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By Trévon Austin

The World Inequality Report 2022, released by the global research initiative World Inequality Lab, found that the COVID-19 pandemic has widened the financial gap between the rich and poor to a degree not seen since the rosy days of world imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

The world’s billionaires enjoyed the steepest increase in their share of wealth last year since the World Inequality Lab began keeping records in 1995, according to the study released Tuesday. Billionaires saw their net worth grow by more than $3.6 trillion in 2020 alone, increasing their share of global wealth to 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, the pandemic has pushed approximately 100 million people into extreme poverty, boosting the global total to 711 million in 2021.

“Global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century,” the report said. “Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between western countries and their colonies.”

The report showed the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population takes 52 percent of global income, compared to the 8 percent share of the poorest half. On average, an individual in the top decile earns $122,100 (€87,200) per year, while a person from the poorest half of global earners makes $3,920 (€2,800) a year.

Global wealth inequality is even more pronounced than income inequality. The poorest half of the world’s population only possess 2 percent of the total wealth. In contrast, the wealthiest 10 percent own 76 percent of all wealth, with $771,300 (€550,900) on average.

The ultra-rich have siphoned a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the last few decades. The top 1 percent took 38 percent of all additional wealth generated since 1995, whereas the bottom 50 percent have only captured 2 percent of it. The wealth of the richest individuals has grown between 6 to 9 percent per year since the mid-1990s, compared to the global 3.2 percent average.

Inequality levels vary across the regions. In Europe, the top decile takes about 36 percent of income share, while it holds 58 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. However, inequalities between countries have declined in the last two decades, whereas inequality within “rich” countries has risen sharply. In the United States, the top 1 percent owned 35 percent of the country’s wealth, approaching Gilded Age levels of inequality.

This massive accumulation of capital has come at the expense of public wealth over the last four decades. The share of wealth held by public actors is close to zero or negative in “rich” countries, indicating that the totality of wealth is privately owned, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The report also studied connections between wealth inequality and inequalities in contributions to climate change, showing the top 10 percent of emitters are responsible for close to 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom half produces 12 percent of the total. This disparity is also seen within nominally rich countries. The bottom half of the population in Europe, East Asia, and North America is responsible for an average of 3 to 9 metric tons of emissions per person a year. This contrasts sharply with the emissions of the top 10 percent in these regions: 29 metric tons in Europe, 39 in East Asia, and 73 in North America.

Given this diverse and severe inequity, the authors of the report propose a series of “modern progressive taxes” on wealth used to invest in education, health, and ecological restoration.

But such a path is a dead end; All the official and semi-official institutions of government are subordinated to the interests of the financial aristocracy and serve to constrain and block any measure that threatens their hoards of wealth.

This is demonstrated by the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with governments around the world declaring the pandemic over and eliminating remaining protective measures. Rather than being driven by concern for public health, the actions of governments have been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of the upper echelons of society.

The glaring contradiction between the world’s richest people and the precarious circumstances billions are living in is fueling a growing wave of working class militancy. The working class must demand the massive amount of wealth and resources hoarded by the wealthiest layers be seized and directed to fight the global pandemic.

The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of inequality—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must build an international socialist movement based on the interests of the working class.

Originally published by WSWS.org

9 December 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Manlio Dinucci

The BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Investment Giants

25 Nov 2021 – The main vaccines used in Italy in the “Covid-19 vaccine plan” are produced by three U.S. pharmaceutical companies – Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – owned and controlled by the three largest U.S. investment companies: BlackRock, the largest in the world, Vanguard and State Street. These three financial firms also own and control the U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck, which first produced the “anti-Covid pill.”

