Global Research

In the light of the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, there has been much talk about the clouding of US-Russian relations. Some voices in the Internet’s alternative media have pointed to the possibility that these conflicts might lead to a new major war, while social networks like Twitter saw the usage of the hashtags #WorldWarIII and #WorldWar3 explode after Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 jet in the vicinity of the Syrian border. Headlines in mainstream media outlets like Foreign Policy and the Guardian also proclaimed, “Welcome to Cold War III” and asked “are we going back to the bad old days?”.

This article suggests that although the ideological division of the Cold War ended de facto with the collapse of the Soviet Union, American geopolitical schemes to contain Russian power abroad have never really been abandoned. Throughout the 1990s and until today, US policymakers have been determined to wage overt or covert proxy wars with the aim of curbing its former adversary’s political, economic, and military influence. Chechnya, Ukraine, and Syria are the key spots where the logic of this second Cold War is played out.

A short glance over the state of the world today and its representation in the media suffices to identify a growing number of actual and potential centers of conflicts:

Civil war is raging in parts of Ukraine, military tensions are growing in the South Chinese Sea, and the Middle East is more of a mess than ever. Nonetheless, some have suggested that the actual number of armed conflicts has actually reached a historical low. But this assertion is solely based on statistical preference. It is true that interstate (conflicts between two or more states) wars are on the decline. Instead, wars today are much more likely to take the form of intrastate conflicts between governments and insurgents, rather than national armies fighting over territory. As demonstrated to an outstanding degree in Syria, these conflicts are more and more internationalized and involve a bulk of non-state actors and countries who try to reach their goals through proxies rather than direct involvement, which would require “boots on the ground.”

But let’s start at the end. The end of the Cold War, that is. The situation during the years of systemic antagonism between the Eastern and Western Blocs has sometimes been captured in the image of three separate “worlds”: the capitalist First World, the socialist Second World, and a Third World. The latter term was not used as a marker for impoverishment and instability as it is commonly understood today, but as a postcolonial alternative “third way” for those newly independent states that struggled to avoid their renewed absorption by the two towering ideological empires. One strategy through which developing countries attempted to duck the neocolonial policies of the Cold War Blocs was by founding the informal Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in 1961, initiated by India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia. Counting 120 members as of now—in fact a large part of the global South—the movement’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonial stance has lost much of its bargaining power after the end of the Cold War.

Still, the final document of the movement’s 1998 summit in Durban, South Africa suggests that the end of the long-standing bipolar power configuration has by no means led to the betterment of those countries’ situation. Unipolar American dominance and the collapse of the Soviet Union instigated what was understood to be “a worrisome and damaging uni-polarity in political and military terms that is conducive to further inequality and injustice and, therefore, to a more complex and disquieting world situation.” This analysis turned out to be correct in many respects, particularly concerning the period of the 1990s.

While the Clinton years of domestic prosperity saw the US economy achieve the rarity of a budget surplus, the citizens of its erstwhile antagonist were (probably with the exception of Boris Yeltsin) experiencing the more sobering effects of Russia’s political and economic paradigm shift. Democratic Russia struggled to consolidate its deeply shaken economy in an environment ripe with organized crime, crippling corruption, and under the doubtful patronage of oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky who controlled the influential television channel ORT and whom Ron Unz in “Our American Pravda” described as “the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s.”

The actual situation in the former Soviet heartland during the 1990s was utterly different from what American elites and media often depicted as a “golden age” of newfound democracy and a ballooning private sector. From the perspective of many US elites, the country’s plundering by oligarchs, ruthless criminal gangs, kleptocratic politicians, and corrupt military officers was welcomed as a convenient, self-fulfilling mechanism to permanently destabilize its mortally wounded adversary. But Russia never completed all the stages of collapse, not least because Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin eventually took legal action to put such “businessmen” like Roman Abramovich and Berezovsky out of business. The latter was forced to seek refuge in London, from where he threatened to use his £850m private fortune to plot “a new Russian revolution” and violently remove his former protégé from the Kremlin.

The chaotic and aimless term of the alcoholic Yeltsin is often regarded as a chiefly positive time in which the East and the West closed ranks, although politicians and neoconservative think tanks in reality conducted the political and economic sellout of Russia during these years. The presidency of Vladimir Putin, while anything but perfect and with its own set of domestic issues, still managed to halt the nation’s downward spiral in many areas. Nevertheless, it is persistently depicted by Western elites and their “Pravda” as dubious, “authoritarian,” and semi-democratic at best.

Thus, in spite of Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist proclamation of the “End of History” after the fall of the Berlin wall that supposedly heralded the universal rein of liberal democracy, the legacy of the Cold War is anything but behind us. Ostensibly, the current geopolitical situation with its fragmented, oblique, and often contradictory constellations and fault lines is utterly different from the much more straightforward Cold War dualism. Of the Marxist ideology only insular traces remain today, watered down and institutionalized in China, exploited in a system of nationalistic iconography in Cuba, and arranged around an absurdly twisted personality cult in North Korea. As of 2015, Russia is an utterly capitalistic nation, highly integrated in the globalized economy and particularly interdependent with the members of the European economic zone. Its military clout and budget ($52 billion) are dwarfed by US military spending of $598.5 billion in 2015. Even more importantly, after 1991 Russia had to close down or abandon many of its important bases, ports and other military installations as a result of the NATO’s eastward expansion.

Nevertheless, the sheer size of its territory and its command of a substantial nuclear weapon arsenal, cement Russia’s role as a primary threat to American national interests. This is illustrated by the fact that since three and a half decades, the US has covertly supported radical Islamic movements with the goal to permanently destabilize the Russian state by entrapping it in a succession of messy and virtually unwinnable conflicts. Pursued openly during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, this scheme continued to be employed throughout the 1990s during both Chechen Wars, as well as in Russia’s so-called “near abroad” spheres of influence: Dagestan, Ingushetia, South Ossetia, and other former Soviet vassal republics in the Caucasus, which have constantly suffered from extremists who exploit the lack of governmental pervasion in their remote mountain regions. These regions are home to over 25 million ethnic Russians and important components of the country’s economy. After the Soviet-Afghan War and the CIA’s buildup of Osama bin-Laden’s “resistance fighters,” American policymakers recognized the destabilizing potential inherent in the volatile political and sectarian configurations in the Islamic countries that encircle the post-Soviet Russian borderlands.

Hence, despite many political ceremonies, pledges of cooperation, and the opening of Moscow’s first McDonalds in 1990, this policy was never fully abandoned. As a matter of fact, peaceful political coexistence and economic convergence never were the primary goals. Democratic Russia with its allies, military potential, and possible Eurasian trade agreements that threaten to isolate or hamper US hegemony was and still is considered a menace to American ambitions of unipolar, universal dominance.

Since the First Chechen War in 1994, Russia’s prolonged struggle against Islamic terrorism has for the most part been disregarded by Western media. Particularly after 9/11, the “war on terror” acted like a black hole that sucked up the bulk of the Western media’s attention. When the acts of terrorism on Russian soil became too horrifying to ignore—the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 Beslan school siege in particular—the massive death tolls were blamed on the drastic responses of Russian security forces who were not adequately prepared and overwhelmed by the vicious and meticulously planned attacks. In Beslan, the death of hundreds of innocents (186 children were murdered on their first day at school) was indirectly condoned and sardonically depicted as the consequences of the “separatist movement [and its] increasingly desperate attempts to break Russia’s stranglehold on its home turf.” Truly, to describe those who shoot children in front of their parents and vice versa as “separatists” and glorify them as “rebels” who act in self defense against an “authoritarian” regime demands a very special kind of callous apathy.

In a 2013 article that examined the Chechen descent of the suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombing, retired FBI agent and 2002 Time Person of the Year Coleen Rowley exposed “how the Chechen ‘terrorists’ proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians.” She explicitly refers to a 2004 Guardian piece by John Laughland, in which the author connects the anti-Russian sentiments in the BBC and CNN coverage of the Beslan massacre to the influence of one particular organization, the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), whose list of members reads like “a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically (sic) support the ‘war on terror,’” among them Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney. Laughland describes the ACPC as an organization that

heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable “Muslim” causes, Bosnia and Kosovo – implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there.

There are three key elements in the organization’s lobbying strategy to denigrate Russia and promote an intervention in Chechnya that serve to unmask a larger pattern behind the US foreign policy after 9/11. First, the labeling of a particular leader or government as “authoritarian” or in some other way “undemocratic” (Vladimir Putin, in this case). Second, the concept of an oppressed yet positively connoted population that strives for freedom and democracy (Chechen terrorists with ties to a-Qaeda, in this case). Finally, the stressing of “human rights violations” that warrant an intervention or economic embargo.

If all of these conditions are satisfied, the violation of the borders of a sovereign state is seen as justified (UN mandate not needed), enabling the US to emerge as a knight in shining armor and champion of human rights, bolting to the rescue of the world’s downtrodden, while covertly achieving an utterly different goal: To further the logic of a second Cold War through proxy warfare and weaken Russian by diminishing its foothold in its surrounding “near abroad” regions, which in many respects represent vital interests, both economically and strategically.

Swap out names and dates and it becomes evident that the same tripartite strategy was used to justify every recent intervention of the US and other NATO members, in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (since 2011). Interventions that were legitimized under the banner of humanitarian relief through the removal of “authoritarian” tyrants and supposed dictators and which have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500.000 people, in Iraq alone. When the ASPC’s made its appeal regarding Chechnya in 2004, mind you, only one year had passed since the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked and two years since the first inmates arrived in the extralegal detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Regarding the sweltering conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the key dynamics are similar. President Viktor Yanukovych, accused by the Euromaidan movement—fueled by aggressive US and EU media propaganda and enticed with promises of lucrative NATO and EU memberships—of “abusing power” and “violation of human rights,” was forced to resign and replaced with a ultranationalist, anti-Russian and pro-Western government. Again, this campaign had nothing to do with actual humanitarian relief or concerns about the country’s democratic integrity. Instead, the hopes of a whole generation for a better future under Western influence were exploited by US policymakers who hoped to stifle Russia’s geostrategic elbowroom by ousting the naval bases of its Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea.

These bases, mostly located in the city of Sevastopol, have been the home port of the Russian navy for over 230 years, and are vital because they provide the only direct access to the Black Sea and (through the Bosporus strait in Turkey) to the Mediterranean. Any expansion of NATO towards these bases had to be regarded as a direct threat, leaving the Russian government practically no choice but to protect them with all means necessary. However, in the stories emanating from Western mainstream media, these bases were showcased as an occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory and used as proof of Russia’s aggressive, “authoritarian,” and imperial aspirations. In reality, Ukraine and Russia signed a Partition Contract in 1997, in which the Ukraine agreed to lease major parts of its facilities to the Russian Black Sea Fleet until 2017, for an annual payment of $98 million.

Along the lines of the currently revitalized genre of alternate history, let’s briefly indulge in the notion that we were still living in the ideologically divided world of the Cold War, in which the Warsaw Pact still existed. For a second, imagine if Mexico or Guatemala or Canada expressed their desire to join said pact and invited its troops to conduct military exercises at their shared border with the US. Even without the existence of an American naval base in that country, how do you think the US would react to such a scenario? Would it stand by idly and let itself be surrounded by its adversaries? For an even more striking parallel, take the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The American military actually has a naval base there—Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous detention camp. Many historians see the deployment of Soviet missiles and troops on the island as the closest that humanity ever came to entering World War III and mutually assured destruction (MAD).  With its support for “regime change” in Ukraine and extension of the NATO to the Russian borders, the US today is engaged in the same old Cold War superpower games that the Soviets played in Cuba 53 years ago. In fact, we should think of Ukraine as being situated in Mother Russia’s “backyard.”

Thousands of miles away from the coasts of North America, the Middle East is the region that Uncle Sam seems to regard as his very own backyard. Many consider George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” after 9/11 and the subsequent interventions in Iraq and (to a lesser degree) Afghanistan as those catastrophic policy decisions that resulted in the sociopolitical destabilization of large parts of this region, resulting in the death, injury, and displacement of millions. In Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the spurious US rhetorical agenda of removing “tyrants” and endowing the local demographics with the liberating gift of democracy has in fact produced vast ungoverned spaces where militant groups like the al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) were able to carve out their “caliphates” and claim other territorial prices. For a long time, the rapid expansion of the Islamic State and its death-loving, apocalyptic ideology was resisted only by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the paramilitary National Defense Forces (NDF), and Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG). The SAA alone has lost as much as 200.000 soldiers in its struggle against various terrorist factions since March 2011.

US politicians and media have expressed their hopes that the Russian intervention to assist the Syrian government in its resistance against these Western, Saudi, and Turkey-backed groups will result in a military and economic debacle, comparable to the Soviet-Afghan war, which lasted well over nine years. It was during the course of this brutal and protracted conflict that US policymakers realized that there was really no need to shed American blood in order to deal the death blow to the Soviet Union. They drew their lessons from the CIA’s countless ventures in South American “nation building,” where a government’s legitimacy and an opposition’s status as either terrorists or freedom fighters depended on their usefulness for American national interests, often accoutered in pithy terms like the “war on drugs.”

Since the days of Pablo Escobar, however, US foreign policy has shifted its main focus towards the Middle East, where the long-term goal has been to weaken the enemies of Israel and strengthen the enemies of Iran. Other goals are to guarantee American access to oil and other natural resources, to establish military bases and consolidate the network of troops abroad, and to secure arms deals for the one-percenters who preside over what president Eisenhower cautioned his nation about in his farewell address: the “military-industrial complex.” As a consequence of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has shifted its strategy towards aerial and drone only warfare combined with the support and (illusion of) control over local militant factions.

Among the many groups fighting in Syria, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), also known as “moderate rebels,” is the US faction of choice. Much like the bin Laden’s Mujahideen fighters in 1980s Afghanistan, they are armed with the help of the CIA. In spite of their apparent moderation, however, a wealth of evidence suggests that this group is directly responsible for a multitude of massacres, mass executions, the ethnic cleansing of non-Sunni citizens, and eating the hearts of their fallen enemies.

The FSA has also been a suspect in the 2013 Ghouta chemical attacks, which some have claimed the US used as a false flag operation to engender international support for the violent removal of the Syrian government. The subsequent UN investigation however failed to establish any conclusive evidence concerning the perpetrator of the war crime and concluded that the sarin gas used in the attacks had most certainly been removed from government arsenals. Based on this information, US, UK, and French leaders and media outlets insisted that the Syrian government had to be the culprit, and immediately pressed the international community to support an intervention with the goal of eradicating Syria’s alleged arsenal of nerve gas and other potential WMDs. This all begins to sound very familiar. Of course, they also requested the bolstering of the “moderate opposition.” Interestingly, though, the official UN report, “careful not to blame either side,” let on that investigators were actually being accompanied by rebel leaders at all times. Moreover, they repeatedly encountered “individuals […] carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.” On page 13, the report goes on to state that: [a] leader of the local opposition forces […] was identified and requested to take ‘custody’ of the Mission […] to ensure the security and movement of the Mission, to facilitate the access to the most critical cases/witnesses to be interviewed and sampled by the Mission […].

Recently, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have protested that their “moderate rebels” were being targeted unjustly by Russian airstrikes in Syria, complaining that “from their [i.e., the Kremlin’s] perspective, they’re all terrorists.” Sometimes, one is inclined to advise them, it can be wise and healthy to assume an outsider’s perspective and check if your reality still coincides with the facts that so many know are true about the FSA. These facts can be broken down to a very short yet concise formula: If it looks like a terrorist, if it talks like a terrorist, if it behaves like a terrorist—it probably is a terrorist.

Instead, the CIA is still supplying the “activists” with outdated-yet-deadly weapons from Army surplus inventories, including hundreds of BGM-71 TOW (“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided”) anti-tank missile systems, which the terrorists use against hard and soft targets alike. The same weapon platform can be seen in action in a recent FSA video that shows the destruction of a Russian helicopter that was sent to extract the Russian pilots at the crash site of their downed Su-24 plane on November 24, 2015. On the same day, another US-supplied TOW missile was used in an ambush targeting a car occupied by RT news journalists Roman Kosarev, Sargon Hadaya, and TASS reporter Alexander Yelistratov in Syria’s Latakia province.

The FSA and other groups, branded as “moderates” who fight against the “authoritarian” forces of tyranny (just like a certain “Saudi businessman” back in the day), function as US proxies in Syria, just like al-Qaeda did in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan War. They are dangerously unstable pawns in a global strategy to secure American and Israeli interests in the Middle East, irrespective of the millionfold suffering and uprooting of entire societies caused by their crimes, the majority of which is directed towards other Muslims.

Commenting on the Russian military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian government, Mr. Obama said that he had no interest in turning this civil war into a proxy war between Russia and the United States, emphasizing that “this is not some superpower chessboard contest.” But this is exactly what US foreign policy, both Republican and Democrat, has done, starting with the end of the Soviet Union and lasting until this very moment. The only difference now being that the Libya-proven rhetorical strategy of (illegal and mandate-less) intervention via “no-fly zones,” “humanitarianism,” and “regime change” did not have the desired effect in Syria because Iran, Lebanon, and Russia did not abandon their ally. Their combined effort succeeded in fending off an unprecedented onslaught of extremists that infiltrated the country, often across the Southern Turkish border, armed with the money of American taxpayers and Wahhabi sheiks.

The Syrian conflict can no longer be described as a civil war. It may have started as one during the ill-fated “Arab Spring” of 2011, when armed “protesters” (i.e., FSA terrorists) murdered several policemen and set government buildings on fire in Daraa, provoking a violent backlash from government forces. The ensuing nationwide chaos was spun by the Western mainstream media troika, namely those media outlets that serve as propaganda tools for the US political and financial elites and who fabricated the myth of the tyrant who massacred peaceful protestors—to be readily sucked up by their indoctrinated clientele.

As a result of the “moderate’s” recent setbacks, the official American position, insofar as its mixed messages can be deciphered, has boiled down to a butt-hurt attitude and passive aggressive lecturing about how to distinguish between varying degrees of moderation among mass-murdering lunatics. Outmaneuvered and publicly exposed, all that is left for Mr. Obama seems to be to pick up the pieces and save some face by accepting Mr. Putin’s offer to join a united front against terrorism in Syria. But such a step seems unthinkable in this ongoing Cold War between Russia and the US. Instead, the most powerful man on earth talks about climate change as the most pressing problem of our times. When it comes to ISIS, he has said he wanted to “contain” them. Meanwhile, tensions are rising as Turkish president Erdogan, on an power trip after his surprising landslide victory in November’s general elections, apparently collaborated with ISIS and risked provoking an NATO Article 5 response by downing a Russian Su-24. On the other side of the equation, Russia’s decision to intervene on behalf of the Syrian government reveals a twofold strategy: On the one hand, trough its direct action it positions the Putin government as being opposed to the fatal logics of proxy warfare. On the other hand, it simultaneously exposes the catastrophic flaws of Mr. Obama’s strategies in Syria and the Middle East.

All these developments do not necessarily mean that we are heading for World War III—although logic dictates that it will happen at some point in the future. In reality, though, a full-on nuclear confrontation would require a massive unraveling of the still sufficiently functional channels of political cooperation and interstate diplomacy. International security and economic communities as well as overlapping alliances like the United Nations, NATO, OSCE, and BRIC all indicate a high level of international integration.

Nonetheless, the geopolitical decisions of the last years herald the start of a new period in political history that indeed corresponds to a Cold War constellation. Particularly US foreign policy is currently undergoing the revival of a more offensive realism, visible in recent demonstrations of power in NATO’s Eastern border states, pushing of the TPP agreement in the Pacific economic area, and aggressive patrolling of the South Chinese Sea. In fact, the avoidance of superpower confrontation at all costs seems to increasingly take a back seat these high-risk maneuvers.

In the late 1940s the first Cold War began as a war of the words when the powers who had together defeated Nazi Germany started to level criticism at their respective global policies. With the help of their media and propaganda sources, their different stances and perspectives solidified and eventually developed into monolithic ideologies. These in turn spawned the geopolitical doctrines that warranted the replacement of any open (i.e., nuclear) confrontation with confined proxy wars as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. A similar erosion of mutual trust, respect, and solidarity is taking place now as the outsourced US-Russian conflicts in Ukraine and Syria remain unsolved. Again, the second Cold War arises as a war of the words while negative sentiments are allowed to petrify and the glacial rhetorics of mistrust and veiled threats gradually begin to replace talk about common interests and cooperation. The influential and policy-shaping Foreign Affairs magazine already struck the right chords of the passive-aggressive Cold War parlance by titling, “Putin’s Game of Chicken: And How the West Can Win.”

At the end of the day, this exact attitude could be one of the reasons why the US might come out on the losing side of this conflict. Because they have not yet realized this is not a “game of chicken” anymore. In fact, this is no longer the same easy game of manipulation that the US played during the 1990s by throwing cheap shots at a collapsing state. The deployment of its air force in Syria is not least a signal to the American establishment that Russia in 2015 no longer stands at the sidelines and watches begrudgingly as the US and its allies commence their disastrous policies in the Middle East.

When Mr. Obama asserted that “this is not some superpower chessboard contest,” he therefore either told a lie or he demonstrated his government’s utter cluelessness with regard to the actual situation and consequences of their actions in Ukraine, Syria, the South Chinese Sea, and other hotspots of the second Cold War. Both possibilities do not bode well for the future.

Steffen A. Wöll is currently enrolled in the American Studies Master’s program at Leipzig University. His research interests include foreign policy, the Middle East, popular culture, as well as radical millennialist and environmentalist movements in the US.

On December 7th, the Netherlands Times  headlined “Ukrainian Secret Service Accused of Trading in Stolen Dutch Paintings,” and Janene Pieters reported that, “Members of the Ukrainian secret service SBU played a role in trying to trade the paintings stolen from the Westfries Museum in 2005, stolen art expert Arthur Brand revealed in the press conference about the stolen paintings in the museum on Monday. … On Monday morning the museum announced that the 24 stolen paintings were traced to a Ukrainian militia, which is trying to sell them for a large amount of money. The museum called in Brand to help negotiate for the return of the paintings after attempts through the international police organization Interpol failed.” Both the thieves and the marketers are so highly placed that Interpol refuses to become involved. So: the Museum is appealing to the public for help.

Much is written about the vast Nazi operation in stolen artworks during World War II, but now the only nation in the world that has not just one, but two, outright racist-fascist, or ideologically nazi, political parties (which are called respectively the “Right Sector” Party, and the “Freedom” Party — the latter having formerly been known as the “Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine”), which is today’s Ukraine, is starting its own black-market-art operation, and the museum from which the artworks were stolen is now finally appealing on its website for enforcement against the nazis, by the supposedly ‘democratic’ nations (the post-U.S.-coup, or post-February-2014,

Ukraine’s allies, including both the United States and the Netherlands), in order to try to draw public attention to the nazi theft, since, as the Museum’s appeal says, the people who are trying to extort the money from them to recover the artworks that were stolen from them “have contacts at the highest political level.”

Indeed, the Netherlands Government was actually working with the U.S. Government to finance the overthrow in 2014 of the democratically elected President of Ukraine and replace him with a racist-fascist regime. Prior to the coup, the top three funders of the influential new TV Station in Ukraine that began precisely in order to propagandize for overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine, the movement that was fashionably called “Maidan,” were, in order: Embassy of Netherlands, Embassy of the United States, and International Renaissance Fund (of George Soros). (You’ll see that list on the document’s page 6.) The station started operation on 22 November 2013, but the two Embassies and Soros were putting it together starting weeks before that. As Steve Weissman said shortly after the coup: “Without their joint funding of Hromadske and its streaming video from the Euromaidan, the revolution might never have been televised and Yanukovych might have crushed the entire effort before it gained traction.”

A branch of the Right Sector Party became separately known as the Social National Assembly or SNA, and its leader is Andriy Biletsky. Here is his ideological statement, basically like Hitler’s. According to Anton Shekhovtsov, “The leader of the SNA Andriy Biletsky is (probably) the favorite of Hromadske (hromadske.tv) journalist Roman Skrypin and some other Ukrainian media, and also heads the Azov Battalion,” which is here shown dancing and shouting “White Power!” A guest on Hromadske openly argued “There is a certain category of people that must be exterminated,” and he said that at least 1.5 million in the area that rejected the coup were “superfluous” and their land must be “exploited as a resource.”  So: the backers of this Ukrainian coup obviously know that they’re backing nazisim, even if this nazism’s target is Russians instead of Jews.

And here, the victim of it happens to be a Dutch art museum, and one of the tacit backers of the theft from this Dutch entity is the Dutch Government.

The Museum’s appeal to the public (or actually public embarrasment and exposure of the ‘democratic’ governments) notes that “The OUN militia [which originally formed in Ukraine in 1929 in alliance with Germany’s then-rising Nazi Party] are claiming to have the entire collection of stolen paintings from the West Frisian Museum in their possession.” The nazi organizations in Ukraine that carried out the U.S. coup in Ukraine are all branches of the original OUN organization. After the coup, the new Ukrainian government formed these nazis into independent ‘militias,’ so as to enable them to violate Ukrainian and international laws while not being able to be held legally accountable.

This also enabled the IMF, which is controlled by the U.S. Government, to have no claim upon Ukraine for the monies that the various U.S.-Government-backing ‘oligarchs’ donated to these ‘militias.’ However, as time has passed and those funds have diminished, these ‘militias’ have evidently decided to get into black-market businesses, in order to continue paying and supplying their troops and their weapons and ammunition. Of course, the international investors who are buying the privatized, sold-off, chunks of the former Ukrainian Government, including land with gas-drilling rights, cannot be held financially liable for the black-market incomes to the OUN ‘militias’ that are now protecting those sold-off formerly national assets, for the private owners. But that’s not enough income. So: income from stolen art is intended to help to support the coup-government’s military operations, in such a way that investors in that government won’t be able to seize any of it in the inevitable default-proceedings.

Thus, the Museum’s online statement says: “The militia declares itself conditionally prepared to transfer the paintings to the Netherlands, but only outside the Ukrainian government authorities.” The Museum goes on: “Current owners [the thieves or the middlemen for them] have completely unrealistic ideas about the value of the stolen paintings. They estimated 50 million euros,” but “recent auction yields of comparable works by the same artists can be estimated at 250,000 euros up to 1.3 million euros, provided they’re still in good condition. Because the latter does not seem the case, he estimates the current market value at no more than 500,000 euros.” That’s one-hundredth of what the nazis are demanding.

“The municipality of Hoorn offered the militia that plus expenses, but never received a response to the offer.” In addition, “The counterparty demands a finder’s fee of 5 million euros,” which the Museum would also have to pay to that “counterparty,” which is negotiating on behalf of the nazis — who themselves might have been involved in the theft, though it occurred before the nazi takeover of Ukraine’s government did.

When a resolution was placed before the U.N.’s General Assembly, on 21 November 2014, to condemn racism, Holocaust denial, and all forms of fascism, it was rejected by Ukraine, and so Obama’s U.N. Representative also voted against it. Canada’s Representative likewise did, in order not to break ranks with the U.S. Those were the only three nations that voted against it.

Just as there are so many unanswered questions about why Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, massacred 14 people at an office party in San Bernardino, California, there is so much that is tragically clear. 

In the first place, 14 innocent people are dead, 17 wounded and hundreds of family members and friends have now had their lives cruelly upended by a heinous crime.

The magnitude of this horror will be felt for a lifetime by those who have been denied the love and companionship of fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, or dear friends who have been taken from them.

But the shock of these murders has reverberated far beyond the “inland empire”. An entire nation followed this nightmare in real time and while those who sat glued to their television sets may not have known the victims, they felt the pain and experienced, from afar, the loss and insecurity that accompanied the seeming randomness of the crime that was committed.

The president struck the right note when he commented on the frequency with which we have had to endure these acts of terror and the fact that we simply cannot allow these mass murders to become “the new normal” that have come to define our daily lives.

There are, as I have noted in an earlier article after the killings in Charleston, more than one mass shooting per day in the United States and all too often these horrific acts are committed by mentally disturbed individuals with access to lethal weapons.

Some are crimes of passion while others have political intent. In the latter case, whether at a church in South Carolina, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, or an office party in California, there have been too many instances where insane people armed with sophisticated weaponry acted out their ideological fantasies taking the lives of plain folks who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether motivated by delusions of white supremacy, lies about the content of a video purporting to sell foetus body parts or gross distortions of religion, these crimes are the same, the victims are the same, and the shock and loss of security experienced by the rest of us are the same.

There is one important difference, and that is that when the perpetrator is a Muslim, the crime spills over to inflict damage on an entire community.

After Charleston, there were efforts to have the Confederate flag removed from the State Capitol. But white southerners who claim that this flag is their heritage were not victimised by hate crimes.

After the attack on Planned Parenthood, anti-abortion activists and their organisations did not receive a wave of death threats nor were their offices vandalised.

But after San Bernardino, innocent American Muslims once again were forced to endure taunts and hate.

Mosques have been vandalised since Farook and Malik committed their acts of terror and innocent Muslims have experienced scores of terrifying hate crimes.

The pain of this hit my office in a personal way. One young woman who works for me came to work with a cap on her head because her mother was afraid to have her leave the house with her hijab.

The 16-year-old sister of another woman in my office received death threats at her high school.

Their co-workers have been supportive, and are bewildered and in shock at these displays of intolerance.

I am no stranger to death threats and hate. And so I understand what they are going through.

After September 11, three men threatened my life, one even threatening to murder my children.

My daughter, then a freshman in college, received a death threat on the phone in her dorm room.

I recall that what bothered me most during this frightening period was that, like the rest of my fellow Americans, I was angry at the murderers who abused the hospitality of my country to kill my countrymen.

And I, too, was mourning the loss of life and the unspeakable sadness of so many whose loved ones had been taken from them.

What the hate crimes did was to deny me and my family our mourning and our shared sense of grief, as Americans, because we were forced to look over our shoulders in fear of those whose misdirected hate had targeted us.

Thankfully the story did not end there. The DC police provided us with protection and the FBI caught, charged and convicted the culprits.

And there were countless acts of kindness from individuals I knew and those I did not know who called or wrote and offered support.

It was truly marvelous and it was America at its best. But it would not have been necessary if haters had not taken our attention away from crime of September 11 and the 19 terrorists who committed those heinous acts of murder.

Law enforcement has now determined that the San Bernardino murders were an act of terror and are now working to see why. They will, no doubt, before long, learn what factors set Farook and Malik on their murderous path.

Their investigation may provide answers, but it will not give closure to the families of those who died. Nothing will heal those wounds.

There are those who will focus exclusively on this act and these actors who, it now appears, may have attempted to justify their murders with religion.

But this should not distract us from the larger problems of guns, mental health and mass violence.

Certainly we must address the lure of violent extremist ideologies (whether based on religion, or anti-government or race hatred) and what draws sick individuals to embrace them.

But there are other issues we must address, as well: the accessibility to powerful weapons that make these mass shootings, of all sorts, possible, the failure of our mental health system that allows so many to fall through the cracks and the culture of violence that has fostered the epidemic of mass shootings.

At the same time, we must tone down the rhetoric of hate and intolerance and not allow the haters to make new victims of this horror by indiscriminately targeting innocent American Muslims.

The controversy over what really happened in San Bernardino last week is just beginning to heat up. Right after the lawyers for the alleged attacker’s family said that they do not believe the suspects did it, yet another eyewitness to the attacks maintained that the real attackers were three, tall, athletic Caucasian men in tactical gear.

“It looked like their skin color was white […] they appeared to be tall”, the eyewitness said.

Investigators with the ATF recovered police issued firearms from the alleged shooters.

This detail was accidentally mentioned by 2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Carly Fiorina during a press interview. After this was stated, the mainstream media never mentioned it again.

There were also widely-reported active shooter drills that had been taking place near the crime scene. Early reports claimed these were taking place hours before the attack. Later the narrative changed to the day before.

One eyewitness to the attacks, Sally Abdelmageed, was an employee at Inland Medical Center where the attack occurred.

How could she have interpreted two shooters, a man and a petite woman who weighed less than 100 lbs, as three Caucasian, athletic-built military men?

Abdelmageed explained to CBS News that “I heard shots fired and it was from you know an automatic weapon.”

She added that it was all “very unusual. Why would we hear shots?”

“As we looked out the window a second set of shots goes off […] and we saw a man fall to the floor. Then we just looked and we saw three men dressed in all black, military attire, with vests on they were holding assault rifles,”

she continued.

“As soon as they opened up the doors to building three […] one of them […] started to shoot into the room.”

She explained that while she

“couldn’t see a face, he had a black hat on […] black cargo pants, the kind with the big puffy pockets on the side […] long sleeve shirt […] gloves […]huge assault riffle […] six magazines […] I just saw three dressed exactly the same.”

The reporter then asked again, to be sure, “You are certain you saw three men?”

“Yes,” Abdelmageed reaffirmed.

“It looked like their skin color was white. They look like they were athletic build and they appeared to be tall.”

The CBS reporter then shot down her eyewitness account, reminding views that the FBI just told them that one of the shooters was a woman, and that the third shooter didn’t exist.

“And of course we just learned that one suspect was a woman,” they dismissed.

Watch the video report below…(US only)

Can anyone explain why eyewitness sources are being dismissed in favor of one of the most bizarre narratives in the history of law enforcement and counter-terrorism?

(Article by M. David and Jackson Marciana)

The Times today carries an article on ISIS’ oil interests, Syria and Turkey. Nowhere does it inform its readers that the owner of the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, has a vested interest in this subject through his role and shares in Genie Energy, an Israeli company granted oil rights in Syria by the Israeli government. Dick Cheney and Lord Rothschild are also shareholders.

No, they really are. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy.

That Israel should grant oil rights within Syria is of course a striking example of contempt for international law, but then that is the basis on which Israel normally operates. Of course Genie’s share value will be substantially boosted by the installation of a neo-con puppet regime in Damascus which can be bought to underwrite the oil concession granted by Israel. Contempt for international law has been the single most important defining characteristic of neo-conservatism, and the need to uphold international law the recurring theme of this blog. I never thought the UK government would make the withdrawal of its support for the concept of international law explicit, as Cameron has done by removing the obligation to comply with international law from the Ministerial Code. That is truly, truly disgraceful.

But to return to Murdoch’s oil interests in Syria, it seems to me a fundamental flaw that when Fox News, Sky News, the Times, the Sun and Murdoch’s numerous other media outlets bang the drum for Western military action in Syria, there is no requirement for the consumer of this propaganda to be told that the outlet is pushing a policy in line with the financial interests of its owner. Even for those actively seeking information, there is no register of the interests of media proprietors.

It is a wonderful irony that there is a register of the interests of the board members of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, but no register of the interests of media proprietors!

This is not an accident. The Leveson Inquiry did receive evidence and questioned a witness – Dr Rowan Cruft of the University of Stirling – who suggested that a proprietor’s financial interest in a story should be revealed. Robert Jay, QC to the counsel asked:

Robert Jay

This is on your page 8, our page 00885. You say:
“First of all, the code could do more to require proprietors, editors and journalist to declare their financial and also their political interests and to declare these to readers as well as editors.”
I don’t think the code does anything to require proprietors, editors and journalist to do that.

Dr Rowan Cruft
That’s right.

Robert Jay QC goes on first to suggest any duty to declare financial interests should only apply to specifically financial journalists. He then moves quickly on to discuss the implications of declaring political interests of proprietors. Robert Jay QC is a clever man and he managed to avoid any discussion of the financial interests of proprietors whatsoever. Shortly after the Inquiry concluded, he was promoted by the Government to be a High Court Judge.

The Leveson Inquiry totally ignored the real rot in Britain’s media – the massive concentration of media ownership and its subservience to other corporate interests. The revised Code of Conduct which was its result does not contain any reference to proprietors’ interests even in the very limited context of writing about stocks and shares. A financial journalist has a duty to declare any interest which he or his family have in a company he writes about, but no duty to declare any interest of his proprietor – the person who is paying him to write.

If you think this is an accident, you are extremely naïve. It is just a tiny glimpse into one aspect of the UK’s extraordinarily dense web of elite corruption,

The largest sea, air and land military maneuvers ever conducted by Chile’s military near the country’s northern border with Bolivia and Peru between November 7 and November 13 have escalated tensions between these countries, pointing to a real threat of war.

The national animosities date to the Pacific War fought in the 19th century (1879-1883), in which the victor, Chile, grabbed vast amounts of Peruvian and Bolivian territory. Bolivia effectively lost 400 kilometers of Pacific coastline, leaving it a landlocked nation.

What makes the Chilean military exercise, codenamed “Huracan 2015”, more significant than those carried out in previous years is that it took place under conditions in which both Peru and Bolivia have won favorable rulings from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague with respect to territorial disputes with Chile.

In early February 2015, the International Court granted Peru control over 50,000 square kilometers of open ocean previously claimed by Chile as part of its national waters. Then in September, the ICJ declared its competence to deal with a demand by Bolivia, which claims the sovereign right to have access to the Pacific Ocean.

Chile insists that in a treaty concluded in 1904, 20 years after the end of the Pacific War, Bolivia forfeited all claims to access to its former Pacific coast. The two countries have not had full diplomatic relations for decades, with the exception of a brief period in which both countries were ruled by fascist military dictators: Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer.

Presidents Ollanta Humala of Peru and Evo Morales of Bolivia have both hailed the decisions of the ICJ as political victories. Last February, then Chilean President Sebastian Piñera bitterly opposed the ruling on maritime borders, and today’s President Michelle Bachelet has said that ruling was questionable, and that in the case of Bolivia, La Paz “has won nothing.”

The decisions appear to concern small changes to long disputed border issues. However, they could have large, dangerous repercussions under conditions in which the ruling elites in all three countries are deliberately whipping up nationalist fervor to deflect growing social tensions generated by a severe economic deceleration due to lower metal prices and reduced exports to China. All three presidents face increasing popular discontent and are all accused of being involved in illegal activities.

For “Huracan 2015”, the Chilean Armed Forces mobilized over 5,500 troops on Chile borders with Bolivia and Peru, in addition to deploying tanks, frigates, submarines and both combat and transport aircraft. At one point, President Bachelet attended the military exercises.

While these exercises have taken place annually since 2000, with the exception of 2010 due to the huge earthquake that hit the Chilean coastline that year, last month’s were by far the largest and most menacing.

On the eve of these military maneuvers, Chile denounced the Peruvian government for its formation of a new administrative district in the La Yarada-Los Palos area on the disputed border. The bone of contention is a tiny 10-acre wedge of land on the sea that both nations claim. Santiago recalled its ambassador when the Peruvian congress voted to form the new district in October, while Humala’s approval of the measure led Chile to cancel a planned bilateral ministers’ meeting that was to take place next month.

The Chilean government also charged that Peru had sent troops into the area, which Lima denied.

The reaction to “Huracan 2015” was strongest in Bolivia. President Evo Morales declared the military maneuvers an act of intimidation. “Maybe some conservative groups in Chile still think that these kind of exercises of the Armed Forces will intimidate Peru, and Bolivia,” he said. “They are wrong. With this kind of action, only the dignity of the Chilean people is damaged.”

Adding to the growing hostility between the two countries, the Chilean Telecommunications Company aired a video mocking the Bolivian people and its president.

“Huracan 2015” took place in the aftermath of an even larger UNITAS naval exercise in October. The annual UNITAS has been conducted by the Pentagon since 1959 as a show of force to further US hegemony in the region. It involves the militaries of a number of countries in the hemisphere.

According to US Southern Command website:

“This year’s exercise is hosted by the Chilean navy and will include 14 warships which will conduct operations in the Southern Pacific through October 24th. Among these warships are USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (CVN 73), USS Chafee (DDG90), USCGC Bertholf (WMSL 750) from the United States and from Chile the ACH Williams, ACH Riveros and the ACH Condell. Also participating in the exercise is Carrier Strike Group NINE (CSG 9).”

Phase one involved naval forces from 11 nations, including the US, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, South Africa and Australia. It began in Valparaiso, Chile on October13.

Phase two was hosted by Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean and took place in November with nine participating countries: the US, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and Senegal.

The exclusion of Peru from the first part of the exercises, begun in Chilean waters, was indicative of the rising military tensions in the region.

Chilean Cmdr. Jose Fuentes, liaison officer to US Naval Forces Southern Command/ US 4th Fleet, said “for the Chilean Navy, it is a rewarding challenge to host such a unique blue water exercise, this is unlike any other in the region’s recent history.”

There is no doubt the US was in command of the exercises. According to Star & Stripes web site: “Carrier Strike Group 9 and USS George Washington’s participation in this year’s exercise makes it one of the largest UNITAS exercises in recent memory.”

The extended sea, land and air military exercises are part of the global growth of militarism that has taken its most advanced form in the Middle East, with the US and its allies in the EU pushing to provoke a Third World War.

This is openly acknowledged by military web sites like Defense News, which at the end of October noted:

“From the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean, from the Mediterranean to the eastern and northern Atlantic, all the way to Latin America, naval forces have undertaken an explosion of major exercises—many of them much larger than normal. Dozens of countries, thousands of military personnel and three US aircraft carriers have been taking part.”

The border conflicts between Chile, Peru and Bolivia intersect with mounting concerns in Washington over China’s economic penetration of South America and its increasing dominance in the extraction of the region’s strategic raw materials. These geopolitical tensions combined with the deepening crisis of bourgeois rule throughout the region raise the real danger that the continent’s Pacific coast could become a new arena of war.

Following nearly eight years of negotiations, 12 Pacific Rim countries – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam – have agreed to take part in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a sweeping trade deal that affects some 40 percent of the global economy.

The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) has closely monitored the TPPA throughout the negotiation period and regards several aspects of the draft text as deeply troubling from the perspective of regional stability, economic feasibility, social justice, and national sovereignty. While advocates of the deal have attempted to allay public criticism, there is a need to reaffirm concerns shared by wide segments of society across all the participating nations.

The TPPA aims to enforce a common regulatory framework structured around the norms of American trade policies that govern rules for tariffs and trade disputes, patents and intellectual property, foreign investment, and other areas such as environmental regulations and internet governance.

Despite a level of secrecy that barred even elected public representatives of participating countries from access to the deal’s draft text during the negotiating process, advisors from major multinational corporations played a consistent, key role in forming the deal’s proposed measures.

This is no ordinary trade deal – it is a fundamental aspect of Washington’s pivot-to-Asia policy, involving the large-scale refocusing of American corporate and military muscle within the heart of the ASEAN region.

The TPPA aims at nothing less than formulating new rules for international trade around core US strategic interests, and in the process overshadowing key functions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a comparatively more even platform for discussing issue of global trade.

The agreement does not include China. The exclusion of the region’s largest economy and world’s second-largest (and by some measures largest) economy is no accident. It is a central aspect of the TPPA’s strategic policy function: harnessing the power of the developing nations throughout ASEAN as an economic counterweight to Beijing for the benefit of the United States.

As the TPPA is implemented, it is possible that friction could occur between Washington and Beijing, as the former reaps preferential treatment from the agreement, which in turn could affect relations between China and certain ASEAN states to the detriment of peace and stability in the region.

Only 4 out of 10 ASEAN states are party to the agreement’s founding group; the trade ties that will emerge from the TPPA, which will reflect the inclusion of some ASEAN states and the exclusion of others, could be inimical to intra-ASEAN harmony.

The most egregious aspect of the trade deal is the Investor-State-Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow corporations to seek restitution against states in an international arbitration court for the contraction of their potential future profits as a result of government regulations.

ISDS-enforced agreements effectively put global multinational companies on a level legal playing field with national governments, thereby limiting the scope of domestic policies that governments can undertake without potentially being challenged for impinging on investor rights.

Acquiescing to ISDS provisions systematically undermines the integrity of public institutions in participating countries and their domestic arbitration instruments while significantly lowering the bargaining power of domestic labour and rights advocacy groups.

The agreement encompasses numerous areas of concern that intimately relate to human health and well-being – from unimpeded entry of genetically modified products into domestic markets, the gradual elimination of tariffs on alcoholic beverages and tobacco, the neglect of any measures to combat climate-disrupting emissions spurred on increased shipping and mass consumption, to the drastic extension of patents on pharmaceutical products that will impede access to affordable medicines. Furthermore, proposed regulations of the internet will require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to more actively monitor users to enforce copyright protections at the expense of individual privacy.

In actuality, the TPPA obliges signatory countries to reshape their national laws and economic policies to conform to a neo-liberal agenda set by giant multinational corporations, to the benefit of local elites at the expense of the region’s working classes and poor.

The agreement’s political undercurrents are apparent in view of the unprecedented measures that the US is attempting to push through that codify legislation to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel – essentially designed to discourage governments around the world from participating in BDS activities by leveraging the incentive of free trade with the US.

The economic policies pushed by the US and its allies – backed to the hilt by multinational corporate interests ­– are demonstrably against the public good and show disregard for national sovereignty and political independence.

Facing notable domestic opposition, each country must now assess its own situation and decide whether or not to agree to the deal’s terms. It should not be forgotten that Malaysia withdrew from a Malaysia-US Free Trade Agreement negotiation in 2009 because the deal being negotiated was perceived to be against national interests.

JUST believes that Malaysia would be better off showing similar courage in the face of the TPPA. It isn’t a question of ‘losing out’ or being ‘left behind’. ASEAN itself has initiated its own vision for free trade, the Regional Cooperation for Economic Partnership (RCEP), with negotiations expected to be completed next year.

ASEAN and the region as a whole would be better positioned to throw its weight behind a trade architecture that is inclusive, formulated on a truly level playing field and capable of demonstrating greater respect for national sovereignty and social priorities.

The Executive Committee, International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

President Barack Obama’s Sunday night “address to the nation” on last week’s mass killings in San Bernardino and the response within the political and media establishment demonstrate that, once again, a tragic event is being used to disorient and browbeat public opinion in order to drag the American people deeper into war.

Obama was on the defensive, seeking to fend off attacks on his Syria policy from the Republican right and elements within his own party who are braying for even greater violence and bloodshed. The speech took place within the context of an explosive escalation of the war in Iraq and Syria last week, beginning with the US administration’s announcement of a Special Forces detachment to conduct combat operations and followed in rapid succession by votes in the British and German parliaments authorizing military operations in Syria.

