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By Jonathan Cook

It is time to stop believing these infantile narratives the British political and media establishments have crafted for us. Like the one in which they tell us they care deeply about the state of political life, and that they lie awake at night worrying about the threat posed by populism to our democratic institutions.

How do they persuade us of the depth of their concern? They express their horror at at the murder of an MP, Jo Cox, and their outrage at the abuse of another, Anna Soubry – both victims of the frenzied passions unleashed by Brexit.

But the political and media elites don’t really care whether politicians are assaulted, vilified or threatened – at least, not if it is the kind of politician who threatens their power. They aren’t seriously worried about attacks on democracy, or about political violence, or about the rottenness at the core of state institutions. Their outrage is selective. It is rooted not in principle, but in self-interest.

Is that too cynical? Ponder this.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t faced just shouted insults from afar, like Soubry. He was recently physically assaulted, hit on the head by a man holding an egg in his fist. But unlike Soubry, our media expressed no real concern. In fact, they could barely hide their sniggers at his “egging”, an attack they presented as little more than a prank. They even hinted that Corbyn deserved it.

‘Kill vampire Jezza’

The media have been only happy too to vilify Corbyn as a Kremlin stooge and a former Soviet spy. Senior Tory Iain Duncan Smith this week called Corbyn “a Marxist whose sole purpose in life is to do real damage to the country” – a remark that, as ever went, entirely unchallenged by the BBC interviewer giving him a platform. Just imagine a Labour MP being allowed to accuse Theresa May of being a fascist whose only goal is to destroy the country.

But the BBC has never bothered to conceal its intense dislike of Corbyn. Its news shows have even photoshopped the Labour leader to make him look “Russian” – or “more Russian”, as the BBC and the rest of the media mischievously phrased it. Those who protested were told they were reading too much into it. They needed to lighten up and not take themselves so seriously.

Senior Conservatives, including the former defence secretary Michael Fallon, have regularly portrayed Corbyn as a threat to national security, especially over concerns about the Trident nuclear missile system. Many senior members of Corbyn’s own party have echoed such smears – all amplified, of course, by the media.

Those who suggested that the government and media needed to engage with Corbyn’s well-grounded doubts about the safety of nuclear weapons, or the economics and practicalities of the Trident programme, were derided – like Corbyn – as “pacifists” and “traitors”.

And the mood music to these political clashes was the quite literal demonisation of Corbyn by the red-top dailies. Most famously, the Daily Mail photoshopped him as Dracula, above the headline: “Labour must KILL vampire Jezza.”

Degraded political culture

Then Corbyn became the target of another sustained smear campaign. It was claimed that this lifelong, very public anti-racism activist – who over decades had forged strong ties to sections of the British Jewish community, despite being a steadfast critic of Israel – was a secret anti-semite, or at best providing succour to anti-semites as they overran the Labour party.

Was there any factual basis or evidence for these claims? No. But the British public was assured by rightwing Jews like the Board of Deputies and by “leftwing” Jewish supporters of Israel like Jonathan Freedland that evidence wasn’t necessary, that they had a sixth sense for these things.

Corbyn’s supporters were told that they should not question the wildly inflammatory and evidence-free denunciations of Corbyn and the wider Labour membership for a supposed “institutional anti-semitism” – and, with a satisfyingly circular logic, that to do so was itself proof of anti-semitism.

The weaponisation of anti-semitism through political spin by Corbyn’s political enemies, including the Blairite faction of the parliamentary Labour party, was and is a dangerous assault on public life, one that has very obviously degraded Britain’s political culture.

Too toxic to lead Labour

The smear was meant to override the membership’s wishes and make Corbyn too toxic to lead Labour.

It has also politicised the anti-semitism allegation, weakening it for a section of the population, and irresponsibly inflaming fears among other sections. It has deflected attention from the very real threat of a rising tide of rightwing racism, both Islamophobia and the kind of anti-semitism that relates to Jews, not Israel.

Then, there was the serving British general who was given a platform by the Sunday Times – anonymously, of course – to accuse Corbyn of being a threat to Britain’s security. The general warned that the army’s senior command would never allow Corbyn near Number 10. They would launch a coup first.

But no one in the corporate media or the political establishment thought the interview worthy of much attention, or demanded an investigation to find out which general had threatened to overturn the democratic will of the people. The story was quickly dropped down the memory hole. Those who sought to draw attention to it were told to move on, that there was nothing to see.

And now, this week, footage has emerged showing British soldiers – apparently taking their commanders’ expressed wishes more seriously than the media – using a poster of Corbyn as target practice out in Afghanistan.

Questioning ‘security credentials’

Do the media and politicians really care about any of this? Are they concerned, let alone as outraged as they were at Soubry’s earlier discomfort at the verbal abuse she faced? Do they understand the seriousness of this threat to British political life, to the safety of the leader of the opposition, they themselves have stoked?

The signs are still far from reassuring. Theresa May did not think it worth using prime minister’s questions to condemn the video, to send an unequivocal message that Britain’s political choices would never be decided by violence. No one else in the chamber apparently thought to raise the matter either.

Sky News even used the footage to question yet again Corbyn’s “security credentials”, as though the soldiers might thereby have grounds for treating him as a legitimate target.

The clues as to where all this is leading are not hard to fathom. The white nationalist who drove into a crowd outside Finsbury Park mosque in London in 2017, killing a worshipper, admitted at his trial that the real target had been Corbyn. An unexpected roadblock foiled his plans.

The fact is that no one in the political or media class cares much whether their constant trivialising of Corbyn’s political programme degrades British political life, or whether their smears could lead to political violence, or whether four years of their incitement might encourage someone to use more than an egg and a fist against Corbyn.

So let’s stop indulging the media and politicians as they cite Jo Cox’s murder and Anna Soubry’s intimidation as evidence of their democratic sensibilities and their commitment to political principle.

The truth is they are charlatans. They will use anything – from the murder of an MP to confections of anti-semitism and smears about treason – to incite against a democratic politician who threatens their domination of the political system.

It is their refusal to engage with a political argument they know they will lose, and to allow a democratic process to take place that they fear will produce the wrong result, that is setting the scene for greater polarisation and frustration. And ultimately for more violence.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

5 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Oscar Grenfell

WikiLeaks today issued a warning that its founder, Julian Assange, faces imminent eviction from Ecuador’s London embassy, where he sought political asylum in 2012. The publishing organisation indicated that he would then be arrested by the British police.

A post by the official WikiLeaks Twitter account at around 5:30 p.m., US Eastern Standard Time, stated: “BREAKING: A high level source within the Ecuadorian state has told @WikiLeaks that Julian Assange will be expelled within ‘hours to days’ using the #INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext—and that it already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.”

In a reply to CNN, Ecuador’s foreign ministry refused to deny WikiLeaks’ allegations. ‘We do not respond to rumors, hypotheses or conjectures that do not have documentary support. If there is official information, we will share it at an opportune moment,’ the ministry stated.

WikiLeaks’ warning must sound the alarm for all defenders of democratic rights. In the heart of London, an advanced conspiracy is underway to abrogate the political asylum of a journalist and publisher, whose only “crime” has been to expose the illegal wars, diplomatic conspiracies and mass surveillance operations of the US, Britain and the other major powers.

If the Ecuadorian government carries out its repeated threats to expel Assange from the embassy, it will forever be viewed by world public opinion as a vassal state that violated the right of asylum to curry favor with the US government, intelligence agencies and Wall Street banks.

As WikiLeaks told the Associated Press earlier this week, if Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno “wants to illegally terminate a refugee publisher’s asylum … history will not be kind.”

A British arrest of Assange would be no less illegal. For years, Assange has been vindictively pursued by British authorities over trumped-up bail charges.

As legal experts have noted, the alleged offences were effectively resolved years ago, when Assange forfeited bail money. Moreover, he has spent more time illegally detained in the embassy, as a result of the British arrest threats, than would stem from any conviction on the minor bail charges.

The transparent purpose of the British detention of Assange would be to facilitate proceedings for his extradition to the US. Late last year, US prosecutors revealed, apparently by mistake, that the American government has already laid charges against the WikiLeaks founder.

Over the past month, the US pursuit of Assange has dramatically escalated. On March 8, Chelsea Manning, who in 2010 leaked US army war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, was arrested and jailed indefinitely for refusing to testify at a closed-door grand jury hearing aimed at concocting charges against Assange. The Trump administration’s detention of the courageous whistleblower has been backed by the Democrats and the corporate press, who have done nothing to oppose her imprisonment.