BlackRock, headed by Larry Fink, has thousands of companies from all sectors in its portfolio. The capital it manages has grown in the last ten years from 3,500 to 9,500 billion dollars (more than 5 times the GDP of Italy) and is increasing further. In this way, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have a decision-making voice in the boards of directors of the major multinationals and banks, including central banks. The largest U.S. investment bank, Goldman Sachs (of which Mario Draghi was vice-president), is owned and controlled by the same “Big Three”. The same is true of Standard & Poor Global, the rating agency that monitors the world’s economies, failing or promoting them.

These facts show that behind the Great Reset there is Big Finance, which is implementing a plan to centralize power and social control with tools such as the “green pass”.

To these are now added others that leverage, in addition to the “pandemic risk”, the “climate risk”. As BlackRock states, “climate risk will fundamentally reshape finance and drive a significant reallocation of capital.”

To that end, while making a spectacle of global warming by announcing imminent catastrophe, they ignore the continuing deterioration of air quality, which, according to the European Environment Agency’s 2021 report, causes about 65,000 deaths per year in Italy, roughly the same number attributed to Covid-19.

Manlio Dinucci is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, a geographer, and geopolitical scientist.

29 November 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

22 Nov 2021 – A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords.

The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.

The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.

On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?

Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.

Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.

Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.”

More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin.

A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows.

Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?

In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.

The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia.

But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.

With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.

So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”

Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.

During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.

Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, all that Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seem to have in common is a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.

But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.

But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.

Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.

A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.

So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.

The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.

But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.

Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.

So we had better hope that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

29 November 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

22 Nov 2021 – Fearful editors and CIA-connected hacks ganged up to defame top MIT scientist who refused to echo government propaganda and had article exposing truth about alleged Syrian chemical weapons attacks pulled by prestigious scientific journal. Instead, he quit his 30-year job on principle.

Theodore Postol is one of the world’s leading authorities on warfare and weaponry. A physicist with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, he is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the chief of naval operations.

During a career full of honors, he received the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society for “incisive technical analysis of national security issues vital for informing the public policy debate”; the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for “uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses”; and the Richard L. Garwin Award from the Federation of American Scientists “that recognizes an individual who, through exceptional achievement in science and technology, has made an outstanding contribution toward the benefit of mankind.”

Professor Postol was also a senior editorial board member of the Princeton-based Science & Global Security journal for more than 30 years—until he quit in protest over the journal’s refusal to publish an article he wrote that embarrassed the CIA and the U.S. government.

The article provided incontrovertible evidence that the murderous April 4, 2017, sarin gas attack on Syrian civilians was not the work of the Assad government but a false-flag operation by U.S.-funded jihadists designed to make it look like Assad was to blame.

As the professor said in his letter of resignation

To keep Postol’s article from being published, a campaign of character assassination was mounted against Professor Postol to destroy his credibility and smear his reputation. Pressure to refuse the article was exerted on the journal’s editors (many of whom Postol had mentored) by select members of the scientific and academic community—who had long suckled at the government teat, and therefore obediently ganged up on their former colleague with defamatory articles and scandalous letters circulated secretly behind his back.

Bizarrely, in one of these cowardly letters, Gregory D. Koblentz, a Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), even compared Postol to a Holocaust denier.

But Professor Postol was no stranger to controversy, or to confronting and exposing U.S. government lies about its military “triumphs” and “successes.”

Following the 1991 First Persian Gulf War, Postol published an article in Science & Global Security debunking U.S. government claims about the efficacy of the Patriot missile defense system, which had reputedly shot down Scud missiles launched by Iraq over Israel.

The article prompted a congressional investigation and Postol became a minor scientific celebrity with a strong reputation for integrity.

Nearly 30 years later, Postol is still doing what he does best: debunking governmental narratives through cutting-edge scientific research and analysis.

However, the political landscape in America has changed—dramatically for the worse.

Not only can Postol no longer get his research published in leading scientific journals; he is now also forced to endure slanderous personal attacks in which he is labeled as a mental basket case, conspiracy theorist and crank.

In an interview with CAM, Postol said “I could not do the stuff with the Patriot missiles I did today. Nobody has the courage to publish things anymore that go against conventional wisdom on certain key topics related to national security.”

