Asia Pacific Research

Before being voted out of office last year, India’s Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration sanctioned open-field trials of GM food crops in India and Monsanto’s share prices rocketed. This decision prompted Rajesh Krishnan of the Coalition for a GM Free India to state that the government was against the interest of citizens, farmers and the welfare of the nation. He went on to state that the government had decided to work hand in glove with the multinational GM seed industry that stood to gain immensely from the open field trails. Since then, the Modi-led administration has continued the policy to drive GMOs into India.

Writing in The Hindu last year, Aruna Rodrigues noted that the Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report (FR) is the fourth official report exposing the lack of integrity, independence and scientific expertise in assessing GMO risk (see here). The four reports are: The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal, overturning the apex Regulator’s approval to commercialise it; the Sopory Committee Report (August 2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) Report on GM crops (August 2012) and the TEC Final Report (June-July 2013).

The TEC recommended an indefinite moratorium on the field trials of GM crops until the government devised a proper regulatory and safety mechanism. No such mechanism exists, but open field trials are being given the go ahead, regardless of a history of blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight mechanisms (see this).

Despite this, the BJP-ruled Maharashtra government recently granted ‘no-objection certificates’ for GM open-field trials of rice, chickpeas maize, brinjal and cotton. Some regard this as a game changer in the push to get GM crops into India. (Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh have given NOCs for field trials of some biotech crops, while states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have banned such research activities.)

Aruna Rodrigues argues there is increasing evidence that: GMOs pose health and environment risks; GM yields are significantly lower than yields from non-GM crops; and pesticide use, instead of coming down, has gone up exponentially. Rodrigues moreover argued that in India, notwithstanding the hype of the industry, the regulators and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Bt cotton yield is leveling off to levels barely higher than they were before the introduction of Bt.

In her piece in The Hindu, she stated:

“The IAASTD was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed. The report states we must look to small-holder, traditional farming (not GMOs) to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable. Governments must invest in these systems. This is the clear evidence.”

The MoA strongly opposed the TEC Committee’s report. This, according to Rodrigues, was to be expected given the conflict of interests:

“The Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) promotes public-private-partnerships with the biotechnology industry. It does this with the active backing of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The MoA has handed Monsanto and the industry access to our agri-research public institutions placing them in a position to seriously influence agri-policy in India. You cannot have a conflict of interest larger or more alarming than this one. Today, Monsanto decides which Bt cotton hybrids are planted and where. Monsanto owns over 90 per cent of planted cotton seed, all of it Bt cotton.”

All the other staggering scams that have rocked the nation have the possibility of recovery and reversal, but, as Rodrigues argues, the GM scam will be of a scale hitherto unknown:

“We have had the National Academies of Science give a clean chit of biosafety to GM crops – doing that by using paragraphs lifted wholesale from the industry’s own literature! Likewise, ministers who know nothing about the risks of GMOs have similarly sung the virtues of Bt Brinjal and its safety to an erstwhile Minister of Health. They have used, literally, “cut & paste” evidence from the biotech lobby’s “puff” material. Are these officials then, “un-caged corporate parrots?”

Arun Shrivastava notes that as early as 2003, when the first ever Bt cotton crop was harvested in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, Gene Campaign evaluated the performance of Bt Cotton. These studies proved that GE seeds don’t increase yield. He goes on to note that the impleadment to ban GMOs was backed by 6.5 million farmers through their respective associations. It was admitted by the Supreme Court in April 2007 and contains a long list of hard scientific evidence.

Shrivastava states that the Standing Committee on Agriculture in Parliament unanimously and unequivocally concluded that GE seeds and foods are dangerous to human, animal and environmental health and directed the Government of Manmohan Singh to ban GMOs. The 400-page report was submitted to Parliament in October 2012.

Officials in India are working closely with global biotech companies to force GMOs into fields and onto the public, despite evidence pertaining to the deleterious impacts of GMOs on various levels (for example, see this, this and this). These companies are in fact playing a key role in determining the overall development agenda for India (see this, this and this).

Despite the evidence pertaining to the risks and efficacy of GMOs, organisations and activists opposing such crops are being singled out for putting a break on development and growth and for being in the pocket of foreign interests.

An Intelligence Bureau (IB) report, ‘Impact of NGOs on Development’, was leaked in June of last year and had a special section on GMOs. It was clearly supportive of the introduction of GM crops into India. The IB said foreign NGOs and their Indian arms were serving as tools to advance Western foreign policy interests in various areas, of which GMOs comprise one aspect.

Aruna Rodrigues, Vandana Shiva and Kavitha Kuruganti, who were all mentioned in the report, in their joint statement noted the report’s hypocrisy by saying that the IB was conspiring with global corporate interests to haemorrhage India’s agricultural economy. The report even quoted Dr Ronald Herring of Cornell University, who is a known promoter of genetically-modified organisms and Monsanto’s monopoly.

Speaking to The Statesman newspaper in India, Aruna Rodrigues said:

“Here is a real foreign hand that informs the IB report. Cornell University, where Dr Herring works, was one of the main forces, along with USAID and Monsanto, behind the making of Bt brinjal in India.”

The joint statement of all three activists went asserted that:

“… the biggest foreign hand by ‘STEALTH’ and official ‘COVER-UP’ will be in GMOs/GM crops if introduced into Indian agriculture. All that stands between a corporate takeover of our seeds and agriculture is the committed and exemplary work by the not-for-profit sector… In conspiring with deeply conflicted institutions of regulation, governance and agriculture… to introduce GM crops into India, the IB will in fact aid the hand-over of the ownership of our seeds and foods to multi-national corporations. This will represent the largest take-over of any nation’s agriculture and future development by foreign-hands… (and)… will plunge India into the biggest breach of internal security; of a biosecurity threat and food security crisis from which we will never recover…. GM crops have already demonstrated no yield gain, no ability to engineer for traits of drought, saline resistance etc and have some serious bio-safety issues which no regulator wishes to examine.”

The statement said that India’s Bt cotton is an outstanding example of the above scenario:

“This ‘VALUE CAPTURE’ for Monsanto which was contrived and approved by our own government mortgaging the public interest has ensured that in a short 10 years, 95% of cotton seeds in the form of Bt cotton are owned by Monsanto… It is Monsanto now that decides where cotton should be planted and when by our farmers… The Royalties accruing to Monsanto that have been expatriated are approximately Rs 4800 Crores in 12 years, (excluding other profit mark-ups)… The IB is thus conspiring with global corporate interests to hemorrhage India’s agricultural economy… We call for an investigation on the foreign influence in writing the GMO section in the IB report.”

The statement concluded:

“If India’s intelligence agencies become instruments of global corporations working against the public interest and national interest of India, our national security is under threat. This IB report is deeply anti-national and subversive of constitutional rights of citizens in our country. It does India no credit.”

Apart from attacking those campaigning against GMOs, the report accused Greenpeace and other groups of receiving foreign funds to damage economic progress by campaigning against power projects and mining.

The IB is India’s domestic spy service and garners intelligence from within India and also executes counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism tasks. Its report attempted to portray certain NGOs like Greenpeace and critics of GMOs as working against the ‘national interest’ and being in the pay of foreigners.

Discrediting certain sections of civil society as being ‘unpatriotic’, by working to undermine some bogus notion of the ‘national interest’, always sits well with ruling elites that are all too ready to play the nationalist card to garner support. Yet, in this case the report itself sides with powerful foreign corporations and, as far as GMOs are concerned, their agenda to secure control over Indian agriculture.

Those who are exercising their legal right to challenge and protest corporate-driven policies that are all too often based on staggering levels of corruption and rampant cronyism – and are non-transparent and secretive – are being discredited and smeared. However, this should come as no surprise. Various nation states such as the US and UK have used their intelligence agencies to monitor, subvert and undermine grass-root activists and civil organizations that have (by acting legitimately and within the law) attempted to hold power to account (seethis and this). Governments the world over have a tendency to dislike genuine democracy and transparency.

Greenpeace India’s actions were singled out for particular criticism in the IB report. It responded by saying:

“We believe that this report is designed to muzzle and silence civil society who raise their voices against injustices to people and the environment by asking uncomfortable questions about the current model of growth.”

Since the report, Greenpeace India has experienced a good deal of pressure. After the report described Greenpeace’s activities as “a threat to national economic security,” the government has gone on to restrict the organisation’s international funding. On 9 April 2015, the Ministry of Home Affairs ordered Greenpeace India’s bank accounts to be frozen and its ability to receive funding from abroad to be suspended. According to Amnesty International India, this violates constitutional rights to freedom of expression and association.

The Ministry of Home Affairs said the acceptance of foreign funds by Greenpeace India had “prejudicially affected” public interest and the economic interest of the country.

Ananth Guruswamy, Executive Director at Amnesty International India:

“It is clear that Greenpeace is being targeted because its strong views and campaigns question the government’s development policies. The extreme measures taken by the government to disable an organisation for promoting the voices of some of the country’s most powerless people will damage and shame India. Intolerance to dissent will only weaken our society.”

Claims that Greenpeace India is acting against public interest have been dismissed by the judiciary twice. In January, the Delhi High Court directed the government to release frozen funds, observing:

“Non-Governmental Organizations often take positions, which are contrary to the policies formulated by the Government of the day. That by itself…cannot be used to portray petitioner’s action as being detrimental to national interest.”

On 11 January 2015, the government prevented a Greenpeace campaigner from travelling to the UK to speak about human rights abuses related to a coal mine in Mahan, Madhya Pradesh. In March, the Delhi High court ruled that the travel restrictions violated fundamental rights, and observed that “contrarian views held by a section of people…cannot be used to describe such section or class of people as anti-national.” The court also noted there was nothing to suggest that Greenpeace India’s activities “have the potentiality of degrading the economic interest of the country.”

Ananth Guruswarmy:

“The Ministry of Environment and Forests has agreed that the Mahan coal block is located in a protected forest, where no mining should take place. Instead of dubbing Greenpeace anti-national, the government should focus on the vital issues that it raises. Amnesty International India is particularly concerned about the rights of Adivasis affected by state policies, and urges the government to strengthen protections for these communities.”

Attempts to dampen dissent in India are nothing new. State repression and physical violence. as well as the structural violence resulting from particular economic policies, affect many regions and impact tens of millions of the country’s poorest and most powerless citizens.

As the current administration seeks to speed up the opening of India’s economy to private interests and to more fully embrace the tenets of neo-liberal economic doctrine, more difficult times may lie ahead for dissenting voices.

April 1975 marks the official end of the Vietnam War. Yet today, Vietnam is an impoverished countries. The Hanoi government is a US proxy regime. Vietnam has become a new cheap labor frontier of the global economy. Neoliberalism prevails.

In a bitter irony, Vietnam which was a victim of US war crimes has become a staunch military ally of the US under Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” which threatens China. 

This article was written twenty years ago, initially published on April 30th 1995 in the context of the 20th anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon. A more in-depth analysis focusing on Hanoi’s neoliberal reforms was subsequently published as a chapter in my book, The Globalization of Poverty, first edition 1997, second edition, 2003.

Michel Chossudovsky, April 17, 2015

On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the capture of Saigon by Communist forces and the surrender of General Duong Vanh Minh and his cabinet in the Presidential palace. As troops of the People’s Army of Vietnam marched into Saigon, U.S. personnel and the last American marines were hastily evacuated from the roof of the U.S. embassy. Twenty years later a fundamental question still remains unanswered: Who won the Vietnam War?

Vietnam never received war reparations payments from the U.S. for the massive loss of life and destruction, yet an agreement reached in Paris in 1993 required Hanoi to recognize the debts of the defunct Saigon regime of General Thieu. This agreement is in many regards tantamount to obliging Vietnam to compensate Washington for the costs of war.

Moreover, the adoption of sweeping macro-economic reforms under the supervision of the Bretton Woods institutions was also a condition for the lifting of the U.S. embargo. These free market reforms now constitute the Communist Party’s official doctrine. With the normalization of diplomatic relations with Washington in 1994, reference to America’s brutal role in the war is increasingly considered untimely and improper. Not surprisingly, Hanoi had decided to tone down the commemoration of the Saigon surrender so as not to offend its former wartime enemy. The Communist Party leadership has recently underscored the “historic role” of the United States in “liberating” Vietnam from Vichy regime and Japanese occupation during World War II.

On September 2, 1945 at the Declaration of Independence of Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi proclaiming the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, American agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor of today’s CIA) were present at the side of Ho Chi Minh. While Washington had provided the Viet Minh resistance with weapons and token financial support, this strategy had largely been designed to weaken Japan in the final stages of World War II without committing large numbers of U.S. ground troops.

In contrast to the subdued and restrained atmosphere of the commemoration marking the end of the Vietnam War, the 50th anniversary of independence is to be amply celebrated in a series of official ceremonies and activities commencing in September and extending to the Chinese NewYear.

Vietnam Pays War Reparations

Prior to the “normalization” of relations with Washington, Hanoi was compelled to foot the bill of the bad debts incurred by the U.S.-backed Saigon regime. At the donor conference held in Paris in November 1993, a total of nearly $2 billion of loans and aid money was generously pledged in support of Vietnam’s free market reforms.

Yet immediately after the conference, a secret meeting was held under the auspices of the Paris Club. Present at this meeting were representatives of Western governments. On the Vietnamese side, Dr. Nguyen Xian Oanh, economic advisor to the prime minister, played a key role in the negotiations. Dr. Oanh, a former IMF official, had been Minister of Finance and later Acting Prime Minister in the military government of General Duong Van Minh, which the U.S. installed 1963 after the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother(f.2). Dr. Oanh, while formally mediating on behalf of the Communist government, was nonetheless responsive to the demands of Western creditors.

The deal signed with the IMF (which was made public) was largely symbolic. The amount was not substantial: Hanoi was obliged to pay the IMF $140 million (owned by the defunct Saigon regime) as a condition for the resumption of new loans. Japan and France, Vietnam’s former colonial masters of the Vichy period, formed a so-called “Friends of Vietnam” committee to lend to Hanoi” the money needed to reimburse the IMF.

The substantive arrangement on the rescheduling of bilateral debts (with the Saigon regime), however, was never revealed. Yet it was ultimately this secret agreement (reached under the auspices of the Paris Club) which was instrumental in Washington’s decision to lift the embargo and normalize diplomatic relations. This arrangement was also decisive in the release of the loans pledged at the 1993 donor conference, thereby bringing Vietnam under the trusteeship of Japanese and Western creditors. Thus twenty years after the war, Vietnam had surrendered its economic sovereignty.

By fully recognizing the legitimacy of these debts, Hanoi had agreed to repay loans that had supported the U.S. war effort. Moreover, the government of Mr. Vo Van Kiet had also accepted to comply fully with the usual conditions (devaluation, trade liberalization, privatization, etc.) of an IMF-sponsored structural adjustment program.

These economic reforms, launched in the mid-1980s with the Bretton Woods institutions, had initiated, in the war’s brutal aftermath, a new phase of economic and social devastation: Inflation had resulted from the repeated devaluations that began in 1973 under the Saigon regime the year after the withdrawal of American combat troops(f.3). Today Vietnam is once again inundated with U.S. dollar notes, which have largely replaced the Vietnamese dong. With soaring prices, real earnings have dropped to abysmally low levels.

In turn, the reforms have massively reduced productive capacity. More than 5,000 out of 12,300 state-owned enterprises were closed or steered into bankruptcy. The credit cooperatives were eliminated, all medium and long term credit to industry and agriculture was frozen. Only short-term credit was available at an interest rate of 35 percent per annum (1994). Moreover, the IMF agreement prohibited the state from providing budget support either to the state-owned economy or to an incipient private sector.

The reforms’ hidden agenda consisted in destabilizing Vietnam’s industrial base. Heavy industry, oil and gas, natural resources and mining, cement and steel production are to be reorganized and taken over by foreign capital. The most valuable state assets will be transferred to reinforce and preserve its industrial base, or to develop a capitalist economy owned and controlled by Nationals.

In the process of economic restructuring, more than a million workers and over 20,000 public employees (of whom the majority were health workers and teachers) have been laid off(f.5). In turn, local famines have erupted, affecting at least a quarter of the country’s population(f.6). These famines are not limited to the food deficit areas. In the Mekong delta, Vietnam’s rice basket, 25% of the adult population consumes less than 1800 calories per day(f.7). In the cities, the devaluation of the dong together with the elimination of subsidies and price controls has led to soaring prices of rice and other food staples.

The reforms have led to drastic cuts in social programs. With the imposition of school fees, three quarters of a million children dropped out from the school system in a matter of a few years (1987-90)(f.8). Health clinics and hospitals collapsed, the resurgence of a number of infectious diseases including malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea is acknowledged by the Ministry of Health and the donors. A World Health Organization study confirmed that the number of malaria deaths increased three-fold in the first four years of the reforms alongside the collapse of health care and soaring prices of antimalarial drugs(f.9). The government (under the guidance of the international donor community) has also discontinued budget support to the provision of medical equipment and maintenance leading to the virtual paralysis of the entire public health system. Real salaries of medical personnel and working conditions have declined dramatically: the monthly wage of medical doctors in a district hospital is as low as $15 a month(f.10).

Although the U.S. was defeated on the battlefield, two decades later Vietnam appears to have surrendered its economic sovereignty to its former Wartime enemy.

No orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social destruction has unfolded. The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are undone and erased almost with a stroke of the pen.

Debt conditionality and structural adjustment under the trusteeship of international creditors constitute in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, an equally effective and formally nonviolent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment affecting the livelihood of millions of people.

Michel Chossudovsky is professor of economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2007 had supposedly asked ex-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd “how do you get tough on your banker?” This was over concerns about China’s growing power and hold on US finances and according to Wikileaks Rudd told Clinton to keep force as a last resort. Do the Chinese trust the Americans? As superpowers, both are wary of each other. The business of America has always been business, not friendship or the interest of others in mind except their very own. That is understandable. About the American hubris- I once read somewhere that hubris was the downfall of a Greek hero in some classical tragedy.

We are entering a new era- the era of a currency war that will test the might of the US economy and the dollar against the might of the Chinese economy and the yuan. The rope in the tug of war will be crude oil. The US economy based hegemony is being challenged by China and therefore it is naturally given that the US will try to maintain its global geopolitical and financial position. Between the giants, the global financial system could end up being completely redefined through a devastating war in the Middle East.

Some years ago I’d read a book “Petrodollar Warfare” by William Clark. The book was published in 2005 when the euro was a rising currency and China’s yuan was a distant dream. Clark had written that the rationale for intervening (in Iraq) was not just for control of oilfields, but also for the control of the means by which oil is traded in global markets. Saddam was deposed by the US and its Arab allies (who held US$ as their reserve currencies) because he refused to sell oil in US$ alone. The same fate was meted to Libya’s Gaddafi. Now Iran is in the American crosshairs not because it is purportedly developing a nuclear bomb which the CIA itself has denied but because it has been selling oil in several currencies from its Kish Island bourse. China is buying oil in international markets from countries that are willing to accept the yuan. Based on the US Energy Information (EIA), China in 2013 became the number two oil importer at 6.2 million bbls/day (MMBOPD), just slightly behind that of the US at 6.6 MMBOPD. Again, as per the EIA, China will become the largest importer of oil in 2014-15. Not only that but China’s oil production from overseas equity shares through acquisitions increased from a meagre 150,000 BOPD in 2005 to 2.7 MMBOPD in 2013.

China has been importing 52% of its crude oil from the Middle East (including 10% from Iran and 20% from Saudi Arabia) while on the flip side the US has reduced its imports from Saudi Arabia to 16% while the imports from Canada have been steadily increasing over the years. In 2010 US oil production was 9.7 MMBOPD and consumption was 19.2 MMBOPD. That balance changed in 2014 as oil production increased to 13.4 MMBOPD due to shale oil while consumption has actually decreased to 18.7 MMBOPD due to alternate energy and fuel efficiency. Net imports, therefore, further decreased in 2014 by 1.3 MMBOPD (source: EIA)

For over 40 years the US$ has been enjoying an unprecedented and guaranteed position as the world’s global currency reserve. In 1971, President Richard Nixon ordered the cancellation of the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold due to heavy inflation caused by the Vietnam war, trade deficit and the rising price of oil which made the dollar worth less than the price of gold used to back it from the Bretton Woods that all other currencies (including the British pound) to be indirectly linked to the gold standard wherein the Central Banks would trade gold among themselves at an agreed peg of US$35/ troy oz. Immediately after this, Nixon negotiated with Saudi Arabia that all oil prices would, in future, be denominated in US$s thus delinking from the metallic yellow gold standard to the fluid black gold standard in return for arms sales and protection. All thirteen OPEC countries including Iran adopted the sale of oil in US dollar. This allowed the US to export much of its inflation.

In January 2015, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) issued a paper titled Global dollar credit: links to US monetary policy and leverage outlining “that since the global financial crisis (of 2008), banks and bond investors have increased the outstanding US dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the United States from $6 trillion to $9 trillion (and up from $2 trillion in 2001). This increase due to quantitative easing (QE) by US Federal Reserve Bank has implications for understanding global liquidity and monetary policy transmission”. The report explores the horrifying and addictive scale of global debt in US dollars. In layman language the debt is a direct result of the US printing of dollars since 2008.

According to SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) China’s yuan became one of the world’s top five payment currencies in November 2014, overtaking the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar. Global yuan payments increased by 20.3 percent in value in December 2014. CIPS (China International Payments System) will also put the yuan on a more even footing with other major global currencies like the U.S. dollar, yen, pound sterling and euro. It is possible that in a few short years the yuan will share the same position with the dollar as the petrocurrency with the price of oil being quoted in both yuan and dollar. This will cause a massive migration of dollars to head back into the US from foreign countries and foreign investors resulting in hyperinflation.

Having explained the impact the yuan in a few years and global debt addiction due to the US QE policies, we turn our attention to the new CIPS to be launched by end of 2015 as an alternative to SWIFT which links more than 9000 financial institutions in over 200 countries for facilitating global currency transactions.As per a Reuters report of 9 March 2015“the launch of the CIPS will remove one of the biggest hurdles to internationalizing the yuan and should greatly increase global usage of the Chinese currency by cutting transaction costs and processing times”. Reuters mentioned that “CIPS will become the superhighway for the yuan”.

Under above scenarios, the 40 years of political and economic marriage of convenience between Saudi Arabia and the US would likely change. Iran could well emerge as the regional Middle East superpower and a close Chinese and Russian ally under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – a new OPEC with nuclear bombs as suggested in brevity by Professor David Wall in Matthew Brummer’s Journal of International Affairs The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Iran: A Power-Full Union. Could that well lead to World War 3 or history may refer to it as “the petrocurrency war”?

Gulam Asgar Mitha is a retired Techinal Safety Engineer. He has worked with several N. American and International oil and gas companies. He has worked in Libya, Qatar, Pakistan, France, Yemen and UAE. Currently Gulam lives in Calgary, Canada and enjoys reading and keeping in tune with current global political issues. Exclusive for ORIENTAL REVIEW.

“I found the Woolworths campaign to be vulgar, but to be honest I didn’t find it more distasteful and vulgar than a lot of other things which are going on in terms of commercialisation of Anzac and the use of the Anzac brand.”  These are the chosen words of former policy advisor to Australia’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Carolyn Holbrook on ABC’s 7.30 program.[1]  Anzac, the name associated with Australian soldiers who found themselves on Turkish beaches in April 1915 as part of Winston Churchill’s disastrous Dardanelles campaign, has become “Brandzac” over the years, a cavernous money pit of opportunity.

That pit is a means to capitalise on solemn occasions which insist on crass adventure and relaxation.  For the supermarket giant Woolworths, the slogan “Fresh in our Memories” was found wanting, marketing sprightly food produce alongside memories of Australia’s dead.  Purchase your regular round of fruit and veg, and keep the fallen at the forefront of your mind.  You, dear customer, will remember them.

Woolworths is hardly more questionable in its tactics than companies who market war for profit, seeing humankind’s perennial love of massacre as a business opportunity.  Brewing companies urge their customers to raise a toast to the soldiers.  Shirts, handbags and hats can be bought with an assortment of logos.  Purchasing poppies for the cause is encouraged.  In Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (2014), James Brown noted that, “a century after the war to end all wars, Anzac is being bottled, stamped and sold.”

It was ever thus.  Blood translates into money with ease, and the “digger myth” was always a lucrative standard to aim for.  Some months after the first Australians and New Zealanders fought at Gallipoli, food stuffs and other items found their way onto the market. This prompted the regulators to get busy, prohibiting the use of “Anzac” for “the purposes of any trade, business, calling, or profession”.[2]

The entire basis of Anzac is both a sentimental and commercial industry, whether it is initiated through maudlin state-directed enterprise, or the private sector.  The cultists of austerity, however, would wish to see it controlled by the long hands of government.  They would prohibit such images as that of a well-endowed Anzac poster girl holding a weapon and kneeling in khaki latex.  “I just thought that was basically Anzac porn, a new low in the commercialisation of Anzac,” fumed Holbrook.

All wars see instances of pornographic fancy, fashioning images to soften the home front while savaging the enemy.  Tits, bums and ravished nuns have seen their place.  The brandzac critics inadvertently tend towards a distinct brand themselves. Since states maintain sacred prerogatives of killing and sending citizens to be killed, it should hold a monopoly on sanguinary commemoration.  They will be the judges.

In line with such views, Woolworths was ultimately told to abandon a campaign deemed “inappropriate”. The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Senator Michael Ronaldson, asserted that the company “did not have permission” to milk the Anzac milch cow.  They might have done the good thing and asked.

Showing how the language police are in full swing, Senator Ronaldson reminded the company that, under the Protection of the Word Anzac Act, he “got to authorise the use of the word Anzac”, something that was not allowed for purely commercial benefit.[3]  This absurd pantomime has continued for decades – commercial benefit is dandy as long as it has ministerial blessing.

A range of penalties exist for misusing the name.  For an individual, it comes to a hefty $10,200.  For corporations, it’s five times that amount.  And there is a peculiar yet brutal 12 months imprisonment in the bargain.  While Anzac involves much disingenuous dribble on the issue of protecting some form of freedom, one earned by invading and killing the darker members of the human race, it is striking that liberty should be removed on the chance that the name was “misused”.

Other features of the regulatory mania over the word “Anzac” can be found in the guidelines of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.  “Anzac biscuits” with the approved recipe receive the nod of approval.  The same goes for the “Anzac Slice”.  However, making reference “to these products as ‘Anzac Cookies’ is generally not approved, due to the non-Australian overtones.”[4]

The Spartan defenders of the Anzac creed insist, instead, on a near incapacitating, high priest veneration.  What this involves is not clear, but presumably standing before the eternal flame in misty-eyed adoration about feats of heroism in the slaughterhouse might count.  We should all be Anzac subjects rather than cognisant citizens suspicious of warmongering.

The birth of the Anzac tradition did involve slaughter and defeat.  But it was a defeat received in the context of invasion, an attack on Ottoman Turkey that was fought back at huge cost to human life.  Few accounts ever bother about the obvious: that Australian soldiers performed what they have been doing decades before and since: invade a sovereign state in the name of some higher moral value, and clothe it in the fluffy reassurance of imperial virtue.

The Anzac legend, like all legends, is there to be vulgarised.  In its true, original sense, the common meaning of it is that held by the common people.  It is, as Brown has observed, a “military Halloween” equipped with absurd masks and retellings, pilgrimages and military tourism.  Anzackery is merely the outcome of yet another zombie myth of Australian military history.[5]

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

Notes:

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-15/critics-disgusted-by-vulgar-commercialisation-of-anzac-day/6395756
[2] http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2098132
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-15/rsl-responds-to-woolworths-fresh-in-our-memories-campaign/6393498
[4] http://www.dva.gov.au/commemorations-memorials-and-war-graves/protecting-word-anzac
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Zombie-Myths-Australian-Military-History/dp/1742230792

Much speculation abounds regarding China’s gold holdings.  They officially claim 1,054 tons as of April 2009.  We suspected they might “re” announce their holdings again last year at this time as it was five years after their last announcement and China has a habit of “five year plans”.  Alisdair Mcleod believes they have 20,000 tons or more which very well may be the case, I can easily make a case their holdings are far in excess of 10,000 tons just from the data since 2009.  In the words of our newest presidential candidate, “at this point, what difference does it make?”.  We’ll get to this shortly.

Before getting into the answer to this question, it might be better look at China’s “bubbles” first.   Money supply:

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As you can see, China’s money supply has gone from 30 trillion yuan to over 120 trillion yuan in 8 years.  The growth rate compounds out to about 18% annually.  The following chart shows their money supply growth slowing drastically, China will need to reflate soon!

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Now let’s look at China’s Shanghai stock market, another bubble.

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Their market has virtually doubled in over 90 days, is this “normal”?  Could this be a function of the market anticipating a reflation in money supply …or maybe a devaluation of the yuan versus a marked up gold price?  I’m not sure but putting their money supply together with market action tells me one of several things.  Money supply must begin to grow more rapidly soon, the yuan will need to be devalued or their market values are unjustified, something must give.  Add to this the fact China’s economy (maybe with slightly cooked numbers) is growing slower than any time in the last six years  and it becomes even more clear, China must do something soon.  It is my guess and has been for quite a while, China will pull a page from FDR’s playbook and revalue gold versus the yuan …and the yuan versus other currencies from top to bottom.

So, why exactly does it matter how much gold China has accumulated and what are the ramifications depending what the number is?  First, if the number comes in “large” (it will), it means China “likes gold” and believes it to be a worthy monetary reserve asset.  A large number would give gold China’s “stamp of approval” so to speak.

Next, we have the “mathematics” to the equation.  If the number comes in anywhere near 10,000 tons, the natural question then becomes “where oh where did it all come from”?  This is a VERY important question because as I’ve said many times before, gold can only come from current supply and also from above ground supplies in vaults.  We know the total annual global supply (ex China and Russia) is about 2,200 tons of which China has chewed up a very large percentage over the last six years.  Total global production has been 11,000 tons over the last six years, we know India and Russia have been importers, not to mention all the other geographical demand and jewelry.  A number even close to 10,000 tons will raise the question of “how?”, how could China have accumulated this much gold if the world is not producing enough to make the math work?  In other words, if China bought virtually all of the global supply, what was used to satisfy the rest of the world’s demand?

The answer is easy and so will be the reaction.  The gold MUST have come from Western vaults, namely N.Y. and London.  It would also explain the refineries working 24/7 to melt 400 ounce bars and create kilo bars …they were in fact heading to China!  The big questions will be “which vaults?” and then of course “who’s gold was it?”.  This really matters because a number of 10,000 tons or more would most likely mean the U.S. has dishoarded its gold …and/or sold gold which belonged to someone else.  It will bring up the rule of law if the gold is someone else’s, it will bring up Constitutional law if the gold came from Ft. Know, West Point or another depository.  Please remember that five years ago or so, gold on the market was turning up which had very similar, if not identical “fingerprints” to our own “coin melt” from the 1930’s.  To me, this was as big a telltale sign as gold turning up in 1989 with the “Czar’s stamp” on it.

As mentioned and illustrated above, China has not been immune to the bubblemania gripping the world.  They are living their own bubble and have exploded their own money supply yet now have the need to goose it again.  If this reverses and becomes an outright contraction, China will be faced with the same dilemma the U.S. was in 1932-1933, they will need to re price gold higher in an effort to devalue their currency and reflate their own system.  It is for this reason I believe they will “set” a price and bid for any and all gold similar to what FDR did when gold was revalued to $35.

A holding’s announcement and higher bid will do much for China.  It will cement their position of financial strength and also lock many buyers out …not to mention turn some holders into sellers.  Thus increasing China’s holdings even more.  The higher gold price will act as a “filler” for many of the losses China will surely take from paper financial holdings.  A higher gold price will be their internal financial penicillin assuring the financial wounds heal rather than spread and infect the entire body.  Quite oversimplified but please understand this has been the remedy many times before throughout history, either willingly or dragged by the ears!

The Houthi rebellion in Yemen that was already in existence more than five years ago had recently turned into a full-blown conflict that escalated into an international crisis in the first week of April of 2015 when Houthi rebels in Yemen deposed President Abed Rabou Mansur Hadi, throwing him out of the helm of Yemeni government. Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia while the Houthis effectively captured the capital Sana’a. Thereafter, Saudi Arabia, has initiated massive aerial bombings against the de facto Houthi government in Sana’a and in various strategic areas of Yemen that are now being occupied by the Houthi militia. 

 It is as clear as the midday sun that US plays a great role in Saudi’s armed interventionism in Yemen. It is indeed a wonder why Saudi Arabia and its allies against Houthis have not taken any confrontational military action against the ISIS of Iraq and Syria when the so-called “Islamic State” committed heinous crimes against Arabs and Kurds in these areas.

Saudi Arabian armed forces did not invade nor bother to bomb even one ISIS camp in Iraq, Syria and the Levant when the inhumanities that this so-called “Islamic State” has done and is still continuously inflicting up till now against Sunni Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Christians as well as against Yezidis were far more brutal, far more cruel and far more heinous compared to any acts committed by other rebel movements in the Middle East, Houthi rebels of Yemen included. It is very telling to note that America immediately and directly condones the undeclared war and unilateral military interventionism of Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, whereas US and Saudi Arabia did not do anything that can be construed as serious military operations against ISIS in Iraq, Syria and the Levant.

The reason why the USA is enthusiastically supporting the undeclared war of Saudi Arabia against the Houthi rebels in Yemen is clearly geopolitical: imperialistic design to control the politics and the economy of Yemen, and eventually the Gulf states in the Arabian Peninsula, by using Saudi Arabia as its more than willing proxy warrior.

The US strategic plan for the Middle East in general, and in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf countries in particular, is to exploit the volatile situation of the region, by initiating regime changes, by manufacturing dissent and by financing proxy wars so that the US can, in effect, hold each nation-state by their necks and thus realize its imperialistic intentions in these countries so that US can make these countries subservient to its hegemonic dream of controlling the geopolitics in this region (for example; military and economic control of the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea using military and tactical cooperation with US’ allied regimes in these regions) and controlling economic resources: fossil fuel being the foremost resource in these countries.

We can now observe that Yemen’s situation is truly hazardous from the point of view of international politics, and the ultimate result of this US-Saudi interventionism upon Yemen is indeed perilous for Yemen and for its people. It can be accurately predicted that US-Saudi interventionism in Yemen if absolutely successful, may have the same tragic results as that of present-day Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Afghanistan—these nations are now failed states, thanks to the unabashed and unabated US military intervention in these countries!

Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian and totalitarian theocratic monarchy. Despite of this, US continues to actively support Saudi monarchy even though the latter’s government is one of the most undemocratic dictatorships among nation-states in the entire Middle East! The sad truth is that US never cares to propagate democracy in the Middle East, contrary to what is being harped and proclaimed far and wide by the Western mainstream media outfits that are unthinking supporters of the already discredited CIA propaganda called “Arab Spring”.

The glaring proof that US is not interested in the democratization of the Middle East is the fact that the US supports the most corrupt and cruel dictators of the world: the dictators of the Middle East first and foremost—for so long as these tyrants actively support the continued US hegemonization in the region! And in return, these dictators and tyrants in the Middle East must pay absolute allegiance to US hegemony in order to be assured of US support against internal democratic movements within and domestic rebellions that are constantly besetting their totalitarian regimes.

The old adage, “it takes two to waltz or tango” proves to be an apt and veritable depiction describing the reciprocal, co-dependent, symbiotic yet parasitic relationship between US hegemony and the corrupt monarchs and dictators in the Middle East region.

Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu is Associate Professor-VI of Philosophy and Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines (UP), Cebu City. He was former Academic Coordinator of the Political Science Program at UP Cebu from 2011-2014. His research interests include Islamic Studies particularly Sunni jurisprudence, Islamic feminist discourses, Islamic philosophy, the writings of Al-Ghazali on tolerance and pluralism, Turkish Sufism and Public Theology. He can be freely contacted at his email address: [email protected].

We seem to have finally arrived at some sort of moment of truth regarding Greece and their inclusion in the EU.  The speculation is they will be out of money by April 9th, this Thursday, unable to make a less than 500 million euro payment.  Please keep in mind they have already been raiding the country’s pension plans to fund day to day services.  How large of a “dent” they have already made remains to be seen but that is not the point.  The point is this, any person, corporation or government who needs to dig into retirement savings for daily operations is like buying a carton of cigarettes with a credit card at 14.99% …and then carrying the balance!

Before laying out their potential options, please keep in mind that Mr. Varoufakis  was in New York this past weekend meeting with Christine Lagarde , Mr. Tsipras plans a trip to Moscow for Tuesday.  Are they pleading for unpaid bailout funds from the IMF?  And if they don’t get them, do they cut a deal and fall into Russia’s arms?  This, just as so many nations have pledged their allegiance to the East and the AIIB bank (topic for tomorrow), Greece may be forced into a pivot toward the rising Sun.  They do however have something left to offer, they stand between Turkey and Eastern Europe, they can provide a route for Russian gas to flow to Europe.

What options does Greece have left?  As I see it, they really only have three, and all with blurry edges.  First, they can cut some sort of deal with Germany (the EU) and the IMF.  They can kick the can down the road by extending maturities of existing debt and restructuring it.  The IMF still owes past monies pledged in bailouts, will they really throw new money away knowing it cannot be paid back?  Obviously this does nothing to face the real problem, Greece simply has too much debt for the size of their economy (this is a global problem but not “admitted yet”).  This option may have been taken off the table on Friday.  As a side note, it was reported Friday by Der Spiegel the IMF evacuated their Athens office.  Why would they do this?  I can only come up with one or two scenarios.  The IMF is giving up and know it is over … or, they are getting out of town while they still can.  Maybe they realize massive social unrest will be unleashed and don’t want to see their employees hanging from lamp posts?  This was denied by Saturday but interesting nonetheless!

Their second option is to just default.  If they cannot make debt payments, they simply don’t pay and thus become classified as a default.  The next question is whether or not they would stay in the EU?  Would they want to?  Or even be allowed to?  Option number three, an offshoot of number two, is Greece defaults and they decide to leave the EU (or are kicked out) and join team Russia.

My guess is we will see Greece default, leave the EU and cut a gas pipeline deal with Russia becoming a stepping stone for China’s “silk road”.  At this point, it’s the only thing that makes any sense …if you are Greek and try to do what is best for Greece.  A story also making the roundson Friday was preparations to re issue the “drachma” .  If this is true, I would say the decision to leave the EU has already been made except for the formalities!  The next question is the biggie, and one which will affect the entire world.  How do the markets and financial systems react to this?

Before exploring this, James Turk proposed a theory the Greek banks will be bailed in as their deposit balances slip down to equal the close to 100 billion Euros that Greece owes the ECB.  He believes this will be done within the next 10 days or so.  In my opinion, there is one big “IF” in this theory.  I would question whether or not the ECB or even the BIS would have the authority to do Cyprus style bail ins if Greece leaves or has already left the EU.  Wouldn’t this be a sovereign decision?  One made by the Greeks themselves?  If I were a Greek depositor, I wouldn’t however hang around to see how it turns out, I’m just not sure if the authority exists to bail in Greek banks?  Another story out over the weekend is Germany may be preparing to freeze deposits of wealthy Greeks, will the rest of Europe follow?

As a West Point graduate raised in the home state of history-rich Massachusetts, I was steeped in the glorious tradition of the Long Gray Line heralding this nation’s greatest military leaders. Knowing that since 1802 the US Military Academy has been producing so many of America’s most famous war heroes – Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower, I was both humbled and enthralled walking those same hallowed gray stone granite halls of one of this nation’s most honored and historic institutions of higher learning. Panoramic images of those steep, majestic banks along one of this country’s most iconic waterways the Hudson River located just fifty miles upstream from New York City will forever be etched in my own visual and visceral memory bank.

In a series of profiles featuring three distinguished fellow West Point graduates, I shall present the best of what West Point represents in leadership and service to our nation within the larger context and historical backdrop of their untimely tragic ends that expose America’s darkest underside. This first article will focus on the most recent fate befallen a national hero in John P. Wheeler III, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, former Army officer and longtime public servant who was murdered a little more than four years ago. His unknown killer or killers were never properly brought to justice. But the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding his death are extremely telling for what life in America has unfortunately become.

“Jack” Wheeler as his friends and family called this Texas born native son hailed from a long line of military professionals. His ancestor Joseph Wheeler was a general who served both with the Confederate Army during the Civil War and later the US Army during the Spanish American War. For a brief time his tank commander father was listed as missing in action at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. A “star man” ranking academically high within the top 5% of his West Point Class of 1966 that lost more than any other alumni class in Vietnam at thirty (Class of ’65 suffered 29 KIA’s), Jack was prominently featured in Rick Atkinson’s book The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966.

A year after graduation while still an Army lieutenant, Wheeler attended Harvard Business School earning a master’s degree in 1969. He then served a tour in Vietnam at Long Binh. In the final year of his five-year post-graduation commitment, Captain Wheeler was a member of the Pentagon’s General Staff. In 1971 he embarked on his first job as a civilian becoming a senior planner for Amtrak. After a year at Virginia Theological Seminary, Jack Wheeler attended Yale Law School and worked on the Yale Law Journal graduating in 1975. Already proving himself a dynamic young leader on the fast track to success, no doubt he was offered membership into Yale’s secret Skull & Bones society of which so many of America’s most powerful elite become card carrying lifelong members. Both US presidents Bush that Wheeler served under, along with the current Secretary of State John Kerry are all Skull & Bones Yale alumni. After law school Wheeler was hired as a clerk for prominent conservative DC Court of Appeals Judge George MacKinnon. After a stint in one major law firm, from 1978 to 1986 Jack Wheeler rose through the ranks at Wall Street’s Securities & Exchange Commission becoming its secretary in charge of conducting numerous investigations of insider trading abuse during his lengthy tenure.

For a decade from 1979 until 1989 Wheeler also worked feverishly as the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund fighting to finally establish designer Maya Lin’s controversial memorial wall as the US commemoration to the Vietnam War. At one point, a powerful senator even threatened to kill Wheeler for his stubborn, unyielding advocacy promoting the unconventional architectural landmark. His two most vocal critics were West Point’s archrival Annapolis grads, onetime third party presidential candidate and billionaire Ross Perot and Virginia Senator Jim Webb. It’s been said had it not been for Jack’s tenacious persistence, the wall listing all 58, 191 names of the American dead in Vietnam would’ve never happened.

Jack’s lifelong dedication and passion for seeking justice and support for the hapless US soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam was heroic. Those Americans who made it out alive once back home were literally spit on and spurned by the American public. As a West Point cadet during the last four years of America’s Vietnam War, I can attest firsthand to the ill treatment toward those of us in uniform during those tumultuous years of a divided America’s most unpopular, then longest running war in its history. I recall nearby Vassar girls attempting to literally rain on our parades spitting on us as we passed before the public in review. While on weekend passes I also recollect the rejection we shorthairs received in Big Apple’s Greenwich Village by our long haired hippie peers.

Of course a decade later ever since its 1982 unveiling, once Lin and Wheeler’s war memorial stood gracefully in place, daily drawing hundreds of profoundly moved, approving visitors to the nation’s most famous wall, and the memorial’s deep needed healing effect it’s had on both vets and the American public alike, not a peep of contempt was ever heard again from those once vociferous resistors.

As an Army officer, Jack wrote the US Department of Defense manual urging abstinence toward all use of chemical and biological warfare banned under the 1925 post-World War I Geneva Protocol and again reinforced in 1972 and 1993. Yet that’s rarely stopped hypocritical rogue states in their arrogance of exceptionalism like the US and Israel as the world’s most notorious violators from breaking international law at will, most recently using flesh burning white phosphorus in Fallujah, Iraq and tear gas on our own citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and free speech during the Occupy Wall Street movement and frequent public demonstrations right up to the present. Of course Israel has used poison nerve gas on Palestinians on numerous occasions with impunity. Recall that it was during the 1980’s Reagan administration that sent US made chemical weapons to then ally Saddam Hussein while he waged war against neighboring Iran, knowing Hussein would use it on his own people the Kurds as well as on Iran’s military that US intelligence provided Hussein with enemy troop movement.