Manning’s arrest confirms that US charges against Assange would be over WikiLeaks’ publications exposing mass civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the extrajudicial assassination of journalists and children, and US diplomatic intrigues affecting virtually every country in the world. Assange would likely face conspiracy or espionage charges carrying a sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty.

Over the same period that Washington has ramped-up its campaign against Assange, the Ecuadorian regime, doubtless in collaboration with the US government, has sought to manufacture a pretext to carry out its long-standing plans to expel the WikiLeaks founder from the embassy.

Since it came to office in 2017, the Moreno regime has sought to reverse the decision of the previous government to grant Assange asylum, slanderously denouncing him as a “hacker” and “our inherited problem.” Moreno has dramatically expanded relations with the US and has been accused by WikiLeaks of spying on Assange on behalf of the US intelligence agencies

Moreno ordered the shutting-off of Assange’s internet access in March last year and severely curtailed his right to receive visitors. In October, his government issued a protocol, stipulating that Assange’s asylum was conditional on him remaining silent on all political issues, including his own plight.

Last week, senior officials began claiming that Assange had violated the draconian protocol. On Tuesday, Moreno declared in an interview with Ecuadorian state radio that Assange was to blame for a corruption scandal currently engulfing his government.

Moreno accused Assange of hacking the contents of his gmail account and mobile phone, which were sent to an opposition lawmaker last February. The material, along with related documents dubbed the “INA Papers,” implicate Moreno, and his closest associates, including his brother, in fraud, corruption and perjury.

The Ecuadorian government is well aware that its unsubstantiated accusations are bogus. They know Assange does not have internet access, because they terminated it in March last year. The only “evidence” of WikiLeaks’ ties to the INA papers is that the organisation’s Twitter account tweeted reports about the revelations.

The dirty intrigues involving the Ecuadorian, British and US governments have only been able to proceed because of the support of all of the official parties, in those countries, and in Assange’s native Australia, for his persecution.

The political establishment in every country views the campaign against Assange as the spearhead of a broader drive to internet censorship and authoritarian forms of rule. They are pursuing the WikiLeaks founder, to set a precedent for the suppression of mass opposition to war, austerity and dictatorship, amid seething popular discontent around the world and an upsurge of the class struggle.

If Assange is expelled from the embassy and taken into British custody, it will set into motion a protracted legal battle for his freedom. Any application by the Trump administration for Assange’s extradition to the US would be bitterly contested by WikiLeaks’ legal representatives.

The jailing of Manning, in a desperate attempt to force her to give perjured testimony against the WikiLeaks founder, indicates that the US case against Assange cannot withstand serious judicial scrutiny. Manning has, courageously and at great personal cost, refused to comply with this legal travesty.

As legal experts and defenders of democratic rights have repeatedly stressed, any attempt to prosecute Assange in the US for his publishing activities would violate centuries of legal precedent. It would represent nothing less than an attempt to overturn the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects free speech and freedom of the press.

If the United States attempts to extradite Assange through extralegal means, it will only cement its status as a criminal regime operating entirely outside the framework of international law.

The Australian government, which, like its predecessors, has collaborated in the attacks on Assange, has an undeniable responsibility to defend the Australian citizen and journalist. It must use its legal discretion and diplomatic powers to compel the British government to allow Assange to leave the country, and return to Australia, with a guarantee against extradition to the US.

While the legal defence of Assange will be critical, the fight to mobilise workers, students and young people for his freedom will be decisive. In workplaces, university campuses and neighbourhoods, workers and young people must be apprised of Assange’s plight, warned that the attacks against him are aimed at eviscerating their own democratic rights, and rallied in his defence.

The WSWS and Socialist Equality Parties around the world, which held powerful demonstrations in Australia and the US last month demanding Assange’s freedom, will step-up the fight for his liberty. The broadest political campaign, involving all defenders of democratic rights, must be organised, including through the calling of meetings, protests and demonstrations over the coming days and weeks.

5 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Peter Koenig

On 4th of April 2019 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)“celebrated” the 70th Anniversary of its murderous existence. Thishorror organization was born sort of as a “Rosemary’s Baby”, signed into life in Washington DC, as the North Atlantic Treaty. Itscreation was absolutely unethical but also absolutely “legal” -meaning what we, the west, have made the law, a man-made law for war, was applied by the Washington-Pentagon driven NATO. Estimates have it, that NATO and its ‘allies’, cronies, proxies and mercenaries killed more than 20 million people since NATO’s existence, basically since the end of WWII. Compare this with about 70 to 80 million killed in WWII. – The 70 years of NATO are considered “Peace Time” – were they really a period of Peace?

This is a call on all NATO members to exit NATO – to opt for Peace and to exit NATO! To stop fighting wars – to liberate yourselves from the shackles of NATO.

Was the artificially and under totally false pretenses, as we know today, Cold War, which started immediately after WWII and lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – aperiod of Peace? – Or was it rather a period of constant intimidation for war, a period of armament of the west, a period of maximizing profits for themainly US military industrial complex – a period, to destroy any chance the Soviet Union may have had to economically advance, as the arms race made it impossible for the USSR, the country that won WII, to concentrate on economic development at home after having lost 25 million lives and her basic production infrastructure.

And yes, it was the Soviet Union – not the “allies” (US, UK, and France) that liberated the world atthetimefromthe German Nazi dominance. And yes, western history books tell you a different story. Western history books are never to be trusted.

The entirely Pentagon-run NATO has today 29 member countries (NATO member states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO), 26 of which are in Europe, and one, Turkey, in Eurasia.Plus, there are anumber of “associated” or wannabe members, like Ukraine, Israel – and in recent months, would you believe! – Colombia in South America joined NATO through a so-called “Cooperation Agreement”,dating back to 2013 – and Brazil is perhaps the next candidate. The US want to control again their “backyard”, by applying again their Monroe Doctrine (no foreign power, other than the US, in Latin America) except, that the backyard has learned its lesson.

While Venezuela and her hydrocarbon and other mineral riches is the main target right now for NATO’s presence in Colombia and perhaps soon in Brazil, the most democratically elected government in the western world, is not just buckling under, as Washington is used to from the past. No. Venezuela has a solid strategic, economic – and MILITARY alliance with Russia and China. Despite all the infamous Trump-Pompeo-Bolton saber-rattling, its Russia and China who are drawing the red line. So much for the Monroe Doctrine. Times ar’a changing.

The US / NATO – all ruled by the Pentagon – have about 800 – and according to some estimates more than 1,000 military bases in about 100 countries. Not all are known to the public. The funds used to arm and maintain the bases are your tax-payer’s moneys. While producing weapons for theNATO killingbulldozer, these moneys are not available formuch needed, educationandhealth care, let alone basic infrastructure in poor countries, precisely those countries that are being colonized by the US / NATO military bases.

It has, of course, never been a priority for the western elite – those financial-military-petrol and lie-propaganda giants – that dark shady neofascist state that pretends to manipulates the rest of the world, to care for people’s health, and, of course even less so, for people’s education. Educated people are dangerous for these nefarious lecherous, greedy kingpins.

Take note! People around the world, your education is not wanted. Instead the money – YOUR MONEY – your government is supposed spend to give you a decent education soyou can earn adecent living and understandthe ropes of this ever more complex globe – these funds – YOUR FUNDS – arespent for arming to the teeththe NATO bases, tocolonize you and your countries, to enslave you to a One World Order under a western dollar dominated financial hegemony.

They have already all the instruments in place, IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO); they are subordinates to NATO. Get out of them too. They are the “elite’s” (for lack of a better term) tool to suffocate you with debt – so you will be at their mercy and sell them your resources for a pittance. Create your own economy, outside of the realm of GLOBALIZATION, of globalized neoliberalism, bordering already today on neofascism. Get out of NATO – and the rest will follow.

Because that’s what Europe has become: A US-NATO-Pentagon colony. European Nations – you think since you area member of NATO, you have a say in NATO decisions? – Better think again. You know,you have no say in NATO. It couldn’t be more obvious that the Pentagon is calling the shots. Trump and his minions, on behalf of the Pentagon and, of course, on behalf of the military industrial oligarchs, is threatening you – you European members, better pay upto NATO, or else…Whatever “else” means, it’s supposed to scare you. You know, you leaders (sic) of so-called EU members, you have been coopted to obey. Your non-elected European Commission (EC) that calls the shots on European legislation – yes, not the EU Parliament – has also been bought by Washington. The EU is nothing but a puppet of Washington and run by NATO.

