Global Research

Police State South Korea Clamps Down on Peace Movement. Deployment of US THAAD Missile System in South Korea

By Gregory Elich, July 28 2016

The Philippines was under American colonial rule from 1898 to 1946. Despite gaining independence, the island nation is now being used as a tool to apply pressure on China, America’s biggest rival in the South China Sea.

SHANGHAI — (Analysis) The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s non-binding ruling on the territorial dispute between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of the Philippines is largely misunderstood.

Sovereignty or ownership of disputed land formations were never going to be adjudicated or awarded as many Filipinos and Filipinas thought or were led to believe by the past and present leadership of the Philippines.

What the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal studied were the geo-legal status definitions of the disputed territory. In part, the Chinese claim of sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal, which Beijing refers to as the Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island, respectively, is under dispute because of the status of the “adjacent waters.” It is mainly the definition and legal status of the adjacent waters that Manila — and Washington — are concerned about, and what The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration examined. This is the crux of the matter.

Adjacent waters are a 12 nautical mile territorial (22 kilometers) stretch in bodies of water that extends from the shoreline of any land territory. The water that is within the 12 nautical miles of territory claimed by a specific country is to be legally treated as its internal waters or territorial sea. This alone gives Beijing control over a large swath of strategic water.

Moreover, Beijing’s official position is that the Spratly/Nansha Islands are entitled to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and that China has legal control over the continental shelf under both Chinese domestic law and under the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Although a country and its government do not have sovereignty in their EEZ or on the continental shelf, they do have “sovereign rights” and jurisdiction over a distance of up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) for the purpose of exploring and developing the natural resources of the seabed and subsoil in these areas.

However, low-tide elevations and rocks that cannot sustain human life do not include any of the maritime entitlements that Beijing claims. This is why the argument on the legal and geographic definition of the Spratly/Nansha Islands as rocks, reefs, low-tide elevations, or islands is so important.

Through its claims, the Philippines has, in part, sought to limit the nautical miles that China can claim for exploration and development. In fact, the Philippines brought the case against China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal exclusively as a maritime dispute and not a territorial dispute as an ipso facto means of extending the EEZ of the Philippines and reducing China’s EEZ.

The location of the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

This is why China generally claims that the Spratly/Nansha Islands are geographically and legally islands, and the Philippines, now with the support of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, claims otherwise. In this context, fearing that the Chinese-controlled Ligao Island/Itu Aba could be categorized as an island that would give an extensive EEZ to the Chinese, Florin Hilbay, the acting solicitor-general of the Philippines, and Francis H. Jardeleza, who was the solicitor-general of the Philippines from 2012 to 2014, originally wanted to exclude Ligao Island/Itu Aba from the legal dossier Manila submitted to the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal.

 

Nationalism and tactics of deliberate confusion

Despite their close proximity to the Philippines, the Spratly/Nansha Islands have not been recognized as Philippine territory. Manila has not even sought an answer on this from the case it brought to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Instead, the tribunal ruled on geo-legal definitions, recommended that China should not build artificial islands in the area, and concluded that disputed islands are located on the continental shelf that forms the archipelago of the Philippines.

The Philippine claims that the disputed islands belong to the Philippines due to the ruling about the continental shelf by the tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration are misleading. This does not even legally mean that the Philippines has sovereignty or ownership over the islands. Geographic proximity is never an indicator of legal ownership. Many countries have islands located on continental shelves that other countries are situated on. For example, Greece has many islands located on the continental shelf of Turkey, and France has the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which are located off Canada’s continental shelf. What the Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal did is simply answer a geographic question.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, attends the 23rd ASEAN regional retreat meeting in Vientiane, Laos. Despite the Philippines taking on China in a territorial dispute in the South China Sea and winning big, other Southeast Asian nations with similar disputes who attended the meetings are backing down from their claims.

 

Beijing has both a strong historical and legal case in regards to its claims over the disputed land formations. The Chinese established trade rights in the waters of the disputed territories over a thousand years ago under the Han Dynasty. Since then, the land formations there were tied to China during the Yuan, Ming, Qing, and Republican periods, until Japan annexed them. In 1947, after the Second World War and as part of China’s diplomatic, legal, and political efforts to regain the Chinese territory that Japan had annexed, the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China established the demarcation line that is the basis for Beijing’s territorial claims in its dispute with Manila. A year earlier, in 1946, when Philippine President Elpidio Quirino asked Washington to help secure the disputed area for the Philippines, he was told that the area in question was already claimed by the Chinese and French. Beijing has, however, refused to participate in the non-binding tribunal proceedings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration because the Chinese government realizes that the geo-legal definitions it promotes would be changed and that the nautical miles and EEZ it claims would be reduced and undermined.

The oldest direct claim of the Philippines is based on the establishment of the municipality of Kalayaan (Freedom) by Tomas Cloma in 1956, which Ferdinand Marcos used to support his regime’s claim of ownership over the area in 1978. What may surprise Filipinos and Filipinas is that the disputed islands were never included in Article III of the Treaty of Paris as part of the territory of the Philippines that the Spanish surrendered to the United States in 1898. Though a protest was made by the Philippines, Washington did not object when France claimed the disputed territory in 1933. For the same reasons, Washington, unlike the French government that claimed the islands, did not object when the Japanese occupied the disputed islands when Tokyo claimed that they were part of the Chinese province of Formosa/Taiwan in 1938. Washington was even involved in 1952 with the signing of the Treaty of Peace between Japan and the Republic of China, in which Japan renounced all territorial claims to the Pescadores Islands, the Spratly Islands, and Taiwan as a means of returning them to China.

Although any country has the right to change geographic names, the domestic renaming of the South China Sea to the West Philippine Sea by President Benigno Aquino III is a break with history. Historically, Filipinos and Filipinas have called the body of water the South China Sea. While the name change is meant to politically accent the objectives of the Philippines to gain a share of the South China Sea’s resources and challenge China, it is problematic. The name change that has been readily adopted in the Philippines illustrates how the Aquino III administration used a nationalist approach to Filipinos and Filipinas’ understanding of the dispute with China. Philippine citizens who do not call the South China Sea the West Philippine Sea are chided and scolded as unpatriotic or Chinese apologists. Even worse, under the atmosphere that the Aquino III administration has cultivated, the loyalty of Philippine citizens of Chinese ethnic background is being unjustly questioned over the dispute in the South China Sea.

Through a tactic of using nationalism and simplistic explanations that deliberately ignore history in preference of geographic proximity, the Aquino III administration misled the people of the Philippines on the dispute with Beijing. In the process, the Aquino III administration readily demonized China as a hostile country and the Chinese as an enemy of the Philippines.

 

Has Manila singled out Beijing at Washington’s behest?

The territorial disputes in the South China also include Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Vietnamese have historically been the most aggressive in their territorial claims, and the pre-Vietnamese unification state of South Vietnam even had tense military altercations with the Philippines over Southwest Cay in 1975. Even though the Spratly/Nansha Islands are divided among these states, Manila has focused on challenging and demonizing Beijing.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, right, welcomes U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit at the Malacanang presidential palace in Manila, Philippines on Wednesday, July 27, 2016.

The demonization of China not only comes at the expense of good relations between China and the Philippines. It serves Washington’s agenda to encircle China, which President Benigno Aquino III was all too happy to go along with. From a strategic standpoint, Washington wants China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea to be eroded so that the South China Sea can be an open body of water where the U.S. can position its military forces.

The purpose of eroding Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea is part of a U.S. strategic military balancing act in Asia. The positioning of the U.S. military in the waters of the South China Sea will give Washington the ability to obstruct Chinese shipping in the event of a conflict between Beijing and Washington. This is why Washington, which itself has refused to sign the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has consistently encouraged the Philippines to challenge China and done everything possible to condense Chinese maritime jurisdiction in the South China Sea. In this regard, one of the objectives of the Philippines is to guarantee open access to the waters of the South China Sea for the U.S. military. This is why the main concern of the Chinese is not to get their nautical miles reduced as much as possible, but to keep the U.S. military out of the South China Sea to maintain their security.

 For Mint Press News by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya. Originally published  on July 27, 2016.

 

Contemporary art is often criticised as pointless or overvalued by art market elites. Even the word ‘artist’ has lost much of its meaning. The many ongoing global socio-political crises seem to make even the idea of art fade into insignificance. Most art either reflects local reality (landscapes, cityscapes, portraits) or internal ‘reality’ (surrealism, conceptual art). But there are artists (in this case, I will focus on painters) who do not shy away from depicting the difficulties facing ordinary people or the elites who create those difficulties in the first place. Here we will look at particular ways in which painters deal with contemporary reality using old and new forms of art to draw attention to injustices or general social issues.

When we see art that is trying to depict contemporary reality we can easily be drawn into the content of the picture without realising that the very forms used are themselves a result of conflicts of differing styles for formal and ideological reasons arising from within the artistic ‘community’ itself. While the forms can range from the purely abstract to the hyper-real, most socio-political art tends towards differing degrees of realism.

Nationalism

Historically, nationalist artists concerned with political change resisted modern forms and looked back into their own nation’s history for inspiration. For example, the intertwining of nationalism and art in Ireland has led, in many cases, to a very inward-looking identity, a striving for Irishness in Irish art (e.g. Celtic art), a misplaced resistance to centuries of colonisation. However, in Ireland, as James Christen Steward writes:

“As it has been throughout the century, internationalism in Irish painting can still be seen as emotionally fraught, the adoption of foreign influence as a form of emigration signifying Ireland’s colonization (specifically as a colonized woman). Those artists who have resisted internationalism have often sought consciously to invoke links between the individual, the community, and the Irish landscape to assert a sense of distinct identity, and this remains the case for Irish painters working in the landscape idiom.” [1]

However, there are examples of nineteenth century Irish artists who used their art and the new style of realism to highlight local social ills, such as James Brennan (1837-1907) as Claudia Kinmonth has noted:

“It was rare for artists to be able to afford the indulgence of painting precisely what they wanted to paint, so the blatantly unfashionable images by James Brennan, for example, were facilitated by his salary as head of Cork School of Art. He was further driven to depict the plight of families of farmers or fishermen at home by his altruistic involvement in the setting up of Irish lace schools and his work for the Great Exhibition in London. His careful attention to the minutiae of what was once commonplace, showing cabin interiors furnished with nothing but the barest necessities, provides some of the most useful windows onto social history.” [2]

News from America (1875) (James Brennan)

Realism

However, the realist form needed real subjects and they were not always enthused by the new attention and focus on their lives and occupations. Some artists converged on the Claddagh in Galway (in the west of Ireland) in the move towards realism and away from romanticism. These included socially engaged British artists. The international focus of realism on the peasant and working class allowed these artists to leapfrog nationalist concerns and paint outside their own community. The initial suspicions of the local people towards artists suddenly taking an interest in their lives soon changed, as is shown by the experiences of the English painters Goodall and Topham in the Claddagh. While at first perceived to be ‘tax-collectors, spies or Protestants’, they were eventually accepted by the people and even stayed with them.[3] Despite typical hostility to outsiders, Julian Campbell writes,

“It was here in the Claddagh and the fish market that a colony of Irish and British artists began to gather in the 1830s and 1840s, the period just before the Great Famine and the arrival of the steam train to Galway. Significantly, this was exactly the same time as the Barbizon School of landscape painters was beginning to form in the forest of Fontainebleau in France.  Unlike the earlier groups of painters in county Kerry whose interest had been primarily in landscape, the artists in Galway focused their attention on the everyday lives and activities of the Galway people in a series of genre pictures. […] The Claddagh provided an authentic fishing village of thatched dwellings to study, and the fish market much colourful activity to observe.” [4]

Cottage Interior, Claddagh, Galway (1845) (Francis William Topham) 

Barbizon School

The French Barbizon artists were initially influenced by the English artist, John Constable, to draw their inspiration directly from nature and to leave the formalism of the Classical style in the studio. Soon, however, this idea was developed by Jean-François Millet from painting the landscape to depicting the local people themselves:

“Millet extended the idea from landscape to figures — peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), for example, Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. Gleaners are poor people who are permitted to gather the remains after the owners of the field complete the main harvest. The owners (portrayed as wealthy) and their laborers are seen in the back of the painting. Millet shifted the focus and the subject matter from the rich and prominent to those at the bottom of the social ladders. To emphasize their anonymity and marginalized position, he hid their faces. The women’s bowed bodies represent their everyday hard work.”

The Gleaners (1857) (Jean-François Millet)

Ashcan School

As we move into the twentieth century even realism itself became institutionalized, producing reactions such as the Ashcan School in New York. They used a darker, rougher style of realist painting to express the poverty of the working class in the ghettoes. Artists working in this style such as Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), William Glackens (1870–1938), John Sloan (1871–1951), and Everett Shinn (1876–1953) were not a formal group, but:

“Their unity consisted of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in the visual arts. Robert Henri, in some ways the spiritual father of this school, “wanted art to be akin to journalism… he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.””

Hairdresser’s Window (John Sloan)

German Expressionism

Back in Europe, during the 1920s and 1930s German Expressionism was at its height and artists like George Grosz and Max Beckman focused less on the working class and more on decadent society and the rise of the Nazis. German expressionism contrasts with the Ashcan School on a formal level as expressionism presents ‘the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas’ unlike realism where the emphasis on objectivity is more important. The use of distortion, caricature and the general aesthetics of ugliness became the formal basis of the art of George Grosz who used this form as an implicit criticism of what he saw around him:

“In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects.”

Max Beckman looked back even further into the history of art and mixed expressionism with medieval aesthetics and forms to represent contemporary reality as he saw it:

“Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity. […] Many of Beckmann‘s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic’s cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.”

Departure (1932-5) (Max Beckman)

Contemporary Visions

Contemporary versions of these approaches can be seen in the realist work of the American painterMax Ginsberg and the more expressionist approach of the English painter John Keane. Ginsburg’s painting Foreclosure has a baroque feel to it. While today baroque is associated with over-the-top exaggeration and opulence, it was rooted much more in realism than romanticism (a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalization of nature). The features of baroque consisted of dramatic tension, heightened realism, illusions of motion, and classical elements used without classical restraint. Ginsburg, like Beckman, is looking back at earlier forms to express contemporary dilemmas.

Foreclosure (Max Ginsberg)

His work is usually straight-up realism but the baroque style of Foreclosure allows him to use more dramatic expressions of the crisis in hand. His interest and concern is reflected in his comment on the painting:

“It is unconscionable that people are being evicted from their homes, especially when banks and corporations are being bailed out. This injustice is not supposed to happen in America.  In this painting I wanted to express the anguish and frustration of people in this situation.”

Ginsburg’s painting War-Pieta shows a similar interest in art history put to contemporary use. He writes:

“I wanted to bring attention to the horror of war, and in this case the war in Iraq. I thought of a mother losing her son and the Pieta paintings of the Old Masters and of Michelangelo’s sculpture, Pieta, showing the Madonna mourning the death of her son. In my painting I sought to symbolically connect, and contrast, the image of a real mother screaming in anguish over the death of her soldier son with the Old Master images of the Madonna mourning the death of her son in a rather unreal, quiet and serene way. The torn fatigues, the mangled soldier’s body and the flag symbolize one of the many young Americans who have been killed in this war.”

War-Pieta (Max Ginsberg)

The English artist John Keane uses expressionism as a form for dealing with Tony Blair’s ‘mercurial’ appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war. While Ginsburg’s work depicts ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary situations, Keane has focused on those who caused them. Here we can see realism used as a form to depict the victims of a state agenda and expressionist distortion used to depict one of the executors of that same agenda.

Figure at an Inquiry no 5 (John Keane)

However, the challenge for contemporary artists is not to fall into the trap of constantly portraying people as victims. Art must be inspired and inspiring. As an artist one can draw attention to the difficulties faced by people the world over but it is also important to recognize that everywhere there are people active in solving problems and trying to change society for the better, both socially and politically. The massive demonstrations against war in Iraq are a case in point:

“On February 15, 2003, there was a coordinated day of protests across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressed opposition to the imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the war took place. Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as “the largest protest event in human history””

Peace-March (Max Ginsburg)

Ginsburg describes the process of painting an image of many people of all ages and types on the streets demonstrating noting also influential artists and styles:

“The differences and individuality of people marching for peace is quite different than the mechanical sameness of soldiers marching. I took many photographs at a Peace March protesting the war in Iraq and selected ten of them that were good for expression and composition to use as reference. Attention was paid to the variation of individuals and the expression of determination. Based on these photographs, I made a compositional sketch for the grouping of figures, perspective and darks and lights. Then, with the aid of a grid, I transferred the drawings to the large canvas to scale. And then I proceeded to paint, in my usual direct alla prima style. I was greatly influenced by Ilya Repin’s Religious Processionpainting and Kathe Kollwitz’ The Weavers.”

Subject / Object

The change in realism over time from Millet’s peasants to narrative painting has also seen the move from the depiction of people as oppressed objects to passive subjects to engaged subjects. It seems that the opposite happens with expressionist depictions – a shift from the subject to the object. By objectifying our problems, bad leaders etc a certain distancing is achieved. Images of unity in mass demonstrations counter media strategies of divide and rule while the subjective, up-close, prettified televised images of silver-tongued politicians need some objectification to put conservative policies and agendas into perspective. Socially and politically conscious artists counteract the controlled images of the state and find new ways of seeing by looking back to images and forms of the past while at the same time searching for new methods of depicting the problems of the present.

Notes:

[1] James Christen Steward et al, When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1999) p.22
[2] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Ninteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.37
[3] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.28
[4] Crawford Art Gallery, Whipping the Herring: Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art (Cork: Gandon Editions, 2006) p.27

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist who has exhibited widely around Ireland. His work consists of paintings based on cityscapes of Dublin, Irish history and geopolitical themes (http://gaelart.net/). His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art 

“I believe that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War – and yet our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face.” – William J. Perry, U.S. Defense Secretary (1994-1997), January 2016

Former Bill Clinton cabinet member Perry perceives a danger that none of this year’s presidential wannabes have paid much if any attention to. The most recent candidate to make nuclear arms a central issue was Congressman Dennis Kucinich in 2008. President Obama has played both sides of the nuclear dilemma: rounding up and securing nuclear materials around the world, but also modernizing and miniaturizing American nuclear weapons to make them more “usable.” These days, no one in leadership – or aspiring to leadership – seems committed to actually making the world any safer from nuclear catastrophe. With rare exceptions like Kucinich, this unquestioned reliance on nuclear weapons is mainstream American military group-think, endlessly echoed in mainstream media, and that’s the way it’s been for decades.

In November 2015, William J. Perry published “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” with Stanford University Press, a short book (234 pages) with a global warning that goes unheeded and almost unmentioned in out denial-drenched culture. A quick Google search turns up no reviews of the book – none – in mainstream media. Pro forma book trade reviews by outfits like Kirkus or Publishers Weekly or Amazon make Perry’s book sound pretty bland and boring, but then so does the publisher’s own blurb. It’s as if these people are saying: yes, we know there’s a pack of wolves in the woods, and that’s not necessarily such a good thing, but we don’t want to be accused of crying wolf, and besides we’ve got our own wolves at home, and they’re trim and well fed, and they haven’t attacked anybody since 1945, so why is anyone worried?

That’s Perry’s point, of course, that nobody’s worried – worse: “our people are blissfully unaware.” He doesn’t go on to argue that our people are deliberately kept unaware by a government and media pyramid that manages public consciousness for its own ends. Listen, Perry was free to publish his book, people are free not to read it, what more can one ask? That’s the nature of repressive tolerance.

“A Stark Nuclear Warning”

California governor Jerry Brown reviewed Perry’s book in the New York Review of Books for July 14, 2016, under the headline: “A Stark Nuclear Warning.” William J. Perry spent an adult lifetime working in the world of nuclear weapons. Perry has long expressed his concern that the detonation of just one nuclear weapon could produce a “nuclear catastrophe … that could destroy our way of life.” Perry has been a manager of nuclear weapons “deterrence,” which he now considers “old thinking.” The fact that deterrence hasn’t failed for more than 70 years is not evidence that the policy is successful. In Perry’s view, nuclear weapons do not provide security for anyone, and the more nuclear weapons there are in more and more and more hands, the more they endanger us all.

In his review, Brown tried to break through the complacent collective quiet in response to the bipartisan American nuclear risk-taking that Perry objects to:

… as a defense insider and keeper of nuclear secrets, he is clearly calling American leaders to account for what he believes are very bad decisions, such as the precipitous expansion of NATO, right up to the Russian border, and President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, originally signed by President Nixon.

Twenty years of American stealth aggression against Russia, particularly in Ukraine and Georgia, is only the most obvious flashpoint, though perhaps not the most dangerous one. Another obvious and over-hyped threat comes from North Korea. Most countries in the world don’t have nuclear weapons, and don’t want them. Even Iran is in that group, thanks to the multi-national deal that Perry wholeheartedly approves. But in the Middle East, what threat might seem serious enough to persuade Israel – or France – to launch a nuclear strike against the Islamic State? How long will India and Pakistan, already at proxy war in Afghanistan, maintain their uneasy standoff? And how secure is the Pakistani arsenal from an Islamist government in Islamabad? Will Turkey somehow get its hands on the NATO nuclear weapons at the air base at Incirlik (still under virtual siege more than a week after the failed coup)?

And then there’s China, which is not in the habit of nuclear saber-rattling. As if the U.S. weren’t risking enough in its perennial confrontation with Russia, in recent years the American “pivot to Asia” has begun to look like the early stages of another game of nuclear chicken.

How many nuclear detonations would create a global wasteland?

Nobody really knows how many nuclear explosions it would take to bring on nuclear winter or create the radioactive conditions to kill millions of not billions of people. Probably it would take more than ten, although ten would have a devastating impact. Maybe fewer than a hundred nuclear attacks could destroy the world as we know it. Not to worry, there are thousands at the ready around the world. The U.S. and Russia, and maybe others, have massive numbers of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert – believed to be a necessary element of nuclear deterrence.

Rhetorically, President Obama has called for the elimination of nuclear weapons, but as a practical matter the Obama administration has reduced the American nuclear arsenal by the smallest amount in 36 years – less than any amount under Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Reagan. Under President Obama, the U.S. has maintained its aggressive policy against Russia, with one consequence being a new nuclear arms race on which the Obama administration wants to spend $1 trillion to make mass killing easier to achieve in smaller increments. No candidate for President has challenged this nuclear orthodoxy, not even Jill Stein of the Green Party.

The world has more than 15,000 nuclear weapons ready-to-use by common estimate, with enough Uranium and Plutonium available to make more than 100,000 more. The U.S. has more than 4,500 nuclear weapons, Russia about 7,000, and the other nuclear weapons states have “only” a few hundred each at most (except North Korea, with a few to none). Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan are the only three countries in the world that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970.

And what might we expect from the next American President?

Republican Donald Trump seems to have published no formal policy on nuclear weapons or foreign policy. In interviews, Trump has indicated a dislike of nuclear proliferation, but has also said it’s probably “going to happen anyway,” and maybe the U.S. “may very well be better off” if countries like Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea had their own nuclear weapons. He implied a willingness to use nuclear weapons against the Islamic State, or even in Europe under undefined circumstances: “I’m not going to take it off the table.” He also told the New York Times on July 20 that if Russia, for no particular reason, attacked one of the Baltic states, he’d want to make sure that they “have fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their defense. He did not address the U.S. treaty obligations under NATO. He has called for re-negotiating treaties that he says are too expensive for the U.S. But, in an odd and perhaps inadvertent way, his answer on the Baltic states speaks indirectly to the 20-year madness of putting Russia’s neighboring countries into the hostile NATO alliance. Trump has also spoken of pulling back forward deployments of American forces around the world, including elements of nuclear deterrence.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has called Trump’s positions “truly scary.” Clinton has indicated her willingness to use nuclear weapons – “massive retaliation” – against Iran in defense of Israel. She has expressed but limited support and limited opposition to the Obama administration plan to spend $1 trillion upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In an ad falsely claiming she was responsible for “securing a massive reduction in nuclear weapons,” Clinton has over-stated the impact of the new START treaty, which has been minimal in reducing nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State, Clinton appointed an utterly unqualified political donor to the International Security Advisory Board dealing with nuclear weapons. Clinton, like Trump, seems to have published no formal foreign policy on nuclear weapons of foreign policy. She has opposed the idea of Japan having its own nuclear arsenal, while at the same time falsely saying Trump “encouraged” the idea.

Where is the candidate who speaks truthfully of reality?

In an address at the University of Sydney in March 2016, titled “A World War Has Begun,” Australian journalist John Pilger argued that Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump. At the heart of Pilger’s argument is his perception of President Obama:

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American President.

Clinton has pledged, forcefully but selectively, to “defend President Obama’s accomplishments and build upon them.” In this written statement, Clinton makes no mention of nuclear weapons, defense spending, or U.S. military deployments on Russia’s borders (among other omissions). Pilger has that covered:

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia….

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

Those who don’t speak up are complicit in silence

In 1996, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry was the only member of President Clinton’s cabinet who got it right, including the President himself. Perry was the only cabinet member who opposed enlarging NATO with former Soviet bloc countries. Perry was the only cabinet member then, and perhaps since, to object to the American policy of steady, stealthy, soft aggression against Russia (including the Ukraine coup) that would lead inevitably to direct confrontation between the world’s largest nuclear weapons states. Perry has called for radical change in the U.S. nuclear force structure consistent with actual deterrence, actual defense, not aggressive war. He would reduce the nuclear triad (about which Trump apparently knew nothing last October), keeping only the sea-based missiles in nuclear submarines and eliminating nuclear bombers and nuclear missiles. This would save millions of dollars and reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war. But it is heresy among the believers in faith-based nuclear policy.

And yet, in an election year, “no one is discussing the major issues that trouble Perry,” as Jerry Brown wrote: “And why does most all of official Washington disagree with him and live in nuclear denial?” In January 2016, while promoting his book, Perry wrote:

What I am really advocating is not so much a particular force structure, but a serious national discussion on this issue, the outcome of which has hugely important security and financial consequences — for the U.S. and for the world. Considering the huge costs entailed, and, even more importantly, the transcendental security issues at stake, we must not simply drift into a decision….

And yet the country drifts on, blissfully unaware, and it’s a mystery why a man as accomplished and respected as Perry has not done more to wake the country out of its sleepwalking incomprehension. But it may be a tragedy that we have neither a President nor a would-be President who would or could confront our potentially fatal collective denial.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation. Russia says “Nyet.” The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrent. The answer remains “Nyet.” One could perhaps imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: “Based on the evidence before us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn’t work; let’s try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals.” And then everybody else would slap their heads and say, “Wow! That’s brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?” But instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable. And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing spectacle.

The whole Edward Snowden imbroglio was particularly fun to watch. The US demanded his extradition. The Russians said: “Nyet, our constitution forbids it.” And then, hilariously, some voices in the West demanded in response that Russia change its constitution! The response, requiring no translation, was “Xa-xa-xa-xa-xa!” Less funny is the impasse over Syria: the Americans have been continuously demanding that Russia go along with their plan to overthrow Bashar Assad. The unchanging Russian response has been: “Nyet, the Syrians get to decide on their leadership, not Russia, and not the US.” Each time they hear it, the Americans scratch their heads and… try again. John Kerry was just recently in Moscow, holding a marathon “negotiating session” with Putin and Lavrov. Above is a photo of Kerry talking to Putin and Lavrov in Moscow a week or so ago and their facial expressions are hard to misread. There’s Kerry, with his back to the camera, babbling away as per usual. Lavrov’s face says: “I can’t believe I have to sit here and listen to this nonsense again.” Putin’s face says: “Oh the poor idiot, he can’t bring himself to understand that we’re just going to say ‘nyet’ again.” Kerry flew home with yet another “nyet.”

What’s worse, other countries are now getting into the act. The Americans told the Brits exactly how to vote, and yet the Brits said “nyet” and voted for Brexit. The Americans told the Europeans to accept the horrendous corporate power grab that is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the French said “nyet, it shall not pass.” The US organized yet another military coup in Turkey to replace Erdoǧan with somebody who won’t try to play nice with Russia, and the Turks said “nyet” to that too. And now, horror of horrors, there is Donald Trump saying “nyet” to all sorts of things—NATO, offshoring American jobs, letting in a flood of migrants, globalization, weapons for Ukrainian Nazis, free trade…

The corrosive psychological effect of “nyet” on the American hegemonic psyche cannot be underestimated. If you are supposed to think and act like a hegemon, but only the thinking part still works, then the result is cognitive dissonance. If your job is to bully nations around, and the nations can no longer be bullied, then your job becomes a joke, and you turn into a mental patient. The resulting madness has recently produced quite an interesting symptom: some number of US State Department staffers signed a letter, which was promptly leaked, calling for a bombing campaign against Syria in order to overthrow Bashar Assad. These are diplomats. Diplomacy is the art of avoiding war by talking. Diplomats who call for war are not being exactly… diplomatic. You could say that they are incompetent diplomats, but that wouldn’t go far enough (most of the competent diplomats left the service during the second Bush administration, many of them in disgust over having to lie about the rationale for the Iraq war). The truth is, they are sick, deranged non-diplomatic warmongers. Such is the power of this one simple Russian word that they have quite literally lost their minds.

But it would be unfair to single out the State Department. It is as if the entire American body politic has been infected by a putrid miasma. It permeates all things and makes life miserable. In spite of the mounting problems, most other things in the US are still somewhat manageable, but this one thing—the draining away of the ability to bully the whole world—ruins everything. It’s mid-summer, the nation is at the beach. The beach blanket is moth-eaten and threadbare, the beach umbrella has holes in it, the soft drinks in the cooler are laced with nasty chemicals and the summer reading is boring… and then there is a dead whale decomposing nearby, whose name is “Nyet.” It just ruins the whole ambiance!

The media chattering heads and the establishment politicos are at this point painfully aware of this problem, and their predictable reaction is to blame it on what they perceive as its ultimate source: Russia, conveniently personified by Putin. “If you aren’t voting for Clinton, you are voting for Putin” is one recently minted political trope. Another is that Trump is Putin’s agent. Any public figure that declines to take a pro-establishment stance is automatically labeled “Putin’s useful idiot.” Taken at face value, such claims are preposterous. But there is a deeper explanation for them: what ties them all together is the power of “nyet.” A vote for Sanders is a “nyet” vote: the Democratic establishment produced a candidate and told people to vote for her, and most of the young people said “nyet.” Same thing with Trump: the Republican establishment trotted out its Seven Dwarfs and told people to vote for any one of them, and yet most of the disenfranchised working-class white people said “nyet” and voted for Snow White the outsider.

It is a hopeful sign that people throughout the Washington-dominated world are discovering the power of “nyet.” The establishment may still look spiffy on the outside, but under the shiny new paint there hides a rotten hull, with water coming in though every open seam. A sufficiently resounding “nyet” will probably be enough to cause it to founder, suddenly making room for some very necessary changes. When that happens, please remember to thank Russia… or, if you insist, Putin.

[O poder do “não”]

The Olympics remains a black hole of needless expenditure, sucking services into it with impending and merciless doom. Unused stadia, tracks left to moulder, services supposedly linked to urban renewal turned into dilapidated wonders. That is the Olympic legacy in its lingering aftermath.

Another feature of the Olympics is the tendency to turn a city into a super security haven, crawling with armed troops, security personnel and surveillance.  In London 2012, efforts to transform humble tenements into rocket launching pads was one of the stranger spectacles that bothered residents.

The Brazilian experience does not look like being anything different, though commentators have gotten on the highest of horses to claim that the state’s security remains “pre-9/11”.[1]  Well it might be that Brazilians are used to the presence of armed gangs and police on the streets, claimed The Independent, but they still lived in a world untouched by the knee-jerk security complex.  It is typical for those permanently immersed in the argot of security that the events of September 11, 2001 had to shape everything else. But not all countries felt that need.

In addition to traditional favela-bred woes, there are fears that the virus of ISIS-Islamic State inspiration will find form amongst Brazilians in an effort to inflict mayhem on locals and visitors.  This might well be, but in the reasoning of the security establishment, nothing about such an assessment is ever proportionate, let alone reasoned.

Last week’s arrest of 10 Brazilians (some reports put the figure at 12) suspected of planning attacks across the Rio games has been seen as a jolt. A country more accustomed to dealing with its own indigenous variants of violence and poverty did not need another incursion of ideological concern.  That was for other countries to wrestle with.

