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By Dr Ramzy Baroud

If imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, becomes the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the status quo will change substantially. For Israel, as well as for the current PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, such a scenario is more dangerous than another strong Hamas showing in the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections.

The long-delayed elections, now scheduled for May 22 and July 31 respectively, will not only represent a watershed moment for the fractured Palestinian body politic, but also for the Fatah Movement which has dominated the PA since its inception in 1994. The once revolutionary Movement has become a shell of its former self under the leadership of Abbas, whose only claim to legitimacy was a poorly contested election in January 2005, following the death of former Fatah leader and PA President, Yasser Arafat.

Though his mandate expired in January 2009, Abbas continued to ‘lead’ Palestinians. Corruption and nepotism increased significantly during his tenure and, not only did he fail to secure an independent Palestinian State, but the Israeli military occupation and illegal settlements have deepened and grown exponentially.

Abbas’ rivals from within the Fatah Movement were sidelined, imprisoned or exiled. A far more popular Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, was silenced by Israel as he was thrown into an Israeli prison in April 2002, after a military court found him guilty of involvement in Palestinian resistance operations during the uprising of 2000. This arrangement suited Abbas, for he continued to doubly benefit: from Barghouti’s popularity, on the one hand, and his absence, on the other.

When, in January, Abbas declared that he would hold three successive rounds of elections – legislative elections on May 22, presidential elections on July 31 and Palestinian National Council (PNC) elections on August 31 – he could not have anticipated that his decree, which followed intense Fatah-Hamas talks, could potentially trigger the implosion of his own party.

Fatah-Hamas rivalry has been decades’ long, but intensified in January 2006 when the latter won the legislative elections in the Occupied Territories. Hamas’ victory was partly attributed to Fatah’s own corruption, but internal rivalry also splintered Fatah’s vote.

Although it was Fatah’s structural weaknesses that partly boosted Hamas’ popularity, it was, oddly, the subsequent rivalry with Hamas that kept Fatah somehow limping forward. Indeed, the anti-Hamas sentiment served as a point of unity among the various Fatah branches. With money pouring in from donor countries, Fatah used its largesse to keep dissent at minimum and, when necessary, to punish those who refused to toe the pro-Abbas line. This strategy was successfully put to the test in 2010 when Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah’s ‘strong man’ in Gaza prior to 2006, was dismissed from Fatah’s central committee and banished from the West Bank, as he was banished from Gaza four years earlier.

But that convenient paradigm could not be sustained. Israel is entrenching its military occupation, increasing its illegal settlement activities and is rapidly annexing Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Gaza siege, though deadly and tragic, has become routine and no longer an international priority. A new Palestinian generation in the Occupied Territories cannot relate to Abbas and his old guard, and is openly dissatisfied with the tribal, regional politics through which the PA, under Abbas, continues to govern occupied and oppressed Palestinians.

Possessing no strategies or answers, Abbas is now left with no more political lifelines and few allies.

With dwindling financial resources and faced by the inescapable fact that 85-year-old Abbas must engineer a transition within the movement to prevent its collapse in case of his death, Fatah was forced to contend with an unpleasant reality: without new elections the PA would lose the little political legitimacy with which it ruled over Palestinians.

Abbas was not worried about another setback, as that of 2006, when Hamas won majority of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC)’s seats. Until recently, most opinion polls indicated that the pro-Abbas Fatah list would lead by a comfortable margin in May, and that Abbas would be re-elected President in July. With his powers intact, Abbas could then expand his legitimacy by allowing Hamas and others into the PLO’s Palestinian National Council – Palestine’s parliament in the Diaspora. Not only would Abbas renew faith in his Authority, but he could also go down in history as the man who united Palestinians.

But things didn’t go as planned and the problem, this time, did not come from Hamas, but from Fatah itself – although Abbas did anticipate internal challenges. However, the removal of Dahlan, the repeated purges of the party’s influential committees and the marginalization of any dissenting Fatah members throughout the years must have infused Abbas with confidence to advance with his plans.

The first challenge emerged on March 11, when Nasser al-Qidwa, a well-respected former diplomat and a nephew of Yasser Arafat, was expelled from the movement’s Central Committee for daring to challenge Abbas’ dominance. On March 4, Qidwa decided to lock horns with Abbas by running in the elections in a separate list.

The second and bigger surprise came on March 31, just one hour before the closing of the Central Election Commission’s registration deadline, when Qidwa’s list was expanded to include supporters of Marwan Barghouti, under the leadership of his wife, Fadwa.

Opinion polls are now suggesting that a Barghouti-Qidwa list, not only would divide the Fatah Movement but would actually win more seats, defeating both the traditional Fatah list and even Hamas. If this happens, Palestinian politics would turn on its head.

Moreover, the fact that Marwan Barghouti’s name was not on the list keeps alive the possibility that the imprisoned Fatah leader could still contest in the presidential elections in July. If that, too, transpires, Barghouti will effortlessly beat and oust Abbas.

The PA President is now in an unenviable position. Canceling the elections would lead to strife, if not violence. Moving forward means the imminent demise of Abbas and his small but powerful clique of Palestinians who benefited greatly from the cozy political arrangement they created for themselves.

As it stands, the key to the future of Fatah is now held by a Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, who has been kept by Israel, largely in solitary confinement, since 2002.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

8 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Edward Curtin

“I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorian people…”  – Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred, 24 March 1980

Whether we are aware of it or not, we live by stories. We live by others’ stories while we tell our lives by how we live.  Our actions tell our stories.  Then when we die, others tell our stories as they wish.

This is the spiritual thread that links the meanings of our lives.  It is the way we pass over to other lives and return to our own. But without truth, we end up in the wrong place, living the wrong stories.

And don’t the stories of certain special people inspire us to carry on their legacies because their spirits are far stronger than death?  Their courage contagious?   Their witness the triumph of life over death?  Love over hate?

Don’t they challenge us to imitate them, to kindle in us the fire of their resurrected spirits?

For Christians, Holy Week is the time for deep reflection on the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus and what they mean for us today.  This year, the anniversary of the murder of the Christian prophet and martyr, Martin Luther King, Jr., falls on Easter Sunday, April 4, which gives rise to doubly deeper thoughts that cross religious boundaries where people of all faiths or none can unite in the spirit of non-violent resistance to the forces of war, poverty, racism, and materialism – violence in all its forms.  Everything that stands in the way of what King called “the Beloved Community.”

That Jesus met violence with non-violent love and voluntarily entered the darkness of death and abandonment is at the heart of the Christian faith.  So too his Resurrection.  If the Jewish radical Jesus had not been executed by the Roman state occupiers of Palestine, if all hope for his followers had not seemingly been lost, then his Resurrection could not have given birth to hope in his followers to carry on his spirit of love for the poor, the downtrodden, and the outcasts – his resistance to violence.

Like Oscar Romero in El Salvador, gunned down by U.S. trained death squads at the altar while offering Mass and subsequently named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s witness and the truth about his death should be a central meditative focus this year. For the convergence of King’s death on April 4, 1968 with Easter this April 4th and the last day of Passover offers us a way to contemplate what is now demanded of all people who yearn for the end to hatred, violence, and injustice, and the creation of a beloved world community where love and kindness reign.

The spirit of all the prophets and martyrs is about now, not then; about us, not them; it confronts us with the challenge to interrogate ourselves.

Shall we turn away from their witness?  What truly animates our souls?  Where do we stand?  Do we support the state’s power to kill and wage war, to deny people freedom, to discriminate, to oppress the poor?

It is always about now; the living truth is now.

To contemplate the lives of the prophets takes us very deep into the darkness where we encounter the murders of Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality.  But only if we go into the darkest truths will we be able to see the light that leads us to accept the resurrected spirit of their resistance to evil.

Another prophet of our broken world, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, soul brother to King, echoed the words that many have heard, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” when, in crossing over to the Christian tradition, he told us: “We dare not think of birth without death on the cross.  Living Christ means a Living Cross, without it life is a living death.”[1]

So what do we need to know about MLK, and why does it matter?

King’s True Story

Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States’ celebrated civil rights icon.  Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For more than fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth.  And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of one man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States.  Today we are eating the fruit of our denial as racial discrimination, poverty, and police violence garner the headlines.

After more than a decade as America’s best-known and most respected civil rights leader, by 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had increasingly focused on poverty issues and publicly declared his intense opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam in a famous speech – “Beyond Vietnam: The Time To Break the Silence” – at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated.[2]

Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he emerged in the mid-1960s as an international figure, whose opinions on human and economic rights and peaceful coexistence were influential world-wide. Shortly before his assassination, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign that would involve hundreds of thousands of Americans who would encamp in Washington, D.C to demand the end to economic inequality, racism, and war.

