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By Brian Cloughley

The commander of US-NATO forces, the vigorously vocal General Breedlove, stated on April 7 that the military alliance’s planners “have been working tirelessly to enhance NATO’s Response Force and implement the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, and today our progress is manifested in the rapid deployments we see happening in locations across the Alliance.”

Breedlove is the man who declared on March 5 that Russia had sent combat troops and massive quantities of military equipment into Ukraine. He said that President Putin had “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine by deploying “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery.” His military opinion was that “What is clear is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”

He spoke absolute drivel, because the ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and separatists in the east of the country was working, albeit shakily, and things were quietening down. The last thing that was needed was provocation. Silence and, or at the most, calm, reasoned comments were essential if both sides were to be encouraged to cool it.

But this man, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the man who has the trust of the American president, the prime nuclear button-shover, told a deliberate lie intended to increase tension.

The manufactured tension built up and on April 7 Breedlove’s HQ announced that the militaries of “11 Allied nations, Germany, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania, Croatia, Portugal, and Slovenia tested their Headquarters’ response to alert procedures,” while “in the afternoon of 7 April, the 11th Air Mobile Brigade in The Netherlands and the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade in the Czech Republic were given orders to rapidly prepare to deploy their troops and equipment” in a maneuver called “Noble Jump” which conjured up an image of a missile-wielding April bunny leaping into the fray against a coyly unnamed enemy who could be no other than Russia. (Although perhaps Russia need not be too troubled about some of NATO’s war preparations. My sources told me that the practice mobilization of the Dutch brigade was a shambles.)

While the ground-based martial bunny-hops were going on there was an aerial provocation in progress, this time involving a US Combat Sent RC-135U spyplane which was on a mission against Russia and flew along its Baltic Sea coastline. To prevent identification its transponder had been switched off — just like those of the aircraft in the 9/11 hijackings and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which disappeared mysteriously a year ago.

All aircraft have transponders which report their speed, height, heading and identification to air traffic controllers and other aircraft in order to avoid aerial confusion, so when Russian radar detected a large aircraft without such a signal but obviously using transmission devices to collect their radar and other electronic emissions, including civilian commercial communications, they sent up a fighter plane to have a look. Washington threw up its hands in mock horror and issued statements about how dangerous this was. Then the western media went into overdrive with a cavalier disregard for balanced reporting.

The Daily Mail of Britain is a garbage newspaper which maintains enormous readership because it specializes in glamorizing Britain’s sad, tacky and pathetic Celeb culture while concurrently condemning it, sometimes in the most portentous terms. The paper’s masses of online readers try to rationalize their attraction to vulgarity by glancing at items on international affairs and were told breathlessly that “In a maneuver with ominous echoes of the Cold War, a Russian fighter jet ‘aggressively’ intercepted an American plane over Poland, the Pentagon claims. Filing an official complaint to Russia, the State Department alleges a U.S. RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft was flying near the Baltic Sea in international airspace when a Russian SU-27 Flanker cut into its path.”

The average Daily Mail reader might not be able to question the absurdly conflicting phrases “near the Baltic Sea,” “over Poland,” and “in international airspace,” but that doesn’t matter. The message was being spread around by the US-NATO propaganda apparatus that the dreaded Russkies were menacing the Free World. The media lapped it up.

Little attention was paid in the West to the Russian announcement that “an Su-27 fighter on duty was scrambled, approached the unidentified aircraft, flew around it several times, identified it as an RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft belonging to the U.S. Air Force and read its side number, and reported it to the command. After having been intercepted by the Russian fighter, the U.S. Air Force aircraft changed its course and moved away from the Russian border.”

What the Russians didn’t say was that the aircraft’s “side number” was 4849 and that it had been photographed the previous day in Eastern England at the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall which houses a USAF tanker squadron, about 200 US special forces soldiers with Osprey aircraft and operatives from such elements as 97 Intelligence Squadron.

No doubt the Russians know that last October it was noticed that US RC-135U spy plane number 4849 carries on its side some eye-catching decals. A photograph taken by Gary Chadwick at Mildenhall shows the “mission markings applied above the crew entry hatch, on the left hand side of the RC-135U Combat Sent 64-14849 ‘OF’ with the 45th Reconnaissance Squadron/55th Wing of the U.S. Air Force : five hammer and sickle symbols.”

These symbols may be stickers or stencils, but whatever they are they cost money and take time and effort to apply on the side of an airplane to which they add neither beauty or distinction. So why are they placed there?

It might be thought strange that a US military aircraft in 2015 should have Soviet-era hammer and sickle decals on its side in order to publicly indicate a military exploit involving achievement of an objective of some sort. And it is interesting that one of the images has been added recently, because when a photograph of 4849 was taken last year there were only four such symbols. What enterprising and gallant mission merited the fifth hammer and sickle? Another addition was a fourth depiction of an aircraft carrier, signifying, no doubt, a successful electronic spying mission involving one of these ships that was not of the United States Navy. What nationality could it have been?

The anti-Russian spy-antics of the US are fully in line with the war-talk of Breedlove and his NATO colleagues who are beavering away in their brand-new billion dollar combat palace in Brussels to justify existence and expansion of their war machine. Russia’s actions have been propagandized accordingly, and the US spy flights are intended to provoke Moscow into taking action which can be used to escalate tension yet further. It would all be childishly funny were it not for the fact that Breedlove and his people are playing with the future of Europe and indeed the world. They are leading us to the nuclear threshold, and must be reined in before they stumble into ultimate confrontation.

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

17 April 2015

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By Junaid S. Ahmad and SANIA SUFI for ISLAMiCommentary on APRIL 13, 2015

When reading dominant narratives about the Muslim world today, we are at pains to escape the imagery of beheadings, stonings, suicide bombings and ‘senseless’ violence in general. The picture has obtained its most concrete manifestation in the form of ISIS. The ‘Islamic State’ seems to embody all that is wrong with a people who have clearly not kept up with the pace of history, and in fact now are trying to offer an atavistic, medieval alternative to it.

However, a critical unpacking of the ideology behind ISIS — however millenarian and myopic it may be — reveals legitimate grievances rooted in an unjust global political architecture which exploits, dehumanizes, and fuels violence among Muslims the world over.

While political expressions of Islam have existed over the past century, the vicious, reactionary, and most obscurantist forms of such currents got their steroid injections through the Western-backed “jihad” against the Communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is clearly the first period of ‘radicalization’ — cradled, nurtured, and advanced by the powerful for their narrow, secular realpolitik.

The second period that dramatically increased terrorism — and not reduced it — has undoubtedly been engendered by post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ politics. Its ‘impressive’ framework of solutions include: torture techniques such as waterboarding and sexual humiliation, wars and occupations, unchecked surveillance and spying, human rights violations, and so on. Its premise has been twofold: that Muslims only understand the language of force, and that there are deep religio-cultural features of theirs that need to be revamped and remolded in order to cater to the demands of their powerful neo-colonial overlords.