When it came to the arrests of alleged Islamic State members, a certain sense of panic moved through the body politic, a sweat inducing fear.  Were cells being cultivated in paradise?  Would the vicious lone-wolf make a long waited debut?  Judicial authorities in the state of Parana claimed to have intercepted calls suggesting a terrorist cell’s wishes to use “weapons and guerrilla tactics” in attaining its goals.[2]

Operation Hashtag, as it was called, sparked confidence in certain officials within the presidential circle.  Something was being done, which is always the operating premise of the guardians.  “This shows,” claimed Brazil’s presidential chief of staff Eliseu Padilha, “that Brazil is on its toes and monitoring any suspects that could become a threat.”

Brazil ’s security establishment, suggested Padilha, had been making visits to France to pick up tips in the aftermath of the Nice attacks.  How useful such tips are to keep Brasilia on its toes, given the specific Gallic context, is hard to see.

The arrests did not inspire confidence at all levels.  The Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes seemed unimpressed, merely seeing bungling children at play. They were dabbling “amateurs” who had flirted with social media rather than any serious terrorist game.

Moraes did note that the men were rather green converts, having come to Islam after conducting Internet driven research on jihadism, and exchanging sympathetic messages on such chat platforms as WhatsApp and Telegram.  (Others had also met in Egypt in efforts to learn Arabic.)  Among topics of discussion: weapons training, and the possibility of an online purchase of an AK-47 assault rifle from a Paraguayan-based outlet.

ABIN, the Brazilian secret service, whose members were turning scarlet with rage, suggested that the issue was far more serious, one of greater organisation than the minister was giving them credit for.

A federal police source cited in The Japan Times expressed irritation that the minister “gave the impression that this is a minor problem that does not represent a risk. That’s not right. We cannot spread that idea.”[3]

The genie of fear is truly out of the bottle, roaming the land, sensible or otherwise.  “Amateurs or not,” claimed a former captain of an elite police squad in Rio de Janeiro, “they were organising themselves.” The Islamic States’s recruitment drive thrived on a perceived sense of disorganisation.

The Islamic State’s techniques, and the recent spate of international attacks, are taken to have come from a different stable, a separate blue print.  Robert Muggah, research director at the Rio de Janeiro-based think tank, the Igarape Institute, noted the qualitative difference about such organisations, that “they are more diffuse and widely distributed and may materialise where you don’t expect them.”

The official front from Brazil’s intelligence community, at least for the time being, is that the slate on specific plans for attacking the Olympics is not so much clean as tidy.  There is one fundamental fear: the lone wolf, a sort of terrorist parthenogenesis.

Modern states, with their muscular reach and brutal measures, remain incapable of detecting the point when an idea is implanted, and becomes a faith manifested in knife, bomb, or, in Nice, a murderous truck.  A bloated security state can hardly be the answer, since it was never a solution to begin with.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Notes

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rio-olympics-security-brazil-terrorism-a7158071.html
[2] https://www.rt.com/news/352505-rio-olympics-terror-isis/
[3] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/23/world/plot-rio-olympics-raises-fears-lone-wolf-terrorist-attacks/#.V5hdTfl96Uk

 

On July 26, 2016, the South Korean government blocked the entry of two Korean American peace activists – Juyeon Rhee and Hyun Lee – into its country. The two are representatives of the U.S.-based Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. They had traveled to South Korea to participate in the annual Jeju Peace March as well as join protests against the recent U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea.

After being detained by immigration officers at Incheon International Airport, the two were deported pursuant to Articles 11 and 12 of the Korea Immigration Law, which prohibits the entry of foreigners who, among other things, are “deemed likely to commit any act detrimental to national interests of the Republic of Korea or public safety.”

The two activists had traveled to South Korea numerous times in the past with no problems. They have never broken any laws in South Korea and had never been denied entry nor deported in the past.

The denial of their entry can only be seen as an attempt by the Park Geun-hye administration to block peace activists from internationalizing the growing opposition in South Korea against THAAD deployment. Since announcing its decision to collaborate with the U.S. military to deploy the missile system in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, the government has waged an aggressive campaign to crack down on all those who oppose the government’s decision. President Park recently referred to those voicing opposition as “subversive forces” and declared, “It’s important to block subversive forces from all affairs, and we must be thorough in weeding them out.”

The rushed decision by the South Korean and U.S. governments to deploy the THAAD system in South Korea was undemocratic with no input from South Korean citizens. The burden of producing and operating the THAAD system will ultimately be borne by U.S. and South Korean taxpayers. The cost of the system is estimated at $1.3 billion, and the average annual operating and sustainment costs amount to $200 million. Many fear that long-term exposure to high frequency electromagnetic waves emitted by the THAAD radar and noise caused by its engines may be detrimental to the health of the Seongju residents who live near the designated site. The THAAD system has been deemed ineffective in the defense of South Korea. Its deployment is a provocative move against North Korea, China and Russia and will redraw Cold War lines as well as escalate tensions in a region that is already heavily militarized with weapons of mass destruction.

The South Korean government’s action of refusing entry to peace activists shows just how much it has devolved into a police state under the Park Geun-hye administration and that it deems international solidarity a threat to its policy of military confrontation. Indeed, only the strength of international solidarity between citizens of the United States and South Korea can stop the two governments’ provocative action towards increased militarization. The Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea is resolved to redouble its efforts of solidarity with the people of South Korea fighting for democracy and peace and call on all those who stand on the side of justice to join the opposition against the dangerous U.S. move to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea.

 

US establishment figures are so hellbent for Hillary, they’re reaching new lows to make her America’s 45th president – a legally challenged, trigger-happy Wall Street tool she-devil perhaps eager for global war.

Trump is no solution to changing America’s deplorable state. Compared to Clinton, he’s the lesser of two malign forces.

With no public track record, he’s judged by his rhetoric alone, along with knowing all politicians and wannabe ones lie. Nothing they say is credible. Judge them by their actions alone.

Clinton’s notorious history is abominable, DNC party bosses and complicit media scoundrels suppressing what’s too scandalous and criminal to ignore.

Trump’s unorthodox, anti-establishment-sounding rhetoric makes him political enemy number one. Propaganda targeting him incredibly suggests he’s a Manchurian candidate for Russia’s President Putin.

Brainwashed Americans believe most anything repeated enough. Propaganda works this way – a tool for deception, for misinformation and Big Lies, for convincing people about anything powerful interests want them to believe, suppressing hard truths they’re not told.

One-sidedly supporting Clinton, Washington Post editors call Trump “a threat to the Constitution…a unique and present danger…uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament.”

The New York Times deplorably said Trump’s calling on Russia to find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails is “another bizarre moment in the mystery (sic) of whether (Putin is) seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.”

Trump said “(o)f course I’m being sarcastic” in urging Moscow to uncover and reveal Hillary’s missing emails.

“They have no idea if it’s Russia…China (or) somebody else,” responsible for hacking and revealing DNC emails. “(T)he real problem is what was said” and done. “It’s disgraceful…and (now) they’re just trying to deflect from that.”

Calling Trump a Manchurian candidate for Putin reflects how far US dark forces will go to distract attention from their own wrongdoing – aided and abetted by media scoundrels, substituting managed news misinformation for hard truths.

One observer said calling Trump a Manchurian candidate sounds like pilot for a new TV show. Another suggested he’s a Democrat plant to get Clinton elected.

Trump and Putin never met. Suggesting he’s a Manchurian candidate for Russia’s leader or fronting for Clinton is absurd, offensive, and typical of US mainstream misreporting.

Trump entered the race to win. Any close examination of his demeanor, comments and energy show he wants to be president.

How he’ll govern if elected remains to be seen. Progressive change is off the table. If he wants normal relations with Russia, all to the good.

Whether he means what he says can’t be believed unless and until he proves it, if elected in November.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

“One Ring to rule them all . . . and in the darkness bind them.”  — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

World War II resulted in Europe being conquered, not by Berlin but by Washington.

The conquest was certain but not all at once.  Washington’s conquest of Europe resulted from the Marshall Plan, from fears of Stalin’s Red Army that caused Europe to rely on Washington’s protection and to subordinate

Europe’s militaries to Washington in NATO, from the replacement of the British pound as world reserve currency with the US dollar, and from the long process of the subordination of the sovereignty of individual European countries to the European Union, a CIA initiative implemented by Washington in order to control all of Europe by controlling only one unaccountable government.

With few exceptions, principally the UK, membership in the EU also meant loss of financial independence. As only the European Central Bank, an EU institution, can create euros, those countries so foolish as to accept the euro as their currency no longer have the power to create their own money in order to finance budget deficits.

The countries that joined the euro must rely on private banks to finance their deficits.  The result of this is that over-indebted countries can no longer pay their debts by creating money or expect their debts to be written down to levels that they can service.  Instead, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, and Ireland were looted by the private banks.

The EU forced the pseudo-governments of these countries to pay the northern European private banks by suppressing the living standards of their populations and by privatizing public assets at pennies on the dollar. Thus retirement pensions, public employment, education and health services have been cut and the money redirected to private banks.  Municipal water companies have been privatized with the result being higher water bills.  And so on.

As there is no reward, only punishment, for being a member of the EU, why did governments, despite the expressed wishes of their peoples, join?

The answer is that Washington would have it no other way. The European founders of the EU are mythical creatures. Washington used politicians that Washington controlled to create the EU.

Some years ago CIA documents proving that the EU was a CIA initiative were released. See:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html   and  http://benwilliamslibrary.com/blog/?p=5080

In the 1970s my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, then a very high-ranking official in Washington with control over international security affairs, asked me to undertake a sensitive mission abroad.  I refused. Nevertheless, he answered my question: “How does Washington get foreign countries to do what Washington wants?”

“Money,” he said. “We give their leaders bagfuls of money.  They belong to us.”

The record is clear that the EU serves the interests of Washington, not the interests of Europe.  For example, the French people and government are opposed to GMOs, but the EU permits a “precautionary market authorization” of GMO introduction, relying perhaps on the “scientific findings” of the scientists on Monsanto’s payroll. When the US state of Vermont passed a law requiring labeling of GMO foods, Monsanto sued the state of Vermont. Once the paid-off EU officials sign the TTIP agreement written by US global corporations, Monsanto will take over European agriculture.

But the danger to Europe goes far beyond the health of European peoples who will be forced to dine on poisonous foods.  Washington is using the EU to force Europeans into conflict with Russia, a powerful nuclear power capable of destroying all of Europe and all of the United States in a few minutes.

This is happening because the paid-off with “bagfuls of money” European “leaders” had rather have Washington’s money in the short-run than for Europeans to live in the long-run.

It is not possible that any European politician is sufficiently moronic to believe that Russia invaded Ukraine, that Russia any moment will invade Poland and the Baltic states, or that Putin is a “new Hitler” scheming to reconstruct the Soviet Empire.  These absurd allegations are nothing but Washington propaganda devoid entirely of truth. Washington’s propaganda is completely transparent.  Not even an idiot could believe it.

Yet the EU goes along with the propaganda, as does NATO.

Why?  The answer is Washington’s money. The EU and NATO are utterly corrupt. They are Washington’s well paid whores.

The only way Europeans can prevent a nuclear World War III and continue to live and to enjoy what remains of their culture that the Americans have not destroyed with America’s culture of sex and violence and greed, is for the European governments to follow the lead of the English and exit the CIA-created European Union.  And exit NATO, the purpose of which evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which is now being used as an instrument of Washington’s World Hegemony.

Why do Europeans want to die for Washington’s world hegemony?  That means Europeans are dying for Washington’s hegemony over them as well.

Why do Europeans want to support Washington when Washington’s high officials, such as Victoria Nuland, say “Fuck the EU.”

Europeans are already suffering from the economic sanctions that their overlord in Washington forced them to apply to Russia and Iran.  Why do Europeans want to be destroyed by war with Russia?  Do Europeans have a death wish?  Have Europeans been Americanized and no longer appreciate the historic accumulation of artistic and architectural beauty, literature and music achievements of which their countries are custodians?

The answer is that it makes no difference whatsoever what Europeans think, because Washington has set up a government for them that is totally independent of their wishes. The EU government is accountable only to Washington’s money.  A few people capable of issuing edicts are on Washington’s payroll. The entire peoples of Europe are Washington’s serfs.

Therefore, if Europeans remain the gullible, insouciant, and stupid peoples that they currently are, they are are doomed, along with the rest of us.

On the other hand, if the European peoples can come to their senses, free themselves from The Matrix that Washington has imposed on them, and revolt against Washington’s agents who control them, the European peoples can save their own lives and the lives of the rest of us.

The 2014 attacks on Gaza killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured 11,000, leaving approximately 900 with permanent disabilities. As our latest infographic shows, needing to access care after the conflict struggle to do so due to the nine-year blockade and closure of Gaza, and the damage caused to Gaza’s health sector in 2014.

During the attacks 17 hospitals, 56 primary health clinics, and 45 ambulances were damaged or destroyed, and 16 medical workers lost their lives while on duty.Last year, we partnered with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights to highlight some of these cases in our ‘No More Impunity: Gaza’s Health Sector Under Attack‘ report, and called for thorough, independent investigation into potential violations of international humanitarian law. This year, we have revisited the victims and survivors of these attacks, to ask how the lack of accountability or access to justice has affected their lives.

Last month, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) highlighted the continuing challenges for Gaza’s health system, including shortages of medicines and long waiting lists for surgeries caused by operating room personnel shortages. Their report also found that progress made in rehabilitating damaged health infrastructure. All of the damaged facilities have been or are in the process of being rehabilitated, though the Al Wafa Hospital – featured in our report – has not been rebuilt.

This week, writing in The National about his team’s struggle to provide adequate care to patients in their temporary site, Al Wafa Hospital Director Dr Basman Alashi said:

“Though we hope to rebuild, we cannot do so in the same place for fear of being attacked again. Our only hope is to rebuild on a new site, but even this cannot guarantee our safety in Gaza. The prospect of new attacks hangs over us.”

With the blockade still in place, patients continue to struggle to access adequate health services inside Gaza, and are often prevented or delayed when seeking to travel abroad for urgent care. Though progress has been made in rebuilding after the 2014 attacks, Al Wafa remains in ruins

Medical Aid for Palestinians has joined with 42 other aid and faith organisations to call for an end to the blockade and closure of Gaza.

The Empire is becoming thoroughly unpredictable. It is attacking on all fronts. It lost all its shame and decency.

When Theresa May proclaims in Parliament that we need the £200 billion Trident nuclear missile system to see off the North Korean nuclear threat, writes David Lowry, just bear this in mind. It is a threat that the UK, global nuclear proliferator in chief, created in the first place, providing both the reactor technology and vital centrifuge materials to make North Korea’s nuclear dream come true.

In the debate on Trident nuclear WMD renewal in Parliament last week, the new UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, in a peculiarly ill-informed speech – demonstrating her political career that has virtually no experience in security or defence affairs – made, inter alia, the following unsupported assertions:

• ” … today the threats from countries such as Russia and North Korea remain very real.”
• “North Korea has stated a clear intent to develop and deploy a nuclear weapon, and it continues to work towards that goal, in flagrant violation of a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
• “North Korea is the only country in the world to have tested nuclear weapons this century, carrying out its fourth test this year, as well as a space launch that used ballistic missile technology. It also claims to be attempting to develop a submarine-launch capability and to have withdrawn from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”
• “Based on the advice I have received, we believe that North Korea could already have enough fissile material to produce more than a dozen nuclear weapons. It also has a long-range ballistic missile, which it claims can reach America, and which is potentially intended for nuclear delivery.”

It reminded me of the similarly ill-informed former Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his speeches to MPs trying to win them over with dodgy ‘advice’ from British intelligence, to go to war by invading Iraq in 2003.

MPs have short memories, despite the Chilcot Report on the Iraq invasion disaster not yet two weeks old, and 472 motley MP fools backed May and Trident replacement. As with the Iraq invasion, MPs will in future have to admit their regrets at being fooled. And again, they ignord the thousands of demonstrators outside, calling for Trident to be abandoned.

Britain’s nuclear proliferation ‘secret’

But May was right in one way. North Korea has developed nuclear weapons. But what she did not say was they did it with copied British bomb-making technology.

There is significant evidence that the British Magnox nuclear plant design – which was primarily built as a military plutonium production factory – provided the blueprint for the North Korean military plutonium programme based in Yongbyon. Here is what Douglas (now Lord) Hogg, then a Conservative minister, admitted in a written parliamentary reply in 1994 to Labour MP Llew Smith:

We do not know whether North Korea has drawn on plans of British reactors in the production of its own reactors. North Korea possesses a graphite moderated reactor which, while much smaller, has generic similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc. However, design information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared in technical journals.

The uranium enrichment programmes of both North Korea and Iran also have a UK connection. The blueprints of this type of plant were stolen by Pakistani scientist, A Q Khan, from the URENCO enrichment plant in The Netherlands in the early 1970s.
(see David Albright, Peddling Peril, 2010 pp 15-28, Free Press, New York)

This plant was – and remains – one-third owned by the UK government. The Pakistan government subsequently sold the technology to Iran, who later exchanged it for North Korean Nodong missiles.

A technical delegation from the A Q Khan Research Labs visited North Korea in the summer of 1996. The secret enrichment plant was said to be based in caves near Kumch’ang-ni, 100 miles north of the capital, Pyonyang, where US satellite photos showed tunnel entrances being built.

Hwang Jang-yop, a former aid to President Kim Il-sung (the grandfather of the current North Korean President) who defected in 1997, revealed details to Western intelligence investigators. (Levy A, Scott-Clark C Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Weapons Conspiracy, 2007, p.281, Atlantic Books)

Magnox machinations

Magnox is a now obsolete type of nuclear power plant ( except in North Korea) which was designed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in the early 1950s, and was exported to Italy and Japan The name ‘magnox’ comes from the alloy used to clad the fuel rods inside the reactor.

The reactors at Calder Hall on the Sellafield site – then called Windscale, and operated by the UKAEA – were opened by the young Queen Elizabeth on 17th October 1956. But it was never meant as a commercial civilian nuclear plant: the real purpose was to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

The UKAEA official historian Kenneth Jay wrote about Calder Hall, in his short book of the same name, published to coincide with the opening of the plant, referring (p.88) to“major plants built for military purposes, such as Calder Hall.” Earlier, he wrote (p.80): ” … The plant has been designed as a dual-purpose plant, to produce plutonium for military purposes as well as electric power.”

The term Magnox also encompasses:

• Three North Korean reactors, all based on the open access blueprints of the Calder Hall Magnox reactors, including,
• A small 5 MWe experimental reactor at Yongbyon, operated from 1986 to 1994, and restarted in 2003. Plutonium from this reactor’s spent fuel has been used in the North Korea nuclear weapons program.
• A 50 MWe reactor, also at Yongbyon, whose construction commenced in 1985 but was never finished in accord with the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework.
• A 200 MWe reactor at Taechon, construction of which also halted in 1994.

Nuclear ‘self sufficiency’ on the Korean peninsula

Olli Heinonen, senior fellow at the internationally reknown Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University in the US has explained how North Korea obtained its uranium enrichment capability. He wrote five years ago:

The pre-eminence of Juche, the political thesis of Kim Il Sung, stresses independence from great powers, a strong military posture, and reliance on national resources. Faced with an impoverished economy, political isolation from the world, and rich uranium deposits, nuclear power-both civilian as well as military-fulfills all three purposes.

History and hindsight have shown a consistency in North Korea’s efforts to develop its own nuclear capability. One of the first steps North Korea took was to assemble a strong national cadre of nuclear technicians and scientists. In 1955, North Korea established itsAtomic Energy Research Institute. In 1959, it signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to train North Korean personnel in nuclear related disciplines. The Soviets also helped the North Koreans establish a nuclear research center and built a 2 MW IRT nuclear research reactor at Yongbyon, which began operation in 1969.

Throughout the 1970s, North Korea continued to develop its nuclear capabilities, pursuing a dual track approach that was consistent with the idea of nuclear self-reliance. While engaging in discussions to obtain Light Water Reactors (LWRs) from the Soviet Union, North Korea proceeded with parallel studies on graphite moderated gas cooled reactors, using publicly available information based on the Magnox reactor design.

North Korea also carried out plutonium separation experiments at its Isotope Production Laboratory (IPL), and successfully separated plutonium in the same decade. The North Koreans worked on the design of a reprocessing plant for which, the chemical process was modeled after the Eurochemic plant.

Eurochemic was a research plant dedicated to the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. It was owned by thirteen countries which shared and widely published technologies developed. The plant, located in Dessel, Belgium, operated from 1966 to 1974.

When negotiations to acquire four LWRs from the Soviet Union failed, North Korea had already embarked on its indigenous nuclear program. Throughout the 1980s, North Korea constructed a 5 MWe reactor, fuel fabrication plant, and a reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, with no known documented external help and with minimal foreign equipment procured.

When the joint statement on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was concluded in December 1991, all three facilities had been fully operational for a number of years, with two additional (50 MWe and 200 MWe) graphite moderated gas cooled reactors under construction.

Why enrich the people when you can enrich uranium?

North Korea’s closed society and isolationist position has made it immensely difficult to accurately gauge its nuclear activities. Pyongyang has gone to great lengths to hide much of its nuclear program, including its enrichment route.

Nevertheless, there have been indications, including procurement related evidence, that point in the direction that North Korea has been actively pursuing enrichment since the mid-1990s, with likely exploratory attempts made up to a decade earlier.

It is clear that North Korea received a key boost in its uranium enrichment capability from Pakistan through the A Q Khan network. Deliveries of P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, special oils, and other equipment from Pakistan to North Korea in the late 1990s were acknowledged by former Pakistani President General P. Musharraf in his memoirs, In the Line of Fire.

President Musharraf also wrote that, separately, North Korean engineers were provided training at A Q Khan’s Research Laboratories in Kahuta under the auspices of a government-to-government deal on missile technology that had been established in 1994. In all likelihood, North Korea also received the blue prints for centrifuges and other related process equipment from the Khan network during that period of time.

In the late 1980s, North Korea acquired vacuum equipment from a German company. While such equipment was primarily meant for North Korea’s fuel fabrication plant then under construction, some of the vacuum pumps could have been used for enrichment experiments. But additional attempts made in 2002 to again acquire vacuum technology after the completion of the fuel fabrication plant strongly pointed to its use for enrichment purposes.

Evidence of North Korea’s procurement activities in the late 1990s to the early 2000s showed its objective to achieve industrial or semi-industrial scale enrichment capacity, based on a more efficient Pakistani P-2 centrifuge design. In 1997, an attempt was made to acquire large amounts of maraging steel suitable for manufacturing centrifuges.

UK contributes again – by exporting high strength aluminium

In 2002 / 2003, North Korea successfully procured large quantities of high strength aluminium from Russia and the United Kingdom, another requirement in making centrifuges.

A simple tally of the amounts and types of equipment and material sought by North Korea suggests plans to develop a 5,000-centrifuge strong enrichment capacity. This appears consistent with a separate earlier enrichment offer A Q Khan had made to Libya.

For North Korea to have embarked on procuring equipment and materials meant for a (semi-)industrial scale enrichment facility, it is highly likely that the known Uranium Enrichment Workshop (UEW) at Yongbyon, which in reality approximates a full sized facility, is not the only one that exists. More workshops would have been needed to serve as test beds for pilot cascades of P-1 and P-2 centrifuges prior to (semi-)industrial scale enrichment operations.

While we have signs of North Korea’s enrichment goals, the final picture remains unclear given that the actual amount of items procured remains unknown. This problem is compounded by the fact that the North Koreans have and are continuing to source nuclear material and equipment from several parties. Moreover, there remains a high degree of uncertainty concerning the level of North Korea’s enrichment technology development.

In April 2009, after expelling IAEA inspectors, North Korea publicly announced for the first time that it was proceeding with its own enrichment program. To reinforce its intentions, North Korea followed up with a letter to the UN Security Council on September 3 to confirm that it was embarking on an enrichment phase.

In November 2010, the North Koreans unveiled to Siegfried Hecker, a pre-eminent nuclear expert and former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, an enrichment facility in Yongbyon with 2000 centrifuge machines similar to the P-2 version, built with maraging steel rotors. (S. Hecker, ‘Redefining Denuclearization in North Korea’, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 20, 2010.)

Implications and consequences

On March 22, 2011, North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, portrayed Libya’s decision to give up its nuclear weapons as a mistake that opened the country to NATO intervention following its domestic Arab Spring uprising.

Such conclusions drawn by North Korea make an already difficult case to engage North Korea to give up its nuclear weapon deterrence that much harder. At the same time, the alternative of disengagement will in all likelihood bring about greater problems.

In engaging North Korea, several key hurdles have to be tackled. First, North Korea shows a poor proliferation record. It was the suspected supply source of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Libya via the A Q  Khan network – the uranium gas used in centrifuges to separate out the fissionable 235U needed in nuclear bombs from non-fissionable 238U.

There is also mounting evidence that North Korea was involved in the construction of a secret nuclear reactor at Dair Alzour in Syria that was subsequently destroyed in 2007. It is plausible that North Korean personnel assisted Syria in building the reactor. (‘North Korea’s Nuclear Enrichment: Capabilities and Consequences‘, 38 North.org; 22 June 2011).

Lessons of history

This sorry tale has several important lessons for us today. First – and this must never be forgotten – the UK’s early ‘atoms for peace’ nuclear power programme was specifically designed and intended to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. And it was not just nuclear waste from Calder Hall that went for plutonium extraction at Windscale, but from other sites that were meant to be purely civilian such as Hinkley Point.

The UK is therefore guilty of ‘breaking the rules’ that are meant to separate civil and military nuclear activities, and its complaints of other states doing the same all carry the unmistakeable whiff of ripest humbug.

Second, for all its public position of seeking to restrain nuclear proliferation, the UK is actually one of the world’s most egregious nuclear proliferators: providing arch-nuclear enemy North Korea with both the Magnox technology it has used to produce plutonium for atom bombs; and the high strength aluminium it has used for its uranium centrifuges.

So when Theresa May stands up in Parliament and proclaims that we need the Trident nuclear missile system to see off the North Korean nuclear threat, remember: it is a threat that the UK created in the first place, providing both the nuclear reactor technology and the centrifuge materials to make it happen.

And when the UK cites the nuclear threat from North Korea as a reason to spend an estimated £200 billion on the next generation of Trident, we can be sure that North Korea and other countries aspiring to their own nuclear weapons are applying precisely the same logic to the British nuclear threat.

And that considering the UK’s history of aggressive regime-changing interventions in Iraq and Libya, the hundreds of (up to 225) nuclear warheads in its possession, and its ability to target them accurately anywhere in the world, North Korea’s fears are probably a great deal better founded than Mrs May’s.

Dr David Lowry is senior research fellow at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

 

Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals.

The beginning of interest in post-Cold War information operations can be traced to the UN intervention in Somalia and the Rwanda Genocide. Relatively honest and direct reporting from these war zones meant that the public opinion of Western countries was a factor that had to be considered by the political classes. Hence the  complaining at the time about the so-called “CNN Effect” which forced the politicians to send and/or withdraw troops irrespective of what the elites actually wanted to happen at the time.

The early methods of influencing the public opinion by manipulating the media, though reasonably effective, were not enough. We have seen their strengths and limitations during both wars against Iraq, in which the bulk of the media was effectively co-opted through the process of frequent press briefings (featuring no shortage of videos showing NATO bombs unerringly falling toward their obviously evil targets) and later by “embedding” the mostly male reporters in military units, which naturally had the dual effect of stroking their egos and adopting the military’s point of view.

Still, in spite of all that, it proved impossible to control the narrative, and the public support for the various US and NATO wars collapsed under the pressure of inconvenient news coming even from mainstream media which clearly maintained a degree of independence. But if you fast-forward a decade, to the current wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine, and others, it is clear that something has changed. There is one dominant narrative that is being pushed by literally every mainstream media source, irrespective of their ostensible ideological bent. No matter where you turn, you read or hear about Assad’s “barrel bombs”, Gaddafi’s “massacres”, or “Russian aggression.”

These reports invariably represent a point of view that is not only completely one-sided, but also factually wrong, even on the most basic of issues. How did US and NATO manage to achieve such an amazing discipline within the supposedly free and independent Western media?

There are essentially three parts to the answer:

• state oversight of the media;
• co-opting individual reporters;
• disseminating propaganda through covert means.

The first two are obvious enough and have long been practiced. Media corporations are just that–corporations, subject to variety of laws and regulations whose enforcement can be used to steer individual outlets toward adopting a desired point of view. Individual reporter’s coin of the realm is “access” to privileged information, which may be granted or withheld depending on their effectiveness as government propagandist. The third, the covert dissemination of propaganda, is new, and that factor likely explains the lack of variation from one media outlet to the next. The media are no longer merely encouraged to toe the official line–they have the stories planted for them to pick up through social media and other unofficial channels.

The so-called investigations of the MH17 disaster is a case study, though a fairly crude one due to Ukraine’s crude methods of information warfare. But it is evident that nearly all the “evidence” implicating Russia or the Novorossia insurgents was prepared by Ukrainian secret services, then laundered through social media, before being presented to Western audiences as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth.

NATO is conducting similar operations which are harder to identify and counter because they are more sophisticated, better institutionalized, and provided with higher levels of funding. The United Kingdom, for example, maintains the 77th Brigade whose subunits include the Media Operations Group and the shadowy 15th Psychological Operations Group that has been dubbed the “Twitter detachment.” Germany has established the ZOpKomBw, or the Bundeswehr Rapid Communications Center.

In the US, information operations against the US population appear to be the responsibility of the intelligence community, which is understandable considering the taboo on US military operations on US territory. As such, they remain largely out of public scrutiny, though their handiwork can be readily seen in the form of unverifiable reports from a variety of war zones, and even placing specially prepared “witnesses” in front of Congressional committees. Even non-NATO countries like Sweden are following suit by establishing their own information operations units intended for waging information war on its own population. At the NATO level, information operations are coordinated by NATO doctrine JP 13-3 Information Operations, with practical applications honed by alliance-wide exercises such as the Multinational Information Operations Experiment (MNIOE).

Western voters have been accepting of all these measures because they were sold to them as part of their countries’ counter-terrorism measures. What they failed to take into account is that terrorism is a phenomenon that knows no borders, with the enemy already present among Western societies. Which means that, if counter-terrorist information operations are to be effective, they also have to be aimed at Western publics.

In the short-term, information operations may be effective in manufacturing popular support for policies that otherwise no free society would accept. In the longer term, bypassing the public opinion means the elites are now more free than ever to embark on highly dangerous international adventures that will likely backfire and lower even further the already low standing of the elites. Therefore the fact that the so-called “free world” elites increasingly have to resort to such dirty tricks in order to stay in power means that their grasp on power is slowly weakening.

 

In the video below, Funny or Die pokes fun at Monsanto’s “feeding the world” message by highlighting some of the most obvious features of genetically engineered (GE) foods, such as the unnatural crossing of genetic material between plant and animal kingdoms, the use of toxic chemicals and Monsanto’s ever-expanding monopoly.

“I own everything!” Mama Monsanto exclaims, and that’s pretty close to the truth. Monsanto has gobbled up seed companies, chemical competitors and even research institutions investigating the impact of pesticides on bee die-offs.

Not to mention the influence the company wields over the U.S. government. It sure seems to “own” that too.

Many have pondered how Monsanto managed to rise to such a powerful position with respect to its influence over the U.S. government, and I think journalist Abby Martin may have pin-pointed the source of this obnoxious loyalty in her recent video report, “America’s Monster” (below).

In it, she details Monsanto’s history as an American “war horse,” which began with its involvement in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. Monsanto’s contributions to the U.S. war machine continued during the Vietnam War, when the company became a leading producer of Agent Orange.

These war contributions appear to have cemented a long-lasting and loyal relationship between the U.S. government and Monsanto that continues to this day, to the detriment of the American people.

Sixty-four other nations have been labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for years. Here in the U.S., Monsanto’s influence runs so deep, we just became the first country in the world to UNLABEL GMOs, as President Obama will soon sign a bill that nullifies Vermont’s GMO labeling law, which just went into effect July 1.

Throughout its entire history, which began with the foundation of Monsanto Chemical Works in 1901, Monsanto has specialized in the production of toxic chemicals. Despite attempts to shed its destructive image, Monsanto has utterly failed to do so, for the simple fact that it never actually changed its basic modus operandi.

