effects of road development and infrastructure projects in tropical rainforests for the past 35 years.
Laurance’s research has shown that building paved roads through tropical rainforests causes land-grabbing, illegal road development and accelerated deforestation — all of which have been observed as plans for the Marginal de la Selva highway proceeded.
During the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Summit, Colombia pledged to bring the Amazon deforestation rate down to zero by 2020. However, the Minister of Environment Gilberto Murillo walked back on the goal in February, telling El Espectador that “zero deforestation by 2020 will be very difficult to meet.”
According to the latest research, the Amazon rainforest may be dangerously close to reaching an ecological tipping point where the rainforest ecosystem could rapidly degrade into a more arid savannah if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent.
It has given those in a permanent state of jitters greater reason to jump off the cliff to a certain fate, but John Bolton’s elevation to President Donald J. Trump’s inner circle is predictable and, patterns of employment permitting, brief. It is easy to see each and every appointment of the current president as manically dangerous, shading those of his predecessors. Move over national security advisor H. R. McMaster and welcome Mr. Pre-emption.
The predictions of imminent cataclysm at this latest turn have a certain screeching quality, feeding the endless exhaust fan of Trumpographic terrors. There is a fear that war with Iran might well be possible. This would be tenable, presuming that Trump had taken leave of his remaining senses, and Bolton had received a surge of blood lust. The doomsday cartel is being kept busy.
With all of this, it is easy to forget the last president who found Bolton’s services useful, one who with singular influence plunged the Middle East into multigenerational chaos and sanguinary mayhem. As a right-wing shock pundit he was appointed by President George W. Bush, that other monstrosity of the White House, to destabilise the United Nations. (To be more exact, destabilise the US relationship with that oft confused, disparate entity.)
The danger Bolton poses is dependent on the access, regularity and seeming cogency of his advice to the president. As he explained on Fox News, he is an open book, smudged, as it were, by a certain enthusiasm for war.
“During my career, I have written I don’t know how many articles and op-eds and opinion pieces. I have given – I can’t count the number of speeches, I’ve had countless interviews… They’re all out there on the public record. I’ve never been shy about what my views are.”
He is the creature of pre-emption, the proponent of violent redress regarding international disputes. Evidence of misconduct matters less than the prompt elimination of threats, a strike on Washington’s enemies before they assume any significant influence or form. He has, for instance, put forth boisterous, if clinical positions on striking North Korea (amusingly enough, he dresses this as legal), and Iran.
“It is perfectly legitimate,” he wrote last month in The Wall Street Journal, “for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”
He admitted to various “gaps in US intelligence in North Korea,” but rather than seeing this as a note to be cautious, Bolton suggests the opposite. Washington “should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation.”
His writings have a cool surgical air to them, absent casualties and consequences. The dead, in these instances, do not speak, let alone matter. There are only necessary attacks, imbalances of power that need redressing, and military set pieces. Iran, for instance, requires eradication, a homicidal view that would deserve in at least some small way, the tag of genocide. “[E]nd the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary,” he cheered in the pages of the WJS.
In 2005, he outlined approaches to crippling the Islamic Republic’s potential nuclear capacity, a somewhat less evolved idea of extinguishing the state. “Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan.” Attack Iran, break “key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle” and retard the program by three to five years. Naturally bring Israel on board to do the thorough job.
His positions have always assumed pre-emption. Threats loom in a permanent hot house of problems for US security. In 2002, during his time as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bolton pressed his staff to draw up a document claiming that Cuba had an active biological weapons program and was in the business of transferring that technology to outlaw states.
On May 6, 2002, he described these heralded findings at the Heritage Foundation, prompting something of a storm:
“The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support BW programs in those states.”
His superiors were left reeling with qualifications. “We did not say,” claimed a more cautious Secretary of State Colin Powell, “that [Cuba] actually had such weapons, but it has the capacity and the capability to conduct such research.”
So do most states, for that matter, but such a distinction has never troubled Bolton.
When confronted with demurring views on Cuba’s capabilities, Bolton intimidated the analysts, who grittily held out. As David Ignatiusexplained,
“Bolton wanted to sound the alarm about Cuba, regardless of what the [National Intelligence Estimate] said.”
Such conduct led to an initial blocking of his appointment as ambassador to the UN.
Critics will be wishing some for some act of cannibalisation within the Trump administration. The vital concern here is whether Bolton’s inability to accept evidence of actual threats coalesces with the president’s fantasies. But reduced to a personal dimension (the moustache Trump so detests), Bolton’s days are already numbered.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Dr. Kampmark is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]
The following texts are excerpts from the Preface of Professor Tim Anderson’s timely and important book entitledThe Dirty War on Syria.The book is available fororderfrom Global Research, place your orderherenow!
Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. The British-Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves ‘a depressingly predictable pattern’ of demonising the enemy leader, then demonising the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined (Knightley 2001). Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar al Assad became the new evil in the world and, according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past 15 years.
Dr. Tim Anderson
This book is a careful academic work, but also a strong defence of the right of the Syrian people to determine their own society and political system. That position is consistent with international law and human rights principles, but may irritate western sensibilities, accustomed as we are to an assumed prerogative to intervene. At times I have to be blunt, to cut through the double-speak. In Syria the big powers have sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies while demonising the Syrian Government and Army, accusing them of constant atrocities; then pretending to rescue the Syrian people from their own government. Far fewer western people opposed the war on Syria than opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they were deceived about its true nature.
Dirty wars are not new. Cuban national hero Jose Martí predicted to a friend that Washington would try to intervene in Cuba’s independence struggle against the Spanish. ‘They want to provoke a war’, he wrote in 1889 ‘to have a pretext to intervene and, with the authority of being mediator and guarantor, to seize the country … There is no more cowardly thing in the annals of free people; nor such cold blooded evil’ (Martí 1975: 53). Nine years later, during the third independence war, an explosion in Havana Harbour destroyed the USS Maine, killing 258 US sailors and serving as a pretext for a US invasion.
The US launched dozens of interventions in Latin America over the subsequent century. A notable dirty war was led by CIA-backed, ‘freedom fighter’ mercenaries based in Honduras, who attacked the Sandinista Government and the people of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That conflict, in its modus operandi, was not so different to the war on Syria. In Nicaragua more than 30,000 people were killed. The International Court of Justice found the US guilty of a range of terrorist-style attacks on the little Central American country, and found that the US owed Nicaragua compensation (ICJ 1986). Washington ignored these rulings.
With the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the big powers took advantage of a political foment by seizing the initiative to impose an ‘Islamist winter’, attacking the few remaining independent states of the region. Very quickly we saw the destruction of Libya, a small country with the highest standard of living in Africa. NATO bombing and a Special Forces campaign helped the al Qaeda groups on the ground. The basis for NATO’s intervention was lies told about actual and impending massacres, supposedly carried out or planned by the government of President Muammar Gaddafi. These claims led rapidly to a UN Security Council resolution said to protect civilians through a ‘no fly zone’. We know now that trust was betrayed, and that the NATO powers abused the limited UN authorisation to overthrow the Libyan Government (McKinney 2012).
Subsequently, no evidence emerged to prove that Gaddafi intended, carried out or threatened wholesale massacres, as was widely suggested (Forte 2012). Genevieve Garrigos of Amnesty International (France) admitted there was ‘no evidence’ to back her group’s earlier claims that Gaddafi had used ‘black mercenaries’ to commit massacres (Forte 2012; Edwards 2013).
… Two days before NATO bombed Libya another armed Islamist insurrection broke out in Daraa, Syria’s southernmost city. Yet because this insurrection was linked to the demonstrations of a political reform movement, its nature was disguised. Many did not see that those who were providing the guns – Qatar and Saudi Arabia – were also running fake news stories in their respective media channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. There were other reasons for the durable myths of this war. Many western audiences, liberals and leftists as well as the more conservative, seemed to like the idea of their own role as the saviours of a foreign people, speaking out strongly about a country of which they knew little, but joining what seemed to be a ‘good fight’ against this new ‘dictator’. With a mission and their proud self-image western audiences apparently forgot the lies of previous wars, and of their own colonial legacies.
I would go so far as to say that, in the Dirty War on Syria, western culture in general abandoned its better traditions: of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence at times of conflict; in favour of its worst traditions: the ‘imperial prerogative’ for intervention, backed by deep racial prejudice and poor reflection on the histories of their own cultures. That weakness was reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda. After the demonisation of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad began, a virtual information blockade was constructed against anything which might undermine the wartime storyline. Very few sensible western perspectives on Syria emerged after 2011, as critical voices were effectively blacklisted.
In that context I came to write this book. It is a defence of Syria, not primarily addressed to those who are immersed the western myths but to others who engage with them. This is therefore a resource book and a contribution to the history of the Syrian conflict. The western stories have become self-indulgent and I believe it is wasteful to indulge them too much. Best, I think, to speak of current events as they are, then address the smokescreens later. I do not ignore the western myths, in fact this book documents many of them. But I lead with the reality of the war.
Western mythology relies on the idea of imperial prerogatives, asking what must ‘we’ do about the problems of another people; an approach which has no basis in international law or human rights. The next steps involve a series of fabrications about the pretexts, character and events of the war. The first pretext over Syria was that the NATO states and the Gulf monarchies were supporting a secular and democratic revolution. When that seemed implausible the second story was that they were saving the oppressed majority ‘Sunni Muslim’ population from a sectarian ‘Alawite regime’. Then, when sectarian atrocities by anti-government forces attracted greater public attention, the pretext became a claim that there was a shadow war: ‘moderate rebels’ were said to be actually fighting the extremist groups. Western intervention was therefore needed to bolster these ‘moderate rebels’ against the ‘new’ extremist group that had mysteriously arisen and posed a threat to the world.