Missing in the War on Terror’s assessment in tackling the phenomenon of terror, however, is the West’s own involvement in a brute legacy of subjugation and oppression rooted first in European colonization and now American empire. With such a historical context in mind, it is clear that a people’s belief in Islamist, rather than secular politics, is not the root cause of terrorism, but rather a hegemonic world system dependent on continuous warfare and economic exploitation. Religion — and Islam specifically — has become a convenient scapegoat for power-holders post-9/11, which explains the radical attempts to dismantle and adulterate Muslim identity and agency.

In this context, one project is declared supreme by the gatekeepers of Western secular liberal democracy: the desperate search for the moderate Muslim. The objective has been pursued vigorously throughout the Muslim world, and generous funding and support has been offered to those who present themselves as being the moderate, modernist, liberal, or progressive, alternative to radical or fundamentalist Islam. Such a reductionist binary — in which Muslims are categorized as either “moderate” or “radical” — is not a new phenomenon, but rather reminiscent of the colonial “divide and conquer” policy.

The search for the ‘moderate’ Muslim takes place as the voice of the people advocating a middle path — the Islamic call to liberation — is dehumanized and reprimanded as incompatible with the standards of western secular rationality. Grounded in the foundational concept of human reason, Enlightenment philosophy derides epistemology, which does not recognize the omnipotence of human intellect. Mainstream western political discourse might not view such an axiom as problematic. However, one must question how such discourse impacts non-western societies that ground at least some of their intellectual and political traditions in scripture or religious based knowledge.

Secular liberal thought, which traces its origins back to the Enlightenment era, similarly problematizes Islamic discourse while simultaneously trying to restructure it along secular ideology. Not only should such a re-framing of an Islamic ethos be of concern from an anti-war and anti-empire perspective, as it coincides with post-9/11 War on Terror narrative, but also from the perspective of a collective Muslim consciousness that compels Muslims to intellectual honesty and authenticity. The project of the ‘moderate’ Muslim must thus be seen in light of imperial expansionism and as a challenge to even the possibility of a collective Muslim identity and political consciousness.

The hegemony of the post-9/11 liberal or moderate Islam project also ignores the deep-seated issues of structural injustice that perpetuate an environment of violence and conflict. When this discourse of ‘moderation’ or ‘enlightenment’ is divorced from a systemic critique of institutional subjugation and oppression, then most ordinary people in the Muslim world see little relevance in its function. It is no wonder, then, that the architects of the liberal Islam project advance a watered down, apolitical Islam that ignores state sponsored structural matrices of patriarchal, racial/ethnic, and class hierarchies of society and the global order.

ISIS and all such brutal groups will continue to thrive in the Muslim world as long as grotesque social conditions, such as class inequality, warfare, and extreme poverty, persist in these societies. Western political elites must recognize the consequences of colonial/neo-colonial expansionism and take responsibility for, directly or indirectly, engendering extremist, reactionary ideologies such as those espoused by ISIS.

This would entail very simple steps which could be undertaken immediately: halt all invasions, bombs, drones, and occupations, end support for dictatorial regimes, and support meaningful development that privilege the needs of the local populations rather than foreign multinational companies.

The various religious expressions emerging in contemporary times in post-colonial Muslim societies also make themselves irrelevant as they cater to the demands of local elites (and very often, their Western backers) and not to those of the bulk of the population who yearn for a praxis-based theology offering a better existence in the here and now. In such conditions, Muslims must dig through the Islamic canon for a discourse far more liberating than merely the negation of beheadings or senseless violence or intolerance.

A theology of liberation exists within Islam, which advocates a Divine consciousness as the basis for challenging various forms of injustice. This Islamic tradition provides political agency through which not only is speaking truth to power prioritized, but also the necessity to engage in a concrete struggle for social transformation. The emancipation of the oppressed and suffering people ought to be the objective of such a theological discourse. The imperative is to respect global diversity and simultaneously assert an Islamic social responsibility that challenges the foundations of injustice and domination in the world. Though it may seem like a pipedream, it is probably only in the praxis of liberation theology that the Muslim world will find a way to disentangle itself from the grip of foreign powers, local despots, and reactionary social forces.

Junaid S. Ahmad is the Director of the Center for Global Dialogue at UMT (University of Management and Technology) in Lahore, Pakistan. Sania Sufi is a Political Science graduate of Loyola University Chicago. They jointly blog at decolonizingmuslimistan.blogspot.com.

ISLAMiCommentary is a public scholarship forum that engages scholars, journalists, policymakers, advocates and artists in their fields of expertise. It is a key component of the Transcultural Islam Project; an initiative managed out of the Duke Islamic Studies Center in partnership with the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations (UNC-Chapel Hill). This article was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author(s).

13 April 2015

http://islamicommentary.org/

By Eric Zuesse

People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that’s available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn’t — something Americans have tragically been experiencing lots of, during recent decades, such as when we invaded Iraq in 2003 (just to cite the most famous of many examples).

A typical Reuters ‘news’ report will be examined here, in order to determine how high the journalistic standards of the Reuters ‘news’ organization actually are. Reuters is an internationally respected ‘news’ organization, as reliable as any major ‘news’ organization in the U.S. and Europe — thus, it’s a good source to provide a case-example.

The particular report, dated Thursday, April 16th, is titled “Russia blames U.S. for security crises and turmoil in Ukraine.”

Its first sentence is a simple and true statement of fact:

“Top Russian officials accused the United States on Thursday of seeking political and military dominance and sought to put blame on the West for international security crises, including the conflict in east Ukraine.”

The second sentence is anything but factual: it is instead contemptuous of the Russian speakers and of what they said, yet offering no evidence that what they said was false, nor is it offering evidence in support of the report’s own contemptuous attitude toward them:

“Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said a drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West was a threat to Moscow and had forced it to react.”

This sentence implicitly accuses Russia of “Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric,” with supposedly no reason for Russia to do so. The secondary implication here is that Russia and not the U.S. instigated the current restoration of Cold War between the U.S. and Russia. It also implicitly asserts that there was and is no real “drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West,” and no real “threat to Moscow” that really “had forced it to react” against America’s takeover of Ukraine as a client-state hostile towards Russia next door.

This second sentence is, unfortunately, a string of lies, as will now be documented:
Here is proof that Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department told the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on 4 February 2014 whom to get to be appointed to rule Ukraine once the then-sitting democratically elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown, which occurred 18 days later, on 22 February 2014. In other words: 18 days before the overthrow, she actually chose Yanukovych’s replacement.