Nor did it actually change its direction from purveyor of toxins to a life-giving agricultural company. Its focus remains producing and selling toxins. It simply discovered it could sell more chemicals, and ensure ever-increasing profits, by producing GE seeds with herbicide-resistant properties.

Voluntary ‘Smart Label’ Preempts State and Consumer Rights

Earlier this month, Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts and ranking Democrat Debbie Stabenow announced they’d reached a deal1 to create a national labeling standard for GMOs using voluntary “Smart Labels” (so-called QR codes2) rather than clear labeling.

This despite the fact that polls show 88 percent of Americans have said they do NOT want to be forced into using a smartphone app to find this important information.

The bill, S. 2609, which amends the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 with a national bioengineered food disclosure standard,3,4 is now more or less a done deal. On July 14, the U.S. House passed the bill, 306 to 117, and President Obama has already indicated he will sign it.5

The legislation will supersede and nullify Vermont’s GMO labeling requirement, which took effect mere weeks ago.

It will also bar any other state from enacting GMO labeling requirements that differ from the national standard, and delays the disclosure requirement another two years; three years for smaller food companies.

What’s worse, the new legislation changes and significantly narrows the definition of bioengineering, as applied under this law only, such that the newest biotech methods are exempt from the disclosure standards.

As a result, most GE food products currently on the market will end up being excluded anyway.

With the passing of this bill, the U.S. “war horse” Monsanto won again. Your elected representatives sold you out to the highest bidder. Senator Jeff Merkley has even stated that the bill was “written by and for Monsanto.” As reported by Sputnik International:6

Markley explained that because of loopholes in the legislation, Monsanto-made products ‘would not be covered by it, because the definition excludes them.’

Monsanto Benefits From Farm and Biofuel Subsidies

I recently discussed how government-subsidized commodities such as corn, soy and wheat contribute to the obesity and disease epidemics in the U.S.7,8,9 The Western processed food diet is chockfull of refined added sugars and unhealthy vegetable oils, which are cheap as a result of farm subsidies.

However, as much as 65 percent of the 94.1 million acres of corn grown in the U.S. actually doesn’t enter the food system at all.10 It’s used to produce ethanol fuel.

In a 2009 speech, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said that “energy reform is a strategic imperative,”11 calling for the deployment of “the Great Green Fleet … composed of nuclear ships, surface combatants equipped with hybrid electric alternative power systems running biofuel and aircraft flying only [on] biofuels.”

Mabus had put down 2016 as the deadline for this naval energy reform, but it didn’t come to pass. As noted by Vice News:12

[C]ongressional Republicans … have blocked the Navy from spending more on a gallon of biofuel than it does on a gallon of regular diesel.

Since it costs more to turn seeds, weeds or beef trimmings into usable fuel than it does to extract fossil fuels from the ground and refine them, it’s all but impossible for the fleet to use substantial amounts of biofuels with crude oil prices are as low as they currently are.

Part of the problem is the low production of biofuel, which drives up the price. According to a 2015 report13 by the World Resources Institute (WRI), in order to meet just 20 percent of the global energy demand by 2050, using plant-based biofuels, we would have to DOUBLE the global annual harvest of plant material “in all its forms.”

This makes the “quest for bioenergy at a meaningful scale … both unrealistic and unsustainable,” according to the report. Despite such bleak prognoses, the Biodiesel Tax Incentive Reform and Extension Act of 201614 would provide a $1.00 subsidy for each gallon of biodiesel produced during the taxable year.

In short, not only are your tax dollars continuing the expansion of corn for the production of biofuel, which is “unrealistic and unsustainable” to begin with, government subsidies are also used to grow crops that are primary contributors to obesity and ill health — and both of these schemes end up benefiting Monsanto, since the vast majority of corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified.

‘The Dumbest Guys in the Room’

In an article titled, “GMO Industry: The Dumbest Guys in the Room,”15 columnist Kurt Cobb16 makes a number of strikingly accurate observations.

I am now convinced the GMO industry has managed to hire the worst public relations strategists in human history. By supporting a deeply flawed GMO labeling bill in the U.S. Congress … the industry is about to open a Pandora’s Box of PR nightmares for years to come,” e writes.

“The anti-GMO groups will likely put out lists of the worst labeling violators and lists of their products containing GMOs. And, of course, there will be lists based on those enigmatic QR codes. Perhaps those codes will become the equivalent of the skull and crossbones feared by one GMO executive.17

Cobb likely predicts the future here, as I believe the QR code will become exactly that — the mark of products and brands that are trying to make a mint from deception by making it as difficult as possible for you to find out the truth about their ingredients. The QR code will become known as the Mark of Monsanto, and shoppers will be able to simply assume admission of guilt when they see it, without ever taking the time to rummage through entire websites filled with extraneous information and advertising.

Forbes contributor Nancy Fink Huehnergarth has made similar observations,18 noting that “Big Food may be shooting itself in the foot again,” as the QR code will make it appear they have something to hide.

“Food/drink packaging already has an ingredient label and nutrition facts panel. How simple would it be to mandate that all food packaging add a few words or a universal symbol to communicate the inclusion of GMO ingredients?” she says.

Why Eat GMOs When They Have No Health Advantages?

Cobb makes another great point when he says:

[T]he industry’s business and public relations strategists are the same ones who made a colossal marketing error — while believing they had achieved a regulatory coup — when they steamrolled the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into ruling that GMOs are ‘substantially equivalent’ to their non-GMO counterparts and therefore require no testing …

The reason this strategy has turned out to be a colossal marketing error is that as the attacks on GMOs have mounted … the industry finds itself unable to pivot and point to any advantages that GMO foods have for consumers over non-GMO foods …

After all, GMO foods are said to be ‘substantially equivalent.’ That means that the industry cannot give consumers any reasons to prefer GMO foods over their non-GMO counterparts … So far genetic engineering has focused on creating plants [that] produce insecticides internally — not a pleasant thought for those eating them — and which are immune to herbicides made by, you guessed it, the companies producing the GMO seeds.

Chemical Residues — A Major Reason to Avoid GMOs

Indeed, if GMOs are substantially equivalent to conventional crops in terms of nutritional value yet contain higher amounts of pesticides, why eat them? After all, the idea that pesticides are a boon to health is a tough sell.

As you may have noticed, with the exception of DDT, which was marketed as “good for you,” pesticides do not have health claims. And arguments defending the presence of pesticides on food always focus on the notion that the amount present is low enough that it will not produce adverse effects.

However, health statistics tell a different story, and the reason why the “trace defense” doesn’t hold water is because it’s not just about minor traces of chemicals on certain foods items.

Unless you eat organic foods and use “organic everything,” you’re exposed to pesticides from most foods, plus the chemicals used in the processing, plus chemicals to add flavor, texture and preservation power, plus chemicals found in the packaging and in the cashier’s receipt, plus the chemicals found in just about every product you put on your body every day, including the clothes you wear, and the furniture you sit on. There are even chemicals in the air you breathe and the water you drink.

We are barraged with toxins at every turn, and they all ADD UP. That is the problem. And, unfortunately, food appears to be a major source, so avoiding chemicals in your diet can go a long way toward preserving your health. With that in mind, herbicide-resistant and pesticide-producing food crops are an incredibly foolish idea that contributes absolutely nothing to the health and wellbeing of the global community.

US Right to Know Blows Lid Off Another Monsanto Scheme to Tarnish Organics

Since transparent GMO labeling is not going to happen in the U.S. anytime soon, your options become quite straight forward: Buy organic and/or locally-grown food you can verify being non-GMO. This has always been the best option; just not the least expensive or most convenient. Not surprisingly, in addition to defending the quality and safety of its GE products, Monsanto has also tried to cast doubt on organic ethics and value, in order to curb consumer preference for organics.

Emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) reveal Monsanto colluded with an organization of “independent” academics to mislead the public into thinking they were being duped by the organic industry. The Huffington Post recently ran an article19 revealing this story. It’s well worth reading in its entirety.

USRTK is a nonprofit organization that pursues truth and transparency in the U.S. food system. In 2014, Academics Review, a nonprofit organization composed of “independent academic experts in agriculture and food sciences” issued a 30-page report claiming organic shoppers were over-paying for organics due to deceptive industry marketing practices.

The report, which was “endorsed by an international panel of independent agricultural science, food science, economic and legal experts from respected international institutions” gained traction in the trade press with headlines such as “Organics Exposed!” and “Organic Industry Booming by Deceiving Customers.”

The press release announcing the report even hammers home the point of independence by stating that “Academics Review has no conflicts-of-interest associated with this publication, and all associated costs … were paid for using our general funds without any specific donor influence or direction.” Alas, emails obtained by USRTK tell a different story.

Academics Review — Just Another False Front Group for Monsanto

Monsanto not only helped raise funds for Academics Review, Monsanto executives also “collaborated on strategy and even discussed plans to hide industry funding,” The Huffington Post writes, adding:

Monsanto’s motives in attacking the organic industry are obvious: Monsanto’s seeds and chemicals are banned from use in organic farming, and a large part of Monsanto’s messaging is that its products are superior to organics as tools to boost global food production.

One of the co-founders of Academics Review was Bruce Chassy, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. In March of this year, an investigation by Chicago WBEZ news20 discovered Monsanto paid the now retired Chassy more than $57,000 over two years for travel, writing and speaking expenses, yet Chassy never disclosed his financial ties to the company on state and university conflict-of-interest disclosure forms.

Between 2005 and 2015, Monsanto gave at least $5.1 million to University of Illinois employees and programs — all of it undisclosed, as it was funneled via the University of Illinois Foundation, which is exempt from public scrutiny and disclosure.21

Chassy also lobbied federal officials on Monsanto’s behalf to prevent further regulations on GMOs. Chassy claims he did this of his own volition, but emails22 show Monsanto’s Eric Sachs urged Chassy to get involved. The correspondence also reveals this was in fact part of an industry lobbying effort, “with academics out in front,” basically pretending to be acting independently — just like the Academics Review.

FOIA-recovered emails show Chassy was very eager to attack the organic industry but needed money. Jay Byrne, former head of communications at Monsanto, agreed to help, indicating he would discuss “options for taking the Academic Review project … forward” by meeting with Val Giddings, former vice president of the biotech industry trade association BIO.

Eric Sachs, who handles Monsanto’s public relations, also emailed Chassy discussing funding possibilities for Academics Review while “keeping Monsanto in the background.” Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are often tightly reined in by corporate bias, which prevents the truth to become as widely known as it should. As noted in The Huffington Post:

Despite the revelations in emails and the disclosure of Chassy’s financial ties to Monsanto, the Academics Review website and its report attacking the organic industry are still posted online with all the descriptions claiming independence. And Chassy still enjoys press coverage as an ‘independent’ expert on GMOs. In May 2016, two separate Associated Press stories quoted Chassy on that topic. Neither story mentioned Chassy’s now-public financial ties to Monsanto.

For a number of years Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Tom, after whom the F-14 Tomcat fighter is named, expressed to me his concern that US politics and foreign policy was in the clutches of Israel and that America was being led into war with the Arab Middle East. Admiral Moorer and the State Department and Pentagon at that time did not think that war with the Arab countries served the interests of the United States. However, Admiral Moorer thought that the war could not be avoided because of the hold Israel has over the US government.

What convinced him of this was Washington’s coverup of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty which resulted in 208 killed and wounded Americans. Tom was disheartened that Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of the current US senator, for career reasons had cooperated with the coverup. Tom worried that careerism had destroyed the integrity of the US military.

Last month was the 49th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the American ship. I raised the issue of the USS Liberty eight or nine years ago in a syndicated newspaper column, which, as I suspected would be the case, only a few news sources dared to publish. However, the article editor at Hustler magazine saw the article and contacted me. He said that Hustler was popular among US sailors and now that they were again thrust into needless war they should be aware that the US government could sell them out without notice. Would I write the USS Liberty story for the sailors so they would be aware of the betrayal that might await them?

I had already seen that Admiral Moorer’s prediction that Israel would have us in war against the Arabs had come true. I still hear his bitter statement that “no American president can stand up to Israel.” Tom was deeply wounded by the betrayal of the US Navy by the Commander-in-Chief. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff was powerless before the Israel Lobby.

I understood that to take on this task meant much work. I would have to hunt down USS Liberty survivors and interview them. I would have to find Captain Ward Boston and a pilot or commander of the rescue fighters that Washington called back, denying protection to the American sailors aboard the USS Liberty. They would have to be willing to talk. I undertook the task, and the story is below.

*        *       *

Surviving Sailors Break Their Silence 40 Years After Israeli Attack on US Navy Ship

by

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Hustler Magazine, July 2008

June 8, 1967 — the fourth day of the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan — was a beautiful day in the Mediterranean. The USS Liberty was in international waters off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft had flown over the USS Liberty in the morning and had reported that the ship was American. The crew, in close proximity to the war zone, was reassured by the presence of Israeli aircraft. But at 2:00 p.m. sailors sunbathing on the deck saw fighter jets coming at them in attack formation. Red flashes from the wings of the fighters were followed by explosions, blood and death. A beautiful afternoon suddenly became a nightmare. Who was attacking the USS Liberty and why? The attack on the Liberty was an attack on America.

The Liberty was an intelligence ship. Its purpose was to monitor Soviet and Arab communications in order to warn both Israel and Washington should the Soviets enter the war on behalf of its Arab allies. The Liberty was armed only with four machineguns to repel boarders. Its request for a destroyer escort had been denied.

The assault on the Liberty is well documented. With no warning, the Liberty was attacked by successive waves of unmarked jets using cannon, rockets and napalm. The attacking jets jammed all of the US communications frequencies, an indication they knew the Liberty was an American ship.

The air attack failed to sink the Liberty. About 30 minutes into the attack three torpedo boats appeared flying the Star of David. The Israeli boats were not on a rescue mission. They attacked the Liberty with cannon, machineguns and torpedoes. One torpedo struck the Liberty mid-ship, instantly killing 25 Americans while flooding the lower decks. The Israeli torpedo boats destroyed the life rafts the Liberty launched when the crew prepared to abandon ship, sending the message there would be no survivors.

At approximately 3:15 two French-built Israeli helicopters carrying armed Israeli troops appeared over the Liberty. Phil Tourney could see their faces only 50/60 feet away. He gave them the finger. Surviving crewmembers are convinced the Israelis were sent to board and kill all survivors.

The Israeli jets destroyed the Liberty‘s communication antennas. While under attack from the jets, crewmembers strung lines that permitted the ship to send a call for help. The USS Saratoga and the USS America launched fighters to drive off the attacking aircraft, but the rescue mission was aborted by direct orders from Washington.

When the Liberty notified the Sixth Fleet it was again under attack, this time from surface ships, the Fleet commander ordered the carriers America and Saratoga to launch fighters to destroy or drive off the attackers. The order was unencrypted and picked up by Israel, which immediately called off its attack. The torpedo boats and the hovering helicopters sped away. Israel quickly notified Washington that it had mistakenly attacked an American ship, and the US fighters were recalled a second time.

The USS Liberty suffered 70% casualties, with 34 killed and 174 wounded. Although the expensive state of the art ship was kept afloat by the heroic crew, it later proved unsalvageable and was sold as scrap.

Why didn’t help come?

No explanation has ever been given by the US government for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s orders for the Sixth Fleet to abort the rescue mission. Lt. Commander David Lewis of the Liberty told colleagues that Admiral L. R. Geis, commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force, told him that when he challenged McNamara’s order to recall the rescue mission, LBJ came on the line and said he didn’t care if the ship sank, he wasn’t going to embarrass an ally. The communications officer handling the transmission has given the same account.

A BBC documentary on the Israeli raid reports that confusion about the attacker’s identity almost resulted in a US assault on Egypt. Richard Parker, US political counsel in Cairo, confirms in the BBC documentary that he received official communication that an American retaliatory attack on Egypt was on its way.

The US government’s official position on the USS Liberty corresponds with Israel’s: The attack was unintentional and a result of Israeli blunders. This is the official position despite the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Assistant Secretary of State Lucius Battle, and a long list of US Navy officers, government officials and Liberty survivors are on record saying the Israeli attack was intentional.

According to Helms, Battle and the minutes of a White House meeting, President Johnson believed the attack was intentional. Helms says LBJ was furious and complained when The New York Times buried the story on page 29, but that Johnson decided he had to publicly accept Israel’s explanation. “The political pressure was too much,” Helms said

US communications personnel, intelligence analysts and ambassadors report having read US intercepts of Israeli orders to attack the Liberty. In one intercept an Israeli pilot reports that the Liberty is an American ship and asks for a repeat and clarification of his orders to attack an American ship. One Israeli who identified himself as one of the pilots later came to America and met with US Representative Pete McCloskey and Liberty survivors. The pilot said he had refused to participate in the attack when he saw it was an American ship. He was arrested upon returning to base.

The Liberty flew the US flag. The ship’s markings, GTR-5, measured several feet in height on both sides of the bow. On the stern the ship was clearly marked USS LIBERTY. Mistaking the Liberty for an Egyptian ship, as Israel claims to have done, was impossible.

Tattered flags show ferocity of the attacks

The Israelis claim the Liberty flew no flag, but two US flags full of holes from the attack exist. When the first flag was shot down, crewmen replaced it with a flag 7 feet by 13 feet. This flag with its battle scars is on display at NSA headquarters at Ft. Mead, Maryland.

Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of the current US senator, ordered Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and Captain Ward Boston to hold a court of inquiry and to complete the investigation in only one week. In a signed affidavit Captain Boston said President Johnson ordered a cover-up and that he and Admiral Kidd were prevented from doing a real investigation. Liberty survivors were ordered never to speak to anyone about the event. Their silence was finally broken 12 years later when Lt. Commander James M. Ennes published his book, Assault on the Liberty.

It is now established fact that the attack on the Liberty was intentional and was covered up by President Johnson and every administration since. There has never been a congressional investigation, nor has the testimony of the majority of survivors ever been officially taken. Moreover, testimony that conflicted with the cover-up was deleted from the official record.

Disgusted by the US government’s official stance discounting the survivors’ reports, Admiral Tom Moorer, retired Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, organized the Moorer Commission to make public the known facts about the attack and cover-up. The Commission consisted of Admiral Moorer, former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy Admiral Merlin Staring, Marine Corps General Raymond G. Davis and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins.

The Commission’s Report concluded:

That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.

That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.

That surviving crew members were threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and [the survivors] were abandoned by their own government.

That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.

That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation.

Why did Israel attack the Liberty? Was something super secret going on that is so damaging it must be protected at all cost?

Some experts believe Tel Aviv decided to sink the Liberty because the ship’s surveillance capability would discover Israel’s impending invasion and capture of Syria’s Golan Heights, an action opposed by Washington. Others believe Israel was concerned the Liberty would discover Israel’s massacre of hundreds of Egyptian POWs, a war crime contemporaneous with the attack on the US ship. Still others believe that Israel intended to blame the attack on Egypt in order to bring America into the war. It is known the US was providing Israel with reconnaissance and that there were joint US-Israeli covert operations against the Arabs that Washington was desperate to keep secret.

Survivors with whom I spoke said the attack was the easy part of the experience. The hard part has been living with 40 years of official cover-up and betrayal by the US government. One survivor said that he was asked to leave his Baptist church when he spoke about the Liberty, because the minister and fellow church-goers felt more loyalty to Israel than to a member of the congregation who had served his country. His church’s position was that if our government believed Israel, the survivors should also.

Survivor Phil Tourney said that “being forced to live with a cover-up is like being raped and no one will believe you.”

Survivor Gary Brummett said he “feels like someone who has been locked up for 40 years on a wrongful conviction.” Until the US government acknowledges the truth of the attack, Brummett says the survivors are forced to live with the anger and dismay of being betrayed by the country they served.

Survivor Bryce Lockwood has been angry for 40 years. The torpedo that killed his shipmates, wrecked his ship and damaged his health was made in the USA.

Survivor Ernie Gallo told me he “has been haunted for four decades” by the knowledge that his commander-in-chief recalled the US fighters that could have prevented most of the Liberty‘s casualties.

Every American should be troubled by the fact that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense prevented the US Sixth Fleet from protecting a US Navy ship and its 294-man crew from foreign attack. They should also be troubled that the President ordered the Navy to determine the attack was unintentional.

This article is based entirely on doumented sources and on interviews with six USS Liberty survivors, as well as Captain Ward Boston and Bill Knutson, the executive officer of the USS America fighter squadron dispatched on the first aborted rescue mission.

This article was reproduced in the Unz Review and other places.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that, quite frequently, the theorists lack adequate imagination. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Democratic National Committee’s behind-the-scenes machinations to muscle Hillary Clinton into the White House while plotting against her main challenger, Bernie Sanders. That conclusion stems from the trove of 20,000 DNC emails dumped into the public sphere by Wikileaks last Friday.

The leaked emails have cost Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job as Chair of the DNC but other top DNC officials captured in devious plots against Sanders in the email exchanges still have their jobs – or at least no official firings have been announced. This makes the conspiracies seem more like a DNC business model.

The DNC’s own charter demands that it treat all Democratic primary candidates fairly and impartially, but top DNC officials made a mockery of that mandate. In addition to conjuring up ways to smear Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders during the primary battles, the leaked emails show a coordinated effort to cover up what the Sanders camp called “money laundering” between the Hillary Victory Fund and the DNC.

Despite the fact that the Sanders campaign had no such active arrangement with the DNC, the DNC agreed to participate in the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that sluiced money to both Hillary’s main candidate committee, Hillary for America, as well as into the DNC. To a much tinier degree, funds also went to dozens of separate State Democratic committees.

On May 2 of this year, the Sanders campaign released a statement charging Clinton with “looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign,” and exploiting “the rules in ways that let her high-dollar donors like Alice Walton of Wal-Mart fame and the actor George Clooney and his super-rich Hollywood friends skirt legal limits on campaign contributions.”

Despite Clinton’s promise to rein in tax dodges by hedge funds, Wall Street On Parade reported in April that major hedge fund titans were also big donors to the Hillary Victory Fund. We wrote at the time:

Federal Election Commission records show that S. Donald Sussman, founder of hedge fund Paloma Partners, gave $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while also donating $2.5 million to Priorities USA, the Super Pac supporting Hillary. Hedge Fund billionaire George Soros donated $343,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund while sluicing a whopping $7 million into Priorities USA to enhance Hillary’s efforts to move into the Oval Office.

Today, reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf of Politico have provided significant new details from the leaked emails to show how the DNC worked behind the scenes to control the media’s handling of revelations involving the Hillary Victory Fund.

Vogel was criticized by some media outlets when the Wikileaks emails revealed he had allowed a DNC official to review one of his articles critical of the joint fundraising operation prior to publication. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post has provided some necessary clarity to that issue here.

The Clinton camp and the DNC had attempted publicly to defend the joint fundraising operation as providing critical help to State Committees in order to help down-ticket candidates.

Click to read complete article on Wall Street on Parade 

“Israel is not against ‘terrorism’; it is only against anti-Israeli terrorism.”Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, after the outing of a secret Israeli assassination squad in 1990.

The current attempt by Israel’s supporters to equate “Islamic terror” in France to Israeli victimhood requires a reality check, such as comparing the numbers of the Palestinian injured and dead to that of Israelis.  While psychological studies of Israelis show fast adjustment to the situation, studies of Palestinians indicate a high level of PTSD and widespread psychological damage, especially of children.

In fact, Israelis benefit hugely from “living with ‘terror'”: their homes are often built on stolen Palestinian land, their water is largely from Palestinian sources, and they benefit from Israel’s theft of what should be Gaza’s gas. Their profitable “security” industry tests out their new products on the civilians trapped in Gaza or West Bank enclaves.  The occupation is win-win for Israel.

Israelis pay little for this: the international community picks up the humanitarian aid bill for Israel’s legal obligation to ensure that Palestinians under occupation (in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) have access to adequate food, water and medical care and other necessities of a decent life, such as education.  Israel hobbles humanitarian aid by skimming money off the top and ensures that what reaches Gazans — under siege since 2006 — will not be sufficient to allow their health.  Legal experts, who agree that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “apartheid”, disagree on whether this is “genocide” or merely “genocidal treatment”.

A key point is the use of language.  Israel often calls its own terrorism (usually illegal) “resistance” before it declared itself a state, and “defense” afterward.  Jewish and Israeli terrorists are merely “militants” and the Jewish Defense League operates openly, despite U.S., Canadian and French anti-terror laws.

Palestinian violence (usually legal under international law) should be called “resistance” because their land and resources continue to be taken illegally and they have been deprived of self-determination.  Israel’s control of the media has made “Palestinian” virtually synonymous with “terrorism” despite its vastly greater terrorism inflicted on Palestinians.

Israel’s definition of “terrorism” has come to have global consequences. Like a parasite that has come to occupy the brain of a host, Israel has been able to infect the west with the belief that countries that challenge Israel’s regional hegemony threaten the safety of the west.

Investigators have found that some of the benefactors of Israel’s illegal settlements (such as the Koret, Fairbrook and Irving Moskowitz foundations) are collectively responsible for much of the media’s Islamophobic racism that has come to characterize the west’s attitude toward Muslims. The political benefit to Israel of Muslim demonization is incalculable; the term “terrorist” has come to be defined popularly — with what should be unacceptable racism — as only Muslim violence. Christian and Jewish terrorists are only described as such if there is a link to Muslims, otherwise, they may be  “mentally ill”.  The common perception that “terrorism” is Muslim indicates the impact of that definition, because studies of violence in the U.S. and Europe have repeatedly shown that Muslims are rarely responsible for violent crimes.

Israel’s claim to terrorist victimhood must be understood for what it is: a self-serving ploy to continue its theft of Palestinian resources and its destruction of Palestinian lives.  The impact of anti-Muslim racism will be increasingly catastrophic as long as Israel and its supporters are allowed to influence western media and governments.

Karin Brothers is a freelance writer

 

“Get Money out of Politics”: DNC Emails Reveal a Corrupt and Unreformable Party and System

By Gloria La Riva, July 27 2016

Activists in Philadelphia’s downtown plaza chanted “Jill, not Hill.”

Jill Stein, presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, a longtime physician/activist, a true populist, wanting her professional skills used to heal a sick nation.

It desperately needs what she can provide, media-supported corrupted duopoly power denying her the chance to become president by virtually ignoring her candidacy, opposing what she stands for.

She remains redoubtable and heroic, her progressive agenda what the world needs now, genuinely supporting:

• world peace and disarmament;

• democratic values;

• the inviolability of rule of law principles;

• universal healthcare and education as fundamental human rights;

• living wages for all working Americans;

• green, clean energy;

• popular interests served over monied ones;

• electoral reform free from today’s money-controlled process; along with

• real social justice and revolutionary change.

Seeking support in Philadelphia, she accurately accused Clinton of “backstabbing” Sanders by now exposed electoral rigging, urging his supporters to back her, saying “(m)y campaign is here.”

She’s an advocate for progressive change. Perhaps “Never Hillary” activists will give her enough votes to prevent a 2nd Clinton co-presidency – the top political priority above all others.

Her revolutionary spirit is real. Her message is “Americans deserve real solutions for the economic, social and environmental crises we face. But the broken political system is only making things worse.”

“It’s time to build a people’s movement to end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of every person.”

“The power to create this new world is not in our hopes; it’s not in our dreams – it’s in our hands.”

Jill is a longtime physician, a mother, activist and organizer, a pioneer advocate for environmental health, a promoter of healthy communities, a fighter for peace, equity and justice so desperately needed.

Imagine America led by someone with her dedication for people over profits, assuring enforcement of human and civil rights, a distinguished woman of principle and honor – polar opposite duopoly choices.

I’m proud to support an eminently qualified candidate for president, a dedicated woman, saying “(w)e can build a better future together” and meaning it.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Offshore protections allow those involved to exploit natural resources, while evading taxes and dodge prosecution for corruption and money laundering.

Bill Clinton once bragged about electing him president meant getting “two for the price of one.”

Here we go again. Exposed electoral rigging along with unelected party insider super-delegates handed the Clinton crime family another chance for the nation’s highest office.

Will November electoral rigging assure it, letting both legally challenged Clintons lead America – perhaps into the abyss if occurs?

Sanders capped his sellout to everything he campaigned against, urging Hillary be nominated by acclamation. In disgust, over 500 of his delegates walked out.

He transformed himself into Hillary’s puppet, urging his followers to betray their principles –  selling out to wealth and power like all the rest.

All-out activism against a corrupted system is crucial.

The alternative is a nation more unsafe and unfit to live in than ever, Wall Street and war-profiteers more greatly empowered, and the unthinkable risk of WW III.

That’s what “two for the price of one” emerging triumphant in November means. Defeating the Clinton crime family is vital.

The unacceptable danger of a 2nd Clinton crime family presidency is explained by Hillary once saying “(w)hat do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life” – code language for endless wars of aggression, benefitting privileged Americans exclusively, no matter the cost to humanity.

Straightaway post-9/11, she urged waging war on terror – a pretext for forcefully transforming all sovereign independent nations into US vassal states.

She threatened Iran with total “obliterat(ion) (if they) consider(ed) launching an attack on Israel…”

As me-first lady, she supported genocidal sanctions on Iraq, killing 5,000 children aged five or under monthly. She praised George Bush’s Islamophobia, fully supporting his agenda.

She favors nuclear weapons use, calling them peacekeeping deterrents. As secretary of state, she orchestrated war on Libya and Syria, raping and destroying both countries.

US foreign policy under her leadership ousted democratically elected Honduran and Paraguayan leaders. Following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, she was involved in raping the country for profit along with rigging its election, installing a US puppet to run things.

The Clinton Foundation is a money-laundering racket masquerading as a charitable NGO – selling influence to special interests in return for millions of dollars in contributions.

It’s hard imagining a more despicable choice for president than Killary – partnered with husband Bill for a second time around to run the country into the ground – likely taking planet earth with it this time if elected in November.

Top priority is preventing their return to the White House. Humanity’s fate hangs in the balance.

They’re a duo only Wall Street, war-profiteers and other corporate predators could love, a scourge for everyone else.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

“Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.” -William J. Perry, U.S. Sec. Of Defense (1994-97)

Perry has been an inside player in the business of nuclear weapons for over 60 years and his book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” is a sober read. It is also a powerful counterpoint to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) current European strategy that envisions nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war: “Their [nuclear weapons] role is to prevent major war, not to wage wars,” argues the Alliance’s magazine, NATO Review.

But, as Perry points out, it is only by chance that the world has avoided a nuclear war—sometimes by nothing more than dumb luck—and, rather than enhancing our security, nukes “now endanger it.”

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is generally represented as a dangerous standoff resolved by sober diplomacy. In fact, it was a single man—Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov—who countermanded orders to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer that could have set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the USSR and the U.S.

There were numerous other incidents that brought the world to the brink. On a quiet morning in November 1979, a NORAD computer reported a full-scale Russian sneak attack with land and sea-based missiles, which led to scrambling U.S. bombers and alerting U.S. missile silos to prepare to launch. There was no attack, just an errant test tape.

Lest anyone think the Nov. 9 incident was an anomaly, a little more than six months later NORAD computers announced that Soviet submarines had launched 220 missiles at the U.S.—this time the cause was a defective chip that cost 49 cents—again resulting in scrambling interceptors and putting the silos on alert.

But don’t these examples prove that accidental nuclear war is unlikely? That conclusion is a dangerous illusion, argues Perry, because the price of being mistaken is so high and because the world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1980.

It is 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity’s memory of those events has dimmed. But even were the entire world to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, it would have little idea of what we face today.

The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today’s standards, and comparing “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”—the incongruous names of the weapons that leveled both cities—to modern weapons stretches any analogy beyond the breaking point. If the Hiroshima bomb represented approximately 27 freight cars filled with TNT, a one-megaton warhead would require a train 300 miles long.

Each Russian RS-20V Voevoda intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) packs 10 megatons.

What has made today’s world more dangerous, however, is not just advances in the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but a series of actions by the last three U.S. administrations.

First was the decision by President Bill Clinton to abrogate a 1990 agreement with the Soviet Union not to push NATO further east after the reunification of Germany or to recruit former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact.

NATO has also reneged on a 1997 pledge not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Warsaw Pact countries. This month NATO decided to deploy four battalions on, or near, the Russian border, arguing that since the units will be rotated they are not “permanent” and are not large enough to be “significant.” It is a linguistic slight of hand that does not amuse Moscow.