That was the ‘B’ story. No doubt Hollywood will make movies based on this meta-script, for years to come. However this book leads with the ‘A’ story. Proxy armies of Islamists, armed by US regional allies (mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey), infiltrate a political reform movement and snipe at police and civilians. They blame this on the government and spark an insurrection, seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government and its secular-pluralist state. This follows the openly declared ambition of the US to create a ‘New Middle East’, subordinating every country of the region, by reform, unilateral disarmament or direct overthrow. Syria was next in line, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In Syria, the proxy armies would come from the combined forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanatics. Despite occasional power struggles between these groups and their sponsors, they share much the same Salafist ideology, opposing secular or nationalist regimes and seeking the establishment of a religious state.
However in Syria Washington’s Islamists confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along religious lines, despite many provocations. The Syrian state also had strong allies in Russia and Iran. Syria was not to be Libya Take Two. In this prolonged war the violence, from the western side, was said to consist of the Syrian Army targeting and killing civilians. From the Syrian side people saw daily terrorist attacks on towns and cities, schools and hospitals and massacres of ordinary people by NATO’s ‘freedom fighters’, then the counter attacks by the Army. Foreign terrorists were recruited in dozens of countries by the Saudis and Qatar, bolstering the local mercenaries.
Though the terrorist groups were often called ‘opposition, ‘militants’ and ‘Sunni groups’ outside Syria, inside the country the actual political opposition abandoned the Islamists back in early 2011. Protest was driven off the streets by the violence, and most of the opposition (minus the Muslim Brotherhood and some exiles) sided with the state and the Army, if not with the ruling Ba’ath Party. The Syrian Army has been brutal with terrorists but, contrary to western propaganda, protective of civilians. The Islamists have been brutal with all, and openly so. Millions of internally displaced people have sought refuge with the Government and Army, while others fled the country.
In a hoped-for ‘end game’ the big powers sought overthrow of the Syrian state or, failing that, the creation of a dysfunctional state or dismembering into sectarian statelets, thus breaking the axis of independent regional states. That axis comprises Hezbollah in south Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance, alongside Syria and Iran, the only states in the region without US military bases. More recently Iraq – still traumatised from western invasion, massacres and occupation – has begun to align itself with this axis. Russia too has begun to play an important counter-weight role. Recent history and conduct demonstrate that neither Russia nor Iran harbour any imperial ambitions remotely approaching those of Washington and its allies, several of which (Britain, France and Turkey) were former colonial warlords in the region. From the point of view of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, defeat of the dirty war on Syria means that the region can begin closing ranks against the big powers. Syria’s successful resistance would mean the beginning of the end for Washington’s ‘New Middle East’.
That is basically the big picture. This book sets out to document the A story and expose the B story. It does so by rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence in case of conflict. I hope it might prove a useful resource. Here is a brief overview of the chapters.
Chapter 1, ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region.
Chapter 2, ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyper-reliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.
Chapter 3, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.
Chapter 4, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.
Chapter 5, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on long standing collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.
Chapter 6, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.
Chapter 7, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.
Chapter 8, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.
Chapter 9, ‘The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.
Chapter 10, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.
Chapter 11 ‘Washington, Terrorism and the Islamic State (ISIS)’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.
Chapter 12, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.
Chapter 13 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.
When the attacks on Syria abate the Middle East seems set to be transformed, with greater political will and military preparedness on the part of an expanded Axis of Resistance. That will signal the beginning of the end for Washington’s 15 year spree of bloodshed and ‘regime change’ across the entire region.
Tim Anderson has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government.
No other text brings together all the major accusations and their effective refutation.
This text is essential reading for all peace and justice activists. -James Petras, Author and Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Tim Anderson’s important new book, titled “The Dirty War on Syria” discusses US naked aggression – “rely(ing) on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory,” he explains.
ISIS is the pretext for endless war without mercy, Assad the target, regime change the objective, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing Syrian sovereign independence.
There’s nothing civil about war in Syria, raped by US imperialism, partnered with rogue allies. Anderson’s book is essential reading to understand what’s going on. –Stephen Lendman, Distinguished Author and Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Host of the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
Professor Anderson demonstrates unequivocally through carefully documented research that America’s “Moderate Opposition” are bona fide Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists created and protected by the US and its allies, recruited and trained by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, in liaison with Washington and Brussels.
Through careful analysis, professor Anderson reveals the “unspoken truth”: the “war on terrorism” is fake, the United States is a “State sponsor of terrorism” involved in a criminal undertaking.Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Professor of Economics (Emeritus), University of Ottawa.
Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).
Bulk Order: Click here to order multiple copies at a discounted price (North America only)
Notes:
Edwards, Dave (2013) ‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies’, Media Lens, 13 June, online: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/735-limited-but-persuasive-evidence-syria-sarin-libya-lies.html
Forte, Maximilian (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Quebec
ICJ (1986) Case concerning the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America) Merits’, International Court of Justice, Judgement of 27 June 1986, online: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5
Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, 16 April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2015-02-16/obamas-libya-debacle
Martí, Jose (1975) Obras Completas, Vol. 6, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana
McKinney, Cynthia (Ed) (2012) The Illegal War on Libya, Clarity Press, Atlanta
Putin, Vladimir (2015) ‘Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech’, RT, 28 September, online: https://www.rt.com/news/316804-putin-russia-unga-speech/
Richter, Larry (1998) ‘Havana Journal; Remember the Maine? Cubans See an American Plot Continuing to This Day’, New York Times, 14 February, online: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/world/havana-journal-remember-maine-cubans-see-american-plot-continuing-this-day.html
IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news.
“The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM’s German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information,” IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. “This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week.”
***
IBM also defended Chairman Thomas Watson for his dealings with Hitler and his regime.
***
On September 13, 1939, The New York Times reports on Page 1 that 3 million Jews are going to be “immediately removed” from Poland, and they appear to be candidates for “physical extermination.” On September 9, the German managers of IBM Berlin send a letter to Thomas Watson with copy to staff in Geneva via phone that, due to the “situation,” they need high-speed alphabetizing equipment. IBM wanted no paper trail, so an oral agreement was made, passed from New York to Geneva to Berlin, and those alphabetizers were approved by Watson, personally, before the end of the month.
That month he also approved the opening of a new Europe-wide school for Hollerith technicians in Berlin. And at the same time he authorized a new German-based subsidiary in occupied Poland, with a printing plant across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto at 6 Rymarska Street. It produced some 15 million punch cards at that location, the major client of which was the railroad.
We have a similar example involving Romania in 1941, and The Sunday Times has actually placed the IBM documents up on their Web site…. When Nazi Germany went into France, IBM built two new factories to supply the Nazi war machine. This is the 1941-’42 era, in Vichy, France, which was technically neutral. When Germany invaded Holland in May 1940, IBM rushed a brand-new subsidiary into occupied Holland. And it even sent 132 million punch cards in 1941, mainly from New York, to support the Nazi activity there. Holland had the highest rate of Jewish extermination in all of Europe; 72 percent of Jews were killed in Holland, compared to 24 percent in France, where the machines did not operate successfully.
***
When Hitler came to power in 1933, his desire to destroy European Jewry was so ambitious an enterprise, it required the resources of a computer. But in 1933 no computer existed. What did exist was the Hollerith punch-card system. It was invented by a German-American in Buffalo, New York, for the Census Bureau. This punch-card system could store all the information about individuals, places, products, inventories, schedules, in the holes that were punched or not punched in columns and rows.
The Hollerith system reduced everything to number code. Over time, the IBM alphabetizers could convert this code to alphabetical information. IBM made constant improvements for their Nazi clients.
***
Our entry was of course precipitated by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7. Shortly before that, with sudden new trading-with-the-enemy regulations in force–this is October 1941–Watson issued a cable to all IBM’s European subsidiaries, saying in effect: “Don’t tell us what you’re doing and don’t ask us any questions.” He didn’t say, “Don’t send machines into concentration camps.” He didn’t say, “Stop organizing the military forces of Nazi Germany.” He didn’t say, “Don’t undertake anything to harm innocent civilians.”
***
He then bifurcated the management of IBM Europe–one manager in Geneva, named Werner Lier, and the other one in New York, in his office, named J.L. Schotte. So all communications went from Switzerland to New York. Ultimately there was a Hollerith Department called Hollerith Abteilung–German for department–in almost every concentration camp. Remember, the original Auschwitz tattoo was an IBM number.
***
IBM put the blitz in blitzkrieg. The whole war effort was organized on Hollerith machines from 1933 to 1945. This is when information technology comes to warfare. At the same time, IBM was supporting the entire German war machine directly from New York until the fall of 1941 ….
***
IBM did more than just sell equipment. Watson and IBM controlled the unique technical magic of Hollerith machines. They controlled the monopoly on the cards and the technology. And they were the ones that had to custom-design even the paper forms and punch cards–they were custom-designed for each specific purpose. That included everything form counting Jews to confiscating bank accounts, to coordinating trains going into death camps, to the extermination by labor campaign.
That’s why even the paper forms in the prisoner camps had Hollerith notations and numbered fields checked. They were all punched in. For example, IBM had to agree with their Nazi counterparts that Code 6 in the concentration camps wasextermination. Code 1 was released, Code 2 was transferred, Code 3 was natural death,Code 4 was formal execution, Code 5 was suicide. Code 7 was escape. Code 6 wasextermination.
All of the money and all the machines from all these operations was claimed by IBM as legitimate business after the war. The company used its connections with the State Department and the Pentagon to recover all the machines and all the bank accounts. They never said, “We do not want this blood money.” They wanted it all.
(2) Standard Oil. The Nazi air force – the Luftwaffe – needed tetraethyl lead gas in order to get their planes off the ground. Standard Oil sold tetraethyl to the Nazis.
After WWII began, the English became angry about U.S. shipments of strategic materials to Nazi Germany. So Standard changed the registration of their entire fleet to Panamanian to avoid British search or seizure. These ships continued to carry oil to the Nazis.