But, then, what can you expect, the European Union was never an idea of Europeans. It was an idea born by the CIA already during WWII – then transplanted to some “willing” Europeans, with the promise of NATO protection from the evil Soviets. And, bingo, the red scare did it. It was the US Senator Joseph McCarthy era. The Red Scare. And today, we live in the entire wester era Russia Scare, then the China Scare, scares no-end – they keep NATO in place – keep NATO in Europe and gradually moving around the world – South China Sea, Latin America; the scares keep NATO ravagingand killing millions aroundthe globe.

All the while – there is a real danger of a nuclear war – People, wake up! The Masters of WAR, NATO, are just waiting for the moment to provoke that infamous Red Button. People of this Universe, don’t you realize – if that happens, we are all doomed; mankind is doomed. Mother Earth may recover, but humans self-destruct.

People! Before that happens, kill the killing machine; kill NATO in its roots. Exit NATO! Contribute no penny anymore to the NATO budget. Withdraw from NATO, get out of NATO. Kick NATO out of your sovereign countries. Regain your NATO-stolen sovereignty. – And you will see the feeling of Peace enhances your wellbeing, while the constant fear of war destroys your soul.

Getting out of NATO is actually easy, it’s also legally possible. Asper Article 13 of the NATO charter, all of you members are eligible to exit NATO and to opt for PEACE:

There most likely may be multiple attempts to coopt (buy) your leaders again, under the false pretenses of security. Don’t fall for it. There is no danger from the “East”. In fact, neither Russia or China have an expansionist history. They have a different philosophy. They are seeking amultipolar world, by connecting to what is most logical – the so-called European Continent,which is geographically just the westernmost part of the huge contiguous Continent of Eurasia, even including the Middle East.Trading with friendly nations within this huge land mass is not only logical, it had been done in the past for thousands of years.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, six years ago, launched the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, connecting the world with transport, industrial cultural, learning and research infrastructure; the largest and most brilliant all-inclusive economic development project of known human history. It aims at connecting people, not separating them. It aims at equality and justice, including those left behind, for a world of Peace. As a Chinese delegate to an international conference recently said – we are building bridges to connect people, while the west is building walls.

It’s time for a new era of Peace. Seventy years of NATO, of killing for dominance and greed – is passé. Stop NATO. Exit NATO. Abolish NATO.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst.

6 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rene Wadlow

With the administrative-political situation in Libya badly stalemated and a meeting for negotiations to be held 14-16 April unlikely to make progress, on Thursday 4 April 2019, General Khalifa Hafter, one of the key players in the drama decided to start a “March on Tripoli” and to take overall power by force.

Most of the significant buildings in Libyan cities were built by Italians during the Fascist period when Libya was an Italian colony. Thus, General Hafter has patterned himself on Mussolini’s 1922 “March on Rome”. In 1922, the diplomats of most States looked away when Mussolini marched or the diplomats took it as a domestic affair.

In 2019, the “March on Tripoli” has drawn more international attention and concern. The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met with Hafter a few hours before the March began. Guterres was in Libya to facilitate the 14-16 April meeting on which his Special Representative Ghassan Salomé has been working for some time in the hope of drawing a road map for long-delayed elections. On Friday 5 April, the U.N. Security Council held a closed-door emergency meeting. The Security Council called for a halt to the March on Tripoli and the deescalation of the growing armed conflict.

The Security Council recognized the real possibilities of broader armed conflict and its consequences on the civilian population. In the recent past the Libyan armed factions have violated the laws of war and have a sad record of abuses against civilians.

We will now have to see if Khalifa Hafter is more open to international appeals than was Benito Mussolini. My impression is that the goal of holding overall power is stronger than the respect of international law. However, even a successful “March on Tripoli” will not create the conditions for an administration of a culturally and geographically-diverse country. New and appropriate constitutional structures must be developed.

There cannot be a return to the earlier Italian colonial structures, nor to the forms of government at independence developed by King Idris al Sanussi which depended largely on his role as a religious leader using religious orders, nor the complicated pattern of “direct democracy” developed by Muammar al Qadhafi. The Association of World Citizens has proposed the possibility of con-federal structures.

The post 2011 Libyan society faces large and complex issues. Resolving the institutional, economic and political issues is urgent and cannot be settled by elections alone. There are three distinct regions which must have some degree of autonomy: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica both bordering the Mediterranean and Fezzan in the southern Sahara. Within each of the three regions there are differing and often rival tribal societies which are in practice more kinship lines than organized tribes. (1) There are differing economic interests and there are differing ideologies ranging from “Arab Socialism” to the Islamist ideology of the Islamic State which has spread from its Syrian-Iraqi base.

The situation is critical, and the next few days may be crucial for the future of the country.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

Note

1) See J. Davis. Libyan Politics, Tribes and Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987)
______________________________________________________________________________________________

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

7 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dilip Hiro

It’s still the most dangerous border on Earth. Yet compared to the recent tweets of President Donald Trump, it remains a marginal news story. That doesn’t for a moment diminish the chance that the globe’s first (and possibly ultimate) nuclear conflagration could break out along that 480-mile border known as the Line of Control (and, given the history that surrounds it, that phrase should indeed be capitalized). The casus belli would undoubtedly be the more than seven-decades-old clash between India and Pakistan over the contested territory of Kashmir. Like a volcano, this unresolved dispute rumbles periodically — as it did only weeks ago — threatening to spew its white-hot lava to devastating effect not just in the region but potentially globally as well.

The trigger for renewed rumbling is always a sensational terrorist attack by a Pakistani militant group on an Indian target. That propels the India’s leadership to a moral high ground. From there, bitter condemnations of Pakistan are coupled with the promise of airstrikes on the training camps of the culprit terrorist organizations operating from the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. As a result, the already simmering relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors are quickly raised to a boiling point. This, in turn, prompts the United States to intervene and pressure Pakistan to shut down those violent jihadist groups. To placate Washington, the Pakistani government goes through the ritual of issuing banning orders on those groups, but in practice, any change is minimal.

And in the background always lurks the possibility that a war between the two neighbors could lead to a devastating nuclear exchange. Which means that it’s time to examine how and why, by arraying hundreds of thousands of troops along that Line of Control, India and Pakistan have created the most perilous place on Earth.

How It All Began

The Kashmir dispute began with the birth of the kicking twins — Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan — as independent countries. They emerged from the belly of the dying British Raj in August 1947. The princely states in British India were given the option of joining either of the new nations. The dithering Hindu ruler of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir (its full title) finally signed a legally binding instrument of accession with New Delhi after his realm was invaded by armed tribal raiders from Pakistan. This document offered that state’s citizens the chance to choose between the two countries once peace had been restored. This has not happened so far and there is no credible prospect that it will.

After the 1947-1948 Indo-Pakistani War that followed independence, India was left in control of almost two-thirds of the princely state (18% of which it lost to China in the Sino-Indian War of 1962). Crucially, the 45% of the former princely state that remained in its hands included the Vale of Kashmir. Guarded by snow-capped mountain peaks, covered with verdant forests of fir and pine, carpeted by wild flowers in the spring, and irrigated by the Jhelum River, it has been described by poets and others as “paradise on Earth.” Its population of seven million is 96% Muslim. And it is this territory that is coveted by Pakistan.

In 1989, having secured the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan after a 10-year struggle, some of the Afghan Mujahedin (“Holy Warriors”), including Pakistani militants, turned their attention to liberating Indian-controlled Kashmir. In this, they had the active backing of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, of Pakistan’s army. Earlier, the ISI had acted as the conduit for channeling U.S. and Saudi-supplied weapons and cash to the Mujahedin coalition.

At that time, the two Pakistani groups in the Mujahedin coalition, which always harbored an anti-Indian agenda, emerged front and center. They were the Jaish-e Mohammad (Army of Mohammad) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), led respectively by Masoud Azhar and Hafiz Saeed. Working with those Kashmiris who wanted their state to secede from India, they soon began to resort to terrorist acts.