Furthermore, the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor has called this overthrow of Yanukovych “the most blatant coup in history.” All knowledgeable and honest people acknowledge that this overthrow was a U.S. coup that installed the current pro-U.S. and rabidly anti-Russian client-state-government in Ukraine. No one denies that Ukraine borders Russia, and that to Russia it would be an extremely dangerous place for the U.S./NATO to place nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow ten minutes away. No one denies that when the Soviet Union’s dictator Nikita Khrushchev tried to do something similar to this in the opposite direction (i.e., against the United States), in 1962, by placing missiles in Cuba, that was then validly taken by U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be an existential threat to the United States, and cause for nuclear war unless reversed by the Soviet leader. Consequently, this sentence by Reuters is, essentially, a vicious lie, a historical distortion, against Russia, covering up for a U.S. government that really is taking aggressive actions against Russia (the overthrow of their next-door-neighbor and subsequent arming of it and economic sanctions against Russia), to which Russia is defensively responding — as it must do.

Furthermore, no one denies that Obama’s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, has even acknowledged (7:43 on this video) that “we have invested over five billion dollars” to prepare this coup to yank Ukraine into the U.S. orbit. Furthermore, when, right after Yanukovych’s overthrow, the EU sent its own investigator to Kiev to find out whether Yanukovych’s government had initiated the violence that had caused his downfall, they found, to their shock, that it was instead “someone from the new coalition [that had already replaced Yanukovych]” who actually did it; i.e., Washington — definitely not the EU itself, but also not the Yanukovych government (whom we blamed for it).

Furthermore, the day before the wikipedia account says that the Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych even started, a member of Ukraine’s parliament actually had already described in detail the operation that already was functioning inside the U.S. Embassy to organize the coming Maidan demonstrations; organization of those demonstrations had actually begun in the Spring of 2013, well before the alleged start, and even before the alleged precipitating event.

The rest of the Reuters article quotes what it alleges to be provocative allegations from the Russians, such as a Russian’s statement that, ”It’s clear that measures taken by NATO to strengthen the bloc and increase its military capabilities are far from being defensive.” No actual evidence is presented that’s contrary to any of those Russian allegations against NATO.

Then, it closes with a vague statement from NATO, alleging “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine” — ‘aggression’ that’s unsupported in this ‘news’ report.

So, the article closes with an entirely unsupported allegation of “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” which comes at the end of a string of innuendos and unsupported propaganda to cause uncritical readers to believe that Russia is instead the side that’s spreading unsupported propaganda — against the U.S.

But, obviously, if Russia were to be spreading propaganda here, then it is actually extraordinarily well-supported on a factual basis, including even videos of the events themselves — irrefutable and unrefuted high-quality documentation. And this means that it is truthful ‘propaganda,’ if it can authentically be called propaganda at all (which is a question of how one would define that term).

It is up to the reader here to determine “How Reliable Is Reuters?” and “how high the journalistic standards are of the Reuters ‘news’ organization.” My purpose has been simply to supply the evidence on the basis of which those questions can be rationally answered: they can be rationally answered only upon the basis of the evidence, which has been presented here — and which the Reuters ‘news’ report ignores altogether.

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

17 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Zaida Green

A new study by the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reports that the number of people globally living on less than $1.25 per day is likely to be far higher than the already staggering 1.2 billion estimated by the World Bank.

“There could be as many as a quarter more people living on less than $1.25 a day than current estimates suggest, because they have been missed out of surveys,” the report notes, suggesting that the total number of people living in extreme poverty could be undercounted by as much as 350 million.

If, as the report claims, global poverty figures are “understated by as much as a quarter,” then more than 2.5 billion people, or over a third of the world’s population, survive on less than $2 per day.

The most deprived layers of society—people who are homeless, or are living in dangerous situations that researchers cannot access—are left uncounted by household surveys, which by design are incapable of covering them.

Elizabeth Stuart, lead author of the report, told the World Socialist Web Site that “the poor quality of the data on poverty, child and maternal mortality” are some of the report’s most significant findings.

If one were to define poverty as living on less than $5 per day, over four billion people, that is, two-thirds of the human population, qualify as impoverished, according to World Bank estimates.

Meanwhile the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires, their stock portfolios soaring, are splurging on supercars, yachts and luxury apartments in record numbers. While the monetary policies pursued by the world’s central banks inject unimaginable amounts of wealth into the coffers of a parasitic financial aristocracy, the bulk of humanity struggles to survive amid poverty, austerity and war.

In March, Forbes reported that the combined net worth of the world’s billionaires hit a new high in 2015 of $7.05 trillion. Since 2000, the total wealth of the world’s billionaires has increased eight-fold. The magazine reported, “Despite plunging oil prices and a weakened euro, the ranks of the world’s wealthiest defied global economic turmoil and expanded once again.”

The amount of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent of the population will exceed that owned by the bottom 99 percent by next year, according to the Oxfam charity.

This week, the International Monetary Fund released its semiannual World Economic Outlook, where it warned that there would be no return to the rates of economic growth that prevailed before the 2008 financial crash for an indefinite period.

The IMF’s report further notes that despite record profits and huge amounts of cash being hoarded by major corporations internationally, private investment has plummeted in the six years since the official end of the post-financial-crisis recession. The report documents the single-minded focus of governments, central banks and policy makers in general on the further enrichment of the global financial elite at the expense of the world’s productive forces and the vast bulk of humanity.

The sheer levels of inequality across the globe, expressed in dilapidated infrastructure, the assault on the living standards of workers and youth, and the erosion of democratic rights, themselves inhibit serious studies of poverty, as demonstrated by the ODI’s report.

The ODI study notes that more than 100 countries do not have functioning systems to register births or deaths, making accurate counts of child mortality and maternal mortality impossible. Twenty-six countries have not collected data on child mortality since 2009. According to current estimates, anywhere from 220,000 to 400,000 women died during childbirth in 2014. Fewer than one in five births occur in countries with complete civil registration systems.

Many surveys are outdated, forcing researchers to either extrapolate from old data, or make assumptions about the relations between other data sets. The most up-to-date estimate of people living in extreme poverty was published almost four years ago. Only 28 of 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa had a household income survey between 2006 and 2013. Botswana’s poverty estimates are based on a household survey from 1993.

Estimations of poverty are further complicated by disagreements over the poverty threshold. Some nongovernmental organizations have set their own national poverty lines. For instance, in Thailand, the official national poverty line is $1.75 per day and the poverty rate is 1.81 percent. However, urban community groups have assessed the poverty line to be $4.74 per day, bumping the country’s poverty rate to nearly half the population at 41.64 percent.

Wars and other violent conflicts have a devastating effect on research of any kind, halting studies, ruining infrastructure, and destroying records. The vast sums of money spent on war dwarf those needed to significantly reduce social misery. The United States alone spent $496 billion on defense last year, while, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture organization, “the world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger.”