At the same time, Reverend King was hated by an array of racists throughout America, especially in the American South. Among his greatest declared enemies was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed convinced that King’s backers were Communists out to damage America’s interests. In the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program created a network of informants and agent provocateurs to undermine the civil rights and anti-war movements with a special focus on King.[3]

After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:

Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.[4]

The FBI, after extensive eavesdropping on King, subsequently sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself or else his extramarital sex life would be exposed.  The FBI’s and its Director J Edgar Hoover’s hatred for King was so great that nothing was too low for them.[5]

This history is common knowledge as reported in the Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.

During the Senate Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, a parallel group within the CIA, code-named CHAOS, was uncovered.  Despite its charter disallowing it from operating inside the United States, the CIA similarly used illegal means to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront his own government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens.  This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole.  Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave).  Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.

The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past thirty-five years.  It’s use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message.  After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.

But service without truth is slavery.  It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection.

Educating people about who killed King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.

What exactly is the relationship between King’s saying that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and his murder?

Let’s look at the facts.

When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, as the government also termed Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade. The U.S. government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street. Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and to have driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car. From there he fled to Canada and then to England and then to Portugal and back to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the U.S. The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.

Ray had received erroneous advice from his attorney, Percy Foreman. Foreman had a long history representing government, corporate, intelligence, and mafia figures, including Jack Ruby, in cases where the government wanted to keep people silent. Ray was told that the government would go after Ray’s father and brother, Jerry, and that he’d get the electric chair if he didn’t plead guilty,

Ray initially acquiesced. He entered what is known as an Alford plea before Judge Preston Battle. In making his plea, Ray did not admit to any criminal act and asserted his innocence. The following day, he fired Percy Foreman, who, by offering money to induce a guilty plea, had committed a criminal offense. Foreman had also lied to Judge Battle about his contract with Ray. And, the transcript of Ray’s testimony was doctored to help support the government’s case. Ray was sentenced to life in prison. After three days, Ray tried to retract his plea and maintained his innocence for almost 30 years until his death.

The United State government’s case against James Earl Ray was extremely weak from the start, and in the intervening years has grown so weak that it is no longer believable. A vast body of evidence has accumulated that renders it patently false.

But before examining such evidence, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.[6] All were considered dangerous because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. None of this had to do with war or foreign policy, but such spying was connected to their religious opposition to racist and economic policies that stretched back to slavery, realities that have been officially acknowledged today. But when MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, especially the Vietnam war, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the inner sanctums of the government.  Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.”

The corporate mass media has for more than fifty years echoed the government’s version of the King assassination. Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and also through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced. Through decades of research, a TV trial, a jury trial, and three meticulously researched books, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I., Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures.  In his last two books, An Act of State (2003)  and later The Plot to Kill King (2016), Pepper presents his comprehensive case.

William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures.  He is right to assert that “we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.” This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.

This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty-day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK.

In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.[7]   The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King[8], as delusional. Time magazine called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s “lurid fantasies.”  The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide.  A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.

The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence. During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul.  The government has always denied Raul existed.  Pepper proved that that was a lie.

Slowly, however, glimmers of light have been shed on that trial and truth of the assassination.

On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.?  His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”  While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters.  After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.

Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth.  He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and now deceased U.S. Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said:

I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr. King from the American scene,

and former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, who concurs:

I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.

Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.

“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man.

In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement in the MLK case, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case, such as, Harold Weisberg’s Frame Up in 1971 and Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Name “Zorro” in 1977.  While other lonely researchers dug deeper, most of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.

As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of scapegoats to take the blame for government executions.  Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.

It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s associate, interviewed Ray in prison in 1978.  The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination.  Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million-dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved.  Pepper lists in his book over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past forty-two years.

Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination.  Jurors were selected from a pool of U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney.  He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the New York Times’ Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc.  The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.

As with all Pepper’s work on the case, the mainstream media responded with silence.  And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination.  Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide.  Pepper writes:

Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $100,000 to facilitate the assassination.  He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized …. The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC …. Here was a confession, on prime-time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.

In the twenty-eight years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up.  The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in An Act of State and  The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government.  The foundation of his case proving that was presented at the 1999 trial, while other supporting documentation was subsequently discovered.

Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows.

• Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination.  It was Raul who instructed Ray to return from Canada to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald are startling.
• He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them.  Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed.  One piece was a torn-out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment.  On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read James W. Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
• Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902^nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG), Colonel John Downie.”  Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK.  Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the scapegoat, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.
• To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery.  No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.”  CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.
• Pepper shows that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers (a nine-and-a-half-hour deposition), the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he joined another person in the bushes, and after the shot was fired to kill King, he brought the rifle back into the Grill through the back door. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
• He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.
• He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.)  He uncovers the role of black Memphis Police Department Domestic Intelligence and military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111^th MIG, within the entourage.  McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead.  McCollough officially joined the CIA in 1974 (see Douglass Valentine’s “Deconstructing Kowalski: The DOJ’s Strange MLK Report”)
• Pepper confirms that all of this, including that the assassin in the bushes was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.
• He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4^th, allegedly because of a death threat against him.  And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 were transferred to another station.
• He confirms the presence of “Operation Detachment Alpha 184 team,” a Special Forces sniper team in civilian disguise at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony, and he names one soldier, John D. Hill, as part of Alpha 184 and another military team, Selma Twentieth SFG, that was in Memphis.
• He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
• He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Lloyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
• So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.

There is such a mass of evidence through depositions, documents, interviews, photographs, etc. in Pepper’s An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King that makes it abundantly clear that the official explanation that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King is false and that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him that involved the FBI and other government agencies. Only those inoculated against the truth can ignore such evidence and continue to believe the official version.

Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him.

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty-three years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.

They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed.

For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.

But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness.

The time is now.

Notes

[1] As quoted in James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, New York, 1968, p. 57

[2] See “50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth,” David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 4 April 2017
A significant moment in Dr. King’s odyssey occurred on 14 January 1967 when he first saw a photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. Bernard Lee, who was present at the time, never forgot Martin King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims: “Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” The truth force in these photographs led directly to Dr. King’s Riverside Church exhortation in April.
See “The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation – How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?, David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 30 November 2017

[3] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study, US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”), Final Report – Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976, pp. 79-184

[4] “MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention,” Tony Capaccio, Washington Post, 27 August 2013

[5] “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” Beverly Gage, New York Times, 11 November 2014

[6] “Army feared King, secretly watched him, Spying on blacks started 75 years ago,” Stephen G. Tompkins, The Commercial Appeal, 21 March 1993

[7] An overview of the trial with links back into the court transcript is “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass, Probe Magazine, Spring 2000. Apart from the courtroom participants, Douglass was one of only two people who attended the entire thirty-day trial.

[8] See Transcript of the King Family Press Conference on the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial Verdict, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 1999

Many thanks to my good friends Dave Ratcliffe and Jim Douglass for all their help.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years.

4 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Manlio Dinucci

Not everything in Europe is paralyzed by the anti-Covid lockdown: in fact, the mammoth annual exercise of the US Army, Defender-Europe, which until June mobilized on European territory, and beyond this, dozens of thousands of soldiers with thousands of tanks and other means, has been set in motion. The Defender-Europe 21 not only resumes the 2020 program, resized due to Covid, but amplifies it.

Why does the “Europe Defender” come from the other side of the Atlantic? The 30 NATO Foreign Ministers (Luigi Di Maio for Italy), who physically gathered in Brussels on March 23-24 explained: “Russia, with its aggressive behavior undermines and destabilizes its neighbors, and tries to interfere in the Balkan region.” A scenario constructed with the reality overturning technique: for example, by accusing Russia of trying to interfere in the Balkan region, where NATO “interfered” in 1999 by dropping, with 1,100 aircraft, 23,000 bombs, and missiles on Yugoslavia.

Faced with the Allies’ cry for help, the US Army comes to “defend Europe.” Defender-Europe 21, under the US Army Europe and Africa command, mobilizes 28,000 troops from the United States and 25 NATO allies and partners: they will conduct operations in over 30 training areas in 12 countries, including fire and missile exercises. The US Air Force and Navy will also participate.

In March, the transfer of thousands of soldiers and 1,200 armored vehicles and other heavy equipment from the United States to Europe began. They are landing in 13 airports and 4 European ports, including in Italy. In April, over 1,000 heavy equipment pieces will be transferred from three pre-positioned US Army depots – in Italy (probably Camp Darby), Germany, and the Netherlands – to various training areas in Europe, they will be transported by trucks, trains, and ships. In May, four major exercises will take place in 12 countries, including Italy. In one of the war games, more than 5,000 soldiers from 11 countries will spread across Europe for fire exercises.