The hysterical response of the US media has been wildly disproportionate to the scale of the San Bernardino attack, as tragic as it was. As Obama acknowledged in his Sunday speech, the US is a country where mass killings are “all too common.” Over the past year they have occurred on an almost daily basis. Since the 9/11 attacks, 200,000 people have been killed in homicides. Forty-five people have been killed in attacks attributed to Islamic extremists, but a greater number, 48, have been killed by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists.

Far more people were killed by the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, than the 14 killed last week by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. Just last month, three people were killed and many more wounded in an attack on a Planned Parenthood facility by an anti-abortion fanatic.

The major difference in last week’s shootings was the religious background of the perpetrators. Indications that what had the earmarks of a typical workplace shooting in America may also have been motivated by outrage over US-led wars in the Middle East and support for ISIS were seized upon by the media to launch a non-stop, mind-numbing barrage of fear and warmongering.

This attempt to revive the 15-year “war on terror” is being carried out despite the fact that there is no evidence, as Obama acknowledged in his Sunday speech, that the San Bernardino attack was directed by any terrorist organization or part of a broader conspiracy.

The orchestrated media campaign is in support of powerful factions within the American ruling class and state that have seized on the San Bernardino tragedy, coming on the heels of last month’s mass killings in Paris, to effect a reversal of Obama’s policy of avoiding a large-scale US combat role in Iraq and Syria. The Wall Street Journal spoke for these factions Monday in its editorial on Obama’s speech, in which it called for the deployment of at least 10,000 US Special Forces to Syria to spearhead the war for regime-change against President Bashar al-Assad.

Supplementing the media barrage are the attack dogs of the Republican Party, led by the fascistic front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump. He responded to Obama’s speech by calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration and state profiling of Muslims already in the US. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz said that if he is elected president next year, “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion.”

Nor are the attacks on Obama’s policy as weak and ineffective limited to the Republican Party. Obama’s former Secretary of State and front-runner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her call for a no-fly zone in Syria and coupled it with the demand that social media outlets censor online activity by Islamists and provide US intelligence agencies with information about their customers. She made clear her contempt for democratic rights and the US Constitution when she told a Washington lobbying group, “You’re gonna hear all the usual complaints: freedom of speech, etc.”

The drumbeat for military escalation is not driven by sympathy for the victims of the San Bernardino attack or moral revulsion over the actions of the perpetrators. It is the result of a calculated decision to utilize the event to overcome growing popular disaffection and opposition to war, after 15 years of non-stop military aggression, and intensify the reign of imperialist violence in the Middle East.

For these forces, San Bernardino is a godsend, or, in political parlance, a “game-changer.”

This is nothing new. It follows the pattern established in 9/11. Shortly after that terror attack, for which there has never been a coherent official explanation, the World Socialist Web Site cited the words of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1998 book on US imperialist policy entitled The Grand Chessboard:

It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.

Such is the method behind the current media madness, and it is being employed as well in France, Britain and Germany. In the US, it has reached truly demented proportions, including Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey comparing the attack in San Bernardino to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor!

In his speech, Obama sought to conciliate the right-wing opposition while broadly hinting that he was prepared to escalate his own program of military action in Iraq and Syria. He called the killings in California “an act of terrorism” and invoked 9/11 and the “war on terror.”

Of course, there was no suggestion that the living hell inflicted by US imperialism on the mainly Muslim and Arab masses of the region had anything to do with the growth of terrorist organizations. Nor did Obama mention that the US and its regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, where the San Bernardino killers spent considerable time, directly armed and supported ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalist forces linked to Al Qaeda in their drive to overthrow the regimes in Libya and Syria and install puppet governments.

Obama boasted of having authorized US forces to “take out” terrorists and pledged that he would draw upon “every aspect of American power,” would “continue to hunt down terrorist plotters in any country where it is necessary,” and would “continue to invest in more approaches that are working on the ground.”

But he rejected “a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria,” and this goes to what the media hysteria over San Bernardino is really about. It is part of a bitter and protracted dispute within the ruling class and the state over the focus of US imperialist foreign policy.

The neo-cons and others consider Obama’s decision to pull back from the planned air war against Syria in 2013, prepared on the basis of lying claims of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack outside Baghdad, an unforgivable blunder. All the more so in that it was accompanied by a deal with Russia that effectively shielded Russia’s ally Assad for a period and was followed by the nuclear agreement with Iran.

These forces, both outside and within the military and intelligence apparatus, want nothing less than a full-scale war to turn the Middle East, including Iran, into a US protectorate. They also want the US to give unqualified support to Netanyahu’s plans for a Greater Israel, and they want to escalate the confrontation with Russia to the point of war.

Obama’s foreign policy emphasis, from the time he came into office, has been different. He speaks for those factions that want to focus US military resources on the encirclement and isolation of China, in preparation for a war to dismember the country and reduce it to neocolonial status. He sees another large-scale war in the Middle East as undercutting that more critical agenda.

This dispute has been building in recent months, with a flood of think tank reports and commentaries excoriating Obama for backtracking in the Middle East and demanding a reversal of his policy. These policy disputes represent tactical differences about the pursuit of US imperialism’s geostrategic agenda of global hegemony. But they are substantial differences.

That said, there is no peace faction within the US political establishment or state, or within the Democratic Party. Both orientations lead to catastrophe.

The working class must reject with contempt the latest media campaign for a wider war and resolutely oppose all factions of the ruling class. It must mobilize its strength internationally to put a stop to imperialist war by putting an end to the capitalist system that breeds it.

In Sunday National Assembly elections, Chavismo suffered a humbling defeat – short of disaster. Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD)  fell short of their goal.

On its web site, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) said MUD won 107 seats to the ruling socialist coalition Great Patriotic Pole’s (GPP) 55 – a 64.07% to 32.93 majority. Indigenous seats comprise another 1.80% of the 167 legislative body, its representatives elected solely by members of their communities.

Results for two remaining seats remain unreported as this is written – likely too close to call so perhaps recounts are being conducted before winning candidates are announced.

A super-majority 112 or more seats would let MUD dismiss Supreme Court judges and enact constitutional changes, ending or greatly compromising social justice provisions.

Regardless of their number of seats, they can call for a national referendum to recall elected officials, including President Maduro, with enough popular support perhaps to prevail, as authorized under the Constitution’s Article 72, stating:

“All magistrates and other offices filled by popular vote are subject to revocation (including Venezuela’s president). Once half of the term of office to which an official has been elected has elapsed, a number of voters constituting at least 20% of the voters registered in the pertinent circumscription may extend a petition for the calling of a referendum to revoke such official’s mandate.”

In August 2004, Hugo Chavez overwhelmingly won an opposition called recall election with a 59% majority. He was extremely popular throughout his tenure. Maduro is vulnerable to recall with an approval rating in the 20 – 25% range.

In the wake of Sunday’s legislative loss, he called on Bolivarian officials to discuss ways to strengthen the movement, saying:

“We got 43 percent of the votes… The counterrevolution triumphed yesterday, for now. They have come for the neoliberal restoration of the far right.”

It’s crucial to defend the revolution. “(T)he Venezuelan right wing has just one program” – destroying 16 years of social justice progress, replacing it with neoliberal harshness, Maduro explained.

“Unity should be the main aim. Nobody should be confused by an adverse situation.” He stressed the importance of drafting a “central document for the Bolivarian revolution,” including creating a National Assembly commission to defend hard-won social gains.

On national television, he stressed “(t)his oligarchy will never represent” Bolivarian fairness, what most Venezuelans support.

Sunday elections showed popular discontent about hard economic times above all other issues. Venezuelans are suffering under severe recessionary conditions  combined with high inflation and shortages of basic commodities.

The elections also displayed why Venezuela has the world’s most vibrant democracy, even recognized by MUD candidates.

Sunday’s open, free and fair process was conducted smoothly and efficiently with no significant disruptions. Polls were open as long as voters remained in line.

What happens going forward is crucial. Chavismo suffered its first major defeat. Social justice gains achieved since 1999 years are crucial to preserve. Defending the revolution is top priority.

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.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs. 

In spite of the fierce opposition of the US treasury Department, on November 30 the IMF finally approved the inclusion of the yuan in the Special Drawing Rights, the currency basket created in 1969 to complement the official reserves of the members of the multilateral organization. With this the Chinese currency will become, next October 1 (2016), part of the integrating fifth of the IMF basket. The financial influence of China on a world scale will continue to grow at high velocity: the weight of the yuan in the Special Drawing Rights will be greater in comparison with the Japanese yen and the pound sterling.

A few months ago there was considerable skepticism as to whether the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would incorporate the Chinese «people’s currency» (‘renminbi’) in their basket of currencies[1]. Finally, the doubts disappeared: in spite of the fierce opposition of the US Treasury Department, very soon the yuan will become the fifth member of the currency basket of the IMF[2].

How did we get here? In the midst of the crisis of fixed parities –that was established in 1944 –, in 1969 the IMF created some reserve actions, that are called Special Drawing Rights (SDR). As the Federal Reserve System (FED) of the United States found it impossible to exchange for gold the excessive quantity of dollars that the central banks of the rest of the world had accumulated, the objective of the DEG was to complement the official reserves of the countries that formed the IMF.

At first the value of the DEG was defined as the equivalent of 0.888671 grams of fine gold. Already in a second moment, after the fall of the Bretton Woods agreement, the value of the DEG was established in reference to a basket of currencies of the biggest economies of the time: the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and France. At the end of the 1990s, the IMF basket was left conformed to the dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the pound sterling.

From then on, there were no more changes. In spite of the enormous transformations in world political and economic situation through the last decades, the composition of the IMF basket remained unchanged.

The deterioration of the US economy did not deprive the dollar of its dominant position: in 2011 the dollar represented almost 42% of the DEG; followed by the euro with 37.4%; the pound sterling, with 11.33%; and the Japanese yen with 9.44%. Nevertheless, after this November30 the Executive Directorate of the IMF decided to add the Chinese currency and the composition of the basket will finally change[3].

In this way, the yuan will be the third currency with greater weight in the DEG, with 10.92% of the total above the Japanese yen (8.33%) and the pound sterling (8.09%), although behind the dollar (41.73%) and the euro (30.93%). This division takes place in 11 months, next October 1, 2016.

«The inclusion of the yuan will increase the representation and the attractiveness of the DEG and will help to improve the current international monetary system, a circumstance that will benefit both China and the rest of the world», said the People’s Bank of China in a communiqué[4].

In 2009, Beijing had already indicated that they aspired to include the yuan a world reserve currency. As I have noted in previous articles, the internationalization of the yuan is based on «gradualism» and is backed up, above all, by the commercial strength of China.

In recent years the Popular Bank of China has signed currency swaps with over 40 central banks, from those located in the Asian-Pacific countries, Africa and Europe and those of Chile and Canada, fervent allies of the United States. Nor can the installation overseas of banks of liquidation be forgotten. These facilitate the use of the yuan (‘RMB clearing banks’) as well as the concession of investment quotas to participate in the Chinese Program of Foreign Institutional Investments Qualified in Renminbi (RQFII).

Nevertheless, these measures were hardly sufficient for the yuan to enter the big leagues. It was necessary to gain the recognition of a decisive institution in financial management, such as the IMF. China began to win the battle in August, when it devalued the yuan. Immediately, Beijing insisted that this was a temporal action; that is, that there would be no prolonged devaluations[5].

It was at this time that the managing director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, spoke out to calm the spirits of investors, with which she neutralized the US propaganda that made China responsible for the global economic turbulences[6].

On the other hand, Beijing has not ceased their program of «structural reforms»; on the contrary, they propose to accelerate the opening of their financial structure. Everything points to the liberalization of exchange rates and interest rates, as well as the capital market. After connecting the stock markets of Shanghai and Hong Kong in November of 2014[7], now China contemplates establishing a stock team with London[8].

In conclusion, although the yuan still has a long route to run before being in condition to compete face to face with the dollar, there is no doubt that its coming inclusion in the IMF basket constitutes a historical landmark[9]. The world of finance is changing…

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez is an economist who graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Translation: Jordan Bishop.

Source: Russia Today.

One lesson from military history is that once mobilization for war begins, it takes on a momentum of its own and is uncontrollable. 

This might be what is occuring unrecognized before our eyes.

In his September 28 speech at the 70th Anniversity of the United Nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world. Two days later at the invitation of the Syrian government Russia began war against ISIS.

Russia was quickly successful in destroying ISIS arms depots and helping the Syrian army to roll back ISIS gains. Russia also destroyed thousands of oil tankers, the contents of which were financing ISIS by transporting stolen Syrian oil to Turkey where it is sold to the family of the current gangster who rules Turkey.

Washington was caught off guard by Russia’s decisiveness. Fearful that the quick success of such decisive action by Russia would discourage Washington’s NATO vassals from continuing to support Washington’s war against Assad and Washington’s use of its puppet government in Kiev to pressure Russia, Washington arranged for Turkey to shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber despite the agreement between Russia and NATO that there would be no air-to-air encounters in Russia’s area of air operation in Syria.

Although denying all responsibility, Washington used Russia’s low key response to the attack, for which Turkey did not apologize, to reassure Europe that Russia is a paper tiger. The Western presstitutes trumpeted: “Russia A Paper Tiger.”   ^[1]

The Russian government’s low key response to the provocation was used by Washington to reassure Europe that there is no risk in continuing to pressure Russia in the Middle East, Ukraine, Georgia, Montenegro, and elsewhere. Washington’s attack on Assad’s military is being used to reinforce the belief that is being inculcated in European governments that Russia’s responsible behavior to avoid war is a sign of fear and weakness.

It is unclear to what extent the Russian and Chinese governments understand that their independent policies, reaffirmed by the Russian and Chinese presidents On September 28, are regarded by Washington as “existential threats” to US hegemony.

The basis of US foreign policy is the commitment to prevent the rise of powers capable of constraining Washington’s unilateral action. The ability of Russia and China to do this makes them both a target.

Washington is not opposed to terrorism. Washington has been purposely creating terrorism for many years. Terrorism is a weapon that Washington intends to use to destabilize Russia and China by exporting it to the Muslim populations in Russia and China.

Washington is using Syria, as it used Ukraine, to demonstrate Russia’s impotence to Europe— and to China, as an impotent Russia is less attractive to China as an ally.

For Russia, responsible response to provocation has become a liability, because it encourages more provocation.

In other words, Washington and the gullibility of its European vassals have put humanity in a very dangerous situation, as the only choices left to Russia and China are to accept American vassalage or to prepare for war.

Putin must be respected for putting more value on human life than do Washington and its European vassals and avoiding military responses to provocations. However, Russia must do something to make the NATO countries aware that there are serious costs of their accommodation of Washington’s aggression against Russia. For example, the Russian government could decide that it makes no sense to sell energy to European countries that are in a de facto state of war against Russia. With winter upon us, the Russian government could announce that Russia does not sell energy to NATO member countries. Russia would lose the money, but that is cheaper than losing one’s sovereignty or a war.

To end the conflict in Ukraine, or to escalate it to a level beyond Europe’s willingness to participate, Russia could accept the requests of the breakaway provinces to be reunited with Russia. For Kiev to continue the conflict, Ukraine would have to attack Russia herself.

The Russian government has relied on responsible, non-provocative responses. Russia has taken the diplomatic approach, relying on European governments coming to their senses, realizing that their national interests diverge from Washington’s, and ceasing to enable Washington’s hegemonic policy. Russia’s policy has failed. To repeat, Russia’s low key, responsible responses have been used by Washington to paint Russia as a paper tiger that no one needs to fear.

We are left with the paradox that Russia’s determination to avoid war is leading directly to war.

Whether or not the Russian media, Russian people, and the entirety of the Russian government understand this, it must be obvious to the Russian military. All that Russian military leaders need to do is to look at the composition of the forces sent by NATO to “combat ISIS.” As George Abert notes, the American, French, and British aircraft that have been deployed are jet fighters whose purpose is air-to-air combat, not ground attack. The jet fighters are not deployed to attack ISIS on the ground, but to threaten the Russian fighter-bombers that are attacking ISIS ground targets.

There is no doubt that Washington is driving the world toward Armageddon, and Europe is the enabler. Washington’s bought-and-paid-for-puppets in Germany, France, and UK are either stupid, unconcerned, or powerless to escape from Washington’s grip. Unless Russia can wake up Europe, war is inevitable.

Have the totally evil, moronic neocon warmongers who control the US government taught Putin that war is inevitable?[2]

A string of recent provocations against both Russia and Syria are meant to look like isolated incidents, but in fact constitute incremental “mission creep” into what may become full-scale US intervention in Syria.

The Background 

It was clear in 2011 that the United States sought regime change in Syria, just as it did in Libya. It was clear that it had backed heavily armed sectarian extremists to carry out this regime change. What wasn’t clear, at least apparently to US policymakers, was the resolve the Syrian government, the Syrian Arab Army, and the Syrian people themselves had to defeat this conspiracy, revealed as early as 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker piece, “The Redirection.”

In it, Hersh revealed that the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were determined to build a proxy army of sectarian extremists aligned with or sympathetic to Al Qaeda, for the purpose of undermining and overthrowing the nations of Syria and Iran.

By 2011, with Libya already decimated by NATO-backed extremists, the US State Department was busy transferring weapons and terrorists from Benghazi and Eastern Europe to Turkey where they would be staged, armed, trained, and sent in to invade Syria.

As the Syrian government confounded the US’ proxy war, at various stages attempts were made for a more direct intervention – again, just like in Libya. However, attempts to create a “safe zone” in northern Syria or otherwise carry out strikes on the Syrian military itself were blocked by both the realities on the ground and the support of Syria’s allies – Russia, China, and Iran.

When Russia entered the conflict, the calculus changed dramatically. The prospects of direct intervention by the West against the Syrian government all but dimmed entirely, and what was exposed as a feigned US “fight” with the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) gave way to a very real Russian-led war on the terrorist group and its affiliates across the country, in coordination with Syrian troops on the ground.

Quickly the true source of ISIS’ fighting capacity – supply lines stretching out of NATO-member Turkey’s territory, long protected by NATO itself since the conflict began – came under threat. Russian warplanes are now flying sorties directly along the border, decimating ISIS-bound convoys long before delivering their supplies, weapons, and fresh fighters. Syrian troops have likewise made significant gains near borders they once were deterred from approaching because of NATO treachery.

The endgame is soon approaching, and to prevent this, the US and its regional allies have begun a series of provocations meant to tip toe the West into deeper war in the region, and in particular, against Russia and Syria.

The Provocations 

Turkey’s downing of a Russian Su-24 bomber inside Syrian airspace, with Turkish-backed terrorists then gunning down one of the parachuting pilots – a blatant war crime – before ambushing a subsequent rescue mission which left a Russian Marine dead, was the first major provocation. While the United States has attempted to distance itself publicly from Turkey’s actions, it is clear that Turkey would never have undertaken such a brazen move without coordinating it with the US directly.

In the days and weeks before the incident, US Senators openly called for the shooting down of Russian planes over Syria. Their goal has been clear since 2011, overthrow the government of Syria before moving on to Iran, then finally Russia and China.

Turkey then moved troops and heavy armor into northern Iraq to begin what it claims will be a permanent occupation. It has carried out a “beta test” for its long-sought after “safe zone” the US has engineered and attempted to implement in northern Syria since at least as early as 2012.

And now reports indicate that the US itself has struck Syrian troops near Deir ez Zor City, Deir ez Zor province. There are also unconfirmed reports that the airstrikes which the Syrian government claims killed several of its soldiers, was also followed up by a coordinated ISIS counterattack.

The UK Independent reported in its article, “Syria calls US-led coalition air strike on Assad regime forces an ‘act of aggression’,” that:

An air strike carried out by the US-led coalition in Syria is reported to have targeted regime forces for the first time, killing at least three soldiers and destroying a number of vehicles. 

The Syrian government said four warplanes bombed its Saega military camp in Deir al-Zor province, describing it as an “act of aggression” by coalition forces.

Whether reports of a counterattack are true or not, the US strikes appear to have happened. While the US denies that carried out the strikes, it has refused to coordinate with the Syrian Arab Army throughout its illegal operations in Syrian airspace. And just as in the case of the downed Russian bomber, US senators had also been eager to see US strikes against Syrian forces carried out as “retaliation” for Russia striking US proxies in the region.

With the US and its axis of collaborators attempting to normalize the violation of foreign nations’ airspace, territory, and now the normalization of striking at forces unrelated to its alleged mission to “fight” ISIS, we see a pattern developing that indicates an escalation toward direct confrontation between the West and Syria which includes a direct confrontation between the West and Syria’s allies as well.

The Need to Raise American Costs in Syria

The inability of Syria and its allies to fully secure Syria’s territory has invited these incremental transgressions. The fact that US warplanes are not only still violating Syrian airspace with absolute impunity, but being joined by French and British planes who equally have no real intention of stopping the terrorist menace of their own creation is a sign of hesitation on Syria and its allies’ part that they lack the will to draw a risky line and then enforce it.

Indeed, it would be a risky line to draw – to declare Syria’s airspace and territory off-limits to all nations not formally permitted by the Syrian government. To enforce such a line while legally sound, would require Syria or its allies to eventually target and shoot down Western planes that would inevitably continue violating Syria’s airspace. Such a confrontation could serve as ample impetus for the West to make a limited, full-scale invasion of certain parts of Syria where Syrian forces and their allies are weakest, thus effectively carving Syria into pieces.

However, incremental steps taken now toward establishing such a line coupled with continuously expanding military operations aimed at displacing Western military operations and restoring order across all of Syria’s territory by the government in Damascus and its allies, could help blunt, delay, and even eventually roll back America’s creeping war in Syria.

Likely there are cards yet to be played by Syria and its allies, which include wider roles for Iran and China to contribute in if and when necessary. The idea is to make continued Western intervention in Syria as costly as possible. It must be remembered that beyond the deepening rhetoric of the West, they still have only one goal – the same goal that they had when first beginning their proxy war with Syria – regime change in Damascus before pursuing regime change in Tehran, then Moscow and then Beijing.

It is likely the West will not stop until forced to tactically, strategically, economically, and politically. It is therefore incumbent upon Syria and its allies to create and apply the necessary force to do this.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

Hace apenas unos meses había mucho escepticismo sobre si el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) incorporaría o no la ‘moneda del pueblo’ china (‘renminbi’) en su canasta de divisas. Finalmente, las dudas se han despejado: a pesar de la fuerte oposición del Departamento del Tesoro de Estados Unidos, muy pronto el yuan se convertirá en el quinto miembro de la canasta de divisas del FMI.

¿Cómo es que llegamos hasta acá? En medio de la crisis del sistema de paridades fijas —que se había establecido el año 1944—, en 1969 el FMI creó unos activos de reserva, que denominó Derechos Especiales de Giro (DEG, ‘Special Drawing Rights’, en inglés). Como el Sistema de la Reserva Federal (FED) de Estados Unidos estaba cada vez más imposibilitado para intercambiar por oro la excesiva cantidad de dólares que los bancos centrales del resto del mundo habían acumulado, el objetivo de los DEG consistía en complementar las reservas oficiales de los países que integraban el FMI.

En un primer momento, el valor de los DEG se definió como el equivalente a 0,888671 gramos de oro fino. Ya en un segundo momento, luego del derrumbe de los acuerdos de Bretton Woods, el valor de los DEG se estableció tomando como referencia una canasta de las monedas de las economías más grandes de esa época: Estados Unidos, Alemania, Japón, Reino Unido y Francia. A finales de la década de los 90, la canasta del FMI quedado conformada por el dólar, el euro, el yen japonés y la libra esterlina.

La inclusión del yuan incrementará la representatividad y el atractivo de los DEG y ayudará a mejorar el sistema monetario internacional vigente, circunstancia que beneficiará tanto a China como al resto del mundo

Y, a partir de entonces, no hubo más cambios. A pesar de las enormes transformaciones en el tablero político y económico mundial a lo largo de las últimas décadas, la composición de la canasta del FMI permaneció inalterada.

El deterioro de la economía de Estados Unidos no impidió que el dólar conservara su predominio: en 2011 se apoderó de casi el 42 % de la cartera de los DEG; seguido por el euro, con el 37,4 %; la libra esterlina, con el 11,3 %; y el yen japonés, con el 9,4 %. Sin embargo, después de que este 30 de noviembre el Directorio Ejecutivo del FMI decidiera agregar la moneda china, la composición de la canasta por fin cambiará.

De este modo, el yuan será la tercera divisa con mayor peso entre los DEG, con un 10,92 % del total, por encima del yen japonés (8,33 %) y la libra esterlina (8,09 %), aunque todavía por detrás del dólar (41,73 %) y el euro (30,93 %). Esta decisión entrará en vigor dentro de 11 meses, el próximo 1 de octubre de 2016.

“La inclusión del yuan incrementará la representatividad y el atractivo de los DEG y ayudará a mejorar el sistema monetario internacional vigente, circunstancia que beneficiará tanto a China como al resto del mundo”, refirió el Banco Popular chino en un comunicado.

Leer más

El Banco de Desarrollo del BRICS, a la conquista del mercado financiero chino

En 2009, Pekín ya dejó claro que aspiraba a que el yuan fuera una moneda de reserva mundial. Tal como he apuntado en mis entregas anteriores, la internacionalización del yuan se ha basado en el “gradualismo” y se ha respaldado, sobre todo, en la fuerza comercial de China.

En los años recientes, el Banco Popular de China ha firmado permutas (‘swaps’) de divisas con más de 40 bancos centrales, desde los ubicados en países de Asia-Pacífico, África y Europa hasta los de Chile y Canadá, fervientes aliados de Estados Unidos. Tampoco hay que olvidar la instalación en ultramar de bancos de liquidación para facilitar el uso del yuan (‘RMB clearing banks’), así como el otorgamiento de cuotas de inversión para participar en el Programa Chino de Inversores Institucionales Extranjeros Calificados en Renminbi (RQFII, ‘Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor Program’).

No obstante, esas medidas resultaban insuficientes para que el yuan entrara en ‘las grandes ligas’. Hacía falta ganarse el reconocimiento de una institución decisiva en la gestión de las finanzas, como el FMI. China comenzó a ganar la batalla en agosto, cuando devaluó el yuan. De inmediato, Pekín insistió en que se trataba de una acción temporal; esto es, que no habría devaluaciones prolongadas.

Fue en ese momento cuando la directora gerente del FMI, Christine Lagarde, salió a calmar los ánimos de los inversionistas, con lo cual, neutralizó la propaganda estadounidense que responsabilizaba a China de las turbulencias económicas globales.

Por otro lado, Pekín no ha dado marcha atrás en su programa de “reformas estructurales”; por el contrario, pretende acelerar la apertura de su sector financiero. Todo apunta hacia la liberalización del tipo de cambio y las tasas de interés, así como del mercado de capitales. Tras conectar las bolsas de valores de Shanghái y Hong Kong a mediados de noviembre de 2014, ahora China contempla establecer una mancuerna bursátil con Londres.

En conclusión, si bien es cierto que el yuan todavía tiene un largo camino por recorrer para estar en condiciones de competir cara a cara frente al dólar, no hay duda de que su próxima inclusión en la canasta de divisas del FMI constituye un hito histórico. El mundo de las finanzas está cambiando…

Ariel Noyola Rodríguez

So what exactly happened last Thursday?  The markets (including the dollar) crashed …and this was not supposed to happen? 

It’s actually quite easy to understand if you see what they did was “only a test” …   Do you understand what I mean when I say a “test”?  

I will explain shortly but first, the Fed came out with piggybacked governors talking about a rate hike.  Hilarious on the face of it if you just look at the U.S. economic implosion going on. 

But let’s assume this is reality, the Fed really wants to hike rates (they do not “want to”,  they HAVE to).  For the sake of saving face and retaining any credibility they absolutely MUST raise interest rates after seven years …how do they do this? 

Please read this piece by E.D. Skyrm,  just a .25% rate raise in rates will require the equivalent of up to $800 billion of collateral necessitated to being pulled.  Did you get that?  $800 billion???  A huge number and enough to tank the whole system …unless someone is willing to replace it. 

For starters you must understand if the Fed does tighten and collateral is withdrawn from the system, because everything is now so levered …”collateral” from somewhere else must be added. That “somewhere” was supposed to be Europe.  Mario Draghi tried to push the EU governing council into further QE, in essence the German hawks refused and instead want to let some air out of the current bubbles.  Europe was supposed to carry the baton of QE, they instead dropped it.  

Mario Draghi tried to fix it on Friday with his “whatever it takes” statement.  I see a problem with this and it has to do with collateral, or the lack of.  You see, Europe is experiencing the same limits the Fed ran into during its last round of QE, not enough unencumbered collateral left to purchase.  Another way to say this would be …”there is just not enough debt outstanding”.  I know it sounds crazy because the underlying financial and economic problems have arisen BECAUSE there is too much debt …but, there is not enough to accommodate the needs for more QE.

What happened on Thursday was a “test of wills” between the Fed and the Bundesbank, the Fed clearly lost even though Friday was a giant reversal from Thursday.  I say this because Mario Draghi can say whatever he likes, his mouth will not create the collateral necessary to substitute for any tightening by the Fed.  He can say what he pleases but the governing council of the EU (run by hawkish Germans) will not reach for the QE baton.  Mr. Draghi can now only jawbone and try to mold appearances.

So where does this leave the Fed and their quarter point rate increase?  I would say they have already seen the future and … IT WAS THURSDAY!  If they decide to hike rates and the EU does not pick up the collateral slack, I believe we will not see the markets stay open for more than a week or so.  I say this because in essence the Fed will be issuing a margin call into a system already lacking for liquidity.  As I’ve said before, they originally treated a “solvency” problem with more liquidity and it has now morphed into a far bigger solvency problem.  Only this time as liquidity is also lacking, they do not have the tools (collateral) to create the needed additional liquidity.

The Fed has truly painted themselves into a corner of their own making.  I am shocked they have been so vocal and vehement they were going to raise rates.  Did they not have a deal already in place with the ECB or were they double crossed?  On the one hand if they do not hike rates, their credibility is toast.  On the other hand if they do raise rates they will smoke the financial markets faster than you can call your broker with a sell order.  I can only think the Fed somehow believed they had a deal with the ECB?  Even the BIS has warned the Fed about raising rates, is the Fed just not listening to the rest of the world?  Whether they see it or not, they have created a currency crisis with the dollar being the central character.   

The way I see this, the U.S. now has very big problems on the credibility front.  You can add to the above monetary fix we are in with a multitude of other U.S. “pictures” just not adding up.  U.S. “policy” is now being found out geopolitically thanks to Mr. Putin dropping a few “truth bombs”.  The domestic economy is already in recession and Christmas (the politically correct term is now “holiday”) sales will be a disaster.

“Truth” is beginning to slip out from behind several different curtains.  I hate to say it but a giant false flag will have to come out very soon in order to keep cover and divert attention from the truth.  I do not see any other options left, the reality MUST remain hidden or attention diverted, …or the unravelling comes.

Standing watch,

Bill Holter, Holter-Sinclair collaboration, Comments welcome  [email protected]

This article examines and documents the Houla massacre of May 2012, a terrible incident in the Syrian Crisis which came closest to attracting UN intervention. The analysis here seeks to include all relevant evidence, both from witnesses and on the UN processes. A series of appalling civilian massacres during the conflict helped set the tone for another round of ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘responsibility to protect’ debates.

The killings at Houla deserve close attention. However, because of NATO’s abuse of the ‘no fly zone’ authorisation for Libya and the wider geo-politics of Syria, Russia and China would not allow a similar UN Security Council authorisation of force. As the US did not want another prolonged ground war, big power intervention remained indirect, through proxy militias. While the Syrian army attacked those armed groups, those groups carried out public executions and constantly tried to blame the Syrian Army for attacks on civilians.

I explained in Chapter Four the context to the Islamist insurrection in Daraa, and that the centre of the insurrection spread up into the Homs area. Many Homs residents became terrified by the sectarian-genocidal slogans of ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the tomb’ Reports of these slogans appeared in the US media from May 2011 onwards (Blanford 2011; Eretz Zen 2012; Adams 2012; Wakefield 2012). These FSA groups, with their al Nusra partners, did indeed drive Christians to Beirut and slaughtered Alawis and many other pro-government people. The Orthodox and Catholic churches blamed Farouq for the large scale ethnic cleansing of more than 50,000 Christians from Homs (CNA 2012). They began to impose an Islamic tax (Spencer 2012). A local analyst concluded most of Farouk were sectarian Salafis, armed and funded by Saudi Arabia; while ‘Khalid Ibn al-Walid remained loyal to and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood’ (Mortada 2012). Genocidal slogans and actual ethnic cleansing would never have come from ‘moderate’ religious people, let alone a secular revolution.

Victims of the Houla massacre included families of some who had participated in the recent elections. Leaders of the Farouq Brigade (FSA), identified by villagers as responsible, took over the area and blamed un-named government thugs (shabiha). Photo: SANA

8.1 The Houla Massacre

After the Syrian Army had driven the FSA groups out of Homs, and on the eve of a UN Security Council meeting on Syria, a dreadful massacre of more than 100 civilians took place at the village of Houla, on the Taldou plains just north-west of Homs. The Houla massacre (25 May 2012) became important to ‘Responsibility to Protect’ discussions, as it formed the basis of a failed attempt to authorise UN intervention to protect civilians, based on the claim that the Syrian Government had massacred civilians. Evidence to back that claim, however, was hardly clear.

The governments of Britain, France and the USA immediately blamed the Syrian Government. In what has been called the ‘western and Arab media narrative’ the victims were killed by army artillery (Correggia, Embid, Hauben and Larson 2013). The Syrian Government, in turn, accused the foreign-backed terrorists, in particular the groups that had been driven out of Homs. Syria’s Foreign Ministry said the army clashed with ‘hundreds’ of armed men who committed Friday’s massacre. The killers used knives, which they said was a ‘signature’ of Islamist militant attacks (Reuters 2012). The Government told the UN ‘the victims were reportedly killed by terrorists numbering between 600–800, who had entered Al-Houla previously from the villages of Al-Rastan, Sa’an, Bourj Qaei and Samae’leen, among other locations’. The General Command of the armed forces held an inquiry (HRC 2012a: 6).

Allegations of Islamist ‘false flag’ provocations had been made before. Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, the mother superior in charge of an ancient monastery in Qara, south of Homs, had observed the ethnic cleansing of Christians in Homs, and had grave suspicions about who was behind the killings at Houla. She had said publicly that Syrian Christians had been pressured to join FSA groups, had been used by the rebels as human shields and that Christian homes had been taken over by ‘Sunnis’. She denounced their ‘false flag’ crimes in 2011 (SANA 2011; AINA 2012), pointing out that the Catholic Media Centre had a list of names of hundreds of murder victims, many of whose images had been later used in [FSA] media setups (SANA 2011).

Western media reports, however, generally dismissed statements from Damascus. Several governments expelled Syrian diplomats, in moves designed to isolate the government. The UN Security Council said it: ‘condemned in the strongest possible terms the killings … in attacks that involved a series of Government artillery and tank shellings on a residential neighbourhood … [and] also condemned the killing of civilians by shooting at close range … [this] constitutes a violation of applicable international law and of the commitments of the Syrian Government’ (UNSC 2012). France’s representative at the UN, Martin Briens, said: ‘Tanks and artillery cannons from the government shelled residential areas killing civilians’ (RT 2012). Britain’s envoy Mark Lyall Grant said ‘there is not the slightest doubt that there was deliberate government shelling against a civilian neighbourhood’ (Cowan 2012).

These accusations were premature, betraying prejudice. Russia insisted on a UNSC briefing by UN Special Mission (UNSMIS) head, Norwegian General Robert Mood, who told them the victims included 49 children and 34 women, most of whom had been shot at close range or had their throats cut. Russian diplomat Aleksandr Pankin summarised: ‘very few of the people who died in Houla were killed by artillery shelling’ (RT 2012). From then, culprits in western media stories shifted to pro-government militia (shabiha). Britain’s Daily Telegraph blamed ‘Assad’s Death Squads’. The paper suggested a sectarian motive, from an opposition source: ‘They would fight for Bashar to the death. It is natural – they have to defend their sect’ (Alexander and Sherlock 2012).

The certainty of the British and French governments, and of the anti-government ‘activists’, was not evident in the statements of the head of UNSMIS. General Mood’s group visited the massacre site and heard two distinct stories. His public comments three weeks after the massacre deserve attention, given that the UN did not release the report to which he refers:

We have interviewed locals with one story and we have interviewed locals that have another story. The circumstances and … the facts related to the incident itself still remain unclear to us … we have sent [statements and witness interviews] as a report to UN headquarters New York … if we are asked [to assist] obviously we are on the ground and could help (Mood 2012).

This report was delivered to the UN Secretary General (UNSG 2012); yet it seems it was not received by the Security Council (Hauben 2012). Mood’s ambiguity may have been disconcerting for those wanting clear findings against the Syrian Government. On 1 June the Human Rights Council (three against and two abstentions) blamed the Houla killings on the Syrian Government (‘wanton killings … by pro-regime elements and a series of Government artillery and tank shellings’) before calling for a ‘comprehensive, independent and unfettered special inquiry’ (HRC 2012c). That was an odd coupling of prejudice and a pretence at fair inquiry. UNSMIS had its activities suspended and was disbanded in August, to be replaced by another Committee co-chaired by a US diplomat.

Circumstances and timing were certainly important. As the Syrian Army drove Farouq from Homs and into surrounding towns, Syrians turned out for the 7 May National Assembly elections. Those sections of the opposition aligned to the FSA called for a boycott, and armed groups threatened to enforce this (al Akhbar 2012). In the event, the ruling Ba’ath party won 60% of the vote and their allied parties another 30%, though turnout was only 51% (Zarzar and al-Wahed 2012). There was reason to suspect enforcement of the threat, through reprisals against those who had participated and so lent legitimacy to the state.

Yet that line of inquiry was not pursued by the second UN inquiry. With three of the UNSC permanent members openly backing regime change in Syria, the debate was heavily politicised. The Houla massacre inquiry was taken over by a Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry, co-chaired by US diplomat Karen Koning AbuZayd (HRC 2012a; HRC 2012b). Appointing a US delegate was a mistake, on the part of the UN. Karen Koning AbuZayd had worked for the UN for many years, but was explicitly listed as a USA delegate to the Commission. The US Government had, by this time, publicly blamed the Syrian Government for Houla, demanding that President Assad resign for ‘killing your fellow citizens’ (AP 2012) and, with Turkey, had ‘stepped up’ what it called ‘non-lethal aid’ to rebels in Syria (Barnard 2012). By any standard Washington was a belligerent party to the Syrian conflict. On principles of independence and avoiding conflicts of interest the Human Rights Council should not have incorporated a US representative.

Unlike UNSMIS, this Commission did not visit Syria. A review of evidence was carried out and eight additional interviews were conducted, at a distance from Syria. The interim report reflected some of the ambiguity of the UNSMIS team: ‘[We are] unable to determine the identity of the perpetrators at this time; nevertheless … forces loyal to the Government may have been responsible for many of the deaths’ (HRC 2012b: 10). This was an injudicious statement. The report blamed both government forces and anti-government groups for crimes of war, but came in more strongly against the Syrian government, relying on the formal duties of government to ‘prevent or punish’ violence, as well as not commit it (HRC 2012b: 23). That is, the ‘catch-all’ argument had it that the Government was ultimately responsible for all violence on its territory, regardless of killings by the anti-government armed gangs.

The Commission’s 15 August report firmed up against the Syrian Government, removing most of the earlier ambiguity, but without identifying perpetrators. They wrote: ‘The commission conducted eight additional interviews, including with six witnesses from the Taldou area, two of whom were survivors. They looked at a range of statements from ‘various sources’, including ‘international human rights NGOs’ (HRC 2012b: 64-65). All statements, they said, were consistent with deaths being caused by government shelling and unidentified ‘shabiha’ forces. Even though they had heard evidence that the Al Sayed and Abdulrazzak families (the main groups of civilians killed) were government supporters, this committee concluded that the unidentified killers of those families ‘were aligned to the government’ (HRC 2012b: 67). They discounted evidence that FSA groups had committed the murders, claiming that ‘apart from two witnesses in the Government report, no other account supported the Government’s version of events’ (HRC 2012b: 10). The Government ‘was responsible for the deaths of civilians as a result of shelling’, they said; while as regards the ‘deliberate killing of civilians, the Commission was unable to determine the identity of the perpetrators … [but] it considered that forces loyal to the Government were likely to have been responsible for many of the deaths’ (HRC 2012b: 10).

A prominent witness presented by the anti-government side was 11 year old boy Ali Al Sayed, who says many members of his family were murdered. In an online video little Ali says:

There were tanks in the street, they shot at us with machine guns … soldiers came out … they fired 5 bullets on the door lock … arrested my brother … [and] my uncle … then my mum screamed at them … they then shot her 5 times, they shot her in the head … then he went to my brother and shot him … some of them were dressed as military, some had regular clothes, had shaved heads and beards, shabiha’ (Marchfifteen 2012).

He pretended to be dead, and thus escaped being murdered. Later he saw news on state television of his uncles having been murdered. His story is not consistent in several respects (Larson in Correggia, Embid, Hauben and Larson 2013: 20-28) and, at the end, with the help of some leading questions, he gives what appears to be a tutored appeal for foreign military intervention, the same openly stated aim of the FSA groups:

I demand that the international community stop the killing in Syria and in Houla … we are being killed … the international community is sitting, just talking and not doing anything … the people must fight for us, do what they say and protect us (Marchfifteen 2012).

Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of the boy’s story, Ali’s was hardly the only eye-witness account of the massacre. Further, it was quite false for the UN Commission of Inquiry to suggest that only ‘two witnesses … supported the Government’s version of events’. By that time there was public evidence from at least fifteen witnesses, broadly consistent with the account by the Syrian Government. Russian journalists tried to present their interview material to the Commission and apparently met with a lack of interest (Janssen 2012). The Commission claimed that the Russian reports ‘relied primarily on the same two witnesses as the Government’s report’ (HRC 2012b: 66). Yet a simple reading of a summary of evidence from the latter’s witnesses shows this to be false. Below is a summary of evidence from witnesses the UN Commission ignored. These accounts of ‘rebel’ culprits are broadly consistent with the account of the Government and often quite specific. Several gunmen are named.

8.2 Inconvenient Evidence

First, the Syrian news agency reported two unidentified people who feared for their safety. The first said the gunmen were locals plus a larger group from other areas. The locals assembled after noon prayers before attacking check-points. They then selected pro-government people, those who participated in elections or ‘didn’t give the gunmen money’. One was Haitham al-Housan. The bodies shown on television were of ‘people murdered by terrorists along with the bodies of the gunmen killed in the initial conflict’ (SANA 2012). The second witness, a woman, saw the larger group attacking a check-point. They heard of people from Tal Dahab, Aqrab and al-Rastan. A man called Saiid Fayes al-Okesh fired a mortar and police responded; he was shot in the leg. Another gunmen was Haitham al-Hallaq, who led a group of about 200. The victims belonged to the al Sayed family, with Muawiya al Sayed ‘a police officer who didn’t defect’ and others related to Meshleb al Sayed, who ‘recently became Secretary of the Peoples’ Assembly’. Other targeted groups included four households of the Abdelrazzaq family (SANA 2012).

Syrian television news showed interviews with two distressed male witnesses. The first man said: ‘The terrorists are from this area and all the areas around … a huge number of them, hundreds. They started to use shells and RPGs … hitting the houses with guns, machine guns … They killed people in their houses … some bodies have been burned’ (Syria News 2012: at 6.47). The second man said: ‘A man, his brother, and nephew were killed in front of my sister … [another] was able to run away and hide … the United Nations, those observers, what are they doing while shells are hitting us?’ (Syria News 2012: at 7.35).

German journalist, Rainer Hermann, who speaks Arabic, interviewed witnesses from Houla within days of the massacre. His sources included Syrian opposition members who had rejected violence. He withheld their names. They said Islamist rebels had attacked three army checkpoints. His sources told him:

The massacre took place after Friday prayers … dozens of soldiers and rebels were killed … [in fighting of] about 90 minutes … those killed were almost exclusively families of the Alawite or Shia minorities … [including] several dozen members of a family which had converted to Shia Islam in recent years … and the family of a Sunni member of parliament, because he was considered a collaborator … after the massacre, the perpetrators filmed their victims, presented them as Sunni victims and spread their videos (Hermann 2012).

Hermann gave names to the gang leaders:

more than 700 gunmen under the leadership of Abdurrazzaq Tlass and Yahya Yusuf [Farooq leaders] came in three groups from Rastan, Kafr Laha and Akraba and attacked three army checkpoints around Taldou. The numerically superior rebels and the soldiers fought bloody battles … the rebels, supported by the residents of Taldou, snuffed out the families … [who] had refused to join the opposition (LRC 2012).

German journalist Alfred Hackensberger spoke with a man who had been given refuge in the Qara monastery headed by Mother Agnes Mariam. This man called ‘Jibril’ said:

The fighting began around noon, when the rebels, coming from Ar-Rastan and Saan, attacked the checkpoints … the rebels went to the hospital and killed patients there … several teams targeted and went in selected houses and started to shoot all of the inhabitants. He knew the Sajid’s personally. ‘They were Sunni Muslims, like all of us’, he says. ‘They were killed by them because they have refused to join the revolution. They’ve even murdered a Member of Parliament who … had refused the boycott of the FSA

Asked about the ‘regime loyalists’ claims, Jibril responded derisively:

Nonsense … Houla is in rebel hands since December 2011 … the Army would like to reclaim Taldu, but it has not been done … many people know what really happened … who’s there … can only replay the version of the rebels. Everything else is certain death (Hackensberger 2012).