The Indian government responded with draconian measures. In July 1990, it passed the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, or AFJKSP, a law that authorized the state government to declare any part of Jammu and Kashmir a “disturbed area,” where the Indian army would be free to shoot anyone acting in contravention of “any law” or in possession of a deadly weapon. Indian forces could now arrest people suspected of committing any offense without a warrant or enter and search any premises to make such arrests. In other words, from then on, the armed forces had carte blanche legal immunity to do whatever they wished without the slightest accountability.

Yet resistance to Indian rule did not subside. In fact, the slogan “Azadi” (Freedom) caught on, emboldening both terror groups to jointly launch an audacious attack on the Indian Parliament building on December 20, 2001, with the aim of taking lawmakers hostage. (They were bravely blocked by armed guards.) In the crisis that followed, the mobilized armies of the two neighbors, each already a declared nuclear power, faced off across their international border and the Line of Control in Kashmir. Pressured by Washington, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf banned the two terror organizations in January 2002. Yet both of them soon resurfaced under different names.

In June 2002, at a regional conference in the Kazakh city of Almaty, Musharraf assailed then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for ignoring the wishes of the Kashmiri people. “The possession of nuclear weapons by any state obviously implies they will be used under some circumstances,” he stated grimly, refusing to commit his country (as India had) to a “no first use” policy on nuclear arms. Vajpayee accused him of “nuclear blackmail.” At home, however, Musharraf’s hardline stance was applauded by the militant groups.

Over the years, the crisis only deepened. In November 2008, for instance, working with the ISI, the operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked Mumbai’s landmark Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and two other inns. After a 60-hour siege, 166 people, including 28 foreigners, were dead. Despite initial denials, Pakistan would finally acknowledge that the Mumbai conspiracy was, in part, hatched on its soil, and place Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Saeed under house arrest. But no charges would be leveled against him and he would, in the end, be released.

After the Mumbai carnage, Jaish-e Mohammad’s chief, Azhar, kept a low profile for several years, only to reappear publicly in 2014, issuing fiery calls for more attacks on India (and the United States as well). In September 2016, his fighters stormed an army camp in Uri, an Indian garrison town near the Line of Control, killing 19 soldiers.

With the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, under Narendra Modi gaining power in New Delhi in 2014, repression of the Muslim separatist movement in Kashmir only intensified. Within three years, the number of security personnel — army troops, paramilitaries, border guards, federal armed policemen, state policemen, and intelligence agents — had reached 470,000 in Jammu and Kashmir, which had a population of only 14.1 million. As a result, the proportion of local Kashmiris among anti-Indian fighters only rose.

A Sensational Terrorist Attack

This February 14th, a 19-year-old suicide bomber, Adil Ahmad Dar, drove a car bomb into an Indian convoy heading for Kashmir’s capital city, Srinagar. At least 40 Indian paramilitary troops were killed — the worst such attack in the troubled history of the state. Jaish-e Mohammad proudly claimedresponsibility.

After dropping out of his village school, Dar had gone to work in a neighbor’s sawmill. During a four-month-long protest sparked by the killing of a popular 22-year-old local militant leader, Burhan Wani, in July 2016, Indian troops gunned down nearly 100 protestors, while injuring 15,000, including Dar. In response, he crossed the Line of Control and joined Jaish-e Mohammad. In the wake of his suicide attack, Indian soldiers raided the home of his parents, locked them inside, and set it on fire. And so it continues in the officially “disturbed” Kashmir.

In response to the deaths of the soldiers (and keenly aware of an upcoming nationwide election), Prime Minister Modi exploited the situation for political ends. He turned popular grief into an emotive and prolonged commemoration of those military deaths. TV networks focused on the flag-draped coffins of the slain troops, while local BJP candidates followed their hearses. The cremations were telecast live, while Modi proclaimed that “the security forces have been given complete freedom. The blood of the people is boiling.”

On February 26th, temporarily released from civilian control, the Indian military launched a “pre-emptive” air strike on an alleged Jaish-e Mohammad training camp near Balakot, six miles inside Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The last time the air forces of either country had crossed the international border was during their 1971 war.

India claimed to have killed more than 300 militants, but Islamabad reportedthat the Indian bombs had actually hit a totally deserted site. (This would be confirmed later by satellite analysis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which concluded that no damage had been done to the hilltop facility India claimed to have struck.) The next day Pakistan announced that, in a dogfight between warplanes of the two countries, an Indian fighter jet had been shot down and its pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, captured.

India angrily demanded that he be set free immediately. On February 28th, while announcing the pilot’s release during a televised address, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan warned against miscalculation and the explosive potential for such aerial skirmishes to escalate into a wider conflict in the most dangerous environment on the planet. He said, “With the weapons you have and the weapons we have, can we afford miscalculation? Shouldn’t we think that, if this escalates, what will it lead to?”

This was a barely disguised reference to the devastating nuclear arsenals that the two South Asian neighbors now possess, with 135 nukes in New Delhi’s possession and 145 in Islamabad’s. Those arsenals are more than capable of causing havoc far beyond South Asia. It’s estimated that even a “moderate” Indo-Pakistani nuclear conflict could create a global “nuclear winter,” killing directly or indirectly up to a billion people as crops failed and starvation stalked the Earth.

Those Nuclear Arsenals

Pakistan’s arsenal now includes tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) with “low” explosive power for battlefield use. In 2011, it tested its first one successfully. Since then, according to Professor Rajesh Rajagopalan, author of Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and Concepts, Pakistan is believed to have assembled four or five of these annually. They are to be fired from the Nasr, a short-range missile. Two successful tests of it were conducted this January.

Islamabad began producing and deploying TNWs after India adopted a “Cold Start” military contingency plan to punish unacceptable Pakistani provocations like mass-casualty terror strikes. After repeated denials, in early 2017, India’s army chief finally acknowledged the existence of the plan, involving the creation of eight division-size integrated battle groups (IBGs). Each is to consist of infantry, artillery, armor, and air support and is to be able to operate independently on the battlefield. In response to major terrorist attacks from Pakistan or by Pakistani-based groups, the IBGs are to rapidly penetrate that country at unexpected locations and advance up to 30 miles beyond the border, disrupting command-and-control networks while trying to avoid locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation. In other words, the goal is to be able to launch an overwhelming conventional strike swiftly but in a limited fashion in order to ward off a Pakistani nuclear response. Overall, India’s contingency plan assumes unrealistically that, in the heat of the battle, leaders on both sides will remain calm and rational.

Responding to Islamabad’s production of theater nuclear weapons, New Delhi initiated a super-secret nuclear program revealed only in December 2015, thanks to an investigation by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity. A top-secret, government-run, $100 million rare materials plant near the city of Mysore in southern India now houses a nuclear enrichment complex that has been operating since 2012. It feeds the country’s nuclear weapons program and, far more ominously, has laid the foundation for an ambitious Indian hydrogen bomb project.

To consternation in world capitals, it was also revealed that this plant has a larger twin 160 miles north of Mysore in southern India that goes by the innocuous name of the Aeronautical Test Range. Conceived in March 2007 by the defense ministry, its construction started in 2012 on nearly 13 square miles of land. It is to become the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and aircraft-testing facilities after its completion in 2020. Among the project’s aims is to expand the government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for the country’s nuclear reactors, and to help power its fleet of new nuclear submarines. This nuclear city is to be protected by a ring of military garrisons, turning the site into a virtual military facility, which also means that it will not be open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its overarching aim is to give the country an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could be used to create hydrogen bombs and so further enhance the power of India’s already devastating nuclear arsenal.

Both of these projects are directed by the office of the prime minister. India’s Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act have placed everything linked to the country’s nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who tried to find out more about these activities were bludgeoned into silence.

According to Gary Samore, an Obama-era White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, “India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China. It is unclear when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but they will.” Once manufactured, however, nothing would block India from deploying them against Pakistan. “India is now developing very big bombs, hydrogen bombs that are city-busters,” commented Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy. “It is not interested in [producing] nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for eliminating population centers.”

In other words, while India has long been in a nuclear arms race with Pakistan, it is no longer sticking to the same race course. In late March, Modi announced that India recently launched a rocket successfully shooting downone of its satellites. This creates the possibility that, in a future nuclear war with Pakistan, it could preemptively “blind” the Pakistanis by destroying their space-based communication and surveillance satellites. A race of another kind could be in the offing.