The US Empire has been using Monsanto napalm to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of Asians in Japan during World War II, Koreans and Chinese in Korea and later the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians during the Vietnam War. US backed al Qaeda rebels fighting as Empire’s paid mercenaries in its proxy wars against Syria’s Assad and his allies Iran, Russia and China were guilty of attacks in 2013 that had war zealot Obama calling for preemptive air strikes on falsely blamed Syrian forces prior to Putin stepping in to perhaps save the planet from WWIII by brokering a last minute deal for Assad to turn over his cache of chemical weapons. Apparently the Saudi made and delivered chemicals that remained unused after that horrific Damascus suburb attack still retained in al Qaeda/ISIS’ possession was never disposed of. Such is the inconsistent double standard of phony and hollow moral high ground the US is constantly, feebly promoting in its dealings with the rest of the world. This issue of chemical weapons likely playing into Wheeler’s own murder will be taken up later.

Having served in three presidential administrations in both defense and military, as a career Washington insider, John Parsons Wheeler III became a Council on Foreign Relations member in October 2009. Also during his later years in public service, from 2005-2008 Wheeler worked as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne who happened to be his West Point classmate along with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Mosely. In June 2008 Wynne and Mosely became fall guys when they were both fired by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for the nuclear cruise missile scandal that took place the year before at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. Because Wheeler was a close confidante of so many powerbrokers in both the Pentagon and the federal government, he was very likely aware of the alleged insane neocon plan to secretly launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran.

Because authorization to move nuclear arms requires 14 signatures that go straight up to the commander-in-chief, six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads could never have been flown the length of the United States without direct clearance from Bush or Cheney. Because Cheney was always the sinister mastermind behind all the neocons’ crimes against humanity, speculation naturally leads to Vice President Cheney getting caught subverting the established chain of command that likely included bypassing Robert Gates and perhaps secretly ordering Wynne and Mosely to move six nuclear armed warhead missiles from North Dakota without proper security protocol or authorization mounted on a Boeing B-52 bomber wing that flew to Louisiana.

Another source insists that it was Wheeler’s boss the Secretary of the Air Force that learned of Cheney’s underhanded malevolence and abruptly terminated mostly the Air Force staff working at Minot. Cheney was said to be enraged when he found out. Based on its own sources Russian news agency Pravda also reported that the timing of this incident was right in synch with public statements made by both Bush and Cheney threatening outright nuclear war against Iran, strongly indicating that a false flag nuke attack of some sort was in the making. Cheney was reported to have even pressured Israel to attack Iran in hopes that it would retaliate and justify the United States launching a counterattack. This is how bloodthirsty Cheney is and was.

Apparently the nuclear weapons of mass destruction were left unguarded as the B-52 crew in North Dakota allegedly had no clue that nukes were even on board. The nuclear missiles ended up at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana before ground crew there identified nukes mounted on the wing. The illegal operation was publicly exposed by Air Force whistleblowers who leaked it to Military Times.

Several sources include one more piece of information that is the most disturbing development. The Air Force bomber left North Dakota with six fully loaded nuclear cruise missiles but by the time the ground crew in Louisiana accounted for the nuclear weapons, that number of missiles was only five. Somewhere along the way south, apparently another stop was made and one of those missiles was dropped off and is now supposedly unaccounted for. Implications of this added reality suggest another 9/11 possibility (only bigger) on another unsuspecting American city. The fact that the government’s always hyping up the possibility of another major terrorist attack only makes the lost nuke missile all the more plausible to be used against us at a later date.

As is typical when the government gets caught red-handed, lower ranking individuals were immediately reprimanded, 70 personnel in all, 5 were officers including the Minot base commander. Many of the key personnel involved suddenly and mysteriously began dying in “accidents or suicides” both prior and after the 29-30 August 2007 incident. Citizens for Legitimate Government claimed that six of the airmen that either loaded or transported the missiles within a week after the incident were found dead mostly from vehicle road accidents. It seems more likely that the USA crime cabal went on a serious killing spree designed to silence anyone who may have known about the covert operation, sending a clear message to others still alive to keep their mouth shut or wind up dead themselves.

Muddying the waters even further, most of the Minot staff were newly assigned just two months prior to the incident, and of course once the story broke, they were all scrambled immediately to other faraway assignments, of course with official reprimands in tow. Eventually punishment was meted out all the way up to the top Air Force General Mosely and his civilian boss the Secretary of the Air Force Wynne. But just like at Abu Ghraib several years earlier, the most powerful individuals responsible for the potentially catastrophic blunder to begin with – Bush and/or Cheney – again got away with treason. And then after it was all said and done, the Air Force simply admitted it made an error and the whitewash was never further questioned or taken up by Congress. Again, it smacks of blatant cover-up from the White House on down.

Corroborating both the Russian news agency and widespread speculation, according to journalist Wayne Madsenspeaking with inside sources, the only reason the nuclear attack on Iran was aborted was courageous Air Force staff refused to carry out the White House’s demonic mission. Hence just like Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone and his family were assassinated in October 2002 after his refusal to endorse the “WMD” war against Iraq shortly after Cheney threatened him with “severe ramifications,” so were a number of Air Force personnel apparently whacked by the DC crime syndicate once they refused to obey the order coming from “the devil” himself as Hugo Chavez accurately labeled Bush. Apparently nuclear weapons capable of taking out cities the size of Chicago or Houston or countries like Iran were in process of being launched in 2007. How scary is that? Yet more treasonous war crimes that Bush and Cheney and company need to be held accountable for at The Hague.

It was highly probable that Cheney in his final VP days as Dr. Strangelove, not unlike the Chiefs of Staff’s Operation Northwoods in 1962 that Kennedy put the kybosh on, was diabolically about to perpetrate yet another heinous false flag crime – this time a nuclear annihilation perhaps of an American city to conveniently blame on Iran or a direct preemptive strike on Iran. Operation Northwoods proved that psychopathic powerbrokers in our own federal government are willing to sacrifice American lives here at home in their lust for war against targeted enemies, be they Cuba, Russia, Iraq, Iran or any nation that stands up to the global executioner.

Of course the inside 9/11 job only tragically confirmed that treasonous fact when the globalist neocon crime syndicate posing as US feds murdered 3000 innocent Americans so that US Empire could launch its forever “war on terror.” Eight years ago with those missing nukes, the US doing Israel’s bidding even then was accusing Iran of closing in on nuclear weapons. And of course nearly a decade later the Israeli-US crime cabal has only grown from bad to worse in its global evildoing, imposing ever stiffer economic sanctions on Iran while beating the war drums steadily louder. In fact the now four year war in Syria and the current expanding war in Yemen are just more US-Israel-Saudi evil of axis efforts to carry on proxy wars against Iran and its allies Russia and China. The diabolical endgame of the globalist controlled US Empire never ends until life itself.

After refusing to sign 1970’s international nuclear nonproliferation treaty, Israel hypocritically stole secrets from the US and Russia as well as received covert US assistance to criminally develop its own nuclear arsenal. Because it never happened in 2007, to this day Netanyahu is still frothing at the mouth to destroy Iran. And even as Obama signs the current nuke deal with Iran, Obama is placating his crime boss Netanyahu by not ruling out war with Tehran. In an overt attempt to egg Obama on, ex-Bush neocon war lover John Bolton published a recent angry op-ed piece in the New York Times demanding “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” Meanwhile, perennial warmonger and Annapolis grad John McCain is urging Israel to launch a preemptive war against Iran and the new US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is claiming the US might still bomb Iran even if the peace agreement’s signed. And as evidenced by last month’s treasonous unconstitutional misdeeds of the Israeli controlled US government, virtually all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress dance to the Netanyahu tune of World War III in its frenzy to get reelected as well as go to war on Iran and war against nuclear powered Russia over Ukraine.

All this suicidal madness based on outright lies continues spewing forth from our leaders in spite of repeated confirmation by Western inspectors backed by both US and Israeli intelligence community in recent years assuring that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. Even a Council on Foreign Relations article a week ago quoting Obama’s intelligence guru and known perjurer James Clapper reiterated that Iran does not presently have nor is planning in the future to develop nuclear weapons.

Until he resigned in 2008, much of the late John Wheeler’s work with the Air Force centered on developing a sound cyber defense system for the nation as well gain the edge on the all-important cyber warfare game. Jack Wheeler was tasked with providing Precision Strike technology and Real Time Streaming Video that targeted links to US ground combat troops. One such targeting video link accessed by Private Bradley Manning that captured war atrocities being committed by US soldiers in Iraq was turned over to WikiLeaks.

Recognized as a renowned technical expert within his field, Wheeler had to have also been privy to the United States illegally releasing the Stuxnet virus in 2009 and 2010 infecting Iranian computers. Initially it was believed to derail Iran’s capacity for centrifuge development to produce enriched uranium that in turn posed an estimated two year setback to Iran’s nuclear capability plans. However, a more recent study published two years ago in a British journal maintains that the Stuxnet worm alerted Iran to its internal vulnerabilities that it would never have detected and corrected so soon. The British journal asserted that the Stuxnet actually sped up the Iran’s nuclear development. Thus the devious warfare tactic backfired on the US Cyber Command that had been taken over by the PT Barnum of the cyber world, another cadet a year behind me I went to school with, former NSA director General Keith Alexander. Having developed the Air Force Cyber Command which was the first branch of military service to actually have one, Jack held some reservations about the NSA’s methods. Among his final emails Jack criticized the country for its lack of preparation for cyber-attacks, writing, “In cyberspace and on power grid, US is standing around in boxer shorts.”  Again, clearly he was not happy with NSA director Alexander’s Cyber Command.

Upon retirement from federal service in 2008, Jack Wheeler received the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award. From June 2008 up to his assassination on New Year’s Eve 2010, Jack was employed as a consultant for the defense contractor MITRE Corp. The company website specifies that it involves “aviation system development, defense and intelligence, federal sector modernization and homeland security.” MITRE also works with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or otherwise known as drones. As a firm involving trade and national security secrets involving top clearance, MITRE is also prone to attracting moles from Mossad as well as CIA.

In short, Jack Wheeler developed a career long expertise in state of the art cyber technology as related to cyber, chemical and biological weapons systems. He knew all aspects and functions of military and defense operations within multiple highly classified agencies of the federal government. Wheeler was a valued repository of unlimited top secret information involving the most covert US government operations and project developments spanning a full half century. His wide and versatile breadth of experience and knowledge ranged from defense contracts to cyber-security initiatives, UAV technology, insider trading, Wall Street and the SEC, transactions involving Boeing, the Pentagon and all the shady ins and outs of the Bush crime family having worked for both presidents. As such, he had inside track of the darkest, most destructive side of how US Empire operates, targeting nations, governments and people for predatory exploitation and all too frequent elimination.

No doubt Jack increasingly grew somewhat conflicted about where he saw his government and nation was headed. As an honorable and good man with a conscience surrounded by psychopathic sharks, Jack assuaged some of his mounting guilt by throwing himself into dozens of charitable causes and organizations over the many years. He especially remained active in his tireless efforts to improve the lives of his fellow veterans and those less fortunate. Jack was also chairman and CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), the founding CEO of the Vietnam Children’s fund and President, CEO of the Deafness Research Foundation from 1997 to 2001 and a host of other benevolent societies and organizations.

John Wheeler was also an avid, bigtime emailer to close friends and family. His final emails were to his lifelong West Point classmate and friend Art Schulcz, who stated as of 5:10 PM on December 28^th, two and half days prior to his murder, Jack Wheeler was as sharp as ever and fully in control of all his faculties. The email in question expressed Jack’s frustration of how NCAA sports had become all about money and how his alma mater’s football team “should pull out of the fraud-ridden NCAA.” His classmate added, “Jack was passionate about certain things, like right and wrong and honor.” Schulcz mentioned it was very unusual for Jack not to return his message onDecember 29^th.

Another classmate and sophomore roommate, General Bob Scales, interviewed on Fox News emphasized how a couple days prior to Wheeler’s death the images from the Wilmington parking lot garage of a highly disheveled, disoriented, lost man shuffling back and forth holding one shoe in his hand was not the man he knew. Scales described Jack as a brilliant, kind, mild-mannered, empathic gentleman. His former Air Force boss and classmate Michel Wynne said Jack was passionate about everything he immersed himself in, even to the point of becoming agitated and frustrated when in disagreement with others, “but he was always compassionate. His determination was bulldozer-like and always for the little guy.”

Katherine Klyce was Jack’s second wife who he was married to for over thirteen years. She has her own Cambodian silk import business in New York City and spends time living in their Harlem apartment and sharing their Colonial home in historic, upscale New Castle, Delaware, an hour and a half outside DC. Jack worked mostly in Washington and Wilmington, Delaware frequently commuting to work by Amtrak. The couple spent Christmas 2010 in New York. But on December 27^th Jack told her he had business to attend to in Washington and left early the next morning on the train south. Klyce was angry at him because she had been looking forward to spending the entire holiday week together with a cousin’s wedding to attend in Boston on New Year’s Eve, the same day Wheeler’s body was found falling out of a garbage truck into the land fill dump in Wilmington. The coroner concluded that Jack Wheeler died from a blunt force wound to his head. After several calls to Jack that went straight to his voice mail, Katherine Klyce went to the wedding alone. It wasn’t until she returned to New York that Jack’s daughter from an earlier marriage came to her home on January 2^nd and gave her the tragic news in person.

In subsequent interviews Katherine verbalized her upset with the local Delaware police. She complained that they were rude, uncommunicative and not making any effort or progress toward finding the murderer. As weeks dragged on with still no clues or forthcoming information, Jack’s wife wavered back and forth between thinking it was some random act of violence to concluding it must have been a professional hit. But as weeks became months, especially after the family offered $25,000 to anyone who could help bring the killer to justice, when no one came forward, she concluded the killer must have already gotten paid for his work as a hired assassin.

And Katherine’s right. It was most likely a botched, unprofessional hit gone bad. Jack was never supposed to be discovered the next morning in that Wilmington landfill. It was anything but clean with the victim walking around town for two days looking perturbed, disturbed, dazed and confused. He more than likely had been drugged up, beaten up, and eventually banged up so brutally in the fragile skull he couldn’t survive. The poor tormented man knew he was in danger and was in fear for his life by the time he was wearing the hood over his face not wanting to be identified or seen just prior to his murder. It’s a shameful cheap shot to denigrate this honorable man with thatparking lot video, using his bipolar disorder to write him off as simply another lost cause who went bonkers off his meds. It’s exactly what his assassin killers want us to think. And if we think that, the murderers have won, and gotten away with murder. Jack Wheeler deserves better.

It seems the police are being too tight lipped, not disclosing any info whatsoever about Jack’s business dealings in DC as well as in Wilmington where his lawyer’s office is located. He ran with very powerful beltway insiders that no doubt know more than they or the cops are letting on. Of course they may be too afraid to talk knowing Jack’s powerful enemies are still free to come after them should they reveal too much. Sad that some of his friends and colleagues are likely unwilling to volunteer important, possibly crucial truth that might lead to his killer(s).

Another disgraceful cheap shot was dismissing Jack as a sore loser neighbor resorting to desperate and vengeful petty crime with so called sightings of a man that vaguely fit his physical description throwing smoke bombs into the unwelcomed house under construction across the street. And then to claim his cell phone was found at the scene of the crime, look how low the murderers will go to defame the poor man of his greatness and dignity in death. Again, the evil guilty party always conjures up deceitful slanderous ways to smear the character of those who are ethical and honest. These low life, shameless tactics only rub salt into the wounded hearts of those who loved and knew the man.  Both they and Jack Wheeler deserve better than the scum who destroyed him.

What makes this case even more frustrating is the fact that other than offering token “technical support” as needed to the local police, the FBI chose to never become involved in any homicide investigation. A man with such a high profile that plenty of others may have motivation to silence based on the dirt he may have known about them should automatically draw the FBI to take over the case, that is if they really wanted to solve the murder, which appears they don’t. Throw in the fact that this American hero gave so much of himself to his country and those less fortunate and always seemed to have the genuine desire to enrich the lives of others, then ethically and morally the man deserves to bring the evildoers that did him in to their due justice. For him and his family and friends’ sake, they deserve so much better. The guilty murderer(s) need to pay for their horrific crime.

Obviously law enforcement is concealing lots of evidence. Wilmington and Newark both have lit up streets andcameras on every block. Virtually all his apparent aimless wandering around town had to be captured on video. Certainly from the cameras alone the cops should have come up with some tangible and concrete leads. It’s unacceptable and reprehensible that the police are withholding key evidence that should facilitate catching the criminals.

Then about a day before he died, the killers went to Jack’s home searching for something they didn’t find earlier when they stole his briefcase, roughed him up and drugged him, even to the point of tearing up the floorboard in his house. The bad guys knew Jack had something they wanted that could incriminate them. His ransacked home had nothing to do with robbery just as his gold plated West Point ring and watch were still on his possession when his body was discovered at the landfill.

Perhaps the most explosive assertions made to explain the US government’s motive for assassinating Jack Wheeler came from the European Union Times just days after his death. As a biological and chemical weapons expert from his earlier military days, and consulting with his current firm MITRE that contracts with aerosol chemtrail companies, Wheeler was likely called back from his holiday in New York to respond to an extremely disturbing ongoing crisis at Pine Bluff Arsenal in central Arkansas where a highly poisonous chemical called Phosgene was leaking profusely from a large tanker transport plane.  Apparently on back-to-back days there was enormous spillage killing over 4,000 birds one day and then the next killing more than 100,000 fish in the Arkansas River. Of course even possessing chemical weapons at all was against international law. It apparently had been transported to Iraq for possible use in that war and efforts to remove it from Iraq and bury it underground at the Arkansas arsenal caused over 500 minor earthquakes disturbing the nearby residents in the area.

So as an irresponsible, deceitfully desperate measure to dispose of the killer toxin, the US was criminally dumping it from Iraq to Afghanistan. The international regulatory agency caught wind of this and Russia’s Putin called US out on its careless endangerment to life forms and habitats. Because Wheeler saw what napalm did to his fellow soldiers and especially Asian victims in Nam, and was strongly opposed to harming more humans and animal life, the man with a conscience went to Washington to confront the higher-ups in both the government and Pentagon, actually threatening to publicly expose the evil US practice of indiscriminant killing of earthly life and habitat. And for this noble, brave and righteous action Jack Wheeler likely paid the ultimate price.

There exists some circumstantial evidence that the hit man hired to neutralize Jack was Andrew Robert Levene. A criminal con man, thief and murderer, Levene was an acquaintance of Jack Wheeler. The guy tried to pass himself off as a Special Forces Ranger though his military records show he got booted out of the Army in four months. However, if he had actually been recruited as a CIA asset and goon, his records could have been purposely doctored. He came from a very affluent family and lived his life lavishly far above his means, repeatedly ripping off investors in bad real estate deals in multiple locations in the States. That he may have been recruited to assassinate Wheeler for a sizeable cash bonus that helped him pay off some pressing legal debts that enabled him to move with his wife and children to Barcelona, Spain appears plausible. And it’s public record that he occasionally had face-to-face contact with Jack around the time of his death. Moreover, it’s on record that about that time Levene did pay off some of his debts and did leave the country not long after Jack’s murder.

Even more incriminating is a credit card charge of two airline tickets to Spain that showed up on Jack’s wife’s monthly bill also matching both near the time Jack died as well as when Levene traveled with his wife to Spain. And perhaps the strongest evidence of all that Andrew Levene may have been Jack’s hired killer is that Levene was actually arrested for murder of a New York City jeweler having stolen diamonds and while in custody in Barcelona, Levene is said to have committed suicide. But obviously if the real person in power who wanted Jack dead hired the incompetent killer Levene to do his bidding, then it definitely could have been arranged to silence Levene early on while in custody before he had the chance to spill the rotten beans.

Too often in America the justice system is grossly unjust, and like every other system in this criminal nation, it’s so broken and corrosive, run by soulless, heartless psychopaths, what else can be expected? And for that reason alone, the corrupt FBI that’s part of the international crime syndicate will not get involved because the person or persons responsible for Jack’s murder are so powerful that their power permits them to live above the law. The sinister force behind Jack’s untimely death has effectively stonewalled this case from ever being solved. That of course would also explain why no progress or information is coming from the local police as well. Police state America is only beholding to the globalists that control their law enforcement henchmen. The same reason why those Air Force loaders and flyers of that outlawed contraband began dying is why Jack was also slain. They all got in the way of the powers-that-be who are merely protecting their own high stakes by eliminating all potential incriminating evidence. Killing a few innocent victims poses far less risk to the crime syndicate than getting caught wiping out an entire city or nation.

It’s worthy of a closer examination of the people who make up the non-profit MITRE Corp. that was Jack Wheeler’s final employer and what other elite globalist organizations its employees belong to like Jack’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) , the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones, and Freemasons that typically run the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the IRS, the FBI, the DEA, the Food & Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Association, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and on and on it goes. Political ideology is meaningless. The international crime syndicate acting as our de facto national government (virtually the same now in all Western nations) is one monolithic, interlocking matrix of shadowy think tanks, co-opted elitist universities, political action committees and lobbying organizations, the public face stooges and puppets in Congress, the executive and judicial branches, the military, and corporate management are all controlled by a handful of oligarch families who own everyone and everything on earth there is to own and control. This 1% of the richest owning more than the 99% of the rest of us combined are running this lawless, evil, decaying, broken down, unsustainable system on the brink of total collapse that we humans presently find ourselves stuck with in twenty-first century earth life.

As an example of how this system works, since 1986 right up until his death a year ago, the Chairman of the Board of MITRE was former CIA Director-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger who had such weighty clout in the inner circle NWO power club that he could easily contact his buddy whose the head of FAA in order to get exemptions so that the little Oregon company called Evergreen International Aviation owned by Delbert Smith until he died a few months ago could spray regular routes of toxic chemtrail metals at irregular times down on us. Of course when the old guy passes the next card carrying elitist takes his place in line. In this case Schlesinger was replaced by former Virginia senator and governor and husband to President Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird. Just like European or Saudi royalty, power’s always kept in the family so to speak.

Since MITRE has a CIA no bid contract, every interlocker plays the game called “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” So that the chemtrail company can do its thing, it receives exemptions from MITRE’s working relationship with the FAA, Defense Department and Homeland Security. And how convenient that MITRE and the CIA are headquartered in the same upscale town of McLean, Virginia. Several weeks ago current CIA Director John Brennan was introduced by CFR-Bilderberg-Trilateral Commission member media guy Charlie Rose to speak at the Council on Foreign Relations attended by old NWO lifer himself Henry Kissinger. Birds of a feather flock together in an insulated, stratified, hierarchical system that’s all self-serving for its elite players only. Though Americans tend to delude themselves into believing there’s no rigid caste or class system here in the United States, in fact the global debtor-based feudal system that’s enslaving all of us now is every bit a rigid caste system if there ever was, except there’s only two classes, the 1% haves and the 99% have-nots. We 99%-ers as outsiders are so far removed from the elitist inner power sanctum that we’re simply viewed as the elite’s expendable victims to be used up, all the while dying either slowly from the NWO’s soft and/or dying fast from their hard kill eugenics plan. Not a lot of choice.

Finally, John Parsons Wheeler III was a good guy locked in a bad guy system. His conscience was getting to him and he was not going to look the other way anymore. In a club of psychopaths, there’s no room for humans with a heart, compassion and integrity. Once you’re an inner club member, and retain what makes you still human, if you insist on making waves, the all-powerful, self-purging system will simply eliminate you. Since it’s run by sub-human criminals only for sub-human criminals, actual humans will not usually last long. And since Jack Wheeler was such a good man for all his 66 years, in the psychopathic domain of elitist power, only the good die young.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/.

Anyone with a brain could have told you back in 2011 at the time of the Fukushima nuclear triple meltdown that Tokyo Electric (Tepco) was lying about the true condition of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1 (“Dai-ichi”). Four years later, Tepco officials have finally admitted that it may not be technologically possible to decommission the plant.

The long history of the criminal insanity and negligence of the nuclear industry is revealed in our book, Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization? (edited by Nadesan, Boys, McKillop & Wilcox) which was published last year, and includes detailed chapters from a number of writers who document the nuclear crimes.

In the case of Tepco (Tipkill), the facts are overwhelming that not only was Fukushima an “accident waiting to happen” but rather “a foregone conclusion.” The location of the plant on soft fill soil at a low altitude near the ocean in a tsunami zone was the first big mistake of the planners, who must have graduated from the Homer Simpson school of donutology. Cost-cutting, corruption and incompetence is part of the well-documented history, which ultimately led to the triple meltdowns.

Will the destroyed reactors ultimately need to be buried in a sarcophagus as has been done with Chernobyl which now has the world’s largest moveable “building” covering it (at no small expense)? One big problem — Chernobyl was just one reactor and rests on rock-solid ground, so the radiation can’t go too far downward. At Fukushima the reactors rest on a mushy place next to the ocean which is also atop an underground aquifer/river deep below it. It is theoretically possible that the radiation could leak into that aquifer and reach Tokyo someday.

If they have to build a sarcophagus it will be Mission Impossible since the shielding would have to be underground as well. Nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen proposed this as the only solution and noted a complicated underground piping system would have to be installed to process the leaking radiation before it escapes to the ocean. He also said it may take 500 years to decommission Fukushima.

Now, some of the big-wigs at Tepco have admitted it may be impossible to decommission Fukushima due to the technical hurdles, namely, that retrieving the melted fuel is going to take years to accomplish since the technology does not yet exist (1; 2). Decommissioning Fukushima will involve a great deal of time and money, but also intelligent coordination of R&D, which has thus far not been the path. Bureaucracies, as everyone knows, do just the opposite, they wallow in inefficiency. Maybe Japan needs a strong and benevolent dictator.

One of the main technical problems with retrieving the melted fuel is that it must constantly be cooled in water, but the containers are full of holes and leaks. However, as our friend Nancy Foust of the Simply Info website points out, “the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID) already includes a ‘no water’ option in their rough planning. If that is the route they will have to go then they will need to put all their effort into that research” (personal communication, April, 2015).

Focusing effort into the right research is good advice, however IRID also made the dubious claim that the fuel could be retrieved within ten years which contradicts the pessimism of other officials and draws into question IRID credibility. Somebody ought to get the story straight.

The level of BS at Fukushima is almost as deep as how far the fuel may have melted underground. One scenario from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) describes the melted fuel in a state whereby it “erodes sideways…. The final size of the pooling maximum case is 10 to 15 meters in diameter, and 6-7 meters deep– or even deeper” (3).

Fukushima Diary reports that “Tepco and the government of Japan have been saying though molten fuel had a core-concrete reaction in [the] pedestal, but [has] stopped sinking in the concrete.” Now Tepco is starting to admit the fuel may be “outside of [the] pedestal, Tepco needs to investigate the sub-basement floor of Reactor 1. It is reported that the feasibility of inspection would be confirmed in the end of 2015” (4). Maybe they are now getting ready to admit it is indeed outside the concrete floor.

Foust told me that the location of the fuel could have been determined back in 2012 using “muon” cosmic ray scanners. Apparently this was not done because Homer Simpson, who is in charge of Fukushima decommissioning, spent the funds on donuts.

Seriously, not only is this a kind of gross incompetence (which is reminiscent of the way nuclear operations have been carried out throughout most of the world since the technology was adopted) but also appears to be a blatant political cover-up. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) want to keep news of the actual location of the fuel secret until after they have restarted a number of the currently idled reactors in Japan. Politicians lie, governments lie, corporations are amoral killing machines. Abe even admitted he lied to the Olympic committee in order to get the 2020 Olympics bid when he told them “everything is under control” at Fukushima.

Could it be these admissions by Tepco of the dire situation are part of a psychological conditioning to get more money out of the government? One should never take statements from powerful individuals or governments/corporations at face value. On the other hand, the new chief of decommissioning, Mr. Masuda, may be a more honest and intelligent engineer and sincere about getting at the problem.

Foust provides us with a useful overview and summary of the sorry situation:

At some point the true state of Daiichi will have to be made public. The true state must be known and understood in order to do the needed research towards whatever resolution is determined to be the end goal. Right now that is fuel retrieval so the buildings could eventually be torn down. The muon scans are a step in that direction. They can use those to establish if any fuel is left in the reactors or not. If you remember back to 2011 TEPCO was insisting that most of the fuel was still in the reactor vessels. As more data is completed TEPCO is forced to admit reality.

The next step after the muon scans for units 1-3 is to put the Hitachi shape changing robot into containment. If that goes as planned it will tell them where the fuel is, or isn’t. That is going to be the huge bit of data. Once the fuel is located and disclosed the extent of the meltdowns will have to be admitted. IMHO this is why LDP is so intent on getting reactors restarted right now.

What is problematic in all of this is that TEPCO is still involved. Because TEPCO is involved and also ultimately responsible for the bill for the entire mess, it is a conflict of interest. They want to deal with the problem but as cheaply as possible. You can’t have a challenge of international proportion and a self serving company who only cares about profits. TEPCO has a documented habit of taking concepts put forth by contractors or outside researchers then trying to do them on the cheap. Then the project doesn’t perform as planned and the money is wasted. The holding ponds are a perfect example of that.

Some of these efforts really are experiments. Nobody has tried these things before in this context. So it should be expected that some things won’t work as hoped right out of the box, some might need adjustments. But when you add TEPCO cost cutting to that challenge is becomes very problematic.

As far as the condition of the reactors. We had a pretty good idea in 2011 about what took place in the three melted down units. TEPCO won’t admit the possibility of something until there is no denying it so it is a slow process of enough evidence that some facet can no longer be ignored.

I must remind readers that alternative energy is viable, it is here and now. Even Forbes magazine published an article by the world’s leading alternative energy expert, Amory Lovins, proving irrefutably that Japan could be a rich source for solar and wind power which could significantly diminish the need for carbon let alone nuclear energy sources.

Ultimately nuclear power is rooted in the liberal ideology of unleashing nature’s potential as an inevitable process of human development. However, as Russia’s leading political philosopher, Alexander Dugin points out, “liberalism” in its truest form leads to the ultimate destruction of humanity: by replacing traditions with corporate hegemony; by replacing nature with artificial reality; and by replacing humans with robots (transhumanism) (5).

It could be argued that the wind and sun are natural sources of energy in keeping with his conservative ideology. In that sense, Dugin states correctly:

If you are in favor of global liberal hegemony, you are the enemy.

References 

1. Decommissioning Chief Speaks Out
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/features/201503312108.html

2. Japan faces 200-year wait for Fukushima clean-up
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bfGJG7i7o0gJ:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article4394978.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

3. AP: Melted fuel may have “dropped even beyond” the bottom of Fukushima plant
http://enenews.com/ap-melted-fuel-could-dropped-beyond-bottom-fukushima-plant-iaea-expert-pools-corium-could-be-taller-2-story-house-video 

4. Tepco started stating molten fuel might be out of pedestal of Reactor 1
http://fukushima-diary.com/2015/04/tepco-started-stating-molten-fuel-might-be-out-of-pedestal-of-reactor-1/

5. Alexandr Dugin – The Fourth Political Theory
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2015/03/RIR-150327.php

Richard Wilcox is a contributing editor and writer for the book: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization? (2014) and a Tokyo-based teacher and writer who holds a PhD in environmental studies. He is a regular contributor to the world’s leading website exposing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Rense.com, and a regular contributor to Activist Post. His radio interviews and articles are archived at http://wilcoxrb99.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].

Germany, France and Italy follow Britain’s lead in announcing plans to join a new, $50 billion China-led development institution that could rival the World Bank. Despite pressure from Washington, major U.S. allies have agreed to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, known as AIIB.

Interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

This tiny and impoverished Southeast Asian state is ever more becoming the geopolitical fulcrum for the entire mainland region. Combining close political relations to Vietnam with historical ties to Thailand, Laos is literally in the middle of ASEAN’s two strongest mainland states. 

Vientiane understands the geopolitical sway that it yields, and it’s thus tried to maintain a friendly balance between these two main actors while simultaneously increasing its importance as it prepares to inevitably pick a preferred partner.

Laos’ pivotal position in mainland ASEAN has attracted the attention of neighboring China, which has identified its best opportunity yet to establish a concrete foothold right in the heart of ASEAN. China’s moves in Laos are indicative of a much grander strategy, however, which aspires to deepen Chinese-Thai relations, counter Vietnam, and potentially even ‘flip’ Cambodia from Hanoi’s influence. If successful in any of these three ambitions, then this would represent a strategic victory for China’s ASEAN-directed pushback against the US’ Pivot to Asia and transform the geopolitical balance in Eurasia between Washington and Beijing.

Part I begins with a brief background on Laos and its ties to the region’s three principal actors – Thailand, Vietnam, and China. After that, it explores the energy and physical infrastructure projects in the country that are becoming pivotal factors in the region. The second part of the article connects all of the previous information together by describing China’s grand strategy, and it concludes with the two expected means which the US is expected to employ in blocking China’s coordinated breakout from the American-directed Pivot to Asia containment bloc.

A Little About Laos

This small former French colony is populated by around 6.7 million people, mostly concentrated on the Mekong River along the extreme Western border with Thailand. Laos’ untapped mineral wealth in copper, gold, potash, and iron ore, et al, makes it a valuable future supplier for the growing economies next door, each of which is eager to tap into its virgin mines. Additionally, Laos is the only Southeast Asian country to have five neighbors, thus giving it the potential to be “land-linked, not land-locked”.

Such a position didn’t always work out to its advantage in the past, since it was at times incorporated into or under the tributary of its larger and more powerful Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese neighbors. Other times, however, it was able to capitalize off of its location and strengthen its independence, as it did with the historical kingdom of Lan Xang. In the contemporary era, it appears as though the latter trend is on the upswing, but before addressing Laos’ two pivotal power plays that can shake up ASEAN’s continental arrangement, let’s look a bit more at Laos’ position within it:

Thailand:

Laos and Thailand share a long history and are thus culturally and linguistically close to one another. The two people were split during the period of French colonization and Paris’ occupation of modern-day Laos from Siam in 1893, and this fracture was exacerbated by the political antagonisms of the Cold War period. After the monarchy was overthrown in 1975 following a decades-long communist insurgency and an equally long unsuccessful CIA war to prop it up (which saw the US turn the country into the most heavily bombed in history), Laos hosted fellow Vietnamese communist forces that were hostile to Thailand, thus leading to a freeze in relations between the two formerly fraternal states. Both sides supported regime change elements against the other, and a brief border war exploded in 1987-1988. The end of the Cold War brought about a renaissance in relations, and the Australian-financed Thai-Laos Friendship Bridge became the first of a total of four similar projects linking the civilizational cousins across their Mekong River divide.

Vietnam:

Hanoi’s influence over Laos extends as far back as the early 1950s when the Pathet Laocommunist movement was created inside Vietnam. It was essentially under Hanoi’s direct control until its eventual victory in 1975, after which it allowed Vietnam free reign over the country’s affairs, including the stationing of troops. On paper at least, these were withdrawn in 1989, but Vietnam’s military still has close cooperation with its Laotian counterparts, showing that the common revolutionary struggle between them has not been lost throughout the post-Cold War years.Vietnam is currently the second-largest foreign investor in Laos, and the two sides havepledged to carry relations even further. It’s expected that the Thailand-Vietnam railroad traversing Laos will be a key component in actualizing this goal, since it symbolizes an understanding by both sides of Laos’ geostrategic goal in facilitating interregional trade.

China:

Finally, the last major regional influence in Laotian affairs is China, although constructive relations between the two are a relatively new phenomenon. Scarcely any tangible ties existed prior to the Pathet Laos’ victory in the Laotian Civil War, but after that occurred, the Vietnamese pressured their Laotian counterparts to officially downgrade relations as a result of the brief 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, after which they became de-facto non-existent. All of that changed after the end of the Cold War when Vietnam’s grip on Laos loosened, and Beijing is now officially the largest foreign investor in the country. This sudden reversal of ties is predicated on Laos’ promotion of Chinese interests in ASEAN and its strong potential as the region’s pivot state. China plans to capitalize on its close relations with Laos in order to project its influence as far as possible throughout the rest of mainland ASEAN, and it will be seen in Part II how two major infrastructure projects currently being built in the country can extraordinarily facilitate this.

The Common Denominator:

The interests of Thailand, Vietnam, and China in Laos all have one thing in common, and it’s that the nation’s geopivotal placement gives its partners strategic depth and a forward operating location within the region. During and after the Vietnam War, Hanoi used Laos as a springboard for projecting influence along the Thai border and safeguarding its own vulnerable western flank. Having a satellite state along its border (just as Cambodia was at the time) was necessary for insulating Indochina’s hegemon from conventional Western subversion, which was bound to occur due to Washington’s resentment over its humiliating defeat in the region.Nowadays, Vietnam’s strategy of trying to keep Laos snugly under its wing is thought to prevent Vientiane from taking unfriendly steps towards Hanoi, especially as regards the Mekong River dam projects (which seems to be a losing battle for Vietnam thus far).

Likewise, Laos fulfills a similar, albeit modernized, role for Thailand and China today. While there’s no realistic threat of a Thai-Vietnamese war any longer, Thailand’s restoration of civilizational ties with Laos gives it ‘breathing room’, if one will, and creates a friendly state along its border in which it could project soft power influence. More importantly, it also provides a direct land route to China and its gigantic market, which inversely also provides China with access to ASEAN’s, in what is certainly to Beijing’s benefit as well. Continuing along the Chinese perspective, Beijing recognizes the importance of Laos’ hydroelectric initiatives (to be described in the follow section) in exerting economic and political pressure on Vietnam and Cambodia, and it’s betting that if it fortifies its ties with Vientiane, then it can indirectly use these projects for its own advantage to ideally either ‘flip’ Cambodia from Vietnamese influence and/or asymmetrically counter Vietnam’s diplomatic belligerence in the South China Sea.

Small state, Big Pivot

It’s appropriate at this point to transition to Laos’ pan-regional infrastructural projects that it’s building within the country, since these major endeavors have the capability of becoming China’s battering rams in breaking out of the American-directed containment coalition being constructed along its southern flank. This section will describe those said projects and explain their significance to Laos, while the next part will examine their placement in China’s grand strategy towards mainland ASEAN.

Muddling The Mekong:

The most important indigenous infrastructure project ongoing in the country right now is the plan to build key hydroelectric power plants along the Mekong River, such as the Xayaburi and Don Sahongdams. Laos’ quest to become the ‘Battery of Southeast Asia’ has met with strong resistancefrom Vietnam and Cambodia, which allege that the projects will lead to dire environmental consequences downstream that could ravage their important fishing economies. Some Thai NGOs and local communities have also opposed the dam, although Bangkok has yet to publicly come out against it, indicating a pragmatic stance that may likely be coordinated with China’s long-term geopolitical considerations for the project.

The dams are thus important not only for their massive energy and revenue potential, but precisely because of the concerns they generate downstream with Cambodia and Vietnam. Laos can manipulate this issue to its advantage in order to elevate its regional importance vis-à-vis China and Thailand, which both have an interest in exerting pressure on Cambodia in order to bring it closer to their spheres, for instance. If Laos succeeds in its plans to become a regional energy exporter, then the countries it exports electricity to become stakeholders in its stability. This is exceptionally true in the case of Thailand, which has agreed to purchase 95% of the Xayaburi Dam’s electricity, so in view of this, Laos’ insistence on going against the will of its former Hanoi hegemon must be seen in the prism of its overall political diversification and general redirection towards its cultural cousin, with all of the relative political losses for Vietnam.

The Laotian Land Link:

Kunming-Singapore railroad.

Equal in importance to Laos’ pivot policy is its placement along China’s planned high-speed Kunming-Singapore railroad, which is intended to link Yunnan province with the island metropolis in 10 hours once it’s completed. Although it also envisions supplementary routes through Myanmar and Vietnam/Cambodia, the direct path through Laos is the quickest and most efficient, as well as being the one most relatively free from chaos and containment intrigue. Laos and Thailand have already reached deals with China for its construction, which is set to begin this September, so even if Malaysia for whatever reason decides against it (perhaps if one of Washington’s Color Revolution attempts there finally succeeds), then China would still at least have access to the Andaman Sea (and consequently, the Bay of Bengal and henceforth the Indian Ocean) through the Isthmus of Kra.

Myanmar is currently too unstable and not politically reliableenough as a result of its recent flirtations with the West, and Vietnam is clearly involved in containing China, so it makes sense for Beijing to focus most of its infrastructure efforts in going through stable and friendly Laos en route to its projected Thailand hub. Laos understands these regional dynamics too, so it was no surprise to its decision makers when China approached it with its infrastructure plans. Additionally, Vientiane benefits from being the most important of China’s three gateways for the ASEAN Silk Road since it makes Beijing the ultimate stakeholder in its success, and ensures that it will stand by its Southeast Asian ally both politically and financially. Such support raises hopes that the ASEAN Silk Road can transform Laos’ economy and bring development to some of its more far-flung reaches, which would revolutionize the standard of living in one of the world’s least developed countries and decrease the chances that domestic destabilization can be instigated and thenceforth exploited for outside (American) benefit.

Concluding Thoughts

The most important role that Laos geostrategic position and pivotal infrastructure projects play is to connect China with Thailand, which is the objective of all three parties. No other country is as capable of bridging these two partners as directly as Laos is, and its hydroelectricity plans and Silk Road land linkage give both Beijing and Bangkok stakes in its success and stability. Considering the transformative consequences that Chinese-Thai strategic coordination would have for regional and global politics, Laos’ geostrategic position becomes of the utmost importance, and the final part describes exactly how China plans to utilize this to its maximum anti-containment advantage.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.

Dozens of unidentified foreign troops reported disembarking in the port of Aden turned out to be Chinese soldiers maintaining security as an unknown party opened fire on a vessel evacuating foreign citizens, a Yemeni official told Sputnik.

“A Chinese military ship arrived in the port to evacuate Chinese citizens…a skirmish which occurred during the evacuation led to the disembarkation of Chinese soldiers stationed on the ship to protect civilians,” said Abd ar-Rabb al-Khalyaky, the deputy head of the port union council. After the evacuation, the soldiers returned to the vessel, he said adding that the situation has calmed down.

He said that Chinese soldiers have already left the port, though reportedly they did not manage to take with them all the people intended to evacuate, not all of the Chinese nationals.

An unnamed Yemeni official confirmed to Reuters that the people who disembarked from the Chinese ship were armed guards aiding civilians, not ground troops.

The city of Aden has turned into battlefield as violent street-to-street fighting between advancing Houthi rebels and pro-president troops making a stand.

The data from medics and military suggest that up to 44 people have been killed in street clashes, AFP reports.

Earlier member of the Houthi political council Daifullah Shami told Sputnik that the foreign troops in Aden disembarked from Saudi and Egyptian vessels.

“The number of troopers who landed in the Yemen port of Aden is unknown, but we are talking about dozens. They were covered by several airplanes. They disembarked from Saudi and Egyptian ships,” said a member of Ansar Allah movement, Ahmad Al-Shami.

Saudi Arabian forces, joined by nine other countries, launched a military operation in Yemen against Shiite Houthi rebels in March.

The Saudi-led coalition has declared Yemeni airspace a “restricted zone.”The allies also claim to control the maritime area adjoining the port of Aden, allegedly captured by the Houthis.

Ships in the region have also been urged not to approach Yemen’s ports due to the ongoing military operation.

Yemen’s ousted officials have requested a ground intervention to bolster the air offensive. On March 31, Saudi authorities said they had gathered troops along the border with Yemen in preparation for any possible ground offensive, according to Reuters, adding that no exact time to send the troops in has yet been stipulated.

Meanwhile, amember of the political council of the Ansar Allah group, the armed wing of the Houthi rebels, has declared as cited by RIA Novosti that in case the airstrikes of the Saudi-led coalition on the Yemeni territory continue, the Houthis will have to attack Saudi Arabia.

“We have the power for a retaliatory strike, but the decision will be made when other options are exhausted,” Daifullah Shami, a member of the Houthis’ Ansar Allah political council told RIA Novosti on Thursday.