While Italian and European citizens will still be prohibited to freely move for “security” reasons, this prohibition does not apply to the thousands of soldiers who will move from one European country to another freely. They will have the “Covid passport,” provided not by the EU but by the US Army, which guarantees that they are subjected to “strict Covid prevention and mitigation measures.”

The United States is not only coming to “defend Europe.” The large exercise – explained the US Army Europe and Africa in its statement – “demonstrates our ability to serve as a strategic security partner in the western Balkans and the Black Sea regions while sustaining our abilities in northern Europe, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Africa” For this reason, Defender-Europe 21 “utilizes key ground and maritime routes bridging Europe, Asia, and Africa“.

The generous “Defender” does not forget Africa. In June, again within the framework of Defender-Europe 21, it will “defend” Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal with a vast military operation from North Africa to West Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It will be directed by the US Army through the Southern Europe Task Force with its headquarters in Vicenza (North Italy). The official statement explains: “African Lion exercise is designed to counter malign activity in North Africa and Southern Europe and to defend the theater from adversary military aggression”. It does not specify who the “maleficents” are, but the reference to Russia and China is evident.

The “Defender of Europe” is not passing through here. The US Army V Corps participates in Defender-Europe 21. The V Corps, after being reactivated at Fort Knox (Kentucky), has established its advanced headquarters in Poznan (Poland), from where it will command operations along NATO’s Eastern flank. The new Security Forces assistance Brigades, US Army special units that train and lead NATO partner countries’ forces (such as Ukraine and Georgia) in military operations participate in the exercise.

Even if it is not known how much Defender-Europe 21 will cost, we citizens of the participating countries know we will pay the cost with our public money, while our resources to face the pandemic crisis are scarce. Italian military spending rose this year to 27.5 billion euros, that is 75 million euros a day. However, Italy has the satisfaction of participating in Defender-Europe 21 not only with its own armed forces but as a host country. It will therefore have the honor of hosting the final exercise of the US Command in June, with the participation of the US Army V Corps from Fort Knox.

*

This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

1 April 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

Written by Joan Martinez-Alier and Patrick Bond

Now in retreat, Total talked “net zero” emissions while pursuing ultra-risky gas extraction

On March 26, In a tropical site of great beauty and a centuries-old peasant lifestyle, scores of local residents and a few foreign workers died violently, as a major French oil company allied to a climate-unconscious African government gambled far too much in search of what they assumed would soon be the continent’s biggest fossil fuel bonanza – and ran into guerilla army resistance.

At the northern end of Mozambique, the country’s politicians and state officials (who tellingly are concentrated in Maputo in the country’s far south) should have known, that if you want trouble on your territory, then count on the notoriously corrupt Paris firm Total to exploit your wealth. Total supposedly aims for “net zero” emissions by 2050, its website pledges, but in reality, its 2020 Climate Report promotes the highly dubious voluntary carbon offset market and plans a radical increase in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) production: from 34 million tons per annum (MTPA) in 2019 to 50 MTPA in 2025, as far north as the Arctic’s fragile Yamal Peninsula.

Total claims gas is a bridge fuel to renewable energy, in spite of LNG-related wreckage of local ecologies due to fracking and greenhouse-gas climate damage when methane is flared, vented or leaked. Ironically, this damage was confirmed late last year by the French government’s own climate-catalysed retreat from gas, in spite of the resulting losses in massive Texas LNG export potential sustained by the partially state-owned firm Engie.

As for social responsibility, Total often funds regimes guilty of human rights violations and socio-economic oppression. Twenty years ago, Total was taken to several international courts, including by EarthRights International, for complicity in crimes against humanity by providing moral and financial support to the Myanmar military government as it built the Yadana Gas Pipeline to Thailand. It is besieged by protests across the world, according to the EJ Atlas.

Until the Palma massacre at the end of March, Total had joined Rome-based ENI, Dallas-based ExxonMobil and Beijing-based China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in hoping “counter-insurgent” Mozambican military support would allow more rapid gas extraction offshore Cabo Delgado, near the Tanzania border. For decades, this province witnessed severe socio-economic exploitation and growing anger at environmental injustices.

In the most recent injustices, reports Ilham Rawoot of Friends of the Earth Mozambique/Justiça Ambiental! (JA!), oil companies led by Total – which took over a concession of Anadarko’s in 2019 – were in the process of displacing thousands from homes and livelihoods, including fisherfolk, without adequate compensation:

Residents face the danger of environmental disaster due to the gas drilling. According to Anadarko’s 2014 environmental impact study, the project will produce a large amount of greenhouse gases and sulphur dioxide, introduce new species into the sea, and cause soil erosion. There are growing fears that gas drilling will affect biodiversity in the area, especially the Quirimbas Archipelago, a UNESCO biosphere which is located just 8km from one of the gas fields off the coast of Cabo Delgado. The archipelago is home to 3,000 floral species, 447 bird species, eight species of marine mammals, as well as lions, elephants, buffalo and leopards. The dredging, waste disposal and the physical construction of onshore and offshore facilities will significantly diminish much of this ecosystem. Many species will flee the area due to noise and habitat degradation, while the impact of a potential gas leak or spill will be disastrous.

The gas fields are said to be worth $128 billion, with Total’s stake in the area closest to shore valued at $20 billion. But a full-cost accounting would subtract major ecological, social and economic debits, including the country’s massive uncompensated natural wealth depletion. By deploying ecosystem valuation, even the World Bank admits, Africa as a whole loses the net equivalent of 3% of its income annually due to resource extraction, twice the rate at which funds are lost to “Illicit Financial Flows.”

No less important is the adverse impact on the global environment: the metabolic contribution in terms of fossil fuel energy that will be taken out and exported to industrial areas including Mozambique’s neighbor South Africa. To prevent climate catastrophe, the global energy transition requires an urgent cut in coal, oil and gas extraction to about half the current amount, so that the CO2 produced can be absorbed by oceans and new vegetation without further increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

The search for new materials and energy sources is speeding up because industrial economies are not circular but instead entropic, dissipating fossil fuel energy, tending towards deterioration and chaos. To feed the machine, new extraction frontiers are continuously discovered and commodified, especially natural gas given how extraction technologies have improved. This is the logic behind the unfolding catastrophe at Cabo Delgado.

Inequality, evictions and abuse create conditions for local ‘terrorist’ insurgency

The Islamic insurgency, generally credited to some version of localised (not Somalia-sourced) ‘al Shabaab’ or ‘Islamic State’ extremism, began in earnest in 2017. But the region’s grievances date back many decades, to Portuguese colonial underdevelopment, to post-colonial neglect after independence in 1975, to recent disruptive ruby mining and timber extraction which failed to trickle the wealth back, and now to abuses committed by the gas companies and their white mercenary armies.

Having been attacked earlier, Total retreated from building its main LNG plant, but returned in January during the rainy season, demanding the Mozambican government provide it a 25 km safe zone perimeter at Afungi Peninsula (ENI, ExxonMobil and CNPC are further offshore). It did so using for-profit military allies: the notorious Wagner Group from Moscow, and from South Africa, the Dyke Advisory Group – run by an ex-Rhodesian soldier whom Amnesty International last month accused of authorising random fire by his troops into civilian sites (even a hospital) – and the Paramount company, a major weapons supplier to regimes across Africa and the Middle East. More ominously, U.S. and European armies have recently been “training” Mozambican forces.

But thanks to the thick bush and their integration into civilian populations, the guerrillas escaped detection last month. The end of the rainy season left the town closest to Afungi – Palma – vulnerable to what was a terrible attack on March 26, leaving dozens dead, including several international consultants and expat managers.

Leaving the gas offshore, in exchange for a climate debt downpayment?

Among the most eloquent critics of Total, the Mozambican state and the mercenaries is London-based journalist Joe Hanlon, who regrets how a corruption-riddled state elite became “dazzled by the gas, and believed Mozambique would be like Abu Dhabi, Qatar, or Kuwait. Gas would make the elite fabulously wealthy and also trickle down to ordinary people.” Instead, the insurgents have disrupted the corporate-state extraction strategy, as Hanlon reports: “Total says work ‘is obviously now suspended’ and will only resume when government really can provide security. ExxonMobil has made clear it is unlikely to go ahead; ENI has said nothing about anything more than the initial floating platform.”