The central motive that drove Pakistan to develop its nuclear arsenal, however, remains unchanged. It was the only way Islamabad could deter New Delhi from defeating it in a war waged with conventional weapons. India’s 2.14 million-strong military, equipped with 5,967 artillery pieces, 4,500 tanks, and 2,216 aircraft, is significantly larger and better armed than Pakistan’s 1.55 million soldiers, 3,745 artillery, 2,700 tanks, and 1,143 aircraft. In addition, New Delhi’s annual defense budget of $55.9 billion is more than five times Islamabad’s $10.8 billion.

Little wonder that, in his February 28th televised address, while announcing the Indian pilot’s release, Prime Minister Khan suggested that the two sides “should sit down and resolve our problems through dialogue.” He claimed that his own political party, Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (the Pakistan Movement for Justice), and the country’s powerful military were “all on one page” in wishing to mend fences with India.

Pakistan’s Belated Suppression of Violent Jihadists

In late February, India handed over to Pakistan a dossier with information on Jaish-e Mohammad, its top leadership, and their involvement in several terror attacks. Islamabad initially said that the dossier was being “examined.” However, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi added that his government could act against Masoud Azhar only if New Delhi provided “solid, inalienable evidence” strong enough to convince the country’s judiciary.

And yet on March 8th, the Pakistani government acted, launching a crackdown on leading terrorist groups. Among other things, it outlawed the Jamaat-ud Dawa (Society of the Islamic Call), or JuD, a welfare organization that raised funds for Lashkar-e-Taiba. It sealed the banned organization’s headquarters in Lahore as well as more than 200 schools, seminaries, and hospitals it ran. It also banned its chief, Hafiz Saeed, from leading Friday prayers on the sprawling JuD complex and kept him under surveillance.

One key factor that spurred such action was a warning the Pakistani government received on February 22nd from the Paris-based intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It threatened to add Pakistan to its blacklist of non-cooperating countries if, by May, it failed to take specific steps against the financing of terrorism. To be added to the FATF blacklist could mean being sanctioned by most Western nations, a development only likely to deepen Islamabad’s current financial crisis. (Recently, it has had barely enough foreign reserves to pay for two months of imports or service a huge loan it secured from the International Monetary Fund in 2013.)

In January 2018, President Donald Trump had already cancelled plans for Washington to give Pakistan $1.3 billion in military aid and had imposed sanctions on the country for its support of terrorist groups, including the Afghan Taliban. On Twitter, he accused Pakistan of “providing nothing but lies and deceit.” Soon after, the FATF placed Pakistan on its “gray list.”

Still, none of that proved sufficient to compel Pakistan’s powerful military high command to cede its traditional monopoly on national security and foreign policy decision-making, including its covert backing of anti-Indian extremist groups through the ISI. Only when pressure continued to build, bolstered by fresh urging from Washington, London, and Paris, was a critical mass reached that made those generals finally fall in line with recently elected Prime Minister Khan’s more conciliatory stance toward India.

Now, the international community can only hope that the carnage and chaos of February was the last in a tragic series of encounters between nuclear neighbors that could otherwise lead South Asia to devastation and the world to nuclear winter.

Dilip Hiro is a TomDispatch regular and the author of 37 books, including The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry between India and Pakistan.

4 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

The aims of the Great March of Return protests, which began in Gaza on March 30, 2018 are to put an end to the suffocating Israeli siege and implementing the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and towns in historic Palestine 70 years earlier.

But there is much more to the March of Return than a few demands, especially bearing in mind the high human cost associated with it.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, over 250 people have been killed and 6,500 wounded, including children, medics and journalists.

Aside from the disproportionately covered ‘flaming kites’ and youth symbolically cutting through the metal fences that have besieged them for many years, the March has been largely non-violent. Despite this, Israel has killed and maimed protesters with impunity.

A UN human rights commission of inquiry found last month that Israel may have committed war crimes against protesters, resulting in the killing of 189 Palestinians within the period March 30 and December 31, 2018.

The inquiry found “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at children, medics and journalists, even though they were clearly recognizable as such,” the investigators concluded as reported by BBC online.

Many in the media, however, still do not understand what the Great March of Return really means for Palestinians.

A cynically titled report in the Washington Post attempted to offer an answer. The article, “Gazans have paid in blood for a year of protests. Now many wonder what it was for,” selectively quoted wounded Palestinians who, supposedly, feel that their sacrifices were in vain.

Aside from providing the Israeli military with a platform to blame the Hamas Movement for the year-long march, the long report ended with these two quotes:

The March of Return “achieved nothing,” according to one injured Palestinian.

“The only thing I can find is that it made people pay attention,” said another.

If the Washington Post paid attention, it would have realized that the mood among Palestinians is neither cynical nor despairing.

The Post should have wondered: if the march ‘achieved nothing’, why were Gazans still protesting, and the popular and inclusive nature of the March has not been compromised?

“The Right of Return is more than a political position,” said Sabreen al-Najjar, the mother of young Palestinian medic, Razan, who, on June 1, 2018, was fatally shot by the Israeli army while trying to help wounded Palestinian protesters. It is “more than a principle: wrapped up in it, and reflected in literature and art and music, is the essence of what it means to be Palestinian. It is in our blood.”

Indeed, what is the ‘Great March of Return’ but a people attempting to reclaim their role, and be recognized and heard in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine?

What is largely missing from the discussion on Gaza is the collective psychology behind this kind of mobilization, and why it is essential for hundreds of thousands of besieged people to rediscover their power and understand their true position, not as hapless victims, but as agents of change in their society.

The narrow reading, or the misrepresentation of the March of Return, speaks volumes about the overall underestimation of the role of the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and national liberation, extending for a century.

The story of Palestine is the story of the Palestinian people, for they are the victims of oppression and the main channel of resistance, starting with the Nakba – the creation of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948. Had Palestinians not resisted, their story would have concluded then, and they, too, would have disappeared.

Those who admonish Palestinian resistance or, like the Post, fail to understand the underlying value of popular movement and sacrifices, have little understanding of the psychological ramifications of resistance – the sense of collective empowerment and hope which spreads amongst the people. In his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth”, Jean-Paul Sartre describes resistance, as it was passionately vindicated by Fanon, as a process through which “a man is re-creating himself.”

For 70 years, Palestinians have embarked on that journey of the re-creation of the self. They have resisted, and their resistance in all of its forms has molded a sense of collective unity, despite the numerous divisions that were erected amongst the people.

The March of Return is the latest manifestation of the ongoing Palestinian resistance.

It is obvious that elitist interpretations of Palestine have failed – Oslo proved a worthless exercise in empty clichés, aimed at sustaining American political dominance in Palestine as well as in the rest of the Middle East.

But the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993 shattered the relative cohesiveness of the Palestinian discourse, thus weakening and dividing the Palestinian people.

In the Israeli Zionist narrative, Palestinians are depicted as drifting lunatics, an inconvenience that hinders the path of progress – a description that regularly defined the relationship between every western colonial power and the colonized, resisting natives.

Within some Israeli political and academic circles, Palestinians merely ‘existed’ to be ‘cleansed’, to make room for a different, more deserving people. From the Zionist perspective, the ‘existence’ of the natives is meant to be temporary. “We must expel Arabs and take their place,” wrote Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion.

Assigning the roles of dislocated, disinherited and nomadic to the Palestinian people, without consideration for the ethical and political implications of such a perception, has erroneously presented Palestinians as a docile and submissive collective.

Hence, it is imperative that we develop a clearer understanding of the layered meanings behind the Great March of Return. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza did not risk life and limb over the last year simply because they required urgent medicine and food supplies.

Palestinians did so because they understand their centrality in their struggle. Their protests are a collective statement, a cry for justice, an ultimate reclamation of their narrative as a people – still standing, still powerful and still hopeful after 70 years of Nakba, 50 years of military occupation and 12 years of unrelenting siege.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.

3 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Vltchek

Yes, the latest research confirms that Venezuela is so rich in natural resources, that it could single-handedly satisfy all global demand for oil, for over 30 years. And it has much more than oil to offer, in its Orinoco basin and in other areas of the country.

But it is not all ‘about oil’; actually, far from it.

Those who believe that what propels the spread of Western terror all over the world, are just some ‘business interests’ and legendary Western greed, are, from my point of view, missing the point.

I noticed that such individuals and analysts actually believe that ‘capitalism is responsible for everything’, and that it creates the culture of violence of which, both victims and victimizers, already became hostages to.