If killing of innocent Yemenis continues, Houthis prefer death on the battlefield to dying in bombs strikes, Shami said, commenting on the possibility of an attack on Saudi Arabia.

Skirmishes on the Saudi-Yemeni border have already begun. One Saudi soldier has been killed and up to 10 have been wounded in shootouts, reports Al-Arabia. The firefights took place near a border check point, reports RIA Novosti.

Despite airstrikes delivered by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, the Houthis have been continuing their offensive against the loyalists of ousted President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled to Riyadh.

The Houthis captured the central district of Aden on Thursday, Reuters reported, citing residents. This southern port city remained the last stronghold of forces loyal to Saudi-backed President Hadi. Heavy fighting in the city started early in the morning and the rebels have now allegedly deployed tanks and patrols in several parts of the city.

“The victories in Aden today embarrass this campaign and silenced the aggressor states,” Houthi spokesman Mohammad Abdulsalam told the group’s al-Maseera TV channel. The fighting in Aden means that Saudi Arabia’s military intervention has failed, the spokesman insisted late on Wednesday.

The rebels claim they now control up to 90 percent of Aden’s territory, reports RIA Novosti.

The Shiite Houthi rebels, believed to be backed by Iran, are not the only non-governmental force operating in Yemen. While rebels were busy capturing the port of Aden, Al-Qaeda militants have stormed the center of the coastal city of Al-Mukalla and captured the local prison, setting free about 300 inmates, many of whom are militants, AP reported.

The port of Al-Mukalla reportedly remains under control of the jihadists who have blocked all the roads leading to the city.

The situation in Yemen in general remains chaotic, with fighter jets of the coalition inflicting airstrikes throughout the areas under control of the Houthi rebels, including the capital, Sanaa.

Though the allied Air Force target mostly military facilities, weapon depots and infrastructure, the strikes befell on civilians too. Forty-five people were killed and another 65 injured in an airstrike by a Saudi-led coalition at a refugee camp in Houthi-controlled northern Yemen on Monday, the International Organization for Migration (IMO) said.

A major bombshell has dropped concerning the failed cleanup efforts at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The shuttered plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has apparently been hiding for an entire year the fact that radioactive waste has been quietly pouring into the ocean from an onsite drainage ditch.

Sputnik News reports that TEPCO, which is also managing remediation efforts at the site (with guidance from the Japanese government), concealed from the public the fact that highly contaminated radioactive water has been flowing from the drainage ditch directly into the ocean. Local fishermen and others have since expressed outrage over the news.

“I don’t understand why you (TEPCO) kept silent about the leakage even though you knew about it,” stated Masakazu Yabuki, chief of the Iwaki fisheries cooperative, according to Sputnik. “Fishery operators are absolutely shocked.”

The news comes as TEPCO continues to sustain criticism over the way it’s handled cleanup efforts since the 2011 tsunami and earthquake took their toll. In recent months, TEPCO has been exposed for attempting to cover up the fact that U.S. Navy sailors were exposed to harmful radiation, as well as concealing true levels of radioactive waste releases into the Pacific Ocean.

And this latest revelation only reiterates TEPCO’s tarnished legacy, proving that the company can’t be trusted with adequately addressing the looming problems that are still present at Fukushima more than four years since the disaster occurred.

“This was part of an ongoing investigation in which we discovered a water puddle with high levels of radiation on top of the Reactor No. 2 building,” contended a TEPCO spokesman as to why the company delayed reporting the leak, adding that “because this also happens to be one of the sources for this drainage system, we decided to report everything all at once.”

Promises that Fukushima radiation is “under control” broken; TEPCO still sponsoring 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo

Since samples of ocean water collected from near the drainage pipe allegedly didn’t show any “substantial” radioactive spikes, TEPCO claims that it didn’t feel the need to report the leak, at least until now. This, as the company struggles to continue building radioactive waste storage tanks onsite at the plant to address the never-ending stream of waste pouring from the failed reactor buildings.

As you may recall from back in September 2013, when Tokyo was announced to be the site of the 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised the International Olympic Committee and the world that all radiation leaks at Fukushima were “under control.” TEPCO was also named to be the primary sponsor for the Olympic Games.

But this latest disclosure proves that this simply isn’t the case, regardless of whether or not this latest leak situation violates the regulations set forth by the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (which TEPCO claims it doesn’t).

“The trust of the people in Fukushima is the most important thing” to us, explained a company spokesperson in an apology. “We’ve been working with that in mind, but unfortunately, we have damaged that trust this time.”

Meanwhile, a major investigation is currently underway to assess how Fukushima radiation, as it continues to make it’s way into soil, water and eventually into food, is affecting the safety of what people are eating both in Japan and abroad. More on this is available in a recent report published in Nature:
Nature.com.

Sources for this article include:

http://sputniknews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.zerohedge.com

http://www.gizmodo.com.au

http://www.nature.com

As first reported by Forbes, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dropped a bomb in its October Fiscal Monitor Report.  The report paints a dire picture for high-debt nations that fail to aggressively “mobilize domestic revenue,” which is code for “aggressively tax its citizens.”  It goes on to build a case for drastic measures and recommends a series of escalating income and consumption tax increases – culminating in the direct confiscation of assets.  

Why is the IMF proposing this?

Because global  governments and central banks pumped trillions of dollars of YOUR money into the banks and stock market over the last several years, catapulting public debts to tens of TRILLIONS of dollars. But now,governments and central banks can no longer sustain these debt levels, and global wealth confiscation is their only way to maintain the Ponzi scheme. So it’s more apparent than ever, if you want to keep your savings & retirement out of the hands of desperate governments, there’s only one thing you can do.

The Wolves Are Starving for Your Money

First, here is the excerpt where the IMF clearly advocates a tax on your private savings to pay down government debt:

“The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”—a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability… The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to pre-crisis levels are sizable.  Reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth.”

You read that right:  the IMF wants to take 10% of your private savings in addition to the taxes you’re already paying.  But is that only the beginning of the proposed wealth confiscation?  The report’s most chilling aspect is the clinical manner in which it discusses how all governments can work together to track and tax your savings:

“Financial wealth is mobile, and so, ultimately, are people. … There may be a case for taxing different forms of wealth differently according to their mobility… Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere.”

As Forbes points out, there are three key points to take away from this report:

1. IMF economists know there are not enough rich people to fund today’s governments even if 100 percent of the assets of the 1 percent were expropriated. That means that all households with positive net wealth—everyone with retirement savings or home equity—would have their assets plundered under the IMF’s formulation.
2. Such a repudiation of private property will not pay off Western governments’ debts or fund budgets going forward. It will merely “restore debt sustainability,” allowing free-spending sovereigns to keep tapping the bond markets until the next crisis comes along—for which stronger measures will be required, of course.
3. If politicians should fail to engage in this kind of wholesale robbery, the only alternative scenario the IMF posits is government bankruptcy and hyperinflation. The IMF makes no proposes to reign in the Ponzi-scheme entitlement programs that are bankrupting us.

Forbes argues that this is where the bankruptcy of the modern entitlement state is taking us—capital controls and exit restrictions “so the proverbial four wolves and a lamb can vote on what’s for dinner.”

There’s Only One Place to Hide

With our desperate governments gaining unprecedented access to your personal savings anywhere in the world, you need to take action NOW to protect your savings & retirement from possible capital controls.  But if the government has its hands in your bank accounts, retirement accounts and brokerage accounts, is any place safe?

Absolutely. There’s ONE asset class this sits outside the financial system and is completely secure from government confiscation and global economic collapse:  Gold & Silver.  Gold & Silver have been the best wealth protectors for over 5,000 years and have survived every government & currency collapse in history.  Today, physical gold & silver are selling in record numbers around the world.  Central banks around the world and nations like China are stockpiling gold as a hedge to any possible collapse of all the dollars they hold.

The government has spent way beyond its limits.  And now you know that the government is seizing control of your financial accounts.  So the time is now.  Protect your savings & retirement with physical gold & silver before you have nothing left to protect.

See: http://www.wholesaledirectmetals.com/index.php/gold-blog/631-the-imf-lays-the-groundwork-for-global-wealth-confiscation/?cid=TownhallDedicated

It is unclear that a nuclear deal between the U. S. and Iran will take place. However, if there is a deal, it is guaranteed that those who opposed it from the start will try to sabotage it. The Republicans and several Democrats in Washington, the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu and special interest groups such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) do not want any deal that will benefit Iran’s peaceful nuclear program because they say that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. The main-stream media (MSM) will most certainly jump on board and launch a new propaganda campaign against Iran. In fact, it has already begun. A new story posted by the online magazine “The Daily Beast’ makes accusations that Iran can possibly have a “secret nuclear program” in North Korea.

These accusations are not new by any means, but before we get into the article, I want to highlight the most important principle to journalism, and that is telling the truth with fact-based evidence. The Pew Research Center’s (PRC) ‘Principles of Journalism’ states that“Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can–and must–pursue it in a practical sense. This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.”When verifying the facts on any particular issue, it is also important to verify its sources as PRC accurately describes“Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information.” ‘The Daily Beast’ just released a story by Gordon C. Chang, a columnist who also writes for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and forbes.com titled ‘Does Iran Have Secret Nukes in North Korea?’ It is a serious claim to suggest that Iran might have a “Secret” nuclear weapons program hidden in North Korea. How did he come to this conclusion?

According to Chang, there was a “technical cooperation pact” between Iran and North Korea that took place in November 2014 according to the Washington, D.C. based National Bureau for Asian Research (NBR). NBR’s report conveniently fits Chang’s view that Iran and North Korea’s has a secret nuclear program disregarding the fact that Iran and North Korea made a pact to strengthen their ties in the economic, trade, science and educational spheres which both sovereign nations are supposed to do. Chang believes that “the unconfirmed dispatches make sense in light of the two states announcing a technical cooperation pact the preceding month.” It is also important to mention that the NBR has several well-known members who have a significant influence in the circles of Washington, D.C. One of the members is former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman who declared in a 2013 Wall Street Journal article that Iran is “the most dangerous challenge to U.S. national security.” Another figure in the NBR is Sam Nunn who was also interviewed in 2013 by Germany’s Der Spiegel and said “Now, we have a nuclear standoff between Pakistan and India, an Iran that is on its way to building the bomb and a North Korea bent on developing intercontinental nuclear missiles.”Well you get the picture.

Chang says that “the Mullahs may well have a secret program” and that

“In October 2012, Iran began stationing personnel at a military base in North Korea, in a mountainous area close to the Chinese border. The Iranians, from the Ministry of Defense and associated firms, reportedly are working on both missiles and nuclear weapons.”

The former minister of defense, Ahmed Vahidi had “denied” the accusations calling it “just speculation” in 2012 according to the Tehran Times.

Here is an interesting statement made by Mr. Chang worth mentioning:

But no inspections of Iranian sites will solve a fundamental issue: As can be seen from the North Korean base housing Tehran’s weapons specialists, Iran is only one part of a nuclear weapons effort spanning the Asian continent. North Korea, now the world’s proliferation superstar, is a participant. China, once the mastermind, may still be a co-conspirator. Inspections inside the borders of Iran, therefore, will not give the international community the assurance it needs

Chang says that “The cross-border nuclear trade is substantial enough to be called a “program.” Larry Niksch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., estimates that the North’s proceeds from this trade with Iran are “between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion annually.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) members include Cold War veterans Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. This story is clearly what I would call“knocking out two birds with one stone” or “three birds with one stone” if you add China. The Sunday Times based in London said that “Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, is believed to have travelled to North Korea to observe its third nuclear test last week, according to western intelligence sources.” But the Daily Beast story declares that “Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Tehran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea at Punggye-ri in February 2013 to witness Pyongyang’s third atomic test.” Western intelligence sources“believed” that Mr. Mahabadi travelled to North Korea is not a confirmation that it did actually happen because“believing” something without absolute proof does not mean it is a fact. But it does raise questions about the sources used in the story. Chang also said that North Korea had sold Iran “material for bomb cores, perhaps even weapons-grade uranium” according to The Telegraph because “a barrel of North Korean uranium cracked open and contaminated the tarmac of the new Tehran airport.”

According to Chang’s analysis, North Korea had assisted Iran in every way possible to develop a nuclear bomb. “In 2013, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, charged the North with providing assistance to Iran’s plutonium reactor.”Well here is what Mr. Dagan actually said according to a South Korean news source ‘Maeil Business Newspaper’ (MK) based in South Korea:

North Korea already possesses nuclear capability, and is using it to export weapons to Iran and Syria to make money. However, North Korea is very unlikely to take a provocative action

There are even accusations that there are North Koreans that have worked at numerous nuclear and missile facilities throughout Iran who were at times relaxing at “their own coastal resort” according to a story written in the Wall Street Journal by Henry Sokolski in 2003. Chang said that “In March 2011, police in Port Klang seized two containers from a ship bound to Iran from China. Malaysian authorities discovered that goods passed off as “used for liquid mixing or storage” were actually components for potential atomic weapons.” Here is what the Associated Press published regarding the seized containers:

Malaysian International Shipping Corp. confirmed in a statement to the AP that police confiscated two containers from the MV Bunga Raya Satu on March 8. It said a freight forwarder had declared the contents as “goods used for liquid mixing or storage for pharmaceutical or chemical or food industry

Chang says that “there has been an apparent decline in Chinese shipments to Iran” but there is a possibility that “after decades of direct and indirect illicit transfers, China has already supplied most of what Iran needs to construct a weapon.” Chang also said that China will allow North Korea to lead a “proliferation role.” Ken Kato, director of the Tokyo-based Human Rights in Asia said that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s was in China “After all, the shadowy Fakhrizadeh was reported to have traveled through China on his way to North Korea to observe the North’s third nuclear test.”

He also claims that “In the past, China’s proxy for this deadly trade was Pakistan? Then it was China’s only formal ally, North Korea. In both cases, Chinese policymakers intended to benefit Iran.” These are serious accusations.

“In a theoretical sense, there is nothing wrong with an accommodation with the Islamic Republic over nukes, yet there is no point in signing a deal with just one arm of a multi-nation weapons effort. That’s why the P5+1 needs to know what is going on at that isolated military base in the mountains of North Korea” according to Chang’s analysis.

A 2014 Congressional Research Service report titled ‘Iran-North Korea-Syria Ballistic Missile and Nuclear Cooperation’admitted that “there is no evidence that Iran and North Korea have engaged in nuclear-related trade or cooperation with each other.” The founder of the Daily Beast, Tina Brown once said “Journalism” is having a “Very, Very Pathetic Moment.” I am glad she admitted to something that those in the Alternative media already know. But will a new propaganda push that will paint Iran and North Korea as having a joint-secret nuclear weapons program if a new deal between the West and Iran were to take place? The U.S. government and Israel want a war with Iran. The psychopath, Neo-Con and former state department official John Bolton said in a recent New York Times opinion piece:

The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed

War with Iran is on the shelf, but for how long? Saudi Arabia launching air strikes on Yemen is a dangerous game played by the U.S. warmongers who gave the green light to start a new front against Iran.  Will the main-stream media create new accusations against the Iran linking it to North Korea? Will Iran’s alleged “secret nuclear weapons program” become the new norm among media pundits in the U.S. and Europe? We shall soon see what the MSM has up its sleeves.

It has been such a tough period for the pro-GMO lobby that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But let us start by looking at two pieces of recent research that strike at the very heart of the pro-GMO argument, namely:  

1)      GM crops are needed to feed the world.

2)      The GMO agritech industry is based on sound science and reasoned argument.

GM crops are not needed to feed the world

A new report just released by Environmental Working Group has delivered a stinging rebuke to the argument that GM crops are the answer to future global food shortages (also see this, this and this). A thorough analysis of recent research conducted in the US and around the world shows that such crops have not significantly improved the yields of crops such as corn and soy. 

Author of the report Emily Cassidy says:

“Biotech companies and proponents of conventional, industrial agriculture have touted genetically engineered crops as the key to feeding a more populous, wealthier world, but recent studies show that this promise has fallen flat.”

While GM crops have been a mainstay in US agriculture for roughly two decades, they “have not substantially improved global food security” and have instead increased the use of toxic herbicides and led to herbicide-resistant ‘superweeds’. 

The report found that over the last 20 years, yields of both GE corn and soy have been no different from traditionally bred non-GM corn and soy grown in Europe. It argues that corn and soybeans account for roughly 80 percent of the global land area devoted to growing GM crops. Both are overwhelmingly used for animal feed and biofuels, not for food. This is unlikely to change in light of increased consumption of meat around the world and the US biofuels policy requiring production of millions of gallons of corn ethanol to blend into gasoline.

Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Just Label It says:

“Biotech companies and their customers in chemical agriculture have been attempting to sell the benefits of GMOs for two decades. Between exaggerated claims about feeding the world and a dramatic escalation in the use of toxic pesticides, it is no wonder consumers are increasingly skeptical.”

The report concludes that traditionally bred varieties have been the major source of improved crop yields in recent years and this trend is likely to continue. 

Emily Cassidy states:

“Seed companies’ investment in improving the yields of GMOs in already high-yielding areas does little to improve food security; it mainly helps line the pockets of seed and chemical companies and producers of corn ethanol. The world’s resources would be better spent focusing on strategies to actually increase food supplies and access to basic resources for the poor small farmers who need it most.”

Consider that by 2012, 59 percent of the area planted with GM crops were those resistant to glyphosate. Some 26 percent consisted of insecticidal Bt crops and 15 percent were crops carrying both traits. The organisation GRAIN says that is just two traits after 20 years of research and mega-millions of dollars invested. The real measure of what this technology has produced is according to GRAIN to be found in damaged ecosystems, potential health harms, farmer dependency and big profits for the companies.

But profits are and were always the bottom line, not addressing world hunger. If anything, the planting of GM crops is displacing peasants from their lands, depriving local communities of access to food production and increasing food insecurity. Any amount of genetic modification will not address the structural nature of poverty, inequality and hunger, including the geopolitical antecedents.

The GMO agritech industry is not based on sound science and reasoned argument

The second piece of research that strikes at the heart of the industry’s other major claim – that the case for GM agriculture is based on sound science and reasoned argument – is debunked in Steven Druker’s new book. Druker pulls the rug from beneath the GMO agritech industry and its apologists in academia and the media who ceaselessly trumpet their allegiance to discourse based on science. 

‘Altered Truth, Twisted Genes’ exposes the fraudulent basis upon which the GMO agritech sector is based. GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the Food and Drug Administration covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing.

If the FDA had heeded its own experts’ advice and publicly acknowledged their warnings that GM foods entailed higher risks than their conventional counterparts, Druker says that the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere. He also argues that that many well-placed scientists have repeatedly issued misleading statements about GM foods, and so have leading scientific institutions such as the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the UK’s Royal Society.

While Druker’s book serves to expose the sheer hypocrisy of the industry and its supporters who claim critics to be anti-science and ideologues (a case of projecting their own faults and failings on to critics), Emily Cassidy argues that what GMOs have done is to increase the use of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. She concludes that, unfortunately, the only things popping up faster than herbicide-tolerant superweeds are the unsupported claims of GMOs’ benefits.

Even more bad news

And that neatly leads us on to glyphosate itself. 

On 20 March, the World Health Organisation reached a decision that strikes at the heart of the company. The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said that glyphosate was “classified as probably carcinogenic to humans.” This is just one step below the risk designation of “known carcinogen.” 

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, which was primarily responsible $5.1 billion of Monsanto’s revenues in 2014.  But that’s not all. The herbicide is used to support Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, which comprise the vast bulk of the balance of its revenue stream.

Little surprise that with so much money at stake Monsanto is calling for a retraction of the IARC’s report. It remains to be seen if the WHO capitulates.

While the agribusiness sector has a long history of silencing science and scientists, it has now been alleged that USDA scientists are ordered to retract studies, water down findings, remove their name from authorship and endure long indefinite delays in approving publication of papers that may be controversial. Scientists who are targeted by industry complaints find themselves subjected to disruptive investigations, disapprovals of formerly routine requests, disciplinary actions over petty matters and intimidation from supervisors focused on pleasing stakeholders.

So much for open discourse based on sound science and reasoned argument.

And the bad news just keeps coming.

Bt brinjal has failed for the second year in Bangladesh resulting in hardship for farmers, and Monsanto has been forced to pay out $600,000 in fines for not reporting hundreds of uncontrolled releases of toxic chemicals at its eastern Idaho phosphate plant. It also paid out a string of lawsuit settlements totaling $350,000 as a result of its GMOs tainting wheat in seven US states. 

But there is some good news in all of this for Monsanto. Monsanto’s ‘discredit department’  now has more than enough on its plate and will certainly not be closing down any time soon. 

The only thing it will be attempting to shut down are studies that affect the company’s profits.

The Asian Peasant Coalition (APC) denounced the World Bank (WB) on its “16th Conference on Land and Poverty” that brings together corporations, governments and some civil society groups. The conference [was] taking place at Washington D.C. from March 23 to 27.

“Under the guise of the need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, the FAO and WB reported that the world needs to increase investment in agriculture, coming from the public and private sectors. The FAO estimates that private sector agricultural investment alone, including foreign direct investment, must rise from some $142 billion per year to $209 billion in order to feed a growing population. In 2013 alone, WB investment to agriculture and agriculture-related projects was over $8 billion. But for whom are these investments?” questioned Rahmat Ajiguna, APC deputy secretary general, also the secretary general of the Indonesia based  Aliansi Gerakan Reforma Agraria (AGRA).

“We strongly condemn the WB for its role in global land grabs. In 1970s, the WB actually promoted its own brand of ‘market-assisted land reform’, ” stated Ajiguna adding that “according to the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), after President Ferdinand Marcos’ ouster in 1986 in the Philippines, the Corazon Aquino government was compelled by the strength of both the armed and legal movement for genuine land reform to come up with its own agrarian reform program. But Aquino’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), which ironically was also implemented by her son, President Benigno Aquino III, was never meant to distribute land to the poor and landless peasants. CARP clearly echoed many of the recommendations of the WB’s 1975 Land Reform Policy Paper. Worst of all, the WB land reform concept is indeed distributing land — from the poor to the rich.”

“How market-assisted land reform works in practice can be seen in the Philippines, with the most unequal land distributions in the world. The WB project undermines agrarian reform in the Philippines which actually increases concentration of land in the hands of the landed elite,” remarked Ajiguna adding that “KMP reports that after 27 years of the bogus CARP, the land grabbing spree of Gregorio “Greggy” Araneta III, common relative of Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Mar Roxas and Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, in a more than 3,000-hectare agricultural land in the City of San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan continues. To protect their interests, Araneta terrorizes the farmers thru his more than 200 security guards that served as his private army. Farmers are prohibited from planting and harvesting their produce.” Araneta is the brother-in-law of Marcos. On the other hand, Roxas’ mother, Judy Araneta belongs to the landlord Araneta clan.

“The same is happening in other countries in Asia. In Indonesia, the WBs land grabbing works through the government’s agricultural and land policies. The recent law on industrial agriculture which gives agri-industry companies the right to invest more in agriculture is one of the examples how this WB works. This is concrete in the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate in Papua, where the Indonesian government uses the new law (Law No. 2 2012) to provide so-called land for development and public interest on agriculture to develop 1.6 million hectares of primary forest to be converted into the integrated agro fuels and food estate,” Ajiguna explained adding that “ this law and other agrarian scheme is being used by President Jokowi in the coming celebration of the 60th Asia Africa Conference (popularly known as Bandung Conference) on April 19 to 24 to invite more investors, in infrastructure and food, which will worsen the implementation of Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the country.”

“In Sri Lanka, WB invested $18 million in a so-called ‘Sustainable Tourism Development Project’ signed in January 2010 which is the reason for the conversion of the ancestral lands in Panama into a tourism zone. This was disclosed after the International Fact Finding Mission (IFFM) organized by APC in 2013 where we found out that the WB in collaboration with the Sri Lankan government is to blame for the impacts of Arugam Bay Tourism Promotion Zone in Panama in Southeast Sri Lanka. The Arugam Bay has more than 20,000 people,” stated Zenaida Soriano, APC Southeast Asia coordinator also the chairperson of the Philippine-based National Federation of Peasant Women (AMIHAN).

“What the WB is doing is global land grabbing at the highest level. The WB further destroys the livelihood of small farmers and landless peasants. Therefore, the people especially the food producers and landless peasants have to resist this phenomenon of global land grabbing,” added Soriano.

“On March 23-24, at least 200 farmers led by the KMP and the Alliance of Farmers in Bulacan –San Jose Del Monte camped out in front of the DILG office calling on Secretary Roxas and Senator Marcos to immediately stop the land grabbing of agricultural lands in the City of San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan and to pull out Araneta’s private army. On March 24, farmers and their allies marched to Mendiola to call for the ouster of the landlord President Aquino”, ended Soriano.

The APC calls on all stakeholders to reject the WB’s Conference on Land and Poverty because it will further strengthen the collaboration of the imperialist countries and their puppet governments under the guise of investment and development but in reality it will only advance its role in global land grabbing.

“Genuine land reform will only be realized through resolute and militant struggle of the organized peasantry who will exact a just distribution of land. It is therefore crucial to strengthen the peasant movement at the local and international level. The peasant movement should likewise be integrated with the overall people’s movement against the reactionary forces of imperialism,” ended Ajiguna.

Last Friday, the FBI announced another harrowing, 11th-hour capture of Americans plotting to join “ISIS” and launch attack within the United States. The case of two Illinois men, Army National Guard Specialist Hasan Edmonds and his cousin Jonas Edmonds, ostensibly involved the former going to Syria to join ISIS there while the latter stayed in the US, plotting to attack “scores” at a military base.

Right on cue, the American media publish dressed-up FBI press releases about the “disrupted” plot, complete with balaclava-wearing stock photos: “FBI Disrupts Plot to Kill Scores at Military Base on Behalf of Islamic State” was the Washington Post’s headline (3/26/15).

These outlets, as usual,  omitted the rather awkward fact that this “ISIS plot” did not actually involve anyone in ISIS: At no point was there any material contact between anyone in ISIS and the Edmond cousins. There was, as the criminal complaint  lays out, lots of contact between the Edmond cousins and what they thought was ISIS, but at no point was there any contact with ISIS–the designated terror organization that the US is currently launching airstrikes against.

This distinction may seem like semantics, but it’s actually quite important when trying to accurately inform the public–only 40 percent of whom read past the headlines–about the reality of the ISIS threat vs. the fear-inducing media spectacle that so often inflates it.

MSNBC reports an “ISIS plot” that never was.

While less sensational press like the Washington Postand the New York Timesare careful to avoid calling the sting operations “ISIS plots,” many outlets turn misdirection to explicit misrepresentation: ThisMSNBC headline (3/26/15) is fairly typical of how the reader is misled into thinking ISIS is actually involved in these arrests:

National Guard Soldier, Cousin Charged With ISIS Plot

The Edmond cousins weren’t actually charged with an ISIS plot.  They were charged with attempting to hatch an ISIS plot, but they are not accused of having any contact with ISIS whatsoever.

In a political environment where only a slight majority (54 percent) currently support the ongoing war effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria–and soon potentially dozens of other countries–this sleight-of-hand has subtle but tremendous propaganda value. The specter of ISIS constantly trying to enlist dozens of Americans, often for attacks on US soil, is a crucial element in maintaining the current war effort. The media’s inability to point out that these “plots” are almost always entirely of the FBI’s making helps perpetuate the illusion and inflate perceived risk.

John Knefel  noted recently in the New Republic (3/24/15) the gap between our perception of the ISIS threat and the reality:

The likelihood of Al Qaeda or ISIS launching a massive attack inside the United States is “infinitesimal,” according to the Washington Post, yet a recent poll found 86 percent of Americans now see ISIS as a threat to U.S. security.

That perception, however, is based largely on a myth. The Triangle Center’sreport states that publicly available information does “not indicate widespread recruitment of Muslim-Americans by transnational terrorist organizations to engage in attacks in the United States, or sophisticated planning by the handful of individuals who have self-radicalized.”

Contrary to Fox News, these suspects were not lured by ISIS, but by the FBI.

This trope is also present when reporting on the much-hyped “ISIS social media” army. In a  piece headlined “The Lure of ISIS,”  Fox News (12/16/14) used two cases, that of Abdella Tounisi and Basit Javed Sheikh, as evidence of Syrian jihadists’ social media appeal–without mentioning that fact that both men, according to the FBI’s own complaints, interfaced almost entirely with FBI-created “jihadi” social media:

The cases involve individuals from all across the country, from Florida to Minnesota to Colorado. They underscore the challenge US law enforcement continue to face, as well as the global reach of recruiters and propagandists from ISIS and other groups.

But the case of Tounisi and Sheikh cannot “underscore the global reach of ISIS recruiters and propagandists,” since the only recruiters and propagandists these men met online were the FBI’s “OCE”–Online Covert Employees. In the case of Abdella Tounisi, the FBI went so far as to create an entire fake Al-Nusra website, complete with a fake Al-Nusra training video and a fake Al-Nusra email list, as the DOJ’s complaint explained.

Basit Javed Sheikh, the 29-year-old North Carolina man, was duped using an FBI-created “Al-Nusra” Facebook page set up by a female FBI employee posing as an “Al-Nusra nurse” in Syria. The “nurse” persona would have other social media accounts, as well as an “Al-Nusra” Facebook page complete with extremist messages, videos, pictures and content–all created by the FBI.

Would Tounisi and Sheikh have sought other “recruiters” online? It’s impossible to say. (Also important to note that Sheikh had fallen in love with the “Al-Nusra nurse” FBI persona, who allegedly promised him marriage in Syria.) But what is clear is that FBI-created extremist social media isn’t evidence that extremist social media is helping recruit Americans for ISIS or Al-Nusra. But media treat FBI ruses that simulate terrorist activities as evidence that the crimes the FBI is ostensibly seeking to prevent are actually happening.

The New York Daily News (3/9/15) would take this perverse logic to a comical extreme last month with this goofy headline:

ISIS was not, of course, in Brooklyn. FBI agents posing as ISIS were. This isn’t a matter of emphasis–it’s a matter of reality.

Adam Johnson, a freelance journalist, was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

Ota Masakatsu’s horrifying account of an erroneous order to launch nuclear missiles in Okinawa during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 raises the possibility that, despite the U.S. military’s vehement denials, a nuclear war could start by accident. While much discussion has centered on the Cuban Missile Crisis spinning out of control into nuclear war, the latest revelations link 1950s Okinawa as yet another site in which the possession of U.S. nuclear weapons came close to bringing nuclear holocaust.

Describing an earlier incident in Okinawa, veterans of the Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missile battery at Naha Airbase recalled an accidental firing during a circuits test in 1959, that was blamed on stray voltage. The missile left the launcher, smashed through a fence, and plunged down to the beach below where the warhead bounced out and skidded across the water “like a stone,” but did not detonate. The rocket blast killed two technicians and injured one. (“Nike History: Eyewitness Accounts of Timothy Ryan, Carl Durling and Charles Rudicil,” retrieved November 11, 2012, posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-14_Nike_Hercules)

Nike-Hercules

While U.S. bases were scattered throughout Japan, it was only in Okinawa that nuclear weapons were stored and warheads mounted on rockets. This was one, and perhaps the most dangerous, way that the disproportionate burden carried by this small island prefecture, where two-thirds of the total U.S. military presence in the country remains, weighed so heavily. Along with the risk of “reactivation” is the troubling possibility of serious environmental hazards at former nuclear sites in Okinawa. These include the village of Henoko, now also threatened by the planned construction of a U.S. Marine airbase in the face of deep Okinawan opposition from the grassroots to the Governor.  Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr reported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (November/December, 1999, pp. 26-35) that “Okinawa hosted 19 different types of nuclear weapons during the period 1954-1972.” The “secret agreement” accompanying the 1969 reversion pact between President Nixon and Prime Minister Sato identified nuclear weapons sites at “Kadena, Naha, Henoko, and Nike-Hercules units.” The agreement specified that the U.S. “requires standby retention and activation [of the sites] in time of great emergency.” 

Steve Rabson is professor emeritus of East Asian studies, Brown University, and a Japan Focus associate. His latest book is The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). He was stationed in Okinawa as a U.S. Army draftee during 1967-68.

Okinawa and atom bombs: A Timeline (by Jon Mitchell)

1945 – U.S. military seizes control of Okinawa on June 23^rd, fighting continues for several months

1952 – Treaty of San Francisco ends U.S. occupation of mainland Japan but affirms continued U.S. military rule over Okinawa

1954 – crew of the Lucky Dragon #5 are irradiated when the U.S. tests a powerful H-bomb at Bikini in the Pacific. More than 30 million Japanese people sign a petition in protest. U.S. military secretly stations first nuclear weapons on Okinawa

1956 – Ryukyu Assembly of Elected Officials demands the withdrawal of all nuclear weapons from the island

1962 – first of four Mace missile sites becomes operational at Bolo Point, Okinawa.

1965 – U.S. loses hydrogen bomb from the U.S.S. Ticonderoga 130 km off Okinawa’s coast

1966 – Iejima Island residents successfully block the deployment of Nike nuclear missiles

1967 – PM Sato Eisaku first suggests Japan’s three non-nuclear principles – not to possess, manufacturer or allow the introduction of atomic weapons

1968 – B-52 crashes near nuclear warhead bunkers on Kadena Air Base

1969 – Japan and the U.S. conclude a secret agreement which allows America to re-introduce nuclear weapons to Japan during times of crisis

1971 – Washington demands Tokyo help to pay for the removal of nuclear arms from Okinawa – the first official U.S. admission of the presence of nuclear weapons on the island

1972 – Okinawa reverts to Japanese administrative control with U.S. military bases intact

U.S. Veterans Reveal 1962 Nuclear Close Call Dodged in Okinawa

At the final moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the U.S. nuclear missile men in Okinawa received a launch order which was later found to have been mistakenly issued, according to testimonies by former U.S. veterans given to Kyodo News.

In the fall of 1962, the Soviet Union introduced nuclear missiles into Cuba from where Moscow could target the mainland of the United States. U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his top advisers then seriously considered military options as a countermeasure, and the two superpowers were on the brink of nuclear exchanges.

The testimonies by the veterans, who gazed into the “abyss” of a nuclear war, shed new historical light on a nuclear close call which could have triggered the use of nuclear weapons, highlighting the potential risk of an accidental nuclear launch.

According to John Bordne, 73, former member of the 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, several hours after his crew took over a midnight shift from 12 a.m. on Oct. 28 in 1962 at the Missile Launch Control Center at Yomitan Village in Okinawa, a coded order to launch missiles was conveyed in a radio communication message from the Missile Operations Center at the Kadena Air Base.

Another former U.S. veteran who served in Okinawa also recently confirmed on condition of anonymity what Bordne told Kyodo News in an interview last summer and in following e-mail exchanges. Bordne has mentioned the incident in an unpublished memoir based on his diary.

Eight “Martin Marietta Mace B” nuclear cruise missiles were deployed at that time at the Yomitan missile site, called “Site One Bolo Point” by U.S. military personnel. Bordne, who currently lives in Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, was one of seven crew members there.

Mace B

There were a total of four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point. Each site had eight missiles which were commanded and controlled by the Missile Operations Center at Kadena.

The main daily mission of Bordne, one of the flight-control specialists called Mech2, was to maintain the ready-to-launch status of Mace B missiles. Normally, once they started an eight-hour shift at the site, they “recycled” a missile, meaning powering down a missile, checking parts of the warhead, nosecone and flight control systems and returning it to ready-to-launch status.

“Oh, my God!” Bordne recalled his colleagues as saying as they turned white with shock and surprise when they received a launch order before dawn on Oct. 28. The order was issued from Kadena to all four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point, he said.

According to him, the three-level confirmation process was taken step-by-step in accordance with a manual by comparing codes in the launch order and codes given to his crew team in advance. All of the codes matched.

“So, we read the targets out loud. Out of the four missiles, we had only one headed toward Russia. The other three were not going to Russia. That, right away, gave us a start to wonder. Because the launch directive said you launch all the missiles,”

Bordne said. His crew team was in charge of four out of eight missiles deployed at the site.

“And we figured, ‘Why hit these other countries?’ They’ve got nothing to do with this. That doesn’t make any sense,” Bordne said. “So, our captain, the launch officer, said to us ‘We’ve got to think this through in a logical, rational manner’.”

When the launch order was issued, the five-level “DEFCON” scale, or defense condition, remained at level 2, one step from starting a war. Theoretically, a launch order should not be issued unless DEFCON is raised to 1, which means initiating a military counterattack against enemy forces.

The order under DEFCON 2 made the crew team, especially the launch officer, so dubious about its authenticity that the officer ordered suspension of the ongoing launch procedures which Bordne was engaged in.

Finally, the launch officer figured out that the order had been mistakenly issued, Bordne said, but added he has no idea why such an order was issued. Even though Bordne did not specify which country had been targeted besides Russia under the order, it is believed to be China considering the Mace B missile range of 2,200-2,300 kilometers.

It is not clear what caused such a wrong launch order to be issued, but a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba just a few hours before the order was conveyed to the Mace B sites in Okinawa.

Other former U.S. veterans in Okinawa recalled tense moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis in interviews with Kyodo News, even though they did not have direct knowledge about the aborted nuclear missile launch order, which seems to have been handled as a military secret.

“I knew I was never going home. If we had launched our missiles and they had launched their missiles, there would be nothing to go back to,” Bill Horn, a 71-year old former colleague of Bordne, recalled of the moment when he listened to the presidential address on Oct. 22, 1962, which made public the Soviet buildup of a missile base in Cuba.

“Everybody in that part of the Air Force, or in the military service, knew at that point in time that peacetime would be over, that there would be no more wars to fight…1962 was the closest we ever came to complete annihilation of civilization as we know,”

said Horn, who lives in Cookeville in Tennessee.

On Oct. 24, two days after the presidential address, the U.S. Strategic Air Command, the command unit at the time of a nuclear war, raised the “DEFCON” level from 3 to 2 without consultation with Kennedy.

“Going to DEFCON 2 was disturbing since DEFCON 1 is all-out war. DEFCON 2 is one step from war,” said Larry Havemann, another Mace B veteran who was stationed in Okinawa during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Since I was trained on the nuclear weapon I knew that if all the missiles were unleashed there would not be much left of this world or the people on it. That haunts me to this day,”

Havemann, 73, told Kyodo News in Sparks, Nevada.

After DEFCON 2 was issued, U.S. forces took a posture to be ready for war within 15 minutes.

The crisis ended on Oct. 28, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that he would withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba.

Ota Masakatsu’s report appeared at Kyodo News on March 27, 2015. The original report is available here.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

The Southeast Asian nation of Thailand is currently wrestling with a particularly contentious issue involving international oil concessions. In essence, foreign oil monopolies, particularly Western corporations including Exxon, Chevron, and British Petroleum (BP) have been given access to Thailand’s oil and natural gas supplies, to explore, develop, and exploit for billions in profits year to year.

Two Chinese nationals, Mo Hailong and Mo Yu, are accused of stealing genetically modified (GM) seed technology from biotech giants DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto, as reported by the Des Moines Register.

The siblings face prosecution in what defense attorneys have labeled a “breathtaking and unprecedented” abuse of power. They are among other Chinese nationals who were accused of espionage over GM corn seed several years ago.

Are these individuals stealing valuable trade secrets from international agricultural companies or are they simply practicing Borne-Identity-type tactics to keep the upper hand on biological terrorism practiced through the latest GMO technologies?

The Chinese Nationals face ten years of imprisonment based on the decision of a secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as FISA. FISA is best known for taking privacy rights from Americans by allowing the NSA to spy on citizens through their cell phones, email accounts, and banking activity.

Big Biotech is attempting to link Mo Hailong and Mo Yu to the the Beijing-based DBN Group, a conglomerate that owns a seed company, with the Chinese government, as a means of establishing motive.

However, rights advocates and attorneys representing the two individuals report that the government is exaggerating a trade dispute with a national security threat in order to protect the interests of the biotechnology industry.

Related: Most Seeds are Patented by Corporations – Save the Seeds!

Mark Weinhardt, Defense attorney, states:

“For the first time in the statute’s history (as far as our research reveals), the government used FISA to investigate a trade secret dispute between two privately owned companies.”

Faiza Patel, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Register:

“FISA was intended to capture information about national security-type threats. It wasn’t meant to capture ordinary crime, such as violating trade secrets.” 

Defense attorney Mark Weinhardt has filed a motion to suppress evidence gathered under FISA from being introduced during the siblings’ trial, which is scheduled for Sept. 14. but the lack of transparency in FISA court makes challenging evidence extremely difficult.

Weinhardt wrote in the motion:

“This case involves a breathtaking and unprecedented expansion of the government’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. For the first time in the statute’s history (as far as our research reveals), the government used FISA to investigate a trade secret dispute between two privately owned companies.”

Court records regarding the case state, “prosecutors have turned over to defense attorneys a mountain of more than 500,000 documents, 50 hours of audio tapes and two years’ worth of surveillance footage generated by the investigation,” the Register reports.

That’s a whole lot of taxpayer money used to protect the interests of a few companies that are ruining agriculture the world over.

Additional Sources:

Photo credit: BASF/cc/flickr)

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Despite concerns voiced by its close ally the United States, Britain, a conventional Atlantic force, will become the first major Western economy to join a China proposed financing mechanism, which will explore investment opportunities in, mainly, Asia.

Downing Street believes its decision to apply to be a founding member of the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is “in the U.K.’s national interest.”

Domestic interests may not always be compatible with a country’s allies’ and, in this case, the ally of Britain chose to air concerns over, allegedly, looser lending standards for the environment, labor rights and financial transparency of the proposed bank.

The “unrivalled opportunity” for the United Kingdom, as seen by British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, is enviable, as financiers and industrialists widely expect total infrastructure investment of 8 trillion U.S. dollars in the coming decade in Asia. Not to mention the anticipated stable and handsome returns associated with infrastructure projects.

Other than the U.K., there are at least 27 bidders intending to be AIIB founding members, spanning East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, to Oceania. All have shared the vision of faster-than-average growth in the years to come in Pacific Asia.

The AIIB, and similar organizations, have, understandably, left the U.S. uneasy, with the incumbent power choosing to use the rhetoric that the AIIB will undercut institutions such as the World Bank.

The idea of circumventing existing financial organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will pose a threat, if any, to the international economic and political pattern shaped after World War II, seven decades ago.

The Bretton Woods agreement depicted a global financial and monetary landscape, consolidating the U.S. dollar’s supremacy, which is still valid.

Currencies in the IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) basket of reserve assets represent post-WWII U.S. allies — the pound sterling, the yen and the euro, in addition to the dollar.

One major winner of WWII, the Soviet Union and then Russia, never won its fair share with its currency, the ruble, in the IMF basket, partly due to its voluntary disengagement from Western mechanisms.

Rising to become the second largest economy in the world, China is advocating and working on revising the current international system, almost unchanged in the past 70 years, and as a system it is inadequate as lower income countries largely miss out on equal opportunities.

Its immense size and robust market have seen China sustain the appeal for the outside world, particularly as it frees its huge services market and encourages the outbound investment of surplus funds.

Following 30 years of reform and opening up, China is no longer heavily dependent on foreign capital and exporting money as well, with overseas direct investment of 102.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2014, only 16.7 billion U.S. dollars less than foreign direct investment the country attracted.

Besides the AIIB, China initiated and has taken a leading role in the BRICS development bank, the Silk Road Fund and a development bank for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of which focus on infrastructure.

Designing financing tools that are complementary to the current international financial system, China has no intention of knocking over the chessboard, but rather is trying to help shape a more diverse world playing board.

With further liberalizing the yuan in floating exchange rates and cross-border transactions, China wishes to see its currency included in the IMF basket, in accordance with the weight the yuan now exerts on international goods and services trade.

China welcomes cooperation from every corner of the world to achieve shared prosperity based on common interest, but will go ahead anyway when it believes it is in the right.