But South Africa remains a dangerous player, because not only is the country’s main oil company – formerly state-owned Sasol – already drilling and piping gas from offshore wells 1900 kilometers to the south (and desirous of access to the northern fields), Pretoria’s SA National Defense Force troops are available, according to foreign minister Naledi Pandor. As she testified to parliament last September, a “great opportunity exists for South Africa to import natural gas from Mozambique, thus the security of Cabo Delgado is of great interest to South Africa and her energy diversification strategy. South Africa’s security agencies need to enhance their capacity.” (However, in other parts of Africa, Pretoria’s troops have suffered severe humiliations in similar crony-capitalist deployments.)

There must be an alternative, and indeed one presents itself: the concept of a downpayment on the “climate debt” that the Global North – including CO2-addicted South Africa – already owes Mozambique. According to a proposal made by Ecuador’s government from 2006-13 to prevent oil drilling in the Yasuni Park (on its eastern Amazonian border with Peru, the world’s main biodiversity hotspot), such financing for state social and development programmes – and in Mozambique’s case also ensuring a Basic Income Grant is available to Cabo Delgado communities – could justify a halt to fossil fuel extraction.

After all, unprecedented cyclones tore through Mozambique in March-April 2019, killing hundreds and doing at least $2 billion in damage, including in Cabo Delgado where Cyclone Kenneth was devastating. As Rawoot remarks, there must be a way for the country to avoid future reliance upon fossil fuels, for otherwise the country’s “coal and LNG projects – which are more carbon-intensive than the regular extraction and processing of natural gas – will only further contribute to global warming.”

Mobilising grant finance to “leave fossil fuels underground” in wretched sites like Cabo Delgado should be a top priority for the coming COP26 in Glasgow. Even as Boris Johnson is trying to reduce already-miserly British overseas aid, Christian Aid’s leader Amanda Khozi Mukwashi demanded (just after the Palma massacre), “Vulnerable countries on the frontline of a climate emergency they did not cause need financial support.” The urgency now for Mozambique is apparent, not only as an impoverished majority-peasant country that certainly did not cause the crisis, but as one that might in future, since it is so vulnerable to further rounds of multinational corporate fossil extraction fused with imperial and sub-imperial militarisation… unless an alternative is urgently identified.

The conflicts at Cabo Delgado are multifaceted. They arise from neo-colonial extractivism – of which Mozambique is both villain and victim – whether it is coal from Tete province mined destructively by Brazil’s Vale and by Coal of India, hydropower electricity for smelting exported aluminium for BHP Billiton, eucalyptus monocrops for paper pulp and illegal hardwood harvesting, cashews exported raw not processed, or other sites of unequal ecological exchange. But in addition to Sasol’s gas fields, the potential dimensions of the Cabo Delgado plunder of energy from gas have no precedent in Africa. The robbery taking place is just one further instance of commodity frontiers being pushed to extremes, by destructive changes in the eco-social metabolism of the world industrial economy – a process we must strive to reverse by any means necessary.

Joan Martinez-Alier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Patrick Bond (University of the Western Cape)

3 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

Viewpoint By Kalinga Seneviratne

“The Core Group chaired by the UK tabled a shoddy motion based on a hostile UNHRC Report riddled with factual errors and unproven allegations going back to 2009; none of which qualifies as robust evidence” said Lord Naseby. Conservative party member and the President of the All Party Parliamentary UK – Sri Lanka Group in a statement issued on Tueday following a vote at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva on March 23rd that called for intrusive human rights intervention in Sri Lanka’s domestic affairs.

The resolution, which was tabled at the 46th sessions of the UN body by the UK on behalf of what is called a “Core Group” consisting mainly of western nations such as UK, Canada and Germany, would involve UNHRC spending some $2.8 million to set up an office “to collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence, and to develop possible strategies for future accountability processes for gross violations of human rights” that could be used to mount war crimes cases against Sri Lankan military personnel, as well as economic sanctions against the country.

The resolution was adopted with 22 voting for it and 11 against with 14 abstaining among them India and Japan, while China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Philippines and Venezuela voted against it. Lord Naseby argues that it “is a gross intrusion on the sovereignty of a state (to adopt a resolution) based on a simple majority vote when Motions of this significance would need a 2/3rds majority”.

Sri Lanka has strongly rejected the resolution. Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunewardena said the resolution lacked authority and it “was brought by countries supported by Western powers that want to dominate the Global South.”

Speking before the vote, China’s ambassador to the UNHRC Chen XU said that this resolution is an attempt to “interfere in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs and undermine its development and stability under the pretext of human rights”. He commended the Sri Lankan government for improving human rights by advancing sustainable economic and social development, to improving peoples’ living standards. Russia, Cuba and the Philippines speaking in support of Sri Lanka also expressed similar sentiments.

This week’s battle in Geneva reflects a fundamental difference in the way human rights is viewed by the East and West. Ever since Sri Lanka crushed the Tamil separatist terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, western countries have been using the UNHRC in a witchhunt against Sri Lanka, mainly because the Sri Lankan government led by President Mahinda Rajapakse ignored western calls for a ceasefire to ship the LTTE leaders overseas – to fight another day. The war was won mainly due to Chinese and Rusian diplomatic support and military aid.

In January 2015, there was a regime change in Sri Lanka, where Rajapakse was defeated in elections that was mainly fought on human rights and corruption allegations mounted by NGOs funded by the West that influenced young voters. The new government led by President Maitripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe were very subserviant to the West and openly expressed anti-China sentiments. In September 2015, Sri Lanka co-sponsored a resolution that called for setting up war crimes courts in Sri Lanka with foreign judges to try Sri Lankan military personnel. Many Sri Lankans saw it as similar to the 1815 Kandy Convention where the Kandyan chieftains signed away sovereighty to the British.

The 2019 Easter Sunday Islamic terrorist attacks in Colombo turned public sentiments against the government when it was realised that undermining of the intelliegence services and the military, where many of these personnel were in jail, awaiting trials percipated by the UNHRC resolution Sri Lanka co-sponsored, were a major reason for the attacks.

These attacks helped to solidify a national-security focussed Sinhala nationalist wave that catapulted the Rajapakses – who are still credited with having ended a 30-year terrorist war – back to power. After coming to power, the new government informed UNHRC last year that they are withdrawing the co-sponsorship of the resolution, and this year opposed a new resolution.

Initially the UNHRC resolutions called for accountability for 40,000 deaths during the final push to defeat the LTTE in 2009. The UN, international human rights organisations nor the western media that transmitted these claims were never able to provide evidence. Now UNHRC has quietly dropped this claim and instead the latest resolutions talks about reconciliation and militarisation of civil administration.

In an interview with Sri Lanka’s Derana network, Foreign Secretary Jayanath Colombage said “some powerful countries don’t want us to be neutral. This is the crux of the matter” he argued, adding “this resolution is not about human rights. Its all about international politics. This resolution only has a brief mention about the conflict we ended 12 years ago. It talks about internal domestic politics. Human rights are weaponized, heavily politicised by powerful countries when they want less powerful countries to toe the line and kneel down”.

“The impact on thousands of survivors, from all communities, is devastating. Moreover, the systems, structures, policies and personnel that gave rise to such grave violations in the past remain – and have recently been reinforced” said a statement by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The growing militarisation of key civilian functions is encroaching on democratic governance” she added.

UNHRC seem to be out of touch with recent developments in the country, where at the general elections in August 2020 there was a significant shift in Tamil voter sentiments towards development based empowerment as opposed to rights-based constitutional changes the UNHRC resolutions have been promoting. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which has been working with Tamil dispora groups to pressure western governments such as UK, US, Canada and France to move resolutions against Sri Lanka, had their vote share and seats reduced by over a half. For the first time in 60 years, Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) – a party traditionally identified with Sinhala nationalism – grabbed a seat in the Tamil bastion of Jaffna attracting over 45,000 votes fielding a local Tamil candidate.

“Tamils have voted for change (and) this is a big change and the Tamils in Jaffna have spoken in one voice,” the newly elected Jaffna MP Angajan Ramanathan, who joined the ranks of the government as SLFP is a consituent party of the Rajapakse led alliance, told the Sunday Observer. “When it comes to the North, some politicians only focus on the rights of the Tamils. The Government will provide the peoples’ basic needs and infrastructure, and help them to improve their economic status”.

The Rajapkse regime believes in the Chinese and Singaporean model of economic development which Ramanathan’s statement reflects. Whereas the UNHRC resolution tends to go in the opposite direction. After abstaining from the vote in Geneva, which most Sri Lankans see as voting against them, India released a statement saying that they could not support Sri Lanka because devolution of power to Tamil areas agreed to with India in the late 1980s, has not been properly implemented and the Provincial Council (PC) system that is part of it is being undermined by the current government.