Second was the 1999 U.S.-NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil war and the forcible dismemberment of Serbia. It is somewhat ironic that Russia is currently accused of using force to “redraw borders in Europe” by annexing the Crimea, which is exactly what NATO did to create Kosovo. The U.S. subsequently built Camp Bond Steel, Washington’s largest base in the Balkans.

Third was President George W, Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the decision by the Obama administration to deploy anti-missile systems in Romania and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Last is the decision by the White House to spend upwards of $1 trillion upgrading its nuclear weapons arsenal, which includes building bombs with smaller yields, a move that many critics argue blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

The Yugoslav War and NATO’s move east convinced Moscow that the Alliance was surrounding Russia with potential adversaries, and the deployment of anti-missile systems (ABM)—supposedly aimed at Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons—was seen as a threat to the Russian’s nuclear missile force.

One immediate effect of ABMs was to chill the possibility of further cuts in the number of nuclear weapons. When Obama proposed another round of warhead reductions, the Russians turned it down cold, citing the anti-missile systems as the reason. “How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russian missiles?” asked Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

When the U.S. helped engineer the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, it ignited the current crisis that has led to several dangerous incidents between Russian and NATO forces—at last count, according to the European Leadership Network, more than 60. Several large war games were also held on Moscow’s borders. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachevwent so far as to accuse NATO of “preparations for switching from a cold war to a hot war.”

In response, the Russians have also held war games involving up to 80,000 troops.

It is unlikely that NATO intends to attack Russia, but the power differential between the U.S. and Russia is so great—a “colossal asymmetry,” Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times—that the Russians have abandoned their “no first use” of nuclear weapons pledge.

It the lack of clear lines that make the current situation so fraught with danger. While the Russians have said they would consider using small, tactical nukes if “the very existence of the state” was threatened by an attack, NATO is being deliberately opaque about its possible tripwires. According to NATO Review, nuclear “exercises should involve not only nuclear weapons states…but other non-nuclear allies,” and “to put the burden of the doubt on potential adversaries, exercises should not point at any specific nuclear thresholds.”

In short, keep the Russians guessing. The immediate problem with such a strategy is: what if Moscow guesses wrong?

That won’t be hard to do. The U.S. is developing a long-range cruise missile—as are the Russians—that can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. But how will an adversary know which is which? And given the old rule in nuclear warfare—use ‘em, or lose ‘em—uncertainty is the last thing one wants to engender in a nuclear-armed foe.

Indeed, the idea of no “specific nuclear thresholds” is one of the most extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing concepts to come along since the invention of nuclear weapons.

There is no evidence that Russia contemplates an attack on the Baltic states or countries like Poland, and, given the enormous power of the U.S., such an undertaking would court national suicide.

Moscow’s “aggression” against Georgia and Ukraine was provoked. Georgia attacked Russia, not vice versa, and the Ukraine coup torpedoed a peace deal negotiated by the European Union, the U.S., and Russia. Imagine Washington’s view of a Moscow-supported coup in Mexico, followed by an influx of Russian weapons and trainers.

In a memorandum to the recent NATO meetings in Warsaw, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argued “There is not one scintilla of evidence of any Russian plan to annex Crimea before the coup in Kiev and coup leaders began talking about joining NATO. If senior NATO leaders continue to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between cause and effect, increasing tension is inevitable with potentially disastrous results.”

The organization of former intelligence analysts also sharply condemned the NATO war games. “We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s army launched ‘Unternehumen Barbarossa’ 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead.”

While the NATO meetings in Warsaw agreed to continue economic sanctions aimed at Russia for another six months and to station four battalions of troops in Poland and the Baltic states— separate U.S. forces will be deployed in Bulgaria and Poland —there was an undercurrent of dissent. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for deescalating the tensions with Russia and for considering Russian President Vladimir Putin a partner not an enemy.

Greece was not alone. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeler called NATO maneuvers on the Russian border “warmongering” and “saber rattling.” French President Francois Hollande said Putin should be considered a “partner,” not a “threat,” and France tried to reduce the number of troops being deployed in the Baltic and Poland. Italy has been increasingly critical of the sanctions.

Rather than recognizing the growing discomfort of a number of NATO allies and that beefing up forces on Russia’s borders might be destabilizing, U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently inked defense agreements with Georgia and Ukraine.

After disappearing from the radar for several decades, nukes are back, and the decision to modernize the U.S. arsenal will almost certainly kick off a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. Russia is already replacing its current ICBM force with the more powerful and long range “Sarmat” ICBM, and China is loading its ICBM with multiple warheads.

Add to this volatile mixture military maneuvers and a deliberately opaque policy in regards to the use of nuclear weapons, and it is no wonder that Perry thinks that the chances of some catastrophe is a growing possibility.

Amid a new scandal Debbie Wasserman Schultz was left no alternative but to step down from her role as the Chairwoman to the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, in seeking to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democrat’s presidential nomination. 

Just days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released some 20,000 emails between top DNC officials. These emails show clearly that functionaries of the DNC were actively supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, while trying to destroy that of Bernie Sanders, despite publicly claiming to be neutral in the primaries. Supporters of Sanders were justifiably outraged at the revelations, which confirmed what Sanders himself had been saying for months.

Even more telling, the leaked emails illuminate in great detail how political favors are bought and sold, not as an exception but on a routine basis, and how major donors are rewarded with access to powerful government officials. This is equally if not even more true for the Republican party.

In reporting on the rewarding of big donors, a New York Times article reported: “The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most precious of currencies.”

As has long been the case, paid “proximity” to the president and other influential politicians regularly translates into economic advantage for the big donors. And campaign contributions are critical to election and re-election campaigns from city councils to legislatures to the White House.

Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential candidate Gloria La Riva, commented:

“These latest revelations show once again that our so-called ‘democratic’ political system is irredeemably corrupt, that big money – not the votes nor the interests of the people – is the decisive factor. It’s a system that cannot be reformed, but must be replaced with a new system, a socialist system where the great wealth created by working people is taken out of the hands of the banks, corporations and the super-rich.That is the way, the only way, that the popular demand ‘get money out of politics’ can actually be met.”

The mainstream media alleges that Russia was behind the hack of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The media is parading out the usual suspects alleged experts to back up this claim.

Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – what he thinks of such claims:

Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails:

But mainstream media say it couldn’t:   http://www.businessinsider.com/dnc-hack-russian-government-2016-7

The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the email leaks are to Clinton’s character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html

Who’s right?

Binney responded:

Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless. Here’s what I said to Ray McGovern and VIPS with a little humor at the end. [McGovern is a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (“VIPS” for short).]

Ray, I am suspicious that they may have looked for known hacking code (used by Russians). And, I’m sure they were one probably of many to hack her stuff. But, does that mean that they checked to see if others also hacked in?

Further, do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct. Otherwise, HRC and her political activities are and I am sure have been prime targets for the Russians (as well as many others) but without intent of course.

I would add that we proposed to do a program that would monitor all activity on the world-wide NSA network back in 1991/92. We called it “Wellgrounded.” NSA did not want anyone (especially congress) to know what was going on inside NSA and therefore rejected that proposal. I have not read what Ed has said, but, I do know that every line of
code that goes across the network is logged in the network log. This is where a little software could scan, analyze and find the intruders initially and then compile all the code sent by them to determine the type of attack. This is what we wanted to do back in 1991/92.

The newest allegation tying the Clinton email hack to Russia seems to be all innuendo.

Binney explained to us:

 My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site.  I suspect that’s because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks.

Of course, this brings up another question; if it’s a know attack, why did the DNC not have software to stop it?  You can tell from the network log who is going into a site.  I used that on networks that I had.  I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.

Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things.  Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries.  But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.

Question is do they want to fix the problems with existing protection software.  If the DNC and OPM are examples, then obviously, they don’t care to fix weakness probably because the want to use these weaknesses to their own advantage.

Why is this newsworthy?

Well, the mainstream narrative alleges that the Clinton emails are not important … and that it’s a conspiracy between Putin and Trump to make sure Trump – and not Clinton – is elected.

But there are other issues, as well …

For example, an allegation of hacking could literally lead to war.

So we should be skeptical of such serious and potentially far-reaching allegations – which may be true or may be false – unless and until they are proven.

Hugely increased arms shipments and loans would be the policy of the new White House for a US­-armed Israel to dominate the Middle East on behalf of America

Whoever is elected US president next November, whether Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, they will likely have the advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in casino funds plus the power of the AIPAC lobby in Washington and the CFI lobby and BICOM in London ­ all being either key players or major factors in an international movement to legalise the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Upon completion of the land grab, the Netanyahu government would carry out a unilateral annexation of all of the Occupied Territories whilst contemporaneously expelling the 5 million indigenous Palestinians in a forced transfer from ancestral lands to new refugee camps in adjoining states.

This would signal the commencement of the ‘Greater Israel’ project: an illegal expansionist programme that extends from the Nile to the Euphrates in order to fulfil the Likud Zionist agenda for a nuclear hegemon that would be able to control not only the Middle East but, through its agents and government ministers embedded in the British Parliament and the US Congress, to dictate the global foreign defence and trade policy of NATO, NAFTA, Britain and the EU.

Both Trump and Clinton, in their individual bids to achieve the White House incumbency, are expected to promise unlimited support for the legalisation of the settlements and their annexation as they reject the establishment of a Palestinian state by deliberately rejecting the will of the United Nations in a gross violation of international law.

In direct opposition to the hard­-won democratic values for which so many allied forces died in two world wars, these self-­interested politicians and their backers intend to take the world back to a time of military domination in order to create a neo­-colonial, (nuclear) super state that will impose its will upon the political and economic direction of over half the world, and the disintegration of Europe.

But only if we, and the UN Security Council, are prepared to allow such a global catastrophe.

Secretary of State John Kerry says he raised the email hack of the Democratic National Committee with Russia’s top diplomat but stopped short of making any allegation about who might be responsible. 

According to CBS, Kerry told reporters Tuesday he brought the matter up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a meeting in Laos and explained that the FBI was investigating. He did not, however, repeat allegations or echo suspicions that Russia was responsible for the hack and said he would not draw conclusions until the probe is complete. “I raised the question and we will continue to work to see precisely what those facts are,” Kerry said. He would not say if Lavrov responded

Earlier, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded to accusations that Russia was allegedly behind the DNC server hack, when he blasted a reporter over her question that Russia was behind the DNC email leaks. Lavrov had a concise reply, stating: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

He was speaking ahead of talks at the ASEAN summit in Laos.

This appears to be a denial of the accusations.

Cybersecurity experts and U.S. officials have said there is evidence that Russia engineered the release of the emails in order to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Earlier, the FBI said it was investigating a cyber intrusion at the DNC, adding that Russia is the leading suspect in the hack.

On Sunday, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, claimed in an interview with CNN that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

When asked what kind of evidence he had to back up that theory, Mook answered: “Well, we need the experts speak on this. It’s been reported on in the press that the hackers that got into the DNC are very likely to be working in coordination with Russia.”

Previously Trump also slammed the theory, saying that Clinton campaigners will say anything to be able to win. I mean this is time and time again, lie after lie. You notice he [Mook] won’t say, ‘Well, I say this.’ We hear ‘experts’. His house cat at home once said this is what’s happening with the Russians. It’s disgusting. It’s so phony,” he told CNN.

Neither the Clinton campaign, the White House, nor lawmakers briefed on the hack definitively linked the leak to the Russian government on Monday.

 

Republicans were touted as the divided party this year.

It looks almost unified compared to dissension in Democrat ranks.  

Monday inside and outside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center was raucous and unruly – anti-Clinton delegates and tens of thousands in the streets protesting against her.

If this keep up throughout the convention, she’ll be greater damaged goods than already – unable to unify a a deeply divided party.

What better strategy than to change the subject. What better target than Putin. He’s blamed for practically everything short of Philadelphia’s scorching heat.

A Romanian hacker with no connection to Russia, using the name Guccifer 2.0, hacked into a treasure trove of DNC emails, showing now defrocked former chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigged enough primaries and caucuses to assure Hillary’s nomination – handing the incriminating evidence to WikiLeaks for publication.

Hard as party bosses tried, it proved too great a scandal to conceal, throwing a king-sized spanner at Hillary’s already despicable record. It’s clear she was involved in the chicanery, perhaps responsible for orchestrating it.

How any intelligent voter can support her is beyond comprehension. So is why she’s not in prison doing hard time for multiple high crimes too serious to ignore.

The media support her anyway, concealing her despicable public record – knee-jerk Trump bashing instead featured, a daily onslaught combining facts with over-the-top fiction.

When in doubt or at any convenient time, blame Putin. Throughout his tenure as Russian president, no evidence suggests he interfered with the electoral process in any country – not America’s or any others.

Yet in virtual unison, the media blame him for hacking into DNC emails, collaborating with WikiLeaks for publication – covertly aiding the Trump campaign.

Headlines practically scream Putin for Trump. Cable television channels accuse him despite no evidence suggesting it. Even the FBI suspects his involvement.

Obama officials blame him. Hillary accused him through her campaign manager Robby Mook, saying:

“What is disturbing to us is that experts (sic) are telling us that Russians broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are now releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here and that’s disturbing.”

 

The accusation is as baseless as others claiming nonexistent “Russian aggression.” Yet it’s reported repeatedly as fact.

Big Lies have a life of their own, manipulating most people to believe what’s polar opposite truth – the essence of how propaganda works.

Trump slammed the notion of Russia aiding his campaign, saying Clinton’s team “will say anything to be able to win.”

“The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which never should have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

“I mean this is time and time again, lie after lie…It’s disgusting…so phony.”

 

At the Asean summit in Vientiane, Laos, Sergey Lavrov responded to a reporter’s question on the baseless allegation, saying

“I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Democrat party bosses, including Clinton, were caught red-handed rigging the electoral process against Sanders. Finger-pointing elsewhere won’t change reality.

Wealth, power and privileged interests run America – for their own self-interest at the expense of most others.

Leaked DNC emails provide damning evidence of sham democracy – in name only like it’s always been from the republic’s inception.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

The following article from Australia is a sharp rebuke of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm B. Turnbull by an Aborigine candidate of the Australian Senate that rightly criticizes his government for doing nothing to stop the torture and widespread abuse of children and juveniles at the Don Dale Detention Centre that was exposed by investigative journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna on Australian national television on July 25, 2016. The indigenous or Aborigine Australian community repeatedly demanded that the Australian government take legal action. Reports about Aborigine or First Nation children and juveniles, which are the bulk of the detention wards in the Northern Territory, being brutalized were frequently made without meaningful consequences.

Leaks from Don Dale Detention Centre show children being forcefully stripped naked, hog tied like cattle, carried by the neck, knocked down, and thrown by facility staff. Prison guards systematically de-humanized and humiliated children and juveniles with insults, beatings, and gassing in what amounts to nothing short of unjust abuse of authority and criminal acts. Prior to the leaked footage aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program that explicitly shows children and juveniles being abused and tortured by guards, current and past Australian governments were well aware of what was happening at the youth detention centre for approximately two  to five years. These governments, however, refused to take any action. Only when the broader general public became aware of the horrific crimes at Don Dale Dentention Centre did the Australian government feign outrage and pledge to take action by saying that it would establish a royal commission of inquiry. This is utter hypocrisy and dishonesty on the part of the federal government of Australia, which has been motivated by the self-interest of saving face.

Along with the long history of the Australian state to abuse vulnerable peoples, the racist attitudes that serve to justify the marginalization of the Aborigine of Australia are deeply entrenched in Australian society and have enabled what has happened in Don Dale Detention Centre. The victims were not seen or respected as being equals. Instead the victims were viewed as lesser people by virtue of their socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Essentially they were treated as non-people that could be abused with impunity. This is why Don Dale Detention Centre should be viewed as nothing short of being Australia’s own Abu Ghraib. The Iraqis that were tortured by the US military in Abu Ghraib were also viewed as non-people by the US personnel stationed there, which for the US perpetrators excused the violation of the rights of their Iraqi victims. Moreover, the comparison between Abu Ghraib and Don Dale is especially fitting since many of the wards at Don Dale are children and juveniles from Australian indigenous communities, which are a dispossessed people that have been driven off their ancestral lands by the colonial process that established Australia.

 Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 26 July 2016.

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 Dylan Voller, a thirteen-year old boy, being strangled at  Don Dale Detention Centre.

 Dylan, age seventeen, is seen above and below being tied to a chair in adult prison.

 

Malcolm Turnbull has called for a Royal Commission after seeing on ABC’s Four Corners the brutality that has been happening under both his government and the previous Labor government.

He said this evidence had not been brought forth at previous inquiries. Not good enough Turnbull!

People have been screaming for the past five years about the Don Dale detention centre and your government and the Labor government have chosen to ignore this pure evil. You not only ignored it, you let it fester.

You either knew and thus are complicit, or you did not know and are simply not fit to govern. You cannot get out of this one with a slippery smile, Turnbull.

A Royal Commission? What a joke! You have all the evidence you need; it shocked a whole nation. Predominantly First Nations children are being brutalised by a system you let continue in your pretence of ignorance.

The evidence is there. Sack everyone in Corrective Services in the Northern Territory. Those who did not actually do anything would have known of these practices and allowed it to happen.

Sack the NT government and while you are at it, sweep the federal parliament of the rubbish currently holding seats of power who sat by and watched while our kids were being tortured.

This is an international disgrace and this country should be dragged before the United Nations and stripped of its powers. The Australian government had its racist intervention into the NT so maybe its time for an international intervention into Australia?

Put simply the Coalition and Labor have lost the ability to govern.

Ken Canning is a First Nations activist who was a Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the July 2 elections.

To read a past report about abuse at Don Dale Detention Centre please click here. 

 

A Civil War Looming in Israel?

By Adeyinka Makinde, July 26 2016

The Northern Territory has the highest rate of youth detention in the country, six times the national average. Of those detained in the juvenile justice system 97% are Aboriginal youth.

There have been a number of reports and investigations in the past two years into the treatment of Aboriginal youth in custody. They show that by deliberate design and policy Aboriginal youth are treated in a barbarous, inhumane and illegal way.

Multiple incidents have been reported of handcuffing, gassing, shackling, spit hooding and solitary confinement for 22 out of 24 hours, lasting from 7 to 17 days, and being forced to eat their meals with their hands.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s senior lawyer, Ruth Barson, said the recent case of a 17-year-old boy being hooded and strapped to a chair for close to two hours suggests there is a pattern of mistreating young people in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

“It is deeply concerning that yet another case of a child having their human rights violated has emerged,” she said. “The Northern Territory must once and for all commit to treating children in detention humanely. These types of punitive practices must end.”

In January last year a review of the Northern Territory Youth Justice system conducted by Michael Vita found there was a “lack of understanding and coordination of how risk assessment, case management, classification, pro-social modelling and the incentive scheme should work together to provide an environment that is conducive to stability, harmony, safety and security”.

He found the juvenile detention system’s management is incompetent, staff is under trained, operational practices are haphazard and overly-punitive and there have been cover-ups when things go wrong. The system is also doing nothing to rehabilitate the young people it locks up.

Another report by NT children’s Commissioner Howard Bath looked into the practices occurring at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre found evidence of inappropriate reactions from staff employed in these facilities. An example was the tear gassing of six teenagers while they were sitting in their cells playing cards. The report also made a list of recommendations including addressing the lack of accountability, training of employees and improving the facilities.

Late last year the Human Rights Law Centre sent a request to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for intervention, with a view to ensuring the NT government comply with its international human rights law obligations.

Barson said: “You have to question whether the NT government is taking its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously.

“If it’s genuinely committed to the wellbeing of vulnerable children in its care, it needs to seriously rethink the way it’s treating them. It is clear that the Northern Territory’s youth justice system needs a thorough overhaul.”

Amnesty International Julian Cleary said: “Young people are fundamentally different to adults and must be treated in a way that prioritises their best interests.

“Evidence shows that the best way to keep our community safe in the long run is to focus on the rehabilitation and education of children. The Northern Territory’s current youth justice system is failing these children and the wider community.”

In November the NT Government announced that all children detained in Alice Springs Youth Detention Centre would be transferred to Darwin. This means children as young as 10 would be taken thousands of kilometres away from their families and communities.

In 2014, all children detained in Darwin were moved from the former Don Dale Youth Detention Centre to the Berrimah adult prison, which has since been renamed Don Dale.

Barson said: “We have received reports that children are being locked down for up to 15 hours per day in prison cells that have no air conditioning, and that are reaching temperatures of 35 degrees Celcius. A decommissioned, run-down, adult prison is clearly not an appropriate facility for children.”

The unjust treatment of Aboriginal youth in custody is not accidental, but a by-product of the continued systematic racism towards Indigenous Australians. The punitive and inhumane policies against Aboriginal children is a disgrace and a blight on the entire Australian legal system. It has to end immediately.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. As a former World Bank staff member, he has thirty years of global experience in the fields environment and water resources; Koenig has earned several publications on various news websites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; he is also co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

In an exclusive interview with Khamenei.ir, Mr. Koenig enlightens us on his experience with the World Bank  and the IMF, plus his own perspective on US domination over the global economy.

The following is part one of the interview:

Based on years of working as a staff in the World Bank, does the organization help poor countries to develop?

PK: The World Bank was always dominated by the United States, but in its earlier years and up to the 1980’s – the time when neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus – started their merciless ascent, the World Bank financed and carried out some real ‘grass-roots’ projects, i.e. in rural areas, expanding drinking water and sanitation systems, bringing drinking water to the villages, thereby increasing productivity for local communities, increasing school attendance especially for girls, and reducing intestinal and diarrheal diseases, thereby reducing child mortality and morbidity. In the health sector rural health centers were built; and small-holder agriculture was promoted and funded – all for the benefit of the marginalized rural population. – Of course, the hidden agenda was that these communities would support the central government that provided them with these basic needs services.

These times of social improvement projects have long since gone. Starting in the 1980’s so-called ‘structural adjustment’ loans would gradually replace the poverty alleviation targeted projects described before. The proportions of ‘structural adjustment’ (SA) type loans – I call them ‘blank checks’ – to governments have rapidly increased throughout the nineties.

Today these ‘blank checks’ go under different euphemisms of SAs (which has become a bad term even in the mainstream media – MSM). They are called, ‘sector loans’, ‘program loans, ‘budget support’ – whatever suits the purpose – all ‘blank checks’ with the same objective: enslaving the borrowing countries with debt. And that even more so, when the country disposes of natural resources that the West covets to maintain its oligarchy’s luxury way of life – and, not to forget – to feed the armament industry.

But this World Bank and IMF ‘official’ indebting does more harm than just increasing the national debt from these Bretton Woods Institutions. These international financial institutions’ loans represent a green light for private banking to lend even more money to countries with corrupt leaders. Thus the leverage effect of WB / IMF lending is a multiple of their own lending. Here the question ought to be asked – who is worse, the corruptor or the corruptee? – In my opinion, the one who scrupulously offers money or goods to vulnerable leaders – often leaders the west has put in place as puppets – bears the bulk of the blame.

After all, that’s how the west, Europe in particular, has enslaved, plundered and raped Asia, Africa and Latin America for centuries. So, what the World Bank does today is but a modern continuation of colonialism disguised as development assistance.

Today, SA type blank checks account for nearly 90% of the World Bank’s lending portfolio. They have become hardly anything else than instruments to buy corrupt government officials with unaccounted for blank checks – loans or credits that increase national debt and increase dependence on the western predatory corporate and finance system. Its neocolonialism at its best – nothing to do with ‘development of poor countries’. To the contrary – its debt-dependence for easy exploitation.

How does the international monetary system help the United States to keep its dominance over the global economy?

PK: The current US dollar-based western fiat monetary system was specifically designed by the US to dominate the global economy. The Euro was also created by the US, modeled after the dollar, as a fiat currency (Fiat money has no backing what-so-ever; it is money with a value established by [government] decree and can be produced at will with a mouse click by private banks, as debt).

Perhaps we have to be reminded at this point, that neither the European Union (EU) or the Euro are products of Europe; they are purely constructs of the United States; ideas fostered and developed during and especially after WWII. Churchill, in his famous ‘Speech to the academic youth’ held at the University of Zurich in 1946, said: “There is a remedy which … would in a few years make all Europe … free and … happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” He was then as Cameron is today a mouthpiece for the United States, expressing Washington’s ideas as a Trojan horse in Europe.

In 1944 Washington created the so-called Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank and the IMF. The WB was to administer the Marshall Plan funds – US$ 13 billion (in today’s terms about US$ 130 billion) from the US side and for this purpose newly created Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau – German Bank for Reconstruction and Development – on the German side. The Marshall Plan funds were the first common development funds for Europe.

The IMF was to ‘regulate’ the convertible currencies of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, then tied to the US-dollar via the gold-standard established by the IMF at the order of the FED, i.e. US$ 35 per troy-ounce of gold. In fact, the IMF was to watch over adherence to the gold standard to strengthen the link or dependence of other currencies to the dollar.

When in 1971 Nixon abandoned the ‘gold standard’ – the US dollar became de facto the reference currency for the world, meaning the main reserve currency for nations around the globe. This was a smart but Machiavellian move giving the FED basically unlimited power to print dollars as they pleased. Simultaneously, Father Busch (George H. W.), a friend of the House of Saud, made sure that Saudi Arabia remained at the head of OPEC and would not allow hydrocarbons to be traded in other currencies than the US dollar. As compensation the US would militarily protect Saudi Arabia – which was followed by the implantation of several military bases.

As a result of all hydrocarbons being traded in US-dollars, the demand for US-dollars increased further, almost exponentially – leaving virtually unlimited space to produce dollars as required for US-instigated wars and conflicts, for funding lie- and slander propaganda and for financing proxy wars around the globe. That every dollar created meant new US debt was irrelevant for at least two reasons, (i) the entire world would carry the debt, as their reserve coffers were filled with dollars, and (ii) the US debt was never meant to be paid back. As Alan Greenspan, former chief of the FED once answered a journalist’s question on how the US was ever able to repay their debt – Greenspan said, ‘we never will pay our debt, since we can just print new money’. This confirms the pyramid principle of the dollar based monetary system: You create dollars as debt which bears interest which you pay by new debt.

One of the most flagrant of such cases is Greece, now strangled into misery by a fraudulent monetary system. Other fraudulent uses of the dollar denominated pyramid or ‘Ponzi’ scheme, are ‘sanctions’ dished out on countries that do not submit to the tyrannical dominance of the empire, or the confiscation of assets abroad, the blockage of foreign currency accounts abroad – and-so-on. All this is possible, because the world is based on the fraudulent dollar which dominates all international trade. With these hundreds of trillions of dollars floating the globe, it is of course possible to manipulate any currency, including gold. This is best done through the Basle-based BIS (Bank for International Settlement), which is entirely private, dominated by Rothschild and Co, as is the FED, also entirely privately owned.

The good news is that this is changing rapidly. BREXIT is hope for change, not only for the UK and Europe, but for the world at large. BREXIT is a conscious decision of a majority of UK citizens that they have enough of the corrupt monetary and economic system that reigns the world and of which the European Union is a mere puppet. According to different polls, a considerable majority of the people throughout Europe, regardless of the member countries they belong to, are fed-up with the EU, its Euro monetary policy and its impositions of laws and regulations which are gradually but surely depriving European nations of their sovereignty.

Of course Washington is surprised and don’t like this new BREXIT revelation one bit. Obama is sending Kerry to talk to Cameron on how to avoid or prevent BREXIT. Kerry has already said to the press, there are many ways of avoiding or circumventing the UK leaving the EU. An obvious one is that the referendum is not binding and has to be approved by the British Parliament – which could decide that BREXIT is not good for the UK and not good for Europe. I believe, such a decision could cause a revolt in Britain. A subtler way would be extending the ‘exit negotiations’ for the allowed 24 months (or more by mutual agreement), time enough for launching a new referendum for which according to BBC already 2.3 million signatures have been collected.

Whatever may happen – and I don’t doubt one bit in Washington’s capability to strong-arm a country or an entire people into doing what Washington wants – a signal has been set; a signal that says ‘yes we can’ to others who are weary of external domination. People are also aware of the Washington – Brussels incited 2007 / 2008 – and counting – crisis in Europe, to safe the dollar from declining against the Euro and being gradually replaced by the Euro as world reserve currency. Suffocating Greece, the denominated culprit for its ‘high’ debt of at that time about 109% of GDP, was a mere farce, an outrageous manipulation of the truth. Greece, a strategically located Mediterranean European NATO country, with barely 2% of the Eurozone’s GDP, had a debt ratio totally manageable without outside interference. Accusing it for the EU crisis was and still is an outright lie. The EU has demonstrated that it has no sense of solidarity towards fellow member countries, and therefore is not really a ‘union’, but rather a predatory association of a bunch of corporate-finance dominated nations. Such a ‘union’ is by definition not sustainable – and less so its common currency the euro. Through the infamous troika (ECB, EC and IMF), the finance and corporate elite can do whatever they want with Europe. Especially targeted are the strategic southern countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. – But BREXIT was a wakeup call. Awareness is growing. A momentum, I trust, that cannot be stopped.

And there is more good news. Dollar-denominated reserves around the world, close to 90% about 20 years ago, have dropped to below 60% today, fluctuating, of course, depending on the manipulated value of the dollar. When it drops to below 50%, a more rapid shift by reserves into other currencies, including the Chinese Yuan, may take place. The Yuan is now formally admitted as one of the five IMF reserve currencies making up the basket of currencies determining the value of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

In addition, a couple of years ago China and Russia have abandoned the western banking ‘order’ of trading hydrocarbons in US dollars, using their own currencies. Other SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) countries have joined this trend. Russia and China have also largely detached themselves from the US-dollar monetary and international transfer system, SWIFT, using their own, the China International Payment System – CIPS .

When the world demand for dollars falls below a critical point around the globe, a trend that has started, then the US-dollar system and by extension the US economy is truly on the ropes.

Part 2 of the Interview

http://english.khamenei.ir/news/4024/Economy-of-Resistance-liberates-Iran-from-sanctions-former Jul 19, 2016

The ‘Economy of Resistance’, an economy mainly based on self-reliance is an excellent idea. Not only does it help liberate Iran from the foreign imposed sanctions, but it also helps propel own domestic capacities, create labor, added value in the country and ultimately Iran may develop exports far above what they would be in a globalized western and WTO (World Trade Organization) controlled world trade.

Whistle-blowers reporting the corruption inside the World Bank have been under pressure for their efforts. How can we believe the Panama Papers “leaks”?

PK: In short, the Panama Papers are a farce, if there ever was one. They are blown out of proportion by western media to point accusing fingers on politicians who are disliked by Washington, to slander them – this is precisely what these ‘leaked’ papers were supposed to do. They were largely successful in meeting their objective.

The Papers were released by the International Coalition of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an organization in the hands of western secret services. This is revealed by looking at the parent organization of ICIJ, the Center for Public Integrity (CFPI) which is funded by such eminent establishment figures like the Rockefellers, Carnegie Foundations, the George Soros Foundation, as well as Paul Volker, former chairman of the FED and many other prominent figures from the world of corporate finance with links to the CIA, NSA, Mossad and others. Many of the sponsors are members of such semi-secret organizations as the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberger Society and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The Law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which apparently released the so-called Panama Papers to the ICIJ, containing information of off-shore holdings by prominent political figures, may or may not be part of the deal. They claim the information was stolen. In any case, from first sight it is obvious that the powerful western elite who concocted this ‘leak’ had a very specific purpose, namely to mud-racking and slandering politicians disliked by Washington with lie-propaganda.

Prominently appears of course Mr. Putin, even though he is not mentioned personally, he is immediately linked to others who are on the Panama Papers list – thus by implication putting guilt on him. Any clear thinking person would, of course know, that Mr. Putin or his associates – even if they had money to hide for which there has never been proof – they would most certainly not use Panama as an off-shore place for hiding. Panama is Washington’s most watched spot in the US ‘backyard’, as Obama likes to call Latin America, where you can’t even flush a toilette without the White House knowing it.

Besides, none of the figures accused of hiding money is a prominent American. How come? – It is widely known that more US corporate and individual money – amounts can be estimated in trillions – is hidden in the Caribbean than in the rest of the world combined, including Switzerland. – No matter how wrong or distorted, once the information is out on the mainstream propaganda trail – CNN, BBC, CNBC et al – there is no truth that can stop it. This is modern propaganda technique taught at most Ivy League Universities. Once people are impregnated by a lie, it is virtually impossible to replace it by the truth.