This paper considers Africa’s place in China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. The Maritime Silk Road is a major component of the “Belt and Road” development framework announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in late 2013. While the People’s Republic of China has been actively engaged in Africa since 1960, the Maritime Silk Road promises an intensification of Chinese investment on the continent, especially in infrastructural projects including the construction of railways, airports and deepwater ports. The paper will contextualize these development projects in China’s new normal of single-digit growth, and explain that the “Belt and Road” should be seen as one of China’s new engines of growth. The paper will conclude with an examination of the question of whether China is engaged in neocolonialism in Africa.

Introduction: Encountering China in Yola

In August 2011 I arrived in Yola, the capital of Nigeria’s Adamawa State, to start work as an assistant professor at the American University of Nigeria (AUN). Tiny Yola, which resembles a large village, is very different from Nigeria’s cosmopolitan megacity Lagos, and Adamawa State is a region with one of the lowest levels of development in Nigeria. As such I was very surprised when I encountered a plethora of Chinese products in this sleepy corner of Nigeria. Our faculty houses were equipped with DVD players, refrigerators, washing machines, water dispensers, and other consumer electronic products from Chinese multinational firms like Haier and Cway. Apart from these consumer products, Oasis Bakery in our neighborhood was owned and managed by a hardworking expatriate from China who had chosen to settle in Nigeria.

In a seminar I conducted that semester on Chinese investment in Nigeria, one of the Nigerian participants observed that AUN’s campus police had purchased Jincheng motorcycles for its security patrols.1 Another Nigerian participant recounted his visit to the athletes’ accommodations constructed by China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation for the 2003 All-Africa Games in the Nigerian capital city Abuja:
I have personally visited this Games Village and in my opinion it is an amazing reflection of the relationship between China and Nigeria. The houses were very well constructed with very nice parking spaces and a neat environment. The furnishing of the houses was also remarkable as there were adire (local Nigerian fabric) curtains inside. This illustrates the good working relationship between Nigeria and China as the Chinese are sensitive to our preferences.2
These instances of the Chinese presence in Nigeria are part of a vast wave of Chinese investment and economic engagement in Africa, a wave which will intensify under China’s development plans for what it has described as the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The “Belt and Road” and China’s New Normal

In September 2013 Chinese President Xi Jinping announced, during a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, the strategic vision of the Silk Road Economic Belt, a transcontinental zone of economic development stretching from China across Central Asia and the Middle East to Europe, an area that maps over the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road.3 The following month President Xi announced in a speech to the Indonesian parliament the strategic vision of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, a zone of economic development that maps along the key ports and maritime trade routes of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.4

Both strategic visions come together under the “Belt and Road” framework, which offers Chinese funding, expertise, and industrial technology in the implementation of massive infrastructural projects in the geographical areas coming under the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. These projects, ranging from the construction of airports and railways to the redevelopment of deepwater ports, represent important opportunities for Chinese companies to expand and diversify their businesses by going global.5 It is not just these Chinese companies who will benefit from the projects, of course. China’s partner countries can expect to accelerate their economic development thanks to the improvements in their infrastructure, without having to worry about political interference in their internal affairs.6

The Chinese government takes a long-term view of the “Belt and Road” projects. As Foreign Minister Wang Yi mentioned in a speech in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2015:

“When Premier Li Keqiang visited the headquarters of African Union last year, Chairperson of African Union Commission Ms. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said that African people cherish a dream that one day the capitals of all African countries will be linked by high-speed railways. As a good friend of Africa, China is willing to make efforts to help African friends realize the dream. It is a century project that requires comprehensive planning and gradual advancement.”7

The “Belt and Road” initiatives come at a key period for China. After enjoying double digit GDP growth in the first decade of the 2000s, China’s growth has decelerated to what its leadership has described as a new normal of single digit growth.8 At the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in March 2015, Premier Li Keqiang announced that the government has lowered the annual growth target to 7%.9 This contrasts with previous decades when China enjoyed an average growth rate of approximately 10% between 1978 and 2013, with 11.5% between 2003 and 2007. In 2012 and 2013 growth decelerated to 7.7%, ushering in the new normal of medium-to-high growth and development, and triggering the need for the Chinese government to find new engines of growth.10 The “Belt and Road” framework can be placed in this context as one of China’s new engines of growth, offering fresh sources of employment and business opportunities to enable China to achieve what President Xi has highlighted in his political theory of the “Four Comprehensives” as the national goal of a moderately prosperous society.11 In particular, the employment opportunities created by the “Belt and Road” initiatives will be needed for the 15 million students who are expected to graduate from universities, technical and middle schools and join the workforce in 2015, as well as the 3 million surplus rural labourers who are also expected to join these students on the employment market.12

Africa and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road

The African continent’s position on the “Belt and Road” is located at the far west of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Historically, the eastern coast of Africa is remembered as the westernmost stop on Admiral Zheng He’s epic 15th century voyages across the Indian Ocean. In 2005 there was great fanfare in the Chinese press when Mwamaka Sharifu, a Kenyan girl who was reportedly the descendant of one of Zheng He’s Chinese sailors, received a scholarship from the Chinese government in commemoration of the 600th anniversary of Zheng He’s first voyage across the Indian Ocean.13 The infrastructural projects to be undertaken in Africa under the “Belt and Road” framework include the development of deepwater ports in coastal cities including Bizerte, Tunisia; Dakar, Senegal; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Djibouti, Djibouti; Libreville, Gabon; Maputo, Mozambique; and Tema, Ghana. These will be key sites of the transcontinental exchange of manufactured goods and commodities between Asian and African economies along the Maritime Silk Road.14 These ports are also likely to be developed as industrial hubs, following the model of China’s development of the new Cameroonian deepwater port of Kribi.

While China Harbor Engineering Company started constructing the new port in June 2011, the development plan also includes the creation of a 260 square kilometer industrial zone, as well as roads and railways connecting Kribi to major cities in Cameroon, projects which will be undertaken by other Chinese companies.15 In Kenya, China is constructing a railway connecting the capital city Nairobi with the port city of Mombasa. This will eventually be expanded into a regional rail corridor connecting Kenya—one of the African gateways to the Maritime Silk Road—with Uganda, Burundi, and South Sudan.16

As the Kribi port development project in Cameroon shows, Chinese firms have been active in Africa long before the 2013 announcement of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. According to statistics compiled by the State Council of China in 2013:

China has become Africa’s largest trade partner, and Africa is now China’s second largest overseas construction project contract market and the fourth largest investment destination … Up to now, China has completed 1,046 projects in Africa, building 2,233 kilometers of railways and 3,530 kilometers of roads, among others, promoting intra-African trade and helping it integrate into the global economy.17

An early infrastructural project was the TanZam railway between Tanzania and Zambia, which was built between October 1970 and June 1975, and involved not just Chinese financing, but also the participation of 50,000 Chinese engineers and laborers, 65 of whom perished during the arduous construction.18 The beginning of the engagement of the People’s Republic of China with Africa dates back a decade earlier to 1960, when China provided an interest-free loan of 100 million RMB to Guinea’s newly independent socialist government for the construction of a slate of aid projects including factories, plantations, and paddy fields. Other newly-decolonized African states received similar aid packages from China.19 Over the subsequent decades, China’s engagement with Africa changed in tandem with changes in its domestic political economy.

The rise of China’s private corporations after the economic liberalization of the 1980s saw a transition from state-owned enterprises to private businesses in the implementation of Chinese development projects overseas.20 Recent examples of such projects include China Railway Group’s Light Railway in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the first phase of which was recently completed;21 China Railway Construction Corporation’s Abuja-Kaduna railway in Nigeria, which was completed in December 2014, and which is the first phase of a larger railway modernization project connecting Lagos with Kano;22 and the Lobito-Luau railway in Angola, also built by China Railway Construction Corporation, which will eventually be connected to the Angola-Zambia and the Tanzania-Zambia railways.23 Likewise, Chinese engineering firms like China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, China Airport Construction Group Corporation, and China Harbour Engineering Company are constructing airports across the continent, including airports in Angola, Comoros, Djibouti, Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, and Togo.24

Apart from the transportation sector, Chinese companies are also involved in Africa’s energy sector, including hydropower dams in Ethiopia and Uganda;25 biogas development in Guinea, Sudan and Tunisia; and solar and wind power plants in Ethiopia, Morocco, and South Africa. Other economic sectors Chinese companies are actively involved with in Africa include agriculture, construction, healthcare, mining, and industrial manufacturing. A recent count estimates over 2,000 Chinese companies are engaged across almost every country on the African continent.26

To finance these and other projects under the “Belt and Road” framework, China has created a number of key financial institutions. In November 2014, President Xi announced the creation of a 40 billion USD Silk Road Fund. The bulk of its financing will come from the Chinese government, with the remainder from China Investment Corporation, China Development Bank Capital Company, and the Export-Import Bank of China.27 In July 2014, China and its partners in the so-called BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa—contributed 100 billion USD to establish the New Development Bank, an alternative to the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund for emerging economies to raise funds for infrastructural development.28 China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2014, with other founding members from across Asia, the Middle East, and other countries including New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Like the Silk Road Fund and the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank offers funding for infrastructure projects.29 China has also created smaller investment vehicles to finance infrastructural and other overseas business projects.30 The deepwater port development projects listed earlier, for example, will be partly financed by investment vehicles set up by China and Thailand.31

The Neocolonial Question

While China has cancelled the debts of some of its crisis-stricken partner countries, or offered them grants or zero-interest loans to pay for Chinese development projects,32 most of the loans issued by Chinese financial institutions have to be repaid by the recipient countries. In certain cases, China allows its partners to pay for their development projects by bartering their local products, in particular natural resources. China and a number of African states have had such countertrade arrangements since the 1980s, and since then China has received key primary products including oil, rubber, and minerals as payment for development loans.33 These deals involving extraction of natural resources have led to accusations that China is engaging in neocolonialism in Africa, as was voiced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a visit to Zambia in June 2011.34 Such criticisms have also been voiced by a number of African leaders who are concerned about China’s growing economic clout.35

While popular African perceptions of China’s economic engagement remain generally positive across the continent,36 positive public opinion concerning the benefits of Chinese investment to their local economies are on the decline.37 Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent announcement that Chinese diplomacy in 2015 will focus on building international cooperation for the “Belt and Road” reflects the government’s sense of urgency,38 especially given a recent diplomatic setback in Sri Lanka,39 and India’s continued deferral, arising from old suspicions of what it calls the “string of pearls” geopolitical threat.40 from accepting China’s invitation to participate in the “Belt and Road.”41

The continued acceptance of Chinese investments over the past five and a half decades by African states and their people is an important sign that China’s presence in Africa should be seen as that of a partner in economic development rather than that of an aspiring neocolonial hegemon.42 In historical context, the criticisms of China’s engagement with Africa in the Western press today echo Western colonial fears in the 1930s of Japan’s growing influence in Africa.43 A number of African and Western experts have joined the public conversation in critiquing the accusations of neocolonialism voiced by Secretary of State Clinton and others. The Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, for instance, has pointed out that the empirical evidence of China’s activities in Africa shows that its interests are purely commercial and that it has no interest in undermining the political structure, much less the sovereignty, of its African partners.44 (The key exception is China’s interest in keeping its partners from offering diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.

A country will break relations with Beijing should it recognize Taiwan as “China”; but even in this situation Chinese enterprises in the country have been known to continue functioning despite the loss of diplomatic relations.45) The political economist Deborah Brautigam reminds us that China’s swaps of infrastructure for resources with its African partners are based on its positive experience with swapping its own oil for Japanese industrial technology in the late 1970s. The industrial infrastructure and technological training thus received from Japan formed one of the bases for China’s subsequent economic take-off in the 1980s. As such, China sees the similar arrangements it has made with its partner countries in Africa and elsewhere as similarly offering mutual benefits for their economic development.46

While China’s overseas investments are certainly open to scrutiny, it is essential to consider these in the context of projects from other countries: it is by no means necessarily true that Chinese projects offer worse outcomes than those from the West.47 Indeed, when looked at in comparative perspective, it is clear that China’s infrastructural investments in particular fill a development gap in Africa that the West has largely ignored, 48 and that China’s massive imports of African commodities have accelerated African trade and expanded the market for African exports,49 creating the conditions for the continent’s dramatic recent economic growth.50

Africa’s recent rapid growth, which mirrors China’s own economic take-off three decades earlier, suggests that, like the Chinese enterprises that came before them, African enterprises, given the right economic conditions, will be able to hold their own against competition from Asia and the West. The implication is that the neocolonial narrative about China’s engagement with Africa is defeatist in its dire prognosis about the ability of African enterprises to compete against Chinese and other multinational corporations in the global market. Consider the case of textiles. While the textile industry in some African economies failed to withstand competition from China and other global competitors, the same industry in other African economies like Kenya’s and Madagascar’s was able to meet the international competition and recover and grow.51

Indeed, the textile industry is one of the mature industries that the Chinese government has encouraged to move offshore, to allow Chinese industry to move up the value chain, and Chinese entrepreneurs from the textile and other mature industries have settled and taken up citizenship in African countries like Lesotho, further developing the local economies with their industrial knowledge, and deepening the commercial and technical know-how of their local colleagues and employees.52 Such capacity building can accelerate the movement of African industries up the value chain, as was the experience of the mature Chinese enterprises themselves in the 1990s and 2000s. Africa’s movement up the industrial value chain can already be seen in the emergence of an indigenous automobile industry.53 This shows that, rather than defeatism, optimism is warranted when projecting the probable outcomes of China’s continued engagement with Africa.

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy, and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Email: [email protected]. Web: https://manoa-hawaii.academia.edu/AlvinLim

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Notes
1 Joseph Ishaku, “Chinese Products’ Presence in Nigeria: The Case of Motorcycles” (seminar paper, American University of Nigeria, 2011), 7.
2 Lawrence Osekhale Iriogbe, “China in Africa: Nigeria as a Case Study” (seminar paper, American University of Nigeria, 2011), 6.
3 Wu Jiao and Zhang Yunbi, “Xi proposes a ‘new Silk Road’ with Central Asia,” China Daily, September 8, 2013, accessed March 12, 2015.
4 Wu Jiao and Zhang Yunbi, “Xi in call for building of new ‘maritime silk road,’” China Daily, October 4, 2013, accessed March 12, 2015.
5 Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 103-104. Zhang Yuzhe, “With New Funds, China Hits a Silk Road Stride,” Caixin, December 3, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
6 Shi Ze, “‘One Road & One Belt’ & New Thinking With Regard To Concepts And Practice,” 30th Anniversary Conference of the Schiller Institute, October 18, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
7 “Wang Yi: China Is Ready to Work for Africa’s Dream of Building,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People’s Republic of China, January 11, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
8 Kenneth Rapoza, “Double Digits No More, China & India Govts Want To Grow Slow,” Forbes, April 10, 2012, accessed March 12, 2015.
9 Chen Jia, Dai Tian, Zhao Yinan, “Growth rate slows, structural reform predicted,” China Daily, March 5, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
10 “China aims at medium-to-high speed of growth with twin engines: gov’t report,” Xinhua, March 5, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
11 “Xi’s ‘Four Comprehensives’ a strategic blueprint for China,” Xinhua, February 25, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015. Wang Bowen, “China unswervingly sticks to peaceful development under ‘new normal,’” Xinhua, March 5, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
12 “China faces arduous task of ensuring employment,” Xinhua, March 10, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
13 “Is this young Kenyan Chinese descendant?” China Daily, July 11, 2005, accessed March 12, 2015.
14 Atul Aneja, “China steps up drive to integrate Africa with Maritime Silk Road,” The Hindu, January 21, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
15 Shannon Tiezzi, “What’s It Like to Have China Build You a Port? Ask Cameroon,” The Diplomat, February 27, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
16 Cheng Lu, “Return of maritime Silk Road does not forget Africa,” Xinhua, February 12, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
17 “China-Africa relations: something besides natural resources,” Xinhua, March 2, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
18 “Backgrounder: China’s major railway construction projects in Africa, Latin America,” Xinhua, 27 February, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
19 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 31-34.
20 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 79.
21 “China-funded light rail project puts Ethiopia on track for transformation,” China Radio International, February 8, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
22 Chen Boyuan, “Chinese company completes Nigeria railway project,” China.org.cn, December 2, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015. “Nigeria Completes First Standard Gauge Railway Modernization Project,” Nigerian Television Authority, December 4, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
23 “Chinese-built railway in Angola open to traffic,” Xinhua, February 15, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
24 “China airport construction going global,” Xinhua, December 7, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015. “China, Sudan sign $700m loan for new Khartoum airport,” Sudan Tribune, December 17, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015. “Djibouti starts building two Chinese-funded airports,” Reuters, January 20, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015. Hou Liqiang and Hu Haiyan, “Jam-packed airports add to pressure,” China Daily, January 30, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015. Li Lianxing, “Airports give Rwanda a ticket to growth,” China Daily, January 30, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
25 Peter Bosshard,”China’s Global Dam Builder at a Crossroads,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 12 (2014), accessed March 12, 2015.
26 “China-Africa relations.” Ronald Ssekandi and Yuan Qing, “China’s investment in infrastructure key to Africa’s development: experts,” Xinhua, February 24, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
27 Zhang Yuzhe, “Gov’t Said to Name Three to Silk Road Fund Leadership Team,” Caixin, February 5, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
28 Zhang Yuzhe, “With New Funds.”
29 “Asian Infrastructure Development Bank to be operational by year-end,” Press Trust of India, January 2, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015. Jamil Anderlini, Tom Mitchell and George Parker, “UK move to join AIIB meets mixed response in China,” Financial Times, March 13, 2015, accessed March 14, 2015. “New Zealand becomes 24th founding member of AIIB,” China Daily, January 5, 2015, accessed March 14, 2015.
30 Zhang Yuzhe, “With New Funds.”
31 Brian Eyler, “China’s Maritime Silk Road is all about Africa,” East by Southeast, November 17, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
32 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 136-137.
33 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 56.
34 “Clinton Chastises China on Internet, African ‘New Colonialism,’” Bloomberg, June 12, 2011, accessed March 12, 2015.
35 Lamido Sanusi, “Africa must get real about Chinese ties,” Financial Times, March 11, 2013, accessed March 12, 2015. Gregory Chin, “China’s Challenge in Africa: Avoid Blame of Neo-Colonialism,” YaleGlobal, 9 July 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
36 Pew Research Center, “Chapter 2: China’s Image,” Global Opposition to U.S. Surveillance and Drones, but Limited Harm to America’s Image, July 14, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
37 Katie Simmons, “U.S., China compete to woo Africa,” Pew Research Fact Tank, August 4, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
38 “China’s 2015 diplomacy focuses on ‘Belt and Road,’” Xinhua, March 8, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
39 Chen Qin and Huang Shan, “Sri Lanka Tells China It Will Rethink Ties – and a Major Port Project,” Caixin, March 10, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
40 Shee Poon Kim, “An Anatomy of China’s ‘String of Pearls’ Strategy,” The Hikone Ronso 387 (2011), accessed March 12, 2015. David Tweed, “Modi Touring Indian Ocean to Keep China’s Submarines at Bay,” Bloomberg, March 10, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
41 “China invites India to join its Maritime Silk Road initiative,” Press Trust of India, February 14, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015. C. Raja Mohan, “Silk Road Focus: Chinese Takeaway,” Indian Express, March 10, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
42 The growing American military presence in Africa suggests that the putative hegemon is indeed not Chinese. See Nick Turse, “The US Military Has Been ‘At War’ in Africa on the Sly For Years,” The Nation, April 14, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015. See also Nick Turse, “US Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries Than You Can Imagine,” The Nation, January 20, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.
43 Richard Bradshaw and Jim Ransdell, “Japan, Britain and the Yellow Peril in Africa in the 1930s,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (2011), accessed March 12, 2015.
44 Dambisa Moyo, Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for Us (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 157.
45 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 67-69.
46 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 46-48.
47 Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “Gilded Outside, Shoddy Within: The Human Rights Watch report on Chinese copper mining in Zambia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (2011), accessed March 12, 2015.
48 Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “Trade, Investment, Power and the China-in-Africa Discourse,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (2009), accessed March 12, 2015.
49 Dambisa Moyo, “Beijing, a Boon for Africa,” New York Times, June 27, 2012, accessed March 12, 2015.
50 “The Hopeful Continent: Africa Rising,” The Economist, December 3, 2011, accessed March 12, 2015. World Bank, Africa Rising: A Tale of Growth, Inequality and Great Promise, April 14, 2014, accessed March 12, 2015.
51 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 219.
52 Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 222-223.
53 Farai Gundan, “Made In Africa: Three Cars Designed And Manufactured In Africa,” Forbes, January 31, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015.

On the heels of a diplomatic spat between Hanoi and Washington regarding Russia’s use of a former US air base in Vietnam to refuel nuclear-capable bombers on the way to conducting “provocative” runs in the Pacific, we get yet another, larger, sign that it may indeed be the US that’s isolated and not (as Western media would have you believe) the Kremlin. 

The UK (Washington’s “special” friend) has announced it’s joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is essentially China’s answer to the Asian Development Bank over which Beijing feels the US has undue influence.  

The bank, which will fund infrastructure projects across the region and may indeed be part and parcel of China’s implicit attempt to establish a Sino-Monroe Doctrine, represents “an unrivaled opportunity for the UK and Asia to invest and grow together,” according to Britain’s George Osborne. Unsurprisingly, the US doesn’t see it that way and although Washington was generously willing to concede that this was the UK’s decision to make for itself, US officials are clearly perturbed that Britain didn’t ask for permission:

A spokesman for the National Security Council says the US will allow the UK to make its own decisions…

“This is the U.K.’s sovereign decision.”

…but the next time David Cameron thinks about appeasing a country that is a possible threat to US hegemony, he really needs to ask first…

“[The decision was made with] virtually no consultation with the US.”

“We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power.” — From FT, quoting a senior US Official

Washington was also quick to make clear just what the US’s “expectations” are going forward now that London has made a misguided decision to support an effort to improve infrastructure in Asia:

“We hope and expect that the U.K. will use its voice to push for the adoption of high standards.”

Because this really is all about standards, as the US made clear last year when Washington may or may not have operated behind the scenes to discourage Australia, South Korea, and Japan from joining the bank.

From NY Times:

Washington has expressed reservations about the new institution, on the grounds that it would not meet environmental standards, procurement requirements and other safeguards adopted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank for their lending projects.

But fundamentally, Washington views the Chinese venture as a deliberate challenge to those postwar institutions, which are led by the United States and, to a lesser extent, Japan, and the Obama administration has put pressure on allies not to participate…

South Korea and Australia, both of which count China as their largest trading partner, have seriously considered membership but have held back, largely because of forceful warnings from Washington, including a specific appeal to Australia by President Obama. 

But as one official from the rival Asian Development Bank told The Times: “This horse is out of the barn.” 

And that means in short order Australia and South Korea will likely be on board and at that point, the stigma the US has created around membership will have completely disappeared (if it hasn’t already), opening the door for other US “allies” to join despite the bank’s alleged “low” standards.

So again we ask: “Who’s really isolated?”

Scientists have raised concern over the rate of radioactive contamination of the Pacific, due to the Fukushima nuclear accident.

• Expert : Plutonium-241 from Fukushima nearly 70,000 times more than atomic bomb fallout in Japan.
• Officials : Molten fuel now ‘particle-like’, contains ‘special’ nuclear materials.
• Gov’t Labs : Large areas of oceans contaminated by plutonium from events such as Fukushima; Build-up in biosphere expected; Considerable hazard to humans.

Energy News statement :

Detection of long-lived plutonium isotopes in environmental samples by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) — Plutonium isotopes 239Pu, 240Pu and 242Pu are anthropogenic radionuclides emitted into the environment by nuclear activities. Pu is accumulated in the human body and hence, poses a considerable hazard to human health. Due to the long half-lives, these isotopes are present in the biosphere on large time scales and a build-up can be expected. Therefore it is important to study the contamination pathway of Pu into the drinking water… a method to detect long-lived Pu isotopes by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) is being developed. AMS requires only few milligrams of sample material… Consequently, more samples from different locations can be taken which is essential when searching for locally increased Pu concentrations as in the Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima accident… Samples from different locations in the Pacific Ocean and from the snow-hydrosphere are planned…

Statement by: Taeko Shinonaga, head of Radioanalytical Laboratory at Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen (research institution founded jointly by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education & Research and Bavaria’s Finance Ministry), scientists from Technische Universitat Munchen (Germany), Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft 2013 meeting (emphasis added)

Presentation by: Taeko Shinonaga, head of Helmholtz radioanalytical lab (pdf), Nov 2014: Comparison of activity between [nuclear bomb testing] fallout Pu particle and Fukushima origin Pu particle:
Global Fallout Pu in Japan [GF]
> Pu240: 1,360 Bq
> Pu241: 645 Bq
> Total: 208,005 Bq

Fukushima Pu found in our study
> Pu240: 197,000 Bq [145 times GF]
> Pu241: 43,700,000 Bq [67,752 times GF]
> Total: 44,061,000 Bq [212 times GF]

Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Univ. of Notre Dame, 2014: Interstitial incorporation of plutonium into a low-dimensional potassium borate…

[E]vents such as the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan [have] resulted in the contamination of large areas of oceans, ground-water, soils, and sediments by actinides, such as uranium and plutonium… migration of actinides [is] an important environmental concern… Knowledge of the incorporation mechanisms of actinides into… natural materials is therefore required… for predicting the migration of radionuclides…

European Commission Joint Research Centre (pdf), 2014:

[The Joint Research Centre] is studying emerging safety issues…examining mixed oxide (MOX) properties [and] preparing further severe accident studies on specific aspects of the Fukushima accident [such as] off-vessel fuel-concrete interactions… Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) selected a JRC-developed method as one of the most suitable approaches to characterise [Fukushima’s] molten fuel… This characterisation is an international obligation during the decommissioning phase, according to IAEA safeguards. Japanese researchers are now developing and optimising the methodology to quantify special nuclear materials in particle-like debris of the molten reactor fuel.

Asian stocks fell on Thursday following weak US economic data and a sharp sell-off in US technology shares.

The Nasdaq index fell 2.4% – its biggest drop since April 2014 – to 4,876 on concerns that technology and biotech stocks have become overvalued.

US stocks were also hit by news that durable goods orders fell last month.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 shares index closed 1.4% lower at 19,471.12 while South Korea’s benchmark Kospi shed 1% to 2,022.56.

In Australia, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.6% to close at 5,879.06, marking its biggest fall in more than two weeks.

Chinese stocks bucked the trend, however, with the Shanghai Composite closing up 0.6% at 3,682.10.

But in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index closed down 0.1% at 24,497.08

Geopolitical risk

Oil prices rose during Asian trade after Saudi Arabia, a major oil exporter, and its allies began airstrikes in Yemen, raising concerns on the disruption of supplies in the Middle East.

Brent crude rose by as much as 5%, approaching $60 (£40) a barrel in Tokyo.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures , the US benchmark, gained about 4% to $51 a barrel.

“With Saudi beginning to bomb targets in Yemen, in an attempt to defuse a coup by Shiite rebels, the geo-political risk quotient in the Middle East has ratcheted higher,” Vishnu Varathan from Mizuho Bank wrote in a report.

“If the strike morphs into a full-blown confrontation involving Iran, then oil will surge alongside gold and the US dollar while US treasury yields may be set for a renewed drop.”

‘Malicious attack’

Shares in Chinese water purification company Ozner Water International rose by more than 14% following a five-week long suspension.

The firm had been accused of making “false and misleading representations” over its profitability by short-seller Glaucus Research last month.

The allegations caused Ozner’s shares to lose a fifth of its value before trading was halted.

On Wednesday, Ozner addressed Glaucus Research’s claims as “unfounded allegations” in a detailed statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

“We will not tolerate what seems to be an outright malicious attack on the company for personal gains which harms the company’s reputation and business prospects,” it said.

Copyright BBC, 2015

The vigil guards comprise four uniformed officers each standing at a corner of the casket with his head bowed, back turned away and ceremonial sword inverted – led by a senior officer who stands at the head of the casket facing inwards.

SINGAPORE: The Republic’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has been accorded the nation’s highest form of respect: The traditional mounting of the vigil guards during the lying in state period at the Parliament House.

Mr Lee’s coffin was on Wednesday (Mar 25) transported to the Parliament House, and it will lie in state until the State Funeral on Sunday. The vigil guards are in place, and comprise four uniformed officers each standing at a corner of the casket with his head bowed, back turned away and ceremonial sword inverted. They are led by a senior officer who stands at the head of the casket facing inwards.

“If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.” – Singapore statesman Lee Kuan Yew, BBC, Jul 5, 2000 

You never hear the end of it. The “Singapore miracle”, the fabulous Asian city state, a model of development and wealth creation encrusted with “Asian values”, corporate innovation and transparent governance.  “Prosperous, orderly, clean, efficient, and honestly governed,” noted The Economist, though it had to concede that it was not only the work of the late Lee Kuan Yew.

The 91-year-old Lee, statesman spectacular, was the “geostrategist”, the “wise man of the East”.[1]  For many citizens, he was the “father”, a “king”.[2]  Margaret Thatcher expressed her admiration for his clarity of vision.  He led Singapore at a time of crisis, having seen its eviction from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. Vulnerable to being swallowed up, devoid of natural resources, he imposed on Singapore a model of development that would make its way into manuals on economic management.

Such commemorative tributes do little to find in Lee the idiosyncratic racist, the cultural theorist, the humourless strong man of all views Singaporean – because any of his views were obviously deemed good views.  (Forced laughter was always a feature of audiences listening to Lee’s at times eccentric articulations.)

Lee, in many ways, could hardly be said to be modern. His Singaporean recipe was affected by the apparatus of examining civilizations outlined by the British historian Arnold Toynbee.  As his biographer Michael D. Barr notes, Toynbee furnished Lee with the concept of “challenge and response” during his time at Cambridge University. The thesis, albeit something Lee would inventively mangle, was fundamental – the “challenge” presented to a human group could be both detrimental and an opportunity; the “response” to it would be fundamental to its success and durability.[3]

As Barr points out, Lee believed in three additional factors in his Weltanschauung: “medieval scientism” with its emphasis on “ductless glands in determining a person’s and a people’s drive to achieve”; Lamarck’s view of evolution; and “a belief in culturally-based eugenics and dysgenics”.[4]

While meritocracy may well have been the most stressed feature of his policy drive, Lee did not shy away from believing in superior races and values, funnelled through his view of a racial hierarchy.  “The Israelis,” for instance, “are very smart… the rabbi in any Jewish society was often the most intelligent and well-read, most learned of all.” Good genes always count. “That’s how they multiply, the bright ones multiply.  That sums it up.”

Little wonder, then, that durable and prevailing Israel provided the new Singaporean state inspiration, a country encircled in a sea of hostile Arab states. “Like Israel, we had to leapfrog the rest of the region, and attract multinational companies.”[5]

In contrast, the Malays were somewhat lower in the pegging order, suffering a range of cultural “deficits”.  They did not have, for instance, the “X-factor” in terms of development, though Lee, in the usual muddle over race and culture, decided to emphasise one over the other depending on his audience.  When it came to the “Bell curve” on intelligence, he was convinced in claiming that “blacks on average score 85 percent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture.  The whites score an average 100.  Asians score more.”[6]

The paradox of Singaporean governance does not lie in its endorsement of freedom – repressive measures cake the model and ice its functions, allowing the economic arm of existence to work the magic of numbers and gross domestic product.  It rather endorses freedom in various measures, fed by way of drip and concessions, and encouragements, to the money making and investing fraternity.

At all stages, agree with the ruling wisdom of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).  Do not wobble – keep to the pathway of development.  Avoid any nonsense about civil liberties, a distraction that will only incite suspicion on the part of the authorities.  Make money.  Stay open about how corporations make money.  In terms of transparency and anti-corruption measures, Singapore ranks highly – placed seventh in 175 countries in terms of the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International.[7]

Lee’s embrace of a Westminster model for the fledgling state in 1959 was qualified.  On paper, it reeks of Britannic wisdom, with its insistence on Parliamentary power and ministerial accountability.  In practice, it reveals brutal calculation on the part of the PAP to muzzle what, effectively, has only ever been a nominal opposition.

Defamation suits as a means of bankrupting contrarians was Lee’s great innovation.  An opposition was only ever useful to fill a few spaces on the parliamentary benches.  “If we had considered them serious political figures,” claimed Lee scornfully to the Straits Times (Sep 14, 2003), “we would not have kept them politically alive for so long.  We would have bankrupt them earlier.”  The late J. B. Jeyaretnam of the opposing Workers’ Party represented “a thoroughly destructive force” and needed to be “knocked”.  “Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one.”

Similarly, those in the press had to familiarise themselves with the view that a questioning, aggressive media would be legally bludgeoned into manageable docility.  “Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media,” claimed Lee in an address to the General Assembly of the International Press Institute at Helsinki (Jun 9, 1971), “must be subordinated to the overriding interests of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.”

The Singapore Lee left us would allow cyberpunk writer William Gibson to make the claim that it was “Disneyland with the death penalty.”  Practitioners of graffiti, as US citizen Michael P. Fay painfully discovered in 1994 – would be caned.  But income levels have kept rising.  The system seems to be holding.

This modern equivalent of a thriving graffiti-free Venetian city state may well have been Lee’s creation, but it has come at considerable social cost.  The press remains submissive, though this is hardly a concern.  The opposition show no signs of growing, living in permanent emasculation. And Singapore provides a superb fillip for authoritarians, both incumbent and aspirational, who do see in Lee’s legacy something to emulate. The mix, however, is a poorly balanced one – authoritarians tend to make poor economic managers.  Lee proved to be the exception, but one should be cautious making it a model to follow.

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

When Wired published its article, “The Plot to Free North Korea with Smuggled Episodes of ‘Friends,’” it probably hoped that its impressionable, politically ignorant audience would not pick up on the underlying facts and their implications, and simply see a “cute” anecdote poking fun at the besieged East Asian country while inflating their own sense of unwarranted cultural superiority.

What they missed, of course, is the fact that the program peddled by Wired as the work of “the North Korea Strategy Center and its 46-year-old founder, Kang Chol-hwan,” is in fact funded and organized instead by the US State Department.

Indeed, the North Korea Strategy Center is partnered directly with the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the US Department of State, the US State Department’s Radio Free Asia propaganda network, and the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a defacto “department of regime change” backed by Wall Street’s Fortune 500, solely for the interests of Wall Street’s Fortune 500.

Readers of Wired’s latest, long-winded spin on US-backed sedition abroad also most likely missed the fact that if TV shows from America are considered a tool for social engineering in North Korea, they are most likely being used as a tool of social engineering in the United States as well. The degradation of American culture, the family, and weakening of local communities, versus the growing centralized dominance of corporate-financier monopolies and their increasingly draconian police and surveillance state is a direct result of this.

Wired would admit in their article that:

Kang likens the USB sticks to the red pill from The Matrix: a mind-altering treatment that has the power to shatter a world of illusions. “When North Koreans watch Desperate Housewives, they see that Americans aren’t all war-loving imperialists,” Kang says. “They’re just people having affairs or whatever. They see the leisure, the freedom. They realize that this isn’t the enemy; it’s what they want for themselves. It cancels out everything they’ve been told. And when that happens, it starts a revolution in their mind.”

Indeed, convincing a population to be self-absorbed moral and social degenerates is “mind-altering,” however it has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of freedom. The weakness sown amongst populations encouraged to break up first their families, then their local communities, is tantamount to a domestic military campaign of sociopolitical “divide and conquer.” Local communities that are incapable of organizing themselves, because individuals themselves are incapable of building families, reduces the potential of competitors rising up and challenging the status quo established by Wall Street and Washington.

More importantly, it encourages servile dependency on a particular type of consumerist paradigm perfected and exclusively dominated by Western interests that best feeds the sort of self-absorbed behavior endlessly promoted across Western media.

Essentially, NKSC is not working to “free” anyone. Instead, they are working to corral North Koreans out of one cage, and into another. Some might argue this “other cage” is more comfortable, but it is still a cage nonetheless. It is not done for any altruistic purpose, but simply to enroll millions more from yet another region of the planet into Wall Street’s global-spanning, unsustainable, exploitative consumerist paradigm – one which strangles the environment, society, and individuals.

How can NKSC Show People the “Truth” if it Can’t Even be Honest About Who is Behind its Work? It is also a consumerist paradigm admittedly being built up and sustained with US taxpayers’ money, through the US State Department whose mission is allegedly to represent the American people and their best interests, but which is instead demonstrably imposing US corporate-financier interests on other people, through tricks when possible, and through force when necessary.

Wired’s article, like many others it has written to spin what is essentially colonialism 2.0, is meant to give readers a sense of moral superiority over the West’s many perceived enemies.

That Wired never mentions the US State Department’s role in this particular propaganda campaign illustrates that not only are people being manipulated, they are being manipulated through an extraordinarily dishonest campaign. Would Kang’s sedition be as palatable to North Koreans if they knew it was in fact fully funded, supported, and even the creation of the US State Department? Would that bolster Kang’s allegations that North Korea is unreasonably paranoid regarding American designs to subvert, destroy, and overrun the nation? Or does the fact that his work is fully underwritten by the US State Department undermine entirely the lies he uses to defend it?

When offering “freedom” to others, truth and transparency is essential. The ill-informed or misinformed cannot make truly honest decisions about their future. If North Korea’s crime is deceiving its people about the state of the world beyond its borders, than Kang and the North Korea Strategy Center’s campaign to show them the “true world” with propaganda funded by the US State Department – a fact never mentioned by Kang and the NKSC – is just as deceptive.

As is often said, two wrongs don’t make a right – and that’s if one foolishly assumes the US State Department is seeking to make a right in the first place.

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

A major recent event last week largely went unnoticed by both MSM and independent news sources alike. The British are apparently jumping ship away from the US dollar/petrodollar in an overt effort to align itself more closely with the BRICS alliance as it seeks a new standard international currency. For several years Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa (BRICS) have been preparing the world for its transition from USD standard international currency to its own alternative-in-the-making. America’s so called mother country England has seen the writing on the wall and knows the global balance of power is rapidly tilting in favor of where the sun always rises in the emerging East. 

The European central banking cabal from the City of London, a separate and private political and financial entity apart from the rest of both London and England, sent British royalty Prince William to China to quietly sign a deal to become a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). This surprising new development is a clear indication that the royal Bank of England is placing its financial bet and future on China and the East as its rock solid anchor. Much of the world has been looking to move away from and abandon the longtime global financial stronghold of the US Federal Reserve, its World Bank and US dollar standard. A US official feebly chastised UK in the Financial Times:

We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power.

More consternation arose when Germany, France and Italy have additionally made overtures in the same direction. This worldwide trend spells utter defeat for Obama and his disastrous foreign policy. After Washington’s been exerting strong-armed pressure on Australia as its key allied partner supporting its failing Asian pivot designed to check China’s growing regional and global dominance in the Pacific Asian market, Australia is now also looking to follow suit accepting and embracing China’s lead.

According to international investor and entrepreneur Simon Black, the US is experiencing major economic blowback after two plus decades of aggression as the only global superpower:

     … After years of endless wars, spying, debt, money printing, bailouts, and insane regulations, the

rest of the world has had enough. And they’re looking for an alternative.

Enter the China led BRICS alliance and its New Development Bank and now China’s other investment bank entry AIIB. Simon takes liberty in his interpretation of Britain and Europe’s bold rebellion after decades relegated to being a mere puppet of the US Empire:

Look, you have $18.1 trillion in official debt, you have $42 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and you’re kind of a dick. I’m dumping you.

Perhaps some Americans may feel a bit betrayed and unsettled by our longtime strongest global allies one by one seemingly abandoning the US dollar and American Empire in its reckoning time of need. If these geopolitical and economic trends are examined beyond their face value though, the changes occurring now may reflect much more significant, deeper changes than a mere alteration of standard international currency (as impactful as that will likely be for the US). These deep rooted fundamental changes have everything to do with the major global shift now taking place where the West’s ruling power elite itself is losing to the emerging global power rising in the East.

The latest act of bold economic defiance breaking rank with US Empire interests mirrors last month’s bucking trend that Europe exercised when putting the skids on the US campaign for sending heavy armaments to Ukraine and pushing for war against Russia. The fact is Europe and especially Germany depend on natural gas from Russia and the US imposed sanctions on Russia hurt Europe even more than Russia. That along with wanting to avoid war in their own backyard has nations like Germany and France softening their hardline, US pushed anti-Russian posturing.

Several weeks ago German and French leaders attended meetings in Mink, Belarus to negotiate a peaceful way out of the escalating violence in Eastern Ukraine between the government forces in Kiev and the ethnic Russian separatists seeking autonomy in the Donetsk and Lugansk region. In the same way Netanyahu attempted to fan the war flames against Iran, the same day Germany and France were gathering in Minsk to meet with Putin and Ukraine leaders, Secretary of State Kerry showed up in Kiev mouthing the same worn out lie of “Russian aggression” in a transparent feeble attempt to sabotage the Minsk talks. Again, the tie-in is the Israeli-US crime cabal constantly at work every chance they get peddling and promoting more global violence, death and war.

For over a year now Washington’s war drums have been beating louder for NATO to join forces with Ukraine, pressuring Europe to submit as it always has in going along with its permanent war agenda, all the while falsely demonizing Russia’s President Putin with outrageous propaganda lies and nonstop false flags not unlike the WMD lies against Hussein in 2002-3 Iraq. But in a rare gesture of independence, unwilling to start a war so close to home against nuclear powered Russia that Europe relies heavily as a critical source for its natural gas consumption, the powers of Europe are seeking a non-violent resolution to its regional conflict that carries the devastating potential of triggering World War III.

Meanwhile, NATO Supreme Commander US Air Force General Philip Breedlove fashions himself to be a Dr. Strangelove incarnate, making repeated bogus claims and lies of Russian army presence inside Eastern Ukraine in a vain yet persistent attempt to foment war. Having such a deluded and deceitful warmonger in charge of the NATO nuclear arsenal poses a calamitous threat to the entire world. Yet his commander-in-chief Obama has chosen not to relieve him of command. Instead German leaders have openly criticized Breedlove and the European Union wants to replace NATO with its own continental army. This very public geopolitical conflict over such widely differing Western approaches toward Ukraine seriously undermine American Empire’s global influence and power, again underscoring simultaneous developments around the world that indicate consistent across the boards US foreign policy failures and from the broader context, a rapid US decline as the sole global hegemonic superpower.

Putin advisor Sergei Glazyev nailed it when he said:

The war has been provoked to destroy the Russian World, to draw Europe into it, and to surround Russia with hostile countries. Unleashing this world war, America is trying to deal with its own internal problems.

Current economic turmoil reverberating in Japan is in large part due to the notorious corruption of the Abe government that may soon have additional problems to contend with once accusations over a fraudulent past elections get fully exposed. Abe has been a subservient tool used by the same international crime syndicate controlled by subversive Israeli-American forces. As such, Japan will also be moving away from the USD/West geopolitics and very likely pivoting toward China and a Pacific alliance that excludes the US Empire finding itself increasingly isolated on the outs.

Though incumbent Prime Minister Netanyahu is the apparent winner in today’s Israeli election, the despot had to claw and fight for his political life to survive another day. Recent revelations that he’s been a Russian spy surfaced right after his disgraceful debacle in front of the Israeli captured US congressional audience on Capitol Hill two weeks ago and then came the despicable treasonous display of 47 Republican senators threatening letter to Iran. Bibi’s days of hate, war and paranoia are numbered as the ugly truth about his evildoing will continue to unfold that will soon bring him down. Showing his true evil colors right to the end, the day before the election Netanyahu once again reminded the world that an autonomous Palestinian state will never come to pass while on his watch.

Within the last couple weeks other mysterious events suggesting some cataclysmic, behind-the-scenes development included the apparent disappearance of Vladimir Putin for 11 consecutive days, fueling speculation from an internal political coup to possible sickness and/or death to witnessing the birth of his child at the bedside of his girlfriend in Switzerland. Because so many monumental breaking stories and developments seem to abound every week, Putin’s normally high profile lifestyle would naturally generate even higher profile speculation over his abrupt, extended disappearance. Of course it begs the question asking if it’s merely coincidental with these other earth-shaking events or very much related.