These staggering levels of poverty, inequality and military violence stand as a damning indictment of the capitalist system, the sole aim of which is to enrich the financial oligarchy that dominates society at the expense of the great majority of humanity.
17 April ,2015
WSWS.org

By Ramzy Baroud

The population of Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camp, Yarmouk – whose population once exceeded 250,000, dwindling throughout the Syrian civil war to 18,000 – are a microcosm of the story of a whole nation, whose perpetual pain shames us all, none excluded.

Refugees who escaped the Syrian war or are displaced in Syria itself, are experiencing the cruel reality under the harsh and inhospitable terrains of war and Arab regimes. Many of those who remained in Yarmouk were torn to shreds by the barrel bombs of the Syrian army, or victimized by the malicious, violent groupings that control the camp, including the al-Nusra Front, and as of late, IS.

Those who have somehow managed to escape bodily injury are starving. The starvation in Yarmouk is also the responsibility of all parties involved, and the “inhumane conditions” under which they subsist – especially since December 2012 – is a badge of shame on the forehead of the international community in general, and the Arab League in particular.

These are some of the culprits in the suffering of Yarmouk:

Israel

Israel bears direct responsibility in the plight of the refugees in Yarmouk. The refugees of Yarmouk are mostly the descendants of Palestinian refugees from historic Palestine, especially the northern towns, including Safad, which is now inside Israel. The camp was established in 1957, nearly a decade after the Nakba – the “Catastrophe” of 1948, which saw the expulsion of nearly a million refugees from Palestine. It was meant to be a temporary shelter, but it became a permanent home. Its residents never abandoned their right of return to Palestine, a right enshrined in UN resolution 194.

Israel knows that the memory of the refugees is its greatest enemy, so when the Palestinian leadership requested that Israel allow the Yarmouk refugees to move to the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a condition: that they renounce their right of return. Palestinians refused. History has shown that Palestinians would endure untold suffering and not abandon their rights in Palestine. The fact that Netanyahu would place such a condition is not just a testimony to Israel’s fear of Palestinian memory, but the political opportunism and sheer ruthlessness of the Israeli government.

The Palestinian Authority (PA)

The PA was established in 1994 based on a clear charter where a small group of Palestinians “returned” to the occupied territories, set up a few institutions and siphoned billions of dollars in international aid, in exchange for abandoning the right or return for Palestinian refugees, and ceding any claim on real Palestinian sovereignty and nationhood.

When the civil war in Syria began to quickly engulf the refugees, and although such a reality was to be expected, President Mahmoud Abbas’s authority did so little as if the matter had no bearing on the Palestinian people as a whole. True, Abbas made a few statements calling on Syrians to spare the refugees what was essentially a Syrian struggle, but not much more. When IS took over the camp, Abbas dispatched his labor minister, Ahmad Majdalani to Syria. The latter made a statement that the factions and the Syrian regime would unite against IS – which, if true, is likely to ensure the demise of hundreds more.

If Abbas had invested 10 percent of the energy he spent in his “government’s” media battle against Hamas or a tiny share of his investment in the frivolous “peace process”, he could have at least garnered the needed international attention and backing to treat the plight of Palestinian refugees in Syria’s Yarmouk with a degree of urgency. Instead, they were left to die alone.

The Syrian Regime

When rebels seized Yarmouk in December 2012, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces shelled the camp without mercy while Syrian media never ceased to speak about liberating Jerusalem. The contradictions between words and deeds when it comes to Palestine is an Arab syndrome that has afflicted every single Arab government and ruler since Palestine became the “Palestine question” and the Palestinians became the “refugee problem”.

Syria is no exception, but Assad, like his father Hafez before him, is particularly savvy in utilizing Palestine as a rallying cry aimed solely at legitimizing his regime while posing as if a revolutionary force fighting colonialism and imperialism. Palestinians will never forget the siege and massacre of Tel al-Zaatar (where Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were besieged, butchered but also starved as a result of a siege and massacre carried out by right-wing Lebanese militias and the Syrian army in 1976), as they will not forget or forgive what is taking place in Yarmouk today.

Many of Yarmouk’s homes were turned to rubble because of Assad’s barrel bombs, shells and airstrikes.

The Rebels

The so-called Free Syria Army (FSA) should have never entered Yarmouk, no matter how desperate they were for an advantage in their war against Assad. It was criminally irresponsible considering the fact that, unlike Syrian refugees, Palestinians had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The FSA invited the wrath of the regime, and couldn’t even control the camp, which fell into the hands of various militias that are plotting and bargaining amongst each other to defeat their enemies, who could possibly become their allies in their next pathetic street battles for control over the camp.

The access that IS gained in Yarmouk was reportedly facilitated by the al-Nusra Front which is an enemy of IS in all places but Yarmouk. Nusra is hoping to use IS to defeat the mostly local resistance in the camp, arranged by Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, before handing the reins of the besieged camp back to the al-Qaeda affiliated group. And while criminal gangs are politicking and bartering, Palestinian refugees are dying in droves.

The UN and Arab League

Cries for help have been echoing from Yarmouk for years, and yet none have been heeded. Recently, the UN Security Council decided to hold a meeting and discuss the situation there as if the matter was not a top priority years ago. Grandstanding and concerned press statements aside, the UN has largely abandoned the refugees. The budget for UNRWA, which looks after the nearly 60 Palestinian refugee camps across Palestine and the Middle East, has shrunk so significantly, the agency often finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy.

The UN refugee agency, better funded and equipped to deal with crises, does little for the Palestinian refugees in Syria. Promises of funds for UNRWA, which frankly could have done much better to raise awareness and confront the international community over their disregard for the refugees, are rarely met.

The Arab League are even more responsible. The League was largely established to unite Arab efforts to respond to the crisis in Palestine, and was supposed to be a stalwart defender of Palestinians and their rights. But the Arabs too have disowned Palestinians as they are intently focused on conflicts of more strategic interests – setting up an Arab army with clear sectarian intentions and aimed largely at settling scores.

Many of Us

The Syrian conflict has introduced great polarization within a community that once seemed united for Palestinian rights. Those who took the side of the Syrian regime wouldn’t concede for a moment that the Syrian government could have done more to lessen the suffering in the camp. Those who are anti-Assad insist that the entire evil deed is the doing of him and his allies.

Both of these groups are responsible for wasting time, confusing the discussion and wasting energies that could have been used to create a well-organized international campaign to raise awareness, funds and practical mechanisms of support to help Yarmouk in particular, and Palestinians refugees in Syria in general.

But we ought to remember that there are still 18,000 trapped in Yarmouk and organize on their behalf so that, even if it is untimely, we need do something. Anything.

Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net – is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently completing his PhD studies at the University of Exeter.
15 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Niles Williamson

The UN Security Council voted on Tuesday to impose an arms embargo on leading members of the Houthi militia as well as Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The resolution was passed with 14 votes in favor and Russia abstaining.