After working in all corners of the world, I am now more and more convinced that capitalism is actually the result of Western culture, which is predominantly based on expansionism, exceptionalism and aggression. It is also constructed on a deeply rooted desire to control and to dictate. Financial/monetary greed is just a by-product of this culture which has elevated its superiority to something that could be defined as religious, or even religiously fundamentalist.

Or in other words: belief in its own superiority is actually now the main religion in both Europe and North America.

*

What makes the Libyan, Syrian and Venezuelan scenarios so similar? Why was the West so eager to viciously attack, and then destroy these three, at the first glance, very different countries?

The answer is simple, although it is not often uttered in the West; at least not publicly:

‘All three countries stood at the vanguard of promoting and fighting with determinationfor such concepts as “pan-Africanism”, “pan-Arabism” and Patria Grande–essentially Latin American independence and unity.’

Gaddafi, Al-Assad and Chavez have been, regionally and internationally, recognized as anti-imperialist fighters, inspiring and giving hope to hundreds of millions of people.

Gaddafi was murdered, Chavez was most likely killed as well, and Al-Assad and his nation have been, literally and for several long years, fighting for their survival.

The current Venezuelan President Maduro, who is determinedly loyal to the Bolivarian revolutionary ideals, has already survived at least one assassination attempt, and, is now facing direct mafia-style threats from the West. At any moment, his country could get attacked, directly or through the Latin American ‘client’ states of the West.

It is because Africa, the Middle East and Latin America have been considered, and for centuries treated, as colonies. It is because whenever people stood up, they were almost immediately smashed into pieces by the iron fist of Western imperialism. And those who think that they are in control of the world by some divine design, do not want things to change, ever.

Europe and North America are obsessed with controlling others, and in order to control, they feel that they have to make sure to exterminate all opposition in their colonies and neo-colonies.

It is a truly mental state in which the West has found itself; a state which I, in my earlier works, defined as Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD).

To get the complete picture, one also has to recall Indonesia, which was literally liquidated as an independent and progressive nation, in 1965. Its internationalist president Sukarno (father of the Non-Aligned Movement, and close ally of the Communist Party of Indonesia – PKI) was overthrown by the handpicked (by the West),treasonous, intellectually and morally deranged, General Suharto, opening the door to turbo-capitalism, and to the unbridled plunder of the natural resources of his nation. Once a guiding light for the entire Asian independence struggle, after the US/UK/Australia-orchestrated extreme genocide, Indonesia has been reduced to nothing more than a lobotomized and dirt-poor ‘client’ state of the West.

The West has an incredible capacity to identify true regional independence leaders; to smear them, to make them vulnerable by inventing and then upholding so-called ‘local opposition’, and later, by liquidating them and with them, also their countries and even their entire regions.

Sometimes, the West attacks particular countries, as was the case with Iran (1953), Iraq, or Nicaragua. But more often, it goes directly for the ‘big fish’ – leaders of regional opposition – such as Libya, Indonesia, Syria, and now, Venezuela.

Many defiant individuals have literally been murdered already: Gaddafi, Hussein, Lumumba, and Chavez, to name just a few.

And of course, whatever it does, the West is trying to destroy the greatest leaders of the anti-Western and anti-imperialist coalition: Russia and China.

*

It is all far from only being about oil, or about profits.

The West needs to rule. It is obsessed with controlling the world, with feeling superior and exceptional. It is a game, a deadly game. For centuries, the West has been behaving like a fundamentalist religious fanatic, and its people have never even noticed that their world views have actually became synonymous with exceptionalism, and with cultural superiority. That is why the West is so successful in creating and injecting extremist religious movements of all denominations, into virtually all parts of the world: from Oceania to Asia, from Africa to Latin America, and of course, to China. Western leaders are ‘at home’ with Christian, Muslim or even Buddhist extremists.

*

But Syria has managed to survive, and up to today it is standing. The only reason why the government forces are not taking the last terrorist bastion, Idlib, yet, is because the civilian population would suffer tremendous losses during the battle.

Venezuela is also refusing to kneel and to surrender. And it is clear that if the West and its allies dared to attack, the resistance, the millions of people, would fight for the villages and countryside, and if needed, would withdraw to the jungle and wage a guerilla liberation war against the occupiers, and against the treasonous elites.

Washington, London, Paris and Madrid are clearly using an extremely outdated strategy: one that worked against Libya, but which failed squarely in Syria.

Recently, in Syria, near the frontline of Idlib, two top commanders told me that they are fighting “not only for Syria, but for the entire oppressed world, including Venezuela.” They clearly detected that the West is using precisely the same strategy against Caracas, which it tried to use against Damascus.

Now, Venezuela is also suffering and fighting for the entire oppressed world.

It has ‘no right to fail’, as Syria had no right to surrender.

The destruction of Libya had already brought a tremendously negative impact on Africa. And it has opened the doors to the renewed and unbridled French plunder of the continent. France was promptly joined by the U.K. and the U.S.A.

Syria is the last bastion in the Middle East. It is all there is now, resisting the total control of the Middle East by the West. Syria and Iran. But Iran is not yet a ‘front’, although often it appears that soon it might become one.

Venezuela cannot fall, for the same reasons. It is at the northern extreme of South America. Below, there is an entire continent; terrorized by Europe and North America, for decades and centuries: brutalized, plundered, tortured. South America, where tens of millions used to be exterminated like animals, forced to convert to Christianity, robbed of everything and ordered to follow bizarre Western political and economic models.

In Brazil, the progressive socialist government of the PT had been already overthrown.

If Venezuela falls, everything could be lost, for decades, maybe even centuries.

And so, it will fight. Together with those few other countries that are still left standing in this ‘Western Hemisphere’; countries which the dictators in Washington D.C. openly describe as ‘their backyard’.

Caracas stands and fights for the vast slums of Peru, for destitute millions in Paraguay, for Brazilian favelas, for privatized aquifers and the murdered rain forest in Brazil.

As Syria has been fighting for the Palestine, for the destitute minorities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, for Yemen, for Iraq and Afghanistan – two countries robbed of almost everything by NATO.

Russia has already showed what it can do for its Arab brothers, and now is demonstrating its willingness to support its another close ally – Venezuela.

China is rapidly joining the coalition of anti-imperialist fighters, and so is South Africa.

*

No – Venezuela is not only about oil.

It is about the West being able to close access to the Panama Canal, by Chinese ships.

It is about the total control of the world: ideological, political, economic and social. About liquidating all opposition in the Western hemisphere.

If Venezuela falls, the West may dare to attack Nicaragua, and then the bastion of socialism and internationalism – Cuba.

That is why it – Venezuela – should never be allowed to fall.

The battle for Venezuela is now already raging, on all fronts, including the ideological one. There, we are not only fighting for Caracas, Maracaibo or for Ciudad Bolivar: we are fighting for the entire oppressed world,as we did and are doing in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Idlib,as we may soon have to do in many other cities, all over the world. For as long as Western imperialism is alive; for as long as it is not going to give up its dreams of controlling and ruining the entire planet, we cannot rest, we cannot let down our guard, we cannot celebrate final victory in any part of the world.

Therefore, this is all far from being ‘just about oil’. It is about the survival of our planet.

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist.

3 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Richard Falk

29 Mar 2019 – If you are able read just one book in 2019, I urge it to be Joan Mellen’s Blood in the Water: How the U.S. and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty.

The author on the basis of meticulous research probes every detail to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sinking of USS Liberty in the midst of the 1967 War is the greatest moral and political scandal in all of American history. In what was long described as a ‘mistake’ or ‘accident’ Israeli planes and submarines attacked the Liberty, killing 34, wounding 174 American naval personnel. Subsequent critical writing had established convincingly that the United States Government refused to authorize an inquiry that would have established that Israel deliberately attacked the ship of its ally. Those who took the trouble to read the critical literature or were among the surviving crew members were shocked by a cover-up that was willing to overlook what amounts to the murder of American servicemen. Mellen addresses these allegations in a definitive manner that includes evidence that Lyndon Johnson, as president, called off a rescue operation, which seems confirmed, and if properly pursued would seem to indicate both an impeachable offense and indictable as treason.