India may have unintentionally given a boost to increasing public sentiments in the country to abolish the PC system because it is seen by most people as an added tier of corruption. People in Sri Lanka want less politicians, not more, and they would much prefer to see development funds equally distributed to the provinces via existing central government structures.

Sri Lanka’s UNHRC battle is without doubt part of the geo-political power play with the West and India trying to use the UNHRC to control Sri Lanka, while China’s influence is achieve with heavy investments in the island and support for Sri Lanka in UN forums. The UNHRC’s vote has pushed Sri Lanka further into China’s embrace, and since UNHRC’s resolutions are not binding – unlike UN Security Council ones – Sri Lanka will bank on “trusted” China to veto any such moves. Though China could not win the vote for Sri Lanka, China may have won another battle for influence in the Indian Ocean.

Writer is a Sri Lankan born born journalist, broadcaster, documentary make and international communications scholar. He is the author of Myth of ‘Free Media’ and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era. (SAGE,2020)

28 March 2021

A version of this article was published by IDN.

 

Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed. Isaiah 56:1

Your sisters and brothers in Palestine implore you to resist the State of Israel’s impending eviction of 15 families from their homes in the Israeli occupied territory of East Jerusalem. Israeli courts have ruled in favor of lawsuits undertaken by settler organizations to remove these families—yet another instance of Israel’s illegal policy of forced transfer. Evictions are scheduled to take place on Sunday, May 2, which happens to coincide with the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.

Most of these families, totaling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, are refugees who in 1948 were forcibly transferred from their homes during the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). They reside now in the Karm AlJa’ouni area of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan.

We don’t understand the reluctance of many leaders in the global church to use the words apartheid and ethnic cleansing to describe the laws and practices of the State of Israel in relation to its Palestinians citizens and the nearly 5.2 million Muslims and Christians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. We reject their hesitancy to condemn the political program of Zionism, fearing the charge of antisemitism. Many Jews and Jewish organizations—both in Israel and around the world—have led in exposing the reality of Israel’s apartheid regime and decried its impunity on the international stage.1

Daily we experience the restrictions, the dehumanization, the brutality and loss of life resulting from these apartheid laws and policies. Daily we suffer the abuses of Zionism, which as practiced in Israel and Palestine clearly favors the rights of one people, one ethnicity, over another.

On one hand, Israel supports its settler groups taking back their alleged properties by force, while refusing any Palestinian lawful claims to their original properties in West Jerusalem where they were forced out during the 1948.

Kairos Palestine, the most extensive Palestinian Christian ecumenical non- violent movement, is based on Kairos Palestine document: A Moment of Truth, launched in 2009, affirming that the Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Palestinian nation, calling for peace to end all suffering in the Holy Land by laboring for justice, hope and love, embraced by the Christian community, signed by all historically recognized Palestinian Christian organizations, and endorsed by the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem.

Surely you understand our disappointment – bordering on despair- that the global church has not more fully embraced our many urgent calls for concrete and practical acts to end the occupation, the latest being our 2020 Cry for Hope: A Call to Decisive Action. Still, we place our hope in your solidarity.

What are we imploring you to do?

Regarding the impending May 2 evictions—and the hundreds more expected in the neighborhood of Batan al-Hawa in East Jerusalem’s Silwan – Kairos calls on its networks to write to their governments, insisting that they intervene to stop this action on the basis of human dignity and international law. Source

The Nakba of Sheikh Jarrah: How Israel Uses ‘the Law’ to Ethnically Cleanse East Jerusalem (Excerpts from an article by Ramzy Baroud*)

A Palestinian man, Atef Yousef Hanaysha, was killed by Israeli occupation forces on March 19 during a weekly protest against illegal Israeli settlement expansion in Beit Dajan, near Nablus, in the northern West Bank. Although tragic, the above news reads like a routine item from occupied Palestine, where shooting and killing unarmed protesters is part of the daily reality. However, this is not true. Since right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced, in September 2019, his intentions to formally and illegally annex nearly a third of the occupied Palestinian West Bank, tensions have remained high….

In occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a massive battle is already underway. On one side, Israeli soldiers, army bulldozers and illegal armed Jewish settlers are carrying out daily missions of evicting Palestinian families, displacing farmers, burning orchards, demolishing homes and confiscating land. On the other side, Palestinian civilians, often disorganized, unprotected and leaderless, are fighting back… On March 10, fourteen Palestinian and Arab organizations issued a ‘joint urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Procedures on forced evictions in East Jerusalem’ to stop the Israeli evictions in the area. Successive decisions by Israeli courts have paved the way for the Israeli army and police to evict 15 Palestinian families – 37 households of around 195 people – in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah and Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in the town of Silwan.

These imminent evictions are not the first, nor will they be the last. Israel occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem in June 1967 and formally, though illegally, annexed it in 1980. Since then, the Israeli government has vehemently rejected international criticism of the Israeli occupation, dubbing, instead, Jerusalem as the “eternal and undivided capital of Israel”. To ensure its annexation of the city is irreversible, the Israeli government approved the Master Plan 2000, a massive scheme that was undertaken by Israel to rearrange the boundaries of the city in such a way that it would ensure permanent demographic majority for Israeli Jews at the expense of the city’s native inhabitants…

While news headlines occasionally present the habitual evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other parts of East Jerusalem as if a matter that involves counterclaims by Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers, the story is, in fact, a wider representation of Palestine’s modern history. Indeed, the innocent families which are now facing “the imminent risk of forced eviction” are re-living their ancestral nightmare of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in 1948.

Two years after the native inhabitants of historic Palestine were dispossessed of their homes and lands and ethnically cleansed altogether, Israel enacted the so-called Absentees’ Property Law of 1950. The law, which, of course, has no legal or moral validity, simply granted the properties of Palestinians who were evicted or fled the war to the State, to do with it as it pleases. Since those ‘absentee’ Palestinians were not allowed to exercise their right of return, as stipulated by international law, the Israeli law was a state-sanctioned wholesale theft. It ultimately aimed at achieving two objectives: one, to ensure Palestinian refugees do not return or attempt to claim their stolen properties in Palestine and, two, to give Israel a legal cover for permanently confiscating Palestinian lands and homes.

The Israeli military occupation of the remainder of historic Palestine in 1967 necessitated, from an Israeli colonial perspective, the creation of fresh laws that would allow the State and the illegal settlement enterprise to claim yet more Palestinian properties. This took place in 1970 in the form of the Legal and Administrative Matters Law. According to the new legal framework, only Israeli Jews were allowed to claim lost land and property in Palestinian areas. Much of the evictions in East Jerusalem take place within the context of these three interconnected and strange legal arguments: the Absentees’ Law, the Legal and Administrative Matters Law and the Master Plan 2000. Understood together, one is easily able to decipher the nature of the Israeli colonial scheme in East Jerusalem, where Israeli individuals, in coordination with settler organizations, work together to fulfill the vision of the State.

Palestinian human rights organizations describe the flow of how eviction orders, issued by Israeli courts, culminate into the construction of illegal Jewish settlements. Confiscated Palestinian properties are usually transferred to a branch within the Israeli Ministry of Justice called the Israeli Custodian General. The latter holds on to these properties until they are claimed by Israeli Jews, in accordance with the 1970 Law. The Israeli State claims to play an impartial role in this scheme, it is actually the facilitator of the entire process. While the above picture can be dismissed by some as another routine, common occurrence, the situation in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has become extremely volatile. Palestinians feel that they have nothing more to lose and Netanyahu’s government is more emboldened than ever. The killing of Atef Hanaysha, and others like him, is only the beginning of that imminent, widespread confrontation. Source

27 March 2021

Source: palestineupdates.com

 

By Kenny Stancil

While Myanmar’s military celebrated Armed Forces Day on Saturday with a parade through the capital, the ruling junta’s security forces killed more than 100 people elsewhere throughout the country in the deadliest crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protesters since last month’s coup.

According to Myanmar Now, soldiers and police had killed at least 114 people, including children, nationwide as of 9:30 pm on Saturday in Myanmar.

“The military celebrated Armed Forces Day by committing mass murder against the people it should be defending,” said Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. “The Civil Disobedience Movement is responding with powerful weapons of peace.”

“It’s past time,” Andrews added, “for the world to respond in kind with and for the people of Myanmar.”

Saturday’s brutal massacre, which came just one day after a regional human rights group reported that the total death toll since the military regime seized power on February 1 had climbed to 328, was widely condemned by diplomats around the world.

“This bloodshed is horrifying,” said U.S. Ambassador Thomas Vajda. “Myanmar’s people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule.”

The European Union’s delegation to Myanmar tweeted: “This 76th Myanmar Armed Forces Day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonor. The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts.”