Postol added that “universities and university journals are no longer a source of truth…There is a lack of independence of thought and ability to referee exposés of this nature carefully and a betrayal of the fundamental moral obligation of scientists and academics to society to investigate and then present the truth on important matters—even when it makes people in positions of power uncomfortable.”
Report on Chemical Weapons Use in Khan Shaykhun, Syria

Postol made people in positions of power uncomfortable through his dissection of the official government narrative on chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

An article that he wrote with Goong Chen, a mathematician from Texas A&M University, and five other scientists, “Computational Forensics for the Alleged Syrian Sarin Chemical Attack on April 4, 2017: What Actually Happened?” used forensic computer simulations and three-dimensional image analysis to model the crater that was identified as the source of sarin allegedly released at Khan Shaykhun, an al-Nusra front controlled town in the Idlib province.

The alleged attack served as a pretext for the Trump administration to launch 59 cruise missiles against the Syrian government’s airbase at Shayrat.

Postol and his co-authors determined that the crater and related fragments were almost certainly caused by a vehicle-launched improvised rocket-propelled artillery round with a high-explosive warhead—which the rebels could have possessed—and not an aerial bomb from a Syrian airplane.

No fragments characteristic of an aerial bomb such as tail fins were observed and the size of the crater was too small to be caused by a bomb.

This finding—which was confirmed by a senior intelligence official with experience assessing bomb damage—called into question the scenario of attack described by the U.S. intelligence community, and the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM).

According to Postol’s team, there was extensive tampering with the crater and debris, which led to misreporting in the media.

A dead goat was found at the scene displaying symptoms of sarin inhalation; however, tracks were found indicating that the goat had been dragged to the scene along with a rope around its neck. Dead birds were also found that appeared to have been very recently released from a cage.

Postol and his team determined that there was no physical evidence of any sarin-containing vessel at the scene.

A pipe was inaccurately identified by the OPCW as a container filled with sarin; in truth it was the casing of the rocket motor that propelled the warhead to the location of the explosion.

Chemical weapons generally do not make large craters in the ground and since no workers sent to clean up the scene were exposed to sarin or died—when any contact with the asphalt around the crater would have been highly lethal in the wake of an attack—it is unlikely sarin was actually used.

According to journalist Seymour Hersh, the impression that sarin had been used was created by a toxic cloud that resulted from the bombing of an agricultural supply depot near the crater possessing fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods whose release caused neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin.
The Truth Is Suppressed

Postol, Chen et al.’s article “Computational Forensics for the Alleged Syrian Sarin Chemical Attack on April 4, 2017: What Actually Happened?” was published in the Global Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine in November 2020, and was featured by Tulsi Gabbard on her website when she was running for president.

However, the article was withdrawn from publication by the more prestigious journal Science & Global Security one year earlier after the article had initially been accepted and was circulated at the page proof stage.

Postol had served for more than 30 years on the editorial board of Science & Global Security and mentored the three main editors who ultimately blocked publication of his piece.

These editors were a) Pavel Podvig, an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; b) Zia Mian, a senior research fellow and Co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Science and Global Security; and c) Alex Glaser, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

In a letter to Goong Chen obtained by CAM dated December 27, 2019, Podvig, Mian and Glaser said that they had decided to withdraw publication of his and Postol’s article because of their “identification of a number of concerns with the editorial process,” including “concerns about the competence of the reviews and editorial judgments being used as a substitute for a decision by the reviewers to determine if their concerns had been reasonably addressed.”

The editors went on to state that they “accepted responsibility for mishandling the process in this case,” noting that their “discovery of inadvertent mistakes [in the review process] should have come earlier….Given these editorial mistakes, our decision was to return the manuscript to the authors without prejudice. At no point have we suggested that the manuscript has been rejected or retracted.”