(3) Ford. Ford made cars for the Nazis. Wikipedia notes:
Ford continued to do business with Nazi Germany, including the manufacture of war materiel. Beginning in 1940, with the requisitioning of between 100 and 200 French POWs to work as slave laborers, Ford-Werke contravened Article 31 of the 1929 Geneva Convention. At that time, which was before the U.S. entered the War and still had full diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, Ford-Werke was under the control of the Ford Motor Company. The number of slave laborers grew as the war expanded ….
(And see discussion under GM, below.)
Wikipedia also points out that Henry Ford was one of the world’s biggest anti-Semites … inspiring Hitler, Himmler and other high-level Nazis:
In Germany, Ford’s anti-Semitic articles from The Dearborn Independent were issued in four volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem published by Theodor Fritsch, founder of several anti-Semitic parties and a member of the Reichstag. In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler described Ford as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” Ford is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler wrote, “only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews’] fury, still maintains full independence…[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions.” Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his “inspiration,” explaining his reason for keeping Ford’s life-size portrait next to his desk. Steven Watts wrote that Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany,” and modeling the Volkswagen, the people’s car, on the Model T.
Grand Cross of the German Eagle, an award bestowed on Ford by Nazi Germany
***
James D. Mooney, vice-president of overseas operations for General Motors, received a similar medal, the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, First Class.
***
Testifying at Nuremberg, convicted Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach who, in his role as military governor of Vienna deported 65,000 Jews to camps in Poland, stated,
The decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading and the book that influenced my comrades was … that book by Henry Ford, “The International Jew.” I read it and became anti-Semitic. The book made a great influence on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success and also the representative of a progressive social policy.
“General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,” said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world’s largest automaker. “Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.”
Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.
But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.
***
When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes ….
***
The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market.
***
In 1935, GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named “Blitz” truck, which would later be used by the German army for its blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.
The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland” without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as “German” as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.
Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets.Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company’s German operations were “highly profitable.”
***
After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.
Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Russelsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker “Wunderbomber,” a key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney’s notes show that he returned to Germany the following February for further discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal inspection of the Russelsheim plant.
Mooney’s involvement in the conversion of the Russelsheim plant undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort.
***
At GM and Ford plants in Germany, reliance on forced labor [from concentration camp inmates]increased.
***
In a court submission, American Ford acknowledges that Iwanowa and others were“forced to endure a sad and terrible experience” at its Cologne plant ….
Ford has backed away from its initial claim that it did not profit in any way from forced labor at its Cologne plant.
***
Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford received “indirect” profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant because of the overall increase in the value of German operations during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation from the U.S. government after the war for “losses” due to bomb damage to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any benefits derived from forced labor.
Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants.
(5) Kodak. During World War Two, Kodak’s German branch also used slave laborers from concentration camps. Several of their other European branches did heavy business with the Nazi government.
And Wilhelm Keppler – one of Hitler’s top economic advisers – had deep ties in Kodak. When Nazism began, Keppler advised Kodak and several other U.S. companies that they’d benefit by firing all of their Jewish employees.
As noted above, Hitler and his top henchmen were inspired by Henry Ford’s writings.
The American author Lothrop Stoddard was the source of the concept of “under-man (sub-human)” adopted by the Nazis in regards to Jews and communists.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the idea of killing Jews, communists and gypsies in gas chambers originated in the U.S. … not Germany.
And Nazis were also apparently inspired by America’s treatment of Native Americans. Specifically, retired Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, Todd E. Pierce – who researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. as part of his assignment in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions – notes:
Stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler.
This article which was originally published on Global Research in July 2016 outlines the underreported air base of the US in Germany which plays an important role in the US’ global “war on terrorism”.
*
The overseas hub for America’s “war on terror” is the massive Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany. Nearly ignored by US media, Ramstein serves crucial functions for drone warfare and much more. It’s the most important Air Force base abroad, operating as a kind of grand central station for airborne war—whether relaying video images of drone targets in Afghanistan to remote pilots with trigger fingers in Nevada, or airlifting special-ops units on missions to Africa, or transporting munitions for airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. Soaking up billions of taxpayer dollars, Ramstein has scarcely lacked for anything from the home country, other than scrutiny.
Known as “Little America” in this mainly rural corner of Germany, the area now includes 57,000 US citizens clustered around Ramstein and a dozen smaller bases. The Defense Department calls it “the largest American community outside of the United States.” Ramstein serves as the biggest Air Force cargo port beyond US borders, providing “full spectrum airfield operations” along with “world-class airlift and expeditionary combat support.” The base also touts “superior” services and “exceptional quality of life.” To look at Ramstein and environs is to peer into a faraway mirror for the United States; what’s inside the frame is normality for endless war.
Ramstein’s gigantic Exchange store (largest in the US military) is the centerpiece for an oversize shopping mall, just like back home. A greeting from the Holy Family Catholic Community at Ramstein tells newcomers: “We know that being in the military means having to endure frequent moves to different assignments. This is part of the price we pay by serving our country.” Five American colleges have campuses on the base. Ellenmarie Zwank Brown, who identifies herself as “an Air Force wife and a physician,” is reassuring in a cheerful guidebook that she wrote for new arrivals: “If you are scared of giving up your American traditions, don’t worry! The military goes out of its way to give military members an American way of life while living in Germany.”
That way of life is contoured around nonstop war. Ramstein is the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, and the base is now pivotal for using air power on other continents. “We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein,” a public-affairs officer, Maj. Tony Wickman, told me during a recent tour of the base. “We think of it as a power-projection platform.” The scope of that projection is vast, with “areas of responsibility” that include Europe, Russia, and Africa—104 countries in all. And Ramstein is well-staffed to meet the challenge, with over 7,500 “active duty Airmen”—more than any other US military base in the world except the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
Serving the transport needs of war efforts in Iraq and Syria (countries hit by 28,675 US bombs and missiles last year) as well as in many other nations, Ramstein is a central pit stop for enormous cargo jets like the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster. The Ramstein base currently supports “fifteen different major combat operations,” moving the daily supply chain and conducting urgent airlifts. Last July, when Ankara gave Washington a green light to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for launching airstrikes in Syria, vital equipment quickly flew from Ramstein to Incirlik so F-16s could start bombing.
But these days a lot of Ramstein’s attention is focused southward. The base maintains a fleet of fourteen newest-model C-130 turboprops, now coming in mighty handy for secretive US military moves across much of Africa. With its sleek digital avionics, the cockpit of a C-130J looked impressive. But more notable was the plane’s spacious cargo bay, where a pilot explained that it can carry up to 44,000 pounds of supplies—or as many as 92 Army Airborne “jumpers,” who can each be saddled with enough weapons and gear to weigh in at 400 pounds. From the air, troops or freight—even steamrollers, road graders, and Humvees—leave the plane’s hold with parachutes. Or the agile plane can land on “undeveloped air fields.”
With Ramstein as its home, the C-130J is ideal for flying war matériel and special-operations forces to remote terrain in northern and western Africa. (The Pentagon describes it as “a rugged combat transporter designed to take off and land at austere fields.”) In mid-2014, the itinerary of a single trip got into a fleeting news story when a teenage stowaway was found dead in a wheel well of a C-130J at Ramstein, after the plane returned from a circuit to Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, and Chad. Stealthy intervention has escalated widely in the two years since journalist Nick Turse found that the US military was already averaging “far more than a mission a day on the continent, conducting operations with almost every African military force, in almost every African country.”
The officers I met at Ramstein in early spring often mentioned Africa. But the base mission of “power projection” hardly stops there.
* * *
In the American foreign policy lexicon, peace has become implausible, a faded memory, a mythic rationale for excelling at war. An airlift squadron at the Ramstein Air Base, which proudly calls itself the “Fighting Doves,” displays a logo of a muscular bird with dukes up. On lampposts in a town near Ramstein’s gates, I saw campaign posters for Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke) with a picture of a dove and a headline that could hardly have been more out of sync with the base: Wie lange wollt lhr den Frieden noch herbei-bomben? “How much longer do you want to keep achieving peace by bombing?” Such questions lack relevance when war is perceived not as a means to an end, but an end in itself.
More than ever, with relatively few US troops in combat and air war all the rage, the latest military technology is the filter of the American warrior’s experience. When Ramstein’s 60,800-square-foot Air and Space Operations Center opened in October 2011, the Air Force crowed that it “comes with 40 communication systems, 553 workstations, 1,500 computers, 1,700 monitors, 22,000 connections, and enough fiber optics to stretch from here to the Louvre in Paris.” (Mona Lisa not included.) A news release focused on “the critical mission of monitoring the airspace above Europe and Africa” and “controlling the skies from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Needles.” But the Defense Department didn’t mention that the new hyper-tech center would be vital to the USA’s drone war.
Ramstein receives visual images from drones via satellite, then relays the images to sensor operators and pilots at computer terminals in the United States. “Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program,” says Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. “All information and data go through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole world.”
Bryant and other sensor operators had Ramstein on speed dial: “Before we could establish a link from our ground-control station in the United States to the drone, we literally would have to call Ramstein up and say ‘Hey, can you connect us to this satellite feed?’ We would just pick up the phone and press the button and it automatically dials in to Ramstein.” Bryant concluded that the entire system for drone strikes was set up “to take away responsibility, so that no one has responsibility for what happens.”
The US government’s far-flung system for extrajudicial killing uses Ramstein as a kind of digital switchboard in a process that fogs accountability and often kills bystanders. A former Air Force drone technician, Cian Westmoreland, told me that many of the technical people staffing Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center are apt to be “none the wiser; they would just know a signal is going through.”
Westmoreland was stationed in Afghanistan at the Kandahar Air Field, where he helped build a signal relay station that connected to Ramstein. He never moved a joystick to maneuver a drone and never pushed a button to help fire a missile. Yet, in 2016, Westmoreland speaks sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes. “I did my job,” he said, “and now I have to live with that.”