What are the counter measures independent countries can adopt to neutralize US dominance over global markets?

PK: As explained in the question above, why does the US dominate the international monetary system? – this trend is gradually reversing. Countries which do not want to bend to US-imposed rules, like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and many others, are at best systematically financially and economically ‘sanctioned’. If that doesn’t do the trick, then ‘regime change’ is of the order – which has many models – direct assassination (the internet is full with leaders that were killed by the CIA and other secret service forces) by Obama’s personally approved drone program which are extra-judiciary killings (of which – hilariously! – Obama just accused North Korea to justify further sanctions), military invasions, bombings, by US and NATO (Europe) forces, or by proxies, like funding and arming Saudi Arabia to wipe out Yemen, killing tens of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children, just to take control of one of the most strategically located Persian Gulf country.

There is no limit of Washington’s imagination to subdue nations and entire populations around the world, always with the ultimate objective of full spectrum dominance. It is estimated that between 10 and 15 million people were killed around the world since 9/11 through US / NATO direct invasions, wars and conflicts carried out by proxy (mercenary) forces and US / Brussels instigated civil wars. No wonder people and sovereign nations want to get out from under this oppressive western bulldozer that not only aims at controlling the world militarily, but also by its US-dollar based western fiat pyramid or Ponzi-style monetary system – to which the euro also belongs, as it was modeled according to the dollar. A pyramid scheme is the creation of money through interest-bearing debt by private banks, with debt repayment through new loans and so on until the system collapses in itself.

Russia and China have already developed their own internal monetary and transfer system, the China International Payment System – CIPS, gradually being extended to the members of the SCO, BRICS (unfortunately for now without the ‘B’) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Together they are accounting for about half of the world population and one third of the world GDP. If I am not wrong, Iran is currently in the process of being integrated in the SCO. This would certainly be one way out of the US dominated monetary system. As Mr. Putin recently declared, the ‘sanctions’ were one of the best things that happened to Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It allowed a massive development of Russia’s own agriculture and industry, i.e. loosening Russia from western dependence. Russia is rapidly achieving food self-sufficiency.

In addition, China is promoting the new Silk Road, all the way from Shanghai through Eastern China, Russia, Central Asia, Eastern and Central Europe – and President Xi Jinping offered Madame Merkel in March 2014 to become the western most link of the Silk Road. She had not reacted at that time. But the writing is on the wall, loud and clearly- the economic future for Europe is with the East, Russia, Central and Eastern Asia and China. The potential for joint development investments, trading and research is enormous, by far outweighing the treacherous and deceptive machinations with the west.

Iran’s leader has introduced “Economy of Resistance” as the breakthrough to counter US economic aggression. The “Economy of Resistance” doctrine is intended to make the Iranian economy resistant to all external economic shocks in the long term, including Western sanctions and global financial crises by utilizing the domestic capabilities. What’s your take in this regard?

PK: The ‘Economy of Resistance’, an economy mainly based on self-reliance is an excellent idea. Not only does it help liberate Iran from the foreign imposed sanctions, but it also helps propel own domestic capacities, create labor, added value in the country and ultimately Iran may develop exports far above what they would be in a globalized western and WTO (World Trade Organization) controlled world trade. A resistance economy is what Mr. Putin applies, as I explained before, by intensifying development of local agriculture and industries, depending less on imports and, of course, shedding Russia from the impact of totally illegal sanctions.

Resistance Economy is to a large extent synonymous with a concept called ‘import substitution’, promoting and developing local capacities over imports. Once goods and services formerly imported are available locally, they offer great advantages to national economies, in this case the Iranian economy. For example, instead of exporting crude hydrocarbons, building up a petro-chemical industry, creating jobs, technologies and added value in the country – and perhaps most important, Resistance Economy, substituting imports by local production, is a blow to the nefarious US-corporate driven globalization.

The neoliberal argument that Iran’s economy should be restructured to focus on ‘comparative advantages’ of Iran with imports for everything else, can easily be nullified. This is clearly a neocon argument favoring globalization and making a country vulnerable to economic ‘sanctions’ of all kinds. ‘Comparative advantages’ is hardly anything inherently available in a country, but can be planned and built, especially in times of crisis – as is the case for countries being punished with illegal ‘sanctions’ due to a monetary system totally dominated by the West. This has been proven time and again.

One of the first cases was China; she kept her borders closed until she could declare food, medical and education self-sufficiency – which was the case in the 1980s, when China opened her borders and started exporting food grains. One of the most recent cases, as mentioned before, is Russia, producing for local markets and for export to likeminded countries with whom they are associated, mainly China, the SCO and the BRICS. At the same time de-dollarizing their monetary and international transfer system frees them from illegal and wanton punishments form the west. Iran becoming a member of the SCO is on the right track.

As Ayatollah Khamenei said, “The Resistance Economy is an inspiring pattern of the Islamic economic system and a good chance to make an economic epic.”

 

Over the last decade the city of Detroit has been negatively impacted by the role of the financial institutions which engineered the theft of tens of thousands of homes, jobs and small businesses straight across the largest per capita African American populated major municipality in the United States. Once a working class city with neighborhoods filled with single-family, two-family and multiple-residents housing, Detroit stood out among most other large metropolitan areas in the country.

The housing crisis in Detroit is inextricably linked to the restructuring of the industrial and commercial base of the U.S. Beginning in the mid-1950s, and extending through the first decade of the 21^st century, the theft of millions of jobs around the U.S. particularly had a devastating impact on Detroit. With a declining population and tax base, the city was subjected to even more predatory activity by some of the largest financial institutions internationally.

Nonetheless, people have fought back against these atrocities by the ruling capitalist class and its agents within the state. The Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI), founded in September 2002 amid the Pentagon build-up in the Persian Gulf region in preparation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, had expanded its focus over the years to examine how the defense budget destroys the capacity of urban areas to provide housing, education, utility services and environmental quality.

By the spring of 2008, a coalition of forces came together with MECAWI to form the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs. The impetus for the formation of this alliance was the willingness of former Democratic State Senator Hansen Clarke of Detroit to submit a bill within the state legislature which would have mandated a two-year moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.

This bill met with immediate opposition from varied elements among both the Republican and Democratic Parties failing to even get out of the finance committee. The-then Governor Jenifer Granholm (Democrat) rejected the idea saying that it was not necessary or that the banks would not like it. She expressed fear that they would be in court the following day even though Granholm was the former Attorney General of Michigan. Granholm in 2009 imposed emergency management over the Detroit Public Schools resulting in the closing of over 100 buildings and the decimation of the district, the largest in Michigan.

Earlier Granholm had appointed an emergency manager over the predominantly African American city of Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan. The city had been subjected to racist disinvestment leaving thousands unemployed and impoverished. Granholm, after the Benton Harbor rebellion of June 2003, rather than provide real assistance to Benton Harbor to create jobs, housing and economic opportunities, instead endorsed the privatization of Lake Michigan’s Jean Klock Park, a public entity, leading to the Harbor Shores Development scheme which ended up gentrifying the waterfront area and constructing a golf course for the rich and powerful.

Class Action Lawsuit Filed in Detroit Demanding Moratorium

The latest phase of the housing struggle in Detroit opened up in mid-July when the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) along with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Covington & Burling LLP, a private law firm, filed a class-action lawsuit to impose a moratorium on property tax foreclosures within Wayne County. The suit contends that the majority African American city of Detroit has been disproportionately affected due to overinflated tax rates stemming from the failure of the municipal government to conduct proper assessments of the values of properties and to grant poverty exemptions from property taxes for those who qualify.

Statistics cited in the Michigan ACLU complaint indicates that “owner-occupied homes in 100 percent African American Census blocks are more than 13 times more likely to be at risk of a tax foreclosure sale than 100 percent non-African American Census blocks.” Such stark disparities are clearly racist in their nature and character.

In addition, the Michigan ACLU also says, “Wayne County is foreclosing on and selling homes based on property taxes that the homeowners should never have had to pay. Michigan property owners are required to pay taxes on the market value of their property, and these taxes were based on values that were much higher than the homes were actually worth. Furthermore, many impoverished Detroit homeowners should have been exempt from paying property taxes under the poverty exemption that the city is required to provide under state law.”

Concentrations of Poverty and Its Racial Implications

Detroit has the highest concentration of poverty among any other major city in the U.S. as spelled out in a recent study by the Brookings Institution. Even without access to this data compiled and analyzed by this research center and think tank, all one needs to do is drive around the city to see the devastation brought about by corporate policies led by the banks through predatory lending and racially-oriented red lining.

In an article published by the Non-profit Quarterly in April based upon a review written by the Detroit Free Press, “According to the Brookings Institution’s analysis of the 2010-2014 census data, Detroit has the highest concentration of poverty among the nation’s top 25 metro areas and all U.S. cities with more than 300,000 residents. In Detroit’s six-county region, ‘32 percent of the poor live in census tracts where at least 40 percent of the population is below the poverty line,’ up from nine percent in 2000. Despite a local billionaire buying up much of downtown and the rise of worker-owned cooperatives, despair stubbornly stands shoulder to shoulder with aspiration in Detroit. Decades of bitterness remain palpable. The drawbridges are standing up for those who want to leave this castle of poverty but are too poor to do so.”

No one really knows what is meant by “worker-owned cooperatives” mentioned in the report with the city having one of the highest jobless rates in the country. Nevertheless, the role of misguided and deceptive so-called “development policies” are doing nothing for the majority African American population accept driving them further into poverty and destitution.

This same above-mentioned article goes on to note that “The quality of poverty in Detroit is life-threatening. Detroit’s infant mortality rate is higher than any other city. The chances of surviving to age 1 are better in Mexico than in Detroit.  After Camden, New Jersey, and East St. Louis, Illinois, Detroit ranks 3rd among the nation’s most dangerous cities.  Another recent report cited by Warikoo (Detroit Free Press writer) ‘shows that the poorest residents in southeast Michigan have a life expectancy rate significantly lower than the poor of comparable incomes in other major metro areas.’”

During the period between 1957 and 1968, four significant Civil Rights bills were passed by the U.S. Congress: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 on voting; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ostensibly guaranteeing universal suffrage; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Since this time period the overall status of the Civil Rights of African Americans have been in precipitous decline with rising poverty, mass unemployment and poverty along with attacks on the right to vote through the gutting of the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act and the failure to enforce the Fair Housing Act where the government allowed African Americans to be systematically expropriated of their only real wealth embodied in homeownership.

The Michigan ACLU stressed in their press release coinciding with the filing of the class-action lawsuit, “The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing-related practices that have a discriminatory effect on racial minorities without a substantial legitimate justification, even if the discriminatory effect happens to be unintentional. Because Wayne County cannot provide a substantial legitimate justification for foreclosing on homes on the basis of illegal tax debts, the tax foreclosures constitute an arbitrary barrier to homeownership for African Americans.”

This class-action lawsuit provides further material evidence of the collusion of the banks and their political collaborators in undermining the right to housing and a decent quality of life for African Americans. The mass struggle which fought for people’s homes and their right to remain within the city and Wayne County must continue because it is the pressure from the bottom up that will transform the U.S. from a country dominated by a small section of the ruling class to one controlled by the masses of working families and the nationally oppressed.

61 years ago  (August 28, 1955), an innocent 14 year old black youth, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Money, Mississippi.

96 years ago last month (June 15, 1920), three innocent black men were tortured and murdered by an angry vigilante mob of white racists in Duluth, Minnesota.

A couple of days ago ex-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and Louisiana Republican Party member David Duke, announced his candidacy for the US Senate, crediting the political statements and announced agenda of Donald Trump and, presumably, the platform of the Republican Party. Months earlier, after Duke publicly endorsed Trump for President, Trump unconvincingly claimed that he didn’t know anything about Duke.

Because a multitude of unbiased observers have documented what is obvious to many others (that white racism is alive and well in America), I submit selected  excerpts of articles that will give readers a good historical update of what really happened in our not-too-distant racist past. 

They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row

– Bob Dylan, from “Desolation Row”

 

The Death Of Emmett Till

by Bob Dylan

’Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door
This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up
They said they had a reason, but I can’t remember what
They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat
There were screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds
out on the street

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain
The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie
Was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this
awful crime
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free
While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood
it must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live

*     *     *

“Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates may have given the order to torture detainees, but it was the apathy, fear, and ignorance of millions of Americans that laid the groundwork for these abuses to take place”…“Today, as we consider the decision of ( President Obama) to block the release of hundreds of photographs showing the torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, I hope that those of us who are defending his decision will consider the example of Emmett Till, and of how seeing with open eyes the horrors that he endured …”  – “Big Tex” (pseudonymous author of below 2009 article from Daily Kos) scroll down for full article

A Mob Lynches Three Black Men by Chris Julin and Stephanis Hemphill – June 2001

Posted at: http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2001/06/lynching/page1.shtml

On a June night in 1920, hundreds of angry men and thousands of curious onlookers surrounded the downtown headquarters of the Duluth police department. The crowd might have reached 10,000. They wanted the handful of police officers inside to turn over their prisoners – a group of young, black circus workers. The police had arrested the men earlier that day. They accused some of the out-of-towners of raping a young, white woman at the circus grounds. Later investigations cast serious doubt on the rape charges, but the howling mob outside the police station had no doubts.

“This is where the mob broke in,” says Michael Fedo, who wrote a book about the 1920 lynchings. “I think this was a Sears store or a hardware store. The mob came into this store – which is now the casino – and the proprietor gave them rope for the hangings and said it was on the house.”

Standing in the heart of downtown Duluth, Fedo points across Superior St. to a handsome, three-story brownstone building full of offices. The word “POLICE” is still carved in the stone over the door.

Fedo says when the mob closed in on the police station, the city’s public safety commissioner ordered the 12 officers inside to holster their guns. He didn’t want anyone in the crowd to get hurt. A few officers came out onto the street, and tried to fight the mob back with their bare hands and a fire hose. But the crowd surged past them into the jail, with a roar that could be heard a mile away.

 

Post card photo of the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie – Duluth, MN 6-15-20

 

 

While members of the mob sawed and smashed on the bars, some of the men inside the cells pleaded their innocence. Others prayed.

“The people in the mob believed that six had attacked the girl, so they tried to get six – they only managed to get into three of the cells. There were several people in the cells with the prisoners, asking questions, trying to find out in their minds who the six were among the more than a dozen who were in the cells,” says Fedo.

“The people who were outside were saying, ‘Just give us somebody,’ and that first somebody was a young man named Isaac McGhie, who was just thrown from the cell to the hands of the mob who took him out front, brought him up the hill here one block, where he was the first one hanged,” Fedo recalls.

Isaac McGhie was beaten and bloody when he got to this corner, right next to the Duluth Shrine Temple, which is still here.

“This is where they were brought to be hanged. I don’t know why they would have been brought up the hill instead of down the hill. But it may have been because there was a young man perched on top of this pole, and they just assumed, ‘He’s already there, we’ll take them up there, we’ll have this kid tie a knot on the lamppost above the street, and take care of business that way,'” says Fedo.

A priest named William Powers pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and climbed part way up the lamppost. The priest managed to quiet the crowd for a few moments. He begged them to stop. But members of the mob pulled Rev. Powers down, and hoisted Isaac McGhie up.

Then the mob dragged Elmer Jackson and Elias Clayton out of the jail, and up the hill to the street light. When all three men were hanging, battered and dead, the crowd parted so a photographer could capture the scene.

“This was a significantly posed photo,” says Fedo. “It took a couple of automobiles with lights to illuminate the scene so the photographer could get his picture taken.”

In the center of the crisp, black and white photo, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie hang from the street light, stripped to the waist, their necks impossibly stretched and twisted. Elias Clayton lies beneath their feet, tossed onto the sidewalk, to make it easier to frame the picture. Dozens of men lean into the picture facing the camera.

“What this looks like is the kind of photo you would see at a hunting lodge, where the guys had been out shooting bear, and they came back and they said, ‘We got three.’ You can see people on tip-toe. They’ve crowded into this shot. These are not people who are ashamed to be seen here. This is, ‘I want to be in this picture.'”

“The one that quite stood out is the fellow who’s to the left of the bodies who is beaming. He looks like he’s very proud of what has transpired, and that is the face that really stands out to me,” says Fedo.

Someone made postcards out of the photo, and sold them as souvenirs. Postcards of lynchings were fairly common. A recent book, Without Sanctuary, is a collection of photos and postcards from nearly 100 lynchings. It includes the picture from Duluth.

A lynching in northern Minnesota was big news. It made headlines across the country. It stayed in the local news for months during the criminal trials that followed. Juries in Duluth convicted three men of rioting. The longest sentence served was two years. No one was convicted of murder. But one of the black men who survived the attack on the jail was convicted of rape, in spite of compelling evidence he was innocent. He served four years in prison.

And then, the story of the lynching disappeared from the news.

The Face of Emmett Till (UPDATED) by “Big Tex”

 – May 14, 2009

“Two months ago, I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.” — Mamie Till Bradley (mother of Emmett Till)

On September 6, 1955, a little over a week after he was kidnapped, beaten, and murdered (August 28, 1955) for whistling at a white woman, Emmett Till was laid to rest at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. By the time his journey to the grave had ended, Till’s body had been seen by as many as 50,000 people who personally came to view his body at a Chicago funeral home. But before long, it would be seen by millions more, as photographs of his badly disfigured corpse circulated around the country, ultimately appearing on the cover of Jet magazine. The image of a 14-year-old boy with his eye gouged out and his head caved in was a shock to the senses of all who saw it; but it was also a rallying point for a generation of young African-Americans, and many whites as well, who saw in his mutilated face the suffering of a people, and who were inspired to end that suffering by organizing, by marching, and by voting.

A Mob Lynches Three Black Men

The face of Emmett Till might not have inspired so many if it were not for the grim determination of his mother, Mamie Till Bradley. The funeral home where Till’s body was displayed resisted allowing the casket to be opened, but Mrs. Bradley insisted, threatening to open the casket herself if need be. She wanted to see her son one last time before he left this world, but she wanted others to see him too. And so, because of her perseverance, the casket of Emmett Till was opened, his body was photographed for posterity, and the world saw what they did to Mrs. Bradley’s baby.

 

Funeral photo of Emmett Till

For African-Americans in the South, the horrors reflected in the face of Emmett Till were a daily fact of life. But for African-Americans who had moved away from the South and its Jim Crow laws to places like Chicago, the face of Emmett Till was a reminder that the brutality of racism could not be left behind so easily.

As for white Americans, they were forced to take a serious look at the human toll of the injustice that they had participated in, or tolerated, or tried to ignore. Though many whites, particularly in the South, were unmoved by what they saw (or at least pretended to be), many more were deeply affected by it.

Despite the publicity and anger generated by the photographs of Emmett Till, the people who murdered him were never brought to justice. A little over two weeks after Till was laid to rest, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted the only two men ever formally charged with his murder: Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman who Till whistled at, and Bryant’s half-brother, J.W. Milam. Both men would later admit to murdering Till, safe from prosecution due to double jeopardy protection. They’re dead now, and while as many as 12 other people may have participated in the crime, no one else has been charged in connection with Till’s murder.

But though Emmett Till and his family never received justice from the state of Mississippi, the wave of activism spawned by those who were inspired by the sight of his mutilated body brought justice of a different sort. The face of Emmett Till would inspire Rosa Parks not to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama later that year. It would inspire nine African-American schoolchildren to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. It would inspire sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960, and Freedom Riders in 1961. It would inspire voter registration drives, and a letter from a Birmingham jail cell. It would inspire over 300,000 people to march on Washington, and millions to dream of a day when people would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It would inspire the Freedom Summer of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

And more than 50 years after the death of Emmett Till, in a country where racism still endures but without the power that it once had, it would inspire millions of voters, black and white, to reject the prejudices and fears of the past, and elect the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya to be the 44th President of the United States.

Today, as we consider the decision of that same President to block the release of hundreds of photographs showing the torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, I hope that those of us who are defending his decision will consider the example of Emmett Till, and of how seeing with open eyes the horrors that he endured brought about change in the hearts and minds of so many.

Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates may have given the order to torture detainees, but it was the apathy, fear, and ignorance of millions of Americans that laid the groundwork for these abuses to take place. We as a nation need to be confronted with our failures and to take ownership of them, so we can set a positive example for young Americans to prevent such abuses from happening in the future. And we need to show those outside America that we can and will live up to our democratic values, so that we’ll be taken seriously when we attempt to share those values with the rest of the world. This isn’t about the next election–it’s about the next generation, and about what kind of America they will build on the ashes of what we allowed to be ruined.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten the environment or America’s health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at

http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn,

 

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

or at

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

Michael Roddan gives a chilling depiction of economic manoeuvres, both past and present, undertaken by the Indonesian government in a bid to marginalise the indigenous Papuans. From the transmigration program, to the rural-urban divide and the permitted acts of multinational corporations in the region, Australia’s passive stance in the face of multiple human rights violations is questioned.

Just some 300km north of our borders human rights violations are being committed on a vast scale  [APR editor’s note: Roddan, the author, means north of Australia, MDN]. Torture, rape, extrajudicial killings, false imprisonment, and violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations are happening en masse, and it’s all being carried out in West Papua – one of Australia’s closest neighbours.

There has been a movement for West Papuan independence from Indonesia for half a century and this article, amongst other things, will hopefully show how economics is exacerbating the problem faced by the West Papuan people.

A Dutch colony until 1962, Indonesia garnered the right to act as the temporary authority over the western half of the island of New Guinea until the time came when the Papuan people decided to vote for independence or Indonesian annexation.

The ‘Act of Free Choice’ was held in 1969. Just over a thousand village elders were handpicked to represent over a million Papuans and were instructed to vote at gunpoint for annexation under threat of death for them and their families. The result was unsurprisingly unanimous and West Papua would remain in the hands of the Indonesians. Locals know the referendum as the ‘Act of No Choice’.

So how valuable is this land? Yale and Sydney University reports suggest that it is valuable enough to warrant the deaths of 500,000 Papuans. Taking place over the last 50 years, it’s known as ‘slow-motion genocide’ .

Two years before the 1969 referendum, dictator President Suharto signed a contract with Freeport, a US mining company, giving them full rights to the Ertsberg mine in West Papua. When the Freeport-Indonesia company (of which 9.36% is owned by the State) exhausted all of the material from the Ertsberg mountain in the 1980s, they set up a new mine a few miles away at Grasberg mountain.

Grasberg mine is now the largest gold mine in the world and the third largest copper mine in the world. It is also Indonesia’s sole biggest taxpayer. Pretty valuable and understandable that the government would want to hold onto it, even though the actual business deal struck under Suharto was illegal, being a 30 year lease on land that the government didn’t actually own at the time.

After the fall of Suharto, many (notably Desmond Tutu) have called for a subsequent and proper referendum on West Papuan Independence. However, as it stands, Indonesia has suppressed the Papuans to the extent where this may not be feasible.

In 1961, people of Papuan ethnicity made up 96% of the population of West Papua. Indonesians are largely Javanese Muslims, as opposed to the predominately Protestant Melanesian Papuans, and thus, the division of New Guinea is one of the more perplexing colonial administrative errors.

Economically, Jakarta has sought to socially engineer this problem away and quell any chance of successful referendum, should it ever take place. Economic incentives guide Indonesia’s transmigration program that seeks to entice Javanese to the archipelago’s fringe islands. The urban poor are given assisted passage (read: free passage) and tax incentives to relocate to West Papua, once there they are given capital to start new businesses.

The transmigration program has meant that the demographics have swung wildly since 1961. A Sydney University estimate by Jim Elmslie using the last comprehensive data from 2000 gives us a non-Papuan majority in West Papua. Of a population of 3,612,854 in 2010, only 49.55% of people on the island were indigenous Papuans. By 2030, indigenous peoples will make but 15% of the population.

Economic marginalisation of the Papuans continues unabated, too. Grasberg mine benefits the state enormously and is impossibly profitable ($4.1 billion in operating profit on revenue of $6.4 billion in 2010). But the mine pays its workers, who are overwhelmingly Papuan, just $1.50 an hour. Although it houses Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer, West Papua is the nation’s poorest province – profits are simply not going to the Papuans.

There is a huge divide between the rural and the urban in West Papua. Javanese constitute around 70% of the population in sizeable towns and urban areas of the province. Yet in regional and remote areas where the indigenous Papuans are still the overwhelming majority, the indigenous are largely excluded from the mainstream economy, let alone basic services such as education and healthcare.

Currently, Chevron and BP are carving up West Papua for oil and gas exploitation while deforestation and logging are executed at a terrifying pace. The economic exploitation of the land will spell disaster for Papuans, only deepening their poverty trap. The Grasberg mine discharges so much tailing into nearby waterways, around 230,000 tons daily, which arguably puts it in breach of national law. The World Bank no longer funds any such operations, and no developed country on earth disposes of their mining waste such a manner.

The Australian Rio Tinto has a joint venture agreement with Freeport, the owners of Grasberg mine, which allows a large share of resource production. Most Australian financial institutions invest in Rio Tinto, which means that we too are implicated. To top it off, Australia equips, funds and trains an Indonesian counter terrorism squad called Detachment 88 that regularly kills and tortures peaceful West Papuan Independence activists.

Bob Carr, most glorious Foreign Minister, said on the 20th March “It would be a reckless Australian indeed who wanted to associate himself with a small separatist group which threatens the territorial integrity of Indonesia and that would produce a reaction among Indonesians towards this country.”

While the issue of whether an independent West Papua would be a viable state is another issue entirely, can Australians really argue that territorial integrity is more meritorious than the avoidance and eradication of genocide?

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki urged the Arab League to help the Palestinian Authority to sue the United Kingdom over the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on Monday.

Speaking on behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, al-Maliki delivered a speech Thursday at the Arab League’s annual summit, which is being held this year in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.

Al-Maliki apologized on behalf of Abbas, who couldn’t attend the summit due to his brother’s recent death, before urging Arab countries to “help us bring a suit against the British government over the ominous Balfour Declaration which resulted in the Nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinian people.”

Nearly a century ago, a letter sent from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a British Jewish leader, declared British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Palestinians have since viewed the declaration as paving the way for the creation of the State of Israel at the expense of the land’s original inhabitants.

The declaration was made before the British had wrested control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, and was not made public until several years after the World War I, in 1920.

By that time, Britain had been formally granted a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, and was struggling with its contradictory obligations of “rewarding” Arabs for their support during the war, while also fulfilling their pledge to create a Jewish state.

After World War II, British forces withdrew from Palestine, leaving it in the hands of the newly created United Nations, which favored partition, particularly as evidence slowly emerged of the vast scale of the Holocaust in Europe.

The decision led to the 1948 war between Arab nations, including Palestinians, and Jewish immigrants, ultimately resulting in the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes inside its borders, an event known as the Nakba among Palestinians.

In February, the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a statement that Great Britain bore “the primary responsibility” for “historical injustice in Palestine.”

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein made a direct appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters – and the Vermont Senator himself – during a Monday rally near the Democratic National Convention (DNC).

“Forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good,” Stein said, referring to her Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton while the crowd chanted “Jill, not Hill!” 

“We are the revolution,” she added.

In response to the DNC’s apology to Bernie Sanders for the emails that caused chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down this week, Stein said: “They did much more than say bad things. They sabotaged a revolutionary campaign.”

She later told RT in an interview that her campaign’s fundraising efforts have skyrocketed since Sanders endorsed Clinton ahead of the DNC.

The medical doctor also said she would step down as the Green Party’s candidate if Sanders wanted to run on that ticket.

However, Dr Cornel West – a Bernie backer and former member of the DNC’s platform committee who went on to endorse Stein over Clinton after he was disillusioned by the process – told RT that he was disappointed by Sanders’ decision to endorse the former secretary of state.

The Jill Stein rally of hundreds of people spilled out of a large tent set up in the so-called “Free Speech Zone” in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, located next to the convention venue. A ferocious thunderstorm forced Stein and several supporters to a safety area under a freeway overpass.

Stein used the opportunity to make a second speech, this time with a bullhorn, for those waiting out the storm.

A recent poll taken after last week’s Republican Convention shows Stein in fourth place behind Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson with three percent of the vote, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregator.

She requires 15 percent to be included in the upcoming debates. Stein and her 2012 running mate Cheri Honkala were detained when trying to debate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012.

“I think our arrest and holding in a blacksite was just one piece of evidence of the many ways we are not a democracy,” Stein told RT. “We basically silence political opposition and we keep people off the ballot, out of the debates, and out of the media. The kind of collusion that you saw revealed in the emails that were released reveal what’s going on here with the corporate press, the Hillary campaign, and the DNC. So if that was going on with Bernie Sanders, might there also be something going on [with] other political opponents? We are a very inconvenient truth, as another woman who is actually a progressive candidate.”

The Greens will hold their convention in Houston, Texas next weekend, where Stein is expected to officially receive the nomination. Although she has yet to pick a running mate, West said he would not accept an offer if extended by Stein, since that’s “not his calling.”

Speaking during a live Periscope after Bernie Sanders’ speech, one of his delegates from New Mexico said she is now backing Stein over Sanders, while another is still undecided and will consider backing the Green Party. Neither of them said they would back Trump.

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A major confrontation is in the making at Canada Post. On the one hand, post office management is seeking to extract a series of far ranging concessions from its workers. On the other, those workers and their union, Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), are not simply prepared to resist these demands, but are determined to use the opportunity to negotiate a new collective agreement to pursue an agenda that advances equality within the workplace and the expansion and renewal of vital public services. The importance of this struggle lies in the fact that its outcome will be of enormous significance not only to the lives of postal workers, but to all public sector workers and indeed to future workers as well.

Canada Post has once again taken an aggressive approach to the current negotiations, tabling a long list of demands for significant concessions in work rules and benefits that would roll back many of the advances made by postal workers over the past two decades. Indeed, they applied for conciliation, the first step toward putting themselves in position to lockout CUPW before all these demands were even tabled.

The Issues

The most striking concession demanded was to call for a two-tier pension system where current workers would continue to have a defined benefit plan, but new hires would merely have a defined contribution plan [really just a glorified RRSP], effectively dividing postal workers along generational lines. While the shift to defined contribution plans – in whole or just for new workers – has become fairly common in the corporate sector, they are rare in the public sector and then have only involved small groups of workers. Canada Post’s rationale is that meeting the new legal requirement that all pension plans within federal jurisdiction be ‘fully funded’ [i.e. have enough funds to cover all liabilities in the event they totally ceased operations entirely] would be unaffordable. However, the requirement itself is unrealistic as the post office, like other public organizations is not about to disappear and the post office should join CUPW in opposing it. This demand, together with demands for changes in the collective agreement to allow for the greater use of part-time and casual labour reflects the permanent austerity imposed on the public sector and is intended to ensure the public sector labour market tracks the spread of precarious work in the private sector.

Canada Post’s demands for concessions aren’t the only issues involved in the dispute. The back-to-work legislation in 2011 that brought an end to the previous round of negotiations saddled CUPW members with an iniquitous contract and postal workers have some demands of their own. Understandably, they are looking for a reasonable pay increase, but they are also demanding pay equity for CUPW’s rural mail carriers, mostly women, who earn almost 30 per cent less than urban mail carriers. Canada Post had long insisted that rural mail carriers were independent contractors who had no right to unionize. In 2003 CUPW managed to get Canada Post to agree to recognize the rural mail carriers’ right to unionize but had to acquiesce to their existing lower pay rate. Since then, they have struggled to eliminate it. It was a major issue in the last round of negotiations but progress was derailed by the Tories’ 2011 back-to-work legislation which referred the dispute to binding arbitration under terms that were extremely unfavourable to postal workers.

Underlying these issues is a deep disagreement over the future direction of the post office. Due to technological changes associated with the internet, letter mail volumes have been falling, although parcel volume has grown. While the post office has earned a ‘profit’ virtually every one of the last 15 years, revenue growth has been quite modest, threatening its ability to meet the requirement to be self-sustaining. But whereas Canada Post’s strategy for dealing with this is to place the burden of adjusting to change on the backs of postal workers, and the citizenry by searching for ways to reduce labour costs and services [i.e. replacing door-to-door mail delivery with Community Mail Boxes], possibly in a lead up to privatizing mail delivery, CUPW is urging the post office to expand services.

Initially, this centred on calling for the creation of a postal bank using the post offices throughout the country as local branches as is common in many countries in the world from England to Japan. They argued that a postal bank would be a new source of revenue for the post office as well as providing desperately needed banking services in the many towns, reserves and poorer areas of cities that commercial banks have abandoned. Even where banks remain physically present, exorbitant fees and other requirements make them inaccessible to many poor people.