This explanation is hollow because if the editors—who admitted to poor judgment—screwed up the review process, they were obliged to find a fair-minded reviewer.

The insinuation that the article was never rejected is also false because it was returned to the authors and never published.
Crank Reviewer and Bellingcat Disinformation

According to Postol, the main peer reviewer selected by Science & Global Security’s editors was a “crank” and “clown.” He was either a member of Bellingcat or closely associated with the organization.

Dubbed “an intelligence agency for the people,” Bellingcat puts out reports that advance U.S. and UK government disinformation about countries targeted for regime change like Russia and Syria.

Supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a CIA offshoot—its staff includes former U.S. and UK military and intelligence officers.

Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, attacked Postol in a September 13, 2019, blog entitled: “Simulations, Craters and Lies: Postol’s Latest Attempt to Undermine the Last Vestiges of his Reputation.”
Eliot Higgins (C), founder of online investigation group Bellingcat, addresses a press conference on findings in research on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, on May 25, 2018.

Higgins is a college drop-out who never set foot in the Middle East and, according to Postol, “has no scientific training, knows no science, and is not interested in learning any science.”

Before the Arab Spring, Higgins admitted that he “knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owners; any knowledge he had came from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.”

In his blog, Higgins suggested that Postol was a Russian agent who had tried to pass the results of his research to the Russian delegation at the UN.

In fact, Postol and his team sent letters about their findings to all five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and United States—and to the Acting President of the Security Council—Germany—because of their important implications.

According to Higgins, Postol’s study was flawed because the crater simulated in the computer models did not match the one in Khan Shaykhun or look like real-world craters formed by 122-mm artillery rockets.

However, Postol told CAM that the comparisons Higgins offered were flawed and he could not have replicated his team’s supercomputer calculation. The positions of the casings made clear the crater was caused by an artillery rocket, which was confirmed by military manuals.

Higgins’s blog was misleading, furthermore, because it analyzed photos that did not show the original crater and debris on the site at Khan Shaykhun, but ones that were taken after the scene had been tampered with. Also, it analyzed the wrong end of the rocket motor which had been turned upside down.

As such, Postol wrote that Higgins’s forensic analysis was “no more relevant to the truth than DNA evidence would be from the wrong blood samples at a murder trial.”
Breach of Confidentiality and Conflict of Interest

According to Goong Chen, Science & Global Security’s editors were informed in October 2019 that the referee for Chen and Postol’s article had breached confidentiality by divulging the contents of his report to Higgins who told Postol about it during a public panel discussion in London.

Pavel Podvig’s own conflict of interest was apparent in his job as an adviser to the UN Secretary General.

Postol’s article provided science-based evidence that the OPCW has been falsifying reports to the UN Security Council related to chemical gas attacks in Syria—a charge corroborated by OPCW whistleblower Ian Henderson.

Slander by CFR Fellow

Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University’s Schor School of Public Policy and a CFR fellow, was one of the pseudo-experts quoted frequently in Bellingcat’s reports on Syria.

Koblentz obtained his Ph.D. in MIT’s security studies program in 2004 and took classes on nuclear weapons and missile defense from Postol and participated in WMD-related events that he organized.

Koblentz said that “the Ted Postol writing about Syria and chemical weapons is not the Ted Postol I knew back then [at MIT].”

In an attempt to block publication of Postol’s Khan Shaykhun article, Koblentz wrote confidential letters to members of the editorial board and editors of Science & Global Security—which became known when Frank von Hippel, who helped found the journal in 1989, shared his letter with Postol.

Koblentz in the letter—sent on September 27, 2019—never refuted the science in Postol’s article, but rather replicated Higgins’s efforts to smear him. He wrote that he had spent the last two weeks trying to “educate the editors” of Science & Global Security and its editorial board about Postol’s “conspiratorial views about chemical weapon use in Syria,” which in his view had been “debunked by the open-source investigative site Bellingcat.”