The Arabic speaking Dutch writer Martin Janssen constructed his view from three sources: the Catholic Fides news agency, information from refugees at the Qara monastery and the accounts of Russian journalists Musin and Kulygina. He questioned the shabiha story because many victims were Alawi, who are almost all pro-government. Fides had reported that ‘large groups of Syrian Alawites and Christians in the region were fleeing to Lebanon to escape the violence of armed gangs’, after the events at Houla (Janssen 2012). The Qara monastery told him witnesses said the army was absent in the region, with ‘Rastan and Saan … under full control of the Free Syrian Army’. The armed groups attacked the al-Watani hospital and killed the guards. ‘Then they invaded the hospital where armed rebels killed all present and … put the hospital on fire’ (Janssen 2012). At Tal Daw, near Houla, armed groups murdered all the Alawite families. The report from the monastery described the area around Qusayr as ‘in turmoil’ and wracked by sectarian violence (Janssen 2012).

Those Russian journalists, Marat Musin and Olga Kulygina from the Abkhazian Network News Agency (ANNA-News) had a camera crew in Houla on 25 May and took a number of witness interviews. Their sources make it very clear the murderers were Islamist ‘rebels’. An old woman called ‘The grandmother of Al-Hula’ said: ‘Checkpoint positions were attacked … All the soldiers were killed, then they attacked our villages, torched a hospital … Bandits killed our pharmacist … [because] he had treated a wounded soldier Nobody but the army will help us … They say there have been airstrikes! Lies, lies, lies. Liars, all of them come from Ar-Rastan’ (ANNA 2012). Taldou resident Syed Abdul Wahab, said: ‘The terrorists want to come here … to take power. We have always lived in peace. We cannot leave the house’. A local woman from Al-Gaunt, next to Al-Houla, said ‘Nine terrorists killed my relatives in the field. The bandits set fire to our houses and we fled … we have a martyr, who was burned alive. Why, by what law did they die? Is this Islam? Is this justice?’ (ANNA 2012).

Another woman from Taldou they call Arifah told them she listened to the radio chatter from the ‘bandits’, before the massacre (Musin 2012a). They began by firing at the main checkpoint while a group from the al Hassan clan, led by Nidal Bakkur, attacked a ‘second checkpoint’ outside the village. The bandits lost about 25 people but after about two hours they had taken over both check-points. ‘They then proceeded to murder the Al-Sayed family which lived across the street from the police station’. Three families including about 20 children were murdered, along with another 10 from the Abdul Razaq family. That afternoon Abdul Razak Tlas, leader of the Farouq Brigade, arrived with 250 men from Ar-Rastan, Aqraba and Farlaha (Musin 2012a). The city of Ar-Rastan had been abandoned by most civilians for some time, taken over by Islamists from Lebanon (Musin 2012b). Arifah said that by 8pm the murdered civilians and dead bandits had been taken to the mosque. They then filmed for the Qatari and Saudi television stations. On Saturday morning, when the UNSMIS observers arrived, ‘The fallen rebels involved in the action were presented as civilians, while the conquering rebels dressed in army uniforms posed as defectors. They were surrounded by their family members who told the story of a government attack with heavy shelling and posed as victim’s relatives, while the relatives of the real victims were nowhere to be seen’ (Musin 2012a).

Violence continued after the UNSMIS visit. Musin and Kulygina later interviewed two wounded soldiers, a wounded policeman and another resident, who gave more detail of ‘rebel’ sniper attacks and murders, and of the ‘rebel’ escorts set up for the UN observers. They continued to identify attackers and victims. A group from the Al Aksh clan had been firing mortars and RPGs at the checkpoints. All checkpoint prisoners were executed: a Sunni conscript had his throat cut, while Abdullah Shaui of Deir-Zor was burned alive (Maramus 2012; Musin 2012b). The police officer said ‘the attackers were from Ar-Rastan and Al-Hula. Insurgents control Taldou. They burned houses and killed people by the families, because they were loyal to the government’ (Musin 2012b). The resident saw the clashes from the roof of the police station. ‘Al Jazeera aired pictures and said that the Army committed the massacre at Al Hula … in fact, they [the gunmen] killed the civilians and children in Al-Hula. The bandits … steal everything … most of the fighters are from the city of Ar Rastan’ (Maramus 2012; Musin 2012b). The second UN inquiry ignored these 15 witnesses, who told of specific perpetrators with clear political motives. An outline of major reports and their associated evidence is below.

8.3 Dissent at the UN

The partisan report clearly influenced UN discussions. Although the HRC passed a motion with a strong majority, condemning the Syrian Government, the dissenting comments were significant. Russian representative Maria Khodynskaya-Golenischv (UNTV 2012: 7.00 to 8.10) said ‘we cannot agree with the one-sided conclusions put out in the resolution concerning the Commission on the Houla tragedy … We believe that the question of guilt is still open. An investigation should be carried out thoroughly … unfortunately some states are de facto encouraging terrorism in Syria therefore we have no doubt that the episode in Houla has definitely been whipped up in the media and has been used to carry out force against this country. The delegate from China (UNTV 2012: 13.25 to 15.50) also flagged that country’s intention to vote against the resolution, as there was a need ‘for a political solution … [and an] immediate end to violence … putting pressure on one party for the conflict will not help solve the problem’. The Cuban delegate (UNTV 2012: 16.05 to 18.50) said ‘there are parties that are interested in not fostering the path of dialogue and understanding … [some saying clearly they want] regime change, and even promoting the idea of military intervention with the use of force to impose on the Syrian people decisions that are being taken outside the country’. The Indian delegate (UNTV 2012: 19.00-21.30), who abstained, said India had given ‘unqualified support to the joint missions’ but urged the Human Rights Council to ‘always act with complete impartiality, in order to maintain its credibility and retain the trust and confidence of all … [there is a need for] a balanced and impartial resolution that can help start a meaningful political process in Syria’

The Syrian delegation (UNTC 2012: 24.33-35.30) came out hardest against the resolution, saying that the Commission of Inquiry ‘didn’t even visit Syria’ and had ignored the Syrian inquiry. Referring to some ‘Arab co-sponsors’ Syria said they had no right to ‘give advice’ because they were ‘directly involved in the killings of Syrian people, and criminals cannot be judges’, imposing sanctions and then ‘shedding tears about the humanitarian situation’. The refusal to condemn terrorism in Syrian reflected badly on the Council. Nevertheless, the big powers had the numbers, with 41 voting in favour, three against and three abstentions. The resolution was adopted but no UNSC action was possible because of opposition from two of the five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China.

The unsatisfactory UN process does not negate the fact that strong prima facie evidence emerged against particular groups and individuals. Witnesses identified as perpetrators four local gunmen (Haitham al-Housan, Saiid Fayes al-Okesh, Haitham al-Hallq and Nidal Bakkur) along with groups from two clans (the al Hassan and the al-Aksh), plus a large Farouq group led by Abdurrazzaq Tlass and Yahya Yusuf. Their motive was to punish pro-government villagers, in particular the al-Sayed and Abdulrazzak families, then to set up a scene to falsely blame the government for their own crimes. The Houla massacre did not result in a Libyan-styled intervention, but false accusations afforded temporary impunity to the killers and created a great risk that military intervention could have been set in play.

8.4 The Aftermath

Houla set the tone for a series of similar ‘false flag’ massacres. When the August 2012 massacre of 245 people in Daraya (Damascus) came to light, western media reports quickly suggested that ‘Assad’s army has committed [another] massacre’ (Oweis 2012). However that story was contradicted by British journalist Robert Fisk, who observed that the FSA had slaughtered kidnapped civilian and off-duty soldier hostages after a failed prisoner swap (Fisk 2012). Similarly, the 10 December 2012 massacre of 120 to 150 villagers in Aqrab (less than 15 kilometres from Houla, and also at that time under ‘rebel’ control) was also blamed by ‘activists’ on the Syrian Government. The New York Times suggested ‘members of Assad’s sect’ were responsible (Stack and Mourtada 2012). In fact, as British journalist Alex Thompson (2012b) later reported, from the tightly corroborated evidence of survivors, the FSA (including foreign fighters) had held 500 Alawi villagers for nine days, murdering many of them as the army closed in and the FSA fled. In this case those of ‘Assad’s sect’ were the victims, just as the victims at Houla had been mostly government supporters and their families.

The Houla massacre illustrates great dangers in the practice of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, when the big powers have proxy armies in the field. The idea that almost any sort of atrocity could be blamed on the Syrian Government, with little fear of contradiction in the western media, must have played heavily on the minds of Islamist armed groups. Farouq in particular was very media savvy, regularly producing videos for the television networks of Qatar (Al Jazeera) and Saudi Arabia (Al Arabiya). Up against a superior national army, which was not disintegrating along sectarian lines, Farouq and the others were in desperate need of military backing. Inflaming moral outrage against the Syrian Government just might bring in NATO air power, as it had in Libya. In the meantime, they could carry out major crimes with impunity.

The failure of UN processes to recognise the UN’s own role, in fomenting both impunity and escalation of the violence, further discredited the ‘no fly zone’ idea, which had been cynically exploited in the Libyan intervention. After Houla, while the propaganda war continued, there was no real hope of Security Council authorised intervention in Syria. The next major incident, involving the use of chemical weapons in ‘rebel’ occupied East Ghouta, more than a year later, would have as its reference point a unilateral ‘red line’ decree by Washington. Houla in many respects marked the failure of attempts to build any real UN-sanctioned ‘official truth’ over the conflict in Syria.

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Syria News (2012) ‘Syria News 27 May 2012. Syrian Official TV Channel’, Syria News YouTube, 27 May, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX7n0U5hvWQ

Thompson, Alex (2012) ‘Was there a massacre in the Syrian town of Aqrab?’ 14 December: http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/happened-syrian-town-aqrab/3426

Truth Syria (2012) ‘Syria – Daraa revolution was armed to the teeth from the very beginning’, BBC interview with Anwar Al-Eshki, YouTube, 7 November, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGmrWWJ77w

UNSC (2012) ‘Security Council Press Statement on Attacks in Syria’, United Nations Security Council, 27 May, online: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/sc10658.doc.htm

UNSG (2012) ‘Daily Press Briefing by the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General’, United Nations, 21 June, online: http://www.un.org/press/en/2012/db120621.doc.htm

UNTV (2012) ‘September 28 2012 meeting of the Human Rights Council’, L32 Vote, Item: 4, 38th Meeting – 21st Regular Session of Human Rights Council, online:

http://webtv.un.org/meetings-events/human-rights-council/watch/l32-vote-item:4-38th-meeting-21st-regularsession-of-human-rights-council/1865712813001

Wakefield, Mary (2012) ‘Die Slowly Christian Dog’, The Spectator, 27 October, online: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8708121/die-slowly-christian-dog/

Zarzar, Anas and Tareq Abd al-Wahed (2012) ‘Syria’s New Parliament: From Baath to Baath’, Al Akhbar, 16 May, online: http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/syria%E2%80%99s-new-parliament-baath-baath

Image: General Viktor Bondarev, chief of staff of the Russian Air Force

The elements presented during a Press conference in Moscow by General Viktor Bondarev, chief of staff of the Russian Air Force, leave no doubt – the Turkish aviation, which had been informed of the flight plan of the Russian Sukhoï, in accordance with the agreements on military co-ordination, had already recieved prior instructions to assume attack position. These elements invalidate the position of NATO.

Two days after the attack on the Russian Su-24 by a Turkish F-16 in Syrian air-space, General Viktor Bondarev, chief of staff of the Russian Air Force, made an astonishing declaration which totally changes the image broadcast by the Western media, which has so far published only the Turkish version.

In accordance with the memorandum concerning the Syria campaign signed by Moscow and Washington on the 26th October, the Russian command informed the US 12 hours before the mission involving two Su-24 bombers over nothern Syria.

They sent all the details of the mission, including the time of take-off – 09.40 a.m. – the altitude – 5,600 to 6,000 metres – and the targets to be bombed – in the area of the Chefir, Mortlou and Zahia region in the north of Syria, on the frontier of the Turkish region of Hatay.

The Su-24 tactical bombers took off from the Hmeymim air base at the appointed hour – 09.40 a.m. – each one armed with four OFAB-250 bombs. From 09.51 until 10.11 a.m., the Russian bombers flew in a holding area at an altitude of 5,650 metres and 5,800 metres respectively, to the south of the Syrian city of Idlib. At 10.11 a.m., the two Russian bombers received the GPS coordinates of their targets, and made a primary vertical passage over their targets at 10.16 a.m., during which they dropped bombs. After having made the necessary manœuvres to position themselves for a second attack, one of the Su-24 bombers was hit by an air-to-air missile fired by the Turkish F-16 at 10.24 a.m.

A control analysis of the on-target results, corroborated by the radar network which surveys Syrian air-space, revealed the presence of the two Turkish F-16’s, between 09.08 a.m. and 10.29 a.m., flying at an altitude of 4,200 metres over the Turkish region of Hatay, on the border with Syria. The Turkish planes had taken off at 08.40 a.m., and landed at 11.00 a.m.

The time necessary for the jets to start their motors and take off from the air base at Diyarbakir and reach their service zone, situated at 410 kilometres from their base, shows that the two Turkish F-16’s had received their orders one hour before the Russian bombers took off.

This in turn proves that the two Turkish pilots knew that they would be engaging Russian Su-24’s and were aware of the details of the bombers’ mission, so that they were prepared for their action and were able to position themselves to shoot down the Russian plane to make it appear that the Russians had entered Turkish air-space. They had therefore received orders not to apply the procedure described in the international treaties, which Turkey has signed, in other words interception, followed by visual contact, a warning shot with the on-board cannon, and then, if necessary, destruction.

According to General Viktor Bondarev, the Su-24 bomber had maintained a distance of more than 5 kilometres from the Turko-Syrian border throughout the whole flight, before entering the area in which the Turkish F-16 could fire its heat-seeking air-to-air missile, which flew almost perpendicular to the direction of the Su-24’s. The Turkish plane made a 110-degree turn lasting 1 minute and 40 seconds in order to fire and hit the rear of the Russian bomber. Because of this turn, the Turkish F-16 penetrated two kilometres into Syrian air-space, where it remained for 40 seconds, while the Su-24 only penetrated Turkish air-space for 17 seconds. This was enough for the F-16 to be detected by the radar screens at the Hmeymim air base after the attack, during which it dived to below 2,500 metres.

The turn manœuvre positioned the F-16 from 5 to 7 kilometres behind one of the Russian Su-24 bombers, with an approach speed which enabled the firing of the missile. After the attack, there was no recorded radio contact, either from the pilots or the Turkish command, including the channel which was specially designed for co-operative contact.

Bondarev’s conclusion is that the Turkish pilots had spent several weeks training specifically to shoot down a Russian bomber on their border with Syria, and that the final details of the ambush had been carefully refined by the Turks – probably with their NATO allies – during the 12 hours which had followed the arrival of the information sent by the Russians before take-off.

Translated by Pete Kimberley.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) supported by the National Defense Forces (NDF) continued its advance along the Turkish border in the Latakia province’s northern countryside. Following the heavy clashes against the al Nusra and Free Syrian Army militants, the Syrian forces took control of Zahiyah Tower, near the Turkish border-crossing. The government troops are continuing the advance along the Turkish border.

The Syrian forces targeted terrorists’ concentration centers in the neighborhoods of al- Rashidiya, al-Hwaiqa and al-Sheikh Yassin in Deir Ezzur. Early reports said 11 terrorists were killed and, at least, 34 others were injured in the attacks. The main clashes were observed at the city of Inkhil, and the towns of Zimrin and Simlin in Dara’a.

A strategic village of Marhatan near Palmyra in the Homs province has been purged of the militants in a massive military operation. Earlier, the Syrian troops engaged in heavy clashes with ISIS militants in al-Biyarat region. The pro-government sources argue that the ISIS militants suffered heavy losses.

Some 200 wanted militants from Zabadani region and Madaya in Damascus province turned themselves in to the authorities on Saturday. The Syrian government has vowed to pardon all those who lay down arms voluntarily. Another reason has been the Russian air raids which impact the terrorists’ fighting spirit negatively.

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Scientists monitoring the spread of radiation in the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear accident report finding an increased number of sites off the US West Coast showing signs of contamination from Fukushima. This includes the highest detected level to date from a sample collected about 1,600 miles west of San Francisco.

The level of radioactive cesium isotopes in the sample, 11 Becquerel’s per cubic meter of seawater (about 264 gallons), is 50 percent higher than other samples collected along the West Coast so far, but is still more than 500 times lower than US government safety limits for drinking water, and well below limits of concern for direct exposure while swimming, boating, or other recreational activities.

Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and director of the WHOI Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity, was among the first to begin monitoring radiation in the Pacific, organizing a research expedition to the Northwest Pacific near Japan just three months after the accident that started in March 2011.

Through a citizen science sampling effort, Our Radioactive Ocean, that he launched in 2014, as well as research funded by the National Science Foundation, Buesseler and his colleagues are using sophisticated sensors to look for minute levels of ocean-borne radioactivity from Fukushima. In 2015, they have added more than 110 new samples in the Pacific to the more than 135 previously collected and posted on the Our Radioactive Ocean web site.

Map shows the location of seawater samples taken by scientists and citizen scientists that were analyzed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for radioactive cesium as part of Our Radioactive Ocean. Cesium-137 is found throughout the Pacific Ocean and was detectable in all samples collected, while cesium-134 (yellow/orange dots), an indicator of contamination from Fukushima, has been observed offshore and in select coastal areas.
(Figure by Jessica Drysdale, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

“First, despite the fact that the levels of contamination off our shores remain well below government-established safety limits for human health or to marine life, the changing values underscore the need to more closely monitor contamination levels across the Pacific. Second, these long-lived radioisotopes will serve as markers for years to come for scientists studying ocean currents and mixing in coastal and offshore waters.”

The recent findings reported by Buesseler agree with those reported by scientists who are part of the group Kelp Watch and by the team of Canadian scientists working under the InFORM umbrella. While Buesseler’s work focuses on ocean chemistry and does not involve sampling of biological organisms, the InFORM scientists have done sampling of fish and have not seen any Fukushima cesium in fish collected in British Columbia.

Almost any seawater sample from the Pacific will show traces of cesium-137, an isotope of cesium with a 30-year half-life, some of which is left over from nuclear weapons testing carried out in the 1950s to 1970s. The isotope cesium-134 is the “fingerprint” of Fukushima, but, with a 2-year half-life, it decays much quicker than cesium-137. Scientists back calculate traces of cesium-134 to determine how much was actually released from Fukushima in 2011 and add to it an equal amount of cesium-137 that would have been released at the same time.

Working with Japanese colleagues, Buesseler also continues to independently monitor the ongoing leaks from Fukushima Dai-ichi by collecting samples from as close as one kilometer (one-half mile) away from the nuclear power plants.  During his most recent trip this October they collected samples of ocean water, marine organisms, seafloor sediment and groundwater along the coast near the reactors. Buesseler says the levels of radioactivity off Fukushima remain elevated – some 10 to 100 times higher than off the US West Coast today, and he is working with colleagues at WHOI to try to determine how much radioactive material is still being released to the ocean each day.

WHOI marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler in his lab. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Buesseler will present his latest findings on the spread of Fukushima radiation at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco on Dec. 14, 2015.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.

In recent weeks, more and more discussion has focused on the failed US efforts to defeat ISIS, contrasted with the successful efforts of Russia. 

Since the Paris terrorist attacks a few weeks ago, it has become apparent that a new impetus for defeating terrorism is overtaking the Western political scene.  Or is it. 

While the US military has had to confront its failure against ISIS, mostly as a result of Russian success, recent explanations offered by military spokesmen and government officials for the US failure to defeat ISIS have been incredible and show an extreme willingness to play with three-dimensional reality.  That being said, this is nothing surprising or new.  But it should be noted what these excuses are so that it can be clearly seen who the US military/political establishment would have you blame for the failure to defeat ISIS.

One of the culprits hampering the American military defeat of ISIS is the immense US respect for civilians.  I know a few you just fainted, but I’m serious and this has been said publicly. “It’s insane. Seventy-five percent of those combat missions return to base without dropping a weapon,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stated to the Hill recently.  So the US is just too damn cautious and humanitarian to wage a successful campaign against ISIS?

In the same article Lt. Gen. John W. Hesterman III affirms this reason by stating that

“That’s been true for about the last 10 years, by the way — you know, based on the way we do conflict,”.

Of course, moral warfare is our only way of warfare.

The only problem with this is that it’s not true.  Recently, four servicemen who served a combined 10 years within America’s drone warfare program in various countries around the world, all surfaced to criticize the program.  In this Guardian article, they together blame the Paris terrorist attacks and others like it on the drone warfare campaign and the tendency of it, in up to 90% of cases, to result in the death of non-combatants.  How does one square the reports of these whistleblowers that the drone program alone, not to mention other airstrikes, is killing so many civilians that it is in part responsible for the fertile recruiting grounds for jihadists, while in the sphere of ISIS, the respect for human rights goes so far as to make the war against ISIS completely toothless? Clearly no such pressure exists on our allies such as Saudi Arabia, who are in the middle of a historically brutal air bombing campaign against the Yemenis population.

The next excuse that has emerged is that the US is using too much ammo and has exhausted their supply.  So, in a mission where up to 75% of all missions return without firing any missiles, they have exhausted their missile supply? In addition, Air Force commander Mark Welsh has used this fact as evidence to justify his recent request to the Congress for more money toward the ISIS mission.  Though much has been made of Obama’s “cuts” to the military budget, any organization that has been called out for losing $8.6 trillion (since 1996) can unequivocally be cited as crazy for thinking that somehow their struggles are the result of a lack of resources.  This claim is both ludicrous on its base, but is of course even more absurd when one considers the actual relationship between the US and ISIS, and how US “failure” is anything but.

What both of these claims explaining US “failure” to defeat ISIS illuminate is the cynical nature of the US political and military establishment.   As the Russians and many others in the alternative media have been saying since the emergence of ISIS in mid to late 2014, there is no war ON ISIS, only a war WITH ISIS as the key protagonists and agents for US strategy.  This has also been elaborated extensively by Vladimir Putin who has recently provided several examples of photo evidence on the Turkey (NATO member)-ISIS connections following the recent downing of a Russian fighter jet by Turkish forces.  While the US role in the establishment of and continued support for ISIS is routinely mentioned in international press such as Russia Today and Telesur, it is scarcely mentioned in the mainstream American press.  Given the actual role of the US as supporters and not combatants of ISIS, their reasons for “failing” to combat ISIS come out looking even more absurd.

So while the US seems to be ‘running out of ammo’ in their war against ISIS, ISIS itself will become richer and is astonishingly well-armed and trained and being cited as dangerous due to its growing influence worldwide, even as they suffer setbacks in Syria.  This is occurring according to American officials who have recently warned of the expanding threat ISIS poses to the US homeland.  CIA director John Brennan has stated that ISIS has become transnational in scope and that he “would anticipate that this is not the only operation that ISIL has in the pipeline.” This is combined with comments from the future Democratic presidential candidate (President?) Hilary Clinton that war against ISIS is a “long-term” struggle.

Should the war against ISIS indeed be long-term with more planned attacks carried out against American or other Western targets, the US political/military establishment has already headed off two potential arguments against future draconian security measures carried out by an already out of control police state.

Humanitarian concerns regarding civilian safety can be disregarded more openly as this very humanitarianism has already been propped up as a reason for failed/ing US operations in Syria.  Lastly, anyone who attempts to question the US military’s take in the budget has also had a seat reserved for them at the (very unpopular) pro-ISIS table as someone who supports terrorism.  The arguments are ready to be made to objectors on either of the above grounds, wasn’t that how we failed to stop ISIS in the first place?

The world is falling over itself to bomb Syria.

The following statement from Reuters summarizes the situation:

“Most of the world’s powers are now flying combat missions over Iraq and Syria against Islamic State. But any consensus on how to proceed has been thwarted by opposing policies over the 4-year-old civil war in Syria, which has killed 250,000 people, driven 11 million from their homes, left swathes of territory in the hands of jihadist fighters and defied all diplomatic efforts at a solution.”

While it may seem to the outside observer that this catalogue of mayhem is the result of incompetence, to me – on the contrary – it is evidence of things going to plan.

I have never, thus far, seen a war the ruling elite clearly wanted to happen not happen.

Here, as in all other cases, there has been a bit of hand-wringing, some crying, some protests, some moving speeches. But like the morality plays of medieval times, after enjoying the sermon dressed as entertainment, life has inevitably carried on as normal with the barons raping and pillaging and everyone else having to put up with that reality.

Destruction of Syria is the plan

This time the plan – at least judging from the outcomes – is to destroy Syria.

Syria has been anathema to the self-appointed arbiters of righteousness: the ‘international community’, that coterie of hypocrites which arrogates to itself the monopoly on meting out death to those who won’t get with the program.

This group dislikes Syria which has had an uncompromising stance towards Israel and an independent financial system, and is using the chance to destroy it to flood Europe with refugees, thus further debasing the makeup of its constituent nations, and simultaneously justifying a lockdown in those countries.

Enter Putin

Everything was going swimmingly until Putin stepped in.

While many in the West who have grown jaundiced at the obvious usurpation of our governments by outside interests ascribe almost saint-like motivations to Putin, I do not. He is a superb strategist. Exactly what he is strategizing for is not clear yet.

What is clear is that his move into Syria threw a spanner in the works of a status quo the US was quite happy with: growing terrorism and mayhem in Syria and spreading nicely to Europe.

Assad himself said a few days ago to the BBC (courtesy of Czech Television) that ISIS was growing smaller after Russian bombing intervention whereas moves by other countries served only to strengthen ISIS and increase their recruitment.

He added: “The facts are telling.”

So what do the facts tell?

They tell us that Russia is the only country involved to date which has the removal of ISIS as an actual goal.

Russia is also the only country with a legitimate mandate under international law.

In addition, ISIS was most eloquently outed by author and journalist Gearóid Ó Colmáin on Russia Today as a US creation.

In this scenario, the reason for further western efforts in the region is looking increasingly like an attempt to prevent Russia from routing its assets or achieving the informational coup that would follow.

France and Britain milking the crises

The propaganda war is hotting up, with western press issuing unsubstantiated and emotional surmise as news.

Meanwhile, the French and the British are now, of course, bombing Syria.

At home, the French government not only voted to bomb but enacted ‘emergency’ powers at the same time. And Holland wants to change the constitution to extend these powers.

The Telegraph states: “The draft “Protection of the Nation” bill […] would extend the right to strip French citizenship from dual nationals convicted of terrorism offences by also including people born in France.

It would also prolong certain powers after a state of emergency was lifted.

No time limit will be inscribed in the constitution under the new proposals. As is currently the case, parliament will decide how long a given state of emergency should last.”

This all looks so like a dictator’s wet dream, it takes an effort of will to believe it has not been planned this way.

And a man no less respected than Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has raised legitimate questions about the official line on the Paris attacks.

He says:

“European peoples want to be French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, British. They do not want their countries to be a diverse Tower of Babel created by millions of refugees from Washington’s wars.

To remain a nationality unto themselves is what Pegida, Farage, and Le Pen offer the voters.

Realizing its vulnerability, it is entirely possible that the French Establishment made a decision to protect its hold on power with a false flag attack that would allow the Establishment to close France’s borders and, thereby, deprive Marine Le Pen of her main political issue.”

The same event, of course, justifies France’s bombing of Syria.

The British government for its part – despite some theatrical hand-wringing – has got on the bandwagon and opted to join in whatever further criminality the US has planned in Syria.

As though to justify the decision, the Telegraph breathlessly informs us that ISIS (or ISIL as it calls it) is planning to attack the UK “next”.

It says: “There are unconfirmed reports that Isil has decided that the next target of an attack will be Britain.

European security agencies, citing specific intelligence that had been obtained, stated that British Isil operatives in Syria and Iraq were being tasked to return home to launch an attack, CNN reported.”

This is the level of the propaganda now: CNN reports security agencies who say that a terrorist group whose name changes every five minutes might be sending members to Britain to do harm.

But this is unconfirmed.

The real reason for this war

I’m going to simplify things: the Plan for a New American Century – a document which was created by neoconservative warmongers in or close to power under George Bush Jr. – listed countries which it wanted the US to attack, namely: North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria.

The journal-neo.org site states:

“[all were] pinpointed as enemies of the U.S. well before the illegal war in Iraq in 2003, as well as the illegal 2011 war in Libya and the ongoing proxy war in Syria.”

Retired US General Wesley Clarke went on record in 2007 stating that the fix was in: the U.S. had unilaterally decided to destroy Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

 This is not some wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. Clarke was a four-star general, and the man who commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000.

The pretense of choice

Any objective assessment of who benefits from attacks upon the countries Clarke mentioned would not include any European country – or even the U.S. for that matter.

But the subtext is clear: if Europeans don’t want to take part, terrorist attacks will be allowed or contrived until they acquiesce.

In short: the ruling elite wants this war. Our pretend governments voted it through on the nod. And we the people will have to deal with the fallout and put up with random terrorist acts if we wake up and speak out about how this charade is rigged.

At the same time, the people of Syria are subject to bombing raids by the US, France and the UK – none of which have any invitation from the legitimate government of that country – actions which, properly speaking, are acts of war against the country the perpetrators claim to want to help.

My prediction: the clean-up operation Russia initiated and Assad approves of will be made to fail; terrorism will increase and spread into Europe; and mass immigration from Syria and that area to Europe will continue; and acts of terrorism on European soil will magically justify endless war, internal lock-down, wholesale surveillance, detention without trial, and troops on the street.

And this – in the absence of hard evidence based in action to the contrary – I can only see as the actual plan.

Do you remember voting for that?

No, nor do I.

Yemen’s independent Al Masdar News  headlines on Monday December 7th, “U.S. Backed Syrian Opposition Official Calls for the Extermination of Alawites,” and Leith Fadel reports that:

“A prominent official from the U.S. backed Syrian Opposition has called for the extermination of Alawite Muslim villages after a series of defeats at the hands of the religiously diverse “Syrian Arab Army” (SAA) in the month of November

“Abdullah Al-‘Ali – a former Aleppo-based attorney who has since moved to Turkey, where he works alongside the President of the Syrian National Council, Khaled Khoja, […]  advises followers and friends in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to carry out deliberate sectarian attacks against Syria’s large Alawite Muslim population, which is also contrary to the message the Syrian National Council has attempted to spread to the western world about its secular nature.

“Exterminating Nusayri (derogatory term that is directed towards Alawites) villages is more important than liberating the Syrian capital,” says Abdullah Al-‘Ali. […] Al-‘Ali’s sectarian post seems to be tolerated by his counterparts in the Syrian National Council as several members liked his message.”

Al Masdar News  had previously been in the news itself during the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrations in Yemen against the Shiite President Ali Abdullah Saleh, when the newspaper’s photographer was killed by Saleh’s troops. The newspaper is strictly nonpartisan and opposed to all sectarianism.

A sectarian, pro-Sunni, newspaper owned by Sunni Qatar, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, bannered on December 2nd, “Syrian activists: Destroying Assad means destroying Islamic State group,” and reported that, “Many Syrian activists are frustrated by the UK debate on bombing the Islamic State group in Syria and feel that the cause of the problem, Assad, is being ignored completely.” Qatar’s royal family, the Thanis, have been major donors to jihadist groups, all of which are Sunni. The newspaper quoted a Sunni group saying that the West needs to concentrate upon destroying “the roots of the problem that allows IS to flourish: Assad and his atrocities.”

On November 18th, a U.S. Defense Department press briefing in Baghdad proudly announced the first U.S. bombing of ISIS oil tank trucks carrying Iraqi and Syrian oil stolen by ISIS, for sale in other countries, and announced that:

“this is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike. … It says, “Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them. … Warning: airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life.”

Russia had already bombed, during the prior month and a half, thousands of such ISIS black-market oil trucks, and didn’t warn the people who were driving them.

ISIS is one of the many Sunni jihadist groups that are fighting in Syria to oust from power the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad.

On November 24th, Michael Morell, Obama’s CIA Director during 2011-2013, explained on the PBS Charlie Rose show, “We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure.”

By contrast, the U.S. bombings in Syria have been directed against Syria’s infrastructure, including power stations that are in the territory still held by Bashar al-Assad’s forces. No one who was bombed in those anti-Shiite  attacks was warned in advance.

Shiites in Iraq are considering whether Iraq should kick the U.S. out because the U.S. is supporting Sunni jihadists, such as ISIS.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The situation in Syria today is nothing short of catastrophic. More than half of the entire population has been displaced in a civil war now approaching its fifth year, and almost 4.3 million Syrian refugees are registered with the U.N. Millions are crowded into densely population refugee camps in neighboring Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Many live on the street, and few have access to basic resources or job prospects.

State bureaucracy has a universal operating rationale: if an error occurred because of a flaw in the system, an oversight perhaps, or because of ill-planning, the solution shall relate to something else.  It should be termed the iron law of non-resolution.  It is one that holds resolutely in intelligence and security circles.

For the vast sums being put into defence and security, states across the globe find themselves numerous steps behind anticipating attacks.  The starkest illustration of this was the November 13 attacks on Paris, a cruel unmasking of the national security state’s inability to do what it was meant to.  All that surveillance, all that eye-gazing and accumulation – to what end?

A notable point in all of this is that it took human indifference, an arrogant callousness that refused to accept intelligence from another agency.  The excuse: security agencies get that all the time.  Shrug the shoulders and go back to bed.  Not that it was the sole cause – far from it – but it was fundamental.  Errors are ultimately traceable to human agency.

The one system that remains a perceived friend and foe of government and state authorities in general is the Internet and the labyrinthine channels of communication it offers.  It could not be anything else, being itself a child of the military. It was initially built to facilitate survival and secrecy, rather than its anti-twin, transparency.  Unsurprisingly, it has become a rather vigorous battleground over encryption technologies.

Political representatives, feeling the pinch about the need to do something – anything – after a dramatic attack, have found the subject nearest to their loathing: encryption.  Ranking intelligence committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein from California has gone so far as to call encryption the Internet’s “Achilles’ heel” when it is, in fact, its invaluable, strengthened torso.[1]

Feinstein’s Jekyll-Hyde reasoning here is that privacy will be protected by the surveillance state because the State is not particularly interested in the frivolities of the ordinary citizen. It is the greatest canard of all: data collection programs, and the means to access communications data, actual serve a broader public good.  We are the eyes in the background overseeing that good is done.  But repeatedly, Feinstein’s assertions that such programs target “foreign governments, terrorist groups and overseas criminal syndicates” have been shown to be a product of either a deceptive mind, or at least an overly convinced one.

What a tease and annoyance encryption has become for intelligence and security personnel who struggle to fulfil their briefs.  Chatter between terrorist cells, it was said, took place discretely and secretly.  Yet even French authorities admit that the November 13 attacks were not facilitated by encrypted communications.

Many such attacks tend to be preceded by boisterousness, a screech promising martyrdom plastered across social media postings.  A notable feature of ISIS recruits and others who have joined the jihadi fruit salad of brutal converts is their distinct inability to shut up.  Gabble before you die.  If you want to find them, just scroll down the lists, scour the search engines, and sip your coffee.

In France, a heated effort is underway to target systems that ensure strong encryption protections.  While these are still at a planning stage, the fact that they have made it to the memorandum continues to show the jittery nature of responses to November 13.  According to Le Monde, it has obtained an internal document from the Ministry of Interior authored by the French Department of Civil Liberties and Legal Affairs outlining two key proposals to be brought before France’s parliament.

One proposed bill involves looking at ways to ban Tor (the onion router), a service that is attractive in anonymising Internet users.[2]  The document suggests that efforts could be made “to block or forbid communications of the Tor network” that would go beyond that of a state of emergency.  This would be a tall order, but not impossible, if authorities can arm-wrestle internet service providers to do their bidding.

“Shared or open” Wi-Fi networks during a state of emergency are also on the table, and would be the subject of a second bill, ostensibly as a counter-terrorist measure.  Again, the rationale here is that suspects can engage in clandestine communications using publically available Wi-Fi networks beyond tracking.

The markedly daft suggestion?  Shut down the hotspots; close down the access points. Never mind the basic fact that many such suspects use open communications on unencrypted technologies.

Much of this is also state sloth, the imperative of the failed; officials simply uninterested in making efforts to, for instance, crack Tor communications.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team staged an attack on the service last year between February and July that demonstrated that deanonymizing could also be initiated.[3]  Bad for Tor, but surely a point that should have been jotted down by the sleuths.

Other efforts have also been made to limit Tor’s use in China, whose authorities work around the clock to limit various services available through the Internet in what has been called the Great Firewall of China.  Blocking sites is a regular feature, and VPN services have become a subject of particular interest.[4]

That will not come as surprising to the tech watchers and liberty lovers who insist that the PRC is prone to such measures.  But when the President of the United States does more than hint at weakening encryption to defeat a foe, all take notice. In his Oval Office address on Sunday, Barack Obama revealed he would “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder to use technology to escape from justice.” It should, however, be said that the White House rejected a proposal in October that would have permitted authorities the means to weaken encryption technologies.[5]

FBI director James Comey, undeterred, will keep up the pressure to do so, having badgered Apple and Google for some time to render their products more readily accessible to law enforcement authorities. (Call it Comey’s “back-door” rationale to encryption, if you will.)

The disease that misrelates the actual cause to the hypothetical extends into coverage of terrorist attacks as well, with media outlets running blind with the official line of speculation that the terrorists involved in Paris just might have used encrypted services.

Trevor Timm in the Columbia Journal Review noted the trend all too well: “Why were officials saying it was ‘likely’?  Not because they had actual evidence, but because they assumed that if authorities didn’t know about the plot in advance, the terrorists must have used encryption.”[6]

Timm rounds off with the obvious point that encryption had become “an important tool for journalists of all stripes,” protecting computers, phones, daily conversations with sources via text message or email that might be snared in the surveillance dragnet.  And not just journalists.  Undermining end-to-end encryption services may make accessing information by state authorities easier; but it will not make them more competent.  What diminishes online security for some invariably diminishes it for all.

In March, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made denying a Palestinian state a pillar of his winning re-election campaign, officials in the Obama administration signaled to the media that they would reconsider the U.S. government’s staunch diplomatic support for Israel in the United Nations. The U.S. government feigned “very substantive concerns” and declared the administration may “reassess (its) options going forward” in response to Netanyahu’s explicit rejection of a two-state solution. 

Mainstream media focused on the personal dynamics between the leaders of the two countries. CNN said the Obama administration felt “outright hostility” toward Netanyahu and the New York Times said the leaders had a “poisonous relationship.” They presumed the professed discord would imperil the political alliance between the two governments. In reality, there was no reason to believe a personal conflict would jeopardize the nearly 50-year-old U.S. government policy of providing Israel an unconditional shield in the General Assembly and the Security Council.

It was obvious even at the time the Obama administration’s anonymous threats to reconsider its diplomatic protection of Israel were nothing more than posturing. Netanyahu had broken an unwritten rule when he said in front of the camera’s what is stated in his Likud party’s platform: “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” Not only had this been written policy since 1999, but Netanyahu’s government – and every other Israeli administration since the state’s illegitimate formation in 1948 – has been carrying it out in practice.

Obama has demonstrated little interest in supporting progressive policies in favor of human rights and social justice, but he shown himself zealously concerned with them in the abstract through grandiose and noble rhetoric. During the first six years of his presidency, Netanyahu actively opposed a Palestinian state without Obama’s administration withholding any of the ideological, diplomatic, military and economic support that is a necessary condition for the occupation’s survival. As long as Netanyahu kept quiet, Obama could pretend his administration’s support for Israel was contingent on Israel seeking a permanent peace deal with Palestinians.

Obama urged “cooperation and compromise” and continued the pretense that a “peace process” was not already long dead. But when Netanyahu publicly declared in stark terms that he has no intention of permitting a just solution to Israel’s colonization of Palestine, he made it impossible for Obama to continue the charade. Netanyahu and his fanatical government ministers long ago realized that Obama had no intention of seeking actual concessions from them regardless of how much land and water they stole, or how many Palestinians (or Americans) they killed.

In reality, Obama was happy to let the Israeli government keep slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, expanding checkpoints and repression in the West Bank, and further carving up the West Bank with new illegal settlements while offering nothing but the most mild, toothless complaints.

As Ali Abunimah noted in the Electronic Intifada, “for the Palestinians, there is no meaningful Obama-Netanyahu rift. Indeed US-Israeli relations have never been stronger, nor more damaging to the prospects for peace and justice and for the very survival of the Palestinian people.”

This was not inevitable. In January 2009, Netanyahu had ordered an immediate halt to the IDF’s destructive rampage in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which had killed more than 1,400 people in Gaza, the day before Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January 2009. Presumably Netanyahu believed the failure stop the second assault on the blockaded territory in a year would cause the incoming Obama administration to support an independent investigation, cut military aid, dispute Israel’s argument that it “had a right to defend itself,” or end the U.S. government’s facilitation of the carnage.

But it turns out Netanyahu and the Israeli regime needn’t have worried, as no such change in policy was in the cards. Obama’s new administration would block the Goldstone Report presented to the Human Rights Council, and ensure complete impunity for the Israeli crimes that occurred subsequent to Obama’s election. This likely emboldened Netanyahu to unleash even more wanton destruction and horror in July 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on trumped up accusations against Hamas.

“Having falsely accused Hamas leadership of orchestrating the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens in June, and then assailing the group for ‘purposely playing politics’ when it rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal that offered it nothing beyond a return to the status quo of the siege, (Secretary of State John) Kerry and the Obama administration once again provided the Israeli military with the diplomatic cover it needed to escalate the violence,” writes Max Blumenthal in The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.

Despite extensive documentation from the start of the military campaign that the captive civilian population in Gaza comprised the vast majority of the dead and injured from tank and naval shelling, drone missiles, F-16 bombs and heavy artillery, the Obama administration cast the only vote against establishing a war crimes investigation by the United Nations. A few days later, the administration helped resupply the Israeli army with weapons, including 102mm mortar rounds and 40mm grenades, that the IDF could use to keep up their prolific killing spree.

In May, any doubts that the personality conflicts had actually imperiled the hand-in-glove military cooperation between the two countries, as mainstream pundits so forcefully proclaimed, was put to rest. The Obama administration approved an arms sale for $1.9 billion to Israel – in violation of domestic and international law, and against the explicit demands of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International.

The Electronic Intifada reported: “Among the tens of thousands of bombs included in the weapons package are 3,000 Hellfire missiles, 12,000 general purpose bombs and 750 bunker buster bombs that can penetrate up to 20 feet, or six meters, of reinforced concrete.”

Much as the military cooperation between the two states has carried on seamlessly, so has the diplomatic cooperation. Despite Israeli officials hinting the government might finally decline to vote with the U.S. in the 24th annual UNGA condemnation of the Cuban embargo, predictably Israel was the only country in the entire world to join the U.S. in defense of the embargo. The measure passed by a vote of 191-2.

Not surprisingly, unconditional U.S. support for Israel in the United Nations has also continued uninterrupted. “Traditional Voting Pattern Reflected in General Assembly’s Adoption of Drafts on Question of Palestine, Broader Middle East Issues,” states a U.N. press release after the passage of six resolutions concerning Israel. Indeed, the pattern was traditional: the U.S. and Israel, with a few Pacific Island states, voting against the rest of the world (minus whoever the U.S.-Israel alliance could persuade to abstain).

In a resolution on the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights, from which Israel steals valuable natural resources and where many prestigious Israeli wineries are located, the U.S. government rejected the position that Israel follow previous Security Council resolutions and withdraw to the 1967 borders.

Concerning Jerusalem, the U.S. rejected a measure stating that Israel, as the occupying power, had no right to “impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem,” and that they show “respect for the historic status quo at the holy places of Jerusalem.”

Additionally, the U.S. rejected a call “to exert all efforts to promote the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including their right to self-determination, to support the achievement without delay of an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and of the two-State solution on the basis of pre-1967 borders and the just resolution of all final status issues and to mobilize international support for and assistance to the Palestinian people.”

As these votes were not reported in the mainstream American press, the American public can be forgiven for not realizing the meaninglessness of the “rift” between American and Israeli government officials, which has not impacted at all the U.S. government’s longstanding record of rejecting world opinion and cooperative efforts to achieve a just peace.

The corporate press have demonstrated that their policy analysis consists primarily – if not entirely – of dissecting style, empty rhetoric and official proclamations. Concrete actions and their consequences are of little concern.

Turkey is the main sponsor of terrorist groups in Syria. The international community should start fighting terrorism with pressuring the Turkish government that it abandons its support for terrorism.

The events of the past week will go down in history as a milestone in the development of 21st century imperialism. In the space of a few days, the United States, Britain, and Germany escalated their military involvement in Syria, following France’s intensification of its own bombing campaign in Syria last month.

The pretext for these operations are the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, followed now by the horrific mass shooting in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday. The reasons presented to the public, however, have little to do with the strategic discussions taking place in top ranks of the military and the intelligence agencies.

As tragic as the killings of 130 people in Paris and 14 in San Bernardino are, they cannot explain the sudden and convulsive military escalation by major imperialist powers in the Middle East. One should recall that in 1915, after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania with the loss of 1,198 lives, the United States refrained from entering into World War I. At that point, the American ruling class was still divided over the advisability of intervening in the Great War.

The basic force behind war in Syria is the same as that which has motivated the imperialist carve-up of the Middle East as a whole: the interests of international finance capital. The major imperialist powers know that if they are to have a say in the division of the booty, they must have also done their share of the killing.

This war drive in the Middle East is deeply unpopular, which explains the frenzied rush to utilize the recent attacks, along with an atmosphere of fear whipped up by the media, to push through actions as rapidly as possible. Consider the events of the past week:

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that it would deploy a new contingent of Special Operations Forces, nominally directed at the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, or ISIL). At a press conference on the same day, Obama repeated that any settlement of the war in Syria had to include the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Russia.

On Wednesday, the British Parliament voted to support military action in Syria after Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn cleared the way for war by agreeing to a “free vote” by his party’s MPs. British warplanes moved immediately to bomb targets in Syria on Wednesday night, as Prime Minister David Cameron denounced anyone opposing the war as a “terrorist sympathizer.”