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour. The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts. The EU stands by the people of Myanmar and calls for an immediate end of violence and the restoration of democracy.

— EUMyanmar (@EUMyanmar) March 27, 2021

British foreign secretary Dominic Raab said that “today’s killing of unarmed civilians, including children, marks a new low. We will work with our international partners to end this senseless violence, hold those responsible to account, and secure a path back to democracy.”

In a statement issued Thursday, Andrews had warned that “conditions in Myanmar are deteriorating, but they will likely get much worse without an immediate robust, international response in support of those under siege.”

“It is imperative that the international community heed the recent call of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for a ‘firm, unified international response,’” Andrews said. “To date, however, the limited sanctions imposed by member states do not cut the junta’s access to revenue that help sustain its illegal activities, and the slow pace of diplomacy is out of step with the scale of the crisis.”

Andrews noted that “the incremental approach to sanctions has left the most lucrative business assets of the junta unscathed. It needs to be replaced by robust action that includes a diplomatic offensive designed to meet the moment.”

“Without a focused, diplomatic solution, including the hosting of an emergency summit that brings together Myanmar’s neighbors and those countries with great influence in the region, I fear the situation of human rights in Myanmar will further deteriorate as the junta increases the rate of murders, enforced disappearances, and torture,” he said.

Andrews’ fears were realized Saturday as the military escalated its use of lethal violence against anti-coup demonstrators and other civilians.

“They are killing us like birds or chickens, even in our homes,” resident Thu Ya Zaw told Reuters in the central town of Myingyan. “We will keep protesting regardless… We must fight until the junta falls.”

The resolve of pro-democracy protesters is evident. According to Al Jazeera, citizens defied a “military warning that they could be shot ‘in the head and back’” in order to take to “the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.”

Kyaw Win, the director of the Burma Human Rights Network in the United Kingdom, told BBC News that the military had shown it had “no limits, no principles.”

“It’s a massacre, it’s not a crackdown anymore,” Win added.

In his statement released prior to Saturday’s wholesale killing, Andrews emphasized that “it is critical that the people of Myanmar… the duly elected illegally deposed parliamentarians who make up the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, and opposition leaders and activists see that the international community is working towards a diplomatic solution in support of the peaceful Civil Disobedience Movement.”

“This combined course of action—domestic peaceful resistance, sustained pressure, and international diplomatic momentum—will have a greater chance for success than taking up arms,” Andrews continued, “and will save untold numbers of lives.”

“Member states have an opportunity to demonstrate this alternative, but the window in which this can be achieved is closing rapidly,” he said, adding: “I fear that the international community has only a short time remaining to act.”

That warning has become even more urgent since it was first shared.

Originally published in Common Dreams

28 March 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

22 Feb 2021 – I have spent the past several years on this blog trying to highlight one thing above all others: that the institutions we were raised to regard as authoritative are undeserving of our blind trust.

It is not just that expert institutions have been captured wholesale by corporate elites over the past 40 years and that, as a result, knowledge, experience and expertise have been sidelined in favour of elite interests – though that is undoubtedly true. The problem runs deeper: these institutions were rarely as competent or as authoritative as we fondly remember them being. They always served elite interests.

What has changed most are our perceptions of institutions that were once beloved or trusted. It is we who have changed more than the institutions. That is because we now have far more sources – good and bad alike – than ever before against which we can judge the assertions of those who claim to speak with authority.

Hanging out together

Here is a personal example. When I started work as an editor at the foreign section of the Guardian newspaper in the early 1990s, there were few ways, from the paper’s London head office, to independently evaluate or scrutinise the presentation of events by any of our correspondents in their far-flung bureaus. All we could do was compare the copy they sent with that from other correspondents, either published in rival newspapers or available from two or three English-language wire services.

Even that safeguard is far less meaningful than it might sound to an outsider.

The correspondents for these various publications – whether based in Bangkok, Amman, Moscow, Havana or Washington – are a small group. Inevitably they each bring to their work a narrow range of mostly unconscious but almost identical biases. They hang out together – like any other expat community – in the same bars, clubs and restaurants. Their children attend the same international schools, and their families socialise together at the weekends.

Similar pasts

Correspondents from these various newspapers also have similar backgrounds. They have received much the same privileged education, at private or grammar schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge, and as a result share largely the same set of values. They have followed almost identical career paths, and their reports are written chiefly to impress their editors and each other. They are appointed by a foreign editor who served a decade or two earlier in one of the same bureaus they now head, and he (for invariably it is a he) selected them because they reminded him of himself at their age.

The “local sources” quoted by these correspondents are drawn from the same small pool of local politicians, academics and policymakers – people the correspondents have agreed are the most authoritative and in a position to speak on behalf of the rest of the local population.

Nowhere in this chain of news selection, gathering, editing and production are there likely to be voices questioning or challenging the correspondents’ shared view of what constitutes “news”, or their shared interpretation and presentation of that news.

Working in the guild

This is not the news business as journalists themselves like to present it. They are not fearless, lone-wolf reporters pursuing exclusives and digging up dirt on the rich and powerful. They comprise something more akin to the guilds of old. Journalists are trained to see the world and write about it in near-identical terms.

The only reason the media “guild” looks far less credible than it did 20 or 30 years ago is because now we can often cut out the middleman – the correspondent himself. We can watch videos on Youtube of local events as they occur, or soon afterwards. We can hear directly from members of the local population who would never be given a platform in corporate media. We can read accounts from different types of journalists, including informed local ones, who would never be allowed to write for a corporate news outlet because they are not drawn from the narrow, carefully selected and trained group known as “foreign correspondents”.

My latest: A short video of settlers disrupting a family picnic may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy https://t.co/5RqMrNbgwy

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 17, 2021

A partial picture

In this regard, let us consider my own area of specialist interest: Israel and Palestine. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been beating up and shooting at Palestinian farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives for more than half a century. It is one of the main practical means by which the settlers implement an ethnic cleansing policy designed to drive Palestinians off their farmland.

The settlers have thereby expanded their “municipal jurisdictions” to cover more than 40 per cent of the West Bank, territory under Israeli occupation that was supposed to form the backbone of any future Palestinian state. This settler violence is part of the reason why Palestinian statehood looks impossible today.

But until a decade or so ago – when phone cameras meant that recorded visual evidence became commonplace and irrefutable – you would rarely have had a way to know about those attacks. Correspondents in Jerusalem had decided on your behalf that you did not need to know.

Maybe the correspondents refused to believe the accounts of Palestinians or preferred the explanations from Israeli officials that these were just anti-Israel lies motivated by antisemitism. Or maybe the correspondents thought these attacks were not important enough, or that without corroboration they themselves risked being accused of antisemitism.

Whatever the reason, the fact is they did not tell their readers. This absence of information meant, in turn, that when Palestinians retaliated – in acts that were much more likely to be reported by correspondents – it looked to readers back home as if Palestinian violence was unprovoked and irrational. Western coverage invariably bolstered racist stereotypes suggesting that Palestinians were innately violent or antisemitic, and that Israelis, even violent settlers, were always victims.

Unreliable experts

This problem is far from unique to journalism. There are similar issues with any of the professions – or guilds – that comprise and service today’s corporate establishment, whether it is the judiciary, politicians, the military, academics or non-profits. Those supposedly holding the establishment to account are usually deeply invested, whether it be financially or emotionally, in the establishment’s survival – either because they are part of that establishment or because they benefit from it.

And because these self-selecting “guilds” have long served as the public’s eyes and ears when we try to understand, assess and hold to account the corporate elites that rule over us, we necessarily have access only to partial, self-justifying, establishment-reinforcing information. As a result, we are likely to draw faulty conclusions about both the establishment itself and the guilds that prop up the establishment.

Very belatedly, we have come to understand how unreliable these experts – these guilds – are only because they no longer enjoy an exclusive right to narrate to us the world we inhabit. The backlash, of course, has not been long in coming. Using the pretext of “fake news”, these institutions are pushing back vigorously to shut down our access to different kinds of narration.

Plague of deficiency

All this is by way of a very long introduction to a follow-up post on an article I wrote last week about the failure of doctors to press governments to finance proper, large-scale studies on the treatment of hospitalised Covid patients with Vitamin D – an important immunological hormone created by sunlight on our skin.

The role of Vitamin D on our general wellbeing and health has come under increasing scrutiny over the past two decades after it was discovered that it is the only vitamin for which there is a receptor in every cell in our body.

Long before Covid, researchers had begun to understand that Vitamin D’s role in regulating our immune systems was chronically under-appreciated by most doctors. The medical profession was stuck in a paradigm from the 1950s in which Vitamin D’s use related chiefly to bone health. As a consequence, today’s recommended daily allowances – usually between 400IU and 800IU – were established long ago in accordance with the minimum needed for healthy bones rather than the maximum needed for a healthy immune system.