Koblentz charged that, if Science & Global Security went ahead and published Postol’s piece, the journal’s “prestige and connection to Princeton University would be used by conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, Russian disinformation peddlers, and Assad apologists to whitewash the regime’s most heinous war crimes.”

Koblentz said that Postol’s analysis of chemical-weapons use in Syria exhibited a “pattern of unfounded, unscientific, and illogical assumptions about the world,” a “classic sign of conspiracy theory.”

This conspiracy theory was “quite popular among CW truthers, which include those who deny the Holocaust occurred or that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, as well as among individuals and organizations who support the Syrian and Russian narratives that Syria has not gassed its own people.”

According to Koblentz, “publishing Ted’s latest theory in Science & Global Security is akin to letting Andrew Wakefield publish an article about vaccines and autism in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association], Alex Jones to opine about media coverage of the mass shooting of Sandy Hook in the Columbia Journalism Review, or allowing a known climate change denialist to publish an article on global cooling in Science: these are all discredited conspiracy theorists who are best viewed as charlatans, despite any degrees they hold or honors they’ve received.”

Rejection and Dress-Down

After receiving Koblentz’s letter, he, Mian and Glaser consulted other scientists, like Princeton’s Robert H. Socolow, who encouraged them to withdraw Postol’s article from publication.

Mian and Glaser then met with Postol in a one-hour session in which Mian did all the talking. According to Postol, Mian was “very uppity in the meeting though showed signs he had not actually read his paper.” Postol said he felt at the meeting like he was “some South Asian servant being dressed down by a British imperialist in 1965.”
Resignation

Afterwards, Postol resigned from the editorial board of Science & Global Society, on which he had served for 30 years.

He stated that it was “anathema for him to be part of an organization that would intentionally or not seek to suppress or misrepresent valid scientific findings that have implications for international law and the future viability of the chemical weapons convention.”

In an exclusive interview with CAM, Postol said that the whole matter was very emotional for him because of his long friendship and association with the editors of Science & Global Security whom he mentored, helped get papers published and even helped get jobs. He feels that they betrayed him and the scientific community and made a grievous mistake by “failing to stand for their own scientific judgment.”

On October 25, 2019, Postol wrote to congratulate the three editors for allowing a “technically illiterate, third-class political scientist [Koblentz] to stop publication of a careful and comprehensively documented scientific analysis. Great job!”
Academic Cowardice at George Mason University

In November 2019, Postol lodged a formal complaint of academic misconduct against Koblentz with Mark Rozell, Dean of the School of Government and Public Policy at George Mason University where Koblentz teaches.

Postol said that Professor Koblentz has been “misrepresenting himself as an expert on a matter where he demonstrably has no knowledge and he is using his false claims of knowledge to engage in slanderous allegations against me and my colleagues.”

In response to the letter, George Mason Provost S. David Wu (now president of Baruch College) carried out an investigation which determined that, while some of Koblentz’s statements were “undiplomatic,” he had not misrepresented his credentials and that accusations of slander should be handled in the courts.

The investigating committee concluded that “statements some may characterize as undiplomatic or disparaging nevertheless can be part of a discourse conducted within the bounds of academic freedom.”

Postol responded by writing a letter to George Mason University Rector Tom Davis, a former Republican Congressman, in which he reiterated that Koblentz had no scientific expertise to challenge his findings and said that there was no discourse between him and Koblentz that could fall within the boundaries of academic freedom since the letters he sent were secret. Koblentz never sought to debate any questions about his work with him—rather, he posted information that was false to his colleagues without his knowledge.

Postol further alleged that George Mason’s investigation was unprofessional and inadequate. Postol himself was never interviewed and never provided any information about who the panel members were and whether they possessed the requisite expertise to assess Postol’s research and whether it was professionally carried out.