Recently, this vision has been substantially expanded. Working with ACORN, the authors of the LEAP Manifesto, the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association and Friends of Public Services among others, they have developed a view of the post office as playing a central role in building a more ecologically sustainable and more equal society. Titled Delivering Community Power, it envisions transitioning the post office to a green public institution that employs a fleet of renewably powered vehicles, provides charging stations for electric vehicles, serves as an innovation hub, and provides expanded services to the ill and elderly, with much of the financing coming from the revenues generated by a postal bank. This is probably the most imaginative proposal to come out of the labour movement in the west since the 1976 plan developed by Lucas Aerospace workers in England to counter the threat of layoffs due to technological change and spending cuts by converting the arms manufacturer to peaceful production. DevelopingCommunity Power is still a ‘work in progress’ that holds out the prospect of becoming a larger conversation about the future of Canada Post and other public services, as well as union bargaining strategies.

State of Negotiations

On July 5th, the 21 day ‘cooling off’ period that is part of the conciliation process under the Canada Labour Code ended, and the post office promptly gave the requisite 72 hours’ notice of its intent to lockout CUPW members – on July 8. It looked as if we were headed for a repeat of 2011 when Canada Post locked out CUPW and the government promptly followed with back-to-work legislation. However, 2016 is not 2011 and the Trudeau Liberals are not the Harper Conservatives. It’s not just that the nasty divisive rhetoric of the Harper era, not least the constant vilification of the public sector and public sector workers, [except for the police and prisons] has ceased. There have also been some concrete advances such as the reinstatement of the long form census as well as a long overdue expansion of the Canada Pension Plan.

That said, it is important not to overstate the magnitude of the changes or to ignore the many critical continuities. As the Liberals’ support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) makes clear, the government remains committed to sustaining the neoliberal politics of freer markets that increase the power of capital and impose permanent austerity for the public sector and public sector workers. This pattern of modest positive changes together with continued fealty to an austerity agenda is evident in the Liberals’ approach to the post office as well. They have left the existing management regime headed by the Harper appointed CEO, Deepak Chopra, in place, and despite promising to restore door-to-door mail delivery, they only halted further cuts pending the completion of review of options for the future of postal services. It is likely that Canada Post’s rush to lockout CUPW partly reflected the regime’s desire to pre-empt any unwanted outcomes from that review.

But, this time around, the government was not so anxious for a work stoppage and/or prepared to legislate an end to one if it happened at this point. This is partly connected to the Ontario Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the Harper government’s 2011 back-to-work legislation ending Canada Post’s lockout of CUPW violated the union’s freedom of association and interfered with the “balance of collective bargaining.” It also seems reluctant to mar the ‘sunny ways’ aura surrounding it. Nor could it ignore the impact of CUPW’s well-conceived bargaining and messaging strategy. As a result, Canada Post was forced to back track. First, it extended the deadline by 3 days and then on July 11, it withdrew the notice of its intent to lockout CUPW and announced a renewed commitment to negotiations.

This is not to suggest the government has much sympathy for CUPW’s demands. In this respect, Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk’s suggestion that the parties consider binding arbitration is telling. It is common parlance that no arbitrator would issue a ruling in favour of people who are not yet employed by Canada Post. Further it is quite shocking that the Labour Minister would even suggest binding arbitration on the issue of the wage discrepancy between rural and urban letter carriers. As CUPW PresidentMike Palecek pointed out: “Paying women equally for work of equal value is the law of the land; it’s not something that can be awarded or withheld by an arbitrator.”

Looking Ahead

It would appear that we are in the midst of the ‘calm before the storm’. Evidently, Canada Post is committed to extracting concessions from its workforce and there is little likelihood that CUPW will acquiesce to Canada Post’s demands without a fight – not least to the demand for an inferior pension plan for future, younger, workers. Two-tier pay systems that require workers with different pay and/or benefits to work side-by-side offends most workers’ sense of justice and solidarity and many will go to great lengths to avoid this situation. In 2009, for example, steelworkers in Sudbury and Port Colborne struck for almost a year in an unsuccessful bid to block Vale Inco’s imposition of a two-tiered pension system. [Ed.: see Bullet No. 253 and Bullet No. 395.]

CUPW, with its commitment to equality between male and female workers, as well as full and part time workers, that goes back to the 1970s, is unlikely to act any differently. Indeed, when faced with an attempt by management to create a new lower classification in conjunction with the introduction of new technology back in 1974, they struck illegally to block it. For the same reason, CUPW is unlikely to simply abandon its demand for equal pay for rural carriers.

In this respect, the grassroots coalitions of union, student, anti-poverty and environmental activists that have already sprung up in cities such as Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver are encouraging, and no doubt there will be many others. However, it will be necessary to engage the major public and private sector unions with their much greater resources and potential mobilizing capacities – all of whose members have a real stake in the outcome. This is so clearly the case for unions in the federal public sector whose members will be next in line if Canada Post succeeds in imposing a two-tier pension system on CUPW. But it is also the case that unions in the private sector, many of whom are struggling to overcome the divisiveness created by having accepted two-tier wage and benefit systems, have a real stake in the outcome. A CUPW defeat would only strengthen the forces pushing them into the race to the bottom which is inimical with their members’ interests.

It is urgently necessary that the union leaderships take the initiative in building the requisite mobilization, in concert with CUPW. Unfortunately, past experience reveals that this can by no means be taken for granted. For example, meaningful efforts by USW, let alone the CLC to build support for Vale Inco workers in 2009 were noticeably absent. As for the PSAC, its efforts to build support for a strike by a small group of its members working for the OLG [Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, operates gambling in the province of Ontario] near Ottawa where pension issues were central to the dispute were inadequate and failed to prevent a significant defeat.

Activists need to find ways to put pressure on the leaders of both public and private sector unions, insisting that they go beyond perfunctory statements of support, and even promises of financial assistance, to communicate the importance of the issues to their members and to commit significant resources to mobilizing concrete solidarity with postal workers.

We also need to communicate support for postal workers to the government. Messages from individuals and groups to the government and individual MPs should not only call on the government to press the post office to drop its demands for concessions and respond positively to CUPW’s demands, but also express support for CUPW’s proposals for the future of the postal service. For details see www.CUPW.ca/CanadaPostReview. Equally importantly, we should also communicate support for expanding postal services directly to the Task Force on the future of Canada Post at www.Canada.ca/CanadaPostReview •

Evert Hoogers is a former CUPW National Union Representative. Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett both taught at Carleton University for many years.

A senior French police officer has claimed that the interior ministry “harassed” her into altering a security report from the deadly terrorist attack in Nice.

Sandra Bertin, the officer in charge of Nice’s CCTV control room, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper on Sunday that an unnamed interior ministry official contacted her after the attack and pressured her into altering her report for the night of the incident.

On July 14, a truck driver plowed through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding 200 others.

Bertin claims that she was “harassed for an hour” by the official who wanted her to detail the presence of local and national police at the fireworks event where the carnage took place.

“The national police were perhaps there, but I couldn’t see them on the video,” she said, adding, “He ordered me to put in (the report) the specific positions of the national police which I had not seen on the screen.”

She also said that the person from the ministry told her to email her report in a “modifiable form … so they didn’t have to type it all out again.”

France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (seen below) has dismissed the claims and has announced that he will sue Bertin for defamation.

“It will be very useful if Madame Sandra Bertin could be questioned by the investigators and could give them the names and positions of the people she is accusing, the emails she is talking about and their contents,” he said in a statement.

“Unworthy accusations are part of the virulent polemic that certain elected representatives in Nice have wanted to encourage and feed every day since the terrible July 14 attack,” he added.

The 31-year-old Franco-Tunisian assailant in the attack, who was later shot dead by police, was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group later claimed responsibility for the deadly attack in Nice. But, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that no direct evidence has been found to link the attacker to the terrorists.

The European country has been in a state of emergency since last November, when assailants struck at least six different venues in and around the capital Paris, leaving 130 people dead and over 350 others injured. Daesh claimed responsibility for the horrendous assaults.

On Wednesday, the French parliament extended the country’s state of emergency for another six months.

Since last autumn we have seen a stream of volunteers coming to Samos to ‘help’ the refugees. It has been a new experience for us although we are aware that this type of humanitarian tourism has been around for some years and is said to be one of the fastest growing areas of the global tourist industry. (Guardian November 14 2010, ‘Before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do’.)

On Samos at least, the term ‘volunteer’ now has a specific meaning referring to those from outside the island who sign up to work with an NGO called Samos Volunteers. The term volunteer for example does not include the many local people who over the past 12 months did so much to support and sustain the thousands of refugees who landed here. Nor does it include the refugee activists who come to work on Samos but refuse to be bound by the rules and regulations of the authorities.

We write about our experience of the Samos volunteers with some care as we are aware that some of our critical observations might be hurtful and discouraging for the volunteers many of whom are passionate about helping the refugees here. It is always been our concern to write in ways which both inform and above all which might benefit the refugees. We make no excuse for wanting to try and make things better by changing the ways in which people think and act. We very much hope that the volunteers will take our words in the spirit in which they are intended which is to think more clearly and act more appropriately when trying to help to the refugees here.

Our Observations and Thoughts

1) The volunteers who come to Samos are very mixed. They are not all young ‘gap year’ tourists although many are students who have just completed some of their higher education. There has also been a significant minority who are older and recently retired. The overwhelming majority are European/North American/Australian middle class Caucasians. We have seen no volunteers from Muslim majority societies and even more surprisingly very few from Greece and none from Samos.

For some, Samos is their latest island. A surprising number can list a string of frontier islands from Lesvos to our north to Kos to our south where they have done some days or weeks of volunteering.

2) Samos Volunteers provides the key contact point and a system for the arriving volunteers. It is an NGO which is part of the network of officially recognised organisations working on the island including the other NGOs and state agencies. It has close ties with the local authority which in the past has provided free accommodation and key resources such as their store house. The downside is that it ties the volunteers into a system that remains part of the problem and not the solution.

3) Many volunteers stay for a very short time, often less than 4 weeks and some for only a few days. They tend to be here today and gone tomorrow. There is very little opportunity for them to engage effectively with the refugees given their stay is so brief. This applies especially to the younger children many of whom have been traumatised by the wars they are fleeing, the terrible journey to get to Samos and then the experience of the Camp. They thirst for stability and safety and many are desperate to learn fully aware that they have missed months and sometimes years of schooling. Many of the volunteers understandably want to work with children but their short stays can be problematic as it exposes the children yet again to a reality which has little stability.

4) We have been surprised by the volunteers’ general lack of curiosity and understanding of the situation they are working in. For example, we can’t recall many asking us about our experiences on Samos and the context here. It is as if it does not matter. They want to do something now. Activity and not understanding seems to be their main concern. Some are very poorly informed and worse, come with negative prejudices especially about young Muslim men which are so widespread in the western media. This week we heard 5 volunteers telling us that the people of Samos are against the refugees. This is not true and insulting to the islanders. Yes, the Samian authorities are antagonistic but not the majority of the islanders.

We suggested to some recent volunteers working in their clothing store that they should involve refugees in managing and organising the place given that the refugees are so stressed by boredom and inactivity. They are crying out to do something. But one responded that she had been warned not to talk to the refugees about the location of the store (which is near to the Camp) otherwise they would raid it and rob it. The volunteer co-ordinator was very concerned when we took a Syrian refugee to the store to choose a suitcase. We had made a big mistake they told us. Refugees were not to come there and certainly not to choose what they needed for themselves. 2 weeks earlier an activist was similarly outraged when she was told she could not bring a pregnant Afghani woman to the store to choose her clothes. We suspect that the rule of keeping refugees away from the store is imposed by the local authority and is a clear example of the kind of difficulties which result from being part of the ‘system’. Nevertheless, the volunteers seem to forget that everything in the store has been sent for the refugees. It is their stuff!

Sadly, many of the volunteers as well as many working for the NGOs here are similar in this respect: they rarely engage personally or deeply with refugees as partners. Some clearly don’t trust the refugees and believe that the refugees need discipline and surveillance when they get near to things they need! Refugees are too often seen as people you do things to even though you may well have no skills or experience yourself. Want to help with the kids? Off you go and do it. It is disrespectful and arrogant and in the main they don’t even think about it.

We have also seen a minority of volunteers behave like trophy hunters such as the 2 young Germans who were here a few weeks ago and did some painting with children. They were with the children for less than an hour (the volunteers wanted to go off to the beach). But still enough time for the kids to make some pictures. Until they were stopped it was their intention to take all these pictures back to Germany and not give them to the children.

Many are keen for photographs of themselves with refugees which are then posted on their Facebook pages to much acclaim from their friends for being such wonderful human beings. These volunteers want to be ‘the story’. Moreover, as with so many aspects of refugee practices and policies there is no transparency at all with respect to the funds which many raise to pay for their time in Samos. It is not clear to us that this is the best use of resources.

Most of the volunteers we meet have ‘good hearts’ even if their own personal self development seems to be the most important issue for them. They genuinely care. But the refugees need them to have good heads too.

5) There is a general lack of any kind of progressive political perspective on the part of most of the volunteers we have met. Samos Volunteers does not make any attempt to address the political orientations of those joining them. It is as if their assumed compassion is sufficient. Imagine having to confront a 21year old medical student from London who insisted that the Syrian refugees must take responsibility for the destruction of their country? Or who believe that the EU is right to deport them back to Turkey?

The contrast with the activists who ran the 2 Open Kitchens earlier this year couldn’t be greater. These activists worked with and built solidaristic relationships with the refugees. They made friends with the refugees, sitting and talking for hours together. You will rarely see a volunteer sitting in a café with a refugee drinking coffee.

Whatever we might write, we are not going to stop volunteers from coming to Samos any more than the EU is going to stop refugees from coming to Europe. There is rarely a week that passes when we don’t get messages on our Facebook page from those who want to come to Samos. We have no wish to stop them from coming here. There are so many opportunities for them to see first hand the cruelties of the system and hopefully, to use this experience ‘back home’ to press for change.

Overall we don’t feel that volunteers damage the refugees and with respect to clothes distribution they have made a difference to many but it could be so much better for it is not just a matter of what you do but how you do it. Some of their recent educational initiatives also look promising and make good use of the longer times the refugees now spend on Samos.

Concluding Thoughts

The questions we pose for the volunteers are ones we regularly ask ourselves. We don’t always have clear answers especially when we feel we are doing things which should be done by the authorities, including NGOs like MSF, Save the Children, Red Cross ….. as well as the UNHCR. Like government agencies these NGOs hold massive budgets but so much seems to be spent on themselves, their staff, their cars, apartments, meals, logos, offices, mini buses and so on and so on. The idea that this money should be passed on directly to the refugees is never considered and yet in our opinion this would be the most beneficial direct aid for most of the refugees. It would also help more people on Samos as with money in their pockets the refugees would spend it in the local shops and cafés, renting rooms and apartments and even starting their own enterprises here.

We all need to remember that we are not the story. We can never hope to get near to the experiences of the refugees but we can at least try and stand in their shoes and make that the starting point of our activity. It will not be enough but it might mean we can help in ways which shames and highlights the system’s inhumanity to our fellow human beings as well as demonstrating our solidarity and providing something however small which makes refugees stronger and not weaker.

The Chilcot Inquiry, set up to look into the British role in the war in Iraq, reported on July 6, and although it was overshadowed by the political fallout from the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, received a largely favorable reception from the media and commentators. It is unclear why those commentators judged it to be “hard-hitting” because in terms of its conclusions all it did was tell us what we already knew.

Then British Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued a war that was arguably illegal has had disastrous consequences, not least for the 179 British servicemen and women killed and their loved ones, but also for Iraq, its people and the fight against terrorism.

I was staggered by the rush to say the report was hard hitting. It wasn’t. It simply laid out the facts in a narrative format and let the reader decide. Those facts were of course damning but I struggle to find anything in the report that a well informed reader of British newspapers wouldn’t already know.

It was a very workmanlike narrative of what happened taken from secret documents and witness testimony and therefore providing far more detail than had been previously available but it was not anything like a proper inquiry in the real sense. It was more like a neutral court report than the solid analysis which was required, and what we actually got from the curiously much derided Butler report.

As a result of the Chilcot’s failure to carry out any detailed analysis of the evidence presented to his inquiry, it completely missed the extensive and conclusive evidence of a ten-month illegal air war by Britain and the U.S. designed to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse to go to war in Iraq.

All modern wars begin with an air war in which the enemy positions on the ground are “softened up” to make them easier to overcome. The Iraq War was no different in many ways. Except there was a difference. George W. Bush and Tony Blair didn’t tell us it was happening.

So why does this matter now?

It matters because the Iraq War didn’t begin on March 20, 2003 as everybody thought, it began ten months earlier on May 20, 2002 when the allies started the secret air war. It was definitely illegal because it started six months before the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 which Tony Blair’s government later used to claim the war was legal.

(U.S. readers might also care to note that it started five months before Congress passed the so-called Iraq Resolution which authorized military action against Iraq.)

The secret air war, codenamed Operation Southern Force, was carried out under cover of the UN-authorized operation under which U.S. and RAF aircraft patrolled a so-called no-fly zone over southern Iraq to protect the Shia majority from Saddam’s forces.

Lt.-Gen. Michael Moseley, the U.S. Air Force commander of allied air operations over Iraq, told a conference at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in July 2003 that during Operation Southern Force allied aircraft dropped more than 600 bombs on “391 carefully selected targets.”

British and U.S. officials claimed at the time that the reason behind the increased air strikes carried out in the southern no-fly zone, was an increase in Iraqi attacks on allied aircraft. But Lt.-Gen. Moseley said the bombing of Iraqi positions in southern Iraq paved the way for the invasion and was the reason the allies were able to begin the ground campaign without first waging an extensive air war as they had done during the 1991 Gulf War.

Planning for the illegal air war began shortly after Tony Blair attended a summit with George Bush at the U.S. President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas on April 6 and 7, 2002. Chilcot confirmed evidence from a Cabinet Office Briefing Paper leaked to me as part of the “Downing Street Memos” back in the spring of 2005 that Mr. Blair agreed at Crawford “to support military action to bring about regime change” in Iraq.

The British Prime Minister didn’t waste any time sorting out what would happen next. Chilcot records that the very next day, April 8, 2002, Geoff Hoon, the U.K. Defense Secretary, called in Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce (now Lord Boyce) and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Ministry of Defense (MoD) Sir Kevin Tebbit to discuss “military options” in Iraq.

Ten days later, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, Deputy Commander of RAF Strike Command, was sent to the U.S. to act as liaison with General Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command, who would lead the invasion force. Now Sir Brian, he told the Chilcot Inquiry that he had a meeting with Gen. Franks shortly after arriving at Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa, Florida, discussing the no-fly zones over Iraq “at some length.”

Nine days later, on April 26, Franks flew to London with Burridge for discussions with the U.K. defense chiefs. The Chilcot Report says they talked about the patrols of the no-fly zones with details of the discussions “circulated on very limited distribution.”

A week later, there was a top secret meeting in 10, Downing St. chaired by Blair and attended by Hoon, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Adm. Boyce. The Chilcot Report notes briefly that “Mr. Blair had a meeting on Iraq with Mr. Straw, Mr. Hoon and Adm. Boyce on 2 May but there is no record of the discussion.”

It’s worth pointing out that the Downing Street note which describes that key meeting in such brazenly bare detail was initially provided to the Butler Inquiry which first looked at the intelligence provided to back the war in Iraq in 2004. So the cover-up goes back at least to then and in reality far beyond.

Three days later after that secretive Downing Street meeting, Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Defense Secretary, flew to London for talks with Mr. Hoon, following which British officials announced changes to the rules of engagement in the no-fly zones making it easier for allied aircraft to attack Iraqi military positions.

Simon Webb, then Mod policy director, told the Chilcot inquiry that the Americans had proposed “changing the nature of the no-fly zone, quite a lot of which we were persuaded about but which a part of we weren’t persuaded about … and stood aside from.”

As one of the Mod’s most senior civil servants, Webb was spouting the sort of doublespeak of which the writers of BBC Television’s Yes, Minister would have been very proud. The key words there are not “stood aside from” but “quite a lot of which we were persuaded about.”

On 20 May 2002, allied aircraft began ramping up the number of attacks on Iraqi positions. Throughout the first few months of 2002, they had dropped barely any bombs on Iraq. But answers to parliamentary questions asked by Liberal Democrat MP Sir Menzies Campbell (now Lord Campbell), reveal that during those last ten days of May alone, U.S. and U.K. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone dropped 7.3 tons of bombs on Iraqi positions.

Far from standing aside, as Webb claimed in his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, RAF aircraft dropped more than two thirds of those bombs, a total of 4.9 tons.

Throughout the summer of 2002, both British and U.S. aircraft continued to bomb southern Iraq under cover of the no-fly zone while Blair and Hoon insisted that nothing was happening. The Defense Secretary told a cabinet meeting on 20 June 2002 that “except for continuing patrols in the no-fly zones, no decisions have been taken in relation to military operations in Iraq.”

During defense questions in the House of Commons on Monday 15 July 2002, Hoon told Labour MP Alice Mahon that: “Absolutely no decisions have been taken by the British Government in relation to operations in Iraq or anywhere near Iraq … I can assure the House that any such decision would be properly reported to the House.”

The next day, Blair appeared before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee. Asked if the U.K. was “preparing for possible military action against Iraq,” Blair replied: “No, there are no decisions which have been taken about military action.”

Tony Blair and his Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon were able to claim throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken on military action because the truth of what was taking place in southern Iraq under cover of the UN-authorized no-fly zones was kept on an extremely tight “need to know” basis. Even fairly senior British officials believed the increased air strikes were simply the result of the relaxation of the rules of engagement.

A week later, on Tuesday 23 July 2002, Blair was due to have a meeting with his war cabinet. In preparation for that meeting, the Cabinet Office produced a briefing paper which was one of the Downing St. Memos leaked to me when I was on the Sunday Times. It warned the participants that: “When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the U.K. would support military action to bring about regime change.”

This represented a problem for British policy-makers, the Cabinet Office briefing paper said.

“We need now to … encourage the U.S. Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the no fly zones,” the briefing paper said. “This is particularly important for the U.K. because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.”

This is all the evidence we need to show that the air war was illegal. Those conditions in which Britain could legally support military action did not yet exist. They had to be created. So although it was clearly not known to the officials who drafted the briefing paper, RAF aircraft and for that matter RAF servicemen were already involved in military action against Iraq which was not legal under the U.K. interpretation of international law.

The minutes of that war cabinet meeting on July 23 became best known for comments by Sir Richard Dearlove, the then head of MI6, who had just returned from a trip to Washington DC to see his CIA counterpart George Tenet. He told the meeting that the intelligence was being “fixed around the policy” in America.

But Hoon said something even more interesting. U.S. aircraft overflying southern Iraq had begun “spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.” He did not mention that RAF aircraft were also taking part in the attacks. Presumably some of his colleagues in the war cabinet were unaware of that fact and the lack of an official record for the May 2 meeting suggests that both Blair and Hoon thought it sensible not to have the British participation on record.

The attacks continued through June, July and August with both U.S. and British aircraft carrying out increased bombing but nevertheless failing to provoke the Iraqis into a reaction which might give the allies an excuse for war.

The attacks needed to be ramped up still further.

On September 5 2002, more than 100 allied aircraft, both U.S. and British, attacked an Iraqi air defense facility in western Iraq on September 5, 2002, in what was believed to be a prelude to the infiltration of special forces into Iraq from Jordan. The RAF saw it as such a success that it was reported on the front page of the official publication RAF News.

During September, allied aircraft dropped 54.6 tons of munitions on southern Iraq of which 21.1 tons were dropped by RAF aircraft. In October, they dropped 17.7 tons of which 11.4 tons, roughly two-thirds, were British.

The Iraq Resolution authorizing U.S. military action against Iraq was not passed by Congress until the early hours of October 11, 2002, five months after the start of Operation Southern Force, the secret air war preparing the way for the invasion.

UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which the U.K. Government would later claim made the war legal, was not passed until November 8, 2002, six months after the secret air war began.

It was not until March 17, 2003 that British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith formally confirmed that military action was legal on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. A day later, the British parliament backed U.K. military action in Iraq.

Two days, later allied troops invaded Iraq. It was and remains widely regarded as the start of the Iraq War. Only a very few people knew that was not the truth. The war had begun ten months earlier on 20 May 2002 when British and American aircraft began bombing the 391 “carefully selected” targets assigned to Operation Southern Force, the illegal joint British and American bombing campaign that Chilcot completely missed.

Intelligence beast reporter Michael Smith broke the story of the secret “Downing Street Memos” in 2005. This article was originally published on Michael Smith’s blog.

It may not be a post-RNC bounce, but political analyst and statistician Nate Silver’s latest forecast of the presidential election shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater chance of winning if the general election were held today.

After a parade of D-list celebrities and conservative icons yelled that the nation had been overrun by criminals in the cities and murderous undocumented immigrants in border towns, the Republican party’s presidential nominee’s current likelihood of winning stands at 57.5 percent, compared with Clinton’s 42.5 percent.

FiveThirtyEight’s “now-cast,” Silver’s model, considers more than just polling in its forecast and currently predicts the popular vote going 45.4 percent to Trump vs. 45.1 percent to Clinton, with the Electoral College giving Trump 285 votes and Clinton 252.6. This is the first time the “now-cast” forecast has been projected Trump to win.

Silver, who correctly forecast both the 2008 and 2012, has Trump winning in the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire:

The now-cast is super aggressive, and can overreact to small swings in the polls. But it’s useful if we want to get a snapshot of what the election looks like right now. It suggests that in an election held today, Trump would be a narrow favorite, with a 57 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

[…]

It isn’t straightforward to measure Trump’s convention bounce because he was already gaining ground on Clinton heading into the conventions, narrowing what had been a 6- to 7-point national lead for Clinton in June into roughly a 3-point lead instead. For instance, the CNN poll shows a massive 10-percentage-point swing toward Trump, but its previous poll was taken in mid-June, at a high-water mark for Clinton. By contrast, CBS News shows Trump gaining only 1 percentage point, but its previous poll was conducted earlier this month, shortly after the controversy over Clinton’s email scandal resurfaced.

Amid the seemingly perpetual turbulence and chaos of the Middle East and North Africa comes the warning of a Jewish Civil War:

“We are on the verge of an uprising of hatred, racism, darkness and upcoming killings and assassination based on the overwhelming internal hatred here. We hear hatred at every turn, whether it is directed toward women by military rabbis, by Ashkenazi Jews against Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews against Ashkenazis. This way the seeds of the uprising of hatred are planted, which will lead to a civil war. This hatred is being carried out by the full support and cover of those in charge.” – Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition Zionist Union coalition in the Israeli Knesset.

Isaac Herzog’s words, spoken on Monday 18th July at a Zionist Camp parliamentary bloc session, may strike the unerring observer as alarmist and even fanciful. How on earth could the people of Israel, a state created in the belief that it would provide the best guarantee for the preservation of the Jewish people, be set on a course of fratricidal conflict which would imperil its existence?

The often repeated warnings of Israel being a state surrounded by a multitude of enemies and which has existed under the perpetual threat of being “driven into the sea” by Arab enemies has seemingly provided the basis of an unbreakable communal solidarity whatever the cultural and ethnic differences between the disparate people that comprise it.  To many, the tendency towards fractiousness and vexation; of episodic disputes and divisions arising within the subtext of an often volatile political discourse only lend credence to the old adage of  “two Jews, three opinions.”

Binyamin Netanyahu was able to ruminate over the slaughter of the ongoing Syrian Civil War as follows: “We will never be like them. We will never lift our hands against our brothers with unfettered enmity.”

The matter of fratricidal conflict is, of course, not unknown to Jewish history. The Book of Judges records a civil war fought between the tribes of Gilead and Ephraim in which over 40,000 lives are claimed to have perished. The Battle of Gibeah pitted the tribes of Israel against that of Benjamin in which 25,000 Benjaminites were slain while the narrative of Hanukkah is one that recounts the violent overthrow of Jewish Hellenists via the Maccabean revolt that was led by Mattathias. The Talmud says that rebellion against the Romans failed because of the “needless enmity between brothers”.

The modern age of Zionism has also provided episodes of violence although they have all fallen short of developing into full-blown communal conflicts. The assassinations of the anti-Zionist Jacob de Haan by the Haganah and Chaim Arlosoroff by Revisionist Zionists in pre-Israel Palestine as well as the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by an orthodox settler extremist in 1995 provide examples of the killings of prominent people which occurred during periods of deep discord.

Israel is not a monolithic society and the divisions of ethnicity as well as those based on religious and political values could provide fertile ground for the development of serious social confrontation.

While the contrasts offered between the Sabra and Diaspora Jews -the former being those who were born within the pre-state Mandate era and the latter those who made Aliyah- is arguably one that was overstated and, perhaps, an often superficial one in the grand scheme of things, divisions within Israeli society are readily discernible from the ethnicities that make it up as well as in the differences between those who are religious and those who are secular.

A starting point of any consideration of fundamental divisions existing within the society can be found in the nature of its constitutional settlement. Israel is one of only three countries in the world that functions without a ‘written’ constitution. One reason for this relates to the compromise reached about the legal status of religion between Israel’s secular founders and the representatives of orthodox Jewry. The ‘Status Quo’ Compromise was an attempt to provide a working arrangement for the role that Judaism would play in the governmental and judicial system. Tensions have existed between secular and religious communities over the decades with one centred on exemptions given to Haredis studying in yeshivas and anti-Zionist Hasidic groups.

There are of course divisions in ideology. Israel was dominated at the time of its founding by Labor Zionists, European Jewish socialists who wanted to develop a state through the manpower of a rural Kibbutzim and an urban proletariat. However, the rise of the Likud Party, which first came to power in 1977, has reflected a shift in the national balance of power to that of the political Right. In the time since elapsed, Likud has held power for a longer period than Labor or other Left parties. Further, Likud’s adoption of neoliberal economic policies in place of earlier ones predicated on a populist orientation has markedly transformed Israeli society -and not necessarily for the better.

For while the Israeli economy, globally renowned for its high-tech component, has experienced continual growth for over a decade, the National Insurance Institute released a report in 2014 detailing a finding that one in five of families in the country live below the poverty line.

Soon after, the Taub Center, an economic and social policy think tank based in Jerusalem issued a state of the nation report which found that four out of five Israeli households spent more than they earned each month. The following year, the National Insurance Institute found that the poverty rate had increased with one in three children living below the poverty line. Israel, which is a member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has the highest level of poverty among developed nations.

Although levels of gross disparities in wealth have often formed the basis for social discord which have led to civil insurrections and revolutions, class conflict as the pathway to an Israeli civil war is unlikely.

For many observers of Israel, the only serious basis of a war breaking out among its population is rooted in the matter of Jewish settlement on the occupied Palestinian West Bank which many believe to be the ancient regions of Judea and Samaria. A survey conducted this year by Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the University of Tel Aviv found that 71.5 per cent of the Israeli Jewish public did not consider Israel’s presence in the West bank as an occupation. The considered view has long been that the larger in population size these settlements get and the longer they endure, the less likely it increasingly becomes for the settlers to be evicted as part of a final peace settlement with the Palestinians. It has always been understood that any attempt by a serving Israeli government to dislodge the settlers would risk provoking a Jewish Civil War.

While the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 evoked bitter protests and much acrimony on the part of the Israeli political Right, it did not lead to a serious conflict with military overtones. A large scale withdrawal from the more significantly colonised West Bank and dismantling of the settlements  would be an altogether different enterprise. There is evidence that in 1980, Ariel Sharon, by then a retired army general but one with continuing influence, convened a secret meeting of higher echelon figures from the military and security services in which the attendees signed a blood oath under which they pledged to make common cause with settlers on the West Bank in resisting to the death any such move.

The source of the information of such a meeting having taken place came, according to the English journalist Alan Hart, from Ezer Weizman, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force, when he was serving as the minister of defence.

The oath is one which is believed to have been taken by subsequent generations of generals. It strongly underpins the notion that no Israeli Prime Minister could ever countenance the idea of ordering the army to shoot settlers, many of whom among their ranks are permanently armed religious Zionists who would be prepared to initiate an a rebellion.