For years the CIA and US Empire have been hard at work in nations from Eastern Europe through the Caucasus to Central Asia all the way to China courting the favor of corrupt dictators and supporting coups promoting anti-Russo-Sino US puppet governments along the entire corridor bordering Russia and China. Despite such Obama’s plan after the 2008 Russian-Georgia conflict was to a reset relations with Russia. But with last year’s US-induced Ukrainian coup and Russia’s annexation by consensual vote of Crimea that “reset” plan went out the window. In 2011 Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed the economic alliance of the Eurasian Union. Meanwhile, recognizing the strategic importance of the land bridge between Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Putin has made inroads strengthening ties with the three South Caucasus nations. Putin enticed Armenia to also join the Eurasian Union and has mediated hostilities between Armenia and oil rich Azerbaijan while seeking to repair and realign with Georgia that previously leaned toward the West. US Empire has largely failed to gain a foothold in this part of the world.

Other key geopolitical developments that have been ongoing for some time center in such remote places as western China’s mineral and oil-rich Xinjiang Province. With the powerful US Navy patrolling and to a great extent controlling Pacific waters in conjunction with Obama’s flop of an Asian Pacific pivot, the geopolitics chessboard strategy to hem the two adversarial giants in with hostile neighbors has generally backfired. Furthermore, the US was not prepared for Russia and China to suddenly renew an ultra-close economic, political and military bond that would effectively counter US Empire’s hegemonic aggression. They promptly signed a $400 billion oil-gas pipeline deal that will span a landlocked pathway, thereby foiling the US plan to seal off the China’s energy access via the Pacific. Hence, Moslem populated Xinjiang Province that is the proposed pipeline passage route has become a highly contentious target where the West and CIA in particular have been funding and supporting a separatist movement and acts of terrorism as a disruptive interdiction tactic. Overall this covert strategy has failed.

The Western cabal controlled crime syndicate led by the likes of kingpin Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu financed and supported by the likes of multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson and the Saudi royal family along with congressional henchman and ISIS friend Senator John McCain and the rest of his treasonous Republicans, the rogue US intelligence agency the CIA and NATO’s General Breedlove are all bent on plunging the US Empire-NATO forces into World War III on multiple warfronts at every global hotspot – Ukraine, Syria, Iran, the Caucasus all the way eastward to China’s Xinjiang Province and northward to the oil-rich Arctic against the forces of the two most powerful nations of the East – Russia and China. As a desperate last ditch attempt to retain its many centuries of Rothschild-Rockefeller power and dominance, these evil-minded, megalomaniacal psychopaths know that their hitherto unchallenged global control and strength that have bankrupted and nearly destroyed the planet is fast slipping away. So they seem all the more erratically resolute in seeking revenge by taking the entire earth down with them.

The truth about the horror and destruction these Western oligarchs have conspired and caused worldwide for centuries cannot even be fathomed. They have ensured a permanent state of war (in the US alone 93% of its 239 years) right up to the present Bush crime family-neocon fabrication of the “war on terror,” then under Obama this last year alone wrongly plunging America into another dangerous cold war with Putin’s Russia, and dozens of tragic false flag events like 9/11 designed to demonize Moslems into becoming the instantaneous post-Communist designated enemy of the twenty-first century with the US-Saudi-Israeli creation of al Qaeda/ISIS. These dark malevolent forces of evil that have propagated so much misery and suffering on humanity for so long are finally at last being exposed like never before.

The Western oligarch agenda to inflict a globalized system of absolute totalitarian fascist police state NWO control on every nation and people on earth trapped in hopeless debtor bondage may just be running into a brick Eastern wall as clear losers in the ongoing economic/currency war. Despite the constant jabbing of Putin and his Russian bear in vain attempts to manipulate him to react with military force in eastern Ukraine and despite the failed overt assault in the form of US Empire’s Asian pivot designed to close in and isolate China from the rest of Pacific Asia, ironically it’s the United States that finds itself increasingly alone as the longtime global village bully that’s finally met its match about to get its comeuppance. The smarter, economically stronger forces emerging from the East are winning the power war potentially without even firing a single shot against Western oppressors. Hopefully peace will prevail and the international crime syndicate that has long controlled the West will be deposed of as the murderous traitors to both peace and humankind.

As a necessary qualifier, actual real life tends toward shades of gray far more than black and white. Undoubtedly elements of corruption and evil lurk behind all the most powerful nations in both the West and the East. But the forces of China and Russia appear to be seeking a far more rational, humane and even peaceful resolution to the West-instigated West vs. East geopolitical military showdown sinisterly orchestrated by the international crime cabal’s global agenda of polarization, militarization, privatization and unsustainable, insurmountable debt-driven feudalism based on pure theft, deception, exploitation, impoverishment and pervasive planetary destruction.

Seeking to avoid the inevitable bloodbath that would result from world war and possible nuclear annihilation of all life forms on earth, the East appears to be seeking to avert such global disaster by ensuring that this ongoing war is won by successfully transitioning to an international currency backed once again by the gold standard. The Western central banking cabal consisting of the Bank of England and other European central banks, America’s Federal Reserve Board, its World Bank and International Monetary Fund along with the Israeli-US government crime cabal all stand to ultimately be stripped of their absolute power that have the entire world drowning in debt, crushing destabilization and impoverished despair. But now a light at the end of the tunnel at least is shining a little brighter.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/.

A much-ignored huge news report from Reuters on Friday, February 27th, was headlined “Chinese diplomat tells West to consider Russia’s security concerns over Ukraine.”

China’s Ambassador to Belgium (which has the capital of the EU) said that the “nature and root cause” of the Ukrainian conflict is “the West,” and that “The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration.”

By “real security concerns,” he is clearly referring to NATO’s expansion right up to Russia’s border, and America’s surrounding Russia with U.S. military bases, now inceasingly including the most strategic of Russia’s bordering countries: Ukraine.

In other words, this diplomat says: “the West” has a “zero-sum” attitude toward Russia, instead of seeking to move forward with an approach in which neither side among the nuclear superpowers benefits at the other’s expense — the entire world moves forward together.

This is a direct criticism of Barack Obama, and of all of the pro-Obama, anti-Putin, EU leaders.

It’s also an implicit repudiation of Obama’s having repeatedly referred to the U.S. as “the one indispensable nation.” (Another example of that phrase is here.) Obama keeps saying: every other nation, except the U.S., is “dispensable.” He clearly thinks that Russia is.

That’s not merely an insult: it’s an act of provocation; it is virtually asking for a fight. And all for what? For whose nuclear char?

This criticism of the aggressive nationalist Obama does not come from China’s top leadership, but it would not have come at all if they had not approved of it in advance.

China thus now tells Obama: Stop it. Stop it in word, and in deed.

Implicitly, China is also telling Obama: China is not dispensable, either. In fact, the entire mentality, which Obama embodies, is not just callous and insulting; it’s dangerous.

Like President G.W. Bush, Obama is increasingly an embarassment to his country.

Shortly before Obama’s coup in Ukraine, Gallup International issued, on 30 December 2013, a poll of 65 countries, which found that:

“The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%). Respondents in Russia (54%), China (49%) and Bosnia (49%) were the most fearful of the US as a threat.”

More details of that poll were reported here.

When the U.S. Government is hankering for a war with the only other nuclear superpower, such findings certainly make sense. And the 54% of Russians who cited the U.S. as the greatest threat to peace would probably be far higher today. But Gallup International didn’t publish any update on that poll-question, perhaps because the original financial backer (which was unnamed) wouldn’t fund it.

Already, the finding was bad enough. But Obama keeps calling the U.S. “the one indispensable nation in the world.” He keeps telling other nations: you are dispensable. He keeps rubbing it in — not the fact, but his own nationalism.

It reminds some people of Mussolini, and of Hitler. But Obama pretends to be a democrat, not a fascist.

Maybe he’s just a bigger liar than they were. Maybe that’s what he is so arrogant about: his terrific ability to deceive.

After all, he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for it: for lying. For misrepresenting himself as being progressive, instead of regressive.

Well, now: anyone who doesn’t know the reality is deluded by propaganda — and it’s not coming from Russia, nor from China. It’s coming from their own nation’s ‘news’ media.

Which heads-of-state want to be publicly associated with a foreign leader like that, one who tells the given leader’s public: your nation is dispensable. Fools. Only fools.

Obama is encouraging other countries to oppose the United States.

Wow. He’s the black George W. Bush.

On the sidelines of the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit in Brisbane, US President Barack H. Obama delivered a keynote speech to diplomats, policymakers, faculty members, and students at the University of Queensland on the United States of America’s foreign policy and Obama’s so-called “Asian pivot” or “pivot to Asia.”

In 2013, a report by Brian Andrews and Kurt Campbell for the British think-tank Chatham House described Washington’s redeployment efforts in the Asia-Pacific region like this: “The United States government is in the early stages of a substantial national project: reorienting significant elements of its foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region and encouraging many of its partners outside the region to do the same.”

“The ‘strategic pivot’ or rebalancing, launched four years ago, is premised on the recognition that the lion’s share of the political and economic history of the 21st century will be written in the Asia-Pacific region,” the Chatham House report points out. In one way or another, what this analysis insinuates is that the nation that controls the Asia-Pacific region will dominate the world.

During the time Obama had been in Australia for the G20 gathering, it was falsely but consistently reported by the mainstream media in the US, Canada, the European Union, and Australia that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his delegation were isolated by the leaders of the so-called “Western” countries. Not only did Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott fail to violently “shirtfront” President Putin at Brisbane like he promised, but in fact Abbott had a cordial bilateral meeting with Putin days earlier in the Chinese capital of Beijing during the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting. Nor did British Prime Minister David Cameron or Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper – men of Abbott’s own conservative political cloth that have subordinated their countries to Washington and its empire – dare confront Putin.

Swearing fealty as vassals and subordinates to Washington is not an issue of conservative politics versus socialist politics or left-wing parties versus right-wing parties. Despite different forms of rhetoric and varying nuances, the main political parties in Australia, as well as in countries like Bulgaria, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Romania, South Korea, and Spain, have all followed the same contours in regards to their foreign policy as subordinates supporting US militarism.

Abbott’s Labor Party predecessors in the Lodge and Kirribilli House wholly endorsed Washington’s Asia-Pacific pivot and deepened Canberra’s military ties with the Pentagon, even speaking abrasively about China to the point where the Chinese government broke its typical policy of silence to warn the federal government not to damage or endanger Australian-Chinese bilateral relations. Both officials in the Liberal and Labor Party even called for barring Putin from coming to Queensland for the G20 gathering; Australian Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and Queensland Premier Campbell Newman openly criticized Prime Minister Abbott for allowing the Russians to attend Brisbane for the G20 meeting.

The key word here is ‘deceit’. While one thing is said, another is done or acted. At the G20 meeting everything was polite and diplomatic. Like the earlier APEC meeting in Beijing, Ukraine was not even on the agenda in Brisbane for group discussions by the gathering of world leaders. This, however, did not stop the US and its allies from taking jabs at the Russian Federation outside of the meeting rooms and G20 forums. The false portrayal of what happened in Brisbane between President Putin and the US and its allies are characteristic of Washington’s deceitful regional approach in the Asia-Pacific region: in the name of peace and stability the area is being militarized and destabilized by the stoking of tensions by the United States.

Manufacturing an “Axis of Evil” for the Asia-Pacific?

In his speech at the University of Queensland, Obama warned potential aggressors to never question the resolve or commitment of Washington to its regional allies in East Asia and Oceania. Although President Obama did not emphasize this directly or too much, everyone knew which countries he was talking about, and the media vividly filled in the blanks. While President Obama directly named the nuclear program and missile arsenal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or North Korea as a regional threat, he was careful in how he talked about the People’s Republic of China. Beijing was mentioned casually in terms of regional territorial disputes. Russia’s mention was short too. The Russian Federation was only named once and briefly when President Obama said the Russians were a threat to the world because of their actions in Eastern Europe, specifically Ukraine.

It is with the above understanding that the billing the mainstream media narrative gave to Obama’s University of Queensland speech was one that understood Washington’s commander-in-chief was talking tough and hard to the villainous trio of China, Russia, and North Korea. Unlike Obama’s speech, the names of these three countries were repeatedly named and demonized in the mainstream media. Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang have either directly or tacitly been portrayed as some type of “Axis of Evil” in the Asia-Pacific region.

Like Washington’s Asia-Pacific policy, Barack Obama’s University of Queensland speech was deceptive. China was mentioned seventeen times throughout the body of the speech while North Korea was mentioned twice and Russia once. Even though Beijing was not directly or openly called an adversary in the speech, it is clear the main US concern in the Asia-Pacific region is the Chinese. In reality, President Obama’s message was a US call to arms against the Chinese, which along with the Russians are Washington’s main global adversaries or rivals.

Although North Korea was thrown into the equation by Obama, Pyongyang is merely a pretext for Washington to station the Pentagon’s forces and US nuclear assets in South Korea and Japan and to target Beijing and its strategic ally Moscow in East Asia. Under the justification of protecting South Korea, the Pentagon maintains over a million Marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors on standby for a nuclear war in the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The US even controls the South Korean military – in the event of a war whoever sits as the president of the United States in the Oval Office will give the South Korean military general command its orders through the Pentagon.

Beijing and Moscow understand the real targets of the Pentagon in East Asia. This is why China and the Russian Federation have always worked to prevent a confrontation in the Korean Peninsula from occurring by mediating in the tensions that North Korea has with South Korea and the United States. This is also the reason why the Chinese eventually intervened as combatants against the US in the Korean War in 1950. The Chinese did not want US troops directly on their border and so close to Beijing. Chinese leaders realized that North Korea was a stepping stone towards the US goal of encircling, destabilizing, and neutralizing the People’s Republic of China.

Encircling and Isolating the Chinese and the Russians: Towards Unipolarity?

“I decided that given the importance of this region to American security, to American prosperity, the United States would rebalance our foreign policy and play a larger and lasting role in this region,” Obama told his audience at the University of Queensland. He explained that more US Marines were going to be deployed to Australia while Washington’s alliances with Australia and Japan would be deepened.

The Asia-Pacific region has steadily militarized in recent years. The Australian Defence Ministry has talked about a regional arms race and issued reports on increased Chinese military spending and naval expansion. Never once is it mentioned the Chinese naval expansion and Beijing’s increased military spending are reactions to US militarism and Washington’s attempts to encircle the Chinese. China is acting defensively and trying to secure the Indian Ocean’s maritime trade routes and energy corridors from the US, because it fears the US could block them in the scenario of a confrontation.

Washington’s militarization agenda is tied to a multilateral trade agenda that has hegemonic connotations. In other words, there is a trade dimension to the militarization and the stoking of tensions in the Asia-Pacific. The case is the same for Europe too. In both cases, Washington’s thirst for a unipolar world order is evident. It is in this context that China and Russia are being demonized to help increase US influence and justify a larger US presence in both regions. The United States is trying to exclude and cast out the Russians and Chinese in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. While Washington works to exclude China and Russia, the US goal is to integrate the other countries of these areas with itself.

In Europe, the objectives of the US are to create instability in the flow of Russian energy supplies to the European Union by instigating problems inside Ukraine and between the Russian Federation and the Ukrainians. What the US is actually doing through this is working to weaken both the Russians and the European Union economically. This includes the goal of disrupting trade ties between the different sides in the European theatre. The deterioration of EU-Russian trade ties and relations is meant to aid US negotiations and weaken the European Union. This is part of the US strategy to eventually economically control and swallow the European Union under the framework of the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is under negotiation between Brussels and Washington.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is loosely the military equivalent of the TTIP. Washington’s objective is to construct a single US-controlled Euro-Atlantic military, political, and economic space. Doing this is one step closer towards the unipolar world order that the US seeks.

In the Asia-Pacific region the US is following or using the same strategy of artificially creating tensions and instigating problems between China and other countries in the region. This is exactly why Obama mentioned territorial disputes in his speech and the reason why the US has been getting itself involved in bilateral disputes between China and several local countries over territorial issues. The US government has used this to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the Asia-Pacific theatre. Creating tensions between the Chinese and other East Asian countries, like Vietnam, is part of the strategy to expand US influence.

Ultimately, what the US wants is to subordinate and control China and Russia. In the case of Russia, it wants to control Russia’s vast resources and technology. This is why Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state during the presidency of Bill Clinton, has had the nerve and audacity to say in doublespeak that the Russians have “undemocratic” control of the world’s resources on their country’s vast territory.

In the case of the Chinese, the US wants to control China as an industrial colony. Washington and Wall Street want China to be a giant factory of labor and manufacturing for US corporations. In this regard, Washington’s goal is to put a leash on China and harness the Chinese dragon like a beast of burden that carries or pulls heavy loads. This is why President Obama made the following points to his audience in Brisbane: “And the question is, what kind of role will it play? I just came from Beijing, and I said there, the United States welcomes the continuing rise of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and stable and that plays a responsible role in world affairs.”

What Obama was really saying is that Beijing serves Washington interests as a manufacturing hub. “So we’ll pursue cooperation with China where our interests overlap or align. And there are significant areas of overlap: More trade and investment,” in Obama’s own words. This is also part of the reason for the contradictions in the Australian government’s foreign policy. While Canberra is a part of the US alliance directed against Beijing, Australia continues to deepen economic and business ties with the Chinese. [On 17 November, Australia and China signed off on a free trade pact.]

Cold War 2.0 and the Threat of a Nuclear World War

The Cold War was more than an ideological struggle. Ideology was merely utilized as a justification for foreign policy and unacceptable actions. The divisions that were perceived to have existed during the Cold War did not or have not disappeared either, because the struggle fuelling the Cold War did not really end. In reality, there has been a “post-Cold War cold war” or a cold war after the Cold War. Over the years it has become increasingly clear that the divisions that existed in the Cold War have been carried on and merely transformed. Those divisions have slowly re-emerged and are displaying themselves again.

Nor has the specter of a nuclear war disappeared. The threat of a nuclear war has actually increased because there is less pressure for constraint on public officials due to the fact that the general public is less aware of the nature of global rivalries and the dangers of nuclear escalation. This is why people like Malcolm Fraser, one of Australia’s former prime ministers, warn against the path being followed by Australia and the United States.

A chain of US-controlled alliances and a military missile shield are being constructed and equipped around both China and Russia. Chinese and Russian allies, such as Iran, Belarus, Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Serbia, Brazil, Sudan, and Kazakhstan, are being targeted too. While NATO has expanded eastward in Europe towards the borders of Russia and its allies in the post-Soviet space, the US has tightened its system of alliances in East Asia and Oceania against China.

Land components of the missile shield have been kept and expanded in the Balkans, Israel, Turkey, and the Asia-Pacific region. Aside from land elements, the Pentagon’s missile shield project has been expanded to include a naval armada of ships that will surround Eurasia from the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, South China Sea, and the East China Sea. In Europe and the Middle East the missile shield project includes NATO. Missiles that are pointing at Armenia, Iran, Syria, and Russia have been deployed to Turkey while infrastructure has been put in place in Poland on the direct borders of Russian ally and Eurasian Union founding member Belarus, as well as the Russian Federation’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

The Commonwealth of Australia, alongside both Japan and South Korea, is a key part of the global missile shield system targeting the Chinese and Russians. Australia, Japan, and South Korea are also homes to US-led rapid response military forces that are configured for immediate military action should a war ignite with China, Russia, or North Korea. The policies of Australia, Japan and South Korea have also begun to radically change as they harden themselves as frontline states facing the People’s Republic of China. For example, the strategic aim of the Pentagon to encircle and contain China has encouraged successive Japanese governments to turn their backs on the Japanese Constitution, specifically Article 9, by re-arming Japan in an offensive context. Despite the objections and anger of many Japanese citizens and many more East Asians, Tokyo has violated and breached the framework of its constitution by militarizing.

There is very little question that Japan is a full partner with Australia, the US, Singapore, Taiwan, and NATO, against Beijing and Moscow. In 2007, Japan signed its second post-Second World War bilateral security agreement. The first one was with the US, but the 2007 agreement was with the Commonwealth of Australia. This was the beginning of the Australia-Japan-US Trilateral Security Dialogue. The security agreement led to the eventual signing of the Japan-Australia Acquisition and Cross-servicing Agreement (ACSA) on 19 May 2010, which allows for the pooling and sharing of military resources by both Canberra and Tokyo.

As for Australia, it has had a steady stream of secret deals and talks with the US government and the Pentagon. The deal signed between the Australian and US governments over the Pentagon intelligence facility and signals base in Geraldton followed years of secretive discussions between both sides. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her government allowed the US to deploy troops on Australian territory after a series of secret and public discussions.

The integration of Australia and Japan into a US-led military front against China and Russia has not only included the formation of the Australia-Japan-US Trilateral Security Dialogue. The creation of this Washington-led front includes NATO as a key feature of the strategy of militarily encircling all Eurasia. It is in this context that the accession of both Canberra and Tokyo, alongside South Korea, New Zealand, and Colombia, as NATO partners has occurred. These NATO partnerships are referred to by NATO Headquarters and the North Atlantic Council as NATO’s “global partners” program. Mongolia, post-2003 Iraq, and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan are also partners. NATO has also created different partnership programs that include countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Mauritania.

The hardening lines being created, specifically with the instigation and agitation of the United States, threaten to turn Europe and the Asia-Pacific region into war theatres. These regions could be theatres of a global confrontation or start off as theatres of regional wars that quickly escalate into a global nuclear war. This is why  Malcolm Fraser warned that Australians risks being pulled into a disastrous war against China. Fraser has argued that successive Australian governments have surrendered their nation’s strategic independence to Washington.

In 2011 the Chinese warned Canberra it was walking down a dangerous road. Prime Minister Gillard’s deal with Obama for allowing US troops into Australia was unwelcomed by the Chinese and seen as the first significant expansion of the Pentagon into the Asia-Pacific region since the Vietnam War. In 2013, the Chinese told the governments of Australia, Japan, and the US not to use their regional alliance to inflame local tensions any further or to instigate hostilities in East Asia by interfering in bilateral territorial disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea. In the same year, an official at the Chinese National Defence University even warned about the possibility of a nuclear war erupting because of the front being created by the US, Australia, and Japan against Beijing.

At the same time that tensions are being ratcheted up with the Chinese, tensions with the Russians are increasing too. Russian politicians and military leaders have continuously warned that if tensions continue, a nuclear war could erupt and devastate the world. Both China and Russia have taken measures to prepare for a possible global military conflict with Washington and its allies. Beijing and Moscow have increased their interoperability and are training together through bilateral exercises and through multilateral military exercises held by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. All the while, as Washington pushes the world closer to the abyss, the governments of countries like Australia and Japan continue sleepwalking their people towards disaster.

Le capitaine Ken Masters, enquêteur chef de la police militaire britannique à Bassora, vient de mourir dans des circonstances mystérieuses. Selon un porte-parole du ministère de la Défense, sa mort « n’est pas due à des actions hostiles » ou à des causes naturelles.

Ken Masters était commandant de la branche des enquêtes spéciales de la police militaire royale. Il était « responsable des enquêtes sur tous les incidents sérieux dans le théâtre (des opérations militaires) », selon le ministère.

Le capitaine Masters était donc responsable de l’enquête sur les circonstances de l’arrestation de deux agents des forces spéciales (SAS) britanniques, habillés en tenue « arabe », par la police irakienne à Bassora le 19 septembre.

Les deux « soldats » britanniques, qui conduisaient une voiture remplie d’armes et de munitions, furent ensuite « rescapés » par les forces britanniques, dans un assaut militaire majeur contre l’édifice où ils étaient détenus. Les britanniques ont eu recours à une dizaine de tanks assistés d’hélicoptères pour détruire les murs de la prison et libérer les deux hommes.

L’incident, qui a fait plusieurs victimes civiles et policières, a mis les autorités britanniques dans l’embarras.

Plusieurs rapports de presse ainsi que des témoignages suggèrent que les deux officiers étaient en quelque sorte déguisés en « terroristes » d’Al Qaïda et planifiaient de faire exploser les bombes dans le centre de Bassora durant un important événement religieux.

Comme le rapporte The Scotsman, le 14 octobre dernier, le Royaume-Uni s’est formellement excusé à l’Irak et à confirmé qu’il dédommagerait pour « les blessures et dommages causés pendant l’attaque par l’armée d’un poste de police à Bassora dans le cadre d’une opération pour libérer deux soldats ». La compensation pour les familles des victimes devait dépendre de l’enquête du capitaine Masters et de son équipe.

Le capitaine Masters est mort à Bassora le 15 octobre. Selon le ministère de la Défense, « les circonstances de sa mort n’ont pas été considérées comme suspectes. »

Les rapports suggéraient prudemment que Masters aurait du « stress », ce qui aurait pu le pousser au suicide. Le Daily Mail du 17 octobre tend toutefois à écarter la thèse du suicide et affirme que « peu de choses sont connues sur sa vie privée et on dit qu’il serait peu probable que la pression du travail puisse l’avoir poussé au suicide. »

L’attaque du 19 septembre pour « secourir » les deux soldats fut lancée sous le commandement du général de brigade John Lorimer. Ce dernier a déclaré que le but du raid était d’assurer la sécurité des deux hommes, qui auraient été entre les mains de milices.

Ironiquement, le récit de Lorimer est contredit par le gouvernement intérimaire mis en place par les États-Unis. Le ministre de l’Intérieur irakien Bagir Solagh Jabr, dans une entrevue à la BBC, a nié le fait que la police avait remis les deux Britanniques aux milices locales. Il a accusé le général de brigade Lorimer de réagir à des rumeurs en ordonnant à ses hommes d’attaquer le poste de police.

Dans une déclaration subséquente, Lorimer a affirmé que la police à Bassora était impliquée dans le terrorisme et soutenue par l’Iran (ce lien avec l’Iran est maintenant nié par les hauts responsables de la Défense britannique).

Selon le Daily Telegraph, Lorimer aurait ajouté que les deux agents britanniques arrêtés avaient enquêté sur des actes de torture et d’abus dans la prison. Les officiers s’étaient vus confier la tâche de découvrir « qui était derrière le règne de terreur à la prison ».

Les citoyens de Bassora ont assisté à l’arrestation. Des civils ont été tués et blessés quand les forces britanniques, sous le commandement du général de brigade Lorimer, ont lancé l’assaut contre la prison. Le réseau télévisé Al Jazira a décrit les circonstances de l’arrestation dans une entrevue avec Fattah al-Shaeikh, membre de l’Assemblée nationale irakienne. Selon ce dernier, les Britanniques conduisaient une voiture piégée qu’ils voulaient faire exploser au cœur de la ville de Bassora, mais « les fils de la ville de Bassora les ont rapidement arrêtés. Ils (les deux étrangers) ont ensuite ouvert le feu sur les personnes présentes et tué certaines d’entre elles. »

Selon le Financial Times, un haut dirigeant du plus grand parti chiite irakien, M. Hakim, a affirmé que les deux britanniques devaient être poursuivis pour espionnage puisque l’immunité légale pour les soldats britanniques ne s’appliquait pas lorsqu’ils n’étaient pas en uniforme. Il a écarté la possibilité que les agents aient enquêté sur des militants liés à l’Iran et qualifié ces rapports de « propagande ».

Est-ce que l’armée britannique bloquait l’enquête policière du capitaine Masters ?

Selon The Independent, il y avait désaccord entre le commandement militaire britannique et les responsables policiers envoyés sur le théâtre des opérations pour enquêter sur les agissements et comportements du personnel militaire.

Est-ce que le ministère de la Défense a mis de la pression sur Masters ?

Le capitaine Ken Masters avait le mandat de coopérer, dans son enquête, avec les autorités civiles irakiennes. Dans le cadre de son mandat, il devait enquêter sur des « allégations selon lesquelles des soldats britanniques auraient tué ou maltraité des civils irakiens ». Spécifiquement, dans ce cas, l’enquête portait sur les circonstances de l’assaut sur la prison, le 19 septembre. Les rapports de presse et les déclarations officielles suggèrent que l’assaut a été autorisé par le ministère de la Défense.

Le général Sir Michael Jackson, chef de l’État-major, était à Bassora quelques jours avant la mort du capitaine Masters pour traiter de cette affaire.

Alors qu’il était à Bassora, il a sans aucun doute rencontré le brigadier Lorimer ainsi que le capitaine Masters. Le général Jackson avait défendu le sauvetage des deux agents clandestins. Le Times du 12 octobre le cite : « Il est bien clair qu’il était important de récupérer ces deux soldats. »

“When I was young I had not courage, but now I have courage.”  Asra, a 12 year-old Afghan girl who lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan until she was 9

Afghanistan has been called ‘the worst place in the world to be a woman,’¹ because not only is the poverty pervasive and the lifespan short, but while they are alive many women live like serfs. Afghan students at the private school for girls where I work in Kabul recently produced a series of essays in which they describe the social norms for women in their country. One wrote, ‘A girl in my culture marries at eleven or twelve years of age.  Some parents make their daughters marry when they are very young so they can get money for their daughter and the family can be rich. When a girl is married, she accepts her husband’s orders; she must never tell people if she is being treated badly.’ Another of the girls was more blunt: ‘When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers; when brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.’²

Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that the situation for women in Afghanistan is ‘dismal in every area,’ with violence against them ‘endemic’ and a government that fails to protect them from crimes such as rape and murder.³ The report cites cases where rapists have been pardoned by the government, girls and women have been imprisoned for running away from home, rape victims have been charged with adultery and where women in public life have been murdered. Afghan women’s rights activist Malalai Joya writes that, ‘The U. S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. There is no justice for women.’⁴ She contends that the overall situation for women has in some ways gotten worse during the 13 year U.S. occupation because the U.S. financed the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen during the war with the Russians and allowed them to control the Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban.  Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, says attacks against women and girls have increased at a frightening pace. In 2012, female casualties increased by 20 percent over the previous year, and then by 61 percent in 2013.⁵

As disturbing as this news is, the oppression of and violence towards women in Afghanistan is in no way unique. While researching their book Half the Sky:Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn discovered what they called a ‘pandemic’ of abuse of females by men around the world. To begin with, in China, India and elsewhere female fetuses are regularly aborted in favor of male babies; demographers say that more than 100 million females are ‘missing’ from the world due to what they call ‘gendercide.’ Once born, the British medical journal The Lancelet estimates that among the very poor of the world 1 million children are forced into prostitution every year, and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.  130 million women alive today have endured genital mutilation, the cutting out of portions of their reproductive system, in order to destroy any sexuality.⁶

The United States is certainly not immune to gender abuse; one study found that over 22 million women in the United States have been raped in their lifetime. Every two minutes someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. An estimated 17,500 women and children are trafficked into the United States annually for sexual exploitation or forced labor.⁷

The most relevant question that can be asked is, ‘Why is this happening?’  From a historical perspective this perverse dynamic beween the sexes has distant roots.  In Ancient Greece, Athenian women were given no education and were married at puberty to grown men. They remained forever the property of their fathers, who could divorce them and make them marry another. They lived in segregation and could not leave the house without a chaperone. They could not buy or sell land. If one were raped her husband had either to divorce her or lose his citizenship.⁸

The Bible and the Koran both reflect the mores at the time of their writing, and perpetuate male dominance into the present through their social paradigms.  In the Old Testament, Genesis 3:16 instructs women that, ‘Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,’ and Ephesians 5:22 commands, ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.’  Such teachings prompted 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write: ‘The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman’s emancipation.’⁹

Similar passages are found in the Koran, such as 4:34: ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other. Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them.’¹⁰

The Catholic Pope Innocent issued a Papal Bull in 1484 on the problem of demons in which he initiated the systematic accusation, torture and execution of countless ‘witches’ all over Europe, all of the females.  Innocent commissioned a document called Hammer of Witches which basically said that if you were accused of witchcraft, you were a witch.  Torture was an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. The most fantastic testimony was readily accepted—that tens of thousands of witches had gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000 of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The Bible had counseled, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’; so legions of women were burned to death.¹¹

There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements, as might be expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with inquisitors drawn from the class of nominally celibate priests.  The trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil. No one knows how many women were killed altogether—perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. ¹²

A best-selling book titled Advice to a Daughter published in London in the early 1700s, and widely read in the American colonies, gives the flavor of a woman’s station in that time. ‘There is Inequality in Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar’d for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of those Dudes which seem’d to be most properly assign’d to it.’¹³

On one level we can attribute the abuse of women to a long tradition of males viewing females as weaker and inferior members of the human family.  There are deeper psychological currents as well.  Since the advent of large urban and agricultural civilizations, humans have demonstrated an extreme antipathy for the natural cycles of life on earth.  Not only do rivers flood and rains fail, threatening society, but death itself menaces each individual.  The rich and powerful could attempt to escape death by building religious monuments that rose away from the earth to reach the sky—ziggarats and pyramids—but their efficacy against the inevitability of death was minimal. 

Women on the other hand are wedded to the earth’s cycles, and are therefore problematic because they are evidently more earth-bound by nature. Not only can they create new life inside their bodies, which no male is capable of, but they also exude body fluids back to the earth monthly (menstruate) and they produce milk to nurture life.  Male discomfort with this arrangement is illustrated in the Bible, where it is written, ‘If a woman has born a man child, then she shall be unclean seven days. But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks.’ (Leviticus 12:5). The Koran offers supporting arguments: ‘Keep aloof from women during their menstrual periods and do not approach them until they are clean again.’ (2:222)  The message is that when women menstruate they are earthy, dirty, untouchable. Many of those burned at the stake in the Middle Ages as witches were midwives and herbalists—women who were knowledgable about nature. And some of them had orgasms; a sure sign of devil-worship.

In our time males are still engaged in a war against the Earth and against the painful reality of death. While we do not think of it as such, modern warfare has in fact become a war against the Earth itself. Ecologist Wendell Barry writes, ‘We’re living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare—warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.’  In steadfast pursuit of this war, the United States has dropped 20 million tons of high explosives on the Earth in the last 70 years along with a million tons of napalm and 22 million gallons of toxic herbicides in an effort to eradicate imaginary evil (usually in the form of impoverished rice farmers in Asia) and thus gain a sense of heroic purpose. And, killing others offers a brief feeling of immortality. The profound sham and transience of the experience of war and killing others is a major reason that currently 22 war veterans commit suicide every day; they can no longer live the lie that they were enticed into.¹⁴

A 2002 report titled ‘War on the Earth’ details how nearly thirty years after the end of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, many of the affected ecosystems have still not recovered, according to the Environmental Conference on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Ten percent of southern Vietnam’s forests (including one third of the coastal mangroves, which play a vital role in the coastal ecosystem and fish habitats) were destroyed by the 20 million gallons of herbicide the U.S. military dropped during the Vietnam War era. Arsenic and dioxin in the herbicides are expected to pose a health threat long into the future. Since 1975, 50,000 civilians have been killed by the landmines and other weapons the U.S. military left behind. The U.S.’s vast bombing campaign also left millions of large bomb craters. This war in Southeast Asia is is just one of innumerable examples of the American the assault on the Earth.¹⁵

In addition, the United States maintains by far the most potent arsenal of nuclear weapons on the planet, which if used would destroy most of the biosphere and signal a final victory for man over his apparent arch enemy, the Earth which gives him life.

In the insightful book The Denial of Death author Ernest Becker observes that the terror of death is so overwhelming we do everything in our power to remain unconscious of it.  We are defended by a fortress of self-identity that feels immortal, even though it is not, and a social hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something larger than ourselves. The root of human evil according to Becker is our need to deny our mortality by gaining a sense of permanent selfhood.

Another facet of this assault on women and the biosphere is the human proclivity to seek an external authority to tell us who we are and how to act. Not only are we faced with the humiliation and horror of death, but we are confused as to our purpose while alive.  ‘We are,’ wrote cosmologist Carl Sagan, ‘like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from.’  So we turn en masse to individuals who purport to have answers.  ‘Why in the world,’ asked French philosopher Etienne De La Boetie, ‘do people consent to their own enslavement?  The mystery of civil obedience: why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of government, which  always constitutes a small minority of the society? If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.’ De la Boetie penned these lines in the year 1552 in his treatise, The Politics of Obedience.

There is an alternative to the mass destruction of ecosystems and of half the human race, and that is for every adult human being to reject external authority and take responsibility for their own lives.  After all, as John Lennon pointed out, ‘Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.’ People in the United Sates seem to fear their government as if it were some kind of god, even though the American government is ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,’ according to Martin Luther King, and it is clearly the greatest source of human suffering and death and of ecosystem destruction on the planet.  If you as a unique, sovereign living being of the Earth do not want to see the biosphere destroyed by nuclear weapons, why have you spent your life paying for them? The answer can only be fear; your fear of your so-called government has to date overwhelmed your desire to live a sane and ethical life.

Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death, ‘There are signs that some individuals are awakening from the long, dark night of tribalism and nationalism and developing a moral conscience, an ethic that is universal rather than ethnic. Our task for the future is exploring what it means for each individual to be a member of earth’s household, a commonwealth of kindred beings. Whether we will use our freedom to encapsulate ourselves in narrow, tribal paranoid personalities and create more bloody Utopias or to form compassionate communities is still to be decided.’

It is a simple task to see in retrospect the journey that humanity has been on, with personal identity and consciousness transitioning from the family to the clan, and through tribe, village, and city-state to the nation-state. It is up to every individual who cares about the Earth and the creatures upon it to continue the journey and become a life-enhancing member of the Earth household.

Dana Visalli is an ecologist and organic farmer living in Washington state, email is [email protected]

An illustrated version of this essay is available at http://www.methownaturalist.com/21-Afghanistan%202014.pdf

 Notes

1. Reuters Foundation: Afghanistan worst place in world to be a woman: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/15/worst-place-women-afghanistan-india

UNICEF: Afghanistan worst place in the world to be pregnant: www.unicef.org/newsline/02pr59afghanmm.htm

Save the Children: Afghanistan the worst place in the world to be a mother or child: http://www.ips.org/mdg3/afghanistan-the-worst-place-to-be-a-mother-or-a-child/

2. Testimonials available at http://tinyurl.com/nr62scq

3. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091206/wl_nm/us_afghanistan_women

4. http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/141165/why_is_a_leading_feminist_organization _lending_its_name_to_support_escalation_in_afghanistan/?page=entire

5. http://www.dw.de/un-violence-against-women-in-afghanistan-pandemic/a-17171157

6. From Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide  by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn

7. http://www.feminist.com/antiviolence/facts.html

8. http://www.historyofwomen.org/oppression.html

9. Ibid

10. Koran quote: http://freethoughtnation.com/what-does-the-koran-say-about-women/

11. Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, 1995

12. Ibid

13. http://www.historyofwomen.org/oppression.html

14.  http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/01/16811249-22-veterans-commit-suicide-each-day-va-report?lite

15. War on the Earth by Bob Feldman http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2003/0303maps.pdf

«Allons, camarades, il vaut mieux décider dès maintenant de changer de bord. (…) Quittons cette Europe qui n’en finit pas de parler de l’homme tout en le massacrant partout où elle le rencontre, à tous les coins de ses propres rues, à tous les coins du monde.
Voici des siècles que l’Europe a stoppé la progression des autres hommes et les a asservis à ses desseins et à sa gloire. Regardez-la aujourd’hui basculer entre la désintégration atomique et la désintégration spirituelle».
Franz Fanon, conclusion au livre «Les damnés de la terre».

Co-lauréats du titre « L’homme de l’année 2013″

• François Hollande: « Scipion l’africain au Mali, Général Flamby en Syrie »
• Laurent Fabius: « Le pire ministre des Affaires étrangères socialiste de la Vème République »

Paris- Le jury de renenaba.com a décidé, à l’unanimité, de décerner le titre de l’homme de l’année 2013, conjointement, à «François Hollande, Scipion l’africain au Mali, général Flamby en Syrie», en tandem avec Laurent Fabius, «le pire ministre des Affaires étrangères socialiste de la Vème République».

Au titre de mention accessit, un bonnet d’âne a été attribué au parlement de Westminster de Londres pour avoir fait capoter une nouvelle pulsion belliciste des socialistes français dans la sphère arabo musulmane, conférant ainsi au plus vieux parlement du Monde, d’une manière subliminale le titre envié de «munichois», la distinction suprême du socialisme français.

I-Retour sur les bobards diplomatiques et l’enfumage médiatique de la présidence Hollande.

A -Du bon usage de «Munich et des sudètes de Tchécoslovaquie»: «Le changement, c’est maintenant».

MUNICH: Seul pays au Monde à faire un usage intensif de ce terme pour stigmatiser ce qu’il considère être «le défaitisme» des adversaires de sa politique, «Munich» et par extension «Munichois», est en fait l’apanage du socialisme français. Son arme de destruction massive pour neutraliser toute critique à son égard. Harlem Désir, en la matière, n’est en fait que le piètre successeur de Guy Mollet, le dernier premier ministre socialiste de la IV République, l’homme de Suez et d’Alger, -beau palmarès-, qui avait brandi cet argument pour disqualifier les opposants à l’agression tripartite de Suez, en 1956, contre Nasser. 57 ans après, Harlem Désir nous ressert la même rengaine… Le changement, c’est maintenant. Vraiment?
Dans la terminologie de l’époque, l’ «expédition punitive» anglo-franco-israélienne, -menée, faut-il le souligner, par les deux puissances coloniales en association avec leur pupille israélien-, devait châtier le «Bikbachi». Terme de l’ordonnancement militaire ottoman équivalant au grade de Colonel, le Bikbachi Nasser sera ainsi désigné à la vindicte publique comme le nouvel Hitler de l’après-guerre, sous le vocable de Rayïss, que l’on faisait rimer dans le subconscient européen avec le Reich. Le 2eme Hitler arabe sera naturellement Yasser Arafat, le chef de l’Organisation de Libération de la Palestine. Figure de croquemitaine dans l’imaginaire occidental, l’Arabe, surtout lorsqu’il est porteur d’une revendication nationaliste, est un Hitler en puissance, quand bien même les Arabes et les Africains (chrétiens et musulmans) ont été parmi les principaux pourvoyeurs de «chairs à canon» pour la libération de la France, à deux reprises en un même siècle, phénomène rarissime dans l‘Histoire.

De Gamal Abdel Nasser (Égypte) à Mohammad Mossadegh, à l’Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiny et Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran) en passant par Yasser Arafat et Cheikh Ahmad Yassine (Palestine), à Moqtada Sadr (Irak) et Hassan Nasrallah (Liban), tous ont eu l’honneur d’assumer cette fonction sans que jamais personne n’ait songé à établir un lien entre l’arrogance occidentale et la radicalisation des contestataires de sa suprématie. De la Guerre d’Espagne, dans la décennie 1930, où les brigades internationales ont été le fait des communistes, à l’Algérie où les ratonnades de Robert Lacoste résonnent encore dans les mémoires, à l’Egypte où les canonnades de Guy Mollet prétendaient «punir» comme de juste Nasser pour avoir récupéré le canal de Suez, en soustrayant au grand capital l’unique richesse nationale de l’Egypte. Munich, spécialité française, est d’autant plus vigoureusement brandie que les socialistes, plutôt répressifs en ce domaine, n’ont jamais apporté le moindre soutien aux guerres de libération du tier-monde.

Alors Harlem Désir, Munich la Chambre des Communes qui a infligé une retentissante leçon de démocratie à la France? Munich, Barack Obama, qui a jugé plus conforme à l’éthique démocratique de prendre l’avis des représentants de la nation? Munich l’Inde qui a vaincu le colonialisme par la non-violence? Munich, l’Afrique du Sud qui triomphé de la ségrégation raciale par une réconciliation nationale et non par la stigmatisation? Munich le Pape François qui prie pour la paix en Syrie quand le Mufti de l’Otan, le prédicateur millionnaire du Qatar, Youssef Al Qaradawi, supplie que la Syrie soit bombardée par ces anciens colonisateurs? Munich à la manière de Guy Mollet, comme en 1956…. Le changement, c’est maintenant? Ou tout bonnement Harlem Désir, tête brulée pour une politique de terre brûlée?

B- Les Palestiniens, Les Sudètes du XXI me siècle.