Postol wrote:

I was excluded by a process that appears to have been designed from the beginning to exclude the addition of clarifying evidence or the raising of questions about the accuracy of statements that Koblentz may have made in his defense. In short, the procedure may or may not have been rigged, but they were certainly not constructed so as to get a balanced and comprehensive picture of the situation.

Postol asked for Davis to rectify the problem, but he received no reply to his letter. When CAM tried to contact him, he was impossible to reach.
2013 Chemical Attacks in East Ghouta

Postol wrote another important article debunking official government claims about alleged chemical-weapon attacks in Syria: in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, on August 13, 2013.

The latter attacks provided a pretext for threatened U.S. air strikes, which the Obama administration was poised to launch but held back on because of a lack of public support.

On August 20, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a dramatic press conference affirming the intelligence community’s conclusion that sarin chemical-weapon attacks had been carried out from “the heart of regime territory.”

Secretary of State John Kerry gives dramatic performance at press conference on August 20, 2013, blaming Bashir al-Assad for sarin gas attacks in Eastern Ghouta seven days earlier. Kerry’s statements were false. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

Seymour Hersh quoted an intelligence officer at the time who suggested that the charade was a false-flag equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that resulted in the massive U.S. expansion of its war in South Vietnam.

The Obama administration used the attacks to justify Operation Timber Sycamore, a $1 billion program supplying arms to jihadist rebels seeking to overthrow Assad, and to push for air strikes which were called off because congress and the public made clear they did not want them.

Postol’s article is entitled “The 2013 Nerve Agent Attack in Damascus, Syria: A Potentially Disastrous National Intelligence Failure.” As of yet, it has not been published. In one journal to which Postol submitted it, the editor waited five months to give him the peer review after he had received it—an unheard of time-lag.

Postol’s paper demonstrated that the artillery rocket motors which delivered the sarin gas in Eastern Ghouta were sufficiently powerful to propel each heavy sarin-filled steel barrel to a range of 2 to 2.5 km (about 1.5 miles).

Inspection of the map issued with the White House intelligence report showed that the attack could only have come from Syrian government-controlled areas if the rockets had a range of more than 10 km—which they did not.

Human Rights Watch, and The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets echoed the official U.S. government view that the attacks were carried out in Syrian government-controlled territory, which was impossible based on the laws of physics.

The New York Times published the above graphic across its front page on September 17, 2013, thereby bolstering the public misperception that the report issued by U.S. intelligence agencies was correct. The assumption implicitly made by The New York Times author and editors was that the rockets could travel 6 to 10 miles to various impact points in Ghouta. In fact, the rockets could only travel about 1.5 miles. When The New York Times was provided by Theodore Postol with information that showed that its front-page headline story was wrong, it published a short misleading article that did not refer to the seriously flawed headline story, misreporting a much longer range for the rockets allegedly launched from Syrian government territory. In addition, The New York Times author and editors left uncorrected their earlier reported false conclusion that the intelligence data showed the attack had come from Syrian government-controlled territory. [Source: Theodore Postol]

After Postol’s article was written, a UN inspection team corroborated many of its findings. At a press conference on December 16, 2013, Åke Sellström, the Head of Mission of the UN Mission to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic, said that a 2-km range for the rockets that delivered the nerve agent was a “fair guess.”

Sellström’s conclusion was omitted from the OPCW report and UN leadership never corrected U.S., British and French assertions about the attacks that were false.

James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, additionally never corrected the false intelligence report that was used by the Obama administration to sell war.

New Evidence

After the attacks, a video surfaced which depicted fighters wearing gas masks—identified as members of the opposition faction Liwa Al Islam—launching sarin-filled Volcano rockets on August 21, the night of the attack.

The video was ignored in the media at the time, and dismissed as a fake, though a June 2021 study by Rootclaim—a website founded by tech entrepreneur Saar Wilf—pointed to several landmarks visible in the video that matched with footage from satellite photos.

The video combined with the satellite imagery helped the authors of the Rootclaim article, Michael Kobs and Adam Larson, to locate the launch site to a small field in rebel-held Qaboun with two rows of trees, low vegetation, and a paved platform.