On Friday, the German Bundestag rushed through a vote to join the Syrian war with almost no discussion. The parliamentary sanctioning of war followed the decision by the government earlier in the week to send 1,200 troops, six Tornado jets and a warship to the region.

Then, over the weekend, the US media and political establishment moved to exploit the killings in San Bernardino, California to press for expanded war. The Republican presidential candidates issued belligerent statements insisting that the US faces “the next world war” (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie), that “the nation needs a wartime president” (Texas Senator Ted Cruz), and that “they have declared war on us, and we need to declare war on them” (former Florida Governor Jeb Bush).

In a speech Sunday night, Obama defended his own policy in Syria against his Republican critics, repeating his opposition to a massive deployment of ground forces in Iraq and Syria in favor of accelerated airstrikes, the funding of groups within Syria, and the use of troops from neighboring countries. Praising the moves of France , Germany and the UK, Obama declared, “Since attacks in Paris [on November 13], our closest allies… have ramped up their contributions to our military campaign which will help us accelerate our effort to destroy ISIL.”

As they press for war, neither Obama nor any section of the political establishment is capable of saying anything about the actual roots of ISIS, which explode the pretext of the “war on terror” that has been the foundation of US foreign policy for 15 years.

In his speech on Sunday, Obama referred obliquely to the growth of ISIS “amidst the chaos of war in Iraq and then in Syria,” as if this was unrelated to the policy of the US itself. In fact, the US and its allies first illegally occupied and devastated Iraq, then built up Islamic fundamentalist groups in Syria from which ISIS emerged as the spearhead of the war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The ISIS fighters who led the Paris attacks were able to travel freely in and out of Syria, because thousands of similar youth were traveling from Europe to Syria with the support of the authorities to join the war against Assad.

As for the San Bernardino attack, officials have cited the travel of the two shooters to Saudi Arabia and their contact with individuals in the Al Nusra Front to justify calling the shooting a terrorist attack. Saudi Arabia, the center of financing and support for Islamic fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East, is a key US ally in the region, and the Al Nusra Front, affiliated with Al Qaeda, is the de facto ally of the US in Syria.

Rather than a response to the recent attacks, the actions of the imperialist powers are the realization of long-standing plans and ambitions. In Britain, this week’s vote reverses the 2013 vote in the House of Commons rejecting participation in a planned US-led war with the Assad regime. The German ruling class has been clamoring to play a much more active military role, to assert itself as Europe’s dominant power.

In the United States, prior to the San Bernadino attacks, there were insistent calls within the political establishment and media for the deployment of ground troops and the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria.

Led by United States, the imperialist powers have been engaged in unending war, centered in the Middle East and Central Asia, for a quarter of a century. More than a million people have been killed, and millions more turned into refugees. After wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush administration, Obama has overseen the war in Libya and CIA-backed campaigns for regime change in Ukraine and Syria. The disastrous consequences of each operation have set the stage for an expansion and intensification of war.

What is taking place is a redivision and recolonization of the world. All the old powers are piling in to claim their share. While currently centered in the oil-rich Middle East, the conflict in Syria is developing into a proxy war with Russia. On the other side of the Eurasian landmass, the US is launching increasingly provocative actions against China in the South China Sea.

The geopolitical situation today is more explosive than at any time since the eve of World War II. Beset by an intractable economic and social crisis for which they have no progressive solution, the ruling class increasingly sees war and plunder as the only possible response.

Last weekend, approximately 1,100 additional troops arrived to the Syrian Government stronghold of Al-Safira in order to intensify their military operations near the strategic towns of Al-Hadher and Tal Al-‘Eiss in the Aleppo province. According to the field reports, the Syrian troops was moved to Aleppo from the the town of Ras Al-Bassit in northwest Latakia.

Now, the pro-government forces including Hezbollah and Iraqi paramilitary units are advancing in the southern Aleppo countryside.

On Monday, the pro-government forces captured the villages of Zeitan and Al-Qala’jiyah near the strategic city of Khan Touman after a series of firefights with Al-Nusra, Harakat Nouriddeen Al-Zinki, and Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham.

The villages of Zeitan and Al-Qala’jiyaj are lcoated approximately 1km east of the Aleppo-Damascus highway which is the most important supply line in the region.

In the western countryside of Palmyra, the SAA supported by Hezbollah, Liwaa Imam ‘Ali and the National Defense Forces have imposed control over the strategic Palmyra-Homs Highway after intense clashes with ISIS.

According to the field reports, the pro-government forces captured the villages of Al-Bayarat and Marhatten and are now in 4km away from the western walls of Palmyra.

On Dec. 6 Venezuela held its 20th election in 17 years and one of its most difficult yet. With the opposition upping the ante in terms of media attacks and sabotage, 2.5 years of economic difficulties and since the passing of revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez, not to mention a recent right-wing victory in Argentina, the left and right around the world turned anxious eyes to Venezuela.

Ultimately, the Bolivarian revolution (the “Perfect Alliance” of the governing PSUV and other supportive parties and organizations) lost at the polls with the opposition winning at least 99 seats, and 19 still to be decided. Eighty-seven is necessary for a simple majority. But what does this electoral loss mean, politically, and given the current context in Venezuela, what will the consequences of it be, going forward?

Key factors leading to these election results

1) As usual, this year the disinformation by the opposition media has been intense. The opposition’s main campaigning was through local and international media and social media, with very little street campaigning.

2) Many of those who do generally vote for the opposition do so because they want to vote against the government (and everything demonic and evil the private media has made it represent, “Castro-communism,” where even droughts are the national government’s fault) or for ambiguous “change” after 16 years of Chavismo, without being particularly concerned or aware of what that change is. Many of these people are of course upper class people who resent the empowerment of the poor, but their ranks have been swollen by those frustrated by the last two years of serious difficulties.

3) Other key factors bringing people to the opposition include encouragement by the right-wing victory in Argentina, with a Trump like figure due to swear-in as president on Dec. 10, and younger generations in Venezuela who now don’t remember what it was like in Venezuela before Chavez was elected in 1998 (18-year-old voters would have been 3-years-old at the time).

4) But while the opposition has attracted some of the less politically aware social sectors to its anti-Chavismo discourse, the government has also lost some ground from conscientious and solid revolutionaries, partly due to its lack of a solid response to the “economic war.” Although it’s easier said than done to combat a rentier state, capitalist system, historical corruption, and opposition and big business economic sabotage, Maduro has only announced things like national commissions to deal with the situation. While people spend up to seven hours a week lining up for food, and while many of them understand that the government isn’t directly responsible for the situation, the lack of a serious response and significant measures hasn’t helped support for the government.

5) Further, while the government clearly sides with the poor, for multiple reasons including more right-wing attacks, it has becoming increasingly distanced from the organizing grassroots. “The government would have more of a sense of urgency (in solving problems) if it was closer to the people in the street,” Rachael Boothroyd Rojas, community activist and Venezuelanalysis journalist told teleSUR. That distance is relative to other times in the Bolivarian revolution, not to other governments around the world, who don’t come close. However, with the way the government communicates with the people, the way it gets information out and involves people in serious decision making—there has been a step back. This aspect of the Bolivarian revolution is perhaps the most important, so the significance of it and its impact on people shouldn’t be underestimated.

Key Likely Consequences

The consequences are serious, but do not necessarily mark the end. Despite its financial resources and support from international powers and elites, the opposition has not been strategic or intelligent and won’t be strategic with this new power. Under Chavez and the revolution they lost privileges and a lot of their initial measures will be about getting revenge: probably things like kicking out the Cuban doctors, making fun of the poor classes that have lost, continuing to not collect garbage, and enjoying the praise from the international media. They won’t fix the economic problems, that’s not their aim, and after all, they (the business elites and wealthy people with access to dollars) benefit from the crazy exchange rates and huge profits gained from hoarding.

Further, with this and the right-wing win in Argentina, the talk of the left loosing Latin America will strengthen, the media as usual broadcasting how they wish things were rather than any sort of complex analysis. Nevertheless, two such losses will no doubt cause some regional demotivation among progressives and have a significant impact on Latin American integration bodies.

For PSUV politicians, there will hopefully be some reflection, and the government will now be in the difficult position of having to compromise with the opposition—with Maduro and his ministers still in power, but unable to allocate extra income (beyond the budget for 2016, passed on Dec. 1) or modify laws or approve bilateral and multilateral treaties. After the referendum loss in 2007, Chavez moderated his discourse and policies for a while, and Maduro may be forced to do so even more. It’s hard to know if in these circumstances Maduro will turn to the grassroots for more support, or will distrust them even more after loosing some of their support, and if he will see the outcome as a need for reflection, or purely the consequence of opposition sabotage.

For grassroots Chavistas, the majority of whom who have never been involved in the revolution for the sake of financial resources, they will continue organizing, promoting their progressive projects, their community organizations, but under more difficult circumstances. For the first time, they may not feel like the proud, governing majority in the country. On the other hand, an opposition with power is more the reason for strengthening organization. Having lost the luxury of taking victories for granted, the grassroots will likely become even more serious. With an emboldened opposition, they and their projects may also face verbal and physical attacks.

For the wavering voters, in the long term, having the opposition in power could be a bit of a reminder and reality check as they see that things get worse for the majority of people.

That the opposition has won its second out of 20 elections under Chavismo proves that all the U.S, European, opposition, and private media hype about how undemocratic Venezuela’s electoral system is false. Of course, their reaction will be to claim that it was their “international pressure” that kept things in check.

Overall though, this loss, while it is a big step back for the progressive cause, it isn’t the end of the line. The global struggle for a world that puts people and planet first, for a democratically controlled economy and so on, is a long term one with many ups and downs, defeats and victories.

Here is a condensed version of President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office on Sunday night, unofficially translated [by Norman Solomon] into plain English. 

I kind of realize we can’t kill our way out of this conflict with ISIL, but in the short term hopefully we can kill our way out of the danger of a Republican victory in the presidential race next year.

As a practical matter, the current hysteria needs guidance, not a sense of proportion along the lines of what the New York Times just mentioned in passing: “The death toll from jihadist terrorism on American soil since the Sept. 11 attacks — 45 people — is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies…. And both tolls are tiny compared with the tally of conventional murders, more than 200,000 over the same period.”

While I’m urging some gun control, that certainly doesn’t apply to the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs and their underlings have passed all the background checks they need by virtue of getting to put on a uniform of the United States Armed Forces.

As much as we must denounce the use of any guns that point at us, we must continue to laud the brave men and women who point guns for us — and who fire missiles at terrorists and possible terrorists and sometimes unfortunately at wedding parties or misidentified vehicles or teenagers posthumously classified as “militants” after signature strikes or children who get in the way.

We can’t see ourselves in the folks we kill. But I know that we see ourselves with friends and co­workers at a holiday party like the one in San Bernardino. I know we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris.

Also I know we don’t see ourselves in the blameless individuals who have been beheaded by our ally Saudi Arabia, which has executed 150 people this year mostly by cutting off their heads with swords.

Nor should we bother to see ourselves in the people the Saudi government is slaughtering with airstrikes in Yemen on a daily basis. We sell the Saudis many billions of dollars worth of weapons that make the killings in San Bernardino look smaller than puny. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I gave a lofty major speech a couple of years ago about how a democratic society can’t have perpetual war. I like to talk about such sugary ideals; a spoonful helps the doublethink medicine go down.

Let me now say a word about what we should not do. We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. The United States of America has colossal air power — and we’re going to use it. No muss, little fuss: except for people under the bombs, now being utilized at such a fast pace that the warhead supply chain is stretched thin.

Yes, we’re escalating a bit on the ground too, with hundreds of special operations forces going into Syria despite my numerous public statements — adding up to more than a dozen since August 2013 — that American troops would not be sent to Syria. Likewise we’ve got several thousand soldiers in Iraq, five years after I solemnly announced that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended.”

But here’s the main thing: In the Middle East, the USA will be number one in dropping bombs and firing missiles. Lots of them! It’s true that we keep making enemies faster than we can possibly kill them, but that’s the nature of the beast.

In Afghanistan too. At the end of last year I ceremoniously proclaimed that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion” and the United States “will maintain a limited military presence in Afghanistan.” But within 10 months I changed course and declared that 5,500 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan into 2017.

Midway through this fall — even before the terrorist attacks in Paris — the United States had launched an average of about 50 airstrikes per week in Syria during the previous year, and the New York Times reported that the U.S. military was preparing “to intensify airstrikes against the Islamic State” on Syrian territory.

And according to official Pentagon figures, the U.S.-led aerial bombing in Iraq has topped 4,500 airstrikes in the last year — approaching an average rate of 100 per week.

Our military will hunt down terrorist plotters where they are plotting against us. In Iraq and Syria, airstrikes are taking out some of the latest ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure. I’ve got to tell you that these actions will defeat ISIL, but I’ve got to not tell you that the airstrikes will kill a lot of civilians while launching new cycles of what gave rise to ISIL in the first place — inflaming rage and grief while serving as a powerful recruitment tool for people to take up arms against us.

In the name of defeating terrorist forces, our air war has the effect of recruiting for them. Meanwhile, in Syria, our obsession with regime change has propelled us into closely aligning with extremist jihadi fighters. They sure appreciate the large quantities of our weapons that end up in their arsenals.

You don’t expect this policy to make a lot of sense, do you?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stated, “The opposition hasn’t won, a counterrevolution has won.” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro responded Monday to the outcome of Sunday’s National Assembly (AN) election praising the turnout of nearly 75 percent.

“The constitution and democracy have triumphed, we recognize and accept these results,” said President Maduro.

The comments came in the wake of Sunday’s high stakes AN election, which saw the president’s socialist party, the PSUV, lose its majority in the National Assembly.

The head of Venezuela’s electoral authority announced the results early Monday. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela won 46 seats, the opposition coalition won 99 seats, with 19 still to be announced, as well as the three indigenous positions.

President Maduro thanked the workers of the electoral authority and the country’s armed forces that supported the realization of Sunday’s elections.

“A perfect electoral system, without a doubt is one the most marvelous creations of these 16 years of revolution, of transformations and the creation of something new,” said Maduro.

As many as 19 million registered voters were expected to cast ballots in the election, that was widely predicted to be one of the tightest in years.

In light of the results, Maduro called on the opposition and their supporters to cease the “economic war” against the government and to respect the law.

President Maduro also took the opportunity to call on supporters to learn the lessons from this defeat.

“We have lost a battle today but the fight is for a new socialism has barely begun … We see this as a slap to wake us up to act,” said Maduro.

“It is time for a rebirth.”

Leading figures in the opposition declared victory before the release of official results.

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, the head of an election accompaniment mission representing the UNASUR regional bloc, Jose Luis Exeni, said Venezuela’s voting system is secure.

Exeni told teleSUR the mission has have more than 40 personnel positioned in voting stations across the country.

“We come here with important experience to accompany this (electoral) process,” he said during an interview Thursday.

The mission head said international media reports in the lead up to the vote suggesting the electoral system is vulnerable to abuse are misleading, describing the Venezuelan electoral process as “consistent,” and “very auditable.”

“Everyone should commit to respecting the results,” he said.

For the first time since the U.S. President Barack Obama announced an aerial campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) in Syria, the Anti-ISIS Coalition of predominately Arab states have struck a Syrian Arab Army (SAA) camp in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor, killing 1 soldier and wounding half dozen others on Sunday evening.

According to a military source from the Syrian Arab Army’s 104th Airborne Brigade of the Republican Guard, a U.S. warplane struck the military camp belonging to the SAA’s 137th Artillery Brigade (17th Reserve Division) in the village of ‘Ayyash, killing 1 soldier instantly and leaving 6 soldiers in critical condition – including an officer.

The Syrian Arab Army’s 137th Brigade has been protecting the civilians in the village of ‘Ayyash from the swarming ISIS fighters that are attempting to break into the provincial capital of the Deir Ezzor Governorate from the northern flank; this airstrike only boosted ISIS’ positions inside this village and the nearby broadcast tower.

As of now; it is not clear who the U.S.-led Anti-ISIS Coalition aircraft meant to target, but it was clear to the Syrian Arab Army soldiers that the airstrikes were inaccurate and lacked logistical comprehension of the ground situation in the Deir Ezzor Governorate.

We bring to the attention of our readers a recent UN report on terrorism in Iraq which has barely been acknowledged by the mainstream media.

Nearly 500 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq last month in a “vicious circle of violence,” ranging from acts of terrorism to armed conflict, as the total number of Iraqi casualties rose to more than 2,100, according to the UN Assistance Mission in the crisis-gripped country.

In the month of November, the mission, known as UNAMI, reported the number of civilians killed was 489 and the number of civilians injured was 869, with a further 399 members of the Iraqi Security Forces killed and 368 injured.

Baghdad was again the worst affected Governorate with 1,110 civilian casualties (325 killed, 785 injured), Ninewa had 109 killed and 41 injured, while Kirkuk 14 killed and 23 injured, Salahadin 21 killed and 08 injured, and Diyala 16 killed and 11 injured.

UNAMI said it has been hindered in effectively verifying casualties in conflict areas.

For instance, the mission said, it could not obtain the casualty figures for the month of November from Anbar, where fighting for control of the province is raging and lack of access has left tens of thousands of people without humanitarian assistance for more than seven months.

“The Iraqi people continue to suffer from this vicious circle of violence, which has affected all walks of life in this country,” said UN Special Representative for Iraq Ján Kubiš. “The United Nations deplores the continuing loss of life resulting from acts of terrorism and armed conflict in Iraq.”

On a positive note, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced it had managed to have distributed urgently needed food assistance today, provided by the Government of Iraq, to nearly 70,000 people in two besieged cities of Haditha and Al Baghdadi in the central governorate of Anbar. Haditha and Al Baghdadi have been under siege since March 2015, severely impairing humanitarian access.

More than 3 million Iraqis have been displaced by the conflict in Iraq since mid-June last year. In October, WFP reached over 1.1 million Iraqis who had fled their homes across all 18 governorates with food assistance.

UNAMI also noted in its update issued Monday that it has also received, without being able to verify, reports of large numbers of casualties along with unknown numbers of persons who have died from secondary effects of violence after having fled their homes due to exposure to the elements, lack of water, food, medicines and health care.

“For these reasons, the figures reported have to be considered as the absolute minimum,” the mission said

1 December 2015 – Nearly 500 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq last month in a “vicious circle of violence,” ranging from acts of terrorism to armed conflict, as the total number of Iraqi casualties rose to more than 2,100, according to the UN Assistance Mission in the crisis-gripped country.

In the month of November, the mission, known as UNAMI, reported the number of civilians killed was 489 and the number of civilians injured was 869, with a further 399 members of the Iraqi Security Forces killed and 368 injured.

Baghdad was again the worst affected Governorate with 1,110 civilian casualties (325 killed, 785 injured), Ninewa had 109 killed and 41 injured, while Kirkuk 14 killed and 23 injured, Salahadin 21 killed and 08 injured, and Diyala 16 killed and 11 injured.

UNAMI said it has been hindered in effectively verifying casualties in conflict areas.

For instance, the mission said, it could not obtain the casualty figures for the month of November from Anbar, where fighting for control of the province is raging and lack of access has left tens of thousands of people without humanitarian assistance for more than seven months.

“The Iraqi people continue to suffer from this vicious circle of violence, which has affected all walks of life in this country,” said UN Special Representative for Iraq Ján Kubiš. “The United Nations deplores the continuing loss of life resulting from acts of terrorism and armed conflict in Iraq.”

On a positive note, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced it had managed to have distributed urgently needed food assistance today, provided by the Government of Iraq, to nearly 70,000 people in two besieged cities of Haditha and Al Baghdadi in the central governorate of Anbar. Haditha and Al Baghdadi have been under siege since March 2015, severely impairing humanitarian access.

More than 3 million Iraqis have been displaced by the conflict in Iraq since mid-June last year. In October, WFP reached over 1.1 million Iraqis who had fled their homes across all 18 governorates with food assistance.

UNAMI also noted in its update issued Monday that it has also received, without being able to verify, reports of large numbers of casualties along with unknown numbers of persons who have died from secondary effects of violence after having fled their homes due to exposure to the elements, lack of water, food, medicines and health care.

“For these reasons, the figures reported have to be considered as the absolute minimum,” the mission said.

The Paris attacks on November 13, 2015 did not just “happen”. There is a back story to them.

And, regrettably, a front story as well.

What Is Past Is Prologue

For the past four years, American efforts to illegally remove Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, have failed. Even with aid from France, the Gulf States, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, the only accomplishment to date has been to dehouse, deculturalize, destabilize, and destroy Syria. Clearly, the pressure was growing to get outsiders more deeply involved in “regime change” there.

Apparently, the goal was to add Paris, and, by extension, France, to the wreckage. The rest of Europe, particularly Germany and Britain, came next. The U.S.-sponsored Migration of Peoples seems to be the means of choice. It’s built on years of recruiting and supporting terrorists in the Middle East.

The U.S. government had previously backed terrorists in South and Southwest Asia on an ad hoc basis. But then, following its use of the mujahideen to fight the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, America transformed them into a cadre of extremists, the Arab-Afghan Legion, ready to subvert or overthrow governments anywhere, anytime, so long as those governments were “enemies” of the U.S. (Or, in Europe’s case, capable of being dragged into the Forever War.) In recruiting the “muj”, the U.S. had help: Saudi Arabia for its money and Pakistan for its espionage organization, Inter-Services Intelligence. Later, the Israelis got involved, especially in Iraq and Syria. [For details, see J. Michael Springmann, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World (Washington , D.C., Daena Publications LLC, 2014)].

The nightmare in Paris was likely an outgrowth of all this, with special help from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Turks, and Israel.

The New Weapon Against Syria

Beginning early in 2015, the Americans (and their Zionist allies) evidently recognized that their Syria policy was not producing desired results–Assad was still alive and still in office. Consequently, they adopted a new tack: flood Europe with Arab and Muslim “migrants”. With sufficient mutual hatred and distrust generated, Europe would end its timorous questioning of Israeli repression and move towards a more active role in the war against Syria.

That policy has been successful.

While there had been a steady stream of migrants from North Africa, it wasn’t until early in 2015 that they moved in the hundreds of thousands to Europe–through Turkey, a NATO member. The cause was straightforward: the new Ottomans, failing to unseat Assad with weapons transfers from Libya along with cross-border raids by agents provocateurs, worked with the United States and its repressive allies in the region to fill Anatolia with Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many others. It then opened the floodgates. A simple stream became a deluge, one that even Noah and his Ark couldn’t handle. This flood came in waves, some Syrian, some from many other nationalities and ethnic groups. The rising tide began to cascade into the Balkans (which the U.S. and NATO had destroyed in the 1990s), then into Austria, and then into Germany. Turkey being Turkey, no Kurds were part of this river.

German Help and Propaganda

German Chancellor Merkel and her advisors (who had supported the 2003 American war against Iraq) worked assiduously in making the process run smoothly, sending railroad trains to the Austrian frontier to bring the migrants into the Federal Republic. From there, if the asylum-seekers so desired, they could move into the other nations on the Continent

Propaganda helped. Pushing the concept in Germany of the Good Man (Gutmensch), it was made clear that only selfish, xenophobic people could oppose the new arrivals. Indoctrination also targeted children. Bright cartoons with catchy music pushed the concept that “No Animal Is Illegal”. However, not a word was uttered about why Egypt, the Gulf States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia were not housing the rush of migrants.

This appears well planned. It transports Arabs and Muslims out of countries neighboring Israel, weakening them and providing Israel with the opportunity to expand. Israelis already control large parts of northern Iraq and a good-sized piece of Syria (the Golan Heights).With the tide of Arabs and Muslims washing all over Europe, there were to be and now are three results: mutual hatred and distrust, a growing split between the haves and have-nots, and, consequently, a weaker Europe. We’ve seen the articles about defecation in the streets and schools warning parents not to let their daughters dress provocatively (in hard-core Muslim eyes). There have been fights between religious Muslims and beered-up Germans at the Oktoberfest in Munich. The events in Paris were another side of this. On the 13^th, the France24 Facebook page was full of posts such as “send them home”, “they are bringing their quarrels with them”, etc.

According to a knowledgeable source, S. Germek, this “army of invaders” will likely be 1 million strong by the end of 2015. She noted that EU politicians and human rights NGOs insist on describing them as “Syrian war refugees”. European mainstream media, she observed, goes out of its way to present photogenic Syrian children in tragic scenes to sell an unspecified and unexplained agenda to the public. It is clear, our interlocutor added, that true Syrian refugees are in a minority while mostly young, male economic migrants as well as radical Islamists from many countries make up a large portion of the migrant tsunami. Furthermore, most do not qualify for political asylum by EU laws, she continued. Yet, many are wealthy, each paying traffickers US$7,000 to US$15,000, some of which supposedly comes from American government pockets, she remarked.

Our source opined that not all bother to register as asylees. There are reports, she said, that migrants vanish by the thousands once inside Germany. She mentioned that many are drawn into Salafist networks busy recruiting the newcomers, particularly the countless unaccompanied minors among them.

Benefits? Cui Bono?

Merkel sees this, some think, as a way to do what the American news media have long been urging: bring more immigrants into the country. This will generate more taxes to support social benefits for an aging population. Also, it’s a golden opportunity to either keep wages from rising or force them down since so many are willing to work for a pittance. That’s something that’s worked quite well in the U.S. for years.

What these people don’t realize is that, in the end, it undermines Europe as a competitor for the U.S. Countries riven by ethnic and religious hatred can’t produce high quality goods. Low wage workers don’t care about making superior items. (Remember the East German Trabi?)

Also, by inflaming relations between the migrants and Europe, manipulators can force the Continent more deeply into the Middle East conflict, getting France, Britain, Germany, and other NATO members to send soldiers, warplanes, weapons, and money to fight “terrorists”. These are the low-lifes the U.S. and its repressive allies in the area, the Gulf States, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have been recruiting, training, and supporting.

What Hath Been Wrought?

The French are now deeply engaged in fighting Syria. The British and Germans are becoming embroiled also.

On December 3, 2015, the U.K. began airstrikes against Syria, just hours after Parliament, despite strong opposition, authorized military action. Earlier, on November 26, 2015, Germany had sent a frigate, the FGS (Federal German Ship) Augsburg to join Teutonic support vessels already with the European force in the Mediterranean. Another frigate, the Karlsruhe, will escort the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The de Gaulle’s deployment to the eastern Mediterranean was allegedly planned before the November 13 attacks in Paris. The carrier is now sailing to the Persian Gulf for further attacks on Syria and Iraq.

On November 4, the German Parliament voted to send 1200 men against ISIL. Included are six Tornado warplanes for “reconnaissance”. Additionally, Germany is sending ground forces to Mali (208) to hunt “terrorists” and to Iraq (100). That Mali force will increase to 650 men by June 2016. Germans soldiers in Iraq will increase to 150 by January 2016. (Excluded from this tally are Federal Republic fighting men already in Turkey staffing Patriot missile batteries and AWACS scouting flights.) German taxpayers will shell out €134 million (approximately US$146 million) for this.

Still, many people contested this. Not from the Left, whose thought processes apparently were stultified, calcified, and frozen in amber, but from the Right. Journalists asked, is it true that there are at least 4,000 ISIL terrorists mixed in with the hundreds of thousands of migrants, economic and otherwise? Our answer was probably not, but, then, you can’t rule out the possibility that at least some trouble-makers are swimming in the stream of Middle Easterners and others.

Paris Showed That This Was True.

On Friday, November 13, 2015, allegedly unknown people, allegedly out of nowhere, attacked a concert hall, a sports stadium, a restaurant, and other locations, killing 130 and wounding an unspecified number. French government officials identified the attackers as Arabs, some from Europe, some from the Migration of Peoples.

But, the officials never clarified some really essential and very basic information. In tightly-controlled France, how did the terrorists get their AK-47 rifles? In tightly-controlled France, how did the terrorists get their explosives? They apparently had help from “the usual suspects”.

According to Radio Free Europe, a CIA-linked sender, the AKs, produced by Serbia’s Zastava works, were weapons stolen from the former Yugoslav military (likely by Croatians, Bosnians, and Kosovo Albanians). They then passed the firearms on from long-held stocks to German weapons traffickers. These sent them on to Paris. BUT, the Croats are old-time helpers to CIA gunrunners and Albanians are suppliers for Germany. All likely have ties to NATO, also historically notorious weapons brokers.

And how did France’s General Directorate for External Security, and the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, fail to deal with the attackers whom they knew had jihadi backgrounds? (At least five of them had traveled to Syria to fight Bashar al-Assad’s forces and then returned to France or Belgium.) The best “gover-up” answer? A tactical mistake.

Worse, from what’s been on TV, there might be some outside planning involved in this. How reasonable is it that some random fanatic is going to bring his counterfeit passport, a SYRIAN one, with him while blowing things up? Naturally, this helps demonstrate that Syrians are dangerous and need to be bombed back into the Stone Age–which the French and British are doing now.

Was Any of This Really a Surprise? Was Any of This Really News?

No.

As previously noted, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World set out the basics of American foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia: recruit, train, and support radicals. With the financial backing of Saudi Arabia (suspected to figure in the still-classified 28 pages missing from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on 9/11 failures) along with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the U.S. used them to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the U.S. and its NATO allies, including Germany, exploited them to destroy Yugoslavia. These trained terrorists then moved at the behest of America into Iraq, wrecking that country following the U.S. invasion of 2003. In 2011, America’s extremists, working in concert with NATO forces and U.S. and European intelligence services, obliterated Libya. By the end of that year, weapons and fighters were moving into Syria, with the big push occurring in 2012.

But Darkness Is Coming.

France helped create the jigsaw puzzle that is today’s Middle East. In May 1916, in the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, it arranged with Britain to divide the Arab world, taking what are now Lebanon and Syria into the French Empire. It then pursued a policy of divide and rule, splitting its new lands along the lines of religion, region, and ethnicity. Since then, la belle France has profited from massive arms sales to the region, ranking third after the United States and Russia. It has built close ties with the reactionary Gulf Cooperation Council. Moreover, France accepts and supports Egyptian Dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s policies. The French Republic is suspected of directly or indirectly supplying radical forces, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front, opposing the Assad government in Syria.

Now, after two years of hectoring the world about the need to unlawfully depose the president of Syria, France began surveillance flights over Bashar al-Assad’s country on September 8, 2015. On September 27, the Armée de l’Air began bombing what was left of Syria.

On November 13, 2015, shadowy but somehow known figures shot up and blew up various sites in Paris.

In response, François Hollande, French President, declared a state of emergency, putting 5,000 soldiers onto the streets of Paris. Additionally, he announced the hiring of thousands more policemen as well as plans to cancel the French citizenship of dual nationals thought to engage in suspicious activity. Hollande also planned to increase domestic surveillance. He instituted numerous, broad dragnets combined with wide-ranging searches without probable cause. The President also banned large public protests and gatherings, seemingly abandoning Liberté and Egalité in the name of Securité.

Government officials both in Europe and the U.S. (particularly John Brennan, CIA Director) are now demanding the end of any kind of encryption that citizens can use. Claiming that it thwarts official surveillance and supposedly aids “fanatics”, various spokesmen assert that this attack on civil liberties will aid in preventing “terrorism”. There are now calls to “check” travelers at airports. (To date, most “terrorism” has been government sponsored, with America’s drone attacks and Arab-Afghan Legion being in the forefront.)

It’s past time to ask some hard questions. Who’s planning this? Why? Was the proposed attack on the Hannover football stadium, November 17, a real event or was it another, carefully calculated undertaking to keep the fear alive and justify more assaults on peoples’ rights? While this was happening, we had a running online commentary from a German friend watching this unfold in real time. She repeatedly noted that genuine information and hard facts were few and far between. In another email, our contact stated that Germany is now panicking, with every misplaced suitcase being a security risk. Police sirens are now part of the sound of city life, she said.

Moreover, on Sunday, November 22, the Washington Post reported the previous day’s shut down of Brussels, capital of Belgium and the EU and the site of NATO headquarters. After the government announced a “serious and imminent” threat against the capital, the subway closed, department stores and restaurants were shuttered, and concerts canceled. According to a Belgian contact, Brussels was almost a ghost town. The populace stayed indoors, and the streets were full of soldiers, regular police, and a federal counterterrorism unit, she said. Additionally, she told us that these forces had increased three times and the country was at its highest state of alert, Level 4. As a result, the people don’t know what to do. It’s as if the country were at war, she added. She also noted that many Belgians are referring to this as “their” 9/11.

Coincidence? The journalist Sarah McClendon claimed such things don’t exist.

The concept of terrorists everywhere has already taken root in the United States. Are the Paris attacks, the Hannover story, and the Brussels closure an effort to spread this concept among the far more realistic and skeptical Europeans?

Regrettably, it seems so.

GR Editor’ Note: These are relevant questions formulated by author William Blum, to be addressed to president Obama at a hypothetical press conference. These are the questions being addressed by the US media

Which is most important to you – destroying ISIS, overthrowing Syrian president Assad, or scoring points against Russia?

Do you think that if you pointed out to the American people that Assad has done much more to aid and rescue Christians in the Middle East conflicts than any other area leader that this would lessen the hostility the United States public and media feel toward him? Or do you share the view of the State Department spokesperson who declared in September that “The Assad regime frankly is the root of all evil”?

Why does the United States maintain crippling financial sanctions and a ban on military aid to Syria, Cuba, Iran and other countries but not to Saudi Arabia?

What does Saudi Arabia have to do to lose its strong American support? Increase its torture, beheadings, amputations, whippings, stonings, punishment for blasphemy and apostasy, or forced marriages and other oppression of women and girls? Increase its financial support for ISIS and other jihadist groups? Confess to its role in 9-11? Attack Israel?

What bothers you more: The Saudi bombing of the people of Yemen or the Syrian bombing of the people of Syria?

Does the fact that ISIS never attacks Israel raise any question in your mind?

Does it concern you that Turkey appears to be more intent upon attacking the Kurds and the Russians than attacking ISIS? And provides medical care to wounded ISIS soldiers? Or that ISIS deals its oil on Turkish territory? Or that NATO-member Turkey has been a safe haven for terrorists from Libya, Chechnya, Qatar, and elsewhere? Or that last year Vice President Biden stated that Turkish president Erdogan’s regime was backing ISIS with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons”?

If NATO had never existed, what argument could you give today in favor of creating such an institution? Other than – as some would say – being a very useful handmaiden of US foreign policy and providing American arms manufacturers with trillions of dollars of guaranteed sales.

Does the United States plan on releasing any of its alleged evidence to back up its repeated claims of Syrian bombing and chemical warfare against the Syrian people? Like clear photos or videos from the omnipresent American satellite cameras? Or any other credible evidence?

Does the United States plan on releasing any of its alleged evidence to back up its repeated claims of Russian invasions of Ukraine in the past year? Like clear photos or videos from the omnipresent American satellite cameras? Or any other credible evidence?

Do the numerous connections between the Ukrainian government and neo-Nazis have any effect upon America’s support of Ukraine?

What do you imagine would have been the outcome in World War Two if the United States had opposed Soviet entry into the war because “Stalin must go”?

Would you prefer that Russia played no military role at all in Syria?

Can the administration present in person a few of the Syrian opposition “moderates” we’ve heard so much about and allow the media to interview them?

Have you considered honoring your promise of  “No boots on the ground in Syria” by requiring all American troops to wear sneakers?

Excerpts from a State Department daily press briefing, November 24, 2015, following the Turkish shoot-down of a Russian plane, conducted by Mark Toner, Deputy Spokesperson:

QUESTION: President Obama said he will reach out to President Erdogan over the next few days.

MR TONER: Yeah.

QUESTION: Did not mention Putin. That really puts you squarely on Turkey’s side, doesn’t it?

……………………

QUESTION: You’re saying Turkey has the right to defend itself; President Obama said the same thing. What defense are you talking about? Does anyone think Russia was going to attack Turkey?

MR TONER: Again, I mean, this is –

QUESTION: Do you think so?

MR TONER: Look, I don’t want to parse out this incident. I said very clearly that we don’t know all the facts yet, so for me to speak categorically about what happened is – frankly, would be irresponsible.

……………………

QUESTION: Even if you accept the Turkish version that the plane traveled 1.3 miles inside Turkey and violated its airspace for 17 seconds – that’s according to Turkey – do you think shooting down the plane was the right thing to do?

MR TONER: Again, I’m not going to give you our assessment at this point. We’re still gathering the facts.

……………………

QUESTION: In 2012, Syria shot down a Turkish plane that reportedly strayed into its territory. Prime Minister Erdogan then said, “A short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack.” Meanwhile, NATO has expressed its condemnation of Syria’s attack as well as strong support for Turkey. Do you see the inconsistency of NATO’s response on this?

MR TONER: As to what President Erdogan may have said after that incident, I would refer you to him.

……………………

QUESTION: Turkoman forces in Syria said they killed the two Russian pilots as they descended in parachutes.

MR TONER: Yeah.

QUESTION: Turkoman forces are supported by Turkey and are fighting against the Syrian Government, they are part of the rebel force there. Do you consider these rebels to be a moderate force in Syria?

……………………

QUESTION: I’m trying – I mean, do you think that everybody has the right to defend themselves?

MR TONER: We’ve said very clearly that people have the right to defend themselves.

QUESTION: Right? Including the Assad regime?

MR TONER: No.

Is it terrorism or is it religion? Does the question matter?

From the early days of America’s War on Terror, and even before then, I advocated seeing terrorists as more than just mindless, evil madmen from another planet. I did not believe they were motivated by hatred or envy of American freedom or democracy, or of American wealth, secular government, or culture, although George W. Bush dearly wanted us to believe that. The terrorists were, I maintained, driven by decades of terrible things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. There should be no doubt of this I wrote, for there are numerous examples of Middle East terrorists explicitly citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their actions. And it worked the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of outrageous Washington interventions, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. 9/11 was a globalized version of the Columbine High School disaster. When you bully people long enough they are going to strike back.

In 2006 Osama bin Laden was inspired to tell Americans to read my book Rogue State because it contained the following and other similar thoughts of mine: “If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize – very publicly and very sincerely – to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.”

So does this mean that I support ISIS?

Absolutely not. I think they’re one of the most disgusting collection of supposed humans in all of history. But I’m surprised at how often those who are highly critical of them, and supportive of the movement to defeat them, are very reluctant to denounce ISIS as a religious force; this, apparently, would be politically incorrect. Shortly after the terrible November 13 events in Paris I was watching the French English-language TV station France 24, which presented a round-table discussion of what happened in Paris amongst four or five French intellectual types. Not one of them expressed a negative word about Islam; it was all sociology, politics, economics, psychology, history, Western oppression, etc., etc. Hadn’t any of them ever heard any of the perpetrators or their supporters cry out “Allahu Akbar”?

I then read a detailed review of an article by Thomas Piketty, the French author of the much-acclaimed 700-page opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the international best-seller of last year. According to the review in Le Monde, Piketty said that inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Paris attacks, and that Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality. Terrorism that is rooted in inequality, he maintains, is best combatted economically. Not a word about Muhammad in the 7th century, Sharia Law in the 21st century, or anything in between.

Next, by contrast, we turn to an interview with Mizanur Rahman, one of social media’s most famous promoters of the Islamic State, whom Britain and the US consider to be a recruiter for ISIS. British authorities closely monitor his movements and have taken his passport. He wears a court-mandated electronic ankle bracelet.

Rahman is known for his thousands of tweets and Facebook posts, and fiery lectures on YouTube, intended to inspire vulnerable young people. He openly advocates for a global caliphate, a homeland ruled by Islamic sharia law, which he says is a superior political, legal and economic system to democracy. The Islamic State’s black flag will one day fly over the White House he insists, adding that the militants will probably conquer Washington by military force, but he watches his words carefully to avoid being accused of advocating violence. Still, he argues, the concept of spreading Islam by force is no less honorable than Western countries invading Iraq or Afghanistan to spread democracy. [I wonder if he really believes that Western foreign policy has anything to do with spreading democracy.]

Rahman called last month’s Islamic State attacks in Paris “an inevitable consequence” of French participation in coalition airstrikes against the militants’ de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria. “I don’t think anybody should really be surprised at what happened,” he said. “In war, people bomb each other. I think it’s an opportunity for the French people to empathize with the people in Raqqa, who suffer very similar impact whenever the French airstrikes hit them – the civilian casualties, the shock, the stress. The anger that they must be feeling toward the Islamic State right now is the same kind of anger that the people of Iraq and Syria feel towards France.”

He argues that it is no worse for the Islamic State to behead American journalists than for the United States to kill Muslim civilians in drone strikes. “I’m promoting sharia because I think it’s the best,” Rahman, a former accountant and web designer, said in the London coffee shop interview. “I think it is better than what we have, and what is wrong with saying that?” [Nothing unless you enjoy music, sex, and alcohol and find praying five times a day highly oppressive.)

In August, Rahman was charged in Britain with “inviting support” for the Islamic State, and he faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. He is free on bail under strict conditions, including the ankle bracelet.

Rahman called the allegations against him ridiculous and anti-Muslim persecution. He said that he has done nothing more than preach the virtues of Islam and that he has never specifically recruited anyone to join the Islamic State or urged anyone to commit violence.

“Islam is more than just a book with an old story. It’s actually a code for life,” he said, adding that Islam is a blueprint for everything from personal hygiene to international relations. “It’s not just some medieval rantings.”

Rahman’s first arrest was in February 2002, when he was fined 50 pounds for defacing posters for a pop band that featured scantily clad women, something he considered indecent. [But forcing women to walk around fully covered from head to toe, with only their eyes showing, is not indecent? And what woman in the entire world would dress like that without great pressure from a male-dominated society?]

Peter Neumann, head of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College in London stated that Rahman is skilled at persuading Muslims that it is their religious obligation to swear allegiance to the Islamic State leader, arguing that God wants the world united under a caliphate, without ever overtly calling for them to move to Syria or Iraq. [How, we must ask, does Rahman know what God wants? There are countless individuals all over the world confined to institutions for committing violence which, they insisted, was in response to God talking to them.]

The couple in California … The only explanation my poor pagan mind can offer for their unspeakable behavior is “martyrdom”. They knew that their action would, in all likelihood, result in their death and they believed what they had been taught – oh so profoundly taught in the Kuran and drummed into their heads elsewhere like only religion can – that for martyrs there are heavenly rewards in the afterlife … forever.

With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Notes

1. U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing, November 24, 2015
2. Washington Post, December 1, 2015, p.A11

3. Washington Post, November 23, 2015

The two pillars upon which the entire edifice of vaccinology rest are that vaccines are safe and effective. We are told by our medical and federal authorities, physicians, pharmacists and health care practitioners that vaccines work by stimulating the body’s immune system to create specific antibodies. These antibodies in turn will protect us from the infectious disease specific to a given vaccine.

This central premise is virtually never challenged. Hundreds of millions of Americans simply accept that all vaccines are scientifically proven to confer immunity against disease. In a previous article, Uncovering the Cover-Up: Scientific Analysis of the Vaccine-Autism Connection, Deeply Flawed US Vaccine Policies, we examined the myths about vaccine safety and presented the actual science demonstrating vaccines’ toxic ingredients and adverse neurological effects. This report investigates the medical industry’s claims that vaccines are effective. Moreover, the independent research presented for each major vaccine raises serious questions that challenge the concept of antibody generation as a reliable factor to assure viral and bacterial immunity.

Measuring Vaccine Efficacy: Junk Science at its Worst

Every flu season, millions of Americans visit their physician’s office or local pharmacy to receive a flu shot. Recipients are given one of a handful of influenza vaccines on the market. The same vaccine will be injected into a 14 pound infant, teenage athletes weighing 200 pounds, and frail, immunocompromised elderly patients. Regardless of age, weight, medical history, previous compromised immune system and any other health factor, they are all given the same exact chemical cocktail. Furthermore, we are told to accept that this one-size-fits-all approach will predictably result in the production of a number of protective antibodies that will ward off a flu infection.

Once the flu season concludes, vaccinated persons who made it through the season without contracting a diagnosed flu infection are categorized by our health officials as having been successfully immunized. And these statistics then stand as living proof of the vaccine’s efficacy. Meanwhile, very little if any attention is paid to the numerous other factors that have been shown to influence immunity, including, quality of diet, additional nutrient profile, vitamin D, A and C status, exercise, stress management, exposure to environmental toxins, sleep patterns and biochemical and genetic makeup.

A person who chooses to be vaccinated and follows a healthy lifestyle by eating a balanced wholesome diet, minimizing environmental toxins, engaging in regular exercise and practicing de-stress techniques is far less likely to fall sick. It is therefore impossible and completely unscientific to make any absolute claims that vaccines are the sole protective cause for not contracting an infectious illness. On the other hand, an unvaccinated individual who eats the standard American diet, suffers from multiple nutrient deficiencies, and leads a sedentary, high-stress lifestyle, has a higher risk of developing a significantly compromised immune system condition. If such a person comes down with an illness, how can it be blamed on the absence of a vaccine and not the unhealthy lifestyle?

When assessing the impact of vaccines, removing the body’s many other biomolecular principles and functions from the equation is completely unscientific, The claim that a vaccine can prevent disease without looking at many other critical health factors in a person’s life is contrary to a scientific gold standard for assessing health and illness. It is no different than if a person took vitamin C and subsequently didn’t come down with a cold, that it was exclusively the vitamin C intake that deserves all the credit also being unscientific.

There is very strong evidence suggesting that all clinical trials carried out by vaccine manufacturers fall short of demonstrating vaccine efficacy accurately. And when they are shown to be efficacious, it is frequently in the short term and offer only partial protection. According to an article in the peer-reviewed The Journal of Infectious Diseases, the only way to evaluate vaccines is to scrutinize the epidemiological data obtained from real-life conditions. In other words, researchers simply cannot — or will not — adequately test a vaccine’s effectiveness and immunogenicity prior to its release onto an unsuspecting public. (1)

Based upon our research a study has yet to be undertaken that evaluates the long-term progress of both fully vaccinated and unvaccinated children of comparable biochemistries, ages, and lifestyles. Since immunity hinges on more than vaccination status, it stands to reason that the only way to make a fair determination about the effectiveness of the current vaccine schedule would be to carry out such an analysis using gold standard scientific methodology and protocol. Why has this never been done? To understand this unanswered question we must look back at vaccinology’s history and the scientific evidence that would implicate our national vaccine campaign as a dangerous and deceptive experiment upon the public.