Dans sa démarche vis-à-vis de la Syrie, François Hollande, nous chuchote le quotidien Le Monde jamais avare de confidence dès lors qu’il s’agit d’épauler le nouveau pouvoir socialiste au point de lui servir d’amplificateur médiatique et de relais diplomatique, est hanté par le précédent de la Tchécoslovaquie et le sort des Sudètes (1938) qu’Hitler absorba sans crier gare du fait de la passivité européenne, résultante des accords de Munich. Le conditionnement idéologique est tel, la servitude intellectuelle si forte que les ravages de la pensée socialiste paraissent incommensurables. Ainsi Laurent Fabius, qui passe pour être l’un des esprits les plus brillants de la République, préconise avec morgue et suffisance d’armer l’opposition syrienne pour établir une parité militaire et créer les conditions équilibrées à une négociation avec le pouvoir syrien. Il suggère de même une action énergique en vue de favoriser le retour des réfugiés syriens dans leur pays.

Préoccupation humanitaire légitime qui aurait pu honorer son auteur si elle s’était accompagnée d’une requête similaire concernant les Palestiniens, dépouillés, exilés et déplacés, eux, depuis soixante ans…… Les Sudètes du XXIème siècle.
En un siècle, la carte géostratégique du monde a connu une modification radicale, mais de cette houle centenaire a surgi un borborygme, signe patent de l’indigestion de la Palestine par les Israéliens: «L’Arabe israélien». Une expression forgée spécialement par les stratèges de la communication pour le lexique diplomatique international afin de désigner un Palestinien porteur de la nationalité israélienne. Mais l’occultation du fait national palestinien, fait majeur de la diplomatie internationale de la seconde moitié du XX me siècle, a conduit à forger cet être hybride par excellence, en guise d’enfumage, comme si l’Arabe israélien n’était pas un Palestinien, comme si le Palestinien et la Palestine ne se situaient pas au cœur du Monde arabe et au cœur des conflits du XX me et XXI me siècle.

C- « La Syrie, le drame du XXI me siècle»? La Syrie ou l’Irak?

Le premier drame du XXIème siècle est non la Syrie, comme le soutient François Hollande, mais l’Irak tant par son antériorité que par son ampleur. L’Irak où s’est refusé à s’enliser Jacques Chirac et non la Syrie ou se sont laissés embourbés Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande, deux philo-sionistes atlantistes patentés. «Des néoconservateurs américains avec un passeport français», selon l’expression du transfuge socialiste Eric Besson.

Sauf à concéder à l’auteur de ce constat l’excuse de troubles précoces de mémoire, une telle approximation est inexcusable. Que dire de l’Irak, désormais dénommé «Le pays des veuves»? Un million de victimes. Et des dizaines d’autres quotidiennement depuis dix ans. La prostitution en guise de survie alimentaire. Quatre millions d‘exilés, dont deux millions en Syrie, sans la moindre assistance humanitaire, faisant planer sur lui le risque d’une implosion démographique et une catastrophe alimentaire. De l’Uranium appauvri, arme de destruction massive prohibée par le droit international, abondamment utilisé contre biens et personnes par «le plus vieil allié de la France» et son nouveau partenaire dans l’équipée syrienne. Un fait avéré, qui ne fera l’objet de la moindre enquête dans l’ancien journal de référence Le Monde, davantage soucieux de faire office de caisse de résonnance au Quai d’Orsay avec ses enquêtes préprogrammés et ses blogs relais.
Sur ce lien la difformité des enfants irakiens du fait de l’uranium appauvri: https://dub120.mail.live.com/default.aspx#n=239199927&fid=1&mid=8a155573-4ed3-11e3-b539-00237de335ac&fv=1

II – Le tropisme philo sioniste des socialistes

De l’expédition de Suez contre Nasser, en 1956, ordonnée par Guy Mollet, aux ratonnades d’Alger par Robert Lacoste (1955-1958), au caillassage de Lionel Jospin à Bir Zeit pour avoir traité de «terroriste» le Hezbollah libanais, l’unique formation politico-militaire du Monde arabe à avoir infligé un double revers militaire à Israël (2000-2006), à l’esplanade David Ben Gourion dédiée par Khoyya Bertrand Delanoë, le Maire de Paris, au fondateur de l’armée israélienne au lendemain de l’attaque navale israélienne contre un convoi humanitaire turc en direction de Gaza…. Le registre est connu et bien tenu (4).
La filiation est lointaine et ne se dément pas, remontant au grand manitou du socialisme français, Léon Blum, qui invoquera son «trop d’amour» pour son pays «pour désavouer l’expansion de la pensée et de la civilisation française», admettant «le droit et même le devoir des races supérieures d’attirer à elles celles qui ne sont pas parvenues au même degré de culture».
Cette profession de foi surprenante est parue dans le journal «Le Populaire» en date du 17 juillet 1926, sans que ce vénérable humaniste, premier chef du gouvernement socialiste de la France moderne, artisan des premières conquêtes sociales sous le gouvernement du Front Populaire (1936), ne se doute que, lui-même, à son tour, subira, quinze ans plus tard, les lois de l’infériorité raciale de la part de ses compatriotes non coreligionnaires.

A-La relève : Manuel Valls, Pierre Moscovici et Laurent Fabius.

L’éviction de la vie politique française de Dominique Strauss Khan, un des parangons d’Israël, de même que la dérive xénophobe du gouvernement israélien matérialisée par la présence au sein du cabinet de l’ultra droitier Avigdor Libermann, ministre des Affaires étrangères, n’ont pas pour autant réduit la vigueur du tropisme pro israélien au sein de la hiérarchie socialiste en ce que la relève est désormais pleinement assurée par Pierre Moscovici, ancien lieutenant de DSK, et Manuel Valls, un sarkozyste de gauche, dont il a hérité de son poste à Beauvau, ainsi que Laurent Fabius.

Pierre Moscovici, le directeur de la campagne du candidat socialiste François Hollande, confirme cette filiation en exergue du site israélien JSSnews.com: «Si j’ai adhéré au Parti socialiste, en tant que juif français et socialiste, c’est aussi en pensant à Léon Blum». Le ministre des Finances et de l’économie a certes pris ses distances avec la libido de son ancien mentor, sans pour autant répudier son credo. Celui qui briguait fortement le Quai d’Orsay, est en effet demeuré fidèle à la philosophie politique de DSK, au nom de la lutte contre l’archaïsme diplomatique français, au diapason du gouvernement israélien, se prononçant en faveur d’une action préventive contre l’Iran, corrélativement à une mansuétude absolue envers Israël nonobstant les violations flagrantes de l’état hébreu de la loi internationale. Le nouveau gouvernement Ayrault comble d’aise d’ailleurs les Français d’Israël en dépit du fait que 92,00 pour cent d’entre eux ont voté pour le rival des socialistes, Nicolas Sarkozy (5).

Quant à Manuel Valls, lié de son propre aveu, «de manière éternelle à la communauté juive et à Israël », dont, de surcroît, le premier déplacement ministériel en province, le 21 Mai 2012, aura été pour un dîner avec le CRIF PACA Marseille, stigmatise le boycott d’Israël, mais non la phagocytose de la Palestine ou sa rétention des recettes d’exportation des produits de Cisjordanie. Il se place ainsi sur la même longueur que Richard Prasquier, l’ancien président du CRIF, dont la tonitruance inconditionnellement pro israélienne s’accommode mal du positionnement qui se veut «normal» du nouveau président français. Sa profession de foi, -lors du lancement du groupe d’amitié avec Israël, le nouveau lobby français pro israélien en pleine campagne présidentielle en avril 2012, «Israël, grande nation parmi les nations»-, a retenti comme une tartarinade démagogique.
La déclaration de Manuel Valls sur son «lien éternel» avec Israël est sur ce lien http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRrOBE3OerIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRrOBE3OerI

En résonnance avec ses prises de position xénophobes à Evry, la ville dont il est le maire, dont il souhaitait y implanter,-selon le modèle des colonies israéliennes?- davantage de «white et de blancos» pour y diluer la population bariolée. En résonnance avec sa volonté de dissiper les Roms de France. En résonnance avec son comportement abusivement dilatoire dans l’affaire Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. En résonnance avec ses foucades dans l’affaire de la kosovare Leonarda comme du lycéen parisien Khatchig Khatchatérian expulsé vers l’Arménie le jour de son anniversaire. Un homme controversé, au point qu’un hiérarque socialiste, le secrétaire national à la culture, Frédéric Hocquard a suggéré «une mesure d’éloignement du gouvernement à l’encontre de Valls». C’est dire le rejet qu’il suscite dans son propre camp. Mais non dans le camp adverse.
Que le plus populaire des membres d’un gouvernement socialiste soit le ministre de l’intérieur, c’est-à-dire le ministre de la loi et de l’ordre et de la répression subséquente, donne la mesure de l’inversion des valeurs dans la douce France. De leur perversion. CF. A ce propos http://www.renenaba.com/liban-france-georges-ibrahim-abdallah-contre-loubli/

B– Laurent Fabius: De la pôle-position à la voiture balai. La France et la réforme du Droit de veto au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU

Laurent Fabius, ministre socialiste des Affaires étrangères, a proposé Lundi 22 octobre 2012 à Paris, la réforme du recours au Droit de véto au sein du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, préconisant que son usage soit réduit au seul cas où un état détenteur de ce droit était menacé d’une action hostile des instances internationales. La France a une «proposition à faire est que le droit de veto soit utilisable quand il concerne uniquement le propre pays» dans le débat objet de la résolution, a déclaré M. Fabius sur le plateau du grand journal, commentant les vetos russe et chinois en faveur de la Syrie (3).
http://www.canalplus.fr/c-divertissement/pid3349-c-le-grand-journal.html?progid=745248 – A Ecouter à partir de la 6eme minute
Le hic réside toutefois dans le fait que le décompte officiel laisse apparaitre un usage avantageux des Occidentaux du Droit de véto par rapport à la Russie: 132 fois pour le camp atlantiste contre 124 fois pour la Russie.

Bénéficiaires d’un passe-droit, qui leur a permis de bloquer l’admission de la Palestine en tant que membre de plein droit de l’organisation internationale, sans que le prédécesseur de Laurent Fabius à l’époque, ni probablement son successeur demain ne juge opportun de soulever le bien-fondé de l’usage du Droit de véto, particulièrement lorsqu’il est le fait des Etats-Unis bloquant, par exemple, une résolution ordonnant la destruction les colonies israéliennes édifiées illégalement sur le territoire palestinien. Qu’un pays repêché in extremis dans ses droits souverains, de surcroît ayant perdu la justification de ce droit, l’empire colonial, ait l’outrecuidance de suggérer la modification de l’usage du droit de veto dont il a été largement et abusivement bénéficiaire, sans s’interroger sur son propre comportement, sans que la presse nationale ne pose la question de la pertinence de cette proposition et le bien-fondé de l’opportunisme de son auteur dénote une grave altération de la fonction critique de la classe politico-médiatique. A l’analyse, la proposition de Laurent Fabius de reformer l’usage du droit de véto au Conseil de sécurité s’est révélée être ce que son auteur a voulu qu’elle soit: un bobard diplomatique pour enfumage médiatique.

Normale Sup, ENA et tutti quanti… le super-capé de la méritocratie française ne s’est-il pas rendu compte qu’en privant la Russie de son droit de véto sur la Syrie, il privait par ricochet Israël de son bouclier diplomatique américain? Alors Laurent Fabius, ces diplômes, du pipeau? Alors Laurent Fabius, Nicolas Sarkozy, seul à la remorque des Américains? Ou vous avec et jusqu’au cou, comme en témoigne la volte-face américaine à propos de la Syrie? CF: Laurent Fabius, en 2006, traitant Nicolas Sarkozy d’être à la remorque des Américains, sans se douter que sept ans après il fera mieux et plus. http://www.ina.fr/video/I09082522

Bachar Al Assad «ne mérite pas d’être sur terre».

Bachar Al-Assad «ne mérite pas d’être sur terre». Laurent Fabius ne s’imagine sans doute pas les millions de personnes qui formulent pareil vœu à son égard tant sa morgue, sa suffisance et ses outrances verbales ont indisposé et choqué venant du chef de la diplomatie d’un pays réputé pour sa courtoisie et sa finesse d’esprit. A propos des outrances verbales de Laurent Fabius, CF. http://blogs.rue89.com/yeti-voyageur/2013/09/16/syrie-le-suicide-moral-des-socialistes-francais-selon-chokri-ben-fradj-231108

Si Manuel Valls est le «meilleur ministre de l‘intérieur de l’UMP», selon l’expression de l’ancien ministre de droite Dominique Bussereau, «à deux doigts de mériter sa carte au Front national», selon Florian Philippot, un responsable de ce parti, le plus capé des socialistes, réputé par ces somnolences dans les forums internationaux, passera dans l’histoire comme le piètre pensionnaire du Quai d’Orsay de la gauche française, à l’égal du transfuge sarkozyste du socialisme Bernard Kouchner, à l’égal de Christian Pineau, son équivalent de Suez, détenteur de la palme pour la IVème République. Très largement devancé par de prestigieux prédécesseurs de la stature et du calibre de Claude Cheysson, Roland Dumas et Hubert Védrine. Le plus jeune premier ministre offert à la France par François Mitterrand se retrouve, 30 ans plus tard, -en fin de carrière? En fin de poste?- ministre des Affaires étrangères de François Hollande, le pâle successeur du florentin de Nevers. Nullement une promotion, plutôt une rétrogradation. Très exactement une régression. De la pôle-position à la voiture balai. Un vrai gâchis.

III-Une présidence irréprochable??? Voyons voir.

«Une présidence irréprochable» présuppose un comportement à l’opposé de celui affiché par le nouveau ministre socialiste de l’Intérieur, désormais particulièrement dans le viseur des organisations anti racistes en raison de ses outrances verbales. Sans surprise, l’expulsion de l’ambassadeur de Syrie en France et la menace de la saisine de la Cour pénale Internationale, dans la foulée du massacre de Houla,-qui a fait près d‘une centaine de victimes civils, quinze jours après l’entrée en fonction de François Hollande-, a confirmé la pesanteur anti syrienne des socialistes en ce que le nouveau titulaire du Quai d’Orsay, Laurent Fabius, avait cautionné de sa présence le premier congrès de l’opposition syrienne tenu à Paris, en juin 2010, sous l’égide du philo-sioniste Bernard Henry Lévy et de la branche syrienne des Frères Musulmans.

Au-delà de ces considérations, La France dont François Hollande a hérité n’est pas la France qu’il a connu au début de la mandature de son ancien rival. L’Egypte et la Tunisie ont basculé hors du giron français, dans le camp hostile au tourisme parasitaire du personnel politique français, la crise bancaire de 2008 qui a volatilisé près de 180 milliards d‘euros du patrimoine français du fait de placements dans de fonds douteux ainsi que la crise systémique de l’endettement européen, ont considérablement réduit la posture exhibitionniste française. Le triple camouflet infligé à la France et au Qatar dans leur guerre de Syrie, par le véto combiné de la Chine et de la Russie, puis par le camouflet de la chambre des communes, enfin le revirement de Barack Obama, a constitué à cet égard un revers significatif à l’hégémonie américaine depuis l’implosion de l’Union soviétique dans la décennie 1990. L’hostilité de trois membres du BRICS (Inde, Afrique du Sud et Brésil) à l’unilatéralisme atlantiste, en traduisant ce nouveau rapport de forces sur le terrain, a témoigné, par contrecoup, de l’égarement de la diplomatie française tant sous l’impulsion d’Alain Juppé que de Laurent Fabius, les plus capés de droite et de gauche de la classe politique française, censés être «les meilleurs d’entre nous».

Soyons charitables et passons sur l’incident de l’avion du Président de Bolivie Evo Morales, démocratiquement élu mais néanmoins interdit de survol de l’espace aérien français par le fait du prince d’un pays récidiviste, initiateur de la première piraterie aérienne de l’histoire contemporaine avec le détournement de l’avion marocain transportant les chefs historiques du FLN, dans la décennie 1950. Passons sur la désinvolture consistant à exiger une résolution contraignante sur la Syrie à l’ONU, de la part d’un pays qui a outrepassé le mandat onusien sur la Libye. Passons enfin sur la contre conférence de l’opposition syrienne off-shore organisée le 30 janvier 2013 à Paris le jour même de la tenue à Genève de la conférence de l’opposition démocratique syrienne, c’est-à-dire l’opposition non parrainée financièrement par le Qatar, la Turquie et la France. Une mauvaise manière faite à la démocratie. Comment expliquer de telles lacunes? Sans doute par le fait que les caciques socialistes vaquaient aux joies de l’école buissonnière à l’évocation de la séquence postcoloniale à l’école de formation des cadres du parti.

A moins qu’une sournoise arabophobie compensatoire de Munich, par une sorte de «solidarité expiatoire» à l’égard des Juifs et d’Israël, ne tienne lieu de doxa officielle du socialisme français, comme en témoigne la désarabisation du Quai d‘Orsay vigoureusement entamée sous le tandem Nicolas Sarkozy et le transfuge socialiste Bernard Kouchner et gaillardement poursuivie sous le tandem François Hollande Laurent Fabius (6). La France s’est sionisée car tétanisée par son passif colonial (7), qui explique le fait que la France socialiste, artisan de l’armement atomique israélien, soit le plus intransigeant dans le dossier nucléaire iranien, en une nouvelle illustration de la duplicité de la diplomatie française.

IV-François Hollande, non un homme de poids, mais un homme empesé.

Le choix de François Hollande a constitué pour plus d’un tiers de son électorat un choix par défaut. Un vote de sanction anti-Sarkozy plutôt qu’un vote d’adhésion à sa personne. Entonner la rengaine habituelle du parti socialiste en affichant sans retenue un philo-sionisme tapageur comparable à celui de son prédécesseur lui a aliéné la sympathie de larges couches de l’opinion française, sans pour autant que la soumission au Likoud ne lui assure, en retour, de percevoir des dividendes israéliennes, comme son successeur en a fait la triste expérience. Et plutôt que de se lancer dans une politique déclamatoire, à coups d’effets d’annonce et d’effets de manche, en vue d’abuser son peuple, François Hollande serait avisé de se donner les moyens de sa politique faute d’être réduit à la politique de ses moyens.

De s’engager, dans une zone en transition, sur la voie d’une résolution durable des problèmes lancinants qui gangrènent la relation euro-arabe, notamment la dénucléarisation du Moyen Orient, la claire délimitation des zones de prospection pétrolière dans le triangle Liban Chypre Israël, une claire reconnaissance des éléments représentatifs de la société arabe aussi bien le Hamas palestinien que le Hezbollah libanais, enfin, dernier et non le moindre, un règlement équitable du conflit israélo arabe, véritable test de crédibilité de la nouvelle diplomatique française en ce que l’affaire palestinienne est la résultante du jeu trouble des puissances occidentale dans leur découpage arbitraire de la zone, à l’origine de la désaffection croissante du Monde arabe à l’égard des Occidentaux. En un mot d’engager un patient travail de cicatrisation des plaies béantes générées par la véhémence de celui qui a incarné mieux que tout plus que personne, la fonction de tête de pont sur le théâtre européen de l’axe israélo-américain, en sa qualité de «premier président de sang mêlé» de France, dont le zèle compensatoire en a fait le plus détesté du monde arabe dans l’histoire de la Vème République.

Une politique relayée, contre toute attente, par Le 2me Président socialiste de l’Histoire de France. En 2013, comme en 1956, le parti socialiste français a été le défenseur des riches et des puissants. A Suez, en 1956, le défenseur du grand patronat, en collaboration avec Israël, en 2013, en partenariat avec l’Arabie saoudite, alléché par le faramineux marché de la grande démocratie saoudienne de l’ordre de 400 milliards de dollars portant sur 19 centrales nucléaires, de six vedettes ainsi que du sempiternel lot habituel du fantomatique et problématique marché Rafale. Le changement socialiste, c’est la continuité, encore et toujours. Errare Humanum Est, Sed Perseverare Diabolicum. En 2013, comme en 1956, le rétropédalage aura été aussi abrupt que le démarrage en fanfare. Empruntant à son voisin corrézien sa formule, François Hollande renoncera à «punir» la Syrie pour opter en faveur de «mesures coercitives», le terme utilisé par Jacques Chirac à l’encontre du Hezbollah libanais, en 2006, en pleine guerre contre Israël. Ah ce besoin viscéral des dirigeants français de châtier les Arabes, indice symptomatique d’une pathologie mentale.

Que n’a-t-il suivi l’exemple de son ainé corrézien? Jacques Chirac qui avait préconisé des «mesures coercitives» pour brider le Hezbollah se ravisera après l’échec israélien dépêchant une escadrille française pour protéger l’espace aérien libanais lors du défilé célébrant la «divine victoire», craignant que la moindre anicroche atteignant Nasrallah, ne déclenche des représailles allant à l’éradication politique et physique de la famille de son ami Rafic Hariri, particulièrement de son héritier politique, Saad Hariri, planqué à l’étranger durant les hostilités loin d’une capitale dont il est le député et d‘un pays dont il est le chef de sa majorité gouvernementale

V- La Syrie, ultime expédition post coloniale de la France en phase de déclin.

Atteint de plein fouet sur le plan domestique par les gazouillis de la «Première peste de France» (8), caramélisé sur le plan international par la défection de ses deux alliés atlantistes, les Etats-Unis et le Royaume Uni, François Hollande, en dépit d’une reprise pondérale n’est pas un homme de poids, mais un homme empesé, affligé d’une posture dépareillée par un langage suranné, secondé par le pire ministre socialiste des Affaires étrangères de la Vème République. En contrepied de l‘aîné corrézien passé à la postérité pour sa gestuelle gaulliste de Chirac d’Irak, le point d‘orgue de sa double mandature par ailleurs calamiteuse, le cadet socialiste de Tulle, à dix ans de distance, s’est laissé happé par la tourmente d’un «annus horribilis», Scipion l’Africain du Mali, en janvier 2013, Général Flamby en Syrie, à l’automne de la même année, une performance qui pourrait signer son crépuscule diplomatique.

Camouflet supplémentaire, «le plus vieille allié des Etats Unis» n’a pas échappé à l’espionnage de son partenaire outre atlantique, qui lui a dérobé près de 70 millions de communications électroniques entre décembre 2012 et Janvier 2013, en pleine campagne du Mali et de Syrie. Véritable dindon de la farce, que n’a-t-il perçu cela avant de s’engouffrer dans la brèche syrienne alors que ce scandale marquait et l’affaiblissement et la duplicité des Etats Unis: « un affaiblissement fort de l’Amérique. On a longtemps dit que l’Amérique était libre, un modèle à suivre par rapport à la dictature d’Etat de la Chine, qui ne cache pas sa censure. Les Etats-Unis, eux, ont un contrôle sûrement pire [au niveau mondial], sans qu’on le sache », affirme le Français Stéphane Van Gelder, président du comité de nomination de l’Icann.

En 19 mois de gouvernance, seul fait indubitable, François Hollande par ses bourdes successives pourrait accréditer l’idée que Ségolène Royal, la précédente postulante socialiste à la magistrature suprême, aurait fait meilleure présidente que lui, dans tous les cas de figure, qu’il a, comble de cynisme, lui, en tant que secrétaire général du PS, elle, en sa qualité de la mère de ses quatre enfants, plaqué au paroxysme de la campagne présidentielle; indice indiscutable d’une grandeur d’âme.
Quarante ans après Epinay, le glorieux parti de Jean Jaurès, le parti du conquérant François Mitterrand qui rêvait d’un dépassement du socialisme par l’Europe n’est plus que l’ombre de lui-même. Un syndicat de barons arcboutés sur des privilèges surannés. Sans créativité, ni réactivité. Sans novation ni innovation. Sans vitalité. Un électro-encéphalogramme plat.

Amplificateur multiplex des thèses atlantistes du pouvoir socialiste, le journal Le Monde actera la défaite française, dans son édition du 1 er octobre 2013. «Loin d’être à la remorque des Américains, la France a cherché à les tirer vers une politique plus décisive sur une politique qui a fait 110.000 morts et menace tout le Moyen orient», soutiendra la directrice du quotidien Nathalie Nougayrède dans un éditorial intitulé «les limites de l’influence française». Ce constat qui a retenti comme une oraison funèbre de la diplomatie française, était d’autant plus amère que le journal dressait ce jour-là un portrait, en double page, de sa bête noire et de ses bloggeurs attitrés: «Bachar Al-Assad, sans une égratignure… Le Lion de Damas sort renforcé du compromis diplomatique qui a suivi le massacre au sarin». Non Nathalie Nougayrède. Pas du fait du massacre au sarin. Mais du fait du délire des parrains de l’opposition off-shore syrienne et des dérives de leurs poulains. Non Madame, La France n’assume pas une fonction de «diplomatie de repère», ni de balises, mais une diplomatie de repaires et de tanières.

La Syrie apparaitra rétrospectivement comme l’ultime expédition post coloniale d’un pays en déclin: «Parmi les grands perdants de la mondialisation, parmi les grands perdants de l’Européanisation», selon l’expression de Marcel Gauchet (9), la France de François Hollande figure aussi parmi les grands perdants en Syrie et, indice patent de la déflagration mentale des socialistes français, les meilleurs alliés des Saoudiens et néoconservateurs américains, des néo conservateurs israéliens.
« JE RESTERAI TOUJOURS UN AMI D’ISRAËL » « Tamid esha’er haver shel Israel ! » Accueilli en grande pompe par le président Shimon Pérès et le premier ministre, Benyamin Nétanyahou, dès son atterrissage à Tel-Aviv, M. Hollande a entendu visiblement faire honneur au « tapis rouge » que M. Nétanyahou avait annoncé dérouler pour la visite du président français. Au point de le clamer, en hébreu dans le texte: « Je resterai toujours un ami d’Israël ». Une déclaration Ce que qu’aucun des présidents français n‘avait fait auparavant, pas même Nicolas Sarkozy, qui passait jusqu’à présent comme le plus philo-sioniste des dirigeants français. Chapeau l’artiste socialiste tel qu’el lui-même l’éternité le figera.

CF: Le «chant d’amour» de François Hollande «pour Israël et ses dirigeants» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3DRjD8qoKA&feature=youtu.be

Malheur aux vaincus: L’ingratitude est la loi cardinale des peuples pour leur survie. Sauf à précipiter un naufrage collectif du socialisme français déjà sinistré par Dominique Strauss Khan et Jérôme Cahuzac, de parfaits représentants de la déliquescence du socialisme et non de sa quintessence, la Loi d’airain du cynisme en politique commande le scalp de Fabius pour la survie de Flamby.

René Naba

Référence

1. Scipion l’Africain (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus) est un général et homme d’État romain, né en 235 av. J.-C. mort en 183 av. J.-C. à Linterne en Campanie. Vaincu par le carthaginois Hannibal Barca à la bataille de Cannes, près de l’actuelle Canosa, il s’emploiera à prendre sa revanche à sa nomination Consul en 205 av. J.-C. A la tête d’une armada de 50 vaisseaux de guerre et 400 navires de transport, emportant près de 35.000 soldats, il passe en Afrique. Deux ans plus tard, il réussit à vaincre le général Carthaginois Hannon et prend le titre Scipion l’africain.
2. Flamby: Pâtisserie sans œufs ni crème désigne péjorativement un être mollasson et onctueux. Sobriquet réservé à François Hollande avant son accession à la présidence de la république française.
3. A propos de la réforme du droit de véto au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU http://www.renenaba.com/la-france-et-la-reforme-du-droit-de-veto-au-conseil-de-securite/
4. Le gouvernement Ayrault satisfait les Français d’Israël http://jssnews.com/2012/05/16/ayrault1/ Ainsi que à propos du tropisme socialiste à l’égard d’Israël; L’inauguration de l’esplanade David Ben Gourion à Paris Cf. Lettre ouverte à Bertrand Delanoë par René Naba http://www.renenaba.com/lettre-ouverte-a-bertrand-delanoe/
5. Bilan de Nicolas Sarkozy sur le plan interne, selon la Fondation terre Nova (proche du Parti Socialiste). Nicolas Sarkozy est «le recordman de la hausse la plus brutale du taux de chômage depuis trente Socialiste). Nicolas Sarkozy est «le recordman de la hausse la plus brutale du taux de chômage depuis trente ans ». A 8,1% en 2007, le taux devrait être autour de 10% en 2012, selon les dernières prévisions de l’Insee. La baisse des moyens consacrés à la lutte contre le chômage s’est accélérée depuis 2008 (-10,5% entre 2010 et 2011 et -11,3% entre 2011 et 2012), pointe Terra Nova. Le think tank estime que certaines mesures, comme la défiscalisation des heures supplémentaires ont eu des effets néfastes sur l’emploi en période de crise. La dette publique a explosé de 600 milliards d’euros, alors que, parallèlement, les cadeaux fiscaux se sont élevés à 75 milliards d’euros et que 350.000 emplois industriels ont été détruits, générant 337.000 pauvres supplémentaires.
6. Les arabisants du Quai d’Orsay expédiés en Amérique latine : http://blog.lefigaro.fr/malbrunot/2013/09/quai-dorsay-les-ambassadeurs-a.html
7. La France gagnée par le sionisme, par Eyal Sivan : http://www.rue89.com/2013/10/07/eyal-sivan-cineaste-israelien-france-est-gagnee-sionisme-246345
8. La première peste de France : http://www.grazia.fr/societe/phenomenes/articles/valerie-trierweiler-la-premiere-peste-de-france-487191
9. Marcel Gauchet in «Les quatre failles d’une présidence», Le Monde en date du 1er octobre 2013, article de Françoise Fressoz, page 6.

Pour aller plus loin sur la problématique de la France dans le conflit de Syrie

• http://www.renenaba.com/genocide-armenien-le-jeu-trouble-de-la-france/
• http://www.renenaba.com/alain-juppe-le-meilleur-d-entre-nous-vraiment
• http://www.renenaba.com/la-credibilite-de-lopposition-syrienne-a-lepreuve-du-parrainage-franco-turc/
• http://www.renenaba.com/la-fabrication-de-la-violence-et-du-sectarisme-dans-les-medias/

Pierre Charasse, ancien diplomate français, ayant occupé des postes d’ambassadeur au Pakistan, Uruguay et au Pérou, a adressé à la date du 02 septembre, depuis le Mexique où il réside, une lettre ironique à François Hollande sur la crise syrienne, publiée sur le site de Médiapart. En voici le texte intégral :

Mexico, le 2 septembre 2013

Monsieur le Président de la République,

Dans l’épreuve que subit actuellement l’humanité du fait de la présence d’armes chimiques en Syrie, vous avez pris la tête d’un grand mouvement mondial au nom de « l’obligation de protéger » les populations civiles menacées. Vous avez très bien expliqué dans votre discours du 27 août devant vos Ambassadeurs que c’était là la vocation de la France, comme elle l’a fait en Libye récemment, et qu’elle ne manquerait pas à son devoir. Votre détermination exemplaire devrait rapidement convaincre vos partenaires européens flageolants et les opinions publiques pleutres, en France, en Grande Bretagne, aux Etats-Unis et partout dans le monde, du bien-fondé d’une intervention militaire chirurgicale en Syrie.

Naturellement, comme vous l’avez rappelé le 27 août, « l’obligation de protéger » s’inscrit dans une démarche très réglementée par les Nations Unies et incombe en premier lieu aux Etats concernés : protéger leur propre population. En cas de défaillance de leur part, c’est au Conseil de Sécurité qu’il appartient de décider des modalités de mise en œuvre de ce principe. Sous votre conduite, la France s’honorera si elle fait respecter à la lettre cette avancée importante du droit international. Je suis sûr que le Président Poutine sera sensible à vos arguments tout comme le Président Xi Jiping et qu’ils ne feront pas obstacle à vos projets en opposant un veto au Conseil de Sécurité. Peu importe que l’objectif final soit encore un peu flou, ce qui compte c’est la défense énergique de principes clairs.

De même, je suis sûr que d’autres pays suivront la France dans son intention de livrer des armes aux rebelles syriens, malgré les risques que cela comporte. M. Laurent Fabius, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, a annoncé qu’il exigerait des destinataires des armes françaises qu’ils signent un « certificat d’utilisateur final ». Avec une telle fermeté nous aurons l’assurance que nos armes ne tomberont pas entre les mains des combattants Jihadistes du Front Al Nusra-Al Qaeda, qui font partie de la Coalition rebelle (encore très hétéroclite mais que vous avez le mérite de vouloir unifier, bon courage !) et ne se retourneront pas contre les pays occidentaux qui les ont aidés ou leurs rivaux au sein de la Coalition, voire des populations civiles.

Nous voilà rassurés. Al Qaeda devrait comprendre le message fort que vous lui envoyez. Il est important de bien expliquer que notre ennemi reste le Terrorisme International, même si de temps en temps, il faut se montrer pragmatique, comme disent nos amis anglo-saxons, et tendre la main à ceux qui veulent notre perte. Ceux-ci ne devraient pas être insensibles à nos gestes amicaux. Vos services devraient pouvoir sans peine démentir l’information diffusée par l’agence Associated Press selon laquelle des armes chimiques livrées par notre allié l’Arabie Saoudite (le Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, chef des services saoudiens de renseignement) au Front Al Nusra-Al Qaeda auraient été manipulées maladroitement par ces apprentis-sorciers.

Une fois ce point éclairci, vous aurez les mains libres pour agir sur la base des informations fournies par les Etats-Unis et Israël qui ont toute votre confiance. Toutefois il ne serait pas inutile d’éviter que se reproduise le scénario de 2003 aux Nations Unies lorsque Colin Powell a exhibé des photos truquées et un flacon de poudre de perlimpinpin comme preuves irréfutables de la présence d’armes de destruction massive en Irak ! Principe de précaution élémentaire. On vous fait confiance, c’est la crédibilité de la France qui est en jeu.

Quand aux objectifs militaires de cette opération, il paraît évident qu’ils doivent être en priorité de détruire par des moyens aériens les dépôts d’armes chimiques sans les faire exploser au nez de la population civile, ce qui serait un véritable désastre, et de neutraliser tous les engins qui permettent leur utilisation (missiles, chars, lance-roquettes etc.), sans mettre en péril la vie de nos soldats sur un terrain incertain. Si les Américains ont du mal à identifier les cibles, les services français de renseignement se feront un plaisir de leur fournir toutes les informations dont ils disposent, de telle sorte que l’opération soit courte et cinglante et que grâce à vous les armes chimiques soient définitivement éradiquées de la planète.

Les populations que nous allons protéger auront un prix à payer pour le service rendu et doivent accepter d’avance les quelques centaines ou milliers de morts que peuvent provoquer les effets collatéraux de cette opération et leurs conséquences en cascade. Mais c’est pour leur bien. Si vous prenez la tête de la manœuvre à la place de vos collègues Obama et Cameron, qui semblent rétropédaler avant même que le coup d’envoi ait été donné, Bashar Al Assad comprendra très vite à qui il a affaire. L’Occident ne doit pas mollir, ce serait un mauvais signal au reste du monde, on compte sur vous pour tenir la barre fermement.

Lorsque cette mission humanitaire sera terminée et que Bashar Al Assad aura fait amende honorable après la tripotée qu’on va lui mettre tout en le laissant au pouvoir, vous aurez la satisfaction d’avoir contribué à appliquer en Syrie la théorie du « chaos constructif » élaborée par des « think tanks » américains à l’époque de George Bush, en espérant que les grandes entreprises américaines, principales bénéficiaires du chaos, auront la bonté de laisser aux entreprises françaises la possibilité de tirer quelques avantages du désordre institutionnalisé qui a désormais vocation à se substituer à des Etats forts comme c’est le cas en Irak ou en Libye. Quelques contrats pétroliers feraient bien l’affaire de nos grands groupes.

Après cette victoire pratiquement acquise d’avance, il vous appartiendra de porter ailleurs le message humanitaire universel de la France. Les crises sont nombreuses dans le monde, la liste des dictateurs sanguinaires est longue, et des millions d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants attendent avec joie que la France puisse les protéger comme elle s’en est donnée la mission. On pense toujours à l’Afrique qui arrive au premier rang de nos préoccupations. Mais il y a le feu dans de nombreuses régions du monde. Une intervention humanitaire en Palestine serait la bienvenue, vous y songez certainement.

Au Mexique, on estime à 70.000 les morts provoqués par la violence des groupes criminels et des forces de sécurité et 26.000 disparus durant de sexennat du Président Calderón (2006-2012). Après la première année du mandat du Président Peña Nieto, on dénombre déjà 13.000 morts. En toute logique avec de tels chiffres la population civile mexicaine devrait être éligible aux bénéfices du programme « obligation de protéger » concocté par la « communauté internationale », même si celle-ci se réduit aujourd’hui à la France seule. Au point où nous en sommes, il faut bien qu’un pays se dévoue pour être l’avant-garde agissante d’une communauté internationale amorphe et irresponsable, « ensemble gazeux et incertain » comme a dit Hubert Védrine à propos de l’Union Européenne. Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné. S’agissant du Mexique, on pourra tirer les leçons de l’intervention militaire française de 1862 et ne pas répéter l’erreur qui a conduit à la déconfiture les armées de Napoléon III : déclencher des opérations militaires injustifiées et lointaines qui dépassent nos forces.

Pour cela il faudra, mais vous l’avez évidement prévu, programmer davantage de moyens budgétaires, par exemple pour la construction de nouveaux porte-avions nucléaires, les avions et missiles qui vont avec. Le « Charles de Gaulle » rend de brillants services lorsqu’il n’est pas immobilisé dans nos arsenaux pour de trop longues périodes de révision, mais il aura du mal à répondre seul à toutes les demandes d’intervention surtout lorsqu’il devra croiser dans des mers lointaines, exotiques et dangereuses. Je suis sûr que vous saurez persuader nos compatriotes que dans les circonstances actuelles, le monde occidental, pour poursuivre sa mission civilisatrice, pilier de la globalisation, devra s’en donner les moyens budgétaires.

On se souvient des contraintes qui ont empêché les forces françaises de frapper encore plus massivement la Libye. Leurs stocks de missiles se sont rapidement épuisés et le budget de la Défense n’avait pas prévu que l’abominable Khadafi, pourtant ami intime de votre prédécesseur, serait aussi peu sensible à nos problèmes budgétaires en opposant une résistance aussi farouche qu’inutile. La population, si elle est bien informée, acceptera certainement de bon gré l’augmentation des impôts et les coupes dans les dépenses publiques, notamment sociales, comme les bourses scolaires pour les français de l’étranger, ainsi que la réduction des moyens du réseau diplomatique, consulaire, éducatif et culturel français dans le monde si c’est le prix à payer pour que la France garde son statut de grande puissance mondiale. Tout est question de pédagogie.

Monsieur le Président, vous n’êtes pas sans savoir que nos amis et alliés américains n’ont pas toujours une très bonne image dans le monde. La France, avec les Présidents De Gaulle, Mitterrand et Chirac, a joui d’un grand prestige international, justement parce ce qu’elle parlait d’une voix différente de celle de ses alliés occidentaux. Le Président Sarkozy a mis fin à cette tradition diplomatique, pensant que la France avait tout intérêt, dans le contexte de la mondialisation et face à la montée en puissance de nouveaux acteurs, à se fondre dans « la famille occidentale » et à réintégrer l’appareil militaire de l’OTAN, c’est à dire à mettre ses forces conventionnelles sous le commandement américain.

«O tempora ! O mores !», comme a dit Ciceron en son temps. Mais vos Ambassadeurs ont déjà du vous signaler que dans de nombreux pays la France est désormais perçue comme un relais servile de la politique américaine. Des épisodes récents, comme l’affaire Snowden avec l’interception du Président Evo Morales lors de son survol de l’Europe, ont pu donner cette impression fâcheuse, mais je suis convaincu que vous n’aurez aucun mal à persuader vos interlocuteurs du monde entier que cette perception est erronée, car c’est en toute indépendance que vous avez confirmé l’ancrage de la France dans sa « famille occidentale ».

Enfin, je pense que vous avez réfléchi à la meilleure manière de protéger les populations mondiales des catastrophes humanitaires provoquées par le capitalisme mafieux et prédateur à l’origine des dernières crises économiques et financières. Il est probablement dans vos intentions de proposer à vos collègues du G7 et du G20 que vous allez rencontrer au Sommet de Saint Pétersbourg de changer de cap pour mettre fin à l’économie-casino et à l’empire de la finance sans contrôle. L’opinion publique mondiale, les chômeurs en Grèce, au Portugal, en Espagne, en France et ailleurs, apprécieraient vraisemblablement des frappes chirurgicales sur le FMI, la Banque Centrale européenne, la City de Londres, quelques paradis fiscaux « non-coopératifs » ou d’improbables agences de notation qui font plier les gouvernements.
Une telle cohérence dans l’application de « l’obligation de protéger » honorera la France et son Président. En continuant sans relâche sur cette voie et en défendant comme vous le faites le droit international et les normes fixées par les Nations Unies, il ne fait aucun doute qu’avant la fin de votre mandat, vous rejoindrez votre collègue et ami Barack Obama dans le club très sélect des Prix Nobel de la Paix. Vous l’aurez bien mérité.

Veuillez agréer, Monsieur le Président, l’assurance de ma très haute et respectueuse considération.

Pierre Charasse, Français de l’étranger, contribuable et électeur

http://www.gnet.tn/revue-de-presse-internationale/syrie-lette-dun-ex-ambassadeur-de-france-a-francois-hollande/id-menu-957.html

Lundi 9 Septembre 2013

Interviewé par la chaîne Russia Today sur l’utilisation des armes chimiques en Syrie (et par qui ?), Michel Collon expose brièvement les 5 principes de la propagande de guerre, qui permettent à chacun de repérer la désinformation, les intérêts cachés, la diabolisation de l’adversaire et le refus du débat public. Pourquoi, informés par les satellites russes qui montreraient que ce sont les rebelles qui ont employé ces armes, les Etats-Unis, la France et leurs alliés tirent leurs conclusions avant même toute enquête…

Source introduction et version française : http://www.michelcollon.info/

Vendredi, le président Barack Obama a défendu avec acharnement l’ensemble du programme gouvernemental d’espionnage des appels téléphoniques, des courriers électroniques et des communications en général du peuple américain.

S’exprimant devant des journalistes à San Jose en Californie avant l’ouverture de son sommet avec le président chinois Xi Jinping, Obama a qualifié de « battage médiatique » les révélations des médias sur les programmes secrets de rassemblement de données organisés par la National Security Agency (NSA – qui dépend du Pentagone) dirigé contre des centaines de millions d’Américains.

Il a défini la récupération quotidienne par la NSA des données téléphoniques de tous les clients des grands firmes de téléphone américaines, révélée pour la première fois par le journal britannique Guardian, et les accès par la NSA et le FBI aux serveurs des grands fournisseurs d’accès internet pour lire les courriels, les photos, les conversations par chat et les documents des clients, révélées jeudi par le Guardian et le Washington Post, comme un « petit empiètement » sur les droits à la vie privée, protégés par la constitution.

Obama a défendu ces programmes de surveillance orwelliens avec des généralités, disant qu’ils sont nécessaires pour protéger les Américains contre les attentats terroristes. Il a affirmé qu’ils sont légaux puisqu’ils ont été validés par le Congrès et approuvés par les Cours de justice secrètes créés expressément pour cela dans le cadre du Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA). Il y a « toute une série de garde-fous, » a-t-il déclaré, sans rien dire de concret sur les vérifications qui sont censées être faites sur les agents et les agences, puisque, comme tout le reste dans ces programmes, ces informations sont classées.

Ses remarques, du début à la fin, étaient un ramassis de raisonnements bancals et de mensonges. Il a insisté à plusieurs reprises sur l’idée que « personne n’écoute vos appels téléphoniques, » comme si, en supposant que ce soit vrai, cela rendrait sans dangers la possession par l’armée d’informations détaillées sur les liens sociaux et politiques et les habitudes quotidiennes de centaines de millions de gens. De même, Obama a affirmé que le programme de surveillance d’internet – qui implique lui des consultations des courriels et autres communications de millions de gens – ne « cible » pas les Américains. En fait, toute personne résidant aux États-Unis qui communique avec des gens en dehors du pays est susceptible d’être prise dans ses filets.