Eliot Higgins suggested that the Syrian army launched the chemical rockets from an area of a military base south of the Air Force Intelligence Branch. However, the Rootclaim study shows it could not have been the source, as the angle was off and a rocket shot from there would have penetrated the northern wall of the target building, not the western wall, the actual one struck.

Three days after the Ghouta attack, as Syrian army forces entered the area, they were attacked by sarin, just 200 meters from the field where the Ghouta attack was thought to have been launched.

This attack was detailed in a UN report that Higgins, Koblentz and Bellingcat not surprisingly ignored.

Their agenda is clear in trying to poison the debate about Syria and defame dedicated scientists like Postol whose research casts important light on the deceptions underlying U.S. policy.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on U.S.

29 November 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Mairead Maguire

25 Nov 2021 – It was with deep sadness that on Wed 23 Nov 2021 the world watched in horror the news that 27 people had drowned in the English Channel when their flimsy dinghy overturned in the sea in an attempted crossing from Calais to Dover. I am sorry and I ask the forgiveness of migrants and refugees who have been forced to flee their lands and seek a place of refuge in any country who would give them a place to lay their heads. I send my condolences to the families at the loss of their beloved ones in a cold watery tragedy far away from their homes.

Over the last twenty years, NATO (led by USA/UK) has cruelly carried out sanctions, wars, invasions and occupations over many countries. I visited many of these countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,) and was shocked at the way in which western governments’ policies have made these countries unstable by their foreign policies.

Arms manufacturers and dealers ferment violence and wars contributing to geopolitical games which cost the lives of millions displaced and millions dead. We have witnessed that when guns come into play in any situation, fear sets in and people flee in the thousands to save their lives, their children. We have to STOP the madness of militarism and weapons and end governments’ and elites’ profiting from the arms industry and wars.

Migrants/refugees who come to Europe come to us because we have bombed their countries and there is no hope for them to find jobs and safety there anymore. Every act has a consequence, and we are now witnessing the results of our governments’ unjust policies that keep destabilizing so many countries.

The militarization of Europe is a waste of peoples’ money and will not provide human security.

Imposing unilateral sanctions on countries (as I witnessed in Iraq and now in Iran) creates reactive violence and destroys vital infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals, life itself.

A more compassionate approach to asylum seekers would be to open safe channels through which they could come into the UK. Politicians must be honest and admit, ‘we are where we are,’ and we have a duty to do and to do it with love. We caused the problems and we have a responsibility to help find solutions that are humane and compassionate.

Many asylum seekers come to the UK because they have relatives in Britain, they can speak English, or they feel links to the UK Commonwealth. All have brains, courage and hope and will make good contributions wherever they go…. Let’s welcome them and show them our warmheartedness as their brothers and sisters.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

29 November 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Kalinga Seneviratne

SYDNEY (IDN) — In the early 1980s when I was studying mass communications in Australia, our journalism lecturer told us that as journalists we will have to hold governments to account, and to do that sometimes we may need to depend on leaks from government officials. “You should not hesitate to use that information, while ensuring that you do not disclose the source,” he instructed us, adding, “if anyone asks you (for the source) tell them it fell off the back of a truck”.

What founder of WikiLeaks, Australian journalist Julian Assange did 20 years later was exactly that, and in the Internet age, instead of using some paper documents leaked by a government official, he used electronic documents leaked to him via computer by a US government intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

If this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is about promoting “Press Freedom” the Norwegian Nobel Committee has missed a golden opportunity to make a powerful statement at a time when such freedom is under threat in the very countries that have traditionally claimed a patent on it.

Assange held under torturous conditions in a high-security British prison awaiting possible extradition to the US, should have been given the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer has accused the British government of torturing Assange. “The purpose of what has been done to Julian Assange is not to punish or coerce him, but to silence him and to do so in broad daylight, making visible to the entire world that those who expose the misconduct of the powerful no longer enjoy the protection of the law,” he said in media statement before his trial began.