Today we know that many people in northern latitudes, especially the elderly, are deficient or severely deficient in Vitamin D, even those taking government-approved, low-level supplements. In fact, it would be true to say there is a global plague of Vitamin D deficiency, even in many sunny countries where people have lost the habit of spending time outdoors or shield themselves from the sun.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

8 March 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Manlio Dinucci

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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About six years ago, when we titled “Are the missiles returning to Comiso?” in il Manifesto (June 9, 2015), our hypothesis that the US wanted to bring their nuclear missiles back to Europe was ignored by the entire political-media arc. Subsequent events have shown that the alarm, unfortunately, was well founded. Now, for the first time, we have the official confirmation.

A few days ago, on March 11, one of the top US military authorities, General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the United States Army confirmed it. Not in an interview with CNN, but during a speech at an experts’ meeting at the George Washington School of Media and Public Affairs – here we have the official transcript General McConville not only reported that the US Army is preparing to deploy, evidently aimed at Russia, new missiles in Europe, but revealed that they will be hypersonic missiles, an extremely dangerous new weapon system.

This decision creates a very high-risk situation, similar or worse than that one Europe experienced during the Cold War, as front line of the nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR.

Hypersonic missiles – their speed is 5 times faster than that of sound (Mach 5), that is more than 6,000 km / h – constitute a new weapon system with a nuclear attack capacity superior to that of ballistic missiles. While these follow an arc trajectory for the most part above the atmosphere, the hypersonic missiles instead follow a low altitude trajectory in the atmosphere directly towards the target, which they reach in less time by penetrating the enemy defenses.

In his speech at the George Washington School of Media and Public Affairs, General McConville revealed that the US Army is preparing a “task force” with “a long-range precision fires capability that can range anywhere from hypersonic missiles to mid-range capability, to precision strike missiles and these systems have the ability to penetrate an Anti-Access Aerial Denial environment”. The General stated that “ We see the future of that being in the Pacific, probably two in the Pacific ” (evidently directed against China); we see one in Europe (evidently directed against Russia); and we’re building them as we speak”.

In an official statement DARPA informed to have commissioned Lockheed Martin to manufacture “a ground-launched intermediate-range hypersonic weapons system”, that is, missiles with a range between 500 and 5500 km belonging to the category that was prohibited by the Treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces signed in 1987 by President Gorbachev and President Reagan; the treaty was torn apart by President Trump in 2019. According to the technical specifications provided by DARPA, itt will be “a novel system enabling hypersonic boost glide weapons to rapidly and precisely engage critical, time-sensitive targets while penetrating modern enemy air defenses. The program is developing an advanced booster capable of delivering a variety of payloads at multiple ranges and compatible mobile ground launch platforms that can be rapidly deployed”.

The Army Chief of Staff and the Pentagon Research Agency therefore informed that the United States will soon deploy hypersonic missiles, armed with “ a variety of payloads” (that is, nuclear and conventional warheads), in Europe (there are rumors of a probable first base in Poland or Romania). Intermediate-range nuclear hypersonic missiles installed on “ mobile ground launch platforms “, that is, on special vehicles, could be rapidly deployed in the NATO countries closest to Russia (for example the Baltic Republics). Having already the ability to fly at around 10,000 km/h, the hypersonic missiles will be able to reach Moscow in around 5 minutes.

Russia is also building hypersonic intermediate-range missiles but, by launching them from its own territory, it cannot hit Washington. However, the Russian hypersonic missiles will be able to reach US bases in a few minutes, first of all nuclear ones such as Ghedi and Aviano bases, and other targets in Europe. Russia, like the United States and other nations, is deploying new inter-continental missiles: the Avangard is a hypersonic vehicle with a range of 11,000 km and armed with multiple nuclear warheads which, after a ballistic trajectory, glides over 6,000 km at speed almost 25,000 km/h. Hypersonic missiles are also being built by China. Since hypersonic missiles are guided by satellite systems, the confrontation is increasingly taking place in space: for this purpose, the US Space Force was created in 2019 by the Trump Administration.

Air and Naval Forces, that have greater mobility, are also equipped with hypersonic weapons. These weapons open a new phase of the nuclear arms race, making the New Start Treaty, just renewed by the US and Russia, largely outdated. This race passes more and more from the quantitative level (number and power of nuclear warheads) to the qualitative level (speed, penetrating capacity and geographical location of the the nuclear delivery vehicles). In the event of an attack or presumed attack, the response is increasingly entrusted to artificial intelligence, which must decide the nuclear missiles’ launch in a few seconds or fractions of a second. It exponentially increases the possibility of a nuclear war by mistake, a risk that occurred several times during the Cold War. “Doctor Strangelove” will not be a mad general, but a supercomputer gone mad. Lacking the human intelligence to stop this mad rush to catastrophe, the survival instinct should at least be triggered, so far only awakened by Covid-19.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

24 March 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Alfred W McCoy

Empires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.

By 1956, Britain had exploited its global empire shamelessly for a decade in an effort to lift its domestic economy out of the rubble of World War II. It was looking forward to doing so for many decades to come. Then an obscure Egyptian army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal and Britain’s establishment erupted in a paroxysm of racist outrage. The prime minister of the day, Sir Antony Eden, forged an alliance with France and Israel to send six aircraft carriers to the Suez area, smash Egypt’s tank force in the Sinai desert, and sweep its air force from the skies.

But Nasser grasped the deeper geopolitics of empire in a way that British leaders had long forgotten. The Suez Canal was the strategic hinge that tied Britain to its Asian empire — to British Petroleum’s oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the sea lanes to Singapore and beyond. So, in a geopolitical masterstroke, he simply filled a few rusting freighters with rocks and sank them at the entrance to the canal, snapping that hinge in a single gesture. After Eden was forced to withdraw British forces in a humiliating defeat, the once-mighty British pound trembled at the precipice of collapse and, overnight, the sense of imperial power in England seemed to vanish like a desert mirage.

Two Decades of Delusions

In a similar manner, Washington’s hubris is finding its nemesis in China’s President Xi Jinping and his grand strategy for uniting Eurasia into the world’s largest economic bloc. For two decades, as China climbed, step by step, toward global eminence, Washington’s inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. In the process, from Bill Clinton’s administration to Joe Biden’s, Washington’s China policy has morphed from illusion directly into a state of bipartisan delusion.

Back in 2000, the Clinton administration believed that, if admitted to the World Trade Organization, Beijing would play the global game strictly by Washington’s rules. When China started playing imperial hardball instead — stealing patents, forcing companies to turn over trade secrets, and manipulating its currency to increase its exports — the elite journal Foreign Affairs tut-tutted that such charges had “little merit,” urging Washington to avoid “an all-out trade war” by learning to “respect difference and look for common ground.”

Within just three years, a flood of exports produced by China’s low-wage workforce, drawn from 20% of the world’s population, began shutting down factories across America. The AFL-CIO labor confederation then started accusing Beijing of illegally “dumping” its goods in the U.S. at below-market prices. The administration of George W. Bush, however, dismissed the charges for lack of “conclusive evidence,” allowing Beijing’s export juggernaut to grind on unimpeded.

For the most part, the Bush-Cheney White House simply ignored China, instead invading Iraq in 2003, launching a strategy that was supposed to give the U.S. lasting dominion over the Middle East’s vast oil reserves. By the time Washington withdrew from Baghdad in 2011, having wasted up to $5.4 trillion on the misbegotten invasion and occupation of that country, fracking had left America on the edge of energy independence, while oil was joining cordwood and coal as a fuel whose days were numbered, potentially rendering the future Middle East geopolitically irrelevant.

While Washington had been pouring blood and treasure into desert sands, Beijing was making itself into the world’s workshop. It had amassed $4 trillion in foreign exchange, which it began investing in an ambitious scheme it called the Belt and Road Initiative to unify Eurasia via history’s largest set of infrastructure projects. Hoping to counter that move with a bold geopolitical gambit, President Barack Obama tried to check China with a new strategy that he called a “pivot to Asia.” It was to entail a global military shift of U.S. forces to the Pacific and a drawing of Eurasia’s commerce toward America through a new set of trade pacts. The scheme, brilliant in the abstract, soon crashed head-first into some harsh realities. As a start, extricating the U.S. military from the mess it had made in the Greater Middle East proved far harder than imagined. Meanwhile, getting big global trade treaties approved as anti-globalization populism surged across America — fueled by factory closures and stagnant wages — turned out, in the end, to be impossible.