The Polio Vaccine Nightmare

Almost everyone now believes that vaccines were responsible for the eradication of certain major epidemics in the US and around the world. However, this belief is largely propaganda overcoming fact. The story of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine is an example of how some vaccines not only fail to save lives but actually infect the patients with the very disease they are supposed to protect against.

The polio vaccine is recognized as the fastest approved drug in FDA history. In 1955, it only took two hours of review before its approval, licensure to be quickly released to the public. Owing to the fact that no significant research could ever have been carried out on the vaccine in such a short span of time, the vaccine was quickly administered without proper federal review. Known as the Cutter Incident, after the vaccine’s manufacturer Cutter Laboratories, within days of vaccination, 40,000 children became infected with polio, 200 with severe paralysis and ten deaths. Shortly thereafter the vaccine was quickly withdrawn from circulation and abandoned. (2)

The CDC’s website still promulgates a blatant untruth that the Salk vaccine was a miracle in public health policy. To the contrary, officials at the National Institutes of Health were convinced that the vaccine was contributing to a rise in polio and paralysis cases in the 1950s. In 1957 Edward McBean documented in his book The Poisoned Needle that government officials stated the vaccine was “worthless as a preventive and dangerous to take.” (3)

Some US states, such as Idaho where several people died after receiving the Salk vaccine, wanted to hold the vaccine makers legally liable. Dr. Salk himself testified in 1976 that his live virus vaccine, which continued to be distributed in the US until 2000, was the “principal if not sole cause” of all polio cases in the US since 1961. However, after much lobbying and political leveraging, the pharmaceutical industry pressured the US Public Health Service to proclaim the vaccine safe. (4)

Although this occurred in the 1950s, this same private industry game plan to coerce and through the use of lobbyists, consultants, current and former government employees, to influence government health agencies to do their bidding. Today, US authorities proudly claim the US is polio-free. Medical authorities and the advocates of mass vaccination rely upon the polio vaccine as an example of a vaccine that eradicated a virus and as proof of the unfounded “herd immune theory”. Dr. Suzanne Humphries, a board certified nephrologist who has spent more than 10,000 hours researching the safety and efficacy of vaccines has documented thoroughly that polio’s disappearance was actually a game of smoke and mirrors. In her research, she has shown how the alleged eradication of polio coincided with the rise of “new” and strikingly similar ailments which have been classified as variations of a condition known as Acute Flaccid Paralysis. (5) Thanks to Dr. Humphries detailed study of the data, it’s not difficult to connect the dots and see that the reported decline in cases of polio over the years has more to do with calling the disease by different names rather than eradicating it.

Another layer of treachery in the history of the polio vaccine is the story of Dr. Maurice Hilleman, a pioneer in the field of vaccine research at Merck in the 1950s who developed over 40 vaccines, including 5 of the 14 immunizations routinely given to children and adults today. He is considered the father of American vaccinology. In a candid interview, Dr. Hilleman explained that monkey DNA was used in some of the vaccines he developed, and it was impossible to screen out all the viruses carried by the monkeys. He discovered that the new Sabin polio vaccine contained Simian Virus 40 (SV40), a DNA virus shown to be carcinogenic. During vaccine trials in hamsters, SV40 was shown to cause tumors. Hilleman said, “we knew it was in our seed stock from making vaccines…it was good science at the time because that was what you did. You didn’t worry about these wild viruses.” (6) The precise number of Americans exposed to vaccines contaminated with SV40 remains unknown, but estimates are as high as 100 million. As of 2001, Neil Miller, a vaccine research journalist, counted 62 peer-reviewed studies confirming the presence of SV40 in a variety of human tissues and different carcinomas. (7)

The Decline of Epidemic Diseases: Getting to the Truth

What has contributed historically to the decline of scourges like smallpox, polio, tetanus, measles, and diphtheria? Although many attribute the decreased incidence of these diseases to the introduction of vaccines, a look at the epidemiological data indicates that many, if not most, infectious diseases started declining noticeably prior to the introduction of their vaccines due to significant improvements in the way we live. Sanitation, proper sewage disposal, clean water, improved nutrition, indoor plumbing, less-crowded living conditions, elimination of child labor and better hygiene were the real reasons that infectious rates waned. For example, polio declined in the US in the 1920s from 7,229 cases in 1921 to 3,826 cases in 1951. By the time the vaccine became widespread in 1961, the number of cases was already down to 1,076. (8)

There is no scientifically sound evidence that mass inoculation can be credited with eliminating any infectious disease. Furthermore, if vaccination is responsible for the disappearance of these diseases in the US, why did they simultaneously disappear in Europe prior to mass vaccinations?

The following graphs show that large drops in disease death rates occurred long before vaccines were introduced. From 1900 to 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, death rates from measles had declined from 13.3 per 100,000 to 0.2 per 100,000 – a 98% decrease. From 1900 to 1949, death rates from whooping cough declined from 12.2 per 100,000 to 0.5 per 100,000 – a 96% decrease. From 1900 to 1949, death rates from diphtheria declined from 40.3 per 100,000 to 0.4 per 100,000 – a 99% decrease. These graphs demonstrate clear and major changes in the severity of diseases well before any vaccines were introduced. (9)

Figure 1. Death rates from Measles

Figure 2. Death rates from Diphtheria

Figure 3. Death rates from Pertussis

The data suggest that public health interventions, such measures as improved hygiene, infected being being isolated are more effective and less expensive interventions to contain epidemics of respiratory viruses, with estimates of effect ranging from 55% to 91%. (10)Although strong evidence supports good hygiene as a central factor of disease prevention, the press rarely recommends measures people can adopt to best protect themselves against viral or bacterial disease, aside from vaccination.

Deconstructing the Science of Antibodies

The manufacturing methodology in vaccine development involves taking a disease agent and rendering it gradually weaker so that the body’s own immune response is triggered and antibodies are generated (referred to as humoral immunity). However, the body’s immune system is far greater than that targeted by a vaccine. In addition to humoral immunity, there is also cell-mediated immunity. Cell-mediated immunity activates macrophages, natural killer cells, antigen-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocytes, and the release of various cytokines in response to a viral antigen.

Current vaccine science lacks a way to stimulate the entire immune response instead of just a portion of it. Normal exposure to disease-causing agents always begins in the nasal, ear, throat, and respiratory passages–less so through injection. Once primary immunity has been established by infection, the antibody response follows. This allows the immune system to grow stronger and to bestow natural and permanent immunity to an ever-increasing number of pathogens. Vaccines injected into the body bypass cell-mediated immunity and overstimulate humoral immunity. This confuses normal immune response maturation and skews the functioning of the immune system. Humoral immunity becomes dominant and the crucial cell-mediated immunity is suppressed: the result can be autoimmune disease and frequent infections.

According to RM Zinkernagel at the University Hospital of Zurich Institute of Experimental Immunology: “We have not succeeded in generating truly protective vaccines against persisting infections because we cannot imitate ‘infection immunity’ that is long-lasting, generating protective T- and B-cell stimulation against variable infections without causing disease by either immunopathology or tolerance.” (11)

The weak correlation between antibody count and immunity is not a new discovery. Walene James, author of Immunizations: The Reality Beyond the Myth, explains that increased antibody production may not be the most important aspect of the immune process:

Vaccines isolate antibody function, and allow it to substitute for the entire immune response. Scientific evidence questioning the role of antibodies in disease protection can be found in research performed by Dr. Alec Burton, published in a study by the British Medical Council in May 1950. The study investigates the relationship between the incidence of diphtheria and the presence of antibodies. Since diphtheria was epidemic at, or just prior to, the time of the study, the researchers had a large number of cases to investigate. The purpose of the research was to determine the existence or nonexistence of antibodies in people who developed diphtheria and in those who did not. It looked at patients and people who were in close proximity to patients, such as physicians, nurses in hospitals, family, and friends. The conclusion was that there was no relation whatsoever between antibody count and incidence of disease. The researchers found people who were highly resistant with extremely low antibody counts, and people who developed the disease who had high antibody counts. Dr. Burton also discovered that children born with a-gamma globulinemia (an inability to produce antibodies) develop and recover from measles and other infectious or contagious disease almost as spontaneously as other children. (12)

One of the foremost issues surrounding vaccine-induced immunity is that infants are biologically incapable of producing antibodies, other than immature IgM antibodies, until 6-12 months of age. The antibodies the infant acquires, such as immunoglobulins, are passed down from mother to child through breastmilk. Nevertheless, the current CDC schedule calls for more than a dozen injections during the first six months of life. If the immunological function of a fully grown adult is disrupted so significantly by vaccines, what sort of harm can we expect these same vaccines to inflict upon the delicate physiology of an infant?***

Next we will examine some of the most compelling examples of vaccine failure among the most widely-used vaccines in America today.

Influenza

The Cochrane Collaboration, the foremost group of unbiased researchers in the world, has done a series of meta-analyses on the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine with similar results. In 2014 they found that vaccinating adults against influenza did not affect the number of people hospitalized nor decrease lost work. (13)Cochrane researchers stated that their results might be overly optimistic due to the fact that 24 out of 90 studies were funded by the vaccine manufacturers, which tend to produce results favorable to their product. (14)

According to Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, it makes little sense to keep vaccinating against seasonal influenza based on the evidence. (15) Jefferson has also endorsed more cost-effective and scientifically-proven means of minimizing the transmission of flu, including regular hand washing and wearing masks.

Dr. Jefferson’s conclusions are backed by a 2013 piece written by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine scientist Peter Doshi, PhD, published in the British Journal of Medicine. In his article Doshi questions the flu vaccine paradigm stating:

Closer examination of influenza vaccine policies shows that although proponents employ the rhetoric of science, the studies underlying the policy are often of low quality, and do not substantiate officials’ claims. The vaccine might be less beneficial and less safe than has been claimed, and the threat of influenza appears overstated.(16)

The CDC currently recommends that elderly Americans receive a flu shot, stating that “[v]accination is especially important for people 65 years and older because they are at high risk for complications from flu.” (17) Unfortunately, this serious warning flies in the face of a significant body of research showing that receiving the flu shot does not reduce mortality among seniors. (18) One particularly compelling 2005 study was carried out by scientists at the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Not only did the study indicate that the flu vaccine did nothing to prevent deaths from influenza among seniors, but that flu mortality rates in fact increased as a greater percentage of seniors received the shot. (19)

After the release of the study, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson covered the findings in a CBS News segment. Attkisson revealed that she hoped to interview the study’s lead author at NIH but was stonewalled by the agency. She eventually spoke to the only co-author of the study who was not affiliated with NIH, Dr. Tom Reichert, who stated that the research team revisited the data several times, but that no matter how they analyzed the “incendiary material”, the conclusion was clear: flu shots don’t improve mortality rates in the elderly population. (20)

Another important consideration in this discussion is that there are approximately 200 distinct viruses that constitute influenza and influenza-like illnesses. These organisms don’t magically appear during fall and winter – they are always with us. Nevertheless we are more susceptible to flu-like infections during the colder months when there are less daylight hours. Studies suggest that the origin of the so-called flu season may actually be the reduced amount of sunlight in the winter months, with the result that we become deprived of Vitamin D. (21,22)

Gardasil

The history of the Gardasil vaccine illustrates clearly the concerning lack of oversight on the part of our federal health authorities when it comes to testing vaccines for efficacy. Before receiving FDA approval, the popular HPV vaccine Gardasil was tested on fewer than 1200 girls. (23) A major flaw in Merck’s clinical trials was the number of girls enrolled in the trials who elected to take the prescribed three vaccine doses. Only 27% of all the girls tested were actually administered the complete three-vaccine series. (24) Another remarkable misstep in the trials was that no girls under age 15 participated, despite the fact that the vast majority girls given the vaccine today are under 15 years old. (25) Nevertheless, the vaccine was approved by the FDA in 2006. In 2014, approximately 60% of all American girls and 42% of American boys aged 13-17 received at least one HPV shot. (26)

The remarkably unscientific methodology employed during Garadsil’s pre- and post- licensure trials was reviewed in a 2012 analysis by scientists at the University of British Columbia and published in the journal Current Pharmaceutical Design. The research team didn’t mince words in their assessment of the trials:

We carried out a systematic review of HPV vaccine pre- and post-licensure trials to assess the evidence of their effectiveness and safety. We found that HPV vaccine clinical trials design, and data interpretation of both efficacy and safety outcomes, were largely inadequate.

Additionally, we note evidence of selective reporting of results from clinical trials (i.e., exclusion of vaccine efficacy figures related to study subgroups in which efficacy might be lower or even negative from peer-reviewed publications).

Given this, the widespread optimism regarding HPV vaccines long-term benefits appears to rest on a number of unproven assumptions (or such which are at odds with factual evidence) and significant misinterpretation of available data. (27)

More doubts about the FDA approval of Gardasil have come from an unlikely source, Dr. Diane Harper, a consultant for Merck and a chief scientist overseeing the licensure trials to evaluate Gardasil’s safety and efficacy. After receiving FDA approval, Dr. Harper publicly questioned Gardasil’s efficacy and public health value. Among her concerns is that no data show that Gardasil remains effective after 5 years. A truly effective HPV vaccine, on the other hand, would need to be efficacious for 15 years in order to prevent cervical cancer. In addition, she estimated that every American 11 year old girl would have to be vaccinated for the next 60 years in order to have any measurable effect on rates of cervical cancer.(28,29)

Gardasil’s efficacy in protecting against HPV infection has also been criticized due to the fact that it originally only targeted four of the more than one hundred HPV strains in circulation. In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, which supposedly protects against nine strains. Scientists from the University of Texas presented research at the 2015 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research revealing that vaccinated women were significantly at a higher risk to become infected with strains HPV not contained in the vaccine when compared to unvaccinated women. (30) This disturbing revelation is just the most recent piece of evidence demonstrating Gardasil’s dubious effectiveness and potentially hazardous impact on human biochemistry.

Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2007 demonstrates the ineffective nature of Gardasil in women with HPV. The authors concluded that Gardasil offers no benefit to women recovering from HPV during a 12-month period.(31) The research team stated that they “see no reason to believe that there is therapeutic benefit of the vaccine elsewhere because the biological effect of vaccination among already infected women is not expected to vary by population.” (32)

Given the high rate of recovery for people with HPV infections, the widespread use of the vaccine is highly suspect. Even the National Cancer Institute has stated that “[m]ost high-risk HPV infections occur without any symptoms, go away within 1 to 2 years, and do not cause cancer.” (33) In fact, 90% of all cases of HPV disappear within 2 years. Cervical cancer is highly curable when detected early.

It’s important to note that advances in medicine and the regular use of pap smears have helped decrease the incidence of cervical cancer in the United States by over 50% since the 1970s. (34) Examining health data from Finland and the UK , Dr. Harper and her colleagues concluded that HPV vaccinations give a false sense of security to many young women and girls who in turn opt out of regular pap smear tests. According to Dr. Harper, this trend has resulted in exponential increases in recent HPV rates. (35)

Even more alarming, Gardasil has gained notoriety as one of the most dangerous vaccines for it serious life-threatening adverse effects. As of October 2015, the federal program known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has received over 41,000 cases of adverse reactions from the HPV vaccine, including 234 deaths. (36)

Whooping Cough (Pertussis)

The vaccine for pertussis, better known a whooping cough, is packaged together with Diptheria, and Tetanus (DtaP) and given according to a robust vaccine schedule of 5 injections by age six. It is the most administered vaccine in the childhood vaccination schedule: at 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 15-18 months, and 4-6 years. (37)

Despite regular administration of booster shots, scientific evidence now suggests the vaccine does not effectively confer immunity against pertussis. As one recent study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases put it, “pertussis is currently the least well-controlled vaccine-preventable disease despite excellent vaccination coverage and 6 vaccine doses recommended between 2 months of age and adolescence.” (38)

The ineffective nature of the pertussis vaccine was brought into sharp focus in 2010 when California witnessed a dramatic rise in whooping cough cases, over 9,100 people cases, many of them children. A study assessing the vaccine’s efficacy discovered that an extraordinarily high 80% of all children who contracted the illness were fully vaccinated. (39)

One explanation for the pertussis vaccines remarkable lack of efficacy can be found in a 2010 study undertaken at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. The team found that the whooping cough vaccine promotes the colonization of Bordetella parapertussis, pertussis’ causal bacterial agent. Based on their findings, the researchers posited that the whooping cough vaccine itself may be contributing to the marked resurgence of whooping cough cases compared to the previous decade. (40)

Further evidence casting doubt on the whooping cough vaccine’s usefulness was presented at a 2013 meeting of the CDC’s Board of Scientific Counselors, Office of Infectious Diseases. During the meeting, CDC officials pointed out that the widespread use of the DtaP vaccine has given rise to more virulent pertussis strains. What is novel about these new emerging strains is that they lack pertactin (PRN), the antigen current pertussis vaccines target. The meeting’s participants noted that “vaccinated patients had significantly higher odds than unvaccinated patients of being infected with PRN- deficient strains.”(41) Another recent study surveyed the incidence of whooping cough in eight states. The survey found that fully vaccinated children were two to four times more likely to contract an PRN-deficient strain than the unvaccinated population. (42)

A further reason for the pertussis vaccine’s failure to control communal infection is because vaccinated children may become asymptomatic carriers of the pathogen. There is strong evidence that vaccinated populations may be infected with the whooping cough but not present symptoms. (43) The serious downside to this is that asymptomatic carriers can transmit the disease to unvaccinated individuals, especially infants who run the highest risk of suffering complications from pertussis. It also lends credence to new research implicating vaccinated older siblings, not parents, as the primary source of infection for whooping cough among infants. This research runs counter to the entire notion of herd immunity, which states that older populations must be immunized in order to protect infants who are not old enough to receive the vaccine. (44)

Measles

The efficacy of the measles vaccine has also come under serious scrutiny in recent years. In, 2014 Dr. Gregory Poland, Editor in Chief of the journal Vaccine and founder of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, published an alarming statement that the measles vaccine has a poor efficacy record. Despite the high 95% measles vaccination compliance among children entering kindergarten, and the CDC’s propaganda that the MMR vaccine has defeated the virus, measles outbreaks continue to increase. During the first half of 2014, there were 16 large measles outbreaks in the US. Dr. Poland does not believe this is due to unvaccinated individuals, but because of the vaccine’s failure to confer immunity. (45)

During the first six months of 2011, there were 118 cases of measles reported to the CDC from 23 states and New York City. There were no fatalities. Among the 118 cases, 105 were both “import-associated” and unvaccinated. Of the 87 U.S. residents who came down with measles, 74 were unvaccinated: 39 under age 20, and 35 age 20 and older. (46)

The CDC focused heavily on the unvaccinated measles victims while giving no time to the analysis of those vaccinated individuals who also became ill. In fact, 13 of the group (17.5%) had received the MMR vaccine but got measles anyway. While the CDC uses these incidents of disease outbreak to stress the need for vigilant adherence to the vaccine schedule, the real take home message here is that 17.5% of a group of vaccinated individuals got sick despite the vaccine. One thing, however, is certain: all of the unvaccinated people who came down with measles now have a lifelong immunity against measles. For those who became infected despite having been vaccinated, we just don’t know. Could the vaccine prevent these people from developing the normal lifetime immunity? No research has been undertaken to prove this point.

Likewise, a 1985 measles outbreak in a Texas community found that the 14 students out of 1806 who contracted measles were all vaccinated – no exceptions, and no reports of exposure from a foreign endemic area for any of the students.(47)

Chicken pox (Varicella)

The Chicken Pox vaccine is yet another example of a failed vaccine. The present vaccine was licensed in 1995. Following its release, an estimated 25 percent of children were still spreading the varicella virus or getting ill themselves. Anne Gershon, a chicken pox expert and director of pediatric infectious disease at Columbia University Medical Center, says, “We really need boosters of vaccines much more than we thought we ever would.” (48)

This begs the question: how many boosters would be enough? Our vaccines do not confer lifelong immunity. Therefore to compensate for vaccines’ limitation and steady decline in providing immunity, more and more boosters are required. Consequently, in 2006, the CDC recommended that a second chicken pox shot be added to the childhood vaccination schedule. Gershon says it “looks like” a second shot will keep children from getting sick. (49)

Research into the efficacy of the varicella inoculation, however, has increased skepticism about the vaccine. In 2005, South Korea mandated the chickenpox vaccine to all children under 15 months. Regardless of the country’s 97% compliance—well, above herd immunity’s claims to eradicate infectious disease—chickenpox infections have not declined. Rather, between 2006 and 2011, there has been a three-fold increase in chickenpox cases. (50) American research has also yielded proof of a significantly higher rate of vaccine failure despite its widespread administration. (51)

Mumps

Mumps infections is another virus frequently found in vaccinated populations. In 2006 the US experienced the largest nationwide mumps epidemic in 20 years, primarily infecting students on college campuses. Authorities have attempted to blame these outbreaks on crowded dormitory conditions, instead of considering the obvious: the vaccine simply isn’t effective for very long.

In 2009-2010 New York and New Jersey witnessed over 1500 mumps cases among highly vaccinated groups: 88% of infected children had received at least one vaccine and 75% had received the recommended two doses. According to Dr. Jane Zucker, NYC Assistant Commissioner of Immunization, “We know that approximately one in every 20 people who are vaccinated may not develop antibodies.” A Reuters reporter went even further, stating, “The mumps virus can mutate, so people who have had only one or even two doses of vaccine remain vulnerable.” (52) How can a vaccine with such negligible immunity not only be recommended but required for school attendance?

Calling for Science-Based Vaccinology

It is certainly reasonable and responsible to suggest that if a vaccine were proven to be safe and effective by a gold standard of science, it would be an important health service for every child and adult. However, at this moment no such assurance can be made based upon quality science. At the very least we should require unbiased, independent, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of every vaccine, both individually and collectively with no input from vaccine manufacturers or their colleagues, associates or consultants. To ensure a healthier future, it is crucial that we stand up today and demand a new paradigm of vaccinology based on independent, science-based medicine.

Endnotes

1. Weinberg, Geoffrey A., and Peter G. Szilagyi. “Vaccine Epidemiology: Efficacy, Effectiveness, and the Translational Research Roadmap.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases J INFECT DIS 201.11 (2010): 1607-610. Web.
2. Miller, N. “The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequences” Medical Veritas. Vol. 1 239-251, 2004
3.  McBean E. The Poisoned Needle. Mokelumne Hill, California: Health Research,1957
4. Ibid
5. Humphries, S. “Smoke, Mirrors and the Disappearance of Polio,” International Medical Council on Vaccination. November 17, 2011
6. “Vaccine Pioneer Doctor Admits Polio Vaccine Caused Cancer” http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/vaccine-pioneer-doctor-admits-polio-vaccine-caused-cancer/
7. Miller, N. “The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequences” Medical Veritas. Vol. 1 239-251, 2004
8. Alternatives Medicine Digest (AlternativesMedicine.com),          “Vaccination is not Immunization,”
9. ^{Vital Statistics of the United States 1987 Volume II – Mortality Part A, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,}Jefferson T, Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses: Systematic Review. British Medical Journal 2009 Sep 21; 339
10. Zinkernagel RM Protective ‘immunity’ by pre-existent neutralizing antibody titers and preactivated T-cells but not by so-called ‘immunological memory’.” Immunological Review 2006, Jun, 211;310-319
11. James W. Immunization: The Reality Behind the Myth. Massachusetts: Bergin & Gervey; 1988.
12. ^{Jefferson T et al, Vaccines for Preventing Influenza in Healthy Adults, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010, Issue 7. Art. No.: CD001269. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4, June 3, 2010, http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults, accessed December 4, 2011}
13. Ibid
14. 25. ‘A Whole Industry Is Waiting For A Pandemic’, Der Spiegel, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,637119-2,00.html, accessed December 4, 2011
15. Doshi, P. “Influenza: Marketing Vaccine by Marketing Disease.” BMJ 346 (2013): F3037. Accessed November 30, 2015. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f3037.
16. “What You Should Know and Do this Flu Season If You Are 65 Years and Older” http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/65over.htm
17. Urashima, M., T. Segawa, M. Okazaki, M. Kurihara, Y. Wada, and H. Ida. “Randomized Trial of Vitamin D Supplementation to Prevent Seasonal Influenza A in Schoolchildren.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2010, 1255-260. Accessed November 30, 2015. doi:doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2009.29094.Essen, Marina Rode Von, Martin Kongsbak, Peter Schjerling, Klaus Olgaard, Niels Ødum, and Carsten Geisler. “Vitamin D Controls T Cell Antigen Receptor Signaling and Activation of Human T Cells.” Nature Immunology Nat Immunol 11, no. 4 (2010): 344-49. Accessed November 30, 2015. doi:10.1038/ni.1851.
18. . Lind, Peter. “U.S. Court Pays $6 Million to Gardasil Victims.” Washington Times. December 31, 2014. Accessed November 30, 2015. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/31/us-court-pays-6-million-gardasil-victims/?page=all. “Don’t Give This to Your Daughter – Despite What Your Doctor Says .” Dr. Mercola.com . http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/11/05/gardasil-vaccine-is-a-flop-for-good-reasons.aspx (accessed September 16, 2011).
19. 9/15/11. The Gary Null Show. Progressive Radio Network. 15 Sept. 2011. Radio.
20. Tomljenovic, Lucija, Jean Pierre Spinosa, and Christopher A. Shaw. “Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccines as an Option for Preventing Cervical Malignancies: (How) Effective and Safe?” Current Pharmaceutical Design 19, no. 8 (2013): 1466-487. Accessed December 1, 2015. Attkisson, Sharyl. “Gardasil Researcher Speaks Out – CBS News.” Breaking News Headlines: Business, Entertainment & World News – CBS News. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/19/cbsnews_investigates/main5253431.shtml (accessed September 16, 2011).
21.  9/15/11. The Gary Null Show. Progressive Radio Network. 15 Sept. 2011. Radio
22. “Presentation Abstract” http://www.abstractsonline.com/plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?mID=3682&sKey=7f019f73-accb-484e-becc-5ecc405f8ec5&cKey=e2313b32-d6ac-4443-ab2d-49c368ea3b89&mKey=19573a54-ae8f-4e00-9c23-bd6d62268424
23. Hildesheim, A., R. Herrero, S. Wacholder, A. C. Rodriguez, D. Solomon, M. C. Bratti, J. T. Schiller, P. Gonzalez, G. Dubin, C. Porras, S. E. Jimenez, and D. R. Lowy. “Effect Of Human Papillomavirus 16/18 L1 Viruslike Particle Vaccine Among Young Women With Preexisting Infection: A Randomized Trial.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 298, no. 7 (2007): 743-53.Ibid
24. http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/infectious-agents/hpv-fact-sheet
25. Park, Alice. “Pap Tests: Another Revision of Recommendations – TIME.” Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews – TIME.com. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1942044,00.html (accessed September 16, 2011).
26. ] 9/15/11. The Gary Null Show. Progressive Radio Network. 15 Sept. 2011. Radio.
27. http://sanevax.org/
28. “Help Protect Babies from Whooping Cough” http://www.cdc.gov/features/pertussis/
29. Martin, S. W., L. Pawloski, M. Williams, K. Weening, C. Debolt, X. Qin, L. Reynolds, C. Kenyon, G. Giambrone, K. Kudish, L. Miller, D. Selvage, A. Lee, T. H. Skoff, H. Kamiya, P. K. Cassiday, M. L. Tondella, and T. A. Clark. “Pertactin-Negative Bordetella Pertussis Strains: Evidence for a Possible Selective Advantage.” Clinical Infectious Diseases 60, no. 2 (2014): 223-27. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1093/cid/ciu788.Stobbe, Mike. “Study: Whooping Cough Vaccination Fades in 3 Years.” Yahoo Finance. September 19, 2011. Accessed November 11, 2015. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Study-Whooping-cough-apf-2422268709.html.Long, G. H., A. T. Karanikas, E. T. Harvill, A. F. Read, and P. J. Hudson. “Acellular Pertussis Vaccination Facilitates Bordetella Parapertussis Infection in a Rodent Model of Bordetellosis.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277, no. 1690 (2010): 2017-025. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.0010. “Meeting of the Board of Scientific Counselors, Office of Infectious Diseases Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” http://www.cdc.gov/maso/facm/pdfs/BSCOID/2013121112_BSCOID_Minutes.pdf
30. Martin, S. W., L. Pawloski, M. Williams, K. Weening, C. Debolt, X. Qin, L. Reynolds, C. Kenyon, G. Giambrone, K. Kudish, L. Miller, D. Selvage, A. Lee, T. H. Skoff, H. Kamiya, P. K. Cassiday, M. L. Tondella, and T. A. Clark. “Pertactin-Negative Bordetella Pertussis Strains: Evidence for a Possible Selective Advantage.” Clinical Infectious Diseases 60, no. 2 (2014): 223-27. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1093/cid/ciu788.Warfel, J. M., L. I. Zimmerman, and T. J. Merkel. “Acellular Pertussis Vaccines Protect against Disease but Fail to Prevent Infection and Transmission in a Nonhuman Primate Model.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 2 (2013): 787-92. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1073/pnas.1314688110.Skoff, T. H., C. Kenyon, N. Cocoros, J. Liko, L. Miller, K. Kudish, J. Baumbach, S. Zansky, A. Faulkner, and S. W. Martin. “Sources of Infant Pertussis Infection in the United States.” Pediatrics 136, no. 4 (2015): 635-41. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2015-1120.Haelle, Tara. “Measles Cases Are Spreading, despite High Vaccination Rates. What’s Going On?” Washington Post, June 23, 2014.CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, “Measles – United States, January – May 20, 2011
31. Gustafson TL, New England Journal of Medicine, 316: 717-774, March 26, 1987, Measles Outbreak in a Fully Immunized Secondary School Population
32. National Public Radio, “Lifelong Immunity? With Vaccines, it Depends.” October 11, 2010, Nancy Shute^.Ibid
33. Hee Oh, Sung, Et Al. “Varicella and Varicella Vaccination in South Korea.” Clin Vaccine Immunol. 21, no. 5 (2014): 762–768. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1128/CVI.00645-13.Michalik, David E., Sharon P. Steinberg, Philip S. Larussa, Kathryn M. Edwards, Peter F. Wright, Ann M. Arvin, Haley A. Gans, and Anne A. Gershon. “Primary Vaccine Failure after 1 Dose of Varicella Vaccine in Healthy Children.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases J INFECT DIS 197, no. 7 (2008): 944-49. Accessed December 2, 2015. doi:10.1086/529043.
34. Barskey AE Mumps, Resurgences in the United States: A Historical Perspective on Unexpected Elements. Vaccine. 2009 Oct 19;27(44);6186-95.
35. Simonsen, Lone, Reichert, Thomas, et al. . “Impact of Influenza Vaccination on Seasonal Mortality in the US Elderly Population.” Arch Intern Med Archives of Internal Medicine 165, no. 3 (2005): 265. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1001/archinte.165.3.265.Glezen, W P., and Lone Simonsen. “Commentary: Benefits of Influenza Vaccine in US Elderly–new Studies Raise Questions.” International Journal of Epidemiology 35, no. 2 (2006): 352-53. Accessed December 1, 2015. doi:10.1093/ije/dyi293.“Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All” https://sharylattkisson.com/govt-researchers-flu-shots-not-effective-in-elderly-after-all/
36. Teen Vaccination Coverage 2014 National Immunization Survey-Teen (NIS-Teen)http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/who/teens/vaccination-coverage.html

37. “More than 1,500 affected in NY, NJ mumps outbreak” Julie Steenhuysen, Reuters, February 11, 2010.

     

Os mísseis Aim-120 Amraam, lançados pelo F-16 turco (todos dois Made in USA) não foram dirigidos somente contra o caça-bombardeiro russo mobilizado na Síria contra o chamado Estado Islâmico, mas contra um objetivo mais importante: o Turkish Stream, o gasoduto projetado que levaria o gás russo à Turquia e de lá à Grécia e outros países da União Europeia

O Turkish Stream é a resposta de Moscou ao torpedeamento, por Washington, do South Stream, o gasoduto que, contornando a Ucrânia, levaria o gás russo até Tarvisio (na região italiana de Udine) e de lá à União Europeia, com grandes benefícios para a Itália, inclusive em termos de emprego. O projeto, lançado pela empresa russa Gasprom e a italiana ENI depois ampliado à alemã Wintershall e à francesa EDF, já estava em fase avançada de realização (a Saipem da ENI já tinha um contrato de dois bilhões de euros para a construção do gasoduto através do Mar Negro) quando, depois de ter provocado a crise ucraniana, Washington lançou aquilo que o New York Times definiu como “uma estratégia agressiva visando a reduzir fornecimentos russos de gás para a Europa”.

Sob pressão estadunidense, a Bulgária bloqueou em dezembro de 2014 os trabalhos do South Stream, enterrando o projeto. Mas ao mesmo tempo, embora Moscou e Ancara estivessem em campos opostos no que concerne à Síria e ao chamado Estado Islâmico, a Gasprom assinou um acordo preliminar com a companhia turca Botas para a realização de um duplo gasoduto Rússia-Turquia através do Mar Negro. Em 19 de junho Moscou e Atenas assinaram um acordo preliminar sobre a extensão do Turkish Stream (com uma despesa de dois bilhões de dólares a cargo da Rússia) até a Grécia, para torná-la a porta de entrada do novo gasoduto na União Europeia.

Em 22 de julho Obama telefonou a Erdogan, pedindo que a Turquia se retirasse do projeto. Em 16 de novembro, Moscou e Ancara anunciaram, ao contrário, próximos encontros governamentais para lançar o Turkish Stream, com uma envergadura superior à do maior gasoduto através da Ucrânia.

Oito dias mais tarde, a derrubada do caça russo provocou o bloqueio, senão a liquidação, do projeto. Seguramente, em Washington, festejaram o novo acontecimento. A Turquia, que importava da Rússia 55% de seu gás e 30% de seu petróleo, se encontra de fato prejudicada pelas sanções russas e corre o risco de perder o grande negócio do Turkish Stream.

Quem, então, na Turquia, tinha o interesse de abater voluntariamente o caça russo, sabendo quais seriam as consequências? A frase de Erdogan – “Nós não queríamos que isto acontecesse, mas aconteceu, espero que uma coisa desse tipo não acontecerá mais” -, implica um cenário mais complexo do que o oficial. Na Turquia há importantes comandos, bases e radares da Otan sob o comando estadunidense. A ordem de abater o caça russo foi dada dentro desse quadro.

Nesse ponto, qual é a situação na “guerra dos gasodutos”? Os Estados Unidos e a Otan controlam o território ucraniano por onde passam os gasodutos Rússia-União Europeia, mas a Rússia pode hoje contar menos com eles (a quantidade de gás que eles transportam caiu de 90% a 40% da exportação russa de gás para a Europa) graças a esses dois corredores alternativos. O Nord Stream que, no Norte da Ucrânia, leva o gás russo à Alemanha: a Gasprom quer agora duplicar, mas o projeto é contestado na União Europeia pela Polônia e por outros governos do Leste (principalmente os ligados tanto a Washington como a Bruxelas). O Blue Stream, administrado paritariamente pela Gasprom e a ENI, que no sul passa pela Turquia e por este fato não está isento de risco. A União Europeia poderia importar bastante gás a baixo preço do Irã, com um gasoduto já projetado através do Iraque e da Síria, mas o projeto está bloqueado (não por acaso) pela guerra desencadeada nesses países pela estratégia dos Estados Unidos e da Otan.

Manlio Dinucci

Manlio Dinucci : Jornalista, geógrafo e cientista político, colunista do jornal italiano Il Manifesto; tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para o Blog da Resistência

Considering the remarkable success of the Russian intervention in Syria, at least so far, it should not have come as a surprise that the AngloZionist Empire would strike back. The only question was how and when. We now know the answer to that question.

On November 24th the Turkish Airforce did something absolutely unprecedented in recent history: it deliberately shot down another country’s military aircraft even though it was absolutely obvious that this aircraft presented no threat whatsoever to Turkey or the Turkish people. The Russian Internet is full of more or less official leaks about how this was done. According to these versions, the Turks maintained 12 F-16 on patrol along the border ready to attack, they were guided by AWACS aircraft and “covered” by USAF F-15s in case of an immediate Russian counter-attack. Maybe. Maybe not. But this hardly matters because what is absolutely undeniable is that the USA and NATO immediately took “ownership” of this attack by giving their full support to Turkey.

NATO went as far as to declare that it would send aircraft and ships to protect Turkey as if it had been Russia which had attacked Turkey. As for the USA, not only did it fully back Turkey, it now also categorically denies that there is any evidence that Turkey is purchasing Daesh oil. Finally, as was to be expected, the USA is now sending The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group into the eastern Mediterranean, officially to strike Daesh but, in reality, to back Turkey and threaten Russia. Even the Germans are now sending their own aircraft, but with the specific orders not to share any info with the Russians.

Chart of SU-24M Flight Path Released by Russian Ministry of Defense. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

So what is really going on here?

Simple: the Empire correctly identified the weakness of the Russian force in Syria, and it decided to use Turkey to provide itself an element of plausible deniability. This attack is probably only the first step of a much larger campaign to “push back” Russia from the Turkish border. The next step, apparently, includes the dispatching of western forces into Syria, initially only as ‘advisors’, but eventually as special forces and forward air controllers.

The US and Turkish Air Forces will play the primary role here, with assorted Germans and UK aircraft providing enough diversity to speak of an “international coalition”. As for the French, stuck between their Russian counterparts and their NATO “allies”, they will remain as irrelevant as ever: Hollande caved in, again (what else?). Eventually, NATO will create a de-facto safe heaven for its “moderate terrorists” in northern Syria and use it as a base to direct an attack on Raqqa. Since any such intervention will be completely illegal, the argument of the need to defend the Turkmen minority will be used, R2P and all. The creation of a NATO-protected safe heaven for “moderate terrorists” could provide the first step for breaking up Syria into several smaller statelets.

If that is really the plan, then the shooting down of the SU-24 sends a powerful message to Russia: we are ready to risk a war to push you back – are you ready to go to war? The painful answer will be No, Russia is not prepared to wage a war against the entire Empire over Syria, simply because she does not have the capabilities to do so.

As I have already mentioned many times now, Syria is beyond the Russian power projection capability (roughly 1000km), especially if that power projection has to be executed through hostile territory (which Turkey most definitely is). So far, the Russians have succeeded, brilliantly, in organizing and supporting their small force in Syria, but this in no way indicates a Russian capability to support a major air operation over Syria or, even less so, a ground operation.

The fact is that the Russian intervention in Syria was always a risky and difficult one, and it did not take the Empire much time to capitalize on this. I get a lot of flak from flag-wavers and “hurrah patriots” for saying this, but the fact is that Russia cannot ‘protect’ Syria from the US, NATO or even CENCTOM. At least not in purely military terms. This does not mean that Russia does not have retaliatory options. Russia has already engaged in the following:

Economic sanctions: Russia has declared a number of sanctions against Turkey, including the freezing of the Turkish Stream project. Furthermore, Russian tourism in Turkey – a huge source of revenue – is most likely to dwindle down to a tiny fraction of what it used to be: Russians will not be banned from going to Turkey, but no tours or packages will be offered by Russian travel agencies. Some Turkish goods will be banned in Russia, and Turks will not be invited to bid for various types of contracts. All in all, these sanctions will hurt Turkey, but not in a major way.

Political sanctions: here Russia will use one of her most terrifying weapons: the truth. The Russian military presented a devastating series of photos and videos shot by Russian air and space assets proving that Turkey does, indeed, purchase oil from Daesh. What was especially shocking about this evidence is that it showed the truly immense scale of the smuggling: one photo showed 1,722 oil trucks in in Deir Ez-Zor region while another one showed 8,500 oil tankers are used by Daesh to transport up 200,000 barrels of oil. What these figures mean is that not only is this smuggling organized at the level of the Turkish state, but it is also absolutely obvious that the USA knows everything about it.

Predictably, the western media made no mention of the actual evidence, it only spoke of “images the Russians claim to show”, but the damage is still done, especially in the long term. Now everybody with a modicum of intelligence knows that Erdogan is a lying crook. More importantly, it has now become undeniable that Turkey is not only an ally, but a patron and sponsor of Daesh. Finally, in the light of this evidence, it also becomes rather obvious why Turkey decided to shoot down the Russian SU-24: because the Russians were bombing the Daesh to Turkey smuggling routes.

The final blow to the prestige and credibility of Erdogan and Turkey came from Vladimir Putin himself who, in his annual address to the Parliament said:

We know who are stuffing pockets in Turkey and letting terrorists prosper from the sale of oil they stole in Syria. The terrorists are using these receipts to recruit mercenaries, buy weapons and plan inhuman terrorist attacks against Russian citizens and against people in France, Lebanon, Mali and other states. We remember that the militants who operated in the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s found refuge and received moral and material assistance in Turkey. We still find them there.

Meanwhile, the Turkish people are kind, hardworking and talented. We have many good and reliable friends in Turkey. Allow me to emphasize that they should know that we do not equate them with the certain part of the current ruling establishment that is directly responsible for the deaths of our servicemen in Syria.

We will never forget their collusion with terrorists. We have always deemed betrayal the worst and most shameful thing to do, and that will never change. I would like them to remember this – those in Turkey who shot our pilots in the back, those hypocrites who tried to justify their actions and cover up for terrorists.

I don’t even understand why they did it. Any issues they might have had, any problems, any disagreements we knew nothing about could have been settled in a different way. Plus, we were ready to cooperate with Turkey on all the most sensitive issues it had; we were willing to go further, where its allies refused to go. Allah only knows, I suppose, why they did it. And probably, Allah has decided to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by taking their mind and reason.

But, if they expected a nervous or hysterical reaction from us, if they wanted to see us become a danger to ourselves as much as to the world, they won’t get it. They won’t get any response meant for show or even for immediate political gain. They won’t get it.

Our actions will always be guided primarily by responsibility – to ourselves, to our country, to our people. We are not going to rattle the sabre. But, if someone thinks they can commit a heinous war crime, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, or a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they’re delusional. We’ll remind them of what they did, more than once. They’ll regret it. We know what to do.

Of course, in a society thoroughly habituated to lying, dishonesty and hypocrisy, these are “only” words, and they shall be ignored. But in the Middle-East and the rest of the world, these are powerful words which the Turks will have a very hard time “washing off” from their reputation.

Military measures: these are limited, of course, but not irrelevant. First, Russia has now admitted that S-400 are now in Syria (I suspect they were there all along). Second, Russia has began building a 2nd air base, this time in Shaayrat, in central Syria. If this base is indeed built, then bringing in a few Russian AWACS and/or MiG-31s would make sense. Third, Russia will now use more modern SU-34s equipped with advanced air-to-air missiles in northern Syria and Russian strike aircraft will now be escorted by dedicated SU-30SM fighters. This combination of measures will make it much harder for the Turks to repeat such an attack, but I personally doubt that they have any such intentions, at least not in the immediate future.

Evaluation:

In order to fully understand what is happening now we need to look at the bigger picture. The first major consequence of the shooting down of the Russian SU-24 is thatNATO has now become an impunity alliance. Now that the precedent has been set by Turkey’s act of war against Russia, because that is what this shooting down undeniably was, any NATO member can now do the same thing while feeling protected by the alliance. If tomorrow, say, the Latvians decide to strafe a Russian Navy ship in the Baltic Sea or if the Poles shoot down a Russian aircraft over Kaliningrad, they will immediately get the ‘protection’ of NATO just like Turkey now did: the USA will fully endorse the Latvian/Polish version of the events, the Secretary General of NATO will offer to dispatch more forces to Latvia/Poland to “protect” these countries from any “threat” from “the east” and the world’s corporate media will turn a blind eye to any evidence of Latvian/Polish aggression. This is an extremely dangerous development as it gives a strong incentive to any small country to deal with its inferiority complex by showing its “courage” and “determination” to challenge Russia even if, of course, this is done by hiding behind NATO’s back.

NATO is also deliberately escalating its war on Russia by admitting Montenegro into the Alliance and by re-starting talks about admitting Georgia. In a purely military sense, the incorporation of Montenegro into NATO makes no difference whatsoever, but in political terms this is yet another way for the West to thumb its nose at Russia and say “see, we will even incorporate your historical allies into our Empire and there is nothing you can do about it”. As for Georgia, the main purpose behind the discussion of its incorporation into NATO is to vindicate the “Saakashvili line”, i.e. to reward aggression towards Russia. Here again, there is nothing Russia can do.

We thus are facing an extremely dangerous situation:

• The Russian forces in Syria are comparatively weak and isolated
• Turkey can, and will, continue its provocations under the cover of NATO
• The West is now preparing an (illegal) intervention inside Syria
• The western intervention will be made against Syria and Russia
• NATO politicians now have an easy way to score “patriotic” points by provoking Russia

If we strip all the NATO verbiage about “defending our members” what is happening now is that the Empire has now apparently decided that going down the road to war is safe because Russia will not dare to “start” a war. In other words, this is a game of chicken in which one side dares the other to do something about it. This is exactly what Putin was referring to when he said:

If they expected a nervous or hysterical reaction from us, if they wanted to see us become a danger to ourselves as much as to the world, they won’t get it. They won’t get any response meant for show or even for immediate political gain. They won’t get it. Our actions will always be guided primarily by responsibility – to ourselves, to our country, to our people

What the imperial deep state is missing is the fact that Russia might not have a choice but to confront the Empire. Yes, the Russians do not want war, but the problem here is that, considering the absolutely reckless arrogance and imperial hubris of the western elites, every Russian effort to avoid war is interpreted by the western deep state as a sign of weakness. In other words, by acting responsibly the Russians are now providing an incentive for the West to act even more irresponsibly. This is a very, very, dangerous dynamic which the Kremlin will have to deal with. Putin, apparently, does have something in mind, at least this is how I understand his warning:

But, if someone thinks they can commit a heinous war crime, kill our people and get away with it, suffering nothing but a ban on tomato imports, or a few restrictions in construction or other industries, they’re delusional. We’ll remind them of what they did, more than once. They’ll regret it. We know what to do.