Assange has paid a heavy price for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan with the help of Manning. He is now facing 19 espionage charges for activities related to the publication of leaked classified US government information. If convicted he faces a maximum of 175 years in a US jail.

US authorities have accused the 50-year-old WikiLeaks founder of conspiring to hack government computers and of violating an espionage law in connection with the release of confidential cables by WikiLeaks in 2010-2011.

“Julian Assange committed the crime of letting the general population know things that they have a right to know and that powerful states don’t want them to know,” noted renowned American media critic Noam Chomsky in an interview on Russia’s RT channel last year.

In announcing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel Committee said that it was awarded “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”. They added that the two of them have fought a courageous battle for freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia.

It is true that they have waged a courageous battle against their own governments. But these are regimes, which are not subservient to the West. Both of them, are alleged to be heavily funded by western “donor” agencies, thus, a reason for their governments cracking down heavily on both, seeing their activities as a form of espionage and a security threat.

The question that needs to be asked from the Nobel Committee is why is Ressa’s and Muratov’s activities seen as far more important to achieving world peace, than the courageous battle of Assange to exposed far more serious crimes that have far greater impact on world peace?

If charges against Assange were brought before the US courts for his publishing activity, he would be found not guilty due to the US First Amendment constitutional protections for free speech. Thus, the US security apparatus arguing that Assange’s actions compromised the safety of its personnel around the world, has defined WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service”. Basically their claim to be a publisher and journalist were struck down, so that espionage charges could be laid.

Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard in a statement released on October 27 called on US authorities to drop the charges against Assange, and UK courts to release him immediately. “It is a damning indictment that nearly 20 years on, virtually no one responsible for alleged US war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail,” she said.

In January this year, a British court ruled that Assange could not be extradition to the US due to fears of psychological torture in the US prison system. But, he remains in British custody because the Biden administration has appealed against it. A two-day hearing on the appeal was heard on October 27-28 and the verdict is due in the new year.

In a statement following the January verdict, Australia’s journalists’ union MEAA said “journalists everywhere should be concerned at the hostile manner in which the court dismissed all defence arguments related to press freedom” and added “Julian has suffered a 10-year ordeal for trying to bring information of public interest to the light of day, and it has had an immense impact on his mental and physical health”.

“Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime,” noted fellow Australian journalist John Pilger writing in Global Research after the latest court case in London. Pointing out that the case was ignored by the mainstream media, he adds, “most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgment on their right to know: their right to question and dissent”.

Former UK’s Daily Telegraph chief political writer Peter Oborne in a recent commentary for Press Gazzete warned that, “future generations of journalists would not forgive us if we do not fight extradition (of Assange)”. He pointed out that there has been a deafening silence on Assange’s plight in the mainstream media in the UK.

Oborne argues that if it’s a case of a foreign journalist held in Britain’s Belmarch Prison charged with suppose espionage offences by the Chinese authorities, for exposing war crimes of the Chinese troops, and the Chinese were putting pressure on the British government to extradite him to China, where he could face up to 175 years in jail, “the outrage from the British press would be deafening”.

“There would be calls for protests outside the prison, solemn leaders in the broadsheet newspapers, debates on primetime news programmes, alongside a rush of questions in parliament,” he noted, adding that the situation of Assange is identical to this scenario. “Yet there has been scarcely a word in the British mainstream media in his defense.”

If the UK courts agree to extradite Assange to the US, it would send a chilling message to journalists everywhere that fascism has arrived at the doorstep of the so-called “free world” and “watchdog” journalism is dead. In the meantime, President Biden and his allies will be trumpeting “free speech” at the democracy summit he has called for December 9 and 10. [IDN-InDepthNews – 08 December 2021]

Source: www.indepthnews.net