Even President Obama underestimated the seriousness of China’s sustained challenge to this country’s global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” two senior Obama officials would later write, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”

Breaking with the Beltway consensus about China, Donald Trump would spend two years of his presidency fighting a trade war, thinking he could use America’s economic power — in the end, just a few tariffs — to bring Beijing to its knees. Despite his administration’s incredibly erratic foreign policy, its recognition of China’s challenge would prove surprisingly consistent. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster would, for instance, observe that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.” Similarly, Trump’s State Department warned that Beijing harbored “hegemonic ambitions” aimed at “displacing the United States as the world’s foremost power.”

In the end, however, Trump would capitulate. By January 2020, his trade war would have devastated this country’s agricultural exports, while inflicting heavy losses on its commercial supply chain, forcing the White House to rescind some of those punitive tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promises to purchase more American goods. Despite a celebratory White House signing ceremony, that deal represented little more than a surrender.

Joe Biden’s Imperial Illusions

Even now, after these 20 years of bipartisan failure, Washington’s imperial illusions persist. The Biden administration and its inside-the-Beltway foreign-policy experts seem to think that China is a problem like Covid-19 that can be managed simply by being the un-Trump. Last December, a pair of professors writing in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs typically opined that “America may one day look back on China the way they now view the Soviet Union,” that is, “as a dangerous rival whose evident strengths concealed stagnation and vulnerability.”

Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama’s National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. China’s population, he pointed out, is aging, its debt ballooning, and its politics “increasingly sclerotic.” In the event of conflict, China is geopolitically “vulnerable when it comes to food and energy security,” since its navy is unable to prevent it “from being cut off from vital supplies.”

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, a former official in Obama’s State Department, Jake Sullivan, began auditioning for appointment as Biden’s national security adviser by staking out a similar position. In Foreign Affairs, he argued that China might be “more formidable economically… than the Soviet Union ever was,” but Washington could still achieve “a steady state of… coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” Although China was clearly trying “to establish itself as the world’s leading power,” he added, America “still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition,” just as long as it avoids Trump’s “trajectory of self-sabotage.”

As expected from such a skilled courtier, Sullivan’s views coincided carefully with those of his future boss, Joe Biden. In his main foreign policy manifesto for the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden argued that “to win the competition for the future against China,” the U.S. had to “sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world.”

All these men are veteran foreign policy professionals with a wealth of international experience. Yet they seem oblivious to the geopolitical foundations for global power that Xi Jinping, like Nasser before him, seemed to grasp so intuitively. Like the British establishment of the 1950s, these American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they’ve forgotten how they got there.

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s Cold War leaders had a clear understanding that their global power, like Britain’s before it, would depend on control over Eurasia. For the previous 400 years, every would-be global hegemon had struggled to dominate that vast land mass. In the sixteenth century, Portugal had dotted continental coastlines with 50 fortified ports (feitorias) stretching from Lisbon to the Straits of Malacca (which connect the Indian Ocean to the Pacific), just as, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain would rule the waves through naval bastions that stretched from Scapa Flow, Scotland, to Singapore.

While Portugal’s strategy, as recorded in royal decrees, was focused on controlling maritime choke points, Britain benefitted from the systematic study of geopolitics by the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, who argued that the key to global power was control over Eurasia and, more broadly, a tri-continental “world island” comprised of Asia, Europe, and Africa. As strong as those empires were in their day, no imperial power fully perfected its global reach by capturing both axial ends of Eurasia — until America came on the scene.

The Cold War Struggle for Control over Eurasia

During its first decade as the globe’s great hegemon at the close of World War II, Washington quite self-consciously set out to build an apparatus of awesome military power that would allow it to dominate the sprawling Eurasian land mass. With each passing decade, layer upon layer of weaponry and an ever-growing network of military bastions were combined to “contain” communism behind a 5,000-mile Iron Curtain that arched across Eurasia, from the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone near Seoul, South Korea.

Through its post-World War II occupation of the defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, Washington seized military bases, large and small, at both ends of Eurasia. In Japan, for example, its military would occupy approximately 100 installations from Misawa air base in the far north to Sasebo naval base in the south.

Soon after, as Washington reeled from the twin shocks of a communist victory in China and the start of the Korean war in June 1950, the National Security Council adopted NSC-68, a memorandum making it clear that control of Eurasia would be the key to its global power struggle against communism. “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass,” read that foundational document. The U.S., it insisted, must expand its military yet again “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.”

As the Pentagon’s budget quadrupled from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion in the early 1950s in pursuit of that strategic mission, Washington quickly built a chain of 500 military installations ringing that landmass, from the massive Ramstein air base in West Germany to vast, sprawling naval bases at Subic Bay in the Philippines and Yokosuka, Japan.

Such bases were the visible manifestation of a chain of mutual defense pacts organized across the breadth of Eurasia, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe to a security treaty, ANZUS, involving Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. in the South Pacific. Along the strategic island chain facing Asia known as the Pacific littoral, Washington quickly cemented its position through bilateral defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.

Along the Iron Curtain running through the heart of Europe, 25 active-duty NATO divisions faced 150 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact divisions, both backed by armadas of artillery, tanks, strategic bombers, and nuclear-armed missiles. To patrol the Eurasian continent’s sprawling coastline, Washington mobilized massive naval armadas stiffened by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carriers — the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and the massive 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.

By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.

Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.

China’s Eurasian Strategy

After all that, it seems remarkable that Washington’s current generation of foreign policy leaders, like Britain’s in the 1950s, is so blindingly oblivious to the geopolitics of empire — in this case, to Beijing’s largely economic bid for global power on that same “world island” (Eurasia plus an adjoining Africa).

It’s not as if China has been hiding some secret strategy. In a 2013 speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, President Xi typically urged the peoples of Central Asia to join with his country to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.” Through trade and infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” this vast landmass inhabited by close to three billion people could, he said, become “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

This development scheme, soon to be dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, would become a massive effort to economically integrate that “world island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe by investing well more than a trillion dollars — a sum 10 times larger than the famed U.S. Marshall plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II. Beijing also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with an impressive $100 billion in capital and 103 member nations. More recently, China has formed the world’s largest trade bloc with 14 Asia-Pacific partners and, over Washington’s strenuous objections, signed an ambitious financial services agreement with the European Union.

Such investments, almost none of a military nature, quickly fostered the formation of a transcontinental grid of railroads and gas pipelines extending from East Asia to Europe, the Pacific to the Atlantic, all linked to Beijing. In a striking parallel with that sixteenth century chain of 50 fortified Portuguese ports, Beijing has also acquired special access through loans and leases to more than 40 seaports encompassing its own latter-day “world island” — from the Straits of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline from Piraeus, Greece, to Zeebrugge, Belgium.

With its growing wealth, China also built a blue-water navy that, by 2020, already had 360 warships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and the planet’s second global system of military satellites. That growing force was meant to be the tip of China’s spear aimed at puncturing Washington’s encirclement of Asia. To cut the chain of American installations along the Pacific littoral, Beijing has built eight military bases on tiny (often dredged) islands in the South China Sea and imposed an air defense zone over a portion of the East China Sea. It has also challenged the U.S. Navy’s long-standing dominion over the Indian Ocean by opening its first foreign base at Djibouti in East Africa and building modern ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, and Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with potential military applications.

By now, the inherent strength of Beijing’s geopolitical strategy should be obvious to Washington foreign policy experts, were their insights not clouded by imperial hubris. Ignoring the unbending geopolitics of global power, centered as always on Eurasia, those Washington insiders now coming to power in the Biden administration somehow imagine that there is still a fight to be fought, a competition to be waged, a race to be run. Yet, as with the British in the 1950s, that ship may well have sailed.

By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.

As Sir Halford Mackinder might have put it, had he lived to celebrate his 160th birthday last month, the U.S. dominated Eurasia and thereby the world for 70 years. Now, China is taking control of that strategic continent and global power will surely follow.

However, it will do so on anything but the recognizable planet of the last 400 years. Sooner or later, Washington will undoubtedly have to accept the unbending geopolitical reality that undergirds the latest shift in global power and adapt its foreign policy and fiscal priorities accordingly.

This current version of the Suez syndrome is, nonetheless, anything but the usual. Thanks to longterm imperial development based on fossil fuels, planet Earth itself is now changing in ways dangerous to any power, no matter how imperial or ascendant. So, sooner or later, both Washington and Beijing will have to recognize that we are now in a distinctly dangerous new world where, in the decades to come, without some kind of coordination and global cooperation to curtail climate change, old imperial truths of any sort are likely to be left in the attic of history in a house coming down around all our ears.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

22 March 2021

Source: countercurrents.org