This alone would make Joan Mellen’s book well worth reading, but her contribution goes far beyond what prior research and scholarly writing had established and alleged. She demonstrates that the real story of the Liberty attack was far worse than a cover-up of Israeli criminality, it was ‘collusion,’ that is, a deliberated collaborative attack by Israel and the United States. The purpose of this operation was to provide a satisfactory pretext for launching retaliatory strikes against Egypt with the primary objective of destabilizing the Egyptian Government, and removing Gamel Abdul Nasser from power. At the time Nasser was a thorn in the back of both Israel and the United States. The American and Israeli national security establishments, including some identified sinister figures in the CIA and Mossad, regarded Nasser as a major threat to American regional objectives in the Middle East, Israeli security and expansionist ambitions, as well as to the prevailing grand strategy of the Cold War.

Such shocking revelations, even long after the events, come at a time when the momentous events surrounding the 9/11 attacks remain shrouded in suspicion and mystery. It is notable that the Liberty incident occurred under a Democratic president. It would seem that political liberalism is always subordinate to the security imperatives of the militarized American state. What happened in 1967 could easily occur in 2019. None of the pieces have been removed from the great geopolitical board game of the deep state. What Mellen demonstrates so clearly is that democratic elections and public trust are cast aside to satisfy the demonic greed of those within the government bureaucracy who are in the secretive business of slaying monsters in distant settings while pacifying their own citizens with lies and evasions.

We need to read and upon reflect upon Blood in the Water, asking ourselves two familiar political questions: ‘what needs to be done? How can it be done?” It is little wonder that although published in 2018 this crucial book has so far flown far under mainstream radars.

Blood in the Water published by Prometheus Books can be obtained from all booksellers, including Amazon.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 40 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs.

1 April 2019

Source: transcend.org

By Edward Curtin

A Quasi-Review of A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Lisa Pease

“‘We’re all puppets,’ the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment.” – Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan

When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, the American public fell into an hypnotic trance in which they have remained ever since. The overwhelming majority accepted what was presented by government authorities as an open and shut case that a young Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan, had murdered RFK because of his support for Israel, a false accusation whose ramifications echo down the years. That this was patently untrue and was contradicted by overwhelming evidence made no difference.

Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, yet he remains in jail to this very day. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who was 14 years old at the time of his father’s death, has visited Sirhan in prison, claims he is innocent, and believes there was another gunman. Paul Schrade, an aide to the senator and the first person shot that night, also says Sirhan didn’t do it. Both have plenty of evidence. And they are not alone.

There is a vast body of documented evidence to prove this, an indisputably logical case marshalled by serious writers and researchers. Lisa Pease is the latest. It is a reason why a group of 60 prominent Americans has recently called for a reopening of, not just this case, but those of JFK, MLK, and Malcom X. The blood of these men cries out for the revelation of the truth that the United States national security state and its media accomplices have fought so mightily to keep hidden for so many years.

That they have worked so hard at this reveals how dangerous the truth about these assassinations still is to this secret government that wages propaganda war against the American people and real wars around the world. It is a government of Democrats, Republicans, and their intelligence allies working together today to confuse the American people and provoke Russia in a most dangerous game that could lead to nuclear war, a possibility that so frightened JFK and RFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they devoted themselves to ending the Cold War, reconciling with the Soviet Union, abolishing nuclear weapons, reining in of the power of the CIA, and withdrawing from Vietnam. That is why they were killed.

The web of deceit surrounding the now officially debunked Democratic led Russia-gate propaganda operation that has strengthened Trump to double-down on his anti-Russia operations (a Democratic goal) is an example of the perfidious and sophisticated mutuality of this game of mass mind-control.

The killing of the Kennedys and today’s new Cold War and war against terror are two ends of a linked intelligence operation.

Moreover, more than any other assassination of the 1960s, it is the killing of Bobby Kennedy that has remained shrouded in the most ignorance.

It is one of the greatest propaganda success stories of American history.

In her exhaustive new examination of the case, A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease puts it succinctly at the conclusion of her unravelling of the official lies that have mesmerized the public:

The assassination of the top four leaders of the political left in the five year period – President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 – represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene.

If anyone wishes to understand what has happened to the United States since this coup, and thus to its countless victims at home and throughout the world, one must understand these assassinations and how the alleged assassins were manipulated by the coup organizers and how the public was hoodwinked in a mind-control operation on a vast scale. It is not ancient history, for the forces that killed these leaders rule the U.S. today, and their ruthlessness has subsequently informed the actions of almost all political leaders in the years since. A bullet to the head when you seriously talk about peace and justice is a not so gentle reminder to toe the line or else.

“But the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time,” writes Pease, “and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”

Nothing could be truer.

Lisa Pease has long recognized the problem, and for the past twenty-five years, she has devoted herself to shedding light on the CIA’s culpability, particularly in the Robert Kennedy case. Few people possess the grit and grace to spend so much of their lives walking this path of truth. The extent of her research is dazzling, so dazzling in its voluminous detail that a reviewer can only touch on it here and there. She has written a book that is daunting in its comprehensiveness. It demands focused attention and perseverance, for it runs to over 500 pages with more than 800 footnotes. This book will remain a touchstone for future research on the RFK assassination, whether one agrees or disagrees with all of her detailed findings and speculations. For this book is so vast and meticulous in its examination of all aspects of the case that one can surely find areas that one might question or disagree with.

Nevertheless, Pease fundamentally proves that Sirhan did not shoot RFK and that there was a conspiracy organized and carried out by shadowy intelligence forces that did so. These same forces worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, federal, state, and judicial elements to make sure Sirhan was quickly accused of being the lone assassin and dispatched to prison after a show trial. And the mass media carried out its assigned role of affirming the government’s case to shield the real killers and to make sure the cover-up was successful.

No doubt others will investigate this case further. Yet I think no more research is really needed, for as with these other assassinations, additional analyses will only result in pseudo-debates about minutiae. Such debates will only serve to prolong the hallucinatory grip the perpetrators of these crimes have on a day of reckoning, suggesting as they would that we do not really know what happened. This is an old tactic meant to delay forevermore such a day of reckoning.

The facts are clear for all to see if they have the will to truth. All that is now needed is a public tribunal, which is planned for later this year, in which the fundamental, clear-cut facts of these cases are presented to the American public. In the case of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as with the others, a little knowledge goes a long way, and only those who are closed to basic logic and evidence will refuse to see that government forces conspired to kill these men and did so because all were seeking peace and justice that was then, and is now, a threat to the war-making forces of wealth and power that control the American government.

Pease writes:

Anyone who has looked closely and honestly at the evidence has realized that more than one person was involved in Robert Kennedy’s death. So why can’t reporters see this? Why can’t the media explain this? Because the media and the government are two sides of the same coin, and those who challenge the government’s version of history, as numerous reporters have found out, all too often lose status and sometimes whole careers. Kristina Borjesson published an anthology of such stories in her book Into the Buzzsaw, in which journalists describe how they lost their careers when eachof them expressed a truth that the government did not want exposed.

Lisa Pease discloses such truths. I am reporting on her work. Therefore, the mainstream media, except for an extraordinary reporter or two, such as Tom Jackman of The WashingtonPost, will likely ignore both of us, but the publication where you are reading this is on the side of truth, and in the disclosure of truth lies our hope.

Since more than one person was involved in the killing of RFK, there was – ipso facto – a conspiracy. This is not theory but fact. The fact of a conspiracy. For more than fifty years, mainstream reporters have been cowed by this word “conspiracy,” thanks to the CIA. Many others have been intelligence assets posing as journalists, regurgitating the lies. This is a fact.

The official story is that after giving his victory speech for winning the 1968 Democratic California Primary, Kennedy, as he was walking through a crowded hotel pantry, was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who was standing to his left between 3-6 feet away. Sirhan’s revolver held eight bullets, and as he was shooting, he was tackled by a group of large men who subdued him. All witnesses place Sirhan in front of Kennedy and all claim he was firing a gun.

Fact: As the autopsy definitively showed, RFK was shot from the rear at point blank range, three bullets entering his body, with the fatal headshot coming upward at a 45-degree angle from 1-3 inches behind his right ear. Not one bullet from Sirhan’s gun hit the Senator. In addition, an audio recording shows that many more bullets than the eight in Sirhan’s gun were fired in the hotel pantry that night. It was impossible for Sirhan to have killed RFK.

Let me repeat: More than one gunman, contrary to the government’s claims, equals a conspiracy. So why lie about that?