I have no idea as to what he might be referring to, but I am confident that this is not some empty bluster: this was not a threat to Russia’s enemies, but a promise to the Russian people. I sure hope that there is a plan because right now we are on a collision course leading to war. In conclusion, here is a short quote by Putin western leaders might want to ponder:

(Please read Part I before this article)

There should be no doubt among objective observers that the assassination and violent coup plots in the Maldives are predicated on returning Nasheed to power, but the context behind these events extends well past the island chain and into the larger Indian Ocean region. It’s plain to see that Nasheed himself could not manage such an operation on his own, let alone while currently sitting in a maximum security jail, so it’s the foreign powers behind him that are really the ones guiding this operation. The personal history of the jailed former President confirms his closeness to the UK, and to a logical extension, the US, the latter of which is especially so when his Color Revolution-style of regime change tactics are compared with other American proxies across the globe such as Tymoshenko and Suu Kyi.

When piecing together the shadowy web of forces behind Nasheed’s bloody comeback plans, one might be quick to overlook India, believing that its close strategic partnership with the Maldives has remained unchanged since Operation Cactus. That’s not exactly the case, however, since the Maldives have moved radically in China’s direction ever since Yameen’s Presidency first began, and this has drawn serious concern among many in New Delhi.

There is nothing at the moment that openly links India to the violent regime change attempt being plotted in the Maldives, but if there’s one country that would most directly benefit from the removal of a “pro-China” government there, then it would indisputably be India. It might be that the US and UK are conducting the ongoing operation on India’s behalf, or possibly doing so as a preemptive “goodwill gesture” to ‘prove their loyalty’ to India in further wooing it into an overt anti-China geopolitical orientation, but whatever the motives behind what’s really going on, it’s easy to see that Yameen’s assassination or overthrow would be to India’s advantage at China’s expense.

The People’s (Republic of China) President

The Maldivian-Chinese Strategic Partnership:

Yameen earned the support of the people of the Maldives, and also the government of the People’s Republic of China, through his accelerated partnership relations with Beijing. In the course of only two years, the Maldives have received so many soft loans and infrastructure investments (such as a bridge between the capital and the neighboring airport-hosting island) that the Foreign Minister proclaimed last month that “China is now one of the most important development and trade partners of the Maldives” and that “The government of President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom is committed in expanding that partnership to new levels”. This was just a few days after the President reiterated anearlier statement from over the summer “that this government will not tolerate foreign parties to interfere with the country’s domestic issues”, just so happening to remind the world of this on the occasion of the Indian Foreign Minister’s visit on 11 October. Tellingly, Prime Minister Modi skipped the Maldives in March when he went on a tour of the Indian Ocean nations (to be described shortly), in what was largely interpreted as a snub against Yameen over Nasheed’s jailing, while President Xipaid a visit there half a year prior in September 2014.

Modi’s Motivation For Snubbing The Maldives:

To put this into the perspective of Maldivian-Chinese relations, the island nation had officially joined the One Belt One Road (OBOR, or “New Silk Road”) project in December of 2014, thus becoming one of Beijing’s formal strategic partners. India is still somewhat suspicious of OBOR and remains uneasy over the ‘String of Pearls’ maritime relationships that China has made in the Indian Ocean over the past decade. The Maldives’ intensifying ties with China likely emboldened the government into rejecting Western pressure and going forward with Nasheed’s jailing, secure in the knowledge that no matter how the West diplomatically (or perhaps even economically) responds, the country will still prosper owing to its strategic partnership with China. Both of these factors (the Maldivian-Chinese Strategic Partnership and Nasheed’s jailing) seem to have been the real reasons why Modi skipped the Maldives on his Indian Ocean tour and deliberately snubbed its leadership.

One Thing Leads To Another:

Taking stock of India’s sudden change in attitude towards its neighbor and traditional partner, Yameen probably figured that with New Delhi already mad at him for what he perceived to be nothing more than pragmatic 21^st-century economic diversification and domestic law enforcement, there was little he could do to repair the relationship short of rescinding his decisions on both matters, which he certainly wasn’t about to do. Thus, feeling bullied by his bigger ‘partner’, Yameen seems to have prioritized developing his country’s bilateral relations with China even further in an accelerated effort to hedge against what he feared might soon turn out to be an antagonistic former ally. Unintentionally, it might have been this very calculation, likely made in strategic-defensive self-interests and not with any proactive intent to aggravate India (but rather just to respond to the grand snub), which triggered alarm bells in India and deepened the security dilemma between New Delhi and Malé, but also indirectly between it and Beijing.

Land Law, Base Rumors, And Free Trade:

Proceeding forward with its partnership with Beijing, the Maldives enacted an unprecedented land lawin late July that gave foreigners the right for the first time in history to own properly in the country under certain conditions ($1 billion must be invested and 70% of the territory must be reclaimed from the Indian Ocean). This was immediately met with criticism from Indian voices that suspected it could play to China’s strategic advantage, with Asia Times later writing that it offers the possibility of China opening up clandestine listening posts very close to India’s southern coast and giving it a central position in the Indian Ocean. The rumor mill eventually got so out of control at the time with all the talk of potential “Chinese bases” that both the Maldives and China had to publicly reject the flurried speculation, although this doesn’t seem to have allayed any of India or Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party’s fears that China will soon be moving in to the island chain. About a month and a half later, fearlessly showing that they will not let foreign chatter interfere with their partnership, the Maldives and China signed a memorandum of understanding on 9 September that both sides will eventually move towards a free trade pact. Unsurprisingly in hindsight, Yameen was first targeted for assassination at the end of that month, and the country’s drama has only increased since then.

India’s Aspirations In Its Namesake Ocean

Grand Strategy:

New Delhi feels that it alone should exercise hegemony over the Indian Ocean rimland, both in the strategic and commercial sense, and herein it comes into conflict with China’s rising influence in the region. Theoretically, both Great Powers could peacefully cooperate in the region and don’t necessarily have to compete, but the trust deficit between each of them naturally leads India into seeing the expanding Chinese presence as a sort of threat, and the moves it takes in response are inevitably interpreted by China as obstructive and unfriendly, albeit all in a proxy fashion of course. From India’s standpoint, it needs to do everything it can to stop the ‘String of Pearls’ from turning into the New Silk Road’s ports of call, and ideally replace China’s presence with its own, if possible.

This zero-sum-game mentality precludes accepting any significant Chinese presence in India’s namesake ocean, and it makes it an imperative of Indian foreign policy to push back wherever possible and via whatever escalatory means necessary (short of direct conflict) to change the strategic balance in such a way as to sabotage China’s regional plans. Some outposts like the Pakistani port of Gwadar are impossible for India to shut down, but others, chiefly those in the Indian Ocean insular states, are ‘fair game’ and a lot more vulnerable and impressionable to New Delhi. Additionally, because the island ports by their very nature lay inside the ocean itself unlike their mainland counterparts, they provide an important point from which to project power along the sea lines of communication (SLOC) necessary for sustaining hegemony in the wider region.

Insular Interests:

Understanding how integral of a role the insular island nations play in this pan-rimland ‘Great Game’ between India and China, Modi paid a landmark visit to the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Sri Lanka in March of this year. The Diplomat’s Darshana M. Baruah wrote a very comprehensive overview of the importance that each of these nations plus the Maldives have in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s rivalry, and it’s highly recommended that the reader check out that article and the one he wrote earlier about the Eastern Indian Ocean islands to get a sense of the current state of play in these areas. To summarize, it’s suspected that China has gained a foothold in Myanmar’s Coco Islands, and together with its previous dominating influence in Sri Lanka (mildly on the decline since January’s presidential election and which will be touched upon in Part III), the Maldives, and the anti-piracy refueling facility it received access to in the Seychelles, the ‘String of Pearls’ had begun to look a lot more like a ‘naval noose’ from the Indian perspective (especially if one includes Gwadar into this construction). Thus, it became necessary for India to send its top national representative to the region in order to make a strong symbolic stand and prove that New Delhi wasn’t about to surrender its sensitive namesake region any time soon.

After Modi’s trip, The Diplomat also published a detailed piece by SK Chatterji that reviewed all of its accomplishments, which in short were mostly of an economic and symbolic nature (as could have been expected). Modi’s purposeful snubbing of the Maldives thus sticks out like the sore thumb that it was meant to be, and the political overtones were of course not lost on either Malé or Beijing. In fact, it almost looked as if Modi was signaling that the Seychelles and Mauritius were “in play” between the two rivals, that the Maldives had been “temporarily conceded” or put in a bratty position of ‘time-out’, and that Sri Lanka was a victory lap after the stunning loss of ‘pro-Chinese’ incumbent Rajapaksa. It’s actually quite difficult for India’s actions to be interpreted otherwise when placed in the larger context of Indian Ocean rivalry, especially, as mentioned, because of how politically focused his avoidance of the Maldives came off as being. To return to the concept of the naval noose that the author had introduced, the Sri Lankan ‘knot’ tying the Maldives and Myanmar together had been ‘cut’, the Maldives were being ‘diplomatically scolded’, and India was doubling down on its interests in the African-adjacent countries of Seychelles and Mauritius.

African Ambitions:

Modi’s ‘island hopping’ took place concurrently with a conference in Bhubaneswar about the “Indian Ocean: Renewing the Maritime Trade and Civilisational Linkages”, which concluded with the broad unveiling of an Indian-centric “Cotton Route” to challenge China’s New Silk Road. While specific details were scarce, the author released his own analysis about what this could realistically entail, and a large portion of it deals with India’s anticipated trade linkages with the growing East African economies. China’s already embedded in this part of the world, and the New Silk Road prominently features this region in its strategic calculus, but if India could ‘win out’ over China in establishing premier influence over the Seychelles, then it would be in a position to influence China’s SLOC and also establish its own for enhancing its commercial presence along the East African coast. In fact, if one looks at the East African market as the ‘grand prize’ in the Indian Ocean competition (which both Great Powers, but especially China, need to tap into for assured future growth), then the insular politicking between India and China makes a lot more sense. Neither may be able to stop the other, but they can try to ‘one-up’ their rival by laying strategic claim to the fixed number of ‘real estate plots’ scattered throughout the ocean.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentaror currently working for the Sputnik agency, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.

Electoral observers who cover Latin America and the Caribbean see the threat of “systematic, massive fraud” in upcoming elections in a country of longstanding strategic concern to the United States.

Venezuela: Crucial Times

Following around two years of what the government has labelled an “economic war”, as well as months and interspersed days of opposition violence, Venezuelans will head to the polls on Dec. 6 in what could be the country’s most important elections yet.

These National Assembly elections will see a divided opposition, with the support of the region’s business class elites and private media, go against an alliance of pro-Bolivarian parties.

With the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) facing internal criticism as well as general discontent after two challenging years, the elections are likely to be close, with the opposition so far refusing to commit to recognize the results.

Fifteen years of social gains are at stake: community organizing and empowerment, millions educated in the higher education mission, health care, a budget for free housing, cultural achievements, pensions, and more. teleSUR will provide in-depth coverage on various aspects of these crucial times in Venezuela, keeping readers up-to-date on all the latest developments:

Elections and Venezuela

Venezuela’s electoral system is, according to many, the most advanced in the world, while its National Assembly has advanced the democratic rights of all social sectors, particularly the poor.

Interview: Venezuelan Elections Matter for Global Resistance

Nelson Davila, Venezuelan ambassador to Australia, spoke to teleSUR English about what the global and regional consequences could be if the Venezuelan opposition were to make gains in the elections. Read more…

Analysis: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Candidates Mixing It up

In the upcoming parliamentary elections in Venezuela on the 6th of December, the PSUV candidates are… Read more…

Analysis: Venezuelan Vs. US Electoral System

7 Facts That Make the Venezuelan Electoral System More Democratic Than in the US Read more…

The head of the electoral council CNE highlights the peaceful climate under which the elections are taking place. Honduras official praises the legislative elections.

Polls opened early Sunday in Venezuela’s National Assembly election, with people lining up at polling stations well before the start of voting at 6 a.m. local time. Just under 100,000 officials presided over polling stations nationwide, including 130 international electoral monitors.

As many as 19 million registered voters are expected to cast ballots in the election, which has been predicted to be one of the tightest in years. Hours after the polls opened, one of the deans of Venezuela’s CNE electoral council, Socorro Hernandez, highlighted the massive participation of voters in the legislative elections, which is the 20th democratic process in the last 17 years. Hernandez also emphasized that the voting in over 14,500 polling stations with 40,000 voting booths are being carried out in a peaceful atmosphere. The electoral official said the voting is taking place in a highly fluid manner, with most voters taking about 90 seconds to complete the full process.

The official also said there has been a few logistical issues which have been taken care of in a timely manner.

She also highlighted there were no irregularities or any other complains of any sort. Honduran historian and former Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas, who is in Venezuela as an electoral monitor, praised the peaceful process taking place throughout the Latin American country, as well as noting the “peaceful wil and sovereign response of the people while casting their vote.” Rodas also said that the peaceful electoral process in Venezuela highly contrasts with the “deceitful and perverted” information being posted by mainstream international media.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:

“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Polls-Open-in-Venezuelan-National-Assembly-Elections-20151203-0047.html”.

The elevation the Chinese renminbi (also known as the yuan) to the basket of global currencies making up the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights (SDRs), in effect making it an international reserve currency, is unlikely to have any major immediate effects. But it does underscore the vast transformation in the foundations of the world economy over the past three decades resulting from the long-term economic decline of the US.

As the Stratfor web site noted in its comment on the decision, it is the first time that the basket of reserve currencies, which had previously comprised the dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the euro, will include the currency of a country not allied with the US.

The post-World War II monetary order, of which the IMF was a part, was grounded on the overwhelming economic dominance of the US. In 1945, Stratfor pointed out, US gross domestic product was estimated to be as high at 50 percent of the world total. This year it will be 22 percent.

While it supported the decision to include the renminbi in the SDR basket, the US did so very much with gritted teeth. The principal reason for its acquiescence was fear that its continued resistance—it played the leading role in having China’s 2010 push to be included in the SDR basket turned down—would provoke opposition from other powers. There is already criticism of the US from within the IMF because Congress has refused to ratify a 2010 decision to give China increased voting rights. At present, it has the same vote within the organisation’s bodies as Belgium.

This incongruity is a measure of the transformation in the world economy over the past quarter century. Two decades ago, China comprised just 2 percent of global GDP. Since then, its share has increased six-fold and this year will reach 12 percent, as the world’s second largest economy. This is one of the most significant transformations in world economic history.

However, its implications and impact on geopolitics cannot be determined by simply extrapolating from what has already taken place and drawing the conclusion that China is set eventually to become the world’s economic hegemon, or that it is on the way to becoming an imperialist power, if it is not already.

The rise of China can be understood only if it is placed in its historical and international context. This is completely ignored both by those who maintain that China is going to provide a new base of stability for world capitalism and by various pseudo-left tendencies that claim it is an imperialist power.

The overriding tendency in the historical integration of China into the framework of world capitalism has been the drive by the imperialist powers to dominate and subjugate it.

This started with the Opium Wars initiated by Britain in the mid-19th century. By the end of the 19th century, there was not only a scramble for Africa, but also the carve-up of China, as all the imperialist powers, including the emerging ones—the US, Japan and Germany in particular—sought to establish their own economic zones and spheres of influence. The US announced its emergence on the world scene with the declaration that it sought an “open door” policy in China—in other words, it was not to be excluded from exercising its burgeoning interests.

When that perspective was challenged by Japan in the 1930s, first with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and then the attempted conquest of the whole country in 1937, the US set itself on a path of war against its Asian rival, which erupted with the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 and concluded with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945.

However, US plans for domination of the Chinese landmass were thwarted by the Chinese Revolution of 1949, which threw off the yoke of imperialism. But the nationalist policies and program of the Maoist regime, based on the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country,” meant that the country’s economic problems could not be resolved, erupting in a series of crises such as the “Great Leap Forward” of the 1950s and the “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s.

Fearing an eruption of the working class from below, the Maoist regime moved back towards imperialism, beginning with the Nixon-Mao rapprochement at the start the 1970s and leading to the turn to market forces at the end of the decade under Deng Xiaoping. With the bloody suppression of the working class in the events of June 1989 and the subsequent economic opening up of China, the Maoist-Stalinist bureaucracy carried through the restoration of capitalism, making its economy ever more dependent on the shifts and flows of global capital.

The spectacular growth of the Chinese economy over the past quarter century, however, does not mean that China is on the path taken by the existing imperialist powers in an earlier historical period. In the first place, its economic expansion has taken place very differently: it has been a product not of some organic national development, but has flowed above all from its role as the cheap-labour manufacturing platform of the transnational corporations of the major powers.

Consequently, the physiognomy of the Chinese ruling elite—notwithstanding the great wealth of its upper echelons—is very much that of the comprador bourgeoisie that emerged in the earlier period of colonial subjugation, seeking to manoeuvre its way through the powerful currents of the global economy while enhancing its wealth, often by political means and outright corruption.

The concerted push by the regime to have the renminbi recognised as part of the SDR basket displays these characteristics. It is aimed at trying to enhance China’s economic status and give it greater room for manoeuvre by lessening, at least to some extent, the power of the US dollar in determining its connections to the world market.

In that way, the hope of the regime is that it will contribute to what it calls China’s “peaceful rise.”

Such calculations, however, completely leave out of account the implications of the very changes in the structure of the global economy and geo-political relations that have led to the renminbi’s rise.

One hundred years ago, in analysing the significance of World War I as the opening of the imperialist epoch of wars and revolutions, Lenin explained that there could be no permanent peace under capitalism because any equilibrium between the major powers would, by the very nature and dynamic of the capitalist economy, be only temporary.

This was because the capitalist economy developed unevenly. Consequently, the economic conditions that prevailed at one point and formed the basis for stability would immediately start to be disrupted, leading inevitably to the eruption of new wars.

Lenin specifically pointed to the transformation that had led to the emergence of Germany from a “miserable” collection of states and principalities to a major economic power in the space of barely 50 years.

The situation a century ago is not exactly analogous to that of today. China, unlike Germany in the first decade of the last century, is not an imperialist power. But Lenin’s analysis has contemporary relevance nonetheless. The economic rise of China has completely disrupted the post-war economic order and the equilibrium established between the major imperialist powers following the 30 years of conflagration—two world wars and many smaller conflicts—from 1914 to 1945.

The elevation of the Chinese currency must be seen within this context. Rather than providing a new foundation for stability and order, it is an expression of the deepening instability and disorder that increasingly characterise the global economy, flowing from the erosion of the foundations on which it was based—unchallenged US economic hegemony.

Faced with this situation, the US is not planning to fade away peacefully into the background, but is seeking to counter its economic decline by military means. This is the meaning of its ever-increasing bellicosity towards Russia and its pivot to Asia, aimed at the subjugation of China. However, this drive brings it into conflict with its old imperialist rivals, which likewise see their future as bound up with the exploitation of the resources and labour of the Eurasian landmass, and whose interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the US.

From this perspective, the elevation of the renminbi is an expression of shifts in the tectonic plates of the world economy that are fueling geopolitical tensions and creating the conditions for the eruption of a third world war—a catastrophe that can be prevented only by the unification of the working class on the program of world socialist revolution.

The reaction to the San Bernardino shooting in which 14 people were killed and several more wounded is a textbook case of confirmation bias. The first reactions came from the liberal wing of the Twittersphere, heavily represented by “mainstream” journalists, who immediately took the incident to be a classic “mass shooting” of the Sandy Hook-Columbine variety, and it didn’t take long for the finger-wagging to begin. 

At once pro-gun control and anti-religious, the meme went out into cyberspace: “thoughts and prayers” aren’t enough, we need to crack down on gun ownership in this country. The front page of the New York Daily News expressed the left-liberal party line: “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS: As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.”

As it turned out, however, the guns used by Syed Farook and Tashveen Malik, the two perpetrators, were bought legally – and their weaponry consisted of a lot more than mere guns. The editors of the Daily News didn’t wait for the facts because they didn’t care about the facts. They just wanted to make a point – one which turned out to be not only wrong but also completely beside the point.

In the same city, in the offices of a very similar – if ideologically opposite – tabloid, the editors of the New York Post were jumping the gun in an entirely different direction. As the ethnicity and religious affiliation of the attackers came out, they ran with a simple two-word headline: “MUSLIM KILLERS,” with a modifying qualifier: “Terror eyed as couple slaughters 14 in Calif.” As more information came out, however, the editors pulled back, and the final edition was quite different: “MURDER MISSION,” read the headline, with a neutral supplementary: “Shooters slaughter 14 in Calif.” These two editions were published hours after the incident, and only a few hours apart – a testament to the dangers of jumping to conclusions.

This reversal is explained by the subsequent release of yet more information about the perpetrators: Syed Farook worked at the San Bernardino Department of Public Health, which had rented a room at the facility where the massacre took place. The event was a holiday party, which Farook attended, but left early after a reported altercation of some kind. He returned with Malik, his wife, armed to the teeth, and the slaughter commenced.

These facts would appear to point in a different direction entirely from the scenario painted by the Post’s initial edition, and so the imagery conjured by the new headline went from that of the rampaging “Muslim Killers” to the “Murder Mission” of what appeared to be a case of workplace violence.

That’s what I thought around midnight last night, when I tweeted my tentative opinion that the workplace violencescenario seemed to be the most likely. My main reason was the nature of the target: why, I asked, would terrorists choose the Christmas party of the San Bernardino Public Health Department as the latest object of their wrath? In addition, reports of a dispute at the event involving Farook seemed to indicate that scenario: he got angry, came back, and started shooting. There were also reports of “turmoil” inside the department where he worked; several people had left amid rumors of disputes with management, and the fact that Farooq and his accomplice were targeting a very specific group of people – and not, say, a military facility, or even a soft target like a mall – seemed to corroborate this conclusion.

However, as more facts came out, this explanation began to make less sense. To begin with, a bomb – actually, three bombs taped together – had been left behind at the scene of the shooting. The bomb was linked to a device found in Farook’s rental car – rented three days prior – that was very similar to the jury-rigged remote-controlled IEDs recommended by al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, which detailed how to make an explosive device with readily available materials. We don’t yet know why the bomb failed to go off,.

Although reports that the couple came into the venue wearing body armor and Go-Pro body cameras turned out to be false, they were wearing “tactical” clothing, i.e. vests that enabled them to carry large amounts of ammunition. And indeed they were carrying huge amounts, enough to let them reload on the scene, and continue firing up to seventy-five rounds for over 30 seconds. This accounts for the large number of casualties.

Furthermore, the discovery of twelve “pipe-bomb type” devices, hundreds of tools for making more, and “thousands” of rounds of ammunition in the Redlands home rented by Farooq and his wife eliminates the workplace violence scenario. This was, in effect, a bomb-making factory, and neighbors indicate that a number of people were involved: packages were received throughout the day, and activity was observed into the night. One of these neighbors claims they were ready to contact law enforcement but hesitated to do so for fear of being accused of “racial profiling.” Both Farooq and his bride were of Pakistani extraction.

Two factors indicating that this was indeed a terrorist cell carrying out a pre-planned operation, and not a disgruntled employee intent on revenge against his co-workers, are plain enough: 1) The couple dropped off their child at a relative’s house the day before the attack, claiming to have a doctor’s appointment, and 2) The tactics utilized in the shooting of the victims and the gunfight with the police — which included throwing a fake pipe bomb out of their car as the cops pursued them – are evidence of some kind of military training. Such training could have occurred during Farooq’s trips to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

And we are beginning to hear evidence of international contacts with “more than one” terrorist suspect under surveillance by law enforcement. All that’s missing – as of this writing – is a claim of responsibility by some overseas terrorist outfit.

Yet questions remain: again, the target – a holiday party in a small city – hardly seems like the sort ISIS or al-Qaeda would zero in on. Clearly the couple were planning on a much larger operation, but this plan was changed by something that triggered Farooq to act sooner. And we still don’t have the whole picture: there could conceivably be some new information that could alter our whole perception of what motivated Farooq and Malik.

Which brings me to my point: our perception of the facts is shaped – and altered – by our preconceptions. In short, people believe what they want to believe – and the facts be damned. In this case, major media organizations didn’t wait for the facts to come in before they pronounced judgment. They simply rushed into print with what were little more than editorials, bereft of any responsibility to their readers or the truth.

This is why those who proclaim that bias is inherent in all journalism, and that there’s no such thing as objective reporting, are dangerously wrong. Yes, we’re all human; yes, everyone has opinions. But some people wait for the facts to come in before giving vent to those opinions, while others don’t bother with such niceties.

The reality, as I see it, and given what we know now, is this: San Bernardino was an act of terrorism that may or may not have been directed from overseas. The implications of that are very grave for those of us who oppose our crazed foreign policy of perpetual war, and the relentless assault on our civil liberties on the home front.

The pressure to “destroy them over there before they strike us over here” is going to increase a hundred-fold. The advocates of universal surveillance are going to be empowered as never before. That these tactics haven’t worked in the past – and, indeed, have backfired badly – won’t deter the usual suspects from insisting that war and repression are the answers to the problem of terrorism.

Our answer to the War Party must be that their strategy has failed: the terrorists couldn’t recruit anyone if we weren’t over there bombing what remains of their cities and seeking to impose our will on a populace that will never accept our domination, no matter how many soldiers we send and bombing sorties we launch.

As for the authoritarians who want to use incidents like the San Bernardino attack as a pretext to abolish the Constitution and institute a regime of total surveillance and outright repression: where was their vaunted surveillance system in this case?

We didn’t detect this plot – and perhaps that’s because watching everyone, and collecting everyone’s information, blinds us to the real villains hiding in our midst. Then again, perhaps ferreting out villains isn’t the real purpose of government spying.

After the 9/11 attacks, the nation was swept by a wave of war hysteria, and concern for basic civil liberties went right out the window: we will doubtless experience a similar phenomenon in the days and months to come. Yet we are confident that when the history of our era is written, the advocates of peace and liberty will be vindicated, while the War Party will be discredited and disdained by future generations. We must live in the future, in a sense, in order to fight for the future – if there is to be one, that is.

The FBI announced Friday that it was formally taking charge of the investigation into the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 and wounded 21, on the assumption that the horrific massacre was a terrorist attack.

“This is now a federal terrorism investigation led by the FBI,” said FBI Director James Comey.

“And the reason for that is the investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations.”

Comey said that evidence uncovered so far suggested that two suspects—both slain by police—Syed Farook, a 28-year-old county health inspector, and his 27-year-old wife, Tashfeen Malik, had been “radicalized,” but that there was no indication that they were part of any broader group.

The FBI director added that there was there was still “a lot of evidence that doesn’t quite make sense.”

The most widely cited indication of “radicalization” was a Facebook posting allegedly made immediately after the attacks by Malik, under an alias, swearing allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The FBI has also claimed that Farook had been in contact two years ago with Islamist elements, including the Al Nusra Front in Syria, an Al Qaeda affiliate that enjoys virtual state sponsorship from one of Washington’s closest allies, Qatar.

The other source of the alleged “radicalization” under investigation is trips made by Farook to Saudi Arabia, Washington’s other closest ally in the Arab world, along with his wife’s previous residence in the kingdom. Pakistani family members of Malik’s father have told the media that they were shocked by how hardline and conservative he had become in his beliefs after moving to Saudi Arabia, which is the ideological font, as well as a major financial sponsor, of Islamist terrorism.

The corporate media and large sections of the political establishment had been pressing for the mass shooting to be labeled as a terrorist attack from the moment it emerged that the two suspects, the US-born Farook and his wife, who was from Pakistan, were both Muslim. These layers are anxious to exploit the tragedy to further Washington’s reactionary agenda of aggressive war abroad, together with police state repression and anti-immigrant chauvinism at home.

Unlike any other act of terrorism committed on US soil, however, in this case the victims were all co-workers of Farook, with whom he was attending a holiday office party. They were all well known to him, suggesting that the attack may have more in common with the kind of workplace mass killings that happen on a staggeringly regular basis in America.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), there were 14,770 workplace homicide victims between 1992 and 2012, an average of over 700 such killings every year.

At the same time, unlike any other workplace shooting on record, Farook carried out the killings together with his wife, after dropping off their infant daughter with his mother. Such actions and the evident planning that went into assembling an arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives, indicate an ideological element in the crime.

The lawyer for Farook’s family, David Chesley, cautioned against trying to link the killings to international terrorism. Speaking to the press Friday, he said that the FBI indicated to him that they had been “totally stumped” and “totally frustrated” in their attempts to link a motive for the shootings to international Islamist terror.

Chesley said that there were some suggestions that the violence had been “related to his [Farook’s] work, that he was a disgruntled employee.” He added that “some of his coworkers made remarks about his beard.”

Coworkers have reported that Farook had been involved in a heated argument about Islam and Israel two weeks before the massacre with a fellow worker killed in the attack, Nicholas Thalasinos, who identified himself with Messianic Judaism and reportedly espoused right-wing political views.

Thalasinos’ widow told the New York Times: “My husband was very outspoken about ISIS and all of these radicalized Muslims.”

Witnesses at the holiday party said that the couple shot Farook’s supervisors first.

What suggests itself in the San Bernardino massacre is a kind of hybrid attack, the result of a toxic mixture, the interaction of a whole series of pathologies spawned by American capitalism both at home and abroad.

That individuals are even attracted to the reactionary ideology of Islamic fundamentalism is a measure of the staggering level of social alienation that exists within far broader layers of the population. Farook and his wife have been described by family and neighbors as quiet and introverted. Clearly, however, unseen by even those closest to them, there was beneath the surface seething bitterness, anger and alienation.

The desperate search for some simplistic international terrorist link to the tragedy in San Bernardino serves to obscure the deeper causes. The alienation of large numbers of people from a social order dominated by extreme inequality and exploitation, combined with endless war abroad and rampant police violence at home, are the real roots of the epidemic of mass shootings that are emblematic of US society.

At the same time, Islamism has been cultivated by US imperialism as a reactionary political instrument, from the CIA-backed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s through to the ongoing war for regime change in Syria. To the extent that it now produces horrors within the US, it is very much a case of US imperialism’s chickens coming home to roost, with average working people left to pay the terrible price.

A critical question posed by the San Bernardino shootings is: Why are there no countervailing democratic tendencies within American society against the influence of such reactionary ideologies? This is bound up with both the ever-increasing monopolization of economic and political power by a financial oligarchy and the endless crimes carried out by US imperialism abroad.

Within barely a day of the San Bernardino shooting, US politicians moved to exploit the killings as a means of scapegoating immigrants. On Thursday, Republican Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Jeff Sessions (Alabama) made public a letter to the Obama administration demanding the immigration records of Farook, Malik and their relatives in advance of a Congressional vote on legislation that includes funding for the settlement of Syrian refugees and other immigration programs.

That Farook was an American citizen born in Chicago and raised in southern California didn’t phase the two senators, who demanded the immigration records of his parents, who are in no way implicated in the attack and came to the US decades ago. Their aim is to prevent any of those fleeing the carnage and destruction unleashed by US imperialism in the Middle East from receiving asylum in the US.

The media has responded to the events in San Bernardino with a relentless drive to whip up fear and hysteria while promoting war and fomenting anti-Muslim bigotry. The Washington Post, a leading advocate of an escalation of the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria, declared in an editorial Friday that the shootings—whose real motives are far from clear—demonstrated the need “for the United States to redouble its resolve to destroy the Islamic State and other barbarously radical Islamist groups.”

The New York Post, meanwhile, covered its front page Thursday with a photograph of bloodied victims and a screaming headline reading “Muslim Killers.”

The media frenzy surrounding the San Bernardino shooting assumed bizarre and repulsive dimensions Friday when the landlord of the dead suspects, reportedly paid $1,000 by TV producers, opened up their apartment to dozens of reporters and camera crews, who swarmed in, pawing through everything from scattered papers to their baby’s dolls and pampers.

Venezuelans will go to the polls in all-important legislative elections on Sunday December 6, 2015. 

The vote will have a significant impact on the course of the Bolivarian Revolution started by the late Hugo Chavez.  A victory for the opposition could be problematic for the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as an opposition-led National Assembly would use all tools at its disposal to hamper any efforts at continuing the process of political, economic, and social transformation still ongoing today.

Walking the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, one gets the sense that the people are largely still supportive of the government, despite their understandable grievances about runaway inflation, lack of basic goods, and increasing violent crime.  However, one gets a very different picture from US and western media with its droning propaganda about ‘dictatorship’ and ‘unfair elections’.  Were one to read solely the corporate media, one could be forgiven for thinking that the government is on the verge of collapse, and that the opposition is either poised to control the government, or to have the election stolen from them.

In fact, the opposition has already laid the groundwork for a potential destabilization of the country as a number of key figures have openly stated that should they lose the election, it would be an indication of fraud.  Essentially, the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), which is neither democratic nor unified, has manufactured a win-win scenario wherein a loss in the election proves it was cheated, thereby allowing it to decry the elections as a fraud: a pernicious lie which only would benefit them.

Such tactics are par for the course for an opposition made up of US-backed, right wing neoliberal members of the former ruling class – an opposition that heralds criminals such as Leopoldo Lopez as righteous heroes persecuted by the government. The violence that is likely to break out should the MUD lose is also a standard tactic of everyone from criminal gangs to fascist political formations, both terms aptly describing the Venezuelan opposition.

This narrative of ‘election fraud’ is the same one trotted out by the opposition in every election in the last 15 years, with US media dutifully providing the cover of legitimacy to baseless claims as it repeats the same tired, utterly discredited talking points about ‘dirty elections’.  The truth however is that Venezuela’s electoral system is the best, “most transparent in the world,” as former US President and humanitarian Jimmy Carter proclaimed in 2012.  Indeed, despite the lies and distortions of the US media, these elections will be free, fair, and reflective of the will of the people.

The Truth and the Lies about Venezuela’s Electoral System

It seems that nearly every media outlet and major think tank has spread lies and misinformation about the Venezuelan electoral system.  The Washington Post condescendingly wrote that, “The question is not whether the election will be free and fair; it already has been established that it won’t be… What’s unclear is whether Mr. Maduro will resort to outright fraud or violence to prevent an opposition victory.”

In the article, the Editorial Board of the Washington Post implied that the government has deliberately sabotaged the opposition’s chances by altering the ballot to confuse opposition voters by placing two similarly named parties next to each other, as well as banning opposition leaders from running, gerrymandering voting districts, and other nefarious tactics.  Unfortunately for the propagandists of the Post, I was actually able to speak to Tania D’Amelio Cardiet, one of the Directors of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) the impartial body which manages the electoral process.  D’Amelio clearly and unambiguously explained, “The positioning of parties on the ballot is determined by the political parties themselves in a televised public forum attended by all parties.  After the public forum, once every party has had a chance to dispute any positioning issues, all organizations sign off on the ballot.  The opposition has been arguing that the positioning of the two Unidads is a deliberate confusion created by the CNE.”

Oops. Unfortunately for the Washington Post and the opposition, one of their principal claims – that the CNE deliberately placed the MUD next to another party with the word Unidad (Unity) in the name – has been thoroughly exposed.  The fact that the placement of the parties on the ballot was agreed to by ALL parties in a public forum, even after all had been given a chance to voice their objections, proves that the MUD in fact signed off on the physical make-up of the ballot.

But why?  The logical explanation is that the opposition wanted this setup in order to use it as yet another justification for their discredited narrative that the CNE and the government are attempting to confuse voters.  In fact, the opposite is true.  It seems that it is the opposition that is desperate to create confusion, fabricating a pretext to invalidate the results of the election and bring down the wrath of the US political class.  So while MUD perpetually accuses the Venezuelan government of dirty tricks, it is in fact the opposition engaging in underhanded tactics.

One must also recall that what the right wing opposition means when they refer to the “gerrymandering” of districts and the “unfair” tactics of the government is that they resent having poor people housed in public housing projects located in what were once exclusively well-to-do neighborhoods.  When they argue that the government is simply doing this to increase its votes in certain districts, they do so with all the attendant racism, classism, and reactionary language that one should expect from a comprador former ruling class.

Anyone who has ever actually studied the Venezuelan electoral process knows perfectly that the multiple redundancies and transparency requirements make it impossible to tamper with the election results.  Those who oversee each counting table at each voting station are randomly selected.  The machines require fingerprint activation, identification, signatures, and other forms of authentication.  All voting receipts and records are automatically audited at no less than 53%.  All financial records for all candidates and parties are presented for verification.  There are a number of other mechanisms of transparency that bolster Jimmy Carter’s assertion that Venezuela’s electoral process is the most transparent in the world.

Finally, there is the issue of poll numbers and how the corporate media has used them to convince the world that anything other than a resounding victory for the right wing means the election was stolen.  Nearly every media outlet has referenced the notion that the opposition leads by 20-30 points, however they fail to mention the fact that many of the polls cited are from anti-government sources, including opposition and US-funded NGOs. However, perhaps the most respected independent pollster in Venezuela, Oscar Schemel of HINTERLACES, who has a sparkling track record of independence and accuracy, has predicted that ” that the trends indicate the possibility that forces of the Great Patriotic Pole who defend the Bolivarian process may obtain 43 percent of the votes and with that, 96 of the 167 seats of the National Assembly (parliament).”  The importance of this point is that his analysis takes into account the seats up for grabs, the districts being challenged, and the various competing political groupings.  It’s critical to remember that only the Chavista bloc is united, the opposition is completely divided, with unity being merely a word in their name, rather than a characteristic of their political formation.

Washington’s Democratic Heroes or Plain Old Criminals?

There is also the equally spurious claim from the Washington Post, as well as the US Government itself, that the Venezuelan Government has unfairly banned leading opposition figures from standing for election.  In particular though, it is Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Conchita that are especially highlighted.    However, the US media conveniently leaves out the fact that both have been implicated in a number of criminal activities, including criminal conspiracies to bring down the government on more than one occasion.

In the case of Lopez, this is a man who repeatedly has employed violence in order to achieve his political and personal ends, including playing a key role during the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez when Lopez was mayor of Chacao, a municipality in the capital of Caracas.  Lopez has been implicated in embezzlement of government oil revenues when his mother, a former top ranking oil executive, channeled state oil profits into his political party.  He also employed what can only be described as a gang of murderers and assassins, including the infamous José Rafael Pérez Venta.  Venta is “one of those implicated in the case of a dismembered woman…[He] stated in his testimony to the authorities that retired general Antonio Rivero trained him when he was working as a bodyguard…Pérez Venta was a bodyguard for spokesmen of the Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) party for several years…Rivero, exiled in Miami, is wanted in Venezuela for his suspected participation in acts of violence which occurred in the early months of 2014.”

Of course Lopez is also widely remembered for inciting violence during the coup of 2002 by authorizing the rerouting of an anti-Chavez demonstration to the presidential palace knowing that it would run head-on into a pro-Chavez rally.  As Foreign Policy noted, even the coup leader Pedro Carmona has admitted in his autobiography that he “’consulted with’ Lopez and that the protest’s fatal route change was ‘authorized by Mayor Leopoldo Lopez.’”  Lopez has also been implicated in multiple assassination and coup attempts against the Maduro government.  Yes, the man the US hails as a heroic democrat and political prisoner is, in fact, a violent thug and corrupt criminal with obviously fascist tendencies as evidenced by his calls for the beatings and killings of political opponents.

Another principal figure that the US media endlessly upholds as an opposition leader oppressed by the government is Maria Conchita, a Cuban-Venezuelan singer turned politician.  Of course, the media and Washington fail to mention that Conchita was connected to a major assassination attempt against Chavez.  It was revealed that at least 150 paramilitary assassins were housed on a farm belonging to Conchita’s brother and associate Robert Alonso, placing Conchita right in the center of a major conspiracy to overthrow the government and reassert right wing control of the country. Sound familiar?

And these are the glorious heroes of democracy that the US upholds, that Washington utilizes as weapons with which to demonize the Bolivarian government?

There is also the lie that the government has unfairly barred Maria Machado’s Vente Venezuela party from participating in elections. However, as Ms. D’Amelio clearly explained, “Maria Machado has claimed that CNE has refused to allow her or her party from being included on the ballot.  The fact is that she and her party are not registered because they did not meet the deadline which is set way in advance of the elections.”  Again, this is an example of an opposition member concealing their own incompetence (or worse) by simply blaming the CNE.  Yet another blatant attempt at discrediting the CNE and the electoral process through demonization.  She’s continued doing so on twitter, writing recently that she will not recognize the results of the election.

It should be noted that the Washington Post is not alone in its crusade against Venezuela’s electoral system. There are literally hundreds of other articles and white papers disseminating misinformation about the Bolivarian Republic. The Brookings Institution, well known to be a major right wing outlet for US government policy recommendations, recently wrote a paper entitled Venezuelan elections: Could Chavismo lose?, a piece that is essentially a laundry list of still more blatant fabrications and distortions designed to give the false impression of Venezuela as some backward dictatorship rather than a progressive socialist country that respects democracy more than almost any other state in the world, one which demands to have its sovereignty respected, one which values its independence and freedom in a way that is almost difficult for the US to grasp.

This is one of the lasting legacies of Hugo Chavez: independence.  Venezuela is an independent country with an independent foreign policy.  It is a beacon of socialism and anti-imperialism for the world, a pole of resistance against the Empire and neoliberal capitalism.  It is a country that stands on its feet, rather than prostrating itself before the US.

And this is why Venezuela is demonized, why the US must always seek to undermine Venezuela’s democracy, to destabilize it and, ultimately, to bring it to heel.  But Venezuela will never kneel before Washington again.  Its democracy is rooted in justice and equality. Its guiding principles are those laid out by Comandante Chavez: unity, struggle, battle, and victory.

And, despite US aspirations and desires, Venezuela takes these principles seriously.  And that is why it must be defended at all costs.

Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at [email protected].

Israeli jets carried out several raids North of Damascus overnight Thursday-Friday, Israel’s Channel 2 claimed, and citing foreign reports.

Once it fell to politicians and diplomats to solve international conflicts. Now, according to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lies with social media.

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, headed off to Silicon Valley to meet senior executives at Google and its subsidiary YouTube late last month. Her task was to persuade them that, for the sake of peace, they must censor the growing number of Palestinian videos posted on YouTube.

Mr Netanyahu claims these videos spur other Palestinians to carry out attacks, exemplified by the weeks of stabbings and car rammings against Israeli soldiers and civilians.

After the meeting, the foreign ministry issued a press release claiming Google had joined Israel’s “war against incitement”, and would establish a “joint apparatus” to prevent the posting of “inflammatory” videos. Google denied last week that any agreement was reached.

On other fronts of this so-called war, the Israeli army has shut down three West Bank radio stations, accusing them of fomenting unrest. And inside Israel, officials have shut a newspaper and a separate website catering to Israel’s large Palestinian minority.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, including children, are being arrested over their Facebook posts. Others accused by Mr Netanyahu of spreading terror-like incitement include Hamas, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian education system, Palestinian parties in Israel’s parliament and human rights organisations.

There is a deep cynicism at work here.

True, Palestinians are enraged by footage showing their compatriots shot or executed by Israelis, often after they have been disarmed or cornered, or – in the case of two teenage girls last month – badly injured.

But in many cases such videos are posted not by Palestinians but by ordinary Israelis or their government as proof of a supposed Palestinian “barbarism”.

Most Palestinian videos are simply a record of their bitter experiences of occupation at the hands of soldiers and settlers. It is these experiences, not the videos, that drive Palestinians to breaking point.

A “war on incitement” waged through YouTube and Facebook won’t change Palestinian suffering. But it may, Mr Netanyahu presumably hopes, conceal Israel’s brutality from the eyes of the world.

Unrest has escalated of late not because of social media but because Palestinians, faced with an Israeli government implacably opposed to ending the occupation, are losing all hope.

Israel’s generals have warned Mr Netanyahu that without a diplomatic process there will be no end to the attacks. Desperate to obscure this obvious truth, the Israeli right needs to blame everything apart from its own uncompromising ideology.

Israel’s battle against “incitement” is not just meant to deflect attention from the right’s failing policies. It is also a form of incitement itself, and it is no surprise the campaign is led by two masters of provocation: Mr Netanyahu and Ms Hotovely.

Israel has accused Palestinians of incitement for suggesting that Al Aqsa, the much-revered mosque in Jerusalem, is under threat, yet Ms Hotovely recently said her “dream” was to see the Israeli flag flying at Al Aqsa.

There was a reminder, too, of Mr Netanyahu’s own dismal record. An investigation was dropped last month against the prime minister over his warnings, using Israeli terminology for a military emergency, that Palestinian citizens were coming out “in droves” to vote in March’s general election.

A consequence of government-inspired incitement is an ever uglier climate. In many towns, crowds calling “death to the Arabs” barely raise an eyebrow any more.

The justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, has backed a bill to stigmatise Israeli human-rights groups that receive foreign, mostly European, funding. And the culture minister, Miri Regev, demanded that films showing in an Israeli festival about the Nakba, the Palestinians’ mass dispossession in 1948, be vetted for “incitement”.

Public meetings with groups such as Breaking the Silence, Israeli army veterans who want to shed light on the occupation, are being cancelled under police pressure.

Mr Netanyahu, meanwhile, is giving a free hand to far right news sites as they make false and pernicious claims.

One, Newsdesk Israel, took a four-year-old video of Palestinians revelling at their acceptance into the United Nations and repackaged it as footage of Palestinians celebrating ISIL’s massacres in Paris. Another fabricated report suggested Palestinian citizens were proselytising for ISIL by blasting its songs on their car stereos.

In fact, no target seems too big to avoid the Israeli right’s defamation – not even Europe, Israel’s largest trading partner.