The text of the embargo was drafted by Jordan, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council. The Jordanian monarchy is actively participating in the anti-Houthi air assault in Yemen being spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.

The Salehs have given support to the Houthi militia that seized control of Yemen’s capital in September, ousting President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and placing him under house arrest. Hadi fled for the southern port city of Aden in February before leaving the country in March for Saudi Arabia in the face of a Houthi-led assault on his compound.

While the Security Council resolution calls for the Houthis to “immediately and unconditionally end violence,” it says nothing about the airstrikes being carried out on a daily basis by a coalition of Arab Gulf States headed by Saudi Arabia.

Since March 26 Saudi coalition air forces have launched more than 1,200 airstrikes against targets throughout Yemen, with some strikes killing scores of civilians. A bomb dropped on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in northern Yemen on March 30 killed at least 30 civilians. An airstrike on a dairy factory in the port city of Hodeida on April 1 killed at least 37 workers.

The Saudi monarchy, with US backing, has launched a widespread air assault against Houthi-controlled military targets as well as major urban areas. Street fighting in Aden between Houthi forces and armed forces opposed to them has left hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded, littering the streets with corpses.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, released a statement Tuesday warning about the destruction of infrastructure and the high rate of civilian casualties in the three-week-old campaign. “Every hour we are receiving and documenting disturbing and distressing reports of the toll that this conflict is taking on civilian lives and infrastructure,” he said. “Such a heavy civilian death toll ought to be a clear indication to all parties to this conflict that there may be serious problems in the conduct of hostilities.”

Hussein noted that coalition airstrikes have hit residential areas and homes throughout the country, including in the provinces of Taiz, Amran, Ibb, Al-Jawf and Saada. An airstrike that hit a residential area in Taiz on Sunday killed ten civilians and injured seven others.

Schools and hospitals throughout the country have been damaged or destroyed by airstrikes. Eight hospitals in the provinces of Aden, Dhale, Sanaa, and Saada have been hit by coalition bombs.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Monday, Ivan Simonovic, UN Deputy Secretary General for Human Rights, warned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, saying that a majority of those killed so far have been civilians. “Over 600 people killed, but more than half of them are civilians.” Of the civilian deaths counted by the UN, at least 84 have been children and 25 were women.

While the United States has provided intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi coalition from the onset of the assault, it has been gradually increasing its involvement in the conflict. American imperialism has long sought to maintain its control over Yemen, which lies next to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a major oil choke point.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration has a direct hand in the selection of targets for airstrikes. Pentagon war planners at a joint operations center are directly approving every target selected by the Saudi military. The US military planners also provide the Saudis with the specific locations where they should drop the bombs.

“The United States is providing our partners with necessary and timely intelligence to defend Saudi Arabia and respond to other efforts to support the legitimate government of Yemen,” Alistair Baskey, White House National Security Council spokesman told reporters on Sunday.

US warships stationed off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea have also begun assisting the Saudi-led coalition in enforcing a blockade of the country. On April 1, US sailors boarded a Panamanian-flagged ship in the Red Sea in search of weapons supposedly bound for the Houthis. The search did not turn up any weapons.

American drones continue to fly over Yemen in support of Saudi operations against the Houthi militia and the targeting of members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

An apparent drone strike on the southeastern port city of Mukalla Sunday killed senior AQAP leader Ibrahim Al Rubaish and as many as six other people. Rubaish, a Saudi national, had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp from 2002 until his release back to Saudi Arabia in 2006. He reportedly fled to Yemen in 2009 and joined AQAP, and the US recently placed a $5 million bounty on his head.

While neither the CIA nor the Pentagon have claimed responsibility for the attack, it was likely carried out by the US, since Mukalla, which was seized by AQAP fighters earlier this month, has yet to be targeted by Saudi airstrikes. If confirmed, the attack would mark the first US drone strike in Yemen in nearly six weeks.

It has been three weeks since US Special Forces evacuated the Al Anad airbase north of Aden. Al Anad had served as the main hub for the officially secret American air war, which has killed more than 1,000 people in Yemen since 2009.

Meanwhile, both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are actively preparing a possible ground invasion of the country. The Egyptian military dictatorship reported that it and the Saudi monarchy are discussing a “major military maneuver” along with other Gulf states in the coming days.
15 April, 2015
WSWS.org

 

To Remain in Africa For Decades

By Nick Turse

For three days, wearing a kaleidoscope of camouflage patterns, they huddled together on a military base in Florida. They came from U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, from France and Norway, from Denmark, Germany, and Canada: 13 nations in all. They came to plan a years-long “Special Operations-centric” military campaign supported by conventional forces, a multinational undertaking that — if carried out — might cost hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars and who knows how many lives.

Ask the men involved and they’ll talk about being mindful of “sensitivities” and “cultural differences,” about the importance of “collaboration and coordination,” about the value of a variety of viewpoints, about “perspectives” and “partnerships.” Nonetheless, behind closed doors and unbeknownst to most of the people in their own countries, let alone the countries fixed in their sights, a coterie of Western special ops planners were sketching out a possible multinational military future for a troubled region of Africa.

From January 13th to 15th, representatives from the U.S. and 12 partner nations gathered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa for an exercise dubbed Silent Quest 15-1. The fictional scenario on which they were to play out their war game had a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to it. It was an amalgam of two perfectly real and ongoing foreign policy and counterterrorism disasters of the post-9/11 era: the growth of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the emergence of the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. The war game centered on the imagined rise of a group dubbed the “Islamic State of Africa” and the spread of its proto-caliphate over parts of Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon — countries terrorized by the real Boko Haram, which did recently pledge its allegiance to the Islamic State.

Silent Quest 15-1 was just the latest in a series of similarly named exercises — the first took place in March 2013 — designed to help plot out the special ops interventions of the next decade. This war game was no paintball-style walk in the woods. There were no mock firefights, no dress rehearsals. It wasn’t the flag football equivalent of battle. Instead, it was a tabletop exercise building on something all too real: the ever-expanding panoply of U.S. and allied military activities across ever-larger parts of Africa. Speaking of that continent, Matt Pascual, a participant in Silent Quest and the Africa desk officer for SOCOM’s Euro-Africa Support Group, noted that the U.S. and its allies were already dealing with “myriad issues” in the region and, perhaps most importantly, that many of the participating countries “are already there.” The country “already there” the most is, of course, Pascual’s own: the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. has been involved in a variety of multinational interventions in Africa, including one in Libya that involved both a secret warand a conventional campaign of missiles and air strikes, assistance to French forces in the Central African Republic and Mali, and the training and funding of African proxies to do battle against militant groups like Boko Haram as well as Somalia’s al-Shabab and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine. In 2014, the U.S. carried out 674 military activities across Africa, nearly two missions per day, an almost 300% jump in the number of annual operations, exercises, and military-to-military training activities since U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2008.