During his work on the drone program, Westmoreland developed “a new kind of understanding of what modern warfare actually is. We’re moving towards more network-centric warfare. So, orders [are] dealt out over a network, and making systems more autonomous, putting less humans in the chain. And a lot of the positions are going to be maintenance, they’re technician jobs, to keep systems up and running.”
Those systems strive to reduce the lag time from target zone to computer screen in Nevada. The delay during satellite transmission (“latency” in tech jargon) can last up to six seconds, depending on weather conditions and other factors, but once the signal gets to Ramstein it reaches Nevada almost instantly via fiber-optic cable. Permission to fire comes from an attack controller who “could be anywhere,” as Bryant put it, “just looking at the same video feeds as us pilots and sensors. He just sits in front of a screen too.” As Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recent book Kill Chain, “there is a recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screen—with a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers—is representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents away.”
For all its ultra-tech importance, the Air and Space Operations Center at Ramstein is just a steely link in a kill chain of command, while a kind of assembly-line Taylorism keeps producing the drone war. “I think that’s part of the strength of the secrecy of the program,” Bryant said. “It’s fragmented.” Meanwhile, “We were supposed to function and never ask questions.”
Worlds away, the carnage is often lethally haphazard. For example, classified documents obtained by The Interceptshed light on a special ops series of airstrikes from January 2012 to February 2013 in northeast Afghanistan, code-named Operation Haymaker. The attacks killed more than 200 people, while only 35 were the intended targets. Such numbers may be disturbing, yet they don’t convey what actually happens in human terms.
Several years ago, Pakistani photographer Noor Behram described the aftermath of a US drone attack: “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.”
Even without a missile strike, there are the traumatic effects of drones hovering overhead. Former New York Times reporter David Rohde recalled the sound during his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of Pakistan: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”
But such matters are as far removed from Little America in southwest Germany as they are from Big America back home.
* * *
The American drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where polling indicates that two out of three citizens oppose it. So President Obama was eager to offer assurances during a visit to Berlin three years ago, declaring: “We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones…as part of our counterterrorism activities.” But such statements miss the point, intentionally, and obscure how much the drone war depends on German hospitality.
Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent Green Party member of the Bundestag, told The Nation that “the targeted killings with drones are illegal executions at least in countries which aren’t in war with Germany. These illegal executions offend against human rights, international law and the German Grundgesetz [Constitution]. If German official institutions permit this and do not stop these actions, they become partly responsible.”
With 10 percent of the Bundestag’s seats, the Greens have the same size bloc as the other opposition party, the Left Party. “To kill people with a joystick from a safe position thousands of miles away is a disgusting and inhumane form of terror,” Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the Left Party, told me. “A war is no video game—at least not for those who have not the slightest chance to defend themselves…. These extrajudicial killings are war crimes, and the German government should draw the consequences and close down the air base in Ramstein…. In my view, the drone war is a form of state terrorism, which is going to produce thousands of new terrorists.”
A lawsuit filed last year in Germany focuses on a drone attack in eastern Yemen on August 29, 2012, that killed two members of the Bin Ali Jaber family, which had gathered in the village of Khashamir to celebrate a wedding. “Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today,” said Faisal bin Ali Jaber, one of the surviving relatives behind the suit. “It is quite simple: Without Germany, US drones would not fly.” But the German judiciary has rebuffed such civil suits—most recently in late April, when a court in Cologne rejected pleas about a drone strike that killed two people in Somalia, including a herdsman who was not targeted.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has played dumb about drone-related operations in her country. “The German government claims to know nothing at all,” Bundestag member Ströbele said. “Either this is a lie, or the government does not want to know.” The general secretary of the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, sums up the German government’s strategy as “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” He charges that “Germany is making itself complicit in the deaths of civilians as part of the US drone war.”
After an uproar over US National Security Agency spying in Germany caused the Bundestag to set up a special committee of inquiry two years ago, it became clear that surveillance issues are intertwined with Ramstein’s role in a drone program that relies on cell-phone numbers to find targets. The Green Party’s representative on the eight-member committee, Konstantin von Notz, sounded both pragmatic and idealistic when I interviewed him this spring at a Berlin cafe. “We assume that there is a close connection between surveillance and Ramstein,” he said, “as data collected and shared by German and US intelligence services already led to drone killings coordinated via Ramstein.”
Left Party co-chair Wagenknecht was emphatic about the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency. “The BND delivers phone numbers of possible drone targets to the NSA and other agencies,” she told The Nation. “The BND and our foreign minister bear part of the blame. They do not only tolerate war crimes, they assist them.”
The United States now has 174 military bases operating inside Germany, more than in any other country. (Japan is second, with 113.) The military presence casts a shadow over German democracy, says historian Josef Foschepoth, a professor at the University of Freiburg. “As long as there are Allied troops or military bases and facilities on German soil,” he wrote in a 2014 article, “there will be Allied surveillance measures carried out on and from German soil, which means, in particular, American surveillance.”
For surveillance and an array of other spooky purposes, the US government created what would become the BND at the end of World War II. “We grew it carefully,” a retired senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, W. Patrick Lang, said in an interview. “They’ve always cooperated with us, completely and totally.” Intelligence ties between the two governments remain tightly knotted. “When it comes to the secret services,” Professor Foschepoth told a public forum in Berlin last summer, “there are some old legal foundations where the federal [German] government follows the American interests more than the interests of their own citizens.”
Extending such talk to depict the current US military presence as bad for democracy in Germany is a third rail in German politics. When Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg quoted from Foschepoth’s article at the Berlin forum—and pointedly asked, “Why are American troops here still? Why the bases?”—the panelist from the Green Party, von Notz, vehemently objected to going there. “I wouldn’t open the discussion or have in the background that this is still an occupation problem or something,” he said. “It’s not a problem of troops somewhere—it’s a problem of lacking democracy, state of law, controlling our secret services today.”
Nine months later, talking with him at Café Einstein on Berlin’s Kurfürstenstrasse, I asked von Notz why he’d pushed back so heatedly against the idea that US military bases are constraining German democracy. “Germany needs to take full responsibility of what is going on on its territory,” he responded. “The German government can no longer hide behind a US-German relation allegedly characterized by the post–World War II occupation. Germany strictly has to ensure that the US intelligence services comply with the law without ignoring the illegal actions of its own Federal Intelligence Service [the BND].”
* * *
Whatever the state of its democracy, Germany is continuing to enable America’s furtive warfare in Africa. Ramstein’s many roles include serving as home to US Air Forces Africa, where a press officer gave me a handout describing the continent as “key to addressing transnational violent extremist threats.” The military orders come from the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, a two-hour drive from Ramstein.
At first, AFRICOM—which calls itself “a full-spectrum combatant command”—was to be a short-term guest in southwest Germany, some 800 miles from Africa’s closest shores. A State Department cable, marked “Secret” and dated August 1, 2008, said that “no decision has been made on a permanent AFRICOM headquarters location.” Two months later, just as AFRICOM was going into full-fledged operation, a confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin reported that “the German government strongly supported the US decision to temporarily base” AFRICOM in Germany.
Yet at the outset, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show, tensions existed with the host country. Germany balked at extending blanket legal immunity under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement to every American civilian employee at the new AFRICOM facility, and the dispute applied to “all US military commands in Germany.” While the two governments negotiated behind the scenes into late 2008 (one confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin complained about the German Foreign Office’s “unhelpful positions”), AFRICOM made itself at home in Stuttgart.
Nearly eight years later, the “temporary” headquarters for AFRICOM shows no sign of budging. “AFRICOM will stay permanent in Stuttgart if Germany won’t protest against it,” said the Green Party’s Ströbele, who has been on the Bundestag’s intelligence committee for almost twenty years. He told The Nation: “We do not know enough about the AFRICOM facility. Nevertheless there is the assumption that this facility is used to organize and to lead US combat missions in Africa. Because of this reason no country in Africa wanted to have this facility.” Whatever political hazards might lurk for AFRICOM in Germany, the US government finds those risks preferable to headquartering its Africa Command in Africa. And there are more and more interventions to sweep under rugs.
“A network of American drone outposts” now “stretches across east and west Africa,” reports the Center for the Study of the Drone, which is based at Bard College. One of the new locations is northern Cameroon, where a base for Gray Eagle drones (capable of dropping bombs and launching Hellfire missiles) recently went into full operation, accompanied by 300 US troops, including special-operations forces. In late winter TheNew York Times reported that the United States “is about to break ground on a new $50 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya.” In March the Pentagon triumphantly announced that drones teamed up with manned jets to kill “more than 150 terrorist fighters” at an al-Shabab training camp in Somalia.
As drone attacks have widened, they’ve become a growing provocation to a vocal minority of German lawmakers. “We deeply regret Germany’s loss of sovereignty, but the government keeps on acting cowardly,” said Sevim Dagdelen, the Left Party’s leader on foreign affairs. Another member of the party in the Bundestag, Andrej Hunko, told me that “AFRICOM in Stuttgart and the Air Operation Center in Ramstein are very important hubs for drone strikes led by the US military”—but “it is very difficult for German lawmakers to control this issue.”
Hunko and colleagues filed more than a dozen requests for explanation of drone-related policy from the German government, but he says “the answers were always dodgy.” The Merkel government deflects formal queries about Ramstein and AFRICOM by claiming to have no reliable information—a stance abetted by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now in its third year of serving as a big junior partner to Merkel’s right-leaning Christian Democratic Union. While Left Party legislators and some in the Green Party denounce the stonewalling, they have scant leverage; the two parties combined are just one-fifth of the Bundestag.