Israeli politicians have misrepresented as a full-blown boycott the EU’s recent tepid move to label products from illegal West Bank settlements and thereby deny them special customs exemptions reserved for Israeli products. The right argues Israel is being uniquely punished by Europe, when in truth the EU has enforced economic sanctions, not just labelling, against 36 countries.

Incitement does indeed pose a threat to the future of Israelis and Palestinians. But it is to be found in the falsehoods promoted by Mr Netanyahu and his ministers, not the bitter truths being posted on YouTube.

Spectacular violence has again made its reaping appearance, a brutal but sure sign that the distinction between militia and civilian has ceased having any value in the US context.  The militarisation of the society has become the most vigorous of diseases, whose greatest symptom is not so much gun ownership as the culture behind access and use.

Even as the blood of Paris seemed to be making its gruesome presence across US television screens, the fear that an ISIS-like attack might eventuate on local soil did circulated through the networks last month.  Such violence did manifest itself, and, like so many ideological appropriations, it seemed inane.  It was yet another addition to this annus horribilis of mass shootings – 353 in all.[1]

Fourteen people were massacred in San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Centre on December 2 by another military-styled operation that seemed chillingly reminiscent to the attacks that took place in Paris in January on Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters. There were also 21 injured.  The scale was roughly equivalent; the individuals had worn masks and body armour. It was the deadliest since the Sandy Hook bloodbath of 2012.

As information trickles through, suggestions are that the couple suspected as being involved in the shootings, Tashfeen Malik and husband Syed Rizwan Farook, were “ISIS supporters,” which is hardly the same as a direct, solid link.  (Not even ISIS has claimed membership for the two.)  As the assailants were killed in the subsequent police chase, much of this is academic.

US investigators have tentatively suggested that one of the suspects had professed loyalty to the organisation, a morsel that terrorist experts are bound to digest with ravenous enthusiasm.  Facebook, as ever, has provided the lead, with Malik posting his public declaration to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi prior to the rampage.

There is little doubt that the organisation and its various affiliates were having a gloat at the home-soil misery inflicted at San Bernardino, a point made from its Iraq-based station, al-Bayan Radio, which prayed “to God to accept them as martyrs”.  At this point, ISIS is pleased to vicariously reap any reward it can get.  But suggestions that radical Islam is about to unleash itself in the suburbs are, at best, fanciful.

Even retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Rick Francona, who was being happily milked for all he was worth on CNN, suggested that, “What they’re calling these two are supporters, which is kind of a lesser level.”[2] The White House has also suggested that there was “no indication that the killers were part of an organized group or broader terrorist cell.”

The violence of guns has become its own pious affirmation of a lifestyle.  It is the ultimate expression of grievance and affirmation. Forget the social worker – the gun will vocalise grievance.  In the San Bernardino killings, Farook’s co-workers for the environmental health department in the town were the victims.

Even as the US leads the remote bombing charge on the forces of Islamic State, it is waging a failing battle at home on the containment of a contagion that is proving antediluvian in nature.  The militia mentality presumes that someone is going to nick your land, your spouse, and your belongings at any given moment.  Any breach of security must therefore be countered by an exaggerated display of force, or at the very least the means to use it.

Pro-gun advocates have decided to excoriate the White House for stealing a march on the National Rifle Association.  A feverishly indignant Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, observed that, “President Obama used it not as a moment to inform or calm the American people; rather, he exploited it to push his gun control agenda.” His point: California had already embraced the gun control list he had demanded: universal background checks, weapon registration, waiting periods, gun and magazine bans and broader gun categories.[3]

What then, to do? Cox sounds sensible on pointing out that Obama’s foreign policy might well have made the US less safe, but the angle taken here is more slanted. “Unlike the president, regular citizens are not surrounded by armed secret service agents wherever they go.”

Cox’s own suggestion is typical of the self-contained logic of gun ownership in the US.  Gun ecology is an ecosystem: If you perish because of it, it is probably because you were not adequately armed. If a school gets shot up, arm it. If a centre holding a function gets riddled with bullets, then maybe those in attendance should have had their guns handy.  “The responsibility is ours and ours alone.”  Battleground USA has its own supreme, if impenetrable reasoning.

Such a train of thought is encouraged by the extravagant availability of high grade military weapons, including the legally acquired .223 calibre assault rifles, with the near 1,400 rounds of ammunition, along with semiautomatic handguns found on the two assailants.  In the true nature of gun ownership ideology, even those on terrorist watch lists can purchase guns.  From 2004 to 2014, the Government Accountability Office noted that over 2,000 suspects on the FBI’s own terrorism watch list were successful in their gun purchases, a success rate hovering around 90 percent.[4]

The culprit behind limiting such access?  The NRA, who was also instrumental in making sure Congress got clay feet in renewing the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.  In the sobering words of the GAO, “membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms under current federal law.”

In the pseudo-pioneer rhetoric of the NRA, sanctity of person is not assured by any central government but by private, and sometimes murderous, enterprise. The Indians are still circulating the wagon trains.  People must be ready.

The problem with this assumption is that it also takes away from the state another sacred monopoly – that of using violence. Fittingly, Obama may direct the US armed forces to target positions in a distant country in an adventurist enterprise he falsely claims he is winning; he is incapable of directing his own citizens to restrain themselves in resolving disputes in a mass murderous fashion at home.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/2015-the-year-in-mass-shootings-20151203

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/05/us/san-bernardino-shooting/index.html

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/12/03/no-mr-president-nra-not-blame-san-bernardino-column/76748608/

[4] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-guns-from-the-san-bernardino-shooting-were-legal-thanks-to-the-nra-20151203

Last Wednesday, the Russian MoD delivered a lengthy presentation which contained compelling visual evidence of a connection between Islamic State’s illegal and highly profitable trade in stolen Iraqi and Syrian crude and Turkey. Here are some highlights:

After loading up with oil, a truck convoy in east Syria heads toward Turkey in direction Al-Qamishli:

October 18: in the Drer-ez-zor region a satellite imagte reveals 1772 oil trucks:

November 14: in the Tavan and Zaho regions, in the zone where coalition forces are active, one can see a gathering of oil trucks:

November 28: in the region Kara-Choh on the territory of an oil refinery one can see 50 oil trucks:

The routes of alleged oil smuggling from Syria and Iraq to Turkey:

A substantial part from east Syria enter a refinery in Batman, Turkey (100km from the Syria border):

The slide show, hosted by Deputy Minister of Defence Anatoly Antonov, featured photos of oil trucks, videos of airstrikes and maps detailing the trafficking of stolen oil. It was the latest PR snafu for Erdogan who is struggling to convince Turkey’s allies that The Kremlin’s accusations are unfounded and that Ankara isn’t set to put NATO in an awkward position by effectively instigating a shooting war with Russia.

Washington came to Erdogan’s defense in the aftermath of Moscow’s claims as State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the US is confident that Ankara “is not complicit in Islamic State oil smuggling.” Russia seemed to take that denial in stride, but after US special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, Amos Hochstein, said on Friday that the amount of oil smuggled into Turkey from Syria is “of no significance from a volume perspective”, Moscow appears to have had enough.

On Saturday, Russia accused the US of participating in a cover-up.

“Our colleagues from the State Department and the Pentagon have confirmed that the photo-proof, which we presented at a briefing [on December 2], of the origin and destination of the stolen oil, coming from the areas controlled by the terrorists, is authentic. However, the US claim that they ‘don’t see the border crossings with tanker trucks crossing the border,’ raises a smile, if only, because the photos are still images,”

Major General Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

“We advise the American side to have a look at how the tanker trucks not only drive through checkpoints at the Turkish border, but pass through them without even stopping.”

As RT notes, an unnamed US State Department official confirmed to Reuters on Friday that the Russian photos of thousands of oil tanker trucks in Syria were authentic [but] stressed that he hasn’t seen “the imagery of the border crossing with trucks crossing the border, and that’s because [the US doesn’t] believe it exists.”

Well, here it is:

“The declarations of the Pentagon and the State Department seem like a theatre of the absurd,” the MoD added, before noting that Washington should “watch the videos taken by its (own) drones which have recently been three times as numerous over the Turkey-Syria border and above the oil zones”. That, by the way, is an attempt to mock Washington for increasing the number of drones monitoring the situation while failing to actually conduct strikes. Earlier this week, Russia said that despite Washington’s claims, the US and its partners are actually not bombing ISIS oil infrastructure or convoys.

In case the above isn’t clear enough, here’s more from the Russian MoD’s Facebook: “When US officials say they don’t see how the terrorists’ oil is smuggled to Turkey… it smells badly of a desire to cover up these acts.”

We have on any number of occasions suggested that Washington has avoided striking ISIS oil convoys in an effort to ensure that the group retains the funding it needs to continue to destabilize Syria and the Assad government (see here for instance) and in order to preserve amicable relations with Ankara which appears to benefit from the trafficking of illegal crude both from Kurdistan and Islamic State.

And so, Russia once again turns the screws on the West in an effort to expose what at this point looks to be a coordinated effort to facilitate the funding of international terrorism via the establishment and maintenance of smuggling routes for some 50,000 b/d of oil looted from fields in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. If the US is indeed complicit in this, it might be time to cut ties with Erdogan because Moscow is on the PR warpath and it’s just a matter of time before the smoking gun emerges.

Damascus – President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which he said Britain and France have neither the will nor the vision on how to defeat terrorism and their airstrikes against ISIS will yield no results, but will rather be illegal and harmful in that they will help in spreading terrorism.

The following is the full text of the interview:

 Question 1:  Thank you for seeing us Mr President.  As you know, the British government today will be voting on whether it will join the coalition airstrikes against ISIS. Is Britain right to join airstrikes against ISIS in Syria? And do you welcome its involvement; and will it make things worse or not make a change?

President Assad:  If I want to let’s say, evaluate a book, I cannot take or single out a phrase from that book to evaluate the whole book.  I have to look at the headlines, then the titles of the chapters and then we can discuss the rest of the book.  So, what we are talking about is only an isolated phrase.  If we want to go back to the headline, it is “the will to fight terrorism.”  We know from the very beginning that Britain and France were the spearheads in supporting the terrorists in Syria, from the very beginning of the conflict.  We know that they don’t have that will, even if we want to go back to the chapter on military participation with the coalition, it has to be comprehensive, it has to be from the air, from the ground, to have cooperation with the troops on the ground, the national troops for the interference or participation to be legal.  It is legal only when the participation is in cooperation with the legitimate government in Syria.  So, I would say they don’t have the will and they don’t have the vision on how to defeat terrorism.

And if you want to evaluate, let’s evaluate from the facts.  Let’s go back to the reality on the ground.  Since that coalition started its operation a year or so, what was the result? ISIS and al-Nusra and other like-minded organizations or groups, were expanding, expanding freely.  What was the situation after the Russians participated in fighting terrorism directly?  ISIS and al-Nusra started shrinking.  So I would say, first they will not give any results.  Second, it will be harmful and illegal, and it will support terrorism as what happened after the coalition started its operation a year or so, because this is like a cancer.  You cannot cut the cancer.  You have to extract it.  This kind of operation is like cutting the cancer that will make it spread in the body faster.

Question 2:  Are you saying, just to clarify two things, are you saying that the British, if the British join the intervention, that includes also the other coalition, with that intervention you see that is illegitimate from an international-law perspective?

President Assad:  Definitely, definitely, we are a sovereign country.  Look at the Russians, when they wanted to make this alliance against terrorism, the first thing they did was they started discussions with the Syrian government before anyone else.  Then they started discussing the same issue with other governments.  Then they came.  So, this is the legal way to combat any terrorist around the world.

Britain and France helped in the rise of ISIS and al-Nusra in this region

Question 3:  You say that France and Britain are responsible for the rise of terrorism here. But they were not responsible for the rise of ISIS, for example, is not that a little bit a harsh accusation?

President Assad: Let’s start from what Blair said.  He said that invading Iraq led to the rise of ISIS.  And we know that ISIS started publically, announcing itself as a state in Iraq in 2006, and the leader was Abu Mosaab al-Zerqawi.  He was killed by American strikes; and they announced that they killed him.  So, they know he existed and they know that IS in Iraq at that time had existed; and that it moved to Syria after the beginning of conflict in Syria because of the chaos that happened.  So, they confess.  British officials confessed, mainly Blair; and the reality is telling, that they helped in the rise of ISIS and al-Nusra in this region.

Question 4:  In your view, does al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, pose an equal or a greater long-term threat to the West than ISIS? And as such, is Britain’s Prime Minister, Cameron, going after the wrong enemy? I.e. he is going after ISIS instead of going after al-Nusra.

President Assad: The whole question is about the structure, and the problem is not about the structure of the organization.  It is about their ideology.  They do not base their actions on the structure, they base them on their dark, Wahhabi deviated ideology.  So, if we want to evaluate these two, the difference between the two, there is no difference because they have the same ideology.  This is one aspect.  The other aspect, if we want to talk about their grassroots, their followers, their members, you cannot have this distinction, because they move from one organization or one group to another.  And that is why sometimes they fight with each other, for their vested interests, on a local and small scale.  But in reality they are cooperating with each other on every level.  So, you cannot tell which is more dangerous because this is one mentality.  It is like if you say the first one is al-Qaida and the second one is al-Qaida.  The difference is the label, and maybe some other trivial things.

Question 5:  Last week, a key part of Cameron’s argument for extending UK airstrikes to Syria was a number that he used – 70 thousand moderate rebels – that he mentioned “don’t belong to extremist groups”, but are already on the ground, who the west can use to help them in the fight of ISIS. As far as you know, which groups are included in the 70 thousand? Are you aware of 70 thousand moderate rebels in Syria?

President Assad: Let me be frank and blunt about this.  This is a new episode in a long series of David Cameron’s classical farce, to be very frank.  This is not acceptable.  Where are they?  Where are the 70 thousand moderates that he is talking about?  That is what they always talk about: moderate groups in Syria.  This is a farce based on offering the public factoids instead of facts.

The Russians have been asking, since the beginning of their participation two months ago.  They have said: where are those moderates?  No one gave them an answer.  Actually, since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, there were no moderate militants in Syria.  All of them were extremists.  And in order not to say I am just giving excuses and so on, go back to the internet, go back to the social networking sites.  They uploaded their atrocities’ videos and pictures, with their faces and their rhetoric.  They use swords, they do beheadings; they ate the heart of a dismembered innocent person and so on.

And you know, the confession of a criminal is the incontrovertible fact.  So, those are the 70 thousand moderates he is taking about.  It is like if we describe the terrorists who committed the attack in Paris recently, and before that in Charlie Hebdo, and before that in the UK nearly ten years ago, and in Spain before that, and the 11^th of September in New York, to describe them as moderate opposition.  That is not accepted anywhere in this world; and there is no 70 thousand, there is no 7 thousand, he does not have, maybe now ten of those.

Question 6:  Not even the Kurds and the FSA for example, the free Syrian army?

President Assad: The Kurds are fighting the terrorists with the Syrian army, in the same areas.

Question 7:  But they are also being supported and armed and trained and backed by the Americans to also launch, to fight …

President Assad:  Mainly by the Syrian army, and we have the documents.  We sent them armaments, because they are Syrian citizens, and they want to fight terrorism.  We do the same with many other groups in Syria, because you cannot send the army to every part of Syria.  So, it is not only the Kurds.  Many other Syrians are doing the same.

Question 8: U.S. Secretary of state John Kerry said last Friday that the Syrian government could cooperate with the opposition forces against the ISIS even if president Assad is still in office, but he said that this would be so difficult if the opposition fighters, who have been fighting the Syrian president, don’t have a faith that the Syrian president will eventually leave power.

Kerry also said that concerning the timing of leaving office, the answer is it is not obvious whether he will have to leave.

Meanwhile, the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told Le Progres Newspaper on Saturday that he no longer believes that President Assad’s departure is essential to any political transition in Syria, adding that the political transition does not mean that President Assad should step down before it but there should be future insurances.

My question: Do you intend to complete your presidential term until 2021 or do you expect a referendum or presidential elections prior to that date? And if so, when can these elections be held? And what can make you decide to hold them? And if they are held, is it certain that you will be running for election? What can influence your decision?

President Assad: The answer depends on the context of the question. If it is related to a settlement in Syria, then early elections have nothing to do with ending the conflict. This can only happen by fighting terrorists and ceasing Western and regional support for terrorists…Early elections will only be held as part of a comprehensive dialogue about future by the political powers and the civil society groups in Syria.

Thus, it is not about the will of the President, but rather the will of the Syrian people…It is about a political process. If this process is agreed on, then I have the right to run for elections like any other Syrian citizen…My decision in this case will be based on my ability to deliver on my commitments…and on whether I have the support of the Syrian people or not….Anyway, It is early to talk about this, because as you know, this process was not agreed upon yet.

Question 9:   Do you think ISIS can be defeated by airstrikes alone?

You cannot defeat ISIS through airstrikes alone without cooperation with forces on the ground

President Assad:  Did the coalition defeat them by airstrikes during the last year or so?  It didn’t.  Did the Americans achieve anything from the airstrikes in Afghanistan?  They achieved nothing.  Did they achieve anything in Iraq since the invasion in 2003?  Nothing.  You cannot defeat ISIS through airstrikes alone, without cooperation with forces on the ground.  You cannot defeat them if you do not have buy-in from the general public and the government.  They cannot defeat ISIS by airstrikes; they are going to fail again.  The reality is telling.

Question 10:     If the international coalition refuses, as it has so far, to coordinate with the Syrian Army, or with the local troops on the ground, what is your next plan?  I mean do you have a plan B beyond what is going on?  How do you plan to end this war?

President Assad:  This coalition is illusive, it’s virtual, because it has not made any achievements in fighting terrorism on the ground in Syria.  Since an illusion doesn’t exist, let’s not waste time with the ‘before and after.’  From the very beginning we started fighting terrorism irrespective of any global or world powers.  Whoever wants to join us is welcome, and whether they join us or not, we are going to continue.  This is our plan. It is the only plan we have and we will not change it.

Question 11:  Are you calling on them to ask the Syrian government to coordinate and cooperate with the Syrian army and the Syrian air force in the fight against terrorists?

President Assad:  We are very realistic.  We know that they are not going to do so and that they don’t have the will.  This is more about international law than anything else.  Is it possible that western governments, or regimes, don’t know the basics of international law, that they don’t understand the meaning of a sovereign state or that they haven’t read the UN Charter?  They have no respect for international law and we didn’t ask for their cooperation.

Question 12:  But would you like them to?

President Assad:  If they are ready – serious and genuine – to fight terrorism, we welcome any country or government, any political effort.  In that regard we are not radical, we are pragmatic.  Ultimately, we want to resolve the situation in Syria and prevent further bloodshed.  That is our mission.  So, it’s not about love or hate, accepting or not, it is about reality.  Are they truly ready to help us fight terrorism, to stop terrorists coming into Syria through their surrogate governments in our region, or not?  That is the real question.  If they are ready, we will welcome them.  This is not personal.

Question 13:  Do you think it is possible for you, in Syria, and for your allies – Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and other allies – to defeat ISIS militarily; and if so, how long do you think it might take?

President Assad:  The answer is based on two factors: our capabilities on the one hand, and the support the terrorists receive on the other.  From our perspective, if you were to remove the support these groups get from various countries in our region and the West in general, it will take a matter of months to achieve our mission.  It is not very complicated, the solution is very clear to us.  However, these groups have unlimited support from these countries, which makes the situation drag on, makes it more complicated and harder to resolve.  This means our mission will be achieved at a much higher price, which will ultimately be paid by Syrians.

Question 14:  But there has already been a high price: over 200,000 people have been killed.

President Assad:  You are right, and that is a consequence of the support I referred to.

Question 15:  But a lot of it is also blamed on the Syrian government and the Syrian use of force, sometimes indiscriminate or unnecessary force in certain areas that has brought about a large number of people killed.  How do you respond to that?

President Assad:  First, all wars are bad.  There is no such thing as a good war.  In every war there are always too many innocent casualties.  These are only avoidable by bringing that war to an end.  So it is self-evident that wars anywhere in the world will result in loss of life.  But the rhetoric that has been repeated in the West for a long time ignores the fact that from day one terrorists were killing innocent people, it also ignores that fact that many of the people killed were supporters of the government and not vice versa.  As a government, our only countermeasure against terrorists is to fight them.  There is no other choice.  We cannot stop fighting the terrorists who kill civilians for fear of being accused by the West of using force.

Question 16: Let us talk about the role of Russia.  How important has the role of Russia been?  Was Syria about to fall had Russia not intervened when it did at the time?

Russia and Iran’s support played important part in Syria’s steadfastness against terrorism

President Assad: The Russian role is very important.  It has had a significant impact on both the military and political arena in Syria.  But to say that without this role, the government or the state would have collapsed, is hypothetical.  Since the very beginning of the conflict in Syria, there were bets on the collapse of the government.  First it was a few weeks, then it was a few months and then a few years.  Every time it was the same wishful thinking.  What is definite is that the Russian support to the Syrian people and government from the very beginning, along with the strong and staunch support of Iran, has played a very important part in the steadfastness of the Syrian state in the fight against terrorism.

Question 17: You mean the previous one, or the recent military intervention?

President Assad:  No, the whole support; it is not only about their participation.  Their support from the very beginning in all aspects: political, military and economic.

Question 18: How and why did Russian involvement come about now?  And can you give us some details of the discussions between you and President Putin that brought it about?  Who took the first step?  Did you ask, or did they offer?

The Russians want to protect Syria, Iraq, the region, themselves and even Europe

President Assad:  You will have to ask the Russians why they got involved.  But from our perspective, since the Western coalition started in Syria, ISIS has expanded, al-Nusra has expanded and every other extremist and terrorist group has expanded and captured new territory in Syria and Iraq.  The Russians clearly saw how this posed a threat to Syria, Iraq and the region in general, as well as to Russia and the rest of the world.  We can see this as a reality in Europe today.  If you read and analyse what happened in Paris recently and at Charlie Hebdo, rather than view them as separate incidences, you will realize something very important.  How many extremists cells now exist in Europe?  How many extremists did you export from Europe to Syria?  This is where the danger lies.  The danger is in the incubator.  The Russians can see this very clearly.  They want to protect Syria, Iraq, the region, themselves and even Europe.  I am not exaggerating by saying they are protecting Europe today.

Question 19: So, did they come to you and say we would like to be involved? Or did you ask them: could you help us?

President Assad:  It was an accumulative decision; it didn’t happen by me having this idea or them having another.  As you know, our relationship with the Russians goes back more than five decades, and they have always had military staff in Syria: call them experts or by any other name.  This cooperation accelerated and increased during the crisis.  Their teams are here and can see the situation real-time with us.  This kind of decision doesn’t start from the top down, but rather from the bottom up.  There is a daily political and military discussion between our two countries.  When it reached a presidential level, it was mature enough and ready for the decision to be made quickly.

Question 20: But there must have been a point when they said: we think, or with your agreement, we think that we should actually now physically get involved.

President Assad: Again, this was started at the lower levels.  These officials jointly agreed that it was necessary to get involved and each party discussed it with their leaders.  When it reached the stage of discussion between us, I mean between President Putin and I, we focused our discussions on the how.  Of course this did not happen directly as we had not yet met and it’s impossible to discuss these issues on the phone.   It was mediated through senior officials from both sides.  That is what happened.  In terms of procedure, I sent a letter to President Putin which included an invitation for their forces to participate.

Question 21:  So you asked president Putin having been advised by your officials.

President Assad:  Exactly, after we reached that point I sent President Putin a formal letter and we released a statement announcing that we had invited them to join our efforts.  Let’s not forget that President Putin had already taken the step when he said he was willing to create a coalition.  My response to this was that we are ready if you want to bring your forces to participate.

Question 22:  So, what forces have been deployed? I am talking about Russian forces. There have been reports, for example, of a thousand ground troops plus Special Forces, is this correct? Is there anytime when you think that the Russians will be involved in Syria, not just by air but with ground troops as well?

President Assad:  No, so far there is no such thing.  There are no ground troops except for the personnel that they send with their military staff and airplanes to guard the airbase, and that is natural.  They don’t have any ground troops fighting with Syrian forces at all.

Question 23:  And there is no plan for that?

President Assad:  We have not discussed that yet, and I don’t think we need it now, because things are moving in the right direction.  The Russians may consider it with time or under different circumstances, but for the moment, this has not been discussed.

Question 24: There was a report, or a hint, that Syria might be receiving S-300 from the Russians, and the S-300 will allow Syria to protect its airspace. Is this something, for example, that Syria will use against the US-led coalition’s air force, even if Britain was involved, since their warplanes are in Syrian skies, as you said earlier, without official or sovereign permission. As Syria will receive S-300, then will it use this to impose, if you want, protection of its skies and impose a way to tell the coalition that you have to actually directly deal with us, or coordinate with us on the ground?

We will use any means available to us to protect our airspace

President Assad:  That is our right and it is only to be expected that we prevent any airplane from violating our airspace.  That is completely legal.  We are going to use any means available to us to protect our airspace.  It is not about that armament in particular.  Any air defense we have is for that reason.

Question 25:  Do you have that defense at the moment?

President Assad:  No. So far we don’t have it.

Question 26:  If you get that defense?

President Assad:  Any defense systems we are going to have are for that purpose.  If we are not going to protect our airspace, then why buy such armaments in the first place?  That is self-evident.

Question 27:  And if you get it …

President Assad: Not at the moment; it is not our priority now.  Our priority is fighting the terrorists on the ground.  This is the most important danger now.  Of course we are keen to protect our airspace and prevent foreign interference in our internal affairs, militarily or other.  But the priority now is to defeat the terrorists.  By defeating the terrorists, some of whom are Syrians, we can move further in protecting the whole country from foreigners.  It is a matter of priorities.

Question 28:  But I meant about the actual coalition airplanes that are actually flying over Syria. So, that is not a priority either at the moment?

President Assad:  No, not at the moment.  At the moment the priority is fighting terrorism.

Question 29:  If Saudi Arabia were to invite you for serious discussions on the future of Syria, would you accept such an invitation? Or have relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia been severely severed that you would never consider that?

President Assad:  No, there is nothing impossible in politics.  It is not about whether I accept or not, but rather about the policies of each government.  What are their policies towards Syria? Are they going to keep supporting the terrorists or not? Are they going to continue playing their dangerous games in Syria, Yemen and other places?  If they are ready and willing to change their policies, especially with regard to Syria, we don’t have a problem meeting with them.  So it is not about the meeting or whether we go or not, the issue is their approach to what is happening in Syria.

Question 30:  Do you expect any results from the talks in Vienna?  And what would be the shape of any possible deal that you see coming out of Vienna?

President Assad:  The most important clause in the Vienna communique is that the Syrians should come together to discuss the future of Syria.  Everything else is an accessory.  If you don’t have that main part, the accessories are of no use.  So, the only solution is for us to come together as Syrians.  Vienna itself is a meeting to announce intentions; it is not the actual process of siting down and discussing the future.  So, the question is not what results from Vienna, but rather what we Syrians are able to achieve when we sit down together.

Question 31:  But do you realize that some of the opposition’s leaders, and I’m talking about opposition figures who have been against taking up arms and what have you, but are also afraid of coming to Syria, because the moment they land in Syria, they will be arrested by the security officers and put in prison. And it has happened to others.

President Assad:  No, it has never happened.  There is an opposition in Syria, and they are free to do whatever they want.

Question 32:  No, I mean the external opposition. For example, somebody like Haitham Mannaa, cannot come back.

President Assad:  We have clearly stated that when there is a gathering in Syria, which they want to attend, we guarantee that they will not be arrested or held.  We have said this many times.  We don’t have any problems in this regard.

Question 33:  Now, Saudi Arabia invited 65 figures, including opposition leaders, even rebel commanders, businessmen, religious figures for a meeting in Saudi Arabia to present a united front in preparation for the January Vienna talks. Yet, the Syrian government, which is the other major element in this whole thing for the future of Syria, has not been seen to be involved with the opposition. Are you conducting any talks with the opposition? Have you reached any consensus with them?

President Assad:  We have direct channels with some opposition groups; but others cannot communicate with us because they are not allowed to do so by the governments that control them.  From our perspective, we are open for discussions with every peaceful opposition party.  We don’t have any problems.  With regards to the meeting in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi’s have been supporting terrorism directly, publically and explicitly.  That meeting will not change anything on the ground.  Before the meeting and after the meeting Saudi Arabia has been supporting terrorists and will continue to do so.  It is not a benchmark or a critical juncture to discuss.  It will not change anything.

Question 34:  Do you see that anytime, in the future, that in order to protect Syria, or in order to save Syria, or to get the Syria process moving, that you might see yourself sitting with certain groups, one group, or certain groups, that perhaps now you deem terrorist, but in the future, it might be feasible that you would agree to negotiate with them because it would do well for the future?

President Assad:  We already have; since the very beginning one of the pillars of our policy, was to start a dialogue with all parties involved in the conflict, whether they were in Syria or not.  We negotiated with many terrorist groups, not organizations – to be very precise, who wanted to give up their armaments, and return to normal life.  These negotiations led to many amnesties being issued and has proven to be very successful in several areas.  Furthermore, some of these fighters have joined the Syrian Army and are now fighting with our forces.  So yes, we are sitting down with those who committed illegal acts in Syria, whether political or military, to negotiate settlements on the condition that they give up their arms and return to normal life.  This doesn’t mean that we negotiate with terrorist organizations like ISIS, al-Nusra and others. This is what I meant by groups, those who want out of the fight, regret their choices and want to have their lives back.

Question 35:  The rebels call them barrel bombs. You refuse to refer to them as barrel bombs. Irrespective of the name, these were indiscriminate. Do you accept that Syria used indiscriminate bombs in some areas, which resulted in the death of many civilians?

President Assad:  Let us suppose that this part of the propaganda is true, which it isn’t.  But for the sake of argument, let us ask the same question regarding the different attacks committed by the Americans and the British with their state-of-the-art airplanes and missiles in Afghanistan and in Iraq, not only after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but also during the first Gulf war in 1990.  How many civilians and innocent people were killed by those airstrikes with these very high precision missiles?  They killed more civilians than terrorists.  So, the issue is not these so-called barrel bombs and this evil president killing the good people who are fighting for freedom.  This romantic image is not the case.  It is about how you use your armaments, rather than the difference between so called barrel bombs and high precision missiles.  It is about how you use these weapons, what kind of information you have and your intention.  Do we have the will to kill innocent people?  How is that possible when the state is defending them?  By doing so, we are pushing them towards the terrorists.  If we want to kill people, for any reason, innocent people or civilians, that will play directly into the hands of the terrorists.  And this is against our interests.  Are we going to shoot ourselves in the foot? That is not realistic and not logical.  This propaganda cannot be sold anymore.

Question 36: Mr President, the final question. As president of the country, and you always lead the military and everything. Do you, even if by default, not bear responsibility for some of the things that happened in Syria?

President Assad: I’ve been asked this question many times especially by western media and journalists.  The aim of the question is to corner me between two answers: if I were to say I was responsible, they would say look the President bears responsibility for everything that happened, if I were to say I am not responsible, they would say this is not true, you are the president, how can you not be responsible.

Question 37:  Because you are the head, like in a family …

President Assad:  Let me continue, that was only an introduction to my answer.  It is very simple.  Since the very beginning, we built our policy around two pillars, engaging in dialogue with everyone, and fighting terrorism everywhere in Syria.  Now, if you want to talk about the responsibility, you have to discuss many aspects of the conflict, and the reason why we are here today in this difficult and dire situation in Syria.  If I am to claim responsibility, do I also claim responsibility for asking the Qataris to pay the terrorists money?  Or for the Saudis to fund their activities?  Or for western governments allowing their terrorists to come to Syria?  Do I claim responsibility for asking western governments to offer a political umbrella to those terrorists and label them as moderates?  Or for the western embargos on the Syrian people?  This is how we have to discuss it.  We cannot simply say, that he takes responsibility or not.  We have to talk about every part; we have to differentiate between the policy decisions and the practices, between the strategy and the tactics.  So, it is very complicated to evaluate it.  Additionally, if you want to evaluate who bears responsibility in Syria, it could happen at the end of the war, when you can investigate the whole story before, during and after.

Interviewer:  Mr President, thank you very much.

Praise for the speech delivered by Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary of the opposition Labour Party at the recent Parliamentary debate on whether to commence air strikes targeted at Islamic State insurgents in Syria, was quick to come through the media.

The Spectator magazine referred to it as an “extraordinary speech,” while Sky News intoned that it had been a “truly historic speech”. For the Daily Telegraph, the speech was the speech of a “true leader”. Many sources were prone to describing it as having been “electrifying” while others spoke of it as “politically elevating” him and being the “speech of a generation.”

And truth be told, it appeared to be an impressive oratorical combination of emotion and elocution backed by reasoned out arguments.

His speech was replete with intellectual justifications predicated on the inherent internationalism of the ideology of socialism and of taking the fight to the avowed enemy of fascism.

He presented legal justifications first through United Nations Resolution 2249, paragraph 5 which calls upon member states to take all necessary measures to redouble and co-ordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIL and to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria, and secondly, on the grounds of national self-defence via Article 51 of the UN Charter which enable nation states to engage in self-defence, including collective self-defence, against armed attack.

Hilary Benn Syria speech

There were also emotive references to the brutal executions that have become the trademark of Islamic State, as well as to the sexual bondage into which the group has placed many Yazidi females.

The group had declared war on the Western world and was guided by an immutably draconian ideology with values antithetical to those which the British parliament and the citizens it serves have long cherished and have defended by resort to force of arms against the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Benn retreated from the despatch box with cheers echoing around the chamber.

It was a triumphal moment. But whether he made a substantive case for British intervention is extremely doubtful. There were missing facts and there was a profound disconnect from the overriding context of the promulgation of the Syrian conflict and the means by which it has been sustained. There was no outlining of a clear strategy towards achieving both victory and a lasting peace.

Furthermore, the situation regarding the internal affairs of Benn’s party and the use of the debate as an opportunity for those to the right of the party to assert themselves and destabilise the leadership of the recently elected leader Jeremy Corbyn cannot be left out.

The calling for the debate was of course controversial in itself given the fact that Prime Minister David Cameron had two years earlier failed to secure enough votes to get the go ahead to bomb Syria.

That particular vote had been prompted by a chemical attack on Ghouta which the Western powers and its allies in the Middle East had sought to blame on the forces of President Bashar al Assad. Cameron’s recalibrated cross hairs prompted the charge of rank opportunism; of picking a changing enemy as it suited him.

The object of a proposed bombing campaign in 2013, in fulfillment of US President Barack Obama’s earlier declared “red line” would have been to “degrade” the capability of Assad’s military infrastructure.

Had Parliament consented and the US congress given the go ahead to its president, the result would have led to a sustained campaign by NATO conducted along the lines as it had done in Libya with the objective being to overthrow the legitimate government of a country which has taken a foreign policy stance that is independent of that of Washington’s.

And as was the case in Libya, Syria would have fallen into the hands of Islamist groups, the most prominent of which at the time was the al Qaeda-affiliated al Nusra Front. In other words, without any discernibly united, preferably secular and democratic opposition party or coalition of such parties, Syria would most likely be in the chaotic condition that Libya is in today: a lawless cesspit of warring militias, some of who now bear allegiance to Islamic State.

Benn’s rationale about focussing on the threat provided by the Islamic State as a group of “fascists” is flawed. He is seriously ill-informed if he is not aware that the 70,000 or so rebels mislabeled as ‘moderate’, including the aforementioned al Nusra Front, are guided by the same form of ideology. He surely must have heard of the admission by a senior US general about the “four or five” US-trained moderate rebels who represent the sum total of a 500 million dollar programme.

The credibility of Benn’s case is flawed in one fundamental aspect: its failure to take into account the role of Turkey in this conflict. His calculations cannot be taken seriously if on the one hand he (correctly) mentions the porous border between Syria and Iraq, but at the same time fails to ponder the state of affairs in existence on the border between Turkey and Syria.

The Islamic State cannot be defeated if Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, is allowed to continue allowing Islamic State insurgents to traverse its border at will. The border is used to transport illicitly acquired Syrian and Iraqi oil to Turkey where it is then traded at knock down prices for arms and ammunition.

It will not be defeated if political figures within NATO member states such as Benn fail to acknowledge and probe the admissions of US army generals such as Wesley Clarke, the former supreme allied commander of the alliance and Michael Flynn, the recently retired director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, that the Islamic State was created by US intelligence in combination with other intelligence agencies to enable Sunni extremists to overthrow Arab secular regimes as well as to fight Hezbollah and destabilize Iran.

For Clarke speaking to CNN in February 2015, Islamic State was started by the funding provided from “friends and allies” of the United States who needed Sunni jihadist recruits as the only highly motivated force that would be capable of taking on Hezbollah. Marginalising Hezbollah and by extension, Iran, could only be achieved by the destruction of the Baathist government headed by Assad. Flynn, for his part stated that US policy makers made a “willful decision” to enable the rise of Islamic State.

Benn spoke about “extending” the US-led bombing campaign in Iraq to Syria in order to counter the Islamic State, but failed to assess its level of impact on the strength and capacities of the Islamic State. It has not nearly had the effect on the re-conquest of Islamic State taken territory as has the co-ordinated efforts of Russian air strikes and ground action by the Syrian Arab army.

The coalition of US and Arab air forces operating in Iraq cannot hope to significantly debilitate Islamic State in that theatre of operations when the number of sorties taken are far lower than NATO’s intensive bombardment of Serbia back in the 1990s. A commentary in the Wall Street Journal in October 2014 noted that that while NATO strike sorties averaged 138 per day, the figure amounted to seven against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It was the columnists concluded an “unserious air war.”

The Russian action, backed up by statistical evidence referring to total sorties undertaken as well as of re-taken Syrian territory, has clearly exposed the US effort as not seriously aiming for the defeat of Islamic State. At most, it had an objective of containment; this in keeping with a Freedom of Information Act-released Pentagon document circulated in 2012 which specified the desirability of the creation of a Sunni Islamic state in Eastern Syria.

Benn was also flawed in his confident assertions relating to the legality of British military force on Syrian territory that is held by Islamic State insurgents. The considered opinion of international law experts, Dapo Akande and Marko Milanovic is that the unprecedented provision of paragraph 5 of Resolution 2249 falls short of being a stand-alone authorization for using force against Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.

The reason for this is that both assess that most Security Council resolutions which authorise the use of force have certain recurring features. First, they have a preambular paragraph which specifically invokes Chapter VII, that is, the powers the Council has to maintain peace. Secondly, they use the words “decides” as the active verb in the paragraph that authorises force, and thirdly, they use the term “all necessary means” or “all necessary measures” as the jargon for authorising force.

Paragraph 5 does not contain the first two features but has third –“all necessary measures.” The conclusion by Akande and Milanovic is that that the paragraph does not intend to serve as the stand-alone authorisation for the use of force against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The vote was of course arranged under the cloud of a speech given behind closed doors to the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee by David Cameron who asserted that Jeremy Corbyn and anyone supporting a stance of non-intervention were “terrorist sympathisers”.

It was an unfortunate comment which perhaps was in keeping with Cameron’s propensity to resort to name-calling and bullying when he is confronted by compelling counter-arguments and is threatened with not getting his own way.

It is Cameron who after all suggested that those whom he termed as “non-violent extremists” including persons who question and contradict official government narratives on events such as 9/11 should be designated as threats to society every bit as dangerous as threat posed by members of Islamic State.

While Benn did begin his speech by stating that the leader of his party “is not a terrorist sympathiser” and called on Cameron to apologise, his critique of the British prime minister fell far short of what could reasonably be mustered when Cameron is in fact on record as having given aid to terrorist militias in order to achieve certain objectives.

Cameron, by virtue of his active support for NATO intervention in Libya, not only succeeded in reducing the nation with the African continent’s highest standard of living to the wretched state of lawlessness and deprivation that it is today; causing in the process a third of its population to seek refuge in neighbouring Tunisia, he has also created the conditions for Libya to become a terrorist enclave and a repository for battle experienced jihadists who were transferred to Syria via Turkey for a further endeavour aimed at overthrowing a another secular Arab government.

It was Cameron who in 2011 ordered the Special Air Service (SAS), a British Special Forces unit, to support the al Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) towards the end of achieving the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Cameron’s choice of words are also ironic given that fact that an Old Bailey case involving an accusation of “participating in terrorist activities in Syria” in the middle of 2015 against one Bherlin Gildon, collapsed because a trial would have revealed embarrassing information about British security and intelligence service support for so-called rebel groups including the supply of weapons and ammunition.

Given that rebel groups other than Islamic State have murdered civilians in Syria and that Islamist militias have done the same in Libya, the case for ascribing Cameron with a counter-label and even a legally accurate designation as an accessory to the commission of acts of terrorism would not be an inaccurate one.

The plot to overthrow Assad under the pretext of the Arab Spring predated Cameron’s coming to power and was apparently heavy with British involvement. The revelation by the former French foreign minister, Roland Dumas,that he invited to join such a plot by British officials is something Benn and others within the British political establishment have failed to acknowledge.

Benn’s insistence on legal propriety, as evidenced by his reference to Resolution 2249 and Article 51 of the Charter, while no doubt predicated on the memory that he voted in support of the illegal war that toppled Saddam Hussein, is nonetheless compromised by his silence and therefore acquiescence to his country’s complicity in an illegal enterprise to overthrow the legitimate government of a sovereign state.

The “major airlift” of arms from Zagreb in Croatia to Syrian rebels as reported by the Daily Telegraph in March of 2013 was a transaction paid for by Saudi Arabia at the behest of the United States. The shipment also included arms which were either “British-supplied or British procured.” It was carried out in contravention of an embargo on arms sales by the European Union. It is against the norms of international law to supply weapons to terror groups in an endeavour to overthrow the legitimate government of another nation state.

Even at this stage of the conflict, it was clearly the case that such weapons were getting into the hands of Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and not to purportedly nationalist and secular-minded groups promoted as the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’.

It is also clear that at this time, British military officers were among a contingent of NATO military personnel stationed in countries bordering Syria and offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian Army officers.

Benn’s reference to the Vienna peace talks as being the best hope of achieving a ceasefire “that would bring an end to Assad’s bombing” and lead to transitional government and elections gives a clue as to his tacit understanding of the deceit behind longstanding British policy towards the government of Assad.

What interest, after all, does Britain have in securing the overthrow of an admittedly dictatorial government? Hillary Benn can hardly be ignorant of the fact that the secular make up of Syria guaranteed the protection and integration of the country’s long-standing Christian population and other minorities. An earlier removal of its Baathist government would have precipitated its fall into the hands of Islamists and the removal of the Assad government now would lead to the same result.

Christian Roland Dumas offered the following explanation:

It is important to know that this Syrian regime has a very anti-Israeli stance. Consequently, everything that moves in the region- and I have this from the former Israeli prime minister who told me that “we’ll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don’t agree with us will be destroyed.”

At the heart of Western policy toward the Middle East one which is geared towards ensuring the survival and protection of the state of Israel. This is a central plank notwithstanding the overlap of issues such as the interests of the Saudis and the Sunni Gulf States in establishing Sunni supremacy in Syria and Turkish ‘neo-Ottoman’ initiatives that seek to achieve the same sectarian objective.

And while the Syrian conflict may also have been stoked by the preference of the Assad government for an Iranian natural gas pipeline route to Europe to an alternative one proposed by Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council, the overarching policy aimed at breaking up the Syrian nation state is one which has been stage-managed by the United States.

It has for long been Israeli geo-strategic policy to balkanise the Arab nations particularly those such as Iraq and Syria which were led by strong military governments with nationalist ideologies in order to maintain its regional hegemony. It is also the policy of the United States to achieve a reorganising of national borders as part of a strategy for securing the energy resources of the region.

It is clear that NATO powers such as France and Britain, sensing the possible pacification of Syria by a concerted effort by the Russian Federation along with the Syrian government have taken the opportunity to involve themselves more directly in Syria in an attempt to place themselves into a position where they may be able to effect the goal of removing Assad and effecting the desired geo-political objective of Israel and the United States: the division of Syria.

But a concomitant of this policy has been the fomenting of sectarian divisions during an envisaged ‘long war’ during which the United States strategy has been to aid Sunni Islamist groups against the forces of the Shia world. This state of affairs was clearly set out in a United States Army-funded report by the RAND Corporation in 2008 entitled Unfolding the Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects and Implications for the U.S. Army.

Britain has played an integral part in the germination of the state of affairs. The point is that prior to British involvement in NATO’s overthrow first of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq and then of Gaddafi in Libya followed by Britain’s connivance in fomenting a largely imported Sunni Islamist insurrection against the government of Bashar al Assad in Syria, there was no al Qaeda or al Nusra or Islamic State causing mayhem in those countries or attempting export terror to the streets of Britain.

Benn’s argument for supporting airstrikes is fundamentally flawed for the reason that it is embarking on a battle which the defence minister, Michael Fallon admits will be a long and protracted one without any coherent plan. It risks plunging Britain into a quagmire of the sort that involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq did.

It also risks serving as a rallying point for further recruitment to Islamist militias. Even Tony Blair has forced to admit that the germination of the Islamic State is a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq.

By asking whether “we can really leave to others the responsibility for defending our national security when it is our responsibility”, Benn clearly indicated that he subscribes to David Cameron’s position that Britain cannot “sub-contract” its security to other nations. The retort to this by Peter Ford, a former British ambassador to Syria is Britain should not make itself the “hostage to others.”

Putting British planes into action in the overcrowded Syrian skies leaves the possibility of unfortunate incidents in future operations in terms not only of the unintended deaths of civilian populations on the ground, but also of a clash with the Russian military who claim that they have the overriding legal justification for intervention given that the Syrian government requested Russian support.

Benn emoted over socialist and other political Left support for the lost cause of the Spanish Republican coalition against General Franco’s military rebellion comprised of a coalition of nationalists. He fails to grasp that action against Islamic State will prove futile given the present circumstances dictated by the United States.

Simply put, the Islamic State insurgents are but the latest in a line of Islamist assets used in the service of promoting a range of geo-political agendas of its ally, the United States. These have included foreign adventures in Soviet-era Afghanistan, Kosovo and Libya.