Despite this massive increase in missions and a similar swelling of bases, personnel, and funding, the picture painted last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee by AFRICOM chief General David Rodriguez was startlingly bleak. For all the American efforts across Africa, Rodriguez offered a vision of a continent in crisis, imperiled from East to West by militant groups that have developed, grown in strength, or increased their deadly reach in the face of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

“Transregional terrorists and criminal networks continue to adapt and expand aggressively,” Rodriguez told committee members. “Al-Shabab has broadened its operations to conduct, or attempt to conduct, asymmetric attacks against Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and especially Kenya. Libya-based threats are growing rapidly, including an expanding ISIL presence… Boko Haram threatens the ability of the Nigerian government to provide security and basic services in large portions of the northeast.” Despite the grim outcomes since the American military began “pivoting” to Africa after 9/11, the U.S. recently signed an agreement designed to keep its troops based on the continent until almost midcentury.

Mission Creep

For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are negligible, intentionally leaving the American people, not to mention most Africans, in the dark about the true size, scale, and scope of its operations there. AFRICOM public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on the continent. They shrink from talk of camps and outposts, claiming to have just one baseanywhere in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in the tiny nation of Djibouti. They don’t like to talk about military operations. They offer detailed informationabout only a tiny fraction of their training exercises. They refuse to disclose the locations where personnel have been stationed or even counts of the countries involved.

During an interview, an AFRICOM spokesman once expressed his worry to me that even tabulating how many deployments the command has in Africa would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts. Behind closed doors, however, AFRICOM’s officers speak quite a different language. They have repeatedly asserted that the continent is an American “battlefield” and that — make no bones about it — they are already embroiled in an actual “war.”

According to recently released figures from U.S. Africa Command, the scope of that “war” grew dramatically in 2014. In its “posture statement,” AFRICOM reports that it conducted 68 operations last year, up from 55 the year before. These included operations Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic; Observant Compass, an effort to degrade or destroy what’s left of Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa; and United Assistance, the deployment of military personnel to combat the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

The number of major joint field exercises U.S. personnel engaged in with African military partners inched up from 10 in 2013 to 11 last year. These included African Lion in Morocco, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which had a field training component and served as capstone events for the prior year’s military-to-military instruction missions.

AFRICOM also conducted maritime security exercises including Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal, and three weeks of maritime security training scenarios as part of Phoenix Express 2014, with sailors from numerous countries including Algeria, Italy, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The number of security cooperation activities skyrocketed from 481 in 2013 to 595 last year. Such efforts included military training under a “state partnership program” that teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance, or ACOTA, program through which U.S. military advisers and mentors provide equipment and instruction to African troops.

In 2013, the combined total of all U.S. activities on the continent reached 546, an average of more than one mission per day. Last year, that number leapt to 674. In other words, U.S. troops were carrying out almost two operations, exercises, or activities — from drone strikes to counterinsurgency instruction, intelligence gathering to marksmanship training — somewhere in Africa every day. This represents an enormous increase from the 172 “missions, activities, programs, and exercises” that AFRICOM inherited from other geographic commands when it began operations in 2008.

Transnational Terror Groups: Something From Nothing

In 2000, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.” While it touched on “internal separatist or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as non-state actors like militias and “warlord armies,” there was conspicuously no mention of Islamic extremism or major transnational terrorist threats. Prior to 2001, in fact, the United States did not recognize any terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and a senior Pentagon official noted that the most feared Islamic militants on the continent had “not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.”

In the wake of 9/11, even before AFRICOM was created, the U.S. began ramping up operations across the continent in an effort to bolster the counterterror capabilities of allies and insulate Africa from transnational terror groups, namely globe-trotting Islamic extremists. The continent, in other words, was seen as something of a clean slate for experiments in terror prevention.

Billions of dollars have been pumped into Africa to build bases, arm allies, gather intelligence, fight proxy wars, assassinate militants, and conduct perhaps thousands of military missions — and none of it has had its intended effect. Last year, for example, Somali militants “either planned or executed increasingly complex and lethal attacks in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, and Ethiopia,” according to AFRICOM. Earlier this month, those same al-Shabab militants upped the ante by slaughtering 142 students at a college in Kenya.

And al-Shabab’s deadly growth and spread has hardly been the exception to the rule in Africa. In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, AFRICOM commander Rodriguez rattled off the names of numerous Islamic terror groups that have sprung up in the intervening years, destabilizing the very countries the U.S. had sought to strengthen. While the posture statement he presented put the best gloss possible on Washington’s military efforts in Africa, even a cursory reading of it — and under the circumstances, it’s worth quoting at length — paints a bleak picture of what that “pivot” to Africa has actually meant on the ground. Sections pulled from various parts of the document speak volumes:

“The network of al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents continues to exploit Africa’s under-governed regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is expanding its presence in North Africa. Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training, and operations, both within Africa and trans-regionally. Violent extremist organizations are utilizing increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices, and casualties from these weapons in Africa increased by approximately 40 percent in 2014…

“In North and West Africa, Libyan and Nigerian insecurity increasingly threaten U.S. interests. In spite of multinational security efforts, terrorist and criminal networks are gaining strength and interoperability. Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and other violent extremist organizations are exploiting weak governance, corrupt leadership, and porous borders across the Sahel and Maghreb to train and move fighters and distribute resources…

“Libya-based threats to U.S. interests are growing… Libyan governance, security, and economic stability deteriorated significantly in the past year… Today, armed groups control large areas of territory in Libya and operate with impunity. Libya appears to be emerging as a safe haven where terrorists, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated groups, can train and rebuild with impunity. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is increasingly active in Libya, including in Derna, Benghazi, Tripoli, and Sebha…

“The spillover effects of instability in Libya and northern Mali increase risks to U.S. interests in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the success of Tunisia’s democratic transition…

“The security situation in Nigeria also declined in the past year. Boko Haram threatens the functioning of a government that is challenged to maintain its people’s trust and to provide security and other basic services… Boko Haram has launched attacks across Nigeria’s borders into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger…

“…both the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo are at risk of further destabilization by insurgent groups, and simmering ethnic tensions in the Great Lakes region have the potential to boil over violently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

All this, mind you, is AFRICOM’s own assessment of the situation on the continent on which it has focused its efforts for the better part of a decade as U.S. missions there soared. In this context, it’s worth reemphasizing that, before the U.S. ramped up those efforts, Africa was — by Washington’s own estimation — relatively free of transnational Islamic terror groups.