The threat of a civil war in the Jewish state was a real one in the months soon after its creation in 1948. In fact, bullets were fired and fatalities resulted. The belligerents were the army of the newly created Israeli Defence Force and the terror group, Irgun which was led by Menachem Begin.

Begin, a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky who was the creator of New Revisionist Zionism, wanted the nascent Israeli state to continue fighting its Arab neighbours until the whole of Eretz Yisrael was conquered. This included not only the West Bank but the rest of the British Mandate territory that had been east of the River Jordan.

Prime Minister David Ben Gurion preferred not to pursue such a course and demanded that Irgun as with other paramilitary organisations be absorbed into the IDF. Begin resisted this and when his group attempted to bring in a cache of arms from a ship berthed off the coast of Tel Aviv a fierce firefight erupted between both sides leading to 16 Irgun dead and 3 from the IDF.

Begin was the founder of the Likud Party which is merged with Herut, the Right-wing nationalist party he had formed in 1948 to serve as a successor to the defunct Irgun. The formation of Herut was met with great dismay by many Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt who took it upon themselves to write an open letter to the New York Times to warn that Israel would head down a path which legitimized “ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial supremacy”.

Herzog has pointedly blamed the present leadership of Likud, headed by Netanyahu, for allowing the political discourse to slide into a hate filled atmosphere. “This way,” he said, “the seeds of the uprising of hatred are planted, which will lead to a civil war.”

And he is not the only high-ranking Israeli political figure to express profound disquiet at the direction in which Israel is heading. Moshe Yaalon, a former IDF chief of staff resigned as minister for defence after hearing that his position would be offered to Avigdor Lieberman, a hardline figure from the political Right. Yaalon claimed that he was “fearful for Israel’s future”. A few weeks earlier, the deputy chief of the Israeli military, Major General Yair Golan compared contemporary Israel to Nazi Germany of the 1930s.

The rise of Likud, some critics have argued, signified the coming to power of the terror gangs of the Mandate era. And with this they argue has come a more uncompromising position regarding the possibility of a two-state settlement with the Palestinian people. With the expansion of settlements on the West Bank having reached a stage where they are essentially irreversible owing to the certainty of a Jewish Civil War in the event of an attempt to have settlers evicted, the only course left to effect a lasting solution to the ‘Palestinian problem’ is a purge of the Arab population under the cover a serious military conflict with an external enemy.

Herzog’s strongly worded remarks no doubt reflect what many consider to be an entrenched pattern in Netanyahu’s often polarizing and incendiary style. His comments during the last elections regarding the Israeli political Left busing Arab voters “to the polling stations in droves” typified this as did his statements regarding illegal immigrants from Black Africa who he described as “infiltrators” and who he claimed were threatening the “identity of the Jewish state.” Netanyahu’s  rhetoric at a rally in which he criticised Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts at effecting a peace with the Palestinians -one in which people in the crowd held aloft signs bearing Rabin’s image in an SS uniform- is remembered with lasting repulsion by many who consider him at least partly responsible for inciting an atmosphere that led to the assassination of Rabin by Yigal Amir.

It is clear that the statements made by Herzog, Yaalon and Golan point to the increasingly extremist drift of Israeli politics, but whether they reflect a state of affairs capable of metastasizing into an internecine civil conflict remains doubtful. That of course is little comfort for those such as Herzog who observe what he describes as “the budding fascism that is rising and flourishing in Israeli society”; a state of affairs predicted by the aforementioned Einstein and Arendt who had urged American Zionists not to support Begin and what they termed the “latest manifestation of fascism”.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has now confirmed publicly what we said previously: the talks in Moscow with US Secretary of State John Kerry were a failure.

This is what we said about the proposal Kerry took with him to Moscow:

“…….it seems that the US offered to join with the Russians in a joint military campaign in Syria against Al Qaeda and Daesh.  Prior to going to Moscow Kerry also let slip that some of what he called “subgroups” affiliated to Al Qaeda would be targeted as well.  However in return the Russians were apparently expected to accept US leadership of the military campaign, cease bombing rebel groups in Syria aligned with the US, and agree to the eventual removal of President Assad.”

What we said about this proposal was

“If that is in outline what Kerry was proposing then it is not difficult to see why the Russians would reject it. Essentially what Kerry seems to have offered them was yet another plan to overthrow President Assad, this time with their assistance, in return for a place in a US led military coalition.”

Lavrov has now confirmed that that is exactly what happened.  Speaking at a Russian national youth education forumSputnik reports him saying the following:

“They say that we could join their efforts in the fight against terrorism […] but first we need to agree that we remove Assad from power.”

Sputnik reports Lavrov saying that Kerry told the Russians that Assad had lost the support of the “vast majority of Syria’s population”.  According to Lavrov, the Russians responded that it was for the Syrians – not the US or the Russians – to choose Syria’s leader in a democratic way.

In other words the Russians rejected Kerry’s offer.  To underline the point Sputnik reports Lavrov condemning the whole US regime change policy as it has been applied to the Middle East:

“What is happening in the Middle East, in North Africa is a direct result of a very incompetent, unprofessional attitude to the situation. In an attempt to maintain their dominance, our Western partners have acted like a bull in a china shop.”

This has been the consistent Russian position since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.

In truth the story of the diplomacy of the Syrian conflict has been a continuous repetition of the same happening:  the US pushes the Russians to agree to have President Assad removed.  The US make various offers or threats to the Russians to buy or force their agreement.  The Russians respond that President Assad’s future is a strictly Syrian internal matter, which they will not involve themselves in.  The US walks away, baffled and angry.

The same thing happens again and again, Kerry’s talks in Moscow with Putin and Lavrov being just the latest example.

The US are not the only ones to have made the same pitch to the Russians only to get the same result.  In July 2013 the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud flew secretly to Moscow where he also made various offers and threats at a private meeting with Putin to get the Russians to agree to the removal of President Assad.  To his bafflement and anger the Russians said no – as they always do.

In truth the inability of the US and its Western and Arab allies to accept that Russian opposition to their regime policy in Syria and elsewhere is for real, and that the Russians cannot be bullied or bribed to change it, is one of the oddest things about the whole Syrian conflict.  Despite the fact the Russians have gone repeatedly out of their way to explain their policy, the US and its allies seem incapable of believing that the Russians are really serious about it.  They always seem to think that the Russians are really just playing some cynical game, and that if they are made the right sort of offer, or put under the right sort of pressure, they can be brought round and made to agree to let Assad go.

By now – five years after the conflict began – it ought to be obvious that that isn’t going to happen.  Kerry’s trip to Moscow and the long hours of fruitless negotiations he had there however shows that the US still can’t bring itself to accept the fact.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) discovered at least 4,000 bags of Turkey-made chemicals used for making bombs by the ISIL terrorists in the town of Manbij in Northeastern Aleppo.

“These 25 kg bags contain a special kind of agricultural chemicals which are allowed to be used by the governmental bodies not by private centers in Turkey. A sentence in Turkish language is written on these bags that this chemical should be used only by relevant government organizations,” the SDF said.

“The SDF’s engineering units have thus far defused over 6,000 landmines and 25 bomb-laden suicide vehicles,” the SDF added.

“The Turkey-made chemicals can simply used in making landmines,” the SDF pointed out.

On Saturday, the SDF found further proof of the Turkish army’s weapons supplies to the ISIL terrorists after capturing militants’ positions in Manbij.

The SDF found Turkey-made arms after its crushing victory in battle against the ISIL terrorists in different districts of Manbij in recent days.

They also found highly powerful explosive devices that could be used to detonate buildings and armored vehicles.

Late in June, the secret reports of the Turkish police indicated that the al-Nusra Front and ISIL terrorists use Turkey’s both legal and illegal border crossings to transfer weapons and ammunition to Syria.

“Certain elements linked to terrorists in Syria are still shipping weapons and supplying their logistics from Turkey,” the Turkish-language daily, Karshi, cited a police report to the country’s public prosecutor about its operations in the city of Diyarbakir.

The newspaper, meantime, said that certain communities also provided financial supports for the terrorists fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The daily also said the Al-Nusra and ISIL terrorist groups established bases in Turkey to train recruits, adding that many explosive devices were even manufactured and assembled on Turkish soils.

Clinton Cash, a feature documentary based on the Peter Schweizer book, has been posted to YouTube for all to view free just in time for the DNC.  Clinton Cash investigates how Bill and Hillary Clinton went from being “dead broke” after leaving the White House to amassing a net worth of over $150 million, with over $2 billion in donations to their foundation.  This wealth was accumulated during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State through lucrative speaking fees and contracts paid for by foreign companies and Clinton Foundation donors.

The New York Times hailed the book as “The most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle” while MSNBC described the documentary as devastating for the Hillary campaign.

The Clinton camp has, of course, dismissed the documentary as a right-wing smear campaign filled with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.  That said, perhaps the most shocking aspect of the release is that many of the biggest bombshells revealed in the documentary have been vetted and confirmed by various mainstream media outlets.  More recently, some information uncovered in the Panama Papers has echoed some of Schweitzer’s allegations in the movie and book.

Just to highlight a few of the scandals detailed in the documentary:

• Russian Purchase of US Uranium Assets in Return for $145mm in Contributions to the Clinton Foundation – Bill and Hillary Clinton assisted a Canadian financier, Frank Giustra, and his company, Uranium One, in the acquisition of uranium mining concessions in Kazakhstan and the United States.  Subsequently, the Russian government sought to purchase Uranium One but required approval from the Obama administration given the strategic importance of the uranium assets.  In the run-up to the approval of the deal by the State Department, nine shareholders of Uranium One just happened to make $145mm in donations to the Clinton Foundation.  Moreover, the New Yorker confirmed that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in speaking fees from a Russian investment bank, with ties to the Kremlin, around the same time.  Needless to say, the State Department approved the deal giving Russia ownership of 20% of U.S. uranium assets

• Lucrative Haiti Gold Mining Permit Awarded to Hillary’s Brother – The Washington Post confirmed claims that Hillary’s brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of a mining company that just happened to score a lucrative gold mining permit in Haiti, one of only two permits to be awarded in 50 years, while then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to the island in the wake of the devastating earthquake of 2010
• Keystone Pipeline Support in Return for $2mm in Speaking Fees – After not being engaged to speak by TD Bank during his first 8 years out of the White House, Bill Clinton began a string of speeches for the bank starting just 4 days after Hillary was nominated as secretary of state resulting in over $2mm in speaking fees.  As it turns out, TD Bank happened to be the single largest shareholder in the Keystone XL pipeline which needed State Department approval.  Wouldn’t you know it, Hillary Clinton decided to support the pipeline — a heresy to environmentalists — and delayed the Obama administration’s rejection of it

While these accusations, many of which have been substantiated by multiple sources, would be devastating to mere mortal presidential candidates, we’re certain these are just a few more negative data points that will not stick to the teflon-coated Clinton couple.

Wealthy potential donors to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were courted with promises of access to the president, a Washington Post analysis of internal DNC emailsreleased by WikiLeaks has found. The party insiders’ pitches appear to be in violation of White House policy, the newspaper notes.

On Monday, the Post reported:

The DNC emails show how the party has tried to leverage its greatest weapon—the president—as it entices wealthy backers to bankroll the convention and other needs. At times, DNC staffers used language in their pitches to donors that went beyond what lawyers said was permissible under a White House policy designed to prevent any perception that special interests have access to the president.

Top aides also get involved in wooing contributors, according to the emails. White House political director David Simas, for instance, met in May with a half-dozen top party financiers in Chicago, including Fred Eychaner, one of the top Democratic donors in the country, the documents show.

On at least one occasion, a White House lawyer asked DNC employees to alter the language of an invitation to a high-dollar event so it would not appear to be soliciting donations in exchange for access to President Barack Obama—demonstrating that employees were made aware of the policy.

“Let’s remove the word round table on page 2 at the top (‘$33,400 – Round table discussion guest’). As you know, WH policy restricts the use of language that gives the appearance that contributors can pay for policy access to the President,” Ruthzee Louijeune, an associate at Perkins Coie LLC, wrote to a DNC staffer in reference to a May event featuring Obama.

The Post noted, however, that “the emails show several instances in which DNC fundraisers pitched donors with promises of a ’roundtable’ chat with Obama. On May 6, the southern finance director emailed ­Cockrum, [a] Tennessee donor, about packages available for the Philadelphia convention.”

The newspaper continues:

“If [you] were willing to contribute $33,400 we can bump you up a level to the Fairmont,” [the southern finance director] wrote, referring to a luxury hotel. “Additionally, your generous contribution would allow you to attend a small roundtable we are having with President Obama in DC on May 18th or a dinner in NYC on June 8th.”

On the afternoon of the event, the place of honor, at Obama’s side, went to New York philanthropist Phil Munger. Kaplan noted to Shapiro in an email that Munger was one of the largest donors to Organizing for Action, a nonprofit group that advocates for Obama’s legislative agenda.

“It would be nice to take care of him from the DNC side,” Kaplan wrote, adding: “He is looking to give his money in new places and I would like that to be to us.”

The Democratic Party collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single dinner with the president. On May 24, an email with the subject line “Daily Number” gave the donation tally at that point for a June 8 dinner in New York, hosted by venture capitalist andHuffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer, with the president in attendance:

Guests
48

Committed
$143,400

In Hand
$576,113

Total
$719,513

Not only does the DNC appear to be pitching access to the president in exchange for donations, a McClatchy investigation on Thursday also revealed that large-ticket donors often demand such special favors. It also found that DNC insiders attempted to find ways to appease such donors—occasionally arguing about which donor deserved a reward more.

McClatchy reports:

In one exchange, National Finance Director Jordan Kaplan and Mid-Atlantic Finance Director Alexandra Shapiro argue which contributor should be allowed to sit next to Obama at a DNC event.

Kaplan told Shapiro to move Maryland ophthalmologist Sreedhar Potarazu and give the seat to New York philanthropist Philip Munger because he is the largest donor to Organizing for America, a group that pushes Obama’s policies. “It would be nice to take care of him from the DNC side,” Kaplan wrote.

But Shapiro explained that the Potarazu family had contributed $332,250 while Munger had only donated $100,600.

Both the DNC and the Republican National Convention (RNC) have “stepped up their hunt for huge checks since a series of legal changes in 2014 gave them leeway to collect expansive contributions for new accounts to pay for building, legal and convention expenses,” the Post observes.

The Post reports that in addition, in 2015 “the DNC, in consultation with Clinton’s campaign, also decided to reverse a ban on donations from the PACs of corporations, unions and other groups.”

Former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who announced her resignation on Sunday after the leak revealed the DNC favoring Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Bernie Sanders’, actively solicited large donations from super PACs and lobbyists after the new rules were established.

“After those limits were lifted,” the newspaper continues, Schultz “and other top party officials showered corporate lobbyists with calls, emails and personal meetings seeking convention support and PAC contributions to the party, according to a spreadsheet logging the contacts.”

And the resulting donations have been quite significant—particularly when it came to funds solicited to pay for the party convention in Philadelphia. The Post writes:

The top-tier donor package for this week’s Democratic National Convention required a donor to raise $1.25 million or give $467,600 since January 2015, according to a document in the emails. In return, a contributor got booking in Philadelphia at a premier hotel, VIP credentials and six slots at “an exclusive roundtable and campaign briefing with high-level Democratic officials,” according to the terms.

Those perks were aggressively pushed to donors this spring as DNC staffers worked to try to pay for the party’s share of the convention, a tab that had been covered by public funds in previous years.

The DNC also appeared to look for ways around the remaining rules that limited donations, in search of more contributions: “When Pietrzak, who had already given his annual maximum to the party, expressed interest in attending the May 18 event with Obama,” thePost notes, “a party staffer responded to her colleague: ‘No chance of getting more $ out of them, is there? Push the convention packages as an incentive?'”

Such revelations appear to confirm the argument that relying on large donations from wealthy individuals and large corporations inevitably leads to corruption of the political process. Indeed, both Bernie Sanders and Green Party presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein have condemned the DNC’s fundraising practices and called for campaign finance reform:

Throughout the political season, the NYT represented the Clinton campaign, acting as a pseudo-official mouthpiece, turning journalism into PR promotion. 

Branding four days as “Hillary’s Convention,” The Times continues promoting an agenda threatening world peace, supporting monied interests over popular ones, and tyranny masquerading as democracy.

Times editors, correspondents, columnists and contributors portray Hillary as being “left-leaning…on social, economic and political issues.” Her agenda, if elected, assures dirty business as usual, likely elevated to an unprecedented level – notably risking global nuclear war by recklessly challenging Russia and China, along with exclusively representing monied interests at the expense of popular ones.

Times editors claiming Hillary “adopt(ed) elements of the Sanders program” is willful deception, failing to explain his “political revolution” was smoke and mirrors demagoguery, illusion substituting for reality.

“Hillary Clinton’s new Democrats,” as Times editors call them, aren’t democratic, progressive, anti-war, or anti-America’s imperial agenda.

According to the WSJ,

 “Hillary Clinton to Take Command of a Changed Democratic Party: Presumed nominee’s party is more liberal than the one that helped elect her husband in 1992”

They’re polar opposites on steroids, a neocon/war goddess-led scourge – the greatest threat to world peace, stability, and fundamental freedoms crucial to oppose.

Endorsing Clinton is further proof of The Times representing wealth and power interests over all others.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

The world was shocked this week after a horrific video surfaced showing a US-backed rebel group in Syria beheading a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, in yet another example of how the Syrian rebels are the complete antithesis of moderate.

Psychopathic members of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki group – which was formed in late 2011 and operates around the city of Aleppo – carried out the atrocity. In a ridiculous statement, the leaders of the al-Zenki group called the atrocity a “mistake” – how anyone can characterize hacking a child’s head off with a knife a “mistake” is beyond me.

The rebel group accused the boy of being a member of the Liwa al-Quds (Jerusalem brigade), an armed Palestinian group that supports the Syrian government. Liwa al-Quds released a statement stating that the boy was not a fighter however, and was merely an innocent, ill child called Abdullah Issa, who lived in an impoverished area, according to an Al Jazeerareport.

US Supplied al-Zenki with TOW Missiles

Al-Zenki has received military aid and TOW missiles from the US, a fact that even Reuters admitted in an October 2015 article. Earlier this month, Amnesty International released a report which detailed how the al-Zenki group was involved in abducting and torturing various individuals, including humanitarian aid workers.

This rebel group is just one of the numerous legions in Syria who have received arms and financing by various countries who have been supporting the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition, with the US being one of the largest proponents of this strategy. As many critics of this policy have been warning, flooding Syria with arms and mainly foreign terrorists was only going to lead to atrocities of this nature.

This latest abhorrent act is certainly not the first committed by rebel fighters either; a video which surfaced in 2013 showed a rebel biting into the heart of a dead Syrian soldier.

Deliberate Empowerment of Terrorists

Unknowingly supporting extremists is one thing; but deliberately empowering terrorists is a completely other situation.  The US has been fully aware of the nefarious nature of the forces fighting against Bashar al-Assad for years.

As a declassified US military intelligence report from August 2012 clearly states:

“The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The report added that “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media,” and that “events are taking a clear sectarian direction.”

Despite this warning, the US and their allies intensified their support for the opposition. A December 2012 article by Business Insider reported that the US was sending heavy weapons – including anti-tank missiles, rocket propelled grenades and anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles – from Libya to the Syrian rebels. A 2013 article by the Washington Post details how the CIA and State Department were sending weapons, munitions, vehicles, communications equipment and medical kits to the rebels.

Of course, the US was playing a critical role in arming the rebels before late 2012. A June 2012 article by the New York Times titled: C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition, reported that CIA agents were in southern Turkey helping to funnel arms to the rebels.

US-led Coalition Bombs Civilians

Also this week, US and French airstrikes killed over 140 civilians near the Syrian-Turkish border. The Syrian Foreign Ministry sent letters to the United Nations (UN), demanding that the international body takes action. The US-led coalition is operating illegally in Syria – unlike the previous legal Russian campaign – as the Syrian government has never authorized the US-led bombing campaign.

Hopefully the beheading of an innocent child will spark a real commitment by the US to seriously defeat the terrorists in Syria, by working alongside the Syrian Army, Russia, Iran, and other important players in the region.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

According to the conservative English language newspaper Yeni Savak,  “a former U.S. commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, was the organizer of the July 15 military coup attempt in Turkey”. 

Four Star US Army General Campbell and Vice Chief of Staff (March 2013-August 2014) assumed command of  ISAF from August to December of 2014. He was then appointed Commander of NATO’s Afghanistan Operation Resolute Support, “a training, advisory, assistance, and counter-terror mission” from which he retired in March 2016, four months prior to Turkey’s failed coup. 

It should be noted that the Turkey based news media does not fully acknowledge its sources of information. The report remains to be fully corroborated.

According to Yeni Savak:  

General John F. Campbell was one of the top figures who organized and managed the soldiers behind the failed coup attempt in Turkey, sources close to ongoing legal process of pro-coup detainees said.

Campbell also managed more than $2 billion money transactions via UBA Bank in Nigeria by using CIA links to distribute among the pro-coup military personnel in Turkey.

The ongoing investigation unveiled that Campbell had paid at least two secret visits to Turkey since May, until the day of the coup attempt.

The report intimates that General Campbell operated in tandem with  the Fethullah Gülen organization. It also intimates that US intelligence and military were behind the failed coup.

Military sources said Campbell, who was the commander of ISAF between August 26, 2014 and May 1, 2016, had made some top secret meetings in Erzurum military base and Adana İnicrlik Airbase.

İncirlik Airbase has been used by the U.S. Military for conducting the anti-Daesh campaign in Syria.

Military sources said that Campbell was the man, who directed the process of trending / blacklisting the military officers in the base.

If the coup attempt was successful, Campbell would visit Turkey in a short time, according to the sources.

The report also examined the alleged money transactions focussing on the role of  The Nigeria branch of the United Bank of Africa (UBA), which allegedly constituted “the main base for the last six-months of money transactions for the coup plotters”. The report also underscored the role of the CIA in implementing the money transfers

Millions of dollars of money has been transferred from Nigeria to Turkey by a group of CIA personnel.

The money, which has been distributed to an 80-person special team of the CIA, was used to convince pro-coup generals.

More than 2 billion dollars were distributed during the process leading to the coup.

After taking money from their bank accounts, the CIA team hand delivered it to the terrorists under the military dresses.

The money was distributed to military officers who were favorable to the Gullenist cause, according to the report.

“They investigated the soldiers’ trends, their personalities and family background. All soldiers were categorized in three groups: opponents, neutrals, and supporters.”  …

The military personnel who were in a neutral position received a difference in the amount of money, according to the importance of their position and ranks.

The supports who also were categorized as “those who will move with us,” were provided a huge amount of money.

All soldiers and officers in this category were considered as the devoted members of the FETO terror group.

To read the full Yeni Savak article click here

Michel Chossudovsky contributed to this report

The following is an articled written by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and republished by Global Research from the Strategic Culture Foundation on August 14, 2012. Its original title is “The Push to Ignite a Turkish Civil War Through a Syrian Quagmire.” What is explained in the text is that the policy of Turkey in Syria will have self-destructive results that will ultimately hurt Turkey by weakening and dividing it in the future. The failed July 15, 2016  coup in Turkey is to a great degree an accumulation of Ankara’s regional isolation, internal polarization, and “blowback” —ranging from terrorism to reviving problems with the Kurd — from Syria that the 2012 article foretells. 

The Push to Ignite a Turkish Civil War Through a Syrian Quagmire

Turkey itself is a major target for destabilization, upheaval, and finally balkanization through its participation in the US-led siege against Syria. Ankara has burned its bridges in Syria for the sake of its failing neo-Ottoman regional policy. The Turkish government has actively pursued regime change, spied on Syria for NATO and Israel, violated Syrian sovereignty, supported acts of terrorism and lawlessness, and provided logistical support for the insurgency inside Syria.

Any chances of seeing some form of Turkish regional leadership under neo-Ottomanism have faded. Turkey’s southern borders have been transformed into intelligence and logistical hubs for the CIA and the Mossad in the process, complete with an intelligence “nerve centre” in the Turkish city of Adana. Despite Turkey’s denials, reports about Adana are undeniable and Turkish officers have also been apprehended in covert military operations against the Syrian Arab Republic. The Turkish Labour Party has even demanded that the US General Consul in Adana be deported for “masterminding and leading the activities of Syrian terrorists.” Mehmet Ali Ediboglu and Mevlut Dudu, two Turkish MPs, have also testified that foreign fighters have been renting homes on Turkey’s border with Syria and that Turkish ambulances have been helping smuggle weapons for the insurgents inside Syria.

Turkish Regional Isolation

If the Syrian state collapses, neighbouring Turkey will be the biggest loser. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are foolishly aligning Turkey for disaster. Aside from Ankara’s historically bad relations with Armenia, Erdogan has managed to singlehandedly alienate Russia and three of Turkey’s most important neighbours. This has damaged the Turkish economy and disrupted the flow of Turkish goods. There have been clamp downs on activists too in connection with Turkey’s policy against Damascus. The freedom of the Turkish media has been affected as well; Erdogan has moved forward with legislation to restrict media freedoms. Prime Minister Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have even both attacked “reporters who quoted President Assad’s statements in Cumhuriyet, accusing them of treason, because they had questioned the official Turkish account of the Turkish jet shot down by in [sic.] Syria [for spying].”

To Turkey’s eastern flank tensions are building between it and both Iraq and Iran. Baghdad is reviewing its diplomatic ties with the Turkish government, because Ankara is encouraging the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq to act independently of Iraq’s federal government. Erdogan’s government has done this partially as a result of Baghdad’s steadfast opposition to regime change in Syria and in part because of Iraq’s strengthening alliance with Iran. Tehran on the other hand has halted the visa-free entry of Turkish citizens into Iran and warned the Turkish government that it is stoking the flames of a regional fire in Syria that will eventually burn Turkey too.

Growing Internal Divisions in Turkey

Despite all the patriotic speeches being made by the Turkish government to rally the Turkish people against Syria, Turkey is a much divided nation over Erdogan’s hostilities with Damascus. A significant portion of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey or Turkish Meclis and Turkey’s opposition parties have all condemned Erdogan for misleading the Turkish people and stirring their country towards disaster. There is also growing resentment amongst the citizens of Turkey about Erdogan’s cooperation with the US, NATO, Israel, and the Arab dictatorships – like Qatar and Saudi Arabia – against the Syrians and others. The majority of Turkish citizens oppose Turkish ties to Israel, the hosting of NATO facilities in Turkey, the missile shield project, and cooperation with the US in the Middle East.

The Republican People’s Party, Turkey’s second largest political party and its main opposition party, has condemned the government in Ankara over Syria. Their leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has openly accused Prime Minister Erdogan of interfering in the internal affairs of Syria. Kilicdaroglu has been joined by Turkey’s other political parties in the condemnations of Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party. Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, has warned the Turkish government not to drag their country into a war with Syria through intervention. “Some Western countries have put pressure on Turkey for an intervention in Syria. Turkey should not fall into this trap,” Bahceli, who leads the third largest Turkish political party, has warned Erdogan according to the Turkish press. The Peace and Democracy Party, which is the fourth largest Turkish political party, has also clarified that it is against war with Syria. The politician Selahattin Demirtas, who is one of the leaders of the Peace and Democracy Party, has warned that any military intervention by Ankara in Syria would drag Turkey into a broader regional war. Hasan Basri Ozbey, the deputy leader of the Turkish Labour Party, has announced that his political party will file a complaint against Turkish President Abdullah Gul with the Turkish Meclis and the Turkish Higher Court to prosecute Gul, because the Labour Party “has clear evidence that [Gul] incited terrorism and war on Syria and signed a secret agreement with the United States, which alone is groundsfor trial.” Mustafa Kamalak, the leader of the Felicity Party, has even led a Turkish delegation to visit Bashar Al-Assad to show their support for Syria and opposition to Erdogan’s policies.

The mobilization of the Turkish military on the Syrian border as a show of force is a psychological tactic to scare the Syrian regime. Any large-scale military operations against the Syrians would be very dangerous for Turkey and could fragment the Turkish Armed Forces. Segments of the Turkish military are at odds with the Turkish government and the military itself is divided over Turkish foreign policy. Erdogan does not even trust half of Turkey’s own military leaders and has arrested forty of them for planning to overthrow him.  How can he send such a force to even attack neighbouring Syria or think that he can control it during a broader war?

The Dangers of “Blowback” from Syria

While Turkey is trumpeting that it will not allow Kurdish militias to establish bases in northern Syria, the Turkish government is actually facilitating this itself.  There is a real risk of “blowback” from Syria for Turkey. Like Syria, Turkey is a kaleidoscope of various peoples and faiths. The people of Turkey are held together by the primacy of the Turkish language and a shared citizenship. Turkey’s minorities constitute at the very minimum one-third of the country. A significant proportion of Turkey’s minority communities have ties to Syria, Iraq, or Iran.

The Kurds and other similar Iranic peoples alone form about 25% of Turkey’s population, which means one out of four Turkish citizens are of Kurdish and Iranic stock. Other ethnic minorities include Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians, and Greeks. No exact figures have ever been available about Turkey’s Shiite Muslims, because of the historical persecution and restrictions on Shia Muslims in Turkey from Ottoman times. Anywhere from 20% to 30% or more of the Turkish population may be categorized as Shiite Muslims, which includes Alevis, Alawites, and Twelvers. Turkey also has a small Christian minority, some of which have historic or organizational ties to Syria like Turkey’s Alawites and ethnic Arabs. Turkey will be consumed too, one way or another, should a broader sectarian conflict spread from Syria and should the Syrians be violently divided along sectarian fault lines.

The Self-Destructive Nature of Turkish Involvement in Syria

All the factors discussed above are a recipt for disaster. Civil war in Turkey is a real possibility in an increasingly polarized Turkish state. Should Syria burn, Turkey will ultimately burn too. This is why a whole spectrum of Turkish leaders have been warning their country and people that the consequences for the fire that Erdogan, Davutoglu, and Gul are stroking in Syria will have disastrous consequences for Turkey and all the countries bordering Syria.

Erdogan’s government has managed to alienate Turkey from its most important neighbours, hurt the Turkish economy, and destabilize their country’s own borders. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg compared to the damages they could unleash on Turkey. The Turks have been walking into a trap, where they are slated for a self-destructive kamikaze operation against Syria. The US-led siege on Syria intends to create chaos across the entire Middle East and ignite multiple regional conflicts. Violence and conflict from Syria is intended to consume Lebanon and Iraq too. Within this mêlée, Turkey has been slated to be weakened and divided – just as the US, NATO, and Israel have envisaged in their project to create a “new Middle East.”

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an award-winning author, an interdisciplinary sociologist, a geopolitical analyst, and a professor of social sciences. He is the author of The Globalization of NATO (2012) and a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Geopolitica.

To consult the original publication please click here. 

This is an interview I conducted with Professor Yakov M. Rabkin of the Université de Montréal, author of the recently published What Is Modern Israel.

Professor Rabkin’s earlier book on the subject of Israel, entitled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and for the Hecht Prize for Studies of Zionism.

Given all of the books that have been published over the years regarding Israel, what compelled you to write What Is Modern Israel?

My Tokyo publisher. Impressed by the success of the Japanese version of my earlier book, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, in his country (it was listed as the best non-fiction book by the prestigious daily Asahi Shimbun), he asked me to write about modern Israel. It was to be a shorter and more accessible book, aimed at young readers.

In A Threat from Within, I had examined the reasons why Zionism was initially rejected not only by rabbis but also by the vast majority of Jews. In the present book I had to go further. I had to spell out the origins of Zionism, including religious ones, to look at the evolution of Israeli society and its relations with world Jewry, as well as at the roles played by Jews from Russia. The Russian dimension explains many aspects of contemporary Israel that remain otherwise puzzling.

What exactly do you mean by “the Russian dimension”?

While Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was meeting kings and ministers, Jews from the shtetls in the Russian Empire formed the backbone of Zionist settlement in Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently they entrenched themselves in positions of leadership. Even though the Soviet Union did not allow emigration from the 1920s on, over 60 per cent of the members of Israeli parliament in the 1960s were of Russian origin. There has never been a prime minister in Israel who was either not born in the Russian Empire, or whose parents were.