While Benn has impressed many with his recourse to emotion, it would be useful to remember a wise saying that while emotion may serve as an excellent petrol it is, after all things are considered, a rather poor engine.

It will only get you so far.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

It is important not to overlook the very real economic war being waged by the U.S. and its allies in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.

This morning I saw the sun rise over Venezuela from 30,000 feet, my flight descending to Caracas in the early dawn light. As the darkness retreated, a rugged, majestic coastline came into view: the small waves lapping against the rocky shore, perceptible only by a thin streak of white foam set against the dark brown of rock, and deep green of the lush hillside just above it.

This was my first glimpse of Venezuela, a country I have been following since the early days of my political development, when a man named Hugo Chavez was elected and shook the very foundations of Latin America, challenging the hegemony of the U.S. Empire in its own “backyard.” Soon I was in the airport, sipping strong coffee from a small plastic cup with a few members of my delegation from the U.S. and Canada. We all came to the Bolivarian Republic to bear witness to the all-important elections scheduled to take place Sunday, as well as the violence and destabilization that is likely to follow if the U.S.-backed opposition loses.

From the back seat of the car taking us from the airport to the center of Caracas, I gazed out the window, drinking in the landscape, the people, the juxtaposition of modern public housing high rises and small, dilapidated homes lining the hillsides. But as I observed the surroundings, there was one pair of eyes that seemed to be gazing back: El Comandante.

Chavez is larger than life in Venezuela, a country where “Chavismo” is both a movement and an ideology, one rooted in the legacy of this hero and leader, even in death. His face adorns billboards. His signature is plastered on the sides of buildings. His eyes have literally come to be the symbol of the PSUV, the Venezuelan socialist party that he built into a political force in the Bolivarian Republic (also a Chavez creation) and throughout Latin America.

But one cannot help but be struck by the difficulties the country now faces. Many basic necessities of life such as deodorant, sunscreen, and toilet paper are either missing from store shelves, or are in such short supply that lines wrapping around the block are a common sight at busy drug stores in the city. Inflation has wreaked havoc on daily life for ordinary Venezuelans who have been forced to wait for hours at the ATM just to withdraw Bolivars whose official exchange rate is 6.5 to 1 U.S. dollar, while the unofficial rate is hovering around 800 to 1. Even the cafes and restaurants that line the major avenues of Caracas are often out of basic foods such as beans, pork, and more. For someone with visions of hot, steaming arepas (Venezuela’s signature food) filled with juicy pernil (shredded pork) dancing in my head in the days leading up to my trip, the lack of such staples was a major realization of just how dire the economic situation has become.

While many in North America and Europe argue that these harsh realities are the result of mismanagement and corruption by the government or, worse still, endemic to socialism, such reductionist analysis overlooks the very real economic war being waged by the U.S. and its allies in Venezuela and throughout Latin America. As economist and former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations Julio Escalona carefully explained to us over dinner and drinks:

The majority of Venezuela’s imports and distribution networks are in the hands of the elite, the same elite who once also controlled the government until 1999 and Chavez’s ascendance. Many of the goods needed for Venezuelan consumption are diverted to Brazil and Colombia. We are experiencing manufactured scarcity, a crisis deliberately induced as a means of destabilization against the government. For example, we have a huge company that processes chicken, the majority of chicken for the country in fact. That chicken company closed but continues to pay employees to do nothing, deliberately reducing the supply of chicken in the country in order to deprive the people of this critical staple food. This is psychological war waged against the people of Venezuela in an attempt to intimidate them into abandoning the government and the socialist project entirely.

Of course it is difficult to convince a mother with three children and no chicken for dinner that she should consider the political, economic, and psychological dimensions of the issue. Just as it is easy to understand the frustration even of government supporters as they wait on line just to get cash whose value diminishes by the day. But these aspects of the situation are critical to understanding the broader context within which Venezuela is now operating, the new reality that has been thrust upon it.

Interview: Venezuelan Elections Matter for Global Resistance

I have heard stories of foreigners coming to Venezuela in recent months and changing a small amount of dollars or euros or yuan for a mountain of bolivares. While artificial scarcity is one element in the larger strategy to destroy Venezuela, an equally important component is the manipulation of currency in an attempt to instigate hyper-inflation. I can already see the emails from people lecturing me about the finer points of economics, chastising me for “apologia” on behalf of President Maduro and the government, absolving them of their ‘sins’ of economic mismanagement and corruption. The truth is though that the government cannot, and does not, control the economy to the point of being able to stop speculation which continues to drive the currency through the floor.

Here again Julio Escalona succinctly stated the all-important truth, “Our currency is not being devalued by speculation, but by hyper-speculation.” This sort of economic warfare can be understood by looking at the statistics, but it can also be felt on the streets. The people, millions of whom will still vote for leftist pro-government parties on Sunday, are struggling, their standard of living has decreased almost as fast as the price of oil has collapsed. And the correlation between those phenomena is not merely incidental.

Listening to the corporate media, one would think that Venezuela was a barbarous place where men, women and children are gunned down in the streets for seemingly no reason. One could be forgiven for envisioning a city where murals of Che and Chavez are exceeded only by the chalk outlines of dead bodies on every street corner. However, the truth is that the violence and crime – both very real phenomena – are symptoms of the larger affliction: economic and psychological war.

The enemies of Venezuela, both in the country and in the U.S., foment just this sort of crime and violence in order to manipulate the collective consciousness of the people in an attempt to coerce them into abandoning the Bolivarian Revolution in favor of a right-wing, pro-U.S., pro-IMF, neoliberal ruling class that will theoretically restore order and guarantee safety.

Ultimately, that’s what this Sunday’s election is really about: courage in the face of intimidation.

Venezuela is not always as beautiful as it appears from an airplane window. It is a country fighting for survival against the Empire, such fights are rarely pretty. But in doing so, Venezuela is also fighting on behalf of all countries targeted by the U.S. And that is truly something beautiful.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. He is the editor of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. You can reach him at ericdraitser(at)gmail.com.

This article takes a closer look at the arguments from both parties, and reveals two strikingly different processes that led to these conflicting assessments. In short, the WHO process was transparent, stuck to conventional scientific methodology and looked at glyphosate-containing herbicides (as glyphosate is never used alone in the real world), whereas EFSA’s route was based on a ‘peer review’ by anonymous EFSA and national public officials relying on undisclosed industry-sponsored studies that looked at glyphosate alone. The European Commission, which will have the last say on whether or not glyphosate will be re-authorized in the EU, and under which conditions, must now decide what to make of this interesting piece of ‘science’.

On 12 November 2015, following a long saga (see our previous article), unnamed officials from EFSA and experts from EU Member States published the outcome of their joint re-assessment of the toxicity of glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world. More commonly known as ‘Roundup’, which is the original Monsanto trade name, it is applied to more than 150 food and non-food crops 1 and is used by millions of home-owners, businesses and public authorities to keep lawns, gardens, buildings and other land free of weeds. Glyphosate is also a cornerstone of GM crop cultivation. According to GMproponents, 57 per cent of all genetically modified crops grown commercially around the world in 2013 were herbicide tolerant, and the vast majority of these were engineered to tolerate glyphosate-based herbicides. This simplifies their cultivation in large-scale, socially and environmentally harmful monocultureplantations, also known as ‘green deserts‘.2

Following a peer review of available data, these anonymous officials issued several conclusions about the toxicity of glyphosate. Two of the most important outcomes were:

– Glyphosate was deemed “unlikely” to cause cancer in humans;

– It was suggested that the legally permissible exposure levels of EU consumers to glyphosate be increased by 66 per cent.3 4

The first conclusion was anxiously anticipated in the pesticides world, and was met with relief by industry. “Science wins!!” exulted Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley. With this assessment, EFSA had reached a verdict opposite to that of the panel of scientists convened by the WHO’s International Agency for Research against Cancer (IARC). These expertsdetermined in March 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans”5 after having found “limited evidence” of cancer in people and “sufficient evidence” in experimental animals. The complete Monograph waspublished by the IARC in July 2015.

This conclusion was not in itself a death sentence for glyphosate: the IARC’s conclusion is a hazard characterisation, most studies documenting harm were based on high doses and in the EU it is up to the European Commission to regulate glyphosate6. However, the EU pesticides legislation foresees that pesticides that are linked to “presumed human carcinogenicity” based on “sufficient evidence” in animals must be banned7. Since what the IARC found was precisely such sufficient evidence, industry reacted with fury to the threat. The business model of Monsanto, in particular, is still heavily dependent on sales of glyphosate-based Roundup and crops genetically engineered to resist this weed killer. The company publicly demanded the retraction of what they termed “junk science” and lobbied WHO director Margaret Chan to “rectify” the conclusions of the report.

Interpretations

The WHO organized a task force over the summer of 2015 to compare IARC’sfindings with those of another WHO body that had come to opposite conclusions in 2004 and 2011. This body, the Joint FAO/WHO Meetings on Pesticide Residues, was asked by the task force to perform a “full re-evaluation of glyphosate” and to review its “internal guidelines to consolidate the criteria for data inclusion/exclusion with respect to published and/or proprietary data sources”. IARC conclusions were left untouched.

Subsequently, Germany’s national risk assessment agency (BfR), the lead agency in the EU assessment process, scrutinized8 the published IARC Monograph in considerable detail and agreed9 that the IARC classification of the available data as “limited evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate” was adequate.

But BfR adopted a “more cautious view” than IARC in the interpretation of the human evidence, arguing that the IARC review had found “no consistent positive association” documenting human exposure to glyphosate, and that it was not possible to “differentiate between the effects of glyphosate and the co-formulants” in most of the studies at stake.

When it came to the animal evidence, BfR squarely dismissed IARC’s interpretation: “The weight of evidence suggests that there is no carcinogenic risk related to the intended herbicidal uses and, in addition no hazard classification for carcinogenicity is warranted for glyphosate according to the CLP [EU] criteria.”

Differences in interpretation are the daily bread of scientists, but one Member State in particular was caught off guard by BfR’s agreeing with IARC’s classification but coming to such a different overall conclusion. An anonymous Swedish official noted in his country’s official comments10 that “the IARC conclusion is admittedly precautionary but still feasible” as far as evidence in humans was concerned. He also defended the IARC’s choice of statistical tests for measuring the evidence in animals as “more sensitive”, and criticized the use of historical data to balance the control groups in the experiments: “We don’t believe that reference to historical control data can abrogate the positive results from the trend tests.”

But within the EU, Sweden was more or less alone on this one. Although Norway also voiced strong criticism of BfR’s statistical treatment of animal evidence, it is not an EU country. All other Member States followed the BfR judgment, with Belgium agreeing11 with Germany’s (reported) description of the IARC classification choices as “merely driven by the precautionary principle”. France was also in complete agreement with BfR, and surprisingly concise in its reaction12, praising the “huge work provided by Germany on the IARC conclusions”. Denmark, the UK and Spain were also unified in their acquiescence. Ireland asked why the two statistical approaches yielded such different results but did not oppose BfR’s.

EFSA took note of the quasi-unanimity around Germany and, while acknowledging the consensus on the appropriateness of the IARC classification, embraced the general opinion on the statistical flaws in IARC’s data on animal carcinogenicity. IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate “probably” caused cancer in humans thus became an “unlikely” in the EU review’s final conclusions (although Sweden and Norway insisted on their dissenting minority opinion). Both terms refer to a probability, but from an opposite viewpoint. How could the perspectives of IARC scientists and EFSA and EU Member States officials have come to differ so widely?

As EFSA was requested by the European Commission to include the IARC findings in its review, the EFSA officials who published the peer review provided some explanation.

‘Pure’ glyphosate vs. real-world formulations

First of all, EFSA officials explained that the two reviews used different sets of data. As glyphosate is almost never used alone in the real world but in hundreds of different combinations, IARC scientists had reviewed several studies assessing glyphosate formulations.13 These studies of real-world exposures – to agricultural and forestry workers, and to community residents – were obviously essential in their assessment although IARC also reached its conclusions based on laboratory studies of pure glyphosate alone, concluding “sufficient” evidence of cancer in animals and “strong” evidence of genotoxicity.

EFSA and national officials, on the other hand, had a narrower mandate. They were confined to EU pesticide legislation, in which only the declared “active substance” of the pesticide is considered, whereas the assessment of the toxicity of formulations is left to Member States. So EFSA and Member States barely acknowledged IARC’s real-world exposure studies as the products at stake were not pure glyphosate.

This separate assessment in the EU regulation of the different compounds in pesticides is reductionist, and is a fundamental problem. In fact, the final product combines these different compounds to obtain a synergistic effect (greater than the sum of its parts), and as a consequence the health impact of commercial formulations escape assessment at the EU level. For example, Germany had earlier banned a common Roundup adjuvant known as POEA,explaining: “There is convincing evidence that the measured toxicity of some glyphosate containing herbicides is the result of the co-formulants in the plant protection products (e.g., tallowamines used as surfactants)” and concluding14that “Member States are encouraged to consider the substitution of alkylamine ethoxylates (POEA) in plant protection products with less toxic surfactants.” However, no other Member State has yet followed suit: EFSA was mandated by the Commission to look at POEA, but called for more research to be done before it could issue any recommendation.

To their credit, our anonymous experts “recognized that the issue of toxicity of the formulations should be considered further as some published genotoxicity studies15 … on formulations presented positive results in vitro and in vivo.” In particular, they noted16 that “other endpoints should be clarified, such as long-term toxicity and carcinogenicity, reproductive/developmental toxicity and endocrine disrupting potential of formulations.”

Acknowledging such an enormous data gap means that the safety of existing glyphosate formulations used in Europe is in doubt. Indirectly, it is also a damning indication that existing EU regulations are not fit for purpose, and that Member States are not doing their jobs.

Secret data

The second reason provided by the public officials to defend the superiority of their conclusion over that of IARC’s scientists was that their assessment included more data. Indeed, IARC had no access to confidential industry studies, but rather only to summaries that were missing important information. And in particular, they were not privy to five mouse studies carried out by industry.17

This is very unfortunate, because José Tarazona, head of EFSA’s Pesticides Unit, called these studies “key” and “pivotal” during the agency’s press briefing on the matter. Kathryn Guyton, the Senior Toxicologist at the IARC Monographs Programme who followed the file at IARC, said that what was particularly interesting about the two mouse studies IARC looked at was that they showed a statistically significant correlation between exposure to glyphosate and the occurrence of a very rare type of tumour.18 Apparently, a correlation with rare tumours also appeared in the three studies that only EFSA had been able to review in detail. As these studies were not however available for independent scientific review, Guyton could not explain how EFSA had reached a conclusion so divergent from that of IARC after having looked at them. In its comments, Belgium insisted19 that “it was unfortunate that IARC did not take into account 3 guideline studies in both mice and rats, since this could have put the overall conclusions in another perspective”. This sentiment was echoed by Ireland: “IARC’s failure [sic] to evaluate the 3 other studies is not helpful.”

This is in fact a second, fundamental problem with the EU’s pesticides regulation (and practically all regulated economic sectors in the EU): the studies used by EFSA and Member States to assess the risk of regulated products such as pesticides’ active substances are paid for and provided by their producers. But most are only accessible to regulators, and not to the scientific community or the public, because according to industry they contain trade secrets and could be used by competitors to obtain market authorization elsewhere.20

There are some non-industry-sponsored studies on common active substances such as glyphosate that allow EU and national regulators to double-check the information (or absence thereof) submitted by producers.21 However, there are very few independent studies on existing formulations, such as those used by IARC, in the public scientific literature. The ability of Member States to systematically assess the formulations used in the EU is therefore limited, as they would need to finance studies assessing each commercial formulation independently of its producers. This simply does not happen.

As a result, information about the toxicity of glyphosate formulations used in the real world is not available to the public. Industry probably knows more than anyone else, but rarely publishes detrimental findings.

Anonymous authors vs. reproducible process

Other factors, in this case unreported by EFSA, might also have played a role. Throughout the process, whether at BfR or EFSA, the risk assessment process has been anonymous. Bfr did not disclose the authors of its original report, although there are pesticide (including glyphosate) producers on its panel. Furthermore, the agency revealed that the number of studies sent to them by glyphosate producers was so huge that they simply used summaries provided by the producers, adding comments where appropriate.

Similarly, EFSA did not give the work to its pesticides scientific panel, which consists of external scientists who contribute to the agency’s work, but to officials in its Pesticides Unit. The same anonymizing treatment was applied to all officials representing EU Member States who participated in the peer review. This was justified as follows22: “As an EU organization, EFSA has an obligation to protect the personal data of its employees, [and] also to avoid undue influence”. This secrecy is understandable during the process, but less so once the study has been published – many comparable regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, in charge of pesticides evaluation in the USA, do publish such names. Nonetheless, EFSA refused to disclose the names of its officials and those from the Member States (the name of one national expert appears by mistake in the document).

In contrast with EFSA’s ‘peer review’ process of relying on anonymous officials based on undisclosed studies for key decisions, IARC’s process is completely transparent and reproducible. “We only use publicly available data,” explained Guyton. “This is the cornerstone of the Monographs scientific procedures.” This open process makes it possible to access and review all of the original scientific studies, thus ensuring post-publication review that the evidence and conclusions are scientifically valid. In addition, IARC’s panel was composed of “world leading experts” according to Guyton, carefully screened for possible conflicts of interest by IARC staff, with declarations of interest disclosed two months ahead of the meetings for public scrutiny.

“We take our independence very seriously,” said Guyton. “Everybody can know who was in the room all along the process. Under no circumstances could scientists with any perceived conflicts of interest draft Monograph text.” For example, one scientist attending the group’s meetings, C. Portier, could not be appointed on the panel due to his part-time employment by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund. Nonetheless, as his expertise was deemed important to the assessment, he attended as an ‘Invited Specialist’. This is a category created by IARC to enable scientists with interests conflicting with those of the agency to participate in meetings but not to write monographs or contribute to evaluation decisions.23

“What we did was very rigorous,” Guyton continued, adding that this strict independence policy combined with the use of solely publicly available evidence guaranteed the agency’s reputation. “All scientists can replicate our results.” Questioned about the lobbying they had to face from industry, Guyton said: “The pesticides industry is very concentrated, and on this file we were dealing with one manufacturer in particular that has an history of getting involved in scientific processes. However, they could follow the entire process as observers so they always knew what was happening.”24

And now?

What can we make of these two divergent processes? Which body’s assessment of the safety of glyphosate is correct? One obvious way to progress would be to publish the three famous confidential studies and agree on their statistical treatment, but this looks far from straightforward.

EFSA confirmed that they would not publish the raw data of these studies, asserting that what they have already published is comparable to the “amount of information contained within articles published in the open scientific literature”. However, accessing the raw data would be the only way to double-check how these studies’ findings were obtained; the expert NGO Pesticides Action Network Europe has been fighting in courts for years trying to obtain this very data on glyphosate and so far companies have always refused to disclose it and let independent scrutiny on their data take place.

Regarding the statistical methodology, IARC scientists have strongly critiqued the peer review carried out by EFSA and Member States, saying25 they are “astonished” by BfR’s treatment of IARC’s statistical interpretation of animal data. Greenpeace Europe and PAN Europe accused the EU and national public officials of using flawed historical control data to dismiss the significant evidence observed by IARC (and later by BfR itself). EFSA has defended its use of historical control data, asserting that it was selected according to valid guidelines. Which, in turn, is strongly contested by IARC scientists.

[30 NOVEMBER UPDATE] An open letter signed by 96 scientists including nine of the IARC authors, all specialised in relevant disciplines (cancer research, epidemiology, toxicology, occupational health…) was sent on November 30 2015 to the European Commission and EFSA urging them to consider the differences in IARC and BfR conclusions. The scientists, presenting themselves as having “dedicated [their] professional lives to understanding the role of environmental hazards on cancer risks and human health”, argue that “the BfR decision is not credible because it is not supported by the evidence and it was not reached in an open and transparent manner” and call the European Commission to “disregard the flawed EFSA finding on glyphosate in your formulation of glyphosate health and environmental policy for Europe and to call for a transparent, open and credible review of the scientific literature.” The tone of the letter is very angry and they list several reasons to complain about the EFSA/BfR process:

– “the arguments promoted by the BfR to negate the human, animal
and mechanistic evidence are fundamentally and scientifically flawed and should be rejected.”

– “We strongly object to the almost non-existent weight given to studies from the literature by the BfR and the strong reliance on non-publicly available data in a limited set of assays that define the minimum data necessary for the approval of a pesticide.” [/30 NOVEMBER UPDATE]

A story of two processes

A hopefully swift resolution of this dispute is pending, but is it really about science in the end? It is striking that the argument revolves so much around the interpretation of legal texts (OECD guidelines etc) for the inclusion/exclusion of data and so little about the real-world dimension of the problem and the actual experiments. In any case, comparing the integrity of the two processes is sobering. IARC strictly adhered to conventional scientific methodology (with reproducible results), while our European anonymous public officials did not. From that perspective, the Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer’s exclamation that “science wins” means that the company’s position did indeed prevail in this battle, but it really does not say much about the quality of the science at stake.

The obvious conclusion is that the EU’s pesticides risk assessment system sorely needs reform. While glyphosate is the most frequently used herbicide in Europe, “there is little information available on occupational or community exposure to glyphosate,” according to IARC. Asked whether IARC had taken into account a small study commissioned by the NGO Friends of the Earth Europe on the presence of glyphosate in people’s urine across Europe, Guyton commented: “that study was half the data we had! We don’t know the levels, we don’t know the frequency. … Basically, we don’t have any information.” Ultimately, this means that the largest economic entity on the planet, the European Union, does not monitor its own population’s exposure to the top herbicide used in its territory.

Glyphosate has been a commercial blockbuster since its entry on the market. This is because it combines formidable efficacy with toxicity levels that are, as far as known, comparatively lower than those of other broad spectrum herbicides. However, the monoculture agronomic model facilitated by glyphosate is disastrous for the preservation of biodiversity and soils. Also entrenched in this industrialized, large-scale model is the destruction of rural communities.26

In conclusion, we offer one remark and two questions. Germany’s recommendation to increase EU consumers’ legal exposure levels by 66 per cent – supported by EFSA – has hardly been discussed (not just in this article, but anywhere). This is surprising, and EFSA has already announced that it is going to revise approved residue levels in 2016. Secondly, the never-asked question that lurks in the shadows of this process: can the EU really execute its own pesticide policy and ban glyphosate if the law demands so; or is TTIP throwing a spanner in the works again, since glyphosate is of too great strategic importance to US interests (ie GM crop exports)? Finally, if the EU doesn’t want to implement a ban, can it afford to acknowledge that IARC might be right?

At any rate, having independent scientists whose work and background can be checked rather than anonymous officials and confidential references in charge of this evaluation would have increased trust in the outcome of the entire exercise.

Picture: “Herbicide Path“, by Angus Wilson (Creative Commons – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Notes

1. The producers asked for the following uses: “herbicide on emerged annual, perennial and biennial weeds in all crops [crops including but not restricted to root and tuber vegetables, bulb vegetables, stem vegetables, field vegetables (fruiting vegetables, brassica vegetables, leaf vegetables and fresh herbs, legume vegetables), pulses, oil seeds, potatoes, cereals, and sugar- and fodder beet; orchard crops and vine, before planting fruit crops, ornamentals, trees, nursery plants etc.] and foliar spraying for desiccation in cereals and oilseeds (pre-harvest).”
2. The glyphosate tolerance genes inserted in these plants have now spread to a large number of weeds, making the use of glyphosate less and sometimes not at all effective. To fight this, the biotech industry is now selling (or planning to sell) GM crops tolerating several herbicides at the same time. However, these herbicides, which include glufosinate, 2,4 D, and dicamba, are more toxic to humans than glyphosate.
3. The Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) was increased from 0.3 to 0.5mg/kg of body weight.
4. This has been proposed by Germany’s national agency BfR. (The EU’s Pesticides Regulation foresees that Member State do the first examination of a pesticide and that EFSA then does a peer review of this opinion together with all other Member States).
5. The second category (2A) in IARC classification, seehttp://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/
6. CEO is currently supporting an EU-wide petition to the European Commission demanding that glyphosate is banned, seehttps://act.wemove.eu/campaigns/stop-glyphosate
7. Specifically, the regulation says: “classification in Category 1A and 1B is based on strength of evidence […] [which] may be derived from human studies that establish a causal relationship between human exposure to a substance and the development of cancer (known human carcinogen); or animal experiments for which there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate animal carcinogenicity (presumed human carcinogen). In addition, on a case-by-case basis, scientific judgement may warrant a decision of presumed human carcinogenicity derived from studies showing limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans together with limited evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.” Regulations (EC) No 1107/2009 on Pesticides and (EC) No 1272/2008 on Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP), p. 104.
8. Addendum 1 to the RAR Assessment of IARC Monographs, Final addendum to the Renewal Assessment Report (public version), Risk assessment provided by the rapporteur Member State Germany and co-rapporteur Member State Slovakia for the active substance GLYPHOSATE according to the procedure for the renewal of the inclusion of a second group of active substances in Annex I to Council Directive 91/414/EEC laid down in Commission Regulation (EU) No. 1141/2010, October 2015, p. 4156.
9. Ibid, p. 4244
10. Comments of Sweden on the addendum of September 2015 for glyphosate, European Food Safety Authority, Peer Review Report on Glyphosate, October 2015, p.887
11. Peer review report, p.870
12. The country banned glyphosate from garden centers and could have been expected to defend interpretations supporting this decision
13. With adjuvants (substances that change/increase the effect of glyphosate).
14. Glyphosate Addendum 1 to RAR Part Ecotoxicology, Final addendum to the Renewal Assessment Report (public version), Risk assessment provided by the rapporteur Member State Germany and co-rapporteur Member State Slovakia for the active substance GLYPHOSATE according to the procedure for the renewal of the inclusion of a second group of active substances in Annex I to Council Directive 91/414/EEC laid down in Commission Regulation (EU) No. 1141/2010, October 2015, p. 4316.
15. “(Not according to GLP or to OECD guidelines)”
16. EFSA, 2015. Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate. EFSA Journal 2015;13(11):4302, 107 pp. doi:10.2903/j.efsa.2015.4302, p. 11.
17. Two were however included in their evaluation because public, final peer reviews of the data by the US government and the World Health Organization was available.
18. Phone interview with CEO, 19 November 2015.
19. Peer review report, p. 870
20. This problem exists in all regions of the world, and the very high entry cost on the market created by this situation protects large companies against competition: the market is concentrating rapidly, with the 10 largest pesticide producers controlling 94.5 per cent of the global market.
21. Provided of course they actually try to find it: EFSA has to include all available independent information in its work but often fails to do so.
22. Email correspondence with CEO, 17 November 2015
23. In our 2013 “Unhappy Meal” report documenting large numbers of conflicts of interests among EFSA experts, CEO actually recommended that EFSA adopt this approach in order to improve the agency’s independence without cutting it off from the expertise it needs. For more details on IARC’s “Invited Specialist” status, seehttp://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Preamble/currenta5participants0706.php
24. Among the observers to IARC meetings were T. Sorahan, a Monsanto employee, and C. Strupp, an employee of the pesticides manufacturer Adama representing the EU pesticides lobby ECPA, seehttp://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanonc/PIIS1470-2045(15)70134-8.pdf
25. Correspondence between CEO and C. Portier, 24 November 2015
26. This is starting to be acknowledged: in the Ecotoxicology section of its review of the IARC findings, BfR re-stated that such broad-spectrum herbicides cause considerable disruption in entire ecosystems: “In addition to the evaluation of the information from the IARC monograph, [Germany] reiterates in this addendum the knowledge regarding the effects of glyphosate and other broad spectrum herbicides on the populations of non-target species (especially insects and farmland birds), caused by an alteration of the food web.”

The current economic, political, and social situation in Venezuela is very complicated, which makes it somewhat difficult for outsiders to make sense of. On the one hand there are many people who defend the Bolivarian revolution, pointing to the successes it has had in reducing poverty and inequality and in increasing citizen participation and self-governance. On the other hand, there is a chorus of critics, not just from the usual suspects on the political right, but often from the left, who criticize the Maduro government’s economic management of the country, corruption, the high inflation rate and shortages, and the trial of a high profile opposition politician, who the government accuses of fomenting violence. How did Venezuela get here? What happened since Hugo Chavez’s death? Did the project derail, get stuck, hit a speed bump, or crash altogether? In order to answer this question, I will first analyze the origins of the current economic situation.

The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela is no doubt undergoing one if its toughest periods at this time. With inflation reaching an unprecedented 160-200 per cent for 2015, nearly constant long lines at subsidized supermarkets, and sporadic shortages of many consumer goods, the entire population – whether Chavista, opposition sympathizers, or “ni-ni” (neither one side nor the other) – is frustrated with the situation. While the Maduro government says that the problems are the result of an economic war that is being waged against the government, the opposition argues that it is government economic mismanagement that is to blame. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.

Banner: “I don’t feel like living in fear.”

Struggle for Economic Power

The roots of today’s economic problems can be found in Chavez’s efforts already in 2001, to fundamentally reorganize Venezuela’s economy and polity. That is, back then Chavez proved to the country’s old elite that he would not be their pawn and do their bidding as so many presidents before Chavez had done. Instead, in late 2001 he introduced land reform and oil industry reform legislation that touched on the elite’s two most important sources of economic power. In reaction to this move, the opposition launched the April 2002 coup attempt and the December 2002 oil industry shutdown. These efforts at political and economic destabilization provoked a massive bout of capital flight in early 2003. At first, the government tried to counter the capital flight by intervening in the currency market, using its dollars to purchase the bolivar, in order to keep its price stable. However, this caused the central government to lose dollar currency reserves precipitously and so it abruptly changed gears and introduced a fixed exchange rate in March of 2003.

Ever since then, the currency has been fixed and adjusted very rarely. Only those who meet government conditions to buy dollars with bolivars are allowed to do so. The conditions for gaining access to the official exchange rate include international travel, supporting a son or daughter with their studies abroad, or – most importantly – importing essential goods into Venezuela, among several other types of uses. Of course, almost immediately a black market for dollars sprung up, with an exchange rate that was very different from the official one. At first the official exchange rate was 2.15 bolivars per dollar, while the black market rate quickly reached double or triple that rate.

For a long time, from 2004 to 2008, the Venezuelan economy did quite well, growing at a very rapid rate of, on average, 10 per cent per year. This was in part possible because the price of oil was quite high (and climbing), which meant that the government could accommodate most requests for dollars at the official exchange rate. Also, the government’s policies of capturing a far larger proportion of the dollars that the country earned and then reinvesting that money in social programs, education, and in efforts to diversify the economy also made a difference.

However, in mid-2008 the global financial crisis struck and drove the price of oil down from $140 (U.S.) per barrel in mid 2008, to less than $40 (U.S.) per barrel in early 2009. Suddenly the government could no longer cover all of the imports with its oil industry earnings and so in June 2010 the government introduced a new exchange mechanism, SITME, which sold dollar-denominated bonds that could be bought in bolivars at an exchange rate that was double that of the previous rate. The combination of SITME and the borrowing to cover the budget deficit meant that total foreign debt increased rapidly in the period from 2006 to 2014, from 10% of GDP to 25% of GDP. Nominal external debt (private and public) went from $41.8-billion (U.S.) in 2006 to $134.5-billion (U.S.) in 2014, a 320 per cent increase in eight years. The percentage of GDP is indicated on the basis of GDP PPP. The debt to GDP ratio is fairly low compared to the rest of Latin America.

Another measure that the government took during this time was to restrict access to dollars at the official exchange rate. That is, the conditions under which Venezuelans could access dollars were significantly tightened. Fewer dollars were available for travel, for study abroad, and for a more restricted list of imports. The consequence of this action was that the black market exchange rate shot up during this period, going from about 8 bolivars per dollar in 2011, and to 16 in 2012.

Also, since fewer goods could be imported at the official exchange rate, more and more importers began to use the black market to import goods, thus driving up inflation. Even if they used the official exchange rate, rather than undercutting importers who had to pay for goods at the black market rate, people knew that they could make a killing by pricing goods at the far higher black market rate and thus did so. In short, inflation began to heat up too, going from a fairly moderate (for Venezuela) 13.7 per cent in 2006, to 31.4 per cent in 2008 and holding at 20-21 per cent, on average, between 2010 and 2012.

Borrowing in order to pay for the low official exchange rate had another side effect, which is that it increased the volume of bolivars in circulation, relative to the country’s foreign reserves. The M2 money supply figure (which includes circulating cash and bank savings) increased by a factor of 28 (2,800 per cent) between the end of 2006 and the end of 2014, while foreign reserves dropped by more than 50 per cent during the same time, from around $30-billion to $15-billion (U.S.), according to the Venezuelan Central Bank. Although there is some debate among economists about the importance of this ratio for the exchange rate, it is undeniable that in a context of high inflation, where many ordinary Venezuelans and most businesses seek to buy dollars in order to protect their savings from devaluing, a low demand for bolivars and a low supply of dollars will mean a declining black market exchange rate between dollars and bolivars.

Post Chavez Elections

All of these trends became accentuated when President Chavez died of cancer on March 5, 2013 and new elections were held a little later, in April, resulting in Nicolas Maduro’s election by a 1.5 per cent point margin of victory. The wave of violence following the election, which opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonsky encouraged when he called on people to demonstrate “with all of their rage,” in which 14 people died, only made the perception of political and economic instability worse [Ed.: for example, see Bullet No. 986]. Further destabilization attempts, the violent street blockades known as “guarimbas,” between March and June 2014, and which resulted in another 43 dead and over 100 wounded, further exacerbated the economic problems.

That is, the destabilization created further pressure on the black market exchange rate, which, in turn, meant that there was a growing gap between the official and the black market exchange rates that could be exploited for massive profit-making. Anyone who had the opportunity to take advantage of this gap faced enormous temptations to do so.

While the official exchange rate was fixed at 6.3 bolivars per dollar since early 2013, the black market rate had reached three times that, at 18 per dollar. In other words, someone who traveled to the U.S., for example, could buy up to $4,000 (U.S.) at the official rate (paying 25,200 bolivars). If they did not use this cash up or if they purchased equivalent goods abroad, they could trade that at the black market back into bolivars for a 300 per cent profit, earning 75,000 bolivars.

A vicious cycle thus began in early 2014, where an ever-widening gap between the official and unofficial exchange rates created ever-greater incentives to profit from that gap, thereby further widening that same gap. The black market exchange rate thus began to increase exponentially in the course of 2014 and 2015, reaching 100 bolivars per dollar in late 2014 and 800 bolivars per dollar by late 2015, creating a 125:1 ratio between the black market and the official exchange rates. Massive profits of up to 12,500 per cent were thus possible.

As a result, more and more people became involved in efforts to acquire dollars at the official rate, mostly by purchasing subsidized goods in Venezuela and (re-)exporting them across the border for an enormous profit (people known as bachaqueros). Of course, major companies are involved in this process too, claiming that they need to import essential goods, and then either not importing these or re-exporting them to acquire dollars. In mid-2014 president Maduro estimated that up to 40 per cent of all goods imported into Venezuela (at the official exchange rate) were smuggled right back out again.

A logical consequence of all of this was that more and more goods became scarce at the price-controlled prices and in massive inflation for unregulated goods. That is, already early in Chavez’s second term in office, in 2006, the government had begun to introduce price controls for most essential goods, in order to counter the retailers’ tendency to price things based on the black market exchange rate instead of the official rate. Over the years, the government gradually expanded the number of goods that the price controls covered, which, if adhered to, also meant that more and more products were priced far below what these could be sold for in neighboring countries, thereby adding these products to those that could generate massive profits by re-exporting them.

Solutions?

The big question that everyone asks – both within Venezuela and outside – is, if the low fixed exchange rate is leading to so many economic problems, why has the government not raised the rate? There are two main explanations for this. First, raising the official exchange rate so that it is more in tune with the black market exchange rate and with the prices in neighboring countries would mean raising prices for products imported at the official exchange rate, thereby further stoking an inflation rate that is already far too high. And unless wages are raised correspondingly, changing the exchange rate would also mean a corresponding decrease in incomes and thus an increase in the poverty rate.

Second, changing the official exchange rate would represent an admission of defeat in the context of what the government is calling an economic war against Venezuela. While an exchange rate adjustment or devaluation will probably have to happen sooner or later, it is out of the question that such a move (and the implied concession) would be made before the December 6 National Assembly elections. Note, there is some debate within Venezuela as to whether it makes more sense to call a change in the exchange rate an “adjustment” (the government’s preferred term) or a “devaluation.” I prefer to call it an adjustment because technically the currency has already lost a tremendous amount of its value due to inflation, so, in effect, a lowering of the exchange rate is more of adjustment to the reality that inflation has already devalued the currency – this is especially true if you consider that very few people have access to the official exchange rates, thus making the black market rate more real for most people than the official ones.

In other words, the current situation in Venezuela is a result, first, of the exchange rate control that was meant to defend the currency against the destabilization attempts of 2002, which themselves were the result of the Chávez’s government’s attack on capitalist class interests. Second, an already relatively fragile exchange rate control became worse in the wake of the oil price declines of 2008 and again in 2014, which made it increasingly difficult for the government to meet the demand for dollars without going further into debt. Third, the opposition’s new destabilization efforts against the Maduro government the day after Maduro’s election in April 2013 and again in early 2014, turned the existing economic volatility into a vicious cycle of inflation, shortages, black market devaluation, and renewed inflation. The situation is thus quite difficult for the government and very frustrating for the population.

Key Factors in Venezuela as Elections Approach

Despite the extremely difficult economic situation in the lead-up to the Dec. 6 National Assembly elections in Venezuela, the Maduro government and the Bolivarian revolution currently do have a few things that make the situation not quite as bleak as one might otherwise think. I will present this domestic context, first, in terms of the government’s most recent actions and policies, second, in terms of the progressive social movements in Venezuela and, third, in terms of the opposition’s situation and actions.

There is little doubt that the economic and social situation in Venezuela is very difficult at the moment, with the highest inflation rate since the time Hugo Chavez was elected president on December 6, 1998, constant shortages of (price-controlled) basic food goods, and a high crime rate. Recognizing this difficult situation, which the government says is the result of an “economic war” against the government, President Nicolas Maduro has been instituting a number of policies designed to address the problem areas of his administration.

Perhaps the most intensive effort in this regard has been devoted to the “Great Housing Mission,” which since its launch in 2011 constructed nearly 850,000 homes by November 2015 and is supposed to reach one million by the end of 2015. Already this means that the government has managed to construct an average of about 200,000 new homes per year since the mission’s launch, which represents a more than three-fold increase over the 2000-2011 annual average of public homes constructed. Given that the average Venezuelan household has five members, this means that more or less five million Venezuelans will benefit from the housing program by the end of the year – a not insignificant number if you consider that this represents one sixth of Venezuela’s total population of 30 million.

The second major effort to counter the difficult circumstances was a new series of policies to control inflation, which he presented in October of this year. In the course of his two-and-a-half-year presidency, President Maduro already introduced a variety of changes to his economic policy in order to get inflation and shortages under control. Back in February, for example, Maduro announced a series of measures that were supposed to make one of the higher official exchange rates more accessible to the general public and that would make the black market currency exchange more legal. However, neither of these policies had much of an impact on the problems of inflation and shortages.

As a result, the government announced in October that a maximum legal profit would be introduced. One of the great problems of the current economic situation is that some vendors manage to make exorbitant profits by either purchasing goods at an extremely low price-controlled price and then re-sell them for many times that cost. Or, they import goods using one of the lower official exchange rate mechanisms, which makes the import extremely cheap for them, but then sell the goods anyway at a price that reflects a price calculated by the black market exchange rate, thereby also making an exorbitant profit. The new economic measures thus examine the real prices of practically everything sold in Venezuela, and set a profit limit at 30 per cent of the original cost.

Although these new measures were accompanied by steep penalties for violators of the new profit maximums, so far it seems that the measure is not being adhered to. Inflation is still far above tolerable levels (of over 160 to 200 per cent for 2015) and, if some anecdotal reports are generalizable, vendors are resorting to black markets even more, depriving supermarkets of even more products. One likely reason that these new measures have not had much of an effect (yet?) is that overseeing the prices and profits of all products and vendors in Venezuela is a task that is impossible for the Venezuelan government to fulfill. In short, this second policy area is still not having a positive impact on the economic situation.

The third major policy effort for 2015 has been in the area of crime fighting, with a new program named, “Operation Liberation and Protection of the People” (OLP), which was launched in July of this year. In some ways this program represents a militarization of crime fighting, as it involves large-scale raids on high crime neighborhoods, using not only the police force, but also the National Guard. The government clearly felt such a military tactic was becoming necessary, not only because of the influx of Colombian paramilitary organized crime, but also because the crime rate more generally has increased in the past year (partly because of the Colombian paramilitary presence). Given the high crime rate and that previous measures to lower it did not work, most Venezuelans seem to approve of the OLP program. Whether it will make inroads into lowering the crime rate, though, is still too early to tell.

Aside from these three main areas of housing, economic policy, and crime fighting, the government is also continuing – at the same level as before – all of the Chavez government’s social programs, known as missions, such as in the areas of education, subsidized food, community health care, and the expansion of social security benefits, among other programs. It is no doubt the combination of all of these programs that has maintained much of the government’s popularity despite the severe economic crisis that the country is currently going through.

Popular Movements and Organizations

One of the greatest strengths of the Bolivarian revolution is the involvement of popular movements and organizations. Although Venezuela never had particularly strong mass movements, relative to other countries in Latin America, such as Bolivia, the Chavez government did emerge out of progressive movements (see George Ciccariello-Maher’s excellent social history of Venezuela: We Created Chavez). These movements, by and large, are still supporting the government, despite the many criticisms that they have of the government as a result of the current difficult economic situation.

During Chavez’s presidency these movements were strengthened as a result of the government’s policies to broaden and open spaces for their participation in government social programs, community media, and via the communal councils and the communes (which are groupings of communal councils). Certainly, there has been some degree of interference by the government, but these have resisted such efforts, leading to a fair amount of tension and mutual suspicion between the government and community groups. Still, despite these tensions, both sides are very clear that they need each other’s support and that undermining or breaking ranks at this time would only contribute to an opposition victory, which would be bad for both sides.

An innovative new campaign has recently sprung up, known as “Every Heartbeat Counts,” which is in some ways typical of the government-social movement relationship. It represents a coming together of over 20 anti-capitalist community groups, many of them cultural. On the one hand the campaign is clearly a campaign to support the pro-government candidates running for National Assembly, but it is nonetheless independent of the government and seeks to push it further to the left by supporting the strengthening of communal councils and communes in Venezuela. It is difficult to say whether this campaign will make a difference in this election, but the critical support that they give to the government could make a difference in electoral circuits that are very tight. But more than that, the campaign is also an example of the creativity and energy that still exists just below the surface of Venezuelan politics, in the communities and the social movements, despite the frustration and even anger that many people have for the government.

The Opposition

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political divide, the opposition seems to be as internally divided and weaker than ever, despite their surge in the polls. In some ways this is a strange situation, given that the government is without a doubt at its second-weakest point of the entire 17 years of the Bolivarian revolution (Chavez was first elected on December 6, 1998 – exactly 17 years prior to the December 6 National Assembly election of 2015) – the weakest point was the period of the coup attempt and the oil industry shutdown in 2002. One would think that such an opportunity for the opposition would serve to rally it and unify it in the effort to overthrow a government that they have hated for so long.

However, the opposition remains deeply divided between those who are convinced that the only way to get back into power is via an overthrow of the government by any means necessary versus those who would prefer a more constitutional path to regaining power. Also, the lack of a clear opposition program makes them look like the only thing they want is to depose the Bolivarian revolution, but have no idea what they want beyond that. Part of the problem here is that during his presidency Chavez succeeded in completely discrediting the neoliberal discourse to such an extent that practically no one in the opposition dares to bring neoliberalism up as an opposition program (unlike Argentina, where Macri was able to run and win on a neoliberal platform). It is the combination of a lack of political program and internal divisions over strategy that has made it almost impossible for the opposition to profit from the government’s current vulnerability to the extent that it otherwise might.

Looking Toward 6D

As usual, given the vast majority of the media coverage on Venezuela, there is a concerted effort to make it look like the December 6 election will be marred by fraud. This is an image that the Venezuelan opposition is actively promoting with the unabashed help from international media, the U.S. government, and the Organization of American States (its bureaucracy in Washington DC, not most of its member states). However, anyone who has bothered to take a close look at the Venezuelan electoral system, can quickly see that it is perhaps one of the (if not the) most fraud-proof electoral systems in the world. It is thus no surprise that President Carter once said, “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”

The danger inherent in the December 6 election is thus not fraud, but the opposition’s reaction to the result. If it is a result that they do not like, they will almost certainly claim that there was fraud and launch into another violent destabilization campaign, just as they did following the April 2013 presidential election, which left 11 dead, and during the February-May 2014 street blockades known as “Guarimbas,” which killed 43 people and wounded hundreds of others.

The actual National Assembly result is very difficult to predict because it all depends on how well individual candidates do on the level of their electoral districts, of which there are 87 throughout the country. The governing PSUV had held an effective primary election to nominate the candidates last June, many of which are quite young and about half of whom are women. Also, the recent policies in the areas of housing and crime fighting have created plusses for the government among the population. Finally, the fact that most social movements are sticking with the government helps too.

On the other hand, the severe economic situation of inflation and shortages has also created an enormous amount of frustration amongst the chavista base, nearly outweighing the elements in favor of the government. The fact that there is an international campaign against the government, which the United States is leading and which the governments of Argentina and Colombia support, along with OAS Secretary General Almagro, probably won’t have much of an impact on the election itself, but will on the aftermath and the efforts to delegitimize the election, should the opposition not get the result it is hoping for. •

Gregory Wilpert is a long-time activist and organizer, mostly around Latin America solidarity, and a co-founder of venezuelanalysis.com. This article first appeared on the teleSUR English website.