Tipping the Scales in Africa

Despite Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and scareheadlines lamenting their merger or conflating those or other brutal terror outfits operating under similar monikers, there is currently no real Islamic State of Africa. But the war game carried out at MacDill Air Force Base in January against that fictional group is far from fantasy, representing as it does the next logical step in a series of operations that have been gaining steam since AFRICOM’s birth. And buried in the command’s 2015 Posture Statement is actual news that signals a continuation of this trajectory into the 2040s.

In May 2014, the U.S. reached an agreement — it’s called an “implementing arrangement” — with the government of Djibouti “that secures [its] presence” in that country “through 2044.” In addition, AFRICOM officers are nowtalking about the possibility of building a string of surveillance outposts along the northern tier of the continent. And don’t forget how, over the past few years, U.S. staging areas, mini-bases, and airfields have popped up in the contiguous nations of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and — skippingChad (where AFRICOM recently built temporary facilities for a special ops exercise) — the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. All of this suggests that the U.S. military is digging in for the long haul in Africa.

Silent Quest 15-1 was designed as a model to demonstrate just how Washington will conduct “Special Operations-centric” coalition warfare in Africa. It was, in fact, designed to align, wrote Gunnery Sergeant Reina Barnett in SOCOM’s trade publication Tip of the Spear, with the “2020 planning guidance of Army Maj. Gen. James Linder, commander of Special Operations Command Africa.” And the agreement with Djibouti demonstrates that the U.S. military is now beginning to plan for almost a quarter-century beyond that. But, if the last six years — marked by a 300% increase in U.S. missions as well as the spread of terror groups and terrorism in Africa — are any indicator, the results are likely to be anything but pleasing to Washington.

AFRICOM commander David Rodriguez continues to put the best face on U.S. efforts in Africa, citing “progress in several areas through close cooperation with our allies and partners.” His command’s assessment of the situation, however, is remarkably bleak. “Where our national interests compel us to tip the scales and enhance collective security gains, we may have to do more — either by enabling our allies and partners, or acting unilaterally,” reads the posture statement Rodriguez delivered to that Senate committee.

After more than a decade of increasing efforts, however, there’s little evidence that AFRICOM has the slightest idea how to tip the scales in its own favor in Africa.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.

14 April, 2015
TomDispatch.com

 

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

BBC live report of the collapse of WTC building 7, more than minutes before the collapse took place. Building Seven in the background is still intact.

The 9/11 narrative in the mainstream media has taken on a new slant. The FBI is now accused of whitewashing Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

The alleged Saudi involvement in supporting Osama bin Laden, not to mention the classified 28 pages of the 9/11 joint Congressional inquiry pertaining to the insidious role of Saudi Arabia in supporting the hijackers is part of a propaganda ploy.

When the report of Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 was released in December 2002, it was met with considerable skepticism. That skepticism grew for a period of time but then was reduced to speculation about what was contained in the 28 pages that had been redacted by the Bush White House.

Various U.S. government leaders have since suggested that the missing 28 pages point to Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the 9/11 crimes. However such musings fail to discuss other important issues, like the links between the Saudi regime and the Western deep state, or the fact that, from the start, even the Saudis were calling for the 28 pages to be released. Discussion of the missing 28 pages also omits mention of the highly suspicious nature of the Inquiry’s investigation and its leaders. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014

The report of the FBI 9/11 Review Commission (25 March 2015) has revealed circumstances which allegedly were withheld by the FBI from both the 9/11 Commission headed by former Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as well from the joint Senate House inquiry committee chaired by former Senator Bob Graham. Graham.

And now agencies of the US government including the FBI are being accused of protecting the Saudis. This alleged Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks has served to precipitate segments of the 9/11 Truth movement into an erroneous and contradictory discourse. On the part of the US government and its intelligence apparatus, the objective is to ultimately to build a narrative which will weaken the 9/11 Truth movement.

The purpose of this new propaganda ploy is ultimately to sustain the legend that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks and that Saudi Arabia relentlessly supported Al Qaeda, namely that Saudi Arabia acted as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

In this regard, the media reports intimate that if the Saudi connection is confirmed by the 28 classified pages, this “would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government.”

There is, however, an obvious hiccup in this reasoning: if the Saudis were indeed the State sponsors of 9/11, why on earth did the US and the Atlantic Alliance (under the doctrine of collective security) choose to wage a “Just War” of retribution against Afghanistan. Did they get there countries mixed up?

9/11 Truth

Many 9/11 Truthers across America are now calling for the release of the 28 classified pages. They are also accusing the FBI of coverup and complicity.

All eyes are on the classified 28 pages, which document Saudi support for the alleged hijackers. Meanwhile, the irrefutable evidence of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers –not to mention the mysterious collapse of WTC 7 which was announced by CNN and the BBC more than 20 minutes before it occurred– no longer constitutes the centrefold of the 9/11 Truth movement: ’The Saudis are behind 9/11 and our government is protecting them.”

Framed in a “Tele Novela” style scenario featuring wealthy Saudis in the plush suburban surroundings of Sarasota, Florida two weeks before 9/11, the New York Post describes the circumstances of Saudi involvement (quoting the FBI 9/11 Review Commission Report) in an article entitled How the FBI is whitewashing the Saudi connection to 9/11: .

“Just 15 days before the 9/11 attacks, a well-connected Saudi family suddenly abandoned their luxury home in Sarasota, Fla., leaving behind jewelry, clothes, opulent furniture, a driveway full of cars — including a brand new Chrysler PT Cruiser — and even a refrigerator full of food.

About the only thing not left behind was a forwarding address. The occupants simply vanished without notifying their neighbors, realtor or even mail carrier.

The 3,300-square-foot home on Escondito Circle (see image right) belonged to Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of then-King Fahd. But at the time, it was occupied by his daughter and son-in-law, who beat a hasty retreat back to Saudi Arabia just two weeks before the attacks after nearly a six-year stay here.

Neighbors took note of the troubling coincidence and called the FBI, which opened an investigation that led to the startling discovery that at least one “family member” trained at the same flight school as some of the 9/11 hijackers in nearby Venice, Fla.

… The Saudi-9/11 connection in Florida was no small part of the overall 9/11 investigation. Yet it was never shared with Congress. Nor was it mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Now it’s being whitewashed again, in a newly released report by the 9/11 Review Commission, set up last year by Congress to assess “any evidence now known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission.” Though the FBI acknowledges the Saudi family was investigated, it maintains the probe was a dead end.

The panel’s report also doesn’t explain why visitor security logs for the gated Sarasota community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers, including 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta.

The three-member review panel was appointed by FBI Director James Comey, who also officially released the findings.

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis “urgent” pre-9/11 exit suggests “someone may have tipped them off” about the coming attacks.

Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush.

….

Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks — which if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government. The section allegedly identifies high-level Saudi officials and intelligence agents by name, and details their financial transactions and other dealings with the San Diego hijackers. It zeroes in on the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy, among other Saudi entities.