What is amazing is that the obvious conclusion to such simple syllogistic logic (Sirhan in front, bullets in the back, therefore…) that a child could understand has been dismissed by the authorities for fifty-one years. The fact that the government authorities – the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney, federal and state government officials, the FBI, the CIA – have from the start so assiduously done all in their power to pin the blame on “a lone assassin,” Sirhan, proves they are part of a coordinated cover-up, which in turn suggests their involvement in the crime.

The fact that Robert Kennedy was shot from the back and not the front where Sirhan was standing immediately brings to mind the Zapruder film that shows that JFK was killed from the front right and not from the 6th floor rear where Oswald was allegedly shooting from. That unexpected film evidence was hidden from the public for many years, but when it was finally seen, the case for a government conspiracy was solidified.

While no such video evidence has surfaced in the RFK case, the LAPD made sure that no photographic evidence contradicting the official lies would be seen. As Lisa Pease writes:

Less than two months after the assassination, the LAPD took the extraordinary step of burning some 2,400 photos from the case in Los Angeles County General’s medical waste incinerator. Why destroy thousands of photos in an incinerator if there was nothing to hide? The LAPD kept hundreds of innocuous crowd scene photos that showed no girl in a polka dot dress or no suspicious activities or individuals. Why were those photos preserved? Perhaps because those photos had nothing in them that warranted their destruction.

While “perhaps” is a mild word, the cover-up of “the girl in the polka dot dress” needs no perhaps. Dozens of people reported seeing a suspicious, curvaceous girl in a white dress with black polka dots with Sirhan in the pantry and other places. She was seen with various other men as well. The evidence for her involvement in the assassination is overwhelming, and yet the LAPD did all in its power to deny this by browbeating witnesses and by allowing her to escape.

Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign worker and a courageous witness, was bullied by the CIA-connected police interrogator Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez. She had been sitting outside on a metal fire escape getting some air when the polka dot dress girl, accompanied by a man, ran out and down the stairs, shouting, “We’ve shot him, we’ve shot him.” When Serrano asked whom did they shoot, the girl replied, “We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” Then she and her companion, both of whom Serrano had earlier seen ascending the stairs with Sirhan, disappeared into the night. A little over an hour after the shooting Serrano was interviewed on live television by NBC’s Sander Vanocur where she recounted this. And there were others who saw and heard this girl say the same thing as she and her companion fled the crime scene. Nevertheless, the LAPD, led by Lieutenant Manuel Pena, also CIA affiliated, who was brought out of retirement to run the investigation dubbed “Special Unit Senator,” worked with Hernandez and others to dismiss the girl as of no consequence.

Lisa Pease covers all this and much more. She shows how Sirhan was obviously hypnotized, how the trial was a farce, how the police destroyed evidence from the door frames in the pantry that proved more than the eight bullets in Sirhan’s gun were fired, how Officer DeWayne Wolfer manipulated the ballistic evidence, etc. Through years of digging into court records, archives, transcripts, the public library, and doing countless interviews, she proves without a doubt that Sirhan did not kill Kennedy and that the assassination and the cover-up were part of a very sophisticated intelligence operation involving many parts and players. She shows how no matter what route Kennedy took in the hotel that night, the killers had all exits covered and that he would not be allowed to leave alive.

While some of her more speculative points – e.g. that Robert Maheu (Howard Hughes/CIA) was “the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy’s assassination,” that Kennedy was shot twice in the head from behind, etc. are open to debate, they do not detract from her fundamentally powerful case that RFK, like his brother John, was assassinated by a CIA-run operation intended to silence their voices of courageous resistance to an expanding secret government dedicated to war, murder, and human exploitation. The U.S. government of today.

When Bobby Kennedy was entering the kitchen pantry, he was escorted by a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar, a man long suspected of being the assassin. Cesar was carrying a gun that he drew but denied firing, despite witnesses’ claims to the contrary. Conveniently, the police never examined the gun. He has long been suspected of being CIA affiliated, and now Pease says she has found evidence to confirm that. She writes, “It’s hard to overstate the significance of finding a current or future CIA contract agent holding Kennedy’s right arm at the moment of the shooting.”

Yes, it is. As she rightly claims, the CIA takeover of America in the 1960s is the story of our time. And our time is now. None of this is ancient history. That is so crucial to grasp. For those who think that learning the truth about the 1960s assassinations is an exercise in futility reserved for those who are living in the past, they need to think again. Our descent into endless war and massive media propaganda to support it is part of a long-term project that began with the elimination of JFK, Malcom X, MLK, and Robert Kennedy. They were killed for reasons, and those reasons still exist, even if they don’t physically, but only in spirit. Their killers roam the land because they have become far more deeply part of the institutional structure of government and the media.

Pease says:

It was horrible that Robert Kennedy was taken from us far too soon. It is horrible that one man has borne the guilt for an operation he neither planned nor willingly participated in. It’s horrible the conspiracy was so obvious that bullets had to be lost and switched to hide it. And it’s horrible that the mainstream media has never dared to tell the people of this country that the government lied to us about what they really found when they looked into this case. Until the media can deal with the truth of the Robert Kennedy assassination, and until the people can be made aware of the CIA’s role in slanting the truth on topics of great importance, America’s very survival is in jeopardy….We’ve come perilously close to losing democracy itself because of fake, CIA-sponsored stories about our history. Should America ever become a dictatorship, the epitaph of our democracy must include the role the mainstream media, by bowing to the National Security state, played in killing it.

By writing A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease has done her valiant part in refuting the lie that is now failing. Now it is up to all of us to spread the word of truth by focusing on the fundamental facts so we can finally take back our country from the CIA.

Then we can say with RFK and his favorite poet Aeschylus:

And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

*

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

2 April 2019

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Rene Wadlow

Street demonstrations began in Algiers on 22 February 2019 and quickly spread to other cities in Algeria. The demonstrations, often led by young people, are massive on Fridays, the chief day of rest. The first demands were that President Abdelaziz Boutefika not stand for a fifth term as president having already been president for 20 years since 1999. The demands were all the more reasonable that Boutefika had had a stroke in 2013 and was unable to walk and largely could not speak. He had been seriously ill in 2005 and was in week condition from 2005 to 2013 when his health deteriorated seriously. He was often in Switzerland for medical treatment and was rarely seen in public. It is said that his brother Said Boutefika had been making decisions but is now seriously ill as well.

Thus, the Army Chief of Staff, General Ahmed Gaed Salah, a key figure of the regime, has called upon the Constitutional Council to invoke article 102 of the constitution to state that the long-term health of the President makes him unfit to hold the office. The article, taken over from the French Constitution, holds that the President of the Higher Chamber be interim President for up to 45 days and that elections for President then be held.

While the first demands of the broadly-based protests focused on the person of Abdelaziz Boutefika, the focus has now broadened to demand that the whole close-kit group, often called a “clan” who have held power since independence in 1962, be changed. Since 1963, there have been some changes in the visible leadership, but, in practice, the “clan” is still there. It is a small group of people, some still in the higher ranks of the army and others who had been in the army but who had moved over to civilian life to take positions in the oil and gas business or in government, especially the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Energy.

Oil and gas represent some 95% of export revenue, and the energy revenue has not been used to broaden the economic base. The “clan” is widely thought of as corrupt, using the oil revenue for their own benefit. The “Panama Papers” mentioned a good number of the “clan” having created off-shore companies. Trials related to “kick backs” from Italian and Canadian energy companies have also helped to create the image of a self-interested political group in power. Transparency International has highlighted the high perception of corruption in Algeria.

The issue which is now open and which merits close watching is how deep will be the changes in Algeria. There could be a small change among the most visible members of the “clan”. They have already put money safely outside Algeria and are well past retirement age.

There could be a slightly larger change of persons. There will be some time, unclear how much, before the new team takes power. There is enough time for people to find Swiss banks for a comfortable retirement. However the basic structures of power would change little.

There could be a relatively deep change. Some people are calling for a “Second Algerian Republic”. There will be in any case a change of generation. Even if the army continues to play a key role, there are younger officers who are the same generation as many of the protesters and who share a desire for change.

Political opposition to the current “clan” is largely unstructured. There is no coherent group of persons “waiting in the wings”. Opposition has often been in geographically diverse parts of the country making it hard to have national opposition leaders.

Algeria is a key State of the North African region with all the States undergoing changes. Even a good weatherman has difficulties to know the way the wind is blowing.

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

2 April 2019

Source: countercurrents.org