Rien de ce qu’Obama, ni aucun autre représentant du gouvernement, dit sur les programmes de surveillance de l’État, menés sous le couvert de la « guerre contre le terrorisme » ne peut être pris pour argent comptant. Il y a tout juste deux mois, James Clapper, directeur des renseignements nationaux, a tout simplement menti à la Commission du Sénat sur les services de renseignement quand on lui a demandé si la NSA espionnait des Américains.

Les affirmations d’Obama et d’autres politiciens, Démocrates comme Républicains, selon lesquelles l’espionnage systématique de toute la population est motivé par le désir d’empêcher des attentats terroristes doivent être traitées avec mépris. Elles sont proférées dans le contexte d’une nouvelle tentative sordide de dissimuler les complicités évidentes au sein de l’Etat dans un attentat qui a eu lieu sur le territoire américain. Une fois de plus avec l’attentat du Marathon de Boston, comme ce fut le cas pour les attentats du 9/11 et l’attentat raté de Noël 2009 contre un vol commercial passant au-dessus de Detroit, il s’avère que les auteurs étaient bien connus du FBI, de la CIA et d’autres agences et que des avertissements multiples ont été ignorés.

En effet, Obama lui-même a fait allusion aux motifs politiques des programmes d’espionnage du gouvernement, commentant qu’après avoir quitté ses fonctions, « Je serai un citoyen ordinaire, et je soupçonne que sur la liste de gens pouvant être visés [par ces programmes]… je serai probablement en début de liste. »

Ce qui est clair c’est que le véritable danger qui pèse sur les droits du peuple américain vient non pas de terroristes, mais de l’Etat capitaliste américain. Les mesures dignes d’un état policier mises en place par Bush et étendues par Obama visent l’opposition sociale venant de la classe ouvrière contre la politique de la classe dirigeante américaine, l’austérité à l’intérieur du pays et les guerres sans fin à l’extérieur.

La Constitution, le Bill of Rights [déclaration des droits fondamentaux] et l’ensemble des droits démocratiques sont réduits en lambeaux. À leur place, vaguement dissimulée sous les atours de plus en plus troués de la démocratie, une dictature est en train d’émerger.

Le Quatrième amendement, qui fait partie du Bill of Rights, déclare : « Le droit des citoyens d’être garantis dans leurs personne, domicile, papiers et effets, contre les perquisitions et saisies non motivées ne sera pas violé, et aucun mandat ne sera délivré, si ce n’est sur présomption sérieuse, corroborée par serment ou affirmation, ni sans qu’il décrive particulièrement le lieu à fouiller et les personnes ou les choses à saisir.»

Tout dans les programmes défendus vendredi par Obama est en opposition évidente et directe à cette interdiction claire et sans équivoque des violations par l’Etat du droit à la vie privée.

Dans ses remarques de vendredi. Obama a dit que « On ne peut avoir la sécurité à cent pour cent tout en ayant aussi une intimité garantie à cent pour cent… » En d’autres termes que tout le monde peut comprendre, le Quatrième amendement ne s’applique plus. De même, pour le gouvernement, les garanties du respect des procédures déterminées par la loi, du procès devant un jury, de la liberté d’expression, de la liberté de la presse et de la liberté de réunion ne sont plus applicables.

La désintégration de la démocratie américaine a été soulignée par la réaction générale du monde politique officiel aux révélations sur cet espionnage massif de la part du gouvernement. Des Démocrates en vue, comme la présidente de la Commission du Sénat sur les services de renseignement, Dianne Feinstein, et le dirigeant du groupe Démocrate majoritaire au Sénat, Harry Reid, se sont précipités aux côtés de leurs homologues Républicains pour défendre les programmes de la NSA.

L’opposition relativement aphone et dispersée venant des « libéraux » du Parti démocrate et des libertaires de droite du Parti républicain, ainsi que les critiques venant des organes de presse comme le New York Times et le Washington Post, se sont arrêtées bien avant d’en arriver à demander la fin de ces programmes, le démantèlement de la NSA, la mise en examen des responsables des services de renseignement, ou une procédure d’impeachment contre Obama, dont les violations de la Constitution vont pourtant bien plus loin que tout ce qu’a fait Richard Nixon.

Pendant ce temps, le directeur des Renseignements nationaux [le service qui fait le lien entre les différentes agences, ndt], James Clapper, a publié une défense vibrante des programmes de la NSA et implicitement menacé de mettre en examen les personnes responsables de les avoir révélés au public. Il s’est plaint que ces fuites vont entraîner « des dommages de longue durée et irréversibles » à la sécurité nationale américaine, et a qualifié la « divulgation non-autorisée d’informations » sur ces programmes de « répréhensible. »

Le New York Times, quant à lui, a publié un article qualifiant l’auteur des articles du Guardian sur les deux programmes de la NSA, Glenn Greenwald, d’ « obsessionnel » pour ce qui est de la surveillance gouvernementale et a affirmé que Greenwald « s’est mis […] dans le viseur des procureurs fédéraux. »

Dans ses remarques de vendredi, Obama a fait référence au discours qu’il a donné le 23 mai à l’Université de la Défense nationale. Dans ce discours extraordinaire, Obama a défendu sa politique antidémocratique, comme les assassinats extrajudiciaires par drones, y compris contre des citoyens américains, tout en mettant en garde contre les implications de telles violations de la Constitution américaine. Son discours reflétait une crise profonde et des divisions très nettes au sein de l’Etat, et indiquait qu’Obama sent qu’il se trouve dans une position qui n’est pas du tout sûre.

Vendredi, il a affirmé étrangement qu’il « quitte[rait] cette fonction… à un moment donné dans les trois ans et demi à venir. » [notre italique]. Obama est bien conscient de ceux manient réellement le pouvoir – ce sont d’une part le monde militaire et des services de renseignements, et d’autre part leurs alliés de Wall Street. Si ces forces venaient à être mécontentes de la manière dont Obama mène leur politique de contre-révolution sociale contre la classe ouvrière et d’hégémonie mondiale, ou de la diligence avec laquelle il réalise les changements du mode de gouvernement nécessaire pour appliquer ce programme, on pourrait rapidement se débarrasser de lui.

« Si les gens ne peuvent faire confiance ni au pouvoir exécutif, ni au Congrès ni aux juges fédéraux pour s’assurer que nous respectons la Constitution, les procédures requises et l’état de droit » a-t-il ajouté, « alors il y aura des problèmes. »

En fait, l’état déjà bien avancé de l’effondrement de la démocratie américaine sape rapidement tout soutien d’une grande partie de la population pour ce système. Ce tournant vers des formes de gouvernement autoritaires est lui-même alimenté par la croissance immense de l’inégalité sociale et le recours de plus en plus fréquent à la criminalité et à la guerre sur la scène internationale.

Une crise aussi prononcée des relations de classe signifie l’émergence d’une période de soulèvements révolutionnaires. Le capitalisme implique l’inégalité sociale et la guerre, lesquels sont incompatibles avec la démocratie. La seule véritable défense des droits démocratiques tient à la lutte de la classe ouvrière pour le socialisme.

Barrey Grey

Article original, WSWS, paru le 8 juin 2013

La guerre contre le terrorisme et le sort de la démocratie aux Etats-Unis

[29 mai 2013]

La démocratie américaine en lambeaux

[23 avril 2013]

Transcription

Irib – Le ministre des affaires étrangères français Laurent Fabius compte parmi les fervents partisans de la levée d’embargo pour fournir des armes aux rebelles syriens. Mais, tout récemment, il a dit que son pays n’a pas encore décidé la levée de cet embargo d’armes parce que la France craint que ces armes tombent entre les mains des extrémistes. Comment expliquez-vous cette récente prise de position de Monsieur Fabius ?

Alors pourquoi aujourd’hui, après s’être beaucoup engagé à Bruxelles (et à l’ONU également) pour faire avancer son point de vue il fait machine arrière ? Je pense qu’il y a plusieurs raisons. La première, c’est que la France a atteint dans les enceintes internationales un certain degré de ridicule. En proposant au même moment de faire voter à New York une nouvelle convention pour réprimer le trafic d’armes international, et alors que la France déployait un certain nombre d’arguments à New York, sur le terrain en Syrie elle faisait exactement le contraire de ce qu’elle prétendait combattre en droit international.

Ensuite, il y a certainement une pression extérieure. La France fait partie avec le Royaume-Uni, la Turquie, le Qatar, l’Arabie Saoudite du carré d’enragés qui veulent absolument attaquer la Syrie et poursuivre la destruction systématique de ses infrastructures. Mais les États Unis quant à eux, qui ont largement participé à alimenter ce trafic d’armes au cours des deux dernières années, comme ils le revendiquent eux-mêmes à travers des fuites qu’ils ont organisées d’abord dans le New York Times puis dans plusieurs autres journaux au cours des trois dernières semaines, donc les États Unis essayent au contraire de changer de politique, et de montrer que tout ça n’a abouti qu’à des désastres, que si on continue ça sera pire encore. Donc selon toute vraisemblance, c’est Washington qui a demandé à la fois à Londres et à Paris d’abandonner ce projet de légaliser les transferts d’armes vers la Syrie.

Irib – Le ministre français des Affaires étrangères prétend que s’il n’y a pas une décision là-dessus, s’il n’y a pas une transition politique dans le pays, la Syrie se divisera en deux camps : l’arc syro-iranien d’un côté et Al-Qaïda de l’autre côté. Vous pensez que là aussi en fait Fabius cherche à brandir la menace d’al Qaïda pour justifier l’acharnement de Paris à l’égard de la Syrie ?

T.M. – Donc apparemment, Monsieur Fabius est toujours aussi désordonné quand il parle, parce que dire que la Syrie sera divisée avec d’un côté la Syrie et de l’autre côté al Qaïda, ça n’a pas grand sens. En fait, quand il évoque aujourd’hui le Front al Nousra (c’est-à-dire la branche levantine d’al Qaïda) comme étant un « danger », il oublie ses propres paroles dans les mois qui ont précédé. Je vous rappelle que quand le Front al Nousra a été classé comme étant une organisation terroriste par les États Unis, c’est Laurent Fabius au cours de la conférence des « Amis de la Syrie » au Maroc qui a défendu le Front al Nousra en disant que « les gens d’al Qaïda font du bon boulot » (je cite).

Aujourd’hui, s’étant fait taper sur les doigts par les États-Unis, il commence à changer son braquet, à dire que, effectivement, les gens d’al Nousra ce sont des gens dangereux. Il fait bien d’en prendre conscience puisque que s’il continue à les alimenter en armes, et bien ces gens continueront à tuer des soldats français au Mali. Il est désormais attesté que des armes livrées par la France en Syrie ont été utilisées au Mali contre des soldats français. Le problème [que nous posent] des déclarations et des actions de Monsieur Fabius, ce n’est pas trop de comprendre ce qu’ils veut faire, et pourquoi ils change d’avis un jour ou l’autre, mais c’est de chercher la cohérence de ce qu’il fait, et comment lui-même va en assumer les conséquences.

Irib – S’agissant de la pression extérieure dont vous venez de parler, la France se heurte également à cette intransigeance de la Russie et de la Chine, aussi.

Au cours des dernières semaines, le bruit des bottes s’est fait plus bruyant, depuis les Etats-Unis et leurs alliés/vassaux de l’OTAN. Des missiles seront bientôt déployés en Turquie le long de la frontière avec la Syrie et, à Washington, l’administration Obama comme les médias dominants parlent d’une « ligne rouge » que le régime d’Assad ne doit pas franchir. Cette ligne rouge se rapporte à l’utilisation potentielle par Assad d’armes chimiques, essentiellement du gaz sarin, contre sa propre population. On ne connaît que trop bien ce « refrain » pour justifier une intervention étrangère. Durant le prélude de l’invasion de l’Irak par les Etats-Unis en 2003, un subterfuge similaire a été utilisé par l’administration Bush afin de convaincre le public américain que l’invasion de l’Irak était une « guerre de nécessité ». Les preuves que Saddam Hussein possédait des Armes de Destruction Massive (AMD) et qu’il prévoyait de les utiliser furent concoctées par l’administration Bush et celle de [Tony] Blair au Royaume-Uni. Dans les deux cas, ces deux gouvernements avaient la complicité des médias dominants, dont le New York Times, la source d’information de référence aux Etats-Unis.

Jeudi dernier, de vagues efforts diplomatiques pour mettre fin à la guerre civile en Syrie ont eu lieu à Dublin, en Irlande. Les discussions se sont déroulées entre la Secrétaire d’Etat US [Hillary] Clinton et le ministre russe des Affaires étrangères [Sergueï] Lavrov. Il est cependant peu probable qu’une solution diplomatique puisse mettre fin à la guerre civile en Syrie qui dure depuis 21 mois, même si Moscou réalise que les jours d’Assad au pouvoir sont comptés. En dépit de cet effort diplomatique de onze heures entre Clinton et Lavrov à Dublin, la réalité et le ton à Washington étaient assez différents. Le Secrétaire à la Défense [Léon] Panetta a déclaré que « les rapports des renseignements faisaient craindre qu’un président Bachar el-Assad désespéré envisage d’utiliser son arsenal d’armes chimiques. Je pense qu’il n’y a aucun doute sur le fait que nous restons très préoccupés et très inquiets, et alors que l’opposition avance, en particulier à Damas, que le régime d’Assad pourrait bien envisager d’utiliser des armes chimiques ».

Six batteries de missiles Patriot doivent être déployées dans les quatre semaines en Turquie par les Etats-Unis, l’Allemagne et les Pays-Bas. Elles sont censées « renforcer les défenses aériennes des membres de l’OTAN ». Ces missiles sol-air, qui ont la capacité d’intercepter des missiles, seront transportés en Turquie par la mer. Les parlements allemands et néerlandais voteront sur ces déploiements la semaine prochaine, et les approuveront très probablement. Deux batteries de missiles sont censées venir de chacun de ces pays. Une fois opérationnels, les six batteries pourront lancer plus de 500 missiles. Environ 100 soldats sont nécessaires pour faire fonctionner chaque batterie, ce qui signifie que 600 soldats, des Etats-Unis, d’Allemagne et des Pays-Bas, seront déployés en Turquie d’ici un mois.[1]

Les deux puissances mondiales qui peuvent s’opposer à l’attaque de l’Otan en Syrie qui menace dangereusement sont la Russie et la Chine. Mais si celles-ci n’ont rien fait de concret – en dehors de quelque opposition rhétorique à l’ONU – pour bloquer l’intervention militaire de l’OTAN et le soutien armé à la soi-disant « révolution » libyenne, pourquoi agiraient-elles pour empêcher l’OTAN de renverser Assad en Syrie ? Il semblerait que comparé au sort de Kadhafi, le cas d’Assad soit différent, surtout pour la Russie. Après tout, la Russie a des liens historiques avec la Syrie et la dynastie Assad depuis 1962. Pendant des décennies, les Syriens avaient l’habitude d’étudier dans des universités russes et rentraient très souvent au pays avec des épouses russes. Au début de la guerre civile, il y a presque deux ans, le nombre de Russes d’origine ou de personnes ayant la double nationalité russe/syrienne vivant en Syrie s’élevait au chiffre incroyable de 100.000. La perspective que la Russie puisse perdre la Syrie comme allié le plus fort dans cette région serait une perte d’influence écrasante pour le gouvernement de Vladimir Poutine, et exactement comme la Libye post-Kadhafi ou l’Egypte post-Moubarak, une Syrie post-Assad serait probablement contrôlée par des Islamistes, comme les Frères Musulmans, voire même les Salafistes.[2]

Il est concevable qu’une sorte de grand marchandage soit en &oulig;uvre entre les Etats-Unis, l’Arabie Saoudite, le Qatar et l’Europe occidentale – qui soutiennent tous activement et officiellement la pseudo révolution syrienne et qui l’arment – d’une part, et la Russie et la Chine, d’autre part. Mais que pourrait être un tel plan sibyllin s’il existait ? Quel bénéfice tirerait chacun des acteurs impliqués en permettant à toute cette région, à l’exception de l’Irak, d’être dominée par les Sunnites, sous la sphère d’influence de l’Arabie Saoudite et des riches pays pétroliers du Golfe ? L’argent et le pétrole sont-ils la seule considération, en opposition à l’influence politique, et si c’est le cas, des accords secondaires avec la Russie et la Chine sont-ils déjà en cours pour partager le butin ?

Les personnes qui entretiennent des scénarii non-rationnels, et en particulier tous ceux qui sont obsédées par les théories de la conspiration comme celles qui concernent les soi-disant « Illuminati », parlent toujours d’une « fin de partie » : quelque plan mystérieux et tordu concocté par Henry Kissinger et ses amis. Ce plan a bien sûr pour but ultime de dominer le monde et d’asservir toute la race humaine. Mais c’est accorder trop de crédit à un groupe d’hommes surtout âgés dont les problèmes essentiels sont plus probablement l’incontinence et la perte de mémoire que l’établissement d’un nouvel ordre mondial avec eux à la barre.[3]

Une idée plus logique, plus rationnelle mais en fait plus effrayante est qu’il n’y a aucun plan d’ensemble. Si l’on y pense de façon cynique en utilisant les notions capitalistes froides de la dernière ligne du bilan et des bénéfices trimestriels, le business de la guerre – de toutes les guerres, livrées quelles qu’en soient les raisons – est toujours une proposition gagnant-gagnant. La machine de mort du complexe militaro-industriel gagne durant la destruction et les phases de massacres, et ensuite, une fois que tout est réduit à l’état de gravats ou en cendres, d’autres bras de cette même machine capitaliste bénéficient des plans de reconstruction, que cela se déroule dans l’Allemagne de l’après-guerre à travers le Plan Marshall ou en Irak sous la supervision de sociétés privées comme Halliburton.

Gilbert Mercier

Traduction : JFG-QuestionsCritiques

Notes du traducteur :
_____________________

[1] Selon le site Hamsayeh.net, quelques heures après que l’OTAN a accepté de déployer des missiles Patriot en Turquie, la Russie aurait livré une première cargaison de missiles Iskander à la Syrie. Ces missiles sol-sol ultra-précis et indétectables, d’une portée de plus de 450 km, peuvent voyager à une vitesse hypersonique de plus 2,4 km/s (mach 6-7).

[2] La Russie a surtout une attache navale à Tartous en Syrie, son unique port d’attache en Méditerranée.

[3] Certes, Henry Kissinger et consorts, comme David Rockefeller, aujourd’hui très âgés, ont probablement d’autres préoccupations dues à leur grand âge. D’ailleurs, David Rockefeller, cofondateur du Groupe de Bilderberg qu’il a dirigé pendant 60 ans, n’a pas participé aux dernières « conférences ». Toutefois, le témoin a visiblement été passé à Richard Perle (l’un des concepteurs de la guerre d’Irak) et à Paul Wolfowitz (ardent défenseur de la guerre en Libye et de l’intervention américaine en Syrie).

Pour un juriste reconnu expert en droit international, la réponse est claire…

« Le droit international ne permet pas aux Etats de reconnaître des rebelles qui luttent contre le gouvernement reconnu ». Curtis Doebbler, – juriste reconnu enseignant à l’université Webster de Genève, avocat expert en droit international pendant la guerre de l’OTAN contre la Libye pour appuyer les rebelles du CNT – a souligné plusieurs fois la totale illégitimité de l’utilisation de la force contre le pays nord-africain (http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03…).

Et la Syrie ? La « coalition nationale syrienne pour les forces révolutionnaires et d’opposition », née il y a quelques jours à Doha sous les auspices des monarques du Golfe (Arabie Saoudite, Qatar, Emirats, Koweït, Oman et Bahreïn) et des puissances occidentales, a demandé à l’UE et aux USA la reconnaissance officielle et la fourniture directe d’armes et d’argent, pour pouvoir renverser par la guerre le régime de Damas. La Coalition en effet refuse tout dialogue. Les monarchies du Golfe, la France et l’Angleterre l’ont déjà reconnue comme « unique représentant légitime du peuple syrien » (et la Ligue Arabe l’a reconnue comme interlocuteur, avec l’abstention de l’Algérie et de l’Irak ; l’Italie aussi a reconnu la Coalition comme légitime représentant du peuple syrien, bien que pas le seul à présent).
La France – qui avait été le premier pays à reconnaître le CNT libyen en mars 2011 – discutera de la fourniture d’armes avec les partenaires européens dans les prochaines semaines. Même le premier ministre britannique David Cameron, de même que Barak Obama, sont en train de prendre en considération l’idée d’armer officiellement leurs alliés syriens.

De la même façon que le CNT libyen, l’opposition armée syrienne (et les groupes politiques qui la soutiennent) refuse une présence militaire au sol mais demande depuis toujours des appuis militaires. La Russie et la Chine continueront peut-être à empêcher une intervention directe.

Mais la fourniture d’armes et de ressources serait-elle légale, puisqu’on entend toujours le même refrain : le prétexte de la « protection des civils », autrement dit, que les groupes armés sont là uniquement pour sauver la vie des civils).
Doebbler répond :

« Reconnaître une force d’opposition n’est pas illégal parce que c’est une décision qui relève de la compétence nationale, toutefois toute action entreprise pour soutenir l’usage de la force de la part de groupes armés contre le gouvernement légitime est illégale et une grave violation du droit international. Un État qui soutient l’usage de la violence contre un autre État est responsable en droit international des dommages causés. De plus il est interdit à tout autre État de la communauté internationale de reconnaître une situation créée par cette violation du droit. Le soutien aux groupes armés en Syrie est illégal parce que ceux-ci utilisent la force contre un gouvernement reconnu ».

La seule exception, poursuit Doebbler, « consiste dans le fait que les opposants armés se reconnaissent comme mouvement de libération nationale. Ils devraient démontrer alors qu’ils sont opprimés à un point tel que l’exercice de leur droit à l’autodétermination a rendu nécessaire l’usage de la force, unique instrument pour atteindre ce droit. Mais l’opposition soutenue par l’étranger a eu beaucoup d’occasions de participer au gouvernement en Syrie et le régime affirme être prêt à accorder d’autres droits de participation. Non seulement les rebelles soutenus par l’étranger ne représentent pas un groupe clairement défini de la population syrienne, pas plus qu’une majorité. Ils peuvent donc être définis au mieux comme acteurs par procuration des puissances étrangères qui essayent d’intervenir en Syrie pour un changement de régime. Ceci viole différentes obligations : la non-ingérence dans les affaires intérieures d’autres Etats sur base de l’art. 2, al. 7 de la Charte de l’ONU et l’abstention de l’emploi de la force dans l’art. 2 al. 41, l’un des principes les plus importants du droit international. Le 27 juin 1986, les États-Unis ont été condamnés par la Cour internationale de justice de La Haye pour avoir violé ces principes au Nicaragua ».

Dans cet arrêt, la Cour présidée par un juge indien a repoussé par 12 voix contre 3 la justification de l’autodéfense et a décidé que les USA avaient violé : l’obligation de non-ingérence en armant et en finançant les contras nicaraguayens ; l’obligation de ne pas exercer l’usage de la force en attaquant le territoire nicaraguayen en 1983-84 ; l’obligation de respecter la souveraineté et le commerce pacifique, en minant les eaux territoriales.

Marinella Correggia

Deux attentats à la bombe survenus à Beyrouth, capitale libanaise, ont jeté le pays dans une crise, révélant encore davantage le danger que la guerre civile en Syrie ne déclenche un embrasement plus vaste à travers toute la région.

Vendredi 19 octobre, une explosion massive a tué huit personnes à Beyrouth dont un très haut gradé des Forces de sécurité interne, le brigadier général Wissam al-Hassan. Le bilan fait état de 78 personnes blessées lors de l’explosion qui a touché une patrouille motorisée qui passait dans le quartier historique chrétien de la ville.

Un responsable de la sécurité libanaise a dit aux journalistes qu’immédiatement avant son meurtre, Hassan était rentré d’une visite en France et en Allemagne. Au moment de l’attaque, il se serait déplacé dans un véhicule non blindé malgré les risques évidents associés à sa position et à la volatilité de la politique libanaise.

Le général al-Hassan a mené cette année une enquête impliquant un ancien ministre du gouvernement conduit par le Hezbollah au Liban dans un présumé complot avec des responsables syriens visant à perpétrer des attaques dans le pays. Le ministre faisant l’objet de l’enquête diligentée par Hassan, Michel Samaha, entretiendrait des relations de longue date avec les services secrets américains, français et syriens. Un ancien membre du mouvement des Phalanges fascistes durant la guerre civile libanaise, Samaha avait ces dernières années formé une alliance avec le Hezbollah.

Plusieurs politiciens influents libanais se sont empressés de rejeter la responsabilité de l’assassinat sur le gouvernement de la Syrie voisine. Saad al-Hariri, dirigeant du principal bloc d’opposition au Liban, a accusé le gouvernement de Damas d’être derrière le meurtre d’al-Hassan.

Hariri est le fils de Rafic al-Hariri, l’ancien premier ministre libanais qui avait été assassiné en 2005. Washington et ses alliés locaux avaient imputé ce meurtre à la Syrie, ce qui avait entraîné le retrait forcé des troupes syriennes du pays et la guerre israélienne contre le Liban en 2006. Le général Hassan était considéré être très proche de la famille Hariri et de son mouvement d’opposition du 14 Mars. Le corps d’Hassan a été enterré ce week-end aux côtés de celui de Rafic Hariri.

Le ministre de l’Information, Omran al-Zouebi, a condamné l’attentat en le qualifiant d’« acte terroriste lâche ».

Tout en montrant du doigt Damas, les politiciens pro-américains au Liban ont eu tôt fait de se servir de l’assassinat pour réclamer des protestations de masse contre le gouvernement mené par le Hezbollah. Exigeant la démission du premier ministre Najib Mikati, les figures de l’opposition libanaise ont essayé de profiter de l’attentat à la bombe de vendredi pour réclamer un nouveau gouvernement à Beyrouth qui adopterait une ligne plus dure à l’égard du régime du président syrien Bachar al-Assad.

En réaction aux pressions exercées par l’opposition, Mikati a fait semblant samedi de donner sa démission. Toutefois, le président libanais, Michel Sleimane, lui a demandé de rester à son poste « dans l’intérêt national. »

Une déclaration publiée par le mouvement chiite libanais Hezbollah qui représente le plus important parti de la coalition gouvernementale libanaise a fait état d’un « grand désarroi suite à ce crime horrible » et a exigé que les responsables politique et du renseignement attrapent les coupables.

A Washington, la porte-parole du Département d’Etat, Victoria Nuland, a condamné l’attentat de vendredi à Beyrouth tout en affirmant que les Etats-Unis ne disposaient d’aucune information quant aux agresseurs. Cependant, dans une critique à peine voilée à l’égard de la Syrie, la secrétaire d’Etat américaine, Hillary Clinton, a précisé que l’assassinat d’Hassan était « un dangereux signe que certains cherchent encore à saper la sécurité du Liban. »

Face à la pression diplomatique émanant de Washington et de ses alliés, le gouvernement à Beyrouth a refusé de se joindre à la campagne menée par les Etats-Unis pour renverser le régime d’Assad. Depuis des décennies, le Hezbollah bénéficie du soutien de la Syrie et du gouvernement iranien.

La guerre par procuration soutenue par les Etats-Unis en Syrie a de nouveau mis à rude épreuve la paix précaire qui existe entre les factions politico-religieuses rivales au Liban. Le gouvernement mené par le Hezbollah et les partis d’opposition entrent de plus en plus souvent en conflit au sujet de la réaction à avoir face à la guerre civile en Syrie. Les combattants « rebelles », principalement les Islamistes, ont pu accéder à certaines parties du Liban pour lancer des attaques à l’intérieur de la Syrie et y approvisionner les forces de l’opposition.

Au cours du weekend, des manifestants se sont rassemblés à Beyrouth et dans d’autres villes et villages, bloquant les routes en brûlant des pneus et en s’affrontant à la police. Il y a eu des articles qui ont fait état de combats intenses dans la ville de Tripoli, dans le Nord du Liban, un centre d’opposition contre le gouvernement mené par le Hezbollah et un bastion pour le soutien à l’opposition syrienne.

Alors que les protestations anti-syriennes et anti-Hezbollah se déroulaient dimanche, un nouvel attentat s’est produit à Beyrouth. Une voiture piégée a explosé devant un poste de police dans le même quartier chrétien animé de la ville en faisant au moins 13 morts et un bien plus grande nombre de blessés.

Aucun groupe n’a revendiqué la responsabilité des deux attentats.

Article original, WSWS, publié le 22 Octobre 2012

Vendredi, 19 octobre, le groupe Gold Fields s’est vanté de ce que la menace de licenciements de masse avait réussi à contraindre les 9.000 travailleurs de son site Beatrix et 90 pour cent des 14.300 travailleurs du site KDC Est à reprendre le travail. Mais, une nouvelle grève des mineurs de platine à la mine de Marikana de Lonmin a porté un coup aux efforts déployés pour venir à bout du soulèvement de la classe ouvrière tandis que des dizaines de milliers de travailleurs continuent la lutte.

Les travailleurs de Marikana ont cessé le travail jeudi pour défendre leurs collègues victimes d’interpellation et de persécution de la police. Les mineurs de Marikana avaient commencé la vague actuelle de grève en août et avaient refusé de reprendre le travail après que 34 mineurs avaient été abattus et 78 autres blessés par la police. Les grèves s’étaient répandues après que Lonmin avait accepté une augmentation de salaire de 22 pour cent dans le but de régler le conflit à Marikana, ce qui avait suscité des revendications pour des augmentations de salaires identiques dans l’ensemble de l’industrie minière. Les rapports sont imprécis mais l’on estime qu’entre 80.000 et 100.000 mineurs ont fait grève à divers moments.

Dans le compte rendu le plus détaillé des récents événements, le Daily Maverick, remarque qu’à peine une semaine avant l’ouverture d’une enquête officielle sur le massacre de Marikana, la police a mené une vague d’arrestations de militants et de dirigeants de la grève.

Le 15 octobre, les travailleurs de la mine de Marikana ont réussi à empêcher l’arrestation par des gardes de la sécurité du dirigeant de la grève « Rasta » Thembele Sohadi au moment où il arrivait pour pointer à son travail à Three Shaft. La police l’attendait devant l’entrée principale. Le 17 octobre, Xolani Nzuza, un dirigeant du comité de grève ad hoc, et un gréviste nommé Mzet ont été arrêtés et détenus au secret. Ils devraient être inculpés de deux meurtres dont celui d’un responsable du syndicat des mineurs National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

Plusieurs autres mineurs, tous des témoins de ce qui s’était passé lors du massacre du 16 août, se trouvent parmi les personnes arrêtées. Le Daily Maverick s’est concentré sur le cas de Bangile Mpotyie, qui a été arrêté le 14 octobre pour fraude bien qu’aucune accusation officielle n’ait été déposée par Lonmin.

Mptoye avait été arête une première fois le 20 août et accusé d’avoir tiré et tué un policier. Il ne fut libéré qu’au bout de quatre jours de bastonnade et de torture.

« Ce qui est surprenant, c’est que Mptotye affirme que la police l’a emmené tous les jours sur le carreau de la mine de Lonmin et que les bastonnades qu’il a subies avaient eu lieu à Lonmin, » a rapporté le Daily Maverick. « Un avocat travaillant sur différentes affaires de Marikana a dit qu’il était clair qu’il s’agissait là d’une vague de terreur visant à intimider des témoins qui sans cela témoigneraient devant la Commission Farlan. »

L’intimidation à Marikana est l’exemple le plus flagrant d’une vaste campagne impliquant des dizaines de milliers de personnes licenciées ou menacées de licenciement ainsi que des arrestations de masse et de brutalité policière.

Gold Fields, le quatrième plus grand producteur d’or mondial, a aussi menacé de licencier 8.500 grévistes de son site KDC East. Un porte-parole de la société a déclaré, « Les descentes de la police dans les foyers et le désarmement des grévistes ont redonné confiance aux travailleurs pour reprendre le travail. »

Le groupe minier Anglo Americain Platinum Ltd. (Amplalts) a dit qu’il envisageait d’aller de l’avant avec le licenciement de 12.000 mineurs sur son site de Rustenberg mais qu’il discuterait de leur statut avec les syndicats reconnus. Il a fait état d’une présence de seulement 20 pour cent sur le site.

Atlatsa Resources a licencié 3.000 employés à sa mine de platine Bokoni.

Le Mail & Guardian a décrit le 18 octobre comment les grévistes de la mine Kumba Iron Ore de Sishen se sont rassemblés près du tribunal de Kathu en solidarité avec 47 travailleurs arrêtés deux jours auparavant. Les demandes de libérations sous caution des travailleurs ont été rejetées par le tribunal et une deuxième audition a été reportée au 26 octobre en violation d’une loi affirmant que nul ne peut être détenu au-delà de 48 heures sans inculpation.

Les grèves ont affecté Lonmin, Aquarius, Impala, Anglo Americain Platinum, Royal Bafokeng Platinum, Xstrata, AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Gold One, Harmony Gold, Kumba Iron Ore, Petra Diaminds, Forbes, Manhattan Coal et Samancor. En plus des mineurs, 180.000 employés municipaux et conducteurs d’autobus ont débrayé cette semaine. Toyota a interrompu mercredi la production à son usine de Durban à cause d’une grève chez un fournisseur de pièces détachées.

L’atmosphère dans les régions minières a un caractère insurrectionnel alors que les bâtiments de la mine, les briseurs de grève, la police et les postes de police sont attaqués. Des minibus et des taxis transportant des briseurs de grève ont été incendiés.

Les troubles visent tout particulièrement le syndicat National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) qui est considéré comme étant la force de police des entreprises au sein des travailleurs. Le secrétaire général du NUM, Frans Baleni, s’est récemment vanté de ce que son organisation a dépensé un million de rands pour une campagne menée pour mettre un terme aux grèves sauvages. Il a dit que c’était « de l’argent bien dépensé » pour « faire comprendre aux gens le danger auquel ils s’exposent, eux et le pays, » en dénonçant « les gens qui sèment l’anarchie et organisent le sabordage économique. »

« Il suffit tout juste d’une mine pour briser cette grève, » a-t-il ajouté.

Le Mail & Guardian a parlé d’une organisation qui subit « une implosion lente, sûre et violente. » Il souligne que le NUM affirme qu’en tout et pour tout cette année 13 responsables locaux du NUM ont été tués par des grévistes et des centaines de travailleurs d’Amplats se sont rendus ce mois-ci devant les sièges régionaux du NUM à Rustenberg en manifestant et revendiquant la résiliation immédiate de leur adhésion au syndicat.

Chez Lonmin et chez Implats, le NUM a perdu au moins 20.000 membres. Le nombre d’adhérents du NUM chez Implats a actuellement chuté de 70 à 13 pour cent et le nombre réel pourrait même être inférieur parce que les travailleurs ne prennent pas la peine de quitter officiellement le syndicat. Le syndicat est rapidement en train d’arriver à extinction.

Des journalistes du Daily Maverick se sont rendus à la mine de Gold Fields KDC West à Carletonville avant que la grève n’y prenne fin. Les grévistes ont expliqué que quelque 1.500 d’entre eux n’avaient pas repris le travail jeudi parce qu’ils attendaient que le président du NUM, Senzeni Zokwana, soutienne officiellement la proposition faite par la Chambre des Mines, comme il l’avait promis lors de sa visite à la mine mercredi. C’est alors qu’ils ont alors découvert qu’ils avaient été licenciés.

Jeffrey Mphahlele, secrétaire général du syndicat dissident l’Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), est intervenu pour convaincre les travailleurs de reprendre le travail vendredi tout en déchirant leurs cartes du syndicat NUM et rejoignant le nouveau syndicat. Les travailleurs revendiquent actuellement, en plus d’une égalisation des salaires et de l’annulation de tous les licenciements, que les dirigeants du NUM chez KDC West démissionnent. Ils menacent de reprendre leur grève si ces revendications ne sont pas satisfaites.

L’AMCU aurait également joué un rôle déterminant en empêchant que la grève à Marikana ne se transforme en une grève sauvage indéfinie. Selon un autre article paru dans le Daily Maverick, un « représentant de l’AMCU et l’avocat du syndicat ont réussi à convaincre les gens qu’une nouvelle grève n’était pas le moyen le plus judicieux pour atteindre leurs objectifs. »

Le nombre d’adhérents de l’AMCU avoisine un peu plus de 50 pour cent à la fois chez Implats et chez Lonmin, niveau requis pour que l’AMCU soit reconnu comme organe officiel de négociation. Il profite de la haine largement répandue à l’égard du NUM et recourt à la confiance qui lui est témoignée pour rétablir l’ordre. De nombreuses grèves sont toutefois menées par des comités de grève ad-hoc.

Article original, WSWS, paru le 20 octobre 2012

In Malaysian Borneo, home to some of the world’s oldest rainforests and an array of biodiverse plant and animal species, logging will always be a sensitive issue. Controversy has recently surrounded Sabah’s Chief Minister Musa Aman over allegations of embezzling $90 million (RM 279 million) from years of illegal logging operations in the state. The Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), a Swiss-based rainforest advocacy group, has filed a criminal complaint against UBS Bank over ties with Aman through a number of bank accounts he holds with UBS in Hong Kong and Zurich. [1] BMF claims that Michael Chia, an associate of Aman, organized large cash payments from timber companies with logging interests in Sabah to UBS bank accounts in Hong Kong, which were used to send money to Aman’s sons in Australia and a senior official in Sabah. The funds are alleged to be kickbacks from Malaysian timber operators paid to the Chief Minister in return for being allowed to exploit tropical hardwood logging concessions.

Sarawak Report, a London-based whistleblower website, published bank statements and other documents implicating Chief Minister Aman and his brother, Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Anifah Aman, with corruption and money laundering. [2] The report, which cites anonymous sources, leaked documents, and “insider claims,” accuses Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail of blocking further investigation by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and highlights the close family connections between Gani and Aman. Swiss authorities have declared their readiness to freeze the illicit assets of both Musa Aman and Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud (also accused of embezzlement and misconduct) if Malaysia requests legal-assistance in investigating the case. [3] Amid calls for Aman to resign from his post, the Sabah Forestry Department has called allegations of widespread illegal logging in the state “wild and baseless,” adding that the dissemination of such allegations would cause a drop in timber sales and cause Sabah’s forests to lose economic value:

“We have reason to believe the unfounded allegations are politically motivated and not driven by any love for the environment. The allegations are therefore baseless and made with bad intention to discredit the sacrifices made by the state government to achieve good forest governance and sustainable forest management in the shortest time possible, despite the economic, financial and social challenges. Short-term licenses that cause tremendous damage to the environment are being drastically phased out and Sabah’s forest management credibility is at its highest — an open-book philosophy whereby logging and forest management areas are all open to third-party and NGO scrutiny.” [4] [5]

While the Sabah Forestry Department has come to the defense of Aman, it has acknowledged small-scale cases of illegal logging within its forests, which are in no way near the scale and extent as allegedly reported. Press statements issued by the Sabah Forestry Department claim that if allegations by the Bruno Manser Fund and Sarawak Report were indeed accurate, it would imply that at least 1 million cubic meters of timber were illegally felled, representing a land mass of 50,000 acres, or 50 percent of the timber produced from Sabah’s forests in 2011. [6] Given the enormity of the illegal felling allegedly taking place in Sabah, it is bewildering that satellites images have failed to corroborate these claims. One would assume that local environmental groups and NGOs would surely take notice of plunder on such a massive scale. Interestingly enough, Sabah-based NGOs have supported the Sabah Forestry Department in its moves to increase the amount of protected areas in its territory, namely the northern section of the Gunung Rara Forest Reserve to safeguard a secure habitat for Malaysia’s largest orangutan population. Bernama’s August 2012 article “Sabah NGOs Support Protection Forest Move” states:

Founder of LEAP (Land Empowerment Animals People) Cynthia Ong added that “nationally and regionally, Sabah was emerging as a leader in pushing the boundaries in management of natural ecosystem services, and for treating forests as stores of water, carbon and biodiversity rather than just as timber sources.” She added that there are still a number of issues that the NGOs want to address with the Department, “but this is the sort of change that we do want to see.” [7]

Sabah’s Forestry Department argues that since Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) has been introduced, third party auditors who have overseen the issuance of long-term logging licenses since 2010 would have detected such large scale illegal felling. The department points out that Musa Aman led Sabah’s participation in the Great Apes Succeed Project (GRASP) in accordance to UNESCO, which halted logging to protect the natural habitat of several thousand orangutans at the loss of approximately RM 4 billion in potential revenue. Sabah also boasts 1.3 million hectares of Totally Protected Area Reserves (TPAS), accounting for approximately 20 percent of the state’s total landmass. Under the administration of Musa Aman, the issuance of short-term logging licenses have begun being phased out in accordance with a deliberate drop in forest revenue to ensure that ecosystems are given a chance to recuperate from industrial felling. The Press Statement issued by Sabah’s Forestry Department additionally states:

At least 800,000 hectares of Sabah’s forests are partially or fully certified under various internationally recognized systems such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme (MTCS), or the Pan European Forest Scheme (PEFC). This also covers the Sabah Foundation with at least 250,000 hectares of fully certified and 150,000 hectares partially certified forest. Many more forest areas are being earmarked for certification as Sabah has set 2014 as the year for all long term licensed areas to be fully certified. The process of certification means independent third party auditing on the ground. If such an allegation was true, why does Sabah continue to attract the attention of certifying bodies and NGOs, who want to be our partners and to assist us in obtaining verifiable and certifiable good governance? It is not lost to the world that Sabah is the first tropical region in the whole world to have a tract of rainforest certified under the Gold Standard of the FSC in 1997 i.e. Dermakot Forest Reserve. This is a model area not just for Malaysia but the tropical world. [8]

If these statements prove to be accurate, then it would mean Chief Minister Musa Aman has actually overseen an overall increase in areas of Totally Protected Area Reserves (TPAS). Logically, if these allegations are baseless, then the alleged $90 million in embezzled funds have either not originated from the illegal felling of timber, or are simply non-existent. Other confirmed cases of corruption and embezzlement have led to many Malaysians being quite susceptible to disinformation, however it is irresponsible to deny the possibility. Chief Minister Aman would regain public trust by making every effort to be transparent and cooperative with any investigations to prove his innocence, any attempts to deflect inquiry will likely be publically interpreted as suspicious. Indeed, cases of illegal felling of timber do exist and corruption is one of the main drivers of deforestation in Sarawak, which directly threatens the fragile ecosystem and delicate way of life in indigenous tribal communities.

The claims and statistics provided by Sabah’s Forestry Department indeed prove that the state’s leaders recognize their responsibility to maintain the necessary balance between economic development and ecological preservation. In the increasingly globalized world, development has often come at the expense of uprooting indigenous communities with little respect for biodiversity and the spiritual significance of designated land areas held by indigenous tribes. In this respect, Malaysia is not without its shortcomings, but it is important to recognize that state leadership has begun taking steps in the right direction. The impressionability of the Malaysian middle class has become self-evident by the conduct of those seeking a change in government, who are keen to display their willingness to condemn the political establishment in Putrajaya without scrutinizing the (often foreign) sources of their claims.

Upon visiting the website of Swiss-based NGO, the Bruno Manser Fund, one finds it quite curious that the organization has not provided its financial statements or a list of its sponsors, which it states are “private individuals, foundations and selected businesses” – ironic for an organization set on exposing environmental institutions that lack transparency. Upon visiting the website’s news portal, the organization’s status as a “rainforest advocacy group” is most curious, as it clearly endorses non-environmental campaigns such as Ambiga Sreenevasan’s Bersih Movement – in addition to “condemning” the trial of political opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Additionally, the site links to Malaysiakini, the nation’s most pro-opposition political news website, an annual recipient of $100,000 (RM 317,260) from the US-based National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the United States Government. [9] As Malaysia approaches an upcoming general election, political mud slinging as become a component in every issue, with each side attempting to use any opportunity to discredit each other.