The [FBI] review commission, however, concludes there is “no evidence” that any Saudi official provided assistance to the hijackers, even though the panel failed to interview Graham or his two key investigators — former Justice Department attorney Dana Lesemann and FBI investigator Michael Jacobson — who ran down FBI leads tying Saudi officials to the San Diego hijackers and documented their findings in the 28 pages. (emphasis added)

The key figure behind this new wave of propaganda is former Senator Bob Graham, who led the joint inquiry of the Senate and the House intelligence committees together with Rep. Porter Goss, a career CIA official who was subsequently appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by the Bush administration. Graham coordinated the drafting and editing of the report including the 28 classified pages on Saudi Arabia.

While Graham is now heralded by the mainstream media as a 911 Truther, the evidence suggests that immediately in the wake of 9/11, he was involved (together with Porter Goss) in a coverup on behalf of Bush-Cheney. According to Kevin Ryan, “in the months following 9/11, both Goss and Graham rejected calls for an investigation”:

The Senate voted for one anyway, however, and that led both Bush and Cheney to attempt to stop it or limit its scope. Apparently the best they could do was to make sure that Goss and Graham were put in charge. That seemed to work as the Inquiry began in February 2002, more than five months after the attacks, and the approach taken was one of uncritical deference to the Bush Administration and the intelligence community.

Goss immediately made it clear that the Inquiry would not be looking for guilt or accountability with regard to 9/11. Saying he was “looking for solutions, not scapegoats,” Goss continued to defend the White House with regard to warnings the president had received about an impending attack, saying it was “a lot of nonsense.” The FBI did not cooperate but that didn’t seem to bother Goss and Graham. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014

Both the joint inquiry led by Graham and the 9/11 Commission were part of a Big Lie. And now Bob Graham and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean are accusing the FBI of camouflage and the Saudis of collusion in the 9/11 attacks, while failing to acknowledge coverup and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.

According to Bob Graham in an interview with the Miami Herald,

’The FBI has served America through most of its history. There were stumbles by the agency before 9/11 and since the tragedy there has been a consistent effort to cover up the extent of Saudi Arabia’s involvement.’ (emphasis added)

And because Bob Graham accuses the FBI and the federal government, the 9/11 Truth movement applauds without realizing that these accusations directed against the FBI are “framed” with a view to sustaining the mainstream 9/11 narrative. What is at stake is a desperate ploy to uphold the legend that Muslims were behind 9/11 and that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorists giving them money, with the FBI involved in a coverup, George W. Bush protecting his Saudi cronies because the Bushes and the bin Ladens were “intimo amigos”.

Former Senator Graham ”smells a rat” and that rat is the FBI and complicit government agencies:

“This is a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of federal government which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”

“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” he said, adding, “I am speaking of the kingdom,” or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.

But who is the rat? The FBI or Senator Bob Graham who is visibly involved in a coverup on behalf of US intelligence? He accuses US government agencies of negligence, which serves to arouse protest against the FBI by many 9/11 Truthers.
Graham’s staged accusations thereby serve to distract the American public’s attention from the real evidence, amply documented that the WTC towers were brought down through controlled demolition and that Islamic terrorists were not behind the 9/11 attacks. The issue of Saudi financial support of al Qaeda is not only known and documented since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war, it is irrelevant in establishing who was behind the terror attacks. Moreover, the contents of the 28 classified pages are known.

In a bitter irony, Graham’s track record (mentioned above) in supporting the official 9/11 narrative on behalf of Bush-Cheney is not mentioned:

Former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired a congressional inquiry into 9/11 — separate from the 9/11 Commission — stated, as though now it was obvious, “None of the people leading this investigation think it is credible that 19 people — most who could not speak English and did not have previous experience in the United States — could carry out such a complicated task without external assistance.”

Now, Graham says, a breakthrough may finally be around the corner with the upcoming declassification of the 28 pages of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Calling for the official release and publication of the 28 page classified section of the joint inquiry report pertaining to Saudi Arabia is an obvious red-herring. The objective is to confuse matters, create divisions within the 9/11 Truth movement and ultimately dispel the fact that the 9/11 attacks were a carefully organized False Flag event which was used to declare war on Afghanistan as well as usher in sweeping anti-terrorist legislation.

Both the Congressional inquiry as well the 9/11 Commission report are flawed, their objective was to sustain the official narrative that America was under attack on September 11, 2001. And Graham’s role in liaison with the CIA, is “damage control” with a view to protecting those who were behind the demolition of the WTC towers as well sustaining the Al Qaeda legend, which constitutes the cornerstone of US military doctrine under the so-called “Global War on Terrorism”.

Without 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism”, the warmongers in high office would not have a leg to stand on. In turn, 9/11 Truth is an encroachment which undermines war propaganda and the US-led campaign of Islamophobia, which is sweeping the Western World.

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

13 April 2015

Home

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Pakistan has virtually declined Saudi Arabia’s request to join the Arab coalition fighting its current military operation in to restore the deposed Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. After days of discussion in media and parliament, a joint session of parliament passed a resolution on Friday (April 10) saying that Pakistan “should maintain neutrality in the conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis”.

The joint session was summoned after the Saudi government approached Islamabad for Pakistani warplanes, warships and soldiers to assist in the conflict and join the Saudi-led military coalition that began conducting air strikes last month against Houthi forces in Yemen.

The resolution further said that the crisis in Yemen could “plunge the region into turmoil”, calling upon the warring factions in Yemen to resolve their differences “peacefully and through dialogue”. The resolution noted that while the war in Yemen was not sectarian in nature, it had the potential of turning into a sectarian conflict and thereby having a critical fallout in the region, including within Pakistan.

It urged the government to initiate steps to move the UN Security Council and the Organization of Islamic Conference to bring about an immediate ceasefire in Yemen.

Brig. Gen. Ahmad Al-Assiri, consultant in the office of the Saudi defense minister told newsmen at his daily press conference Friday that the Pakistani government had not yet announced its official position. However, he added “Pakistan’s participation is in the interest of the Yemeni people and the operation but there are other forces already with the coalition that are well trained for the terrain.” Tellingly, hours after the Pakistanis parliament’s resolution, Saudi Arabia refused permission to a Pakistani aircraft on the plea that the Shaheen Air plane did not have an entry permit to the Kingdom’s airspace.

On the other hand, the reaction of the United Arab Emirate was very sharp. The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr Anwar Mohammed Gargash Garhash warned Pakistan of having to pay a “heavy price” for an “ambiguous stand.” He told Khaleej Times: “The vague and contradictory stands of Pakistan and Turkey are an absolute proof that Arab security — from Libya to Yemen — is the responsibility of none but Arab countries.” He added that Pakistan should take a clear position “in favor of its strategic relations with the six-nation Arab Gulf cooperation Council”.

Islamabad finds itself in an awkward position on Yemen, reluctant to offend oil-rich