Merkel’s stone wall is strengthened by the fact that some Green Party leaders have no problem with US bases. (Citing the very left-wing pasts of several key figures in today’s party, one peace activist near Ramstein tartly remarked that “the Green Party changed from red to green to olive green.”) In the affluent state of Baden-Württemberg, home to AFRICOM headquarters, the state’s Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is a military booster. Likewise, the drone program has nothing to fear from Fritz Kuhn, mayor of Stuttgart, the largest city in Germany with a Green mayor. Kuhn declined to answer any of the questions that I submitted in writing about his views on AFRICOM and its operations in his city. “Mayor Kuhn wants to waive the interview,” a spokesman said.
More than publicly acknowledged, the economic benefits of hosting AFRICOM’s headquarters were major factors in the German government’s decision to allow it to open in the first place, a member of the Bundestag told me. With the US military footprint shrinking in the country, Germany’s political establishment saw the chance to welcome AFRICOM as very good news. Today, AFRICOM says that 1,500 US military and civilian personnel are stationed at its Kelley Barracks command center in Stuttgart.
* * *
“Ramstein is a preparation center for the next world war,” Wolfgang Jung said as we neared the base. War has overshadowed his entire life. Jung was born in 1938, and his childhood memories are vivid with fear and the destruction that came with bombs (from both sides). He lost two schoolmates. His father ended up on the Russian front and died in a POW camp just after the war’s end. As a teenager, Jung saw Ramstein open, and in the decades since then he has become a dogged researcher. The base is not just about drones, he stressed. Far from it.
The entire region is brandishing huge arsenals. Ten miles from Ramstein, the Miesau Army Depot is the US military’s biggest storage area for ammunition outside the United States. In late February the depot received what Stars and Stripes reported as “the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10 years”—more than 5,000 tons of US Army ammunition that arrived while the Pentagon was “ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along NATO’s eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive Russia.”
In many ways, this heavily militarized stretch of Germany is now a ground-zero powder keg. The consolidated Allied Air Command, “responsible for all Air and Space matters within NATO,” has been at the Ramstein base since 2013. The command includes a center for missile defense, the nexus of the latest US scenario for a missile shield—which the Kremlin views as a threatening system that would make a first strike against Russia more tempting and more likely. Interviewed by the German newspaper Bild in January, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw “striving for an absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.”
Such matters preoccupy Jung and his wife Felicitas Strieffler, also a lifelong resident of the area. She spoke of Ramstein as a grave menace to the world and a blight on the region. Locals dread sunny days, she said, because roaring warplanes take to cloudless skies for training maneuvers. On a hillside, after climbing a 60-foot tower—a red sandstone monument built in 1900 to honor Bismarck—we looked out over a panorama dominated by Ramstein’s runways, hangars, and aircraft. Strieffler talked about a dream she keeps having: The base will be closed and, after the chemical pollutants are removed, it will become a lake where people can go boating and enjoy the beauties of nature.
Such hopes might seem unrealistic, but a growing number of activists in Germany are working to end Ramstein’s drone role and eventually close the base. On June 11, several thousand protesters gathered in the rain to form a “human chain” that stretched for more than five miles near the Ramstein perimeter. At the Stopp Ramstein Kampagne office in Berlin, a 37-year-old former history student, Pascal Luig, exuded commitment and calm as he told me that “the goal should be the closing of the whole air base.” He added, “Without Ramstein, no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible.” With no hope of persuading the US government to shut down Ramstein and its other bases in his country, Luig wants a movement strong enough to compel the German government to evict them.
* * *
The Pentagon top brass can’t be happy about the publicity in Germany connecting Ramstein to the drone war. “They like to keep these things low key, just because there are points of vulnerability,” former drone technician Cian Westmoreland said, noting that “the military is all about redundancies.” In fact, even while Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center was going into action nearly five years ago, a similar facility was on the drawing boards for the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.
According to some sources, the ultimate goal is to replace Ramstein with Sigonella as the main site for relay of drone signals. (Replying to my inquiry, an Air Force spokesman at Ramstein, Maj. Frank Hartnett, wrote in an e-mail: “There are currently no plans to relocate the center’s activities.” He did not respond to follow-up questions.) An investigative journalist working for the Italian newsmagazine L’Espresso, Stefania Maurizi, told me in mid-spring that progress toward such a center at Sigonella remained at a snail’s pace. But on June 21, she reported that an Italian engineering firm had just won a contract for a building similar to Ramstein’s relay center. Construction at Sigonella could be completed by 2018.
As part of the militarization process in Italy—“the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East and beyond,” author David Vine observes—Sigonella already has some infrastructure for satellite communication. Another asset is that Italy is even more deferential to the American military than Germany is. “Italy has become the launching pad for the US wars, and in particular for the drone wars, without any public debate,” Maurizi says. “Our responsibilities are huge and the Italian public is kept in the dark.” And when the Pentagon decides to build big in Italy, it doesn’t hurt the momentum that—as Vine documents in his 2015 book Base Nation—the lucrative contracts are routinely signed with Italian construction firms controlled by the Mafia.
In any event, no one can doubt that the Defense Department has become utterly enthralled with drones, officially dubbed Remotely Piloted Aircraft. “Our RPA enterprise” is now “flying combat missions around the globe,” the general running the Air Combat Command, Herbert Carlisle, testified to a Senate subcommittee in March. There was no mistaking his zeal to further expand drone missions, mangled syntax notwithstanding: “They are arming decision makers with intelligence, our warfighters with targets, and our enemies with fear, anxiety and ultimately their timely end.”
General Carlisle said the US military is now flying five times as many drone sorties as a decade ago—a boost that “exemplifies the furious pace at which we have expanded our operations and enterprise.” But he warned that “an insatiable demand for RPA forces has stretched the community thin, especially our Airmen performing the mission.” Today, almost 8,000 Air Force personnel are “solely dedicated” to Predator and Reaper drone missions. “Of the 15 bases with RPA units,” Carlisle said, “13 of them have a combat mission. This mission is of such value that we plan on consistent increases in aircraft, personnel and results.” Several weeks after his testimony, Reuters—citing “previously unreported US Air Force data”—revealed that “drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising.”
Some in-house government appraisals have concluded that the drone war fails because it creates more enemies than it kills. But the “war on terror” is anything but a failure for many corporations or the individuals who spin through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex. As a critical node in the Pentagon’s global “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” (ISR) system, Ramstein is integral to ongoing boondoggles for contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Dynamics. The bottomless pit for taxpayers is a bottomless well for firms catering to the Air Force, with its jargon-larded pursuit of “a distributed ISR operation capable of providing world-wide, near-real-time simultaneous intelligence to multiple theaters of operation through…robust reachback communications architectures.”
June 11, 2016 protest at Ramstein Air Base. (Courtesy: Activism.org)
Looking back at the milieu of his work in the drone program, Westmoreland has concluded that “it’s more or less a for-profit venture. When you get out of the military, you expect to get a job in the defense sector, an executive position. And really it’s about racking up as many awards and decorations as you possibly can.”
At the top ranks, Westmoreland sees a conflict of interest: “They have an incentive to keep wars going.” For the military’s leadership, the available dividends are quite large. For instance, former NSA and CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden—an outspoken advocate of the drone program—received $240,125 last year as a member of the board at Motorola Solutions. That company has an investment in CyPhy Works, a major developer of drones.
Endless war propels an endless gravy train.
* * *
Like the other drone whistleblowers interviewed for this article, former tech sergeant Lisa Ling was careful not to reveal any classified information. But when we met at a coffee shop in California, what she said at the outset could be heard as subversive of the US drone program: “I would like to see humanity brought into the political discourse.” Her two decades in the military included several years of work on assimilating Air National Guard personnel into the drone program. Now she expresses remorse for taking part in a program where “no one person has responsibility.”
The new documentary film National Bird includes these words from Ling: “We are in the United States of America and we are participating in an overseas war, a war overseas, and we have no connection to it other than wires and keyboards. Now, if that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, it does out of me. Because if that’s the only connection, why stop?”
After leaving the Air Force, Ling went on a humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, planting trees and distributing seeds to people she’d previously seen only as indistinct pixels. The drone war haunts her. Ling asks how we would feel if armed drones kept hovering in the sky above our own communities, positioned to kill at any moment.
In the Little America where the Ramstein Air Base is the crown military jewel, such questions go unasked. For that matter, we rarely hear them in Big America. Yet those questions must be asked, or the forever war will be.
In view of the 19th anniversary of the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, here is an article by Gregory Elich that was first published on GR in April 2015.
It was 1999, shortly after the NATO war. I was with a delegation that came to Yugoslavia to document NATO war crimes, and we found no shortage of them. In all of the towns and cities we visited, not one had been spared destruction.
One of our stops was at Aleksinac, a small mining town that NATO had targeted with a special ferocity. The town was led by a strong socialist local government, which may not have been entirely unrelated to NATO’s attentions. Local officials provided us with statistics that were startling for such a small town: 767 houses and 908 apartment flats were destroyed or damaged, as were 302 public buildings. Dragoljub Todorovich, a 74-year-old retired teacher, was at the opening meeting. Metal braces encased his left leg, and he walked with crutches. A missile levelled his home in one of the attacks. “I had been told for forty to fifty years that Americans were our friends,” he reflected. “Americans, with Russians, destroyed fascism together. I survived the Second World War. I was a partisan during the war.” Now war had once again visited Todorovich, but this time he nearly hadn’t survived.
Following our meeting, we visited the site of Todorovich’s home. Nothing remained but blasted concrete and bricks strewn about the area. As we stepped through the rubble, the clinking of bricks underfoot wove a counterpoint to his words. “When I regained consciousness, I saw that only a small part of skin connected my leg with my body,” he recalled. Although surgery saved Todorovich’s leg, he would remain crippled for the remainder of his life. During his fourteen-week recovery in the hospital, he was in constant pain and suffered a heart attack. One thought persisted in his bedridden state: “The worst way possible – that was the way America chose.”
Damaged home adjacent to destroyed neighborhood on Vuk Karadzhich Street. Photo: Gregory Elich
We strolled down Dushan Trivunac Street, where on April 5 of that year, NATO warplanes wiped out nearly an entire city block. On the night of the attack, Vukoman Djokich heard NATO planes swoop overhead. Djokich knew what the sound meant, and warned his wife, “It’s Aleksinac’s turn now. They are surely going to bomb us.” The sound of planes faded, but two minutes later the noise returned. An instant later an explosion thundered, and Djokich saw a “blazing light.” A second explosion followed in quick succession, filling the house with light and knocking Djokich off his chair. The door to his home blew down, and the roof collapsed. Djokich and his wife managed to pull themselves together and escape through the doorway, where they were confronted by the sight of “huge fire, smoke and a cloud of dust. People were screaming and crying for help.”
Despite the destruction this site had suffered, all of the rubble had been cleared by the time of our visit and it was now a construction site. Neatly stacked bricks and building materials bordered the area, and a dump truck and towering crane stood ready as workers were just departing for lunch. The only sign of the tragedy that had taken place was a neighboring apartment building, still pockmarked by shrapnel from the blasts. Further down the street, at the site of another explosion, the foundation of a new building was already being laid.
Damaged home near bombed neighborhood of Nishka and Uzhichka Streets. Photo: Gregory Elich
Turning down Vuk Karadzhich Street, we entered an appealing neighborhood of two-story homes with red tile roofs and balconies lined with flowers. At the end of the street, we came to a residential area had been bombed on April 5. In a deposition taken two weeks after the attack, Srboljub Stojanovich described the attack. “There was a terrific explosion. The windowpanes burst, the ceiling fell down on us, and the walls collapsed and practically buried us. After that, I could only hear the screams and cries of my family members. My whole body was injured.” He and his family managed to dig their way out from under the rubble, but a ghastly sight awaited them. “There were heaps of various construction material, glass, destroyed vehicles, and people coming out and trying to help those who were buried. I could hear cries for help, crying, screams, calls, and all this was horrific.”
Thirteen-year-old Dushan Miletich was at home with his brother and parents when NATO planes began to bomb the town.
“I remember a terrible explosion, the electricity went off, and then the ceiling, pieces of glass and wood came down on us,” he told investigators. “I was injured by this; especially my head, and I could feel the blood trickling down. My parents somehow managed to pull us out through the house window.” The force of the blast threw his father, Slavimir, against the wall. “Immediately after that,” Slavimir reported, “I felt I was hit on the head by an object, which made me fall to the ground. I felt blood gushing down my face. I stood up and went to the room where my wife was with my two sons, and from where I could hear crying and screams.” After their escape through the window, “We ran through smoke and dust, jumping over beams, glass, smashed tiles and bricks. I heard weeping, sobbing and cries for help. There was a family with a baby in the street, seeking shelter.” Slavmir’s wife, Verica, recalled, “The streets were jammed with people who cried.”
As soon as Vukica Miladinovich heard NATO warplanes “flying at an extremely low level making a great noise,” she and her family raced to the basement and closed the door. “Immediately after that, two detonations were heard. I had the impression that my body would burst at that moment. At such moments, people lose their minds. The room was shaking like in the worst and strongest earthquake. I stood next to my bed. Air pressure threw me away, but when falling down I still managed to cover my children with my right hand and press them to the bed. The room was in darkness, covered with smoke and dust. The door which was flung out of its frame hit my father-in-law.” Vukica’s eyeglasses shattered in the blast, damaging her eye. “I wiped the blood pouring from my eye. I became afraid that I had lost my sight, but soon after, although it was dark, I started recognizing shadows. I thought that fire would break out. The basement was stuffy, and there was little air. We were suffocating.”
She called out to her children and managed to locate them in the darkness. “A bed bar was stuck in my son Marko’s leg, but he managed to take it out by himself. I knew that my father-in-law and sister-in-law were dead, and my mother-in-law was hurt. I could not afford to lose any more time.” Vukica began frantically digging with her bare hands and legs, trying to open a passageway through all the piled rubble. Then the house began to collapse around her, with debris falling everywhere, but she managed to clear the way and rescue her children and mother-in-law.
Her husband, Bratislav, was away from home when the missiles struck. Arriving on the scene, he was informed of what had happened to his family. His mother was to die in the hospital two days later. The loss of his parents and sister was so devastating to Bratislav that he considered committing suicide.
Danijela Dimitrijevich, president of the Socialist Youth in Aleksinac, acted as our translator and guide. She told us that she had frequent nightmares of hearing an air raid siren, which caused her to awake, thinking the town was going to be bombed. Dimitrijevich described the reaction when she arrived in town for work the morning after the attack. “Everyone was in a big shock. It was unbelievable to us. I didn’t expect to see this. I cried. It was the only possible feeling for me at that moment. Not just me. The whole town cried. The whole town.”
Everyone in Zago Militich’s family was wounded in the attack. She wept as she told us, “We have been friends [with Americans] until now. This is something none of us expected. We always thought they were our friends. I am 65-years-old, and now I must think about finding a new home.”
Photographs of the neighborhood from the day after the bombing showed a staggering level of destruction. Like other sites in Aleksinac, this neighborhood had been largely cleared of rubble by the time of our visit. A power shovel had scooped out most of the debris, and the ground was freshly dug. Adjoining the area, there was a house that had lost most of its roof. Shrapnel had sprayed two apartment buildings near the area, leaving dozens of gaping holes and twisted windows. No sign remained of the destroyed houses except a lone wall with a stairway leading nowhere.
Dragoslav Milenkovich’s home was in one of the damaged apartment buildings. “Everything was shaking, breaking apart. No one knew where it would fall,” he told us. “Large shrapnel smashed through the wall, and everything was on fire.” Milenkovich lost everything he owned. With nowhere else to go, he was staying as a guest in a neighbor’s home.
Angrokolonijal, a food processing plant, was also targeted by NATO on the night of April 5, killing a night watchman. We found the main storage building locked and no one present. Peering through a hole, we saw a devastated interior. The registration office near the gate was a ruin. Across the street, most of the roof was torn away from the Commercial Department auxiliary building. A fence, twisted and bent from the heat of the blast, prevented us from going inside. Based on what we were able to view from one end of the building, we assumed that the interior damage was extensive. By the time of our visit, construction inspectors had already determined that all of these buildings would have to be torn down.
In the next lot was Empa, a worker cooperative that manufactured streetlights and lights for factories and homes. On the periphery of the blast radius at Angrokolonijal on April 5, it would later become a direct target, sustaining more than $300,000 in damage. The plant’s director, Slobodan Todorovich, told us that the attack killed one worker and wounded another. During the war, air raid sirens in the town sounded almost daily, he said, and workers stayed at their posts during the bombardment as a show of resistance to NATO. Empa was hit in the last of NATO’s three assaults on Aleksinac. That attack took place in the early morning of May 28, when NATO warplanes fired 21 missiles into the town.
The neighborhood of Nishka and Uzhichka Streets was one of the targets in that last attack. The walls of many brick homes stood eerily erect, but the roofs were gone and the interiors empty. One house appeared to have taken a direct hit. Only a portion of a few walls were still standing, surrounded by piles of rubble. Someone had placed a memorial to one of the victims on a wall. We saw these remembrances everywhere we went in Yugoslavia, posted at the sites where victims had been killed. Single sheets of paper or cloth, posted on walls, trees or telephone poles, displaying a photograph and name of the person killed along with comments. The victims were not forgotten. In a communal society, every person killed was seen as a loss for the whole community.
One woman approached us and spoke of those who died. “When we saw that everything was destroyed, we were crying. We saw that our neighbors were dead and we were shocked.” One of those who NATO killed was Dushanka Savich, a technical manager in the local confectionary factory that had sustained severe damage in one of the bombing raids. “She was a very good neighbor,” the woman told us. “She regretted that she never had children.” I could not help dwelling upon this woman with her failed dream of parenthood. What other dreams did she harbor that now would never be realized? How could she have known that all of her dreams would vanish in an instant, along with her life and all of its joys and struggles and everyday pleasures? Our witness had a message for U.S. President Bill Clinton: “I am not guilty, and my children are not guilty.”
Another woman spoke of a man named Predrag Nedeljkovovich, killed when an explosion caused a wall to fall on him. He built his home in Aleksinac only the year before. “No mother will ever again give birth to such a man,” she said. “He worked very hard in the hospital to help people. He was a man of very good disposition, and he was not ashamed to do anything. He did everything, from cleaning to managing the hospital. He always had time to talk with people, also with sick people. He was not arrogant.” He was a man of kind and gentle disposition, and now he was gone. This woman felt nothing but bitterness towards Western leaders. “We came out of hell but they will not.” There was a pause, and then the emotions welled up within her. “Predrag is here in my heart,” she whispered as she lightly touched the center of her chest. A painful silence fell, and then she burst into tears.
Featured image: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Wess Mitchell (left) and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade on March 14.
The Serbian government is contemplating a “compromise” over Kosovo.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucictold U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Wess Mitchell last week that his country was “ready to talk about possible compromises” in order to enter the EU, a radical policy shift that’s long been suspected by his critics and which would have to include changing the constitution in order to be legal. It’s not yet known exactly what he intends to “compromise” on, but individuals such as Timothy Lesshave been speculating since the end of 2016 that it could amount to a territorial swap whereby the northern Serbian-populated regions of the breakaway province are returned to Belgrade in exchange for the remaining Albanian-inhabited majority of the territory being de-facto recognized by the government as an “independent state”.
The problem with this supposedly “pragmatic” proposal – apart from its dubious morality in surrendering the historic cradle of Serbian civilization and the legal complexities inherent in changing the constitution – is that it could easily produce a “domino effect” throughout the region that sees other geopolitical changes occur as well. Serbia’s majority-Muslim region of Raška, which is commonly referred to by its generic Ottoman-era designation of “Sandzak” whenever it’s mentioned by the Mainstream Media, could possibly be next on the chopping block, as could the Kosovo-bordering and Albanian-populated Preševo Valley. Looking beyond Serbia, Macedonia might end up being “federalized” or outright partitioned between its ethnic Macedonian majority and Albanian minority, which could pave the way for both a “Greater Albania” and a “Big Bulgaria” with time.
Bosnia is another Balkan country that could be immediately affected by any speculative “territorial swaps” or “compromises”, as it’s well known that the country’s Serbian half has been proudly protecting its autonomy in the face of the steady and unconstitutional centralizing tendency from Sarajevo. Current Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations and commander of the United States European Command Curtis Scaparrotti recently fear mongered to Congress that “the Serb population” is a “matter of concern” for him “in particular”, confirming that this Russian-friendly people are still in the US’ crosshairs after almost a quarter of century since the NATO War on Bosnia. Interestingly, the US is publicly against the creation of a separate Croat political entity in this fractured nation, but it’s conceivable that it could also “compromise” on this under the pretext that it’s necessary to stop “Serbian secessionism” in the country.
There’s no way to know for sure whether any of these interconnected scenarios would materialize if President Vucic “compromises” on Kosovo, but there’s also no avoiding the fact that the Balkans have always been a geopolitical Pandora’s Box where even the seemingly smallest developments have a tendency to catalyze fast-moving change throughout the region. Another thing to keep in mind is that the US is the only outside power capable of guiding the course of events here because the extent of Russian influence in the Balkans has been largely exaggerated. Moscow wields much more energy and industrial sway than it does political, and as for China, it only cares about the security of its trade routes and logistics centers. Only America has the military-intelligence wherewithal to effect tangible change in the region, and everything that it seeks to do in this regard will be to the benefit of its EU allies and NATO.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Jason Rezaiancomments on Bolton’s enthusiasm for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) and what it means for U.S. Iran policy:
The MEK is the type of fringe group that sets up camp across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and hands out fliers filled with unsubstantiated claims. This is America — we let crazy people talk. That’s their right, and I would never suggest that they be prohibited from doing that. But giving the MEK a voice in the White House is a terrible idea.
In John Bolton they have someone who will do it for them.
Now that Bolton is in such an influential position in the Trump administration, his connection with and support for the MEK pose some real dangers for the U.S. He could use his position to funnel misinformation from the MEK to the president to distort U.S. policy in their favor. He might use his position to advocate publicly on behalf of the MEK, and that would give them a de facto endorsement from the administration. Worse still, he could persuade the president that this totalitarian cult is the “real” Iranian opposition, which would simultaneously harm Iranian dissidents and saddle the U.S. with a discredited, deranged cult as its preferred alternative to the Iranian government.
Bolton’s connection with the MEK is not the only disqualifying thing in his record, but it is one of the more egregious red flags that should have prevented the president from ever offering him the job in the first place. If any other group had been removed from the list of foreign terrorist organizations a few years earlier, anyone publicly advocating on their behalf while they were still on the list would have tremendous difficulty getting work with the U.S. government, much less serving as one of the most important officials in the White House. Because the MEK hates the Iranian government, shilling for them is probably considered a plus in this administration. It is a measure of how warped the debate over Iran policy is that Bolton and others like him could openly shill for such a group without becoming pariahs.
Rezaian reminds us just what the MEK is:
But it is the group’s activities in the decades since that have cemented its reputation as a deranged cult. For decades its command center was a compound in Iraq’s Diyala province, where more than 3,000 members lived in virtual captivity. The few who were able to escape told of being cut off from their loved ones, forced into arranged marriages, brainwashed, sexually abused and tortured.
All this was carried out under the supervision of the group’s leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, the husband and wife at the top of the organization’s pyramid. He has been missing since the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is presumed dead. She now runs the group and makes regular public appearances with her powerful friends from the West — such as Bolton.
There has been a shameful parade of former U.S. officials, retired military officers, and has-been politicians making their annual pilgrimage to pay tribute to Maryam Rajavi in Paris every year. Bolton has been a faithful devotee for the last decade, and when he was just a former Bush administration official few people cared that he was disgracing himself with his appearances there. Now that he is going to be the next National Security Advisor, his horrible judgment and sketchy ties to awful groups should receive extensive scrutiny and they should make us extremely skeptical about everything he says and does in that position.
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.
With Trump’s naming of the war lovers John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, he has signaled that he is eager to shed more blood and wage a wider war in the service of an imperialistic agenda.
In a rare show of solidarity, the U.S., Germany, and France have all expressed unity in their position that the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, involving a military-grade nerve agent, was ‘likely’ attributable to Russia.
Regrettably, the final list of the civilian casualties has not been determined as yet, although the number is estimated to stand at over 3,000. About 10,000 people were wounded. However, the number of those who lost their lives after the end of the aggression due to sustained heavy injuries, or from unexploded cluster bombs, chemical poisoning that resulted from the destruction of refineries, transformer stations, chemical factories and, in particular, due to the delayed effects of the use of missiles with depleted uranium, most likely, will never be precisely determined.
As tipping points in the Earth’s climate amplify, including hurricanes, snow storms and wildfires, it appears to be beyond human power to contemplate the consequences of four degrees Celsius warming within less than a couple of centuries, a collapse of civilization and the demise of billions. The consequents of global warming have been underestimated as many cannot bring themselves to look at the unthinkable.
The US is threatening to sanction Russia if it sells its S-400 anti-air systems abroad.
Bob Menendez led a group of lawmakers who wrote to the State Department and asked that last year’s “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act”, or CAATSA, be applied against Russia in the event that it exports its latest state-of-the-art defensive technology. The US is evidently scared of the S-400s because it keenly understands just how strongly they undercut the Pentagon’s strategic air and missile dominance and therefore correspondingly raise the cost of any future military campaign. Simply put, investing in this system is akin to investing in one of the most surefire deterrence policies against American aggression, which is why a wide array of states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, India, and China are in the process of doing so.
Qatar had previously been in talks with Russia about purchasing these missiles but looks likely to backtrack on this under American pressure, though there’s recently been speculation that Pakistan might be interested in them as a response to the Pentagon suspending military assistance to the South Asian state at the beginning of this year. Altogether, the identifiable pattern is that countries all across the Eurasian Rimland are interested in buying this technology, with the combined effect being that the US might eventually be shut out of the supercontinental Heartland if all of these prospective sales go through, hence the urgency behind why America wants to sanction Russia for selling its S-400s abroad. Inadvertently, however, this frenzy might backfire and become the best endorsement that Russia could have ever hoped for.
In addition, the threat of concerted American pressure against Moscow and its military partners also creates the opportunity for Russia to lead a broad anti-sanctions coalition in developing and expanding alternative financial and other institutions for limiting the damage that the US could do to their interests through CAATSA. As such, this could become the impetus for strengthening the emerging Multipolar World Order and accelerating the transition away from unipolarity, with the case of possible sanctions and sanction-evading measures related to CAATSA and the S-400s being a trial run for the day when Russia inevitably sells its hypersonic missile technology to other countries in giving them an offensive deterrent to pair with their defensive one against American aggression.
Russia’s “military diplomacy” is helping traditional American allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia diversify their relations with multipolar Great Powers while retaining pragmatic cooperation with the US, with the end result being that they’re able to more comprehensively chart a more independent foreign policy. This ultimately enables them to become the pioneers of a new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM) in the New Cold War that strives to attain strategic equidistance between the US and China, which would be impossible to pull off without the pivotal “balancing” role that their relationship with Russia provides. Approached from this perspective, Russia’s S-400 sales are actually a groundbreaking step in the direction of revolutionary geostrategic change, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the US is reacting as hysterically as it is to this move.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
In recent days, Turkey achieved the most notable military victory since the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. On March 18, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) captured the city of Afrin from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) following an almost two-month long military operation in northwestern Syria. The advance, entitled Operation Olive Branch, was widely covered in the Turkish media in a heroic style creating a patriotic frenzy in the country.
During the whole of 2017, the media and authorities were conducting a large-scale propaganda campaign supporting the military and encouraging citizens to enlist. Some foreigners visiting Turkey in the period mentioned leaflets in municipal transport vehicles promoting the ideal of becoming a martyr defending the interests of the country and nation.
Turkish policy is infamous for its flexibility, a rapid and often hard-to-predict ability to change priorities and allies. According to some reports, the Turkish military victory in Afrin had become possible thanks to a political agreement between the Turkish leadership and the administration of US President Donald Trump. In recent months, there was always at least one Turkish deputy foreign minister in the US for negotiations and at one point most of them were there together.
Meanwhile, Ankara was involved in a successful political dialogue with Moscow, thus preventing Russian interference with its plans or support for Syrian Kurds. Nonetheless, the US-Turkish backroom deal was the main factor behind the success in Afrin.
The US halted its military support to Kurdish militias in northwestern Syria and pressured the Kurdish leadership in the rest of so-called Rojava thus preventing a minor chance that the YPG, known in the mainstream media as the SDF, would open up a new front against the Turkish forces. As a result, the YPG abandoned its key stronghold of Afrin almost without firing a single shot.
The number and types of weapons and ammunition captured by the TAF and the FSA in the city proves that the YPG in Afrin had been receiving military supplies from both the so-called US-led and Russian-led blocks. While details of the game behind the scenes are yet to be revealed, the recent developments have, in any case, led to the Turkish military and diplomatic success.
Almost immediately, following the fall of Afrin, Turkey started implementing a more pro-US approach in its foreign policy. It wiped the YPG out of northwestern Syria and thus no longer needs to manoeuvre between the US and Russia over this issue. At the same time, Ankara’s expansionist aspirations are still on the table. The Erdogan regime will try to annex the north and northwest of Syria by establishing a quasi-state or an autonomy controlled by its proxies. The Syrian government, Iran and Russia will not be able to tolerate this. In this way, the US could become an organic ally of Turkey in northern Syria in the near future.
However, the depth of the possible US-Turkish cooperation will depend on multiple factors, one of them is the Manbij issue. The city is currently controlled by the SDF, which is a mostly PR brand for YPG units backed up by the US. Ankara seeks to kick the YPG out of the city and its countryside by a military force. However, US troops deployed in Manbij and patrolling the Syrian-Turkish border in the SDF-held areas prevent this. In this situation, Turkey has proposed the US to establish a joint security zone in the area, which will not allow the YPG presence. However, the idea has not received a public support from Washington so far.
“That’s funny, because no agreement has been reached,” US Department of State spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters on March 20 commenting on the statement by the Turkish presidential spokesman that the sides have already reached an agreement over the city.
The changes in the Turkish stance towards Russia can be clearly observed through its foreign policy rhetoric. On March 16, the country’s foreign ministry issued an official statement describing the 2014 referendum in Crimea illegitimate.
On the other hand, Ankara seeks to maintain at least neutral relations with Moscow and to develop further the economic cooperation with it. The TurkStream pipeline is a strategically important project for the Turkish leadership because it will allow it to gain control over the transit of natural gas into southern Europe.
In the coming months, Turkey will continue strengthening its political and military influence in the region as well as developing its foreign policy activity. If Ankara succeed in this, the other regional powers will face additional risks caused by the traditional pan-Turkish expansionism, which arises every time Turkey strengthens its military and political power.
Meantime, Turkey has the following goals:
to consolidate gains and to expand the territory under its control in northern and northwestern Syria as well as in northern Iraq. The expansion in northern Iraq may be conducted under the pretext of military efforts against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sinjar. The military presence in neighboring countries will be justified publicly by the need to create so-called “security zones” to combat “terrorism”;
to strengthen positions on the so-called Cyprus Issue. Northern Cyprus is a self-proclaimed state occupying the northern part of the island and is recognized only by Turkey. Turkey maintains a notable military force there;
to strengthen its influence in the Aegean Sea;
to expand its cultural and political influence into the Turkic states of Central Asia and to restore its clandestine influence on the Turkic regions of Russia.
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This article by the late Professor Edward Herman was among the first articles published by Global Research on September 15, 2001. The article was written in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks
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One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible.
Editorializing on the recent attacks (“The National Defense,” Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent “resurgent of ethnic hatreds,” but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian “reform”; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.
Prof Edward Herman, right
The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on “religious fanaticism…the anger among those left behind by globalization,” and the “distaste of Western civilization and cultural values” among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.
Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating “nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses” and threatening to respond to “an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses,” as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be “news fit to print.” In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of “disappeared” in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.
The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of “our kind of guy” Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in “methods of interrogation,” and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his “outstanding service” (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).
The Iraqis then had their turn. Saddam moved from valued ally in the 1980s, whose use of “weapons of mass destruction” against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds caused no problem at all with his U.S. and British friends, to “another Hitler” upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly his possession of “weapons of mass destruction” became an extremely urgent matter as the man had demonstrated an inability to follow orders. The war and “sanctions of mass destruction” that followed have killed more than a million Iraqis, and in the well-know words of Madeleine Albright (image: right), questioned on whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified by the U.S. policy ends, replied, “it is worth it.” No doubt, but an objective observer would recognize that there may be many Iraqis who feel with some justification that the United States is an evil force.
The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas– uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.
All of these victims may well have a distaste for “Western civilization and cultural values,” but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends.
This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions–perhaps even billions–of people “unworthy victims.” The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are prepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.
Featured image: Demonstrators shout slogans and hold Palestinian flags during a protest against the US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, on 7 December 2017 in Gaza City, Gaza (Source: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency)
They do not want to recognise the truth. The project of an independent Palestinian state has ended forever, and any talk about a “Palestinian state” today remains a dead letter that does not go along with its meaning. This is what the Americans, Europeans, Israelis and the Palestinian Authority itself know. There is no possibility for an independent and sovereign state through negotiations based on the current balances.
The project, which was launched by the International Quartet, the US, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations during the George W. Bush era, was concluded with a Road Map for Peace that was supposed to lead to a “viable Palestinian state living in peace and security along with Israel”, as promised. Over time, it has become clear that the project was not about an independent sovereign state, but rather a protectorate curbed with security obligations to the Israeli occupation and restricted with the conditions of grantors who control the daily living of Palestinians who would have to bow to external dictates.
If established, this “state” will today be a dependable non-independent project unable to protect its people and will not enjoy geographical contact between its territories that are fragmented by the occupation. It will be a “state” subjected to the occupation that dominates it, and it will have to fight month after month to receive the crumbs the international funders throw in order to pay the salaries of its employees and security forces.
The expected Palestinian state is basically required to be a security authority to protect the Israeli occupation from the anger of the Palestinian generations who aspire to claim their freedom, independence and their right to return to their land and houses from which they were forcibly displaced. It is obvious that this authority has so far performed its “duties” best under the pretext of “security coordination” even during political tensions between Ramallah and the Netanyahu government.
It seems clear that the Palestinian Authority is in trouble, which explains the current rigorous tone in its speech, especially with the approach of the infamous Trump project called the “Deal of the Century.” The fundamental promises it has made to its people since it was founded in 1994 have not been realised, despite the slogans it has raised about successive “achievements”. People may have forgotten that this power was basically just a transitional phase to an independent state before the end of the last century. However, the temporary situation has become permanent, and there is no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
To compensate for this sovereign stalemate, the Authority held on to some formal independence symbols, such as raising flags and rolling out the red carpet. It has rather remained a mere self-governance administration under the occupation, although it has denied this fact. Israeli forces are still storming Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank and carrying out daily arrests, expanding illegal settlement, and controlling Palestinian movement at crossings and military checkpoints. Several governments have been formed and sovereign positions have been taken under the Palestinian Authority. However, all of its officials remain enchained by occupation restrictions. President Mahmoud Abbas himself has repeatedly stated that he cannot leave his Ramallah headquarters without Israeli approval. Successive complaints from Palestinian prime ministers have been raised over the years from being harshly treated by Israeli soldiers who are the age of their grandchildren. If this is the case with officials holding VIP cards, what does the suffering of Palestinians who are stuck caught between walls, military barriers and settlements look like?
It is not surprising that prominent Palestinian official Saeb Erekat, who has lived the negotiations for a quarter of a century, has announced that the real ruler of Palestine is not Mahmoud Abbas, it is rather the arrogant politician Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli defence minister.
It should be admitted that any “Palestinian state” that will be declared under this deplorable reality will not be a truly independent state, even if the Palestinian leadership will be forced once again to celebrate void achievements with raising more flags and welcoming delegations who will congratulate it.
The fact is that a difficult stage for the Palestinian people has started since the rule of Trump, who seems to seek to impose his forced project to end the Palestinian cause at any price. This time, too, no one has asked the Palestinian people for their opinion and position on this project; neither the US administration nor the Israeli government of course, and not even the Palestinian Authority itself.
The White House master might not notice that the Palestinian cause did not emerge yesterday. It is risky that he and his administration assume that the Palestinian people will bow today and announce the end of history, even if the Palestinian leadership seems weaker and more helpless than ever before.
The discretionary spending bill Trump signed into law on Friday excludes hundreds of billions of dollars in military related spending, enormous classified amounts for CIA, NSA and other intelligence community black budgets, along with add-on appropriations to come for US operations in multiple war theaters.
America spends over $1.5 trillion annually for militarism, warmaking, maintaining its global empire of bases, highly classified intelligence operations, and related expenses, most of it over and above annual appropriation bills.
US FY 2018 spending is expected to add substantially to the federal deficit, likely exceeding another trillion dollars this fiscal year, amounts increasing annually.
David Stockman estimates the great GOP tax cut heist will increase the federal debt to around $35 trillion by 2028. It’s currently slightly over $21 trillion, around 105% of GDP, the percentage rising annually.
He explained $20 trillion in national debt was reached last September 8 – $21 trillion 186 days later, saying “you haven’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Imagine if US discretionary spending went largely for productive, not destructive purposes – for education, healthcare, low-cost housing, other social justice programs, rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and other homeland needs.
America’s permanent war agenda prevents it – notably since Operation Desert Storm (1991), a decade of Balkan wars, the rape of Yugoslavia and what followed 9/11.
In 1981 when Ronald Reagan’s tenure began, the national debt was less than 32% of GDP. It reached an all-time high of nearly 119% of GDP in 1946 because of WW II spending.
In 2008, it was less than 68%, increasing by around 55% through 2017.
Most discretionary US federal spending goes for militarism, raping and destroying countries, corporate welfare including rewarding banksters, and police state harshness, the nation militarized against its own people – including at the state and local levels.
In his treatise on government, Thomas Paine said
“a republic is supposed to be directed by certain fundamental principles of right and justice, from which there cannot, because there ought not to, be any deviation.”
“(It) is executed by a select number of persons, who act as representatives, and in behalf of the whole, and who are supposed to (govern) as the people would do were they all assembled together.”
“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic, (they) mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them.”
“A republic, properly understood, is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.”
Since its founding, America was never governed by these principles, notably not today, serving wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively, waging war on humanity, the nation thirdworldized to finance it, along with serving its monied interests alone at the expense of most others.
Bloated spending Trump signed into law followed earlier out-of-control budgets.
Stockman believes massive annual deficits are as sure as daily sunrises, the “nation’s fiscal accounts…in free fall…for as far as the eye can see into the future” – a slow-motion “fiscal calamity…unfolding.”
Notably, most US discretionary spending goes for the wrong things, vital ones benefitting ordinary Americans increasingly eroding.
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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.