Moreover, a million Russian-speaking Jews settled in Israel in the late 20th century. They are mostly estranged from Judaism; they consider themselves of “the Jewish nationality” and are therefore quite unabashed about ethnic nationalism and the use of force to impose it. Most of them vote for the right and the extreme right parties. Their success in penetrating the highest echelons of power and moving Israeli politics to the nationalist right has been impressive. The recent appointment of Moldova-born Avigdor Lieberman as minister of defence illustrates this accomplishment quite convincingly.

In your book, you delve into the impact of Christian Zionism on the birth of the Israeli state. Is that impact limited only to the early stages of the Zionist project?

No, the role of Christian Zionism did not end with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 or the unilateral proclamation of independence by David Ben-Gurion in 1948. True, certain interpretations of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans argued for the “ingathering [of] the Hebrews” into Palestine as early as the 17th century. This affected the public imagination in the English-speaking countries, particularly those with anti-Semitic prejudices who wanted to get rid of local Jews. This mind-set is clearly reflected in the Balfour Declaration.

This Christian motivation for the Restoration of the Jews in the Promised Land lent a powerful practical impulse to a group of assimilated Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in search of a collective “solution of the Jewish question.” The Judaic hope of Return had been traditionally characterized by an entirely different sensibility and ultimate goal. Jewish tradition holds that this return must be a part of a messianic project rather than a political and a military enterprise. In fact, there was little room for Jewish tradition in the Zionist scheme, which not only originated among Protestants, but was sustained by individuals of Jewish origin who were mostly atheists or agnostics.

A recent Pew poll shows that 82 per cent of white Protestants in the United States believe that “Israel was given to the Jewish people by God.” Only 40 per cent of Jews do. This is why Christian Zionists constitute a much more reliable source of political and financial support for Israel than Jews. Recent Israeli governments and settlers in the territories, which Israel conquered in 1967, have developed close ties with major organizations such as Christians United for Israel. Its leader, Pastor John Hagee, claims that his organization represents 50 million people. This is nearly four times more than the entire Jewish population of the world, which is estimated at 14 million. And one should also take into account the millions of Christian Zionists in Latin America, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

What do you make of Israel’s claim that it represents all of the world’s Jews? Can you elaborate on the distinctions between Judaism and Zionism?

The Jews of Israel constitute about one half of the world’s Jewish population. But Israeli leaders have consistently claimed that they speak on behalf of all Jews since, in their view, the Zionist state somehow belongs to Jews around the world, even though these Jews exhibit no desire to move to Israel and are citizens of their respective countries. The claim to represent all Jews is politically empty, but is an effective tool to blur fundamental differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Jews and the state of Israel. This claim therefore holds Jews hostage to Israel’s political and military behaviour.

It is quite clear that anti-Jewish violence in Europe and elsewhere is fuelled by the conflict in Israel/Palestine. For the Zionists, this is a win-win situation because this violence breeds insecurity and destabilizes Jewish communities. This, in turn, results in emigration, some of it in the direction of Israel, a country that needs Jews in order to ensure a non-Palestinian majority there. Currently, Palestinians constitute a majority on the land controlled by Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What can bring about a just peace in Israel/Palestine, given the steady rightward trend of the Israeli electorate?

Outside pressure. This is the consensus of Israeli peace activists. The Israeli government also understands this and is behind unprecedented legislation in several Western countries forbidding boycotts of Israel and its exports. Western governments permit Israel to act with impunity, but this policy suffers from a serious democratic deficit: citizens of most countries in Europe and North America view Israel very critically and consider it a threat to world peace. It is this grassroots pressure that may help Israel decide to embrace decency and peace.

These viewpoints are not widely known here. Who published and who distributes your book?

The publisher, Pluto Press of London, takes care of Europe; the University of Chicago Press distributes my book in the United States; and in Canada it is Brunswick Books. Whereas my previous book– A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism–has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, the new one has so far appeared in Japanese, French, Russian, and, finally, in English.

Articles 1 of the UN Charter of 1945 gives the purpose & principles of the UN – maintain international peace & security, take effective collective measures to prevent & remove threats to peace, suppress acts of aggression or other breaches of peace, bring about by peaceful means in conformity with principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which may lead to breach of peace. UN bound to develop friendly relations among nations, strengthen universal peace, achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of economic, social, cultural or humanitarian, promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction of race, sex, language or religion & be the centre for harmonizing the actions of nations to attain these common ends.

Article 2 declares that the UN is based on the principle of sovereign equality to all Members, that all Members shall settle international disputes by peaceful means so that international peace is not endangered. All Members shall refrain from threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The most important of which is ‘Nothing contained in the Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially with the domestic jurisdiction of any state’.

 Now ask yourself has the UN abided by the clauses of the UN charter and have the US, UK & NATO nations honoured these clauses.

The answer is a sad NO.

Since 1945 the UN has ignored all of West’s state sponsored terrorism while allowing the West to charge other nations and even endorsed sanctions leading to further deaths and suffering.

What is the use of a UN that ignores the bulk of crimes that exist in the world because of West’s incursions resulting in the exodus of internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers and a host of issues which invariably open up opportunities for West’s mercenaries and missionaries in the form of NGOs and corporations to enter the very nations they have destroyed claiming to offer solutions.  This hypocritical nature of world domination needs to stop. As we can all see it is fairly evident that the Islamic jihadists themselves are well trained mercenaries tasked to do an objective and using Islam in lieu of the ‘Communist’ tag the West used to destroy nations of Asia including the USSR. A West that boasts equality, transparency and justice has been ousting every leftist thinking political leader branding them as ‘communist’ ‘dictator’ while totally ignoring the state terrorism inflicted by them.

The following list is taken from an article by James Lucas “US has killed more than 20million people in 37 victim nations since World War 2” should give readers a fair idea of what the UN has been ignoring and what the West has been committing and this should suffice to say it is time for UNexit and time for UN to wind up for it has failed the rest of the World by becoming an appeasing puppet to Western neo-colonial politics.

Afghanistan 

• US lured Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan
• US armed the Mujahideen from which Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda was later created
• US spent $5-6billion for this exercise
• US-CIA has since captured the heroin market and is one of the core reasons for US presence in Afghanistan
• 9/11 was an excuse to invade Afghanistan so that the West could tap its natural resources and build a commercial pipeline – all corporate interests satisfied in the name of America
• Over 1million people have died to date

UN FAILS AFGHANISTAN

Cambodia

• Bombed on orders of US Presidents
• Villages destroyed, internal displacement, refugees
• US & UK helped Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot to power.
• 2.5m were killed

UN FAILS CAMBODIA

East Timor

• 1975 – US President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger arrive in Indonesia and give Suharto permission to invade East Timor
• 1991 – 217 East Timorese protested at memorial in Dili (many were children) US trained Commando Subianto (son-in-law of Suharto) gunned them and threw bodies to sea
• 200,000 out of 700,000 population killed

UN FAILS EAST TIMOR

Indonesia

• Gen. Sukarno replaced by Gen. Suharto in 1965 coup helped by US
• CIA gives Indonesian Army 5000 names to kill
• US provided Indonesia $400m in economic aid and sold tens of millions in weaponry from 1993-1997.
• 500,000 – 3million killed

UN FAILS INDONESIA

Korea (North & South)

• US propaganda showcase Soviet ordering North Korea to attack South Korea to enable US to attack North Korea even before UN resolution passed
• US uses Napalm
• John H Kim, US veteran “the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million civilians – both South and North Koreans – at many locations throughout Korea…It is reported that the U.S. dropped some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm bombs, during the Korean War.”(The Korean War)
• 1.8m – 4.5m dead (South Koreans, North Koreans & Chinese)

UN FAILS NORTH KOREA

Laos

• During 1965-73 Vietnam War, US dropped 2million tons of bombs on Laos (This was more than what both sides in World War 2 used)
• US military intervention in Laos started in 1950s with US recruiting 40,000 Laotians to oppose leftist political leader Pathet Lao who came into power in 1975
• 200,000 dead

UN FAILS LAOS

Nepal

• Civil war increased after arrival of 8400 American M-16 submachine guns and US advisors
• 2002 another civil war – George Bush passes Bill authorizing $20m military aid
• US helped draft Nepals new constitution
• 8000-12,000 killed since 1996

UN FAILS NEPAL

Angola

• US oppose UN recognition of Angola in 1977
• US approves material support to UNITA to overthrow govt in 1986
• US intervenes using intervention of Cuban troops to Angola
• Prof. Gkleijeses of John Hopkins University says Cuban intervened as CIA financed covert invasion via Zaire (Congo)
• 300,000-750,000 deaths

UN FAILS ANGOLA

Chad

• CIA helps Hissen Habre come to power in 1982 and rule till 1990
• Belgium opens case (allowing victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities abroad) against Habre in 2003 – US response was to threaten Belgium it would lose status as NATO headquarters if proceedings were allowed.
• 40,000 killed – 200,000 tortured

UN FAILS CHAD

Democratic Republic of Congo (Formerly Zaire)

• King Leopold of Belgium murder of Congolese began in 1879 killing 10m in over 20 years.
• Congo gained independence in 1960
• Patrice Lumumba became first Prime Minister
• Lumumba was assassinated by US UK
• West funds civil war supporting mercenaries. US gave $15m military supplies to Zairian President Mobutu to defend himself against rival operating in Angola inspite of US State Dept condemning him for human rights violations.·   Congressional report of 2001 linked an American company to George Bush Snr for fanning war in Congo for monetary gains. Over 125 companies are out to loot the resources in Zaire/Congo (Coltan is one resource needed to manufacture cell phones)

UN FAILS CONGO

Bolivia

• 1970s – Bolivia nationalize 10 mines and distributes lands
• US responds by training Hugo Banzer at US School of the America’s in Panama to stage a coup and came to power with US assistance in 1971

UN FAILS BOLIVIA

Chile

• CIA intervened in 1958-1964 elections
• 1970 – Socialist Savador Allende becomes President – US wanted military coup before inauguration. Chile’s Army Chief Schneider refused. CIA attempted to assassinate Schneider and succeed
• President Nixon sponsored guerilla warfare and in 1973 Allende was assassinated
• US replaced with puppet Pinochet who ruled for 17 years.
• 3000 Chileans killed – many more disappeared

UN FAILS CHILE

Colombia

• US state sponsored terrorism – Refer HRW report 1994 & 1996 HRW report “Assassination squads in Colombia’ revealing CIA agents helped train undercover agents in anti-subversive activity in 1991.
• 67,000 deaths since 1960s

UN FAILS COLOMBIA

Cuba

• Bay of Pigs invasion 18 April 1961, 114 of invading force was killed. 1189 taken prisoners other escaped to waiting US ships.
• Other estimates 1800 killed by napalm.
• 2000-4000 Cuban forces killed.

UN FAILS CUBA

Dominican Republic

• Juan Bosch became President in 1962 and began land reforms & public works
• 7 months later CIA deposed him
• Bosch planned a comeback in 1965, CIA invaded using 22,000 soldiers and marines – the excuse given was to protect the foreigners!
• 3000 Dominicans died from US invasion

UN FAILS DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

El Salvador

• Civil War 1981-1992 financed by $6b in US aid.
• US military advisors taught methods of torture on teenage prisoners.
• Government soldiers were graduates of US School of the Americas.
• The 1993 UN Truth Commission revealed that 96% of human rights violations were by Salvadoran army (who had been trained by US)
• 75,000 people killed

UN FAILS EL SALVADOR

Grenada

• US destabalizing of Grenada began in 1979 when Maurice Bishop became President.
• He was overthrown in 1983 for not joining anti-Cuba calls
• Excuse given was Grenada building airport that would be used to attack UK and lives of American students in Grenada was in danger.

UN FAILS GRENADA

Guatemala

• Jacobo Arbenz became President in 1951 he took over land used by United Fruit Company, the company hired mercenaries and a CIA coup in 1954 ousted him from office.
• Military government of 1981-83 financed by US that destroyed 400 Mayan villages
• Over 200,000 killed from civil wars

UN FAILS GUATEMALA

Haiti

• Papa Doc Duvalier ruled from 1957-1986.
• His son took over – both influenced by CIA and popular movements suppressed.
• 30,000-100,000 killed

UN FAILS HAITI

Honduras

• CIA supported Battalion 316 which kidnapped, tortured & killed hundreds of Hondurans in 1980s.
• Shock and suffocation devices used for interrogations, prisoners kept naked, killed & buried in unmarked graves. (declassified documents are evidence)

 UN FAILS HONDURAS

Hungary

• US radio helped in raising Hungarians against the Soviets in 1956 giving tactical advice on how to fight the Soviets.

UN FAILS HUNGARY

Iran

• US provided military support for Iraq during Iran-Iraq war 1988 firing missiles on a civilian flight that killed 290.
• 262,000 dead (1980-88)

UN FAILS IRAN

Iraq

• 1980-88 : 105,000 dead – US provided Iraq billions including biological agents to defeat Iran. US did not want either side to win
• 1990-2003 : 200,000 Iraqis died in vain – US-Iraq war – Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 believing it was what US wanted. Iraq had fallen into trap and US imposed sanctions. To win over American public the Kuwait ambassador to US falsely testified to Congress that Iraqi troops were pulling plugs on incubators
• US air assault on Iraq in 1991 lasted 42 days. US dropped 400 tons of depleted uranium – US and NATO bombs targeted civilian infrastructure
• The 1991 Gulf War was to save Kuwait from Iraq. That was the official story sold to the world. Saddam Hussein however believes the US cajoled him into invading Kuwait. (Iraq claims that Kuwait was part of the Ottoman Empire) In 1991 – 120,000 sorties were launched and 265,000 bombs were dropped in Iraq. The great majority of the Coalition’s military forces were from the U.S., with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Egypt as leading contributors, in that order. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid around US$32 billion of the US$60 billion cost to bomb a fellow Muslim nation.
• UN sanctions responsible for deaths of over 560,000 children (FAO) / 1999 – 5000 Iraqi children died monthly from sanctions (UNICEF)
• 2003 – to date – 654,000 deaths
• 9/11 was the excuse to attack Iraq claiming WMD and to save Iraq from dictator Saddam
• In 2003 – US launched ‘shock & awe’ on Baghdads 5million populace. Iraq was subjected to 41,000 sorties and 27,000 bombs dropped

UN FAILS IRAQ

Israel-Palestinian War

• US supports Israel and uses its veto powers to stop resolutions against Israel.
• 100,000-200,000 from both sides

UN FAILS ISRAEL AND PALESTINIANS

Nicaragua

• 1981-1990 about 25000 Nicaraguans died from armed struggle between Sandinista government & Contra rebels using CIA assassination manuals
• CIA armed Contras

UN FAILS NICARAGUA

Pakistan

• 1971 US helped West Pakistan invade East Pakistan and led to India invading East Pakistan (creating Bangladesh)
• Estimates are that 3 million died
• US supplied $411m to create West Pakistan’s armed forces – during war US supplied $15m in arms

UN FAILS PAKISTAN

Panama

• 1989 US troops invade Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega (former CIA agent)
• 500-4000 people killed

UN FAILS PANAMA

Paraguay

• Operation Condor was a secret intelligence and operations system created in the 1970s to destroy the “subversive threat” from the left and defend “Western, Christian civilization.” – U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy to pre-empt or reverse social movements demanding political or socioeconomic change.
• Operation Condor employed a computerized database of thousands of individuals considered politically suspect and had archives of photos, microfilms, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on membership in organizations, personal and political histories, and lists of friends and family members, as well as files on all manner of organizations. Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system

UN FAILS PARAGUAY

Philippines

• US has been controlling Philippines for over 100 years
• 1969 Symington Committee in US Congress revealed how war material was sent for counter-insurgency with US Special Forces and US Marines playing active role.
• 100,000 are said to have been executed or disappeared under President Marcos

UN FAILS PHILIPPINES

Sudan

• 1955 Sudan gained independence
• 1978 Sudan discovers oil & Sudan became 6^th largest recipient of US military aid.
• Over 2million people killed from ongoing wars
• US supporting efforts to overthrow central government
• August 1998 US bombed Khartoum with 75 cruise missiles claiming to target a chemical weapons factory owned by Osama bin Laden (it was actually a pharmaceutical supplies plant leading to tens of thousands dying for lack of medicines – this was the real US objective)
• 1999 US Secretary of State Madeline Albright met Sudan Peoples Liberation Army leader and offered food supplies in exchange for him to refuse peace plan sponsored by Egypt and Libya
• Foreign oil companies have been accused of complicity in depopulation of villages.

UN FAILS SUDAN

Vietnam

• US opposed agreement to unify North & South Vietnam and brought Catholic Ngo Diem to power in South Vietnam in a country of majority Buddhists.
• 1964 CIA fabricated story of Vietnam attacking US ship in Gulf of Tonkin to justify US action against Vietnam
• US Operation Phoenix terrorized South Vietnam – 1968 My Lai massacre is just one of America’s gruesome murders
• 7.8million deaths Vietnam War
• Estimated deaths of Cambodia & Laos was 2.7m

UN FAILS VIETNAM

Yugoslavia

• After USSR was dissolved US & Germany wanted to convert Yugoslavia’s economy to a capitalist one but ethnic and religious differences stood in between.
• The answer was to create independent nations run by West
• Over 107,000 estimated deaths from conflicts in Bosnia, Krajina, Croatia, Kosovo

UN FAILS YUGOSLAVIA

Libya

• Since when did a UN allow nations with blood on hands to remove dictators after the lies of Iraq?
• A leader of a nation was killed mercilessly and the world just looked on
• Lies & distortions were all part of another useless intervention that has destroyed Libya and the people.
• Today Libya is a devastated nation thanks to the West and UN

UN FAILS LIBYA

Syria

• It is very clear that Syria’s rebels just like Libya’s are hired mercenaries trained, armed and financed by the West to oust Syria’s leader.
• The appeals by the Syrian government to the UN has failed.
• UN has been accused of bias against Syria
• Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) says U.S. drones kill hundreds of innocent civilians
• A 12 year boy was recently beheaded by the ‘moderates’ that the US are arming.

UN FAILS SYRIA

Since 1945 while the UN was tasked to overlook world peace – the US and fellow Western nations have been responsible for – covert operations, using depleted uranium, napalm, intervening in elections, overthrowing democratically elected leaders & replacing them with puppets, arm twisting Third World leaders to sell national assets to Western corporates, arming, financing and training terrorists, funding terrorist groups,  funding propaganda lies, using mercenaries, enlisting NGOs to do dirty work, creating schools to train in methods of torture, firing at civilian flights, killing civilians from drones and excusing as collateral damage, targeting civilian infrastructure, ruining ancient historical sites (cultural genocide), bogus military interventions on pretext of humanitarian causes – what is even more horrifying is that the US declassified documents boasting of its escapes and CIA and Western intelligence even admits openly to these involvement but no criminal proceedings are taken against the West by the UN. Is the UN the West’s puppet court? And to add to the hypocrisy 8 months after coming into power the US President Obama is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize…. Do we laugh or cry?

Are we to continue with the UN so that the West can now turn its bloody hands on Asia having ruined Latin America, Africa, parts of Eastern Europe & presently the Middle East? Should this Western puppet of racism with welcome hands only for western-worshipping Asian/African sepoys be allowed to do to Asia what they have done to the rest of the world? Let us not forget that we are already carrying the burdens of close to 500 years of colonial legacy do we want to walk into a neo-colonial one too?

Notes

1. Complete report – http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%9314)
3. Timeline of CIA atrocities – http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-timeline-of-cia-atrocities/5348804

 

We are pleased to announce that excerpts from the Chilcot Report by the British Iraq Inquiry Committee have been submitted to the Ninth Circuit in support of the plaintiff’s case in Saleh v. Bush, et al.

What is the current status of the case?

Currently, Saleh v. Bush is on appeal before the Ninth Circuit.  Ms. Saleh’s lawsuit in federal court against US government leaders named as Defendants — George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz — was dismissed in December 2014 after the district court immunized the Defendants, ruling they were acting within the lawful scope of their employment when they planned and executed the Iraq War.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair shaking hands with Defendant-Appellee George W. Bush.

Ms. Saleh is arguing on appeal that the Defendants should not be immunized. She alleges that the Defendants  were acting from personally held convictions that the US should invade Iraq, regardless of any legitimate policy reasons. Specifically, she is pointing to a record of statements made by some of the Defendants in leading neoconservative outlets in which they called for the military overthrow of the Hussein regime as early as 1997.

She is also arguing that Bush administration officials knowingly lied to the public by fraudulently tying Hussein to Al Qaida and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Such misrepresentations would also make them personally liable for their conduct under relevant law.

The Ninth Circuit has not indicated when it will issue a ruling on the appeal.

What is the Chilcot Report?

The Chilcot Report is the final report issued by the Iraq Inquiry, a committee established by the British Government in 2009 to investigate what happened during the run up to the Iraq War. Composed of British “privy counsellors,” the report was released on July 6, 2016 after more than 6 years of investigation, research, and drafting.

Why is the Chilcot Report important to the Saleh v. Bush lawsuit?

The Chilcot Report contains (i) factual conclusions by the privy counsellors about what happened during the run up to the Iraq War, (ii) actual documentation (including written notes between Blair and Bush) that show a plan to go to war in Iraq as early as October 2001, and (iii) statements of international law by distinguished experts who have concluded that the Iraq War was illegal and constituted aggression against Iraq.

What are some of the pieces of evidence submitted to the Ninth Circuit?

These are some of the excerpts that we highlighted for the Ninth Circuit as evidence that the Iraq War was illegal, and that government leaders were not acting within the lawful scope of their employment authority when they planned and executed the Iraq War:

Conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry Committee:

24. President Bush decided at the end of 2001 to pursue a policy of regime change in Iraq.

68. On 26 February 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, advised that the US Administration had concluded that containment would not work, was drawing up plans for a military campaign later in the year, and was considering presenting Saddam Hussein with an ultimatum for the return of inspectors while setting the bar “so high that Saddam Hussein would be unable to comply.”

74. Mr Straw’s advice of 25 March proposed that the US and UK should seek an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to re-admit weapons inspectors. That would provide a route for the UK to align itself with the US without adopting the US objective of regime change. This reflected advice that regime change would be unlawful.

89. Sir Richard Dearlove reported that he had been told that the US had already taken a decision on action – “the question was only how and when;” and that he had been told it intended to set the threshold on weapons inspections so high that Iraq would not be able to hold up US policy.

Conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry Committee related to the legal analysis of the British government leading up to the war:

289. Despite being told that advice was not needed for Mr Blair’s meeting with President Bush on 31 January, Lord Goldsmith wrote on 30 January to emphasise that his view remained that resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the Security Council.

344. Mr Wood had warned Mr Straw on 24 January that “without a further decision by the Council, and absent extraordinary circumstances”, the UK would not be able lawfully to use force against Iraq.

348. Mr Wood wrote that Kosovo was “no precedent”: the legal basis was the need to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe; no draft resolution had been put to the Security Council; and no draft had been vetoed. He hoped there was: “… no doubt in anyone’s mind that without a further decision of the Council, and absent extraordinary circumstances (of which at present there is no sign), the United Kingdom cannot lawfully use force against Iraq to ensure compliance with its SCR WMD obligations. To use force without Security Council authority would amount to the crime of aggression.”

579. Lord Goldsmith recognised that there was a possibility of a legal challenge

Underlying statements and facts relied on by the Iraq Inquiry Committee

15 January 2010 Statement by Foreign & Commonwealth Office legal advisor Sir Michael Wood to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law. In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorized by the Security Council, and had no other legal basis in international law.

18 January 2010 Statement by Foreign & Commonwealth Office legal advisor Elizabeth Wilmshurst to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

I regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal, and I therefore did not feel able to continue in my post. I would have been required to support and maintain the Government’s position in international fora. The rules of international law on the use of force by States are at the heart of international law. Collective security, as opposed to unilateral military action, is a central purpose of the Charter of the United Nations. Acting contrary to the Charter, as I perceived the Government to be doing, would have the consequence of damaging the United Kingdom’s reputation as a State committed to the rule of law in international relations and to the United Nations.

12 July 2010 Statement by Carne Ross, First Secretary of the U.K. Permanent Mission to the U.N. to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.

October 11, 2001 message from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush

I have no doubt we need to deal with Saddam. But if we hit Iraq now, we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half of the EU …

However, I am sure we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date. My suggestion is, in order to give ourselves space that we say: phase 1 is the military action focused on Afghanistan because it’s there that perpetrators of 11 September hide. Phase 2 is the medium and longer term campaign against terrorism in all its forms. …

(Mr. Blair was apparently discussing with Defendant-Appellee Bush regime change in Iraq just one month after the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Mr. Blair’s suggestion for “phase 1” of the U.S.-U.K. strategy on the war on terrorism to first direct military action toward “Afghanistan because it’s there that perpetrators of 11 September hide,” further supports allegations that U.S. officials used an unrelated terrorist attack to execute a pre-existing plan of regime change in Iraq.  Mr. Blair then went on to discuss a “phase 2” that would include invading Iraq).

December 4, 2001 message from  former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush

Iraq is a threat because it has WMD capability … But any link to 11 September and AQ [Al Qaeda] is at best very tenuous; and at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK, to support immediate military action … So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time. …

(This note supports allegations that U.S. government leaders were aware that Iraq had no link to the 9/11 attacks or Al Qaeda and support allegations that U.S. government leaders made false statements to the public about the threat Iraq posed, or its connection to Al Qaeda, in order to support a war and satisfy personally-held objectives of regime change that had no legitimate policy underpinning)

July 28, 2002 message from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush:

I will be with you, whatever …

The Evidence. Again, I have been told the US thinks this unnecessary. But we still need to make the case. If we recapitulate all the WMD evidence; add his attempts to secure nuclear capability; and, as seems possible, add on Al Qaida link, it will be hugely persuasive over here.

(This note confirms that U.S. government official’s intent to invade Iraq was well-formed by July 2002. Mr. Blair’s July 2002 note to George W. Bush observed that U.S. officials thought evidence supporting regime change was “unnecessary” and that an “Al Qaida link” could be simply be tacked onto government messaging in order to sell the war).

Statements by legal experts who have concluded that the Iraq War was illegal

10 September 2010 Submission by Philippe Sands QC to the Iraq Inquiry Committee

Distinguished members of the legal community in the United Kingdom have also concluded without ambiguity that the war was unlawful.

9 September 2010 Statement by Professor Nicholas Grief to the Iraq Inquiry Committee (emphasis added).

A second Security Council resolution specifically and unambiguously authorising military action was required. The vague warning of ‘serious consequences’ in resolution 1441 did not suffice, and to interpret resolution 678 as granting the necessary authority was not ‘good faith’ interpretation as required by international law. Without such a resolution, the invasion of Iraq constituted an act of aggression, contrary to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

What happens next?

The Department of Justice has indicated that it will oppose the filing of these portions from the Chilcot Report with the Ninth Circuit. We will circulate the DOJ opposition once it has been filed.

Over the past few days, Feronia Inc., a Canadian-based company majority-owned by European and US development banks, has been pressuring local communities to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would endorse the company’s continued operation and expansion of oil palm plantations within their territories.

Despite severe pressure and intimidation, the communities have rejected the MOU and are appealing for international support to demand that Feronia respect their decision.

They are calling especially on the development banks or funds, which have a combined control of over 80 per cent of Feronia’s shares, to respect their own internal guidelines regarding the free, prior and informed consent of communities. The development institutions with investments in Feronia include: the CDC of the UK; the AFD and Proparco of France; the AECID of Spain; OPIC of the US; BIO of Belgium; DEG of Germany; FMO of the Netherlands; and SECO of Switzerland.

The order of events

On 8 March 2015, over 60 customary chiefs and other community leaders from across the district of Yahuma, where 90 per cent of Feronia’s Lokutu plantations are located, gathered in the town of Mozité to call for the resolution of their longstanding grievances against Feronia. In a declaration, they stated that the company had never consulted them about the use of their lands and had no right to be there.

“We demand, first and foremost, the start of negotiations to reclaim our rights over the lands that have been illegally taken from us over the past 104 years”, they stated in the declaration. “We want to be compensated, and only afterwards can we proceed to discussions over a memorandum of understanding”.

Since then, several conflicts with Feronia have occurred, as the company has tried to send surveyors into the territories of the communities without their consent.

On 18 July 2016 a delegation of high level provincial authorities and elected officials was dispatched to Mozité to get the communities to agree to an MOU. One of the elected officials participating in this delegation was present during the 8 March 2015 meeting in Mozité and received a copy of the community’s declaration.

Sources within the delegation confirm that the objective of the delegation was to secure community consent to allow Feronia to resume with its land surveying activities. The sources also confirmed that the mission was paid for by Feronia and that the delegation was sent on orders from Kinshasa.

At the initial meetings with the delegation in the village of Mozité, the communities categorically rejected the proposed MOU. The delegation continued to pressure the communities to sign an MOU over the next days until 21 July 2015, when the communities once again refused to sign an MOU and the delegation finally abandoned its mission.

DFIs violate their guidelines

The development finance institutions that effectively own Feronia have guidelines that the companies they invest in must follow in their negotiations with local communities over lands. The current efforts to pressure the communities in Lokutu to sign an MOU are in direct violation of these guidelines.

The development finance institutions should therefore take immediate measures to force Feronia to respect the rights and demands of the local communities and to stop pressuring the communities to sign an MOU. The DFIs must also take measures to ensure the security of community leaders who have been intimidated because of their opposition to the signature of an MOU with Feronia.

Feronia has yet to respect the community’s clear demand that the company provide them with evidence of the legal rights that it claims to have to operate on their lands.

International support

RIAO-RDC and its international partners support the demands of the communities for the return of their lands.

RIAO-RDC and its international partners call on the Government of the DRC to fulfil its responsibilities and ensure the security of the affected communities and their leaders who are now under threat of disappearance and other acts of intimidation and call on the provincial assembly in Kisangani to leave the communities to freely and peacefully seek their rights and to refrain from pressuring communities to sign agreements with companies that affect their control over their lands.

RIAO-RDC and its international partners are calling for an international fact finding mission to investigate and report on the situation of the communities living within the areas affected by the operations of Feronia Inc in the DRC.

For more information please contact:

Jean-Francois Mombia Atuku, RIAO-RDC, +221 773 469621

Ange David Baimey, GRAIN, +233 269 089432

 

Meanwhile At The Democratic National Convention In Philly…

By Tyler Durden, July 25 2016

With the Republican and Democrat party conventions in progress or upcoming, it has now become clear that the 2016 USA presidential election is unlike preceding elections in recent decades. Large percentages of those who consider themselves members of either party do not approve of their presidential candidates, for one thing. That includes more than a third of both Republican and Democrat voters. For another, both candidates have assumed positions on issues that in previous elections would have been considered anathema to the dominant ruling economic and political elites.

Clinton had to know and be actively complicit with former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with other top party officials, in rigging the electoral process in her favor – handing her the nomination Tuesday night.

The traditional roll call of state delegates is pro forma pomp and circumstance, a tedious exercise, boring to watch, the outcome predetermined last year.

Hillary is called the most powerful woman in America, selected last year before announcing her candidacy to be Democrat party standard bearer.

It’s inconceivable for massive fraud on her behalf to have happened without her full knowledge, support, encouragement and complicity. She had to know and be actively involved – calling the shots as Democrat party leader.

Add another racketeering charge to her rap sheet. Her criminal history since the 1990s makes her the most villainous aspirant for president in US history.

How any thinking person can support her is beyond comprehension. A simple review of her despicable criminal record as me-first lady, US senator and secretary of state is easily accessible online, in literally dozens of articles I’ve written about her and husband Bill, along with what other reliable independent sources have reported.

Avoid cheerleading media scoundrels – the New York Times most prominent in praising her despicable record, suppressing her high crimes, inventing her nonexistent qualifications for president.

However short Trump falls as someone worthy of the nation’s highest office, at least he’s not Hillary. Some national polls now show him ahead – though with over three month’s before November’s election, a lifetime in US politics, anything can change many times between now and election day.

Preventing a Clinton presidency is top priority in US electoral history. Trump could win and still lose – Bush v. Gore and Bush v. Kerry perhaps the two most notorious examples. In 2000 and 2004, the winner lost and loser won, accomplished by massive fraud.

Electoral rigging handed Clinton the Democrat nomination – perhaps the process to be repeated to make her president.

With it, she becomes commander-in-chief of America’s military – a ruthlessly dangerous war goddess with her finger on its nuclear trigger, nothing preventing her from squeezing it.

Voting for Clinton is a crap shoot for global war with nuclear weapons – perhaps with loaded dice assuring it.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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