Sarawak Report and its affiliate Radio Free Sarawak are dissident media outlets based in the United Kingdom founded by British investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown, and are openly hostile to the Barisan Nasional-led state governments of Sabah & Sarawak. Brown has demonstrated a clear bias by negligently exaggerating various claims, alluding to isolated incidents of timber workers raping tribal women, which Brown outrageously insinuates is the systematic policy of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government. [10] It is some measure of folly that while Clare Rewcastle Brown and her organization focus on discrediting leadership in Malaysia, her own brother-in-law, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, partnered with the United States’ to invade and occupy Iraq at the expense of over a million of civilian lives.

In conclusion, the Malaysian officials accused of laundering money must make all efforts to be transparent and to continue to deliver the kind of environmental policy that respects ecosystems, biodiversity, and indigenous people. Barisan Nasional have long regarded Sabah & Sarawak as their loyal political stronghold, and it would appear that members of the opposition and their affiliates are attempting to use all means to discredit the ruling governments of those states prior to the highly anticipated general elections. While the political component behind allegations of corruption and resource grabbing must not be ignored, authentic corruption does exist and diligent efforts must be taken to investigate accused individuals – if these individuals are innocent, then their exoneration is a preordained conclusion.

Notes

[1] UBS faces criminal complaint over Malaysia ties, Swiss Info, June 12, 2012

[2] Malaysian Foreign Minister Named In Macc Investigation Into Sabah Timber Corruption, Sarawak Report, April 05, 2012

[3] Swiss govt ready to freeze Musa’s accounts, Free Malaysia Today, September 07, 2012

[4] Illegal logging claims ‘exaggerated’, says Sabah as Swiss probe UBS, The Malaysian Insider, September 07, 2012

[5] ‘More forest reserves under Musa rule,’ Free Malaysia Today, September 07, 2012

[6] Illegal felling claims will harm conservation efforts, Malaysiakini, September 07, 2012

[7] Sabah NGOs Support Protection Forest Move, Bernama, August 24, 2012

[8] Illegal felling claims will harm conservation efforts, Malaysiakini, September 07, 2012

[9] Malaysiakini Blog: Donors, 2011

[10] Clare Rewcastle Brown : Malaysians say their country is corrupt, Malaysia Chronicle, March 01, 2011

Nile Bowie is a Kuala Lumpur-based American writer and frequent contributor to Global Research, focusing on  economic and geopolitical issues.

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I think that after the crushing of the Soviet Union, the US forgot about international law, about Security Council resolutions, about all legitimacy regarding their actions. We watched these things in Kosovo, we watched these things in Bosnia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in many other places in the world. I think that now the US demonstrates a unipolar approach to the solution of all hot issues in the world. I think it is a continuation of an American geopolitical game aiming at imposing on the world their will as the last judge for any problems and questions existing in our globe.

Americans look at the Russian and the Chinese position as a confrontation. So, it is confronting not only the Syrian regime, it is confronting international law, it is imposing on Russia and China new rules of the world order, that they prefer to be dominating in the 21st century in relation with the Russian Federation, with the Chinese Republic, with all the world. I think that we are witnessing new efforts of the US administration to impose on the world the new order of a power that can dominate and can give orders to other states.

Vyacheslav Matuzov, the Director of the Friendship and Business Cooperation Society with Arab countries, talks about American geopolitical plans in the Middle East.

These leaks are not unexpected acts from the American administration, because if we take into consideration that the approach to the Syrian crisis for one year and more was according to one conclusion – that behind all the Arab Spring are American geopolitical plans to overthrow unpleasant regimes in the Middle East. I think that it is unexpected only for those who were considering the Middle East revolutions as the internal business of the Arab world.

But in my opinion the United States of America helped the situation in the Arab world during one year and this is why we consider that all that is going on is based on American policy. I think that it is not an unexpected step. America helped opposition leaders with weapons, with instructions, with financing, with political and informational support. They faced the Russian position that suggested a political solution, an international, inter-Syrian dialog, but it was absolutely unclear whether this Russian suggestion for the American side is acceptable.

Now these leaks, that were not accidental, opened the door for an understanding that push puts an end to Kofi Annan’s mission. These Russian efforts to preserve the situation from a military confrontation, to put it into a framework of a political solution, cannot be realized with American rejection.

America rejects Russian efforts for a peaceful solution and prefers military actions. I think that the response to this American approach will be one of increasing military tension in Syria. And I think that Russia should put an end to its efforts to influence Syrian authorities to calm down military confrontation.

Military confrontation is not the initiative of the Syrian government; military confrontation on an increasing basis is a subject of American policy in the Middle East. So, it is not for the Russians, for the Americans to decide the behavior of the Syrian authorities. The Syrian authorities I’m sure will defend themselves and they have all opportunities to withstand this informational, political and now open military pressure on them.

But Mr. Matuzov, how legal could this move be from the point of view of international legislation, because as far as we understand the UN Security Council has never approved any assistance either to the opposition or to government forces?

I think that after the crushing of the Soviet Union, the US forgot about international law, about Security Council resolutions, about all legitimacy regarding their actions. We watched these things in Kosovo, we watched these things in Bosnia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in many other places in the world. I think that now the US demonstrates a unipolar approach to the solution of all hot issues in the world. I think it is a continuation of an American geopolitical game aiming at imposing on the world their will as the last judge for any problems and questions existing in our globe.

Mr. Matuzov, this leak is a kind of unprecedented openness on the part of the US authorities which definitely have confronted staunch opposition from Russia and China in the matter of Syria. You have extensive contacts in the Arab world. So, what could this open position of the US, what implications could it have for the stance of the US in the Middle East?

Americans look at the Russian and the Chinese position as a confrontation. So, it is confronting not only the Syrian regime, it is confronting international law, it is imposing on Russia and China new rules of the world order, that they prefer to be dominating in the 21st century in relation with the Russian Federation, with the Chinese Republic, with all the world. I think that we are witnessing new efforts of the US administration to impose on the world the new order of a power that can dominate and can give orders to other states.

Could it backfire on the US?

I don’t think it will backfire on the US because the US is a great power. It is certainly. And I think that it is absolutely clear that resistance to this policy will continue. And I’m sure that the Russian position is absolutely clearly laid down by our Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who explained that events surrounding Syria are not events that concern only local or regional issues, as Mr. Lavrov said – it is a regulation of the new international law that will be dominating in the 21st century. I absolutely agree with Mr. Lavrov.

Despite areas of difference and rivalries between Moscow and Tehran, ties between the two countries, based on common interests, have developed significantly.

Both Russia and Iran are major energy exporters, they have deeply seated interests in the South Caucasus. They are both firmly opposed to NATO’s missile shield, with a view to preventing the U.S. and E.U. from controlling the energy corridors around the Caspian Sea Basin.

Moscow and Tehran’s bilateral ties are also part of a broader and overlapping alliance involving Armenia, Tajikistan, Belarus, Syria, and Venezuela. Yet, above all things, both republics are also two of Washington’s main geo-strategic targets.

The Eurasian Triple Entente: The Strategic Importance of Iran for Russia and China 

China, the Russian Federation, and Iran are widely considered to be allies and partners. Together the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, and the Islamic Republic of Iran form a strategic barrier directed against U.S. expansionism. The three countries form a “triple alliance,” which constitutes the core of a Eurasian coalition directed against U.S. encroachment into Eurasia and its quest for global hegemony.

While China confronts U.S. encroachment in East Asia and the Pacific, Iran and Russia respectively confront the U.S. led coalition in Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. All three countries are threatened in Central Asia and are wary of the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

Iran can be characterized as a geo-strategic pivot. The geo-political equation in Eurasia very much hinges on the structure of Iran’s political alliances. Were Iran to become an ally of the United States, this would seriously hamper or even destabilize Russia and China. This also pertains to Iran’s ethno-cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, and geo-political links to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Moreover, were the structure of political alliances to shift in favour of the U.S., Iran could also become the greatest conduit for U.S. influence and expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This has to do with the fact that Iran is the gateway to Russia’s soft southern underbelly (or “Near Abroad”) in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In such a scenario, Russia as an energy corridor would be weakened as Washington would “unlock” Iran’s potential as a primary energy corridor for the Caspian Sea Basin, implying de facto U.S. geopolitical control over Iranian pipeline routes. In this regard, part of Russia’s success as an energy transit route has been due to U.S. efforts to weaken Iran by preventing energy from transiting through Iranian territory.

If Iran were to “change camps” and enter the U.S. sphere of influence, China’s economy and national security would also be held hostage on two counts. Chinese energy security would be threatened directly because Iranian energy reserves would no longer be secure and would be subject to U.S. geo-political interests. Additionally, Central Asia could also re-orient its orbit should Washington open a direct and enforced conduit from the open seas via Iran.

Thus, both Russia and China want a strategic alliance with Iran as a means of screening them from the geo-political encroachment of the United States. “Fortress Eurasia” would be left exposed without Iran. This is why neither Russia nor China could ever accept a war against Iran. Should Washington transform Iran into a client then Russia and China would be under threat.

Misreading the Support of China and Russia for U.N. Security Council Sanctions

There is a major misreading of past Russian and Chinese support of U.N. sanctions against Iran. Even though Beijing and Moscow allowed U.N. Security Council sanctions to be passed against their Iranian ally, they did it for strategic reasons, namely with a view to keeping Iran out of Washington’s orbit.

In reality, the United States would much rather co-opt Tehran as a satellite or junior partner than take the unnecessary risk and gamble of an all-out war with the Iranians. What Russian and Chinese support for past sanctions did was to allow for the development of a wider rift between Tehran and Washington. In this regard, realpolitik is at work. As American-Iranian tensions broaden, Iranian relations with Russia and China become closer and Iran becomes more and more entrenched in its relationship with Moscow and Beijing.

Russia and China, however, would never support crippling sanctions or any form of economic embargo that would threaten Iranian national security. This is why both China and Russia have refused to be coerced by Washington into joining its new 2012 unilateral sanctions. The Russians have also warned the European Union to stop being Washington’s pawns, because they are hurting themselves by playing along with the schemes of the United States. In this regard Russia commented on the impractical and virtually unworkable E.U. plans for an oil embargo against Iran. Tehran has also made similar warnings and has dismissed the E.U. oil embargo as a psychological tactic that is bound to fail.

 
Above photo: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Dmitry A. Medvedev of Russia during a bilateral meeting in Dushabe, Tajikistan.
The bilateral Iranian-Russian meeting was held on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on August 28, 2008.
Second above photo: Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov together in Moscow discussing Russia’s step-by-step nuclear proposal.

Russo-Iranian Security Cooperation and Strategic Coordination

In August 2011, the head of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Secretary-General Saaed (Said) Jalili, and the head of the National Security Council of the Russian Federation, Secretary Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev met in Tehran to discuss the Iranian nuclear energy program as well as bilateral cooperation. Russia wanted to help Iran rebuff the new wave of accusations by Washington directed against Iran. Soon after Patrushev and his Russian team arrived in Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, flew to Moscow.

Both Jalili and Patrushev met again in September 2011, but this time in Russia. Jalili went to Moscow first and then crossed the Urals to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

The Iran-Russia Yekaterinburg meeting took place on the sidelines of an international security summit. Moreover, at this venue, it was announced that the highest bodies of national security in Moscow and Tehran would henceforth coordinate by holding regular meetings. A protocol between the two countries was was signed at Yekaterinburg.

During this important gathering, both Jalili and Patrushev held meetings with their Chinese counterpart, Meng Jianzhu. As a result of these meetings, a similar process of bilateral consultation between the national security councils of Iran and China was established. Moreover, the parties also discussed the formation of a supranational security council within the Shanghai Cooperation Council to confront threats directed against Beijing, Tehran, Moscow and their Eurasian allies.

Also in September 2011, Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian envoy to NATO, announced that he would be visiting Tehran in the near future to discuss the NATO missile shield project, which both the Moscow and Tehran oppose.

Reports claiming that Russia, Iran, and China were planning on creating a joint missile shield started to surface. Rogozin, who had warned in August 2011 that Syria and Yemen would be attacked as “stepping stones” in the broader confrontation directed against Tehran, responded by publicly refuting the reports pertaining to the establishment of a joint Sino-Russo-Iranian missile shield project.

The following month, in October 2011, Russia and Iran announced that they would be expanding ties in all fields. Soon after, in November 2011, Iran and Russia signed a strategic cooperation and partnership agreement between their highest security bodies covering economics, politics, security, and intelligence. This was a long anticipated document on which both Russia and Iran had been working on. The agreement was signed in Moscow by the Deputy Secretary-General of the Supreme Security Council of Iran, Ali Bagheri (Baqeri), and the Under-Secretary of the National Security Council of Russia, Yevgeny Lukyanov.

In November 2011, the head of the Committee for International Affairs in the Russian Duma, Konstantin Kosachev, also announced that Russia must do everything it can to prevent an attack on neighbouring Iran. At the end of November 2011 it was announced that Dmitry Rogozin would definitely visit both Tehran and Beijing in 2012, together with a team of Russian officials to hold strategic discussions on collective strategies against common threats.

 
Above photo and second above photo: Secretary-General Jalili and Secretary Patrushev in Tehran, Iran holding Iranian-Russian national security talks during August 2011.

 
Above photo: Deputy Secretary-General Ali Bagheri at a press conference in Moscow, Russia after signing a security pact with Russian officials.
Second above photo: Konstantin Kosachev, the Chairperson of the Committee for International Affairs in the Russian Duma.

Russian National Security and Iranian National Security are Attached

On January 12, 2012, Nikolai Patrushev told Interfax he feared that a major war was imminent and that Tel Aviv was pushing the U.S. to attack Iran. He dismissed the claims that Iran was secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons and said that for years the world had continuously heard that Iran would have an atomic bomb by next week ad nauseum. His comments were followed by a dire warning from Dmitry Rogozin.

On January 13, 2012, Rogozin, who had been appointed deputy prime minister, declared that any attempted military intervention against Iran would be a threat to Russia’s national security. In other words, an attack on Tehran is an attack on Moscow. In 2007, Vladimir Putin essentially mentioned the same thing when he was in Tehran for a Caspian Sea summit, which resulted in George W. Bush Jr. warning that World War III could erupt over Iran. Rogozin’s statement is merely a declaration of what has been the position of Russia all along: should Iran fall, Russia would be in danger.

Iran is a target of U.S. hostility not just for its vast energy reserves and natural resources, but because of major geo-strategic considerations that make it a strategic springboard against Russia and China. The roads to Moscow and Beijing also go through Tehran, just as the road to Tehran goes through Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut. Nor does the U.S. want to merely control Iranian oil and natural gas for consumption or economic reasons. Washington wants to put a muzzle around China by controlling Chinese energy security and wants Iranian energy exports to be traded in U.S. dollars to insure the continued use of the U.S. dollar in international transactions.

Moreover, Iran has been making agreements with several trade partners, including China and India, whereby business transactions will not be conducted in euros or U.S. dollars. In January 2012, both Russia and Iran replaced the U.S. dollar with their national currencies, respectively the Russian rouble and the Iranian rial, in their bilateral trade. This was an economic and financial blow to the United States.

Left photo: Vladimir V. Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holding talks in Tehran, Iran on the sidelines of a summit of Caspian Sea nations in October 2007.
Right photo: Dmitry O. Rogozin, the departing representative of Russia at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Syria and the National Security Concerns of Iran and Russia

Russia and China with Iran are all staunchly supporting Syria. The diplomatic and economic siege against Syria is tied to the geo-political stakes to control Eurasia. The instability in Syria is tied to the objective of combating Iran and ultimately turning it into a U.S. partner against Russia and China.

The cancelled or delayed deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Israel for “Austere Challenge 2012” was tied to ratcheting up the pressure against Syria. On the basis of a Voice of Russia report, segments of the Russian media erroneously reported that “Austere Challenge 2012” was going to be held in the Persian Gulf, which was mistakenly picked up by news outlets in other parts of the world. This helped highlight the Iranian link at the expense of the Syrian and Lebanese links. The deployment of U.S. troops was aimed predominately at Syria as a means of isolating and combating Iran. The “cancelled” or “delayed” Israeli-U.S. missile exercises most probably envisaged preparations for missile and rocket attacks not only from Iran, but also from Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories.

Aside from its naval ports in Syria, Russia does not want to see Syria used to re-route the energy corridors in the Caspian Basin and the Mediterranean Basin. If Syria were to fall, these routes would be re-synchronized to reflect a new geo-political reality. At the expense of Iran, energy from the Persian Gulf could also be re-routed to the Mediterranean through both Lebanon and Syria.

 
First photo above: Syrian Defence Minister Dawoud (David) Rajha visiting the docked Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in the Syrian port of Tartus on January 8, 2012. Above photo: Syrian allies, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, join President Bashar Al-Assad for a summit in Damascus, Syria on February 25, 2010.

 
Above photo: The Alvand, one of the two Iranian warships that visited the Syrian port of Lattakia during February 2011.
 Second above  photo: Rear-Admirial Habibollah Sayyari holding a press conference on February 28, 2001 at the Iranian Embassy in Syria about the Iranian naval presence off Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

This article was originally published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on January 21, 2012.

Related Articles by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Obama’s Secret Letter to Tehran: Is the War against Iran On Hold? “The Road to Tehran Goes through Damascus”
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2012-01-20

To Tehran, Obama’s gestures in his Hormuz letter are meaningless, because his actions have always contradicted his words.

The Geo-Politics of the Strait of Hormuz: Could the U.S. Navy be defeated by Iran in the Persian Gulf?
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2012-01-08

The Pentagon’s own war simulations show that a war in the Persian Gulf with Iran would spell disaster for the U.S. Navy.

The American-Iranian Cold War in the Middle East and the Threat of A Broader War
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2012-01-01

A Cold War between Tehran and Washington has been raging across the Middle East from Lebanon to Iraq and the Persian Gulf with the use of spies, drones, assassinations, and perception campaigns.

The March to War: Iran and the Strategic Encirclement of Syria and Lebanon
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-12-24

Since 2001, Washington and NATO have started the process of cordoning off Lebanon and Syria. This initiative was supported by Israel with a view to weakening Syria and curtailing Iranian power and influence in the Middle East.

America’s Next War Theater: Syria and Lebanon?
Washington’s War against the Resistance Bloc
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-06-10

Washington has announced that it has the right to violate the national boundaries of countries which harbor terrorists as well as send troops to these countries…

The Secret Wars of the Saudi-Israeli Alliance
– by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-05-28

This secret Israeli-Saudi alliance acts to destabilize Southwest Asia and North Africa on behalf of the Pentagon and NATO.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Sociologist and award-winning author. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He specializes on the Middle East and Central Asia. He has been a contributor and guest discussing the broader Middle East on numerous international programs and networks such as Al Jazeera, Press TV and Russia Today. His writings have been published in more than ten languages. He also writes for the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow.

A chronically ill Canadian man who has endured torture at the hands of the Western-backed Bahraini regime is facing a five-year jail sentence that could put his life at risk.

For the past eight months, Naser Al Raas (28), from Ottawa, has been subjected to a nightmarish  ordeal: illegally detained for weeks, tortured, prosecuted by a military court, charged with offences on the basis of forced confession, denied legal counsel, and finally sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for offences he says he did not commit. On Monday, 21 November, he will hear the verdict of his appeal for release.

Al Raas suffers from a chronic heart and lung condition known as pulmonary embolism for which he underwent surgery in Ottawa when he was a teenager. Because of his detention in Bahrain, he has not been able to receive the medication that he relies on to stabilise his condition. Family and friends fear that if he is imprisoned his life will be put at serious risk.

Ottawa Heart Institute Professor Fraser Rubens, who treated Al Raas in 2002, has given his support to those calling for clemency. Prof Rubens has written publicly to say that incarceration will place Al Raas’ life in jeopardy. “I am also concerned that he will be inordinately at risk of hemorrhage should he suffer any injury,” added the surgeon.

What makes the case all the more harrowing is that the Canadian government has maintained a public silence throughout. The Ottawa government is fully aware of Al Raas’ predicament. Its consul in Saudi Arabia, Michael Erdman, has traveled to the Persian Gulf kingdom to meet privately with family relatives. Members of the public from all over the world have responded to the plight of Al Raas, highlighted by Amnesty International, among others, with letters to Canadian foreign minister Diane Oblonczy urging her government to intervene.

Yet in the face of gross violations of Al Raas’ human rights, the Canadian government has so far remained remarkably muted. A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Ottawa claimed that the government was constrained from intervening in the legal affairs of another state. Meanwhile, the office of Diane Oblonczy claims that it has been advised that the best approach is “quiet diplomacy”.

Such a stance reeks of hypocrisy. The Canadian government emerged as a vehement and active supporter of NATO military intervention in Libya supposedly in support of human rights. It is also prominent among the Western powers slapping sanctions on Syria – again supposedly out of concern for human rights.

But in the case of Naser Al Raas, the otherwise muscular Harper government appears to have turned into a cowering pedant of jurisprudence.

A mere glance at Al Raas’ case beckons immediate government assistance. The IT specialist was first detained on 20 March as he was leaving Bahrain following a visit to his family and fiancée in the Gulf state. Al Raas happened to travel to the country just when a pro-democracy uprising against the Western-backed Al Khalifa Sunni monarchy sparked off in February. On 15 March, a Saudi-led invasion force began a sweeping crackdown against the mainly Shia protests.  Dozens of unarmed protesters were killed by state forces, and hundreds have been detained and systematically tortured.

Al Raas, who was traveling on a Canadian passport, was hauled into prison by Bahraini police just as he was about to board his flight at Bahrain International Airport. For one month, his family did not know of his whereabouts during which time he was severely tortured. He says he was deprived of sleep, subjected to mock executions, electrocuted and whipped all over his body with rubber hoses. 

Finally, he was forced to sign a written confession to a range of alleged crimes, including attempted kidnap of a police officer. He was cleared of that felony in October, but convicted on lesser charges of attending illegal political rallies and spreading false information about the government, and sentenced to five years in jail.

Speaking just hours before his forthcoming appeal, Al Raas told Gobal Research: “I feel abandoned by my government. I have done nothing wrong yet I have been tortured and now face prison. I am terrified that I will be tortured again.”

Al Raas said he wrote recently to Diane Ablonczy, Canada’s foreign minister, pleading for last-minute intervention on his behalf. In the letter, he writes: “My situation is very grave and I need the Canadian government, my government, to stand up for my rights and make it clear to the government of Bahrain that the violations must come to an end… I need help. I need political action. I need the [Canadian] government to be an advocate for my rights. And I need that now. I need to know that my government is on my side, not just some neutral observer on the sidelines… Speak up before I am once against tortured.”

To date, the Canadian government remains silent [1].

The seeming contradiction in Canadian foreign policy – strident intervention in Libya/Syria while meek non-intervention in Bahrain – can be easily explained. The former represent regimes that Canada and its Western allies want to crush for geopolitical reasons; whereas Bahrain’s regime is a loyal Western ally. Along with other Gulf dictatorships Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain has turned out to lend important Arab support, and thus political cover, for Western intervention in the region. The rhetorical concern from Western powers for human rights and international law in one case but not in another equally deserving case can therefore be seen for what it is: a cynical, disingenuous pretext for self-serving intervention that has got nothing to do with human rights.

Another possible factor previously reported by Global Research is the recent conclusion of a three-year bilateral trade deal between Canada and Bahrain [2].

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent

[email protected]

Notes

[1] Members of the public are urged by Amnesty International and family supporters of Naser Al Raas to write to Canada’s foreign minister Diane Ablonczy calling on the Canadian government to demand his immediate release by the Bahraini regime. Write to [email protected]

[2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25666

Les premières disparitions forcées se produisent à la fin des années 70’ en Colombie, dirigées contre des militants reconnus de gauche (syndicalistes, étudiants, intellectuels, entre autres), des partis politiques d’opposition comme le Parti Communiste, ou des membres d’organisations insurgées capturés en dehors des combats. À cette époque, on en sait très peu sur ce genre de crime, il n’est pas considéré comme un acte criminel dans le pays. Les autorités judiciaires et politiques le justifient en signalant simplement qu’il s’agit de personnes disparues ou qui ont décidé d’intégrer des groupes insurgés. Depuis, des informations concernant les victimes ont été recueillies, la plupart du temps par des organisations de défense des droits humains qui ont enregistré de nombreux cas dans leurs bases de données, mais ceux-ci restent dans la plus totale impunité. 

Cette pratique de la disparition forcée coïncide avec la mise en circulation de manuels d’opération militaire définis par le décret 1 537 de 1974, connu sous le nom de Stratégie de Défense et Sécurité Nationale, et le décret 1 923 de 1978 qui élargit les compétences de la force publique au jugement des civils et octroie des pouvoirs judiciaires à la police. Dans ces deux décrets, la population civile est conçue comme objectif de la lutte contre insurrectionnelle puisque c’est en elle que « se fonde l’existence de groupes subversifs » ; c’est pourquoi elle est la cible d’opérations d’intelligence, de guerre psychologique et de « défense » contenues dans les manuels de référence. La classification de la population en listes noires, grises et blanches est une stratégie bien connue à laquelle on applique différentes modalités d’agression, parmi lesquelles la disparition forcée. C’est également une époque de renforcement de la stratégie paramilitaire avec l’apparition du MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores – Mort aux Ravisseurs), dans le Magdalena Medio, et qui s’étendra plus tard à l’ensemble du pays.

Dans les années 80’, ce crime se généralise et devient permanent. Les groupes paramilitaires, avec la complicité des forces armées, reprennent cette pratique comme modalité d’agression et d’exercice de la terreur contre les paysans qu’ils capturent, torturent et assassinent avant de les faire disparaître. Ils s’approprient ainsi leurs terres et leurs biens, ou encore mettent en œuvre des projets stratégiques d’infrastructure ou d’exploitation des ressources naturelles. Dans les années 90’, la disparition forcée devient le crime de lèse humanité le plus pratiqué par les groupes paramilitaires, elle répond alors à trois objectifs principaux : 

– exterminer et faire disparaître les dirigeants sociaux et politiques ;

– réaliser des actions d’extermination de secteurs de la population considérés indésirables, comme les prostituées, les toxicomanes, les LGBT et les indigents ;

– imposer une forme de discipline et de contrôle social de populations entières à qui s’applique cette modalité, afin de créer un état de terreur et en finir avec toute intention de dénoncer ou de s’opposer à la stratégie paramilitaire.

De nombreuses victimes de disparition forcée terminèrent dans des fosses clandestines, réduites en cendres dans des crematoriums artisanaux construits sur des propriétés d’éleveurs de bétail, de paramilitaires ou de narcotrafiquants, ou dans les grands fleuves du pays, sans qu’on ait pu retrouver leur trace jusqu’à nos jours. Cette réalité, ajoutée à la peur de dénoncer une disparition forcée dans une zone contrôlée par ceux qui l’ont perpétrée et au manque de confiance dans les institutions étatiques ne permet pas d’avoir une idée précise du nombre total de victimes. Des témoignages de parents sont encore recueillis car ce n’est qu’aujourd’hui qu’ils osent dénoncer ces crimes, mais de nombreux cas restent à documenter. 

C’est seulement depuis 2000 et la loi 589 que la disparition forcée est reconnue comme un délit, qu’elle est considérée comme tel par l’institution judiciaire. Actuellement, la Colombie souscrit à la majorité des instruments internationaux sur la question et a développé une législation et des mécanismes spéciaux. Pourtant, la détention et la disparition forcée de personnes continuent d’être systématiques, permanentes et généralisées, comme le signalent les rapports de l’ONU, les organismes de défense des droits humains et même les instances officielles. Suite à une importante campagne menée par le Mouvement National des Victimes des Crimes d’État, le gouvernement a consenti à présenter un projet de loi qui permette de ratifier pleinement la Convention internationale des Nations Unies pour la protection de toutes les personnes contre la disparition forcée. 

Combien de victimes de disparition forcée en Colombie ? 

Personne ne peut apporter de réponse précise à cette question. La non reconnaissance de ce délit pendant des années, le fait qu’il apparaisse comme un simple enlèvement ou un homicide et, par conséquent, le manque de rapports officiels, la peur de dénoncer de la part des parents des victimes, la persécution contre les organisations de victimes qui s’occupent de mener des recherches et la volonté constante du gouvernement d’occulter les chiffres, font qu’il est impossible d’avoir des données précises sur la magnitude de ce crime contre l’humanité. 

Jusqu’à mi 2009, le Bureau du Procureur Général de la Nation avait enregistré 25 000 victimes et recevait encore des plaintes. La Commission Nationale de Recherche de Personnes Disparues quant à elle a enregistré 35 086 cas ; elle a par ailleurs déclaré que les cas de disparition forcée ont augmenté dramatiquement entre le 1er février 2007 et le 21 octobre 2008. Durant cette période, 7 763 cas ont été enregistrés, dont 3 090 en 2008. Les registres de médecine légale et sciences légistes disposent de chiffres encore plus élevés. De leur côté, les organismes de défense des droits humains, parmi lesquels le Mouvement National des Victimes des Crimes d’État, affirment que depuis 1977, et si on prend en compte les quatre dernières années, les chiffres pourraient dépasser les 50 000 victimes. Organismes gouvernementaux et non gouvernementaux coïncident sur le fait que le nombre de victimes continue d’augmenter. Ces chiffres intègrent la documentation des cas d’exécutions extrajudiciaires au cours de la période de Sécurité Démocratique, crime également connu sous le nom de « faux positifs » en Colombie. Le nombre de cas documentés s’élève à 3 083 (entre juin 2002 et décembre 2009), parmi lesquels un pourcentage élevé ont débuté par des disparitions forcées. 

Un exemple peut illustrer la magnitude de l’horreur. L’Institut National de Médecine Légale signale qu’il a reçu dans la ville de Medellin – entre le 1er mars et le 7 avril 2010 – un rapport mentionnant 109 cas de disparitions forcées. Six personnes ont été retrouvées mortes et 103 sont encore portées disparues, dont 34 femmes. Enfin, la disparition forcée continue d’être une réalité douloureuse et derrière chaque cas, une personne, un projet de vie, une famille et très souvent un collectif, sont gravement affectés.

Prendre part aux recherches des victimes de disparition forcée. 

Le MOVICE est également préoccupé par la faible participation de familles aux processus de recherche disparus (seules 448 familles ont pu y assister sur plus de 4 000 exhumations réalisées). Dans de nombreux cas, les parents des victimes sont uniquement perçus comme des plaignants, une source d’informations, objet de la preuve d’ADN, mais pas comme des sujets de droit. Mais d’autres raisons expliquent également leur faible participation :

 – méconnaissance de la part des instances officielles de l’identité des personnes qu’elles recherchent, manque d’investigation préliminaire rigoureuse et efficace. Les organismes ne savent pas qui contacter ni vers où orienter leurs investigations ;

– manque d’information adéquate et compréhensible de la part des familles sur leur droit à participer ;

 – refus de Bureau du Procureur de la présence des parents des victimes et de leurs accompagnateurs lors des exhumations, par manque de sécurité ; argument contradictoire puisque le gouvernement nie l’existence d’un conflit armé, nie le contrôle exercé par les paramilitaires sur certains territoires et met l’accent sur les avancées en matière de sécurité grâce à la Politique de Sécurité Démocratique ;

– crainte de la part des fonctionnaires de l’impact émotionnel sur les parents des victimes et des communautés, incapacité à gérer ces situations sans l’appui de professionnels, particulièrement lors des exhumations et des identifications ;

– manque de moyens pour que les parents des victimes puissent réaliser un suivi des processus judiciaire et d’investigation ;

– Annonces des exhumations faîtes au dernier moment. 

« Nous cherchons les êtres qui nous sont chers.

Nous ne cherchons pas des tombes et des os ». 

Telle est la réaction des familles de victimes quand elles voient défiler froidement les statistiques des organismes judiciaires sur le succès des exhumations réalisées par le Programme National d’Identification des Victimes non identifiées et de Recherche de Personnes Disparues, du Bureau du Procureur Général de la Nation. Ce programme a été présenté devant la communauté internationale comme étant à la base du succès de la loi 975 de 2005 (connue sous le nom de Loi de Justice et Paix). Pourtant, en se penchant sur les statistiques, s’il est vrai que le Bureau du Procureur a permis quelques avancées, il est encore bien loin d’assurer l’accès au droit à la vérité et à la justice. Plus de 90% des victimes restent aujourd’hui disparues et la plupart affaires n’ont pas pu être résolues; les paramilitaires n’ont reconnu leurs crimes que de manière globale et l’État n’assume pas sa responsabilité dans ce crime de lèse humanité.

Le règne de l’impunité rend ces délits bien relatifs. Aujourd’hui encore, de nouveaux cas de disparitions forcées passent aux mains de la justice pénale militaire comme s’il ne s’agissait que de cas d’obéissance due. Des combattants ayant été exhumés figurent dans les statistiques afin de gonfler les résultats des recherches de personnes disparues. D’un point de vue psychosocial, cette re-victimisation des familles ôte tout caractère réparateur aux processus de recherche, d’exhumation, d’identification et d’une remise des corps qui se fasse dans le respect de la dignité.

Souvenons-nous qu’il est question de plus de 50 000 victimes de disparition forcée au cours des trente dernières années. Le Bureau du Procureur signale que jusqu’au 28 février 2010, 2 488 fosse ont été retrouvées, contenant 3 017 corps. Mais l’identification et la remise des restes et des corps sont encore très lentes : 910 corps ont été pleinement identifiés, parmi lesquels 796 ont été remis à leur famille. 

Un événement à vite oublier 

Le 15 octobre 2009, dans les installations du Corps Technique d’Investigation (CTI) de Medellin, organisme lié au Bureau du Procureur Général de la Nation, 23 corps de victimes de disparition forcée ont été remis par l’Unité de Justice et Paix. Les familles et la presse furent invitées à participer à l’événement. Les restes se trouvaient dans de petites caisses en bois scellées que les parents n’ont jamais pu ouvrir. Derrière les caisses se trouvaient tous les fonctionnaires de l’Unité de Justice et Paix, du CTI, de la mairie, entre autres. Les parents des victimes quant à eux furent installés sur des chaises, loin des restes des leurs proches ; on leur demanda d’être présent à cette cérémonie pendant laquelle les discours des fonctionnaires représentaient le véritable enjeu vis-à-vis de la presse qui se fit l’écho des bons résultats obtenus par le programme d’exhumation et d’identification des cadavres. 

Ce jour-là, Yoni Rivera était présent avec ses dix frères pour recevoir les restes de leur père Sebastian Enrique Rivas Valeta et de leur frère Wilson Rivas Lopez, tous deux torturés, disparus et assassinés le 20 juillet 1996 dans la commune de Turbo par des paramilitaires qui opéraient dans la région. Leu mère n’a pu assister à l’événement, Rosiris de Carmen Lopez a été cruellement assassinée en 1997 pour avoir dénoncé les faits. Peu importait alors que Rosiris soit enceinte et que ses enfants soient accrochés à ses mollets au moment du meurtre, les assassins n’eurent aucune compassion : elle fut dépecée, étripée, son fœtus arraché et son corps éparpillé pour que ses enfants voient tout. Yoni avait douze ans. Il a eu le courage, avec ses frères, de récupérer les morceaux du corps de leur mère. Le jour de la remise des restes, les enfants se sont retrouvés, car ils vivent maintenant dispersés aux quatre coins du département d’Antioquia, mais leur histoire n’a pas intéressé grand monde, ils n’étaient pas les héros du jour. Le Mouvement National des Victimes des Crimes d’État les a réunis pour une célébration eucharistique intime où pour la première fois, ils ont pu parler de ce qu’ils sentaient. Ils ont pu s’approcher des « cercueils » tranquillement, les toucher et exprimer leurs peurs. Le plus âgé se demanda « Ce sont les corps de notre père et de notre frère ? ». Tout ce qu’ils savent à ce jour, c’est qu’on leur a fait une prise de sang pour réaliser un prélèvement d’ADN auquel ils n’ont pas compris grand chose, ils n’ont pas assisté à l’exhumation. « Ce fut comme une remise de diplôme de fin d’études », ont déclaré certains…

 
Version française : Christophe Kenderian

http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/

[email protected]  

We’re in a class war.

It’s the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us. We’re losing.

In 1962 the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it’s 190 times as much. Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher? No.

From 1950 to 1965, median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000 a year. That’s close to 4 percent a year, close to 60 percent over 15 years. That’s a rising tide.

In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That’s when things started to slow down for average people. By the mid-’70s the rise of the middle class stalled. From 1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That’s not quite 16 percent over 25 years, less than six-tenths of 1 percent per year.

Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at $52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined. Keep in mind that this is median family income. In the ’50s and ’60s, family income was usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from at least two people.

At the same time, income for the richest soared. In 1979 the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of all U.S. income. Now they earn 24 percent of all U.S. income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one-fourth of all the income in the country.

Then came the crashes of 2001 and 2008 and the recessions that followed.

The crash hasn’t changed anything. Things have become worse.

From 1990 to 2005, adjusted for inflation — the minimum wage is down 9 percent, production workers’ pay is up only over 15 years 4.3 percent.

At the same time, the rich get richer:

Corporate profits are up 106.7 percent. The S&P 500 is still up 141.4 percent since 1990. CEO compensation is up 282 percent. Call it transfer of wealth. Or call it class warfare.

What’s wrong with the rich getting richer?

Slate’s Timothy Noah, in “The United States of Inequality,” wrote, “Income distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador.”

Take a look at that list.

Countries with wide income inequality don’t lead the world in research, technology, industry, and innovation. They’re unstable. They have large underclasses. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.

In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the judiciary. They become self perpetuating.

If current trends continue, “The United States by 2043 will have the same income inequality as Mexico.” (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now.)

Countries with high levels of income inequality are third-world countries.

Here’s how regular people can deal with cultures of high inequality. The primary, and best, weapon is a progressive tax structure. As people move up the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. Unearned income –from dividends and capital gains – is taxed at least as high as earned income (money that people actually work for.) Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans. Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with equal precision, the increase in inequality. We had a chance to slow the process by letting the last round, the Bush tax cuts, expire. We’ve lost that round.

People can become educated and move on up.

Back in the ’60s, when I was growing up, New York City had free universities. The burgeoning SUNY system charged $400 tuition a semester. The minimum Regents scholarship was $400 a semester. If a student didn’t get one, he or she could easily earn enough to pay tuition with a summer job. The same held true for most state university systems across the country.

Today, students have to borrow. The median student debt for an undergraduate degree – forget about a doctorate, law school, and med school – is $20,000. The first, and truest, lesson you learn when you go to college is how to be in service to the banks.

We’ve lost that battle.

What does it mean?

“Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

“Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.”

(Understanding Mobility in America, April 26, 2006, Tom Hertz, American University.)

Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote. 

Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they’re getting better at it. According to Business Week, (“How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay,” 10/28/2002),”over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups.”

In the 1940s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it’s down to just 7.2 percent. Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 37 percent.

If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they’re the police and fireman. The stories will tell you their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states; that it’s unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools – without unions – are the new favorite charity for billionaires.     

When a country is, or becomes, a third-world country, the other thing people can do is run. To some place richer and freer. Like America.

But when America becomes Mexico, where you gonna run to?

Larry Beinhart is the author of “Wag the Dog,” “The Librarian,” and “Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin.” His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to [email protected].

Beirut, Lebanon –Two young girls stood, as if frozen, starting below them at an ever vibrant Beirut. Their balcony, like the rest of their house and most of their refugee camp was of an indistinct color. It was dirty, as were their clothes. They, on the other hand, looked beautiful and bright, although their future didn’t.

Here in Bourj el-Barajneh, one of a dozen Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, time seems to have stood still for years. Generation after generation, children grow up in the same desperate reality, punished for crimes they did not commit, injured by a history not of their making. They stand on dirty balconies, cracked beyond repair, watching Beirut and the world go by.

The city is abuzz with life, politics, rumors, anticipation and intrigue. It remains perpetually divided between many worlds and contradictions, in a way that seems almost impossible to reconcile or bridge.

Bourj el-Barajneh has grown into a ‘municipality’ since its original inception as a ‘temporary’ accommodation for the Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and land in Palestine between 1947 and 1948. The Palestinian physical share of the camp has largely remained the same, although the numbers have significantly grown. Influxes of Shia, Sunni, and more recently Iraqis have moved in and around the vicinity of the camp. Little was put in place to accommodate the natural growth, or to regulate the latter population influxes. Some self-servingly argued that allowing Palestinian refugees to improve their conditions would disconnect them from their homeland and sense of belonging. Therefore, suffer they must, with little work opportunity, no civil rights, and no cement or building material to repair their pitiful existence.

A state of arrested development has defined this particular refugee camp and Lebanon’s relationship with refugees. Those opposed to the refugee presence fear that incorporating Palestinians into Lebanese society might be the prelude to incorporating them into the country’s political landscape. This might risk further complicating an already messy demography. While Christian sects in Lebanon are the most fearful, others are also anxious.

In 1982, a constant state of siege received a boost when the Israeli army, along with their allies among Christian Phalangists, laid a brutal and deadly siege around Bourj el-Barajneh. Palestinians and Lebanese resisted, but lightly armed refugees could only go so far in withstanding the might of regional superpowers armed by a world superpower. The camp eventually collapsed, as many of its buildings fell. Whatever remained standing was dotted with holes and painful memories.

Another siege followed, and lasted for almost exactly three years, between 1984 and 1987. The perpetrator this time was the Amal militia. This incident also left its own evidence of ailing walls and cracked windows. With rebuilding made illegal by law, and very little by way of funds, the dust of war was the only fresh coat of paint the camp could possible hope for.

But they are many in Lebanon who still want to see improvement – whether slight or significant to the lives of Palestinian refugees, whether in Bourj el-Barajneh or elsewhere. Hezbollah has, till now, guarded various refugee camps against many threats. Palestinians here gratefully acknowledge that without Hezbollah serving as a bulwark against the many looming dangers, the plight of the refugees would have been much worse. But Hezbollah, a Shia group, can also be hostage to Lebanon’s abhorring sectarian divisions, demography and political forces. Palestinians here are counting on Hezbollah to step up its support. They need the group to challenge the rejectionist forces in the Lebanese parliament, and demand civil rights for Palestinian refugees. Much is being debated at this time, and there are many backdoor discussions over details, semantics, and more.

Meanwhile, the two Palestinian girls continue to stand on the discolored balcony. They are sisters of about eight and ten years old. They were born after the two terrible sieges and much of the war that tormented their family for generations. But they were here to witness the 2006 war. Their refugee camp is a short distance from the Dahiya, the predominantly Shia neighborhood where Hezbollah is headquartered. Tough men and women withstood the unimaginable firepower directed at that tiny stretch of land, as in many other parts of Lebanon. Now, most of Dahiya has been rebuilt, with final touches being laid to edifices of concrete that will soon – if another war doesn’t erupt – become hospitals, schools, offices and subsidised residential areas for the poor.

But the same is not true for Bourj el-Barajneh. The camp continues to carry the physical and philological scars of past wars, each generation passing them on to the next. A paradigm shift here is only possible when the balance of power significantly shifts in favor of one party or another. Aside from admiring its stiff resistance against Israel, Palestinians in Lebanon place so much hope in Hezbollah, believing it will be the party that finally tips the balance of power in favor of justice for the refugees.

Bourj el-Barajneh roughly translates into ‘Tower of Towers’. And in many ways it is. It has stood the test of time and bombs. Its people have surpassed the limits of human endurance and determination in a way that should be scientifically recorded. In some areas it towers over Beirut, from the Haret Hreik direction. Illegal construction and limited space for horizontal expansion forced the refugees to build in some parts in a vertical fashion, creating a Kafkian-like reality, true but surreal.

And the refugees too are teetering between the lines of an almost pseudo-reality. They find themselves held hostage in time and space, in a growing city, a hectically changing world, frozen in time and increasingly lowered expectations.

The two girls continued to stare, clearly without a specific target in mind, while people below them walked on, unhindered by their confusion. I too walked away. For a minute I hoped for a sign, anything that could assure me that there was some meaning behind all this strangeness, all this injustice. I am sure there is, but today, I could find none.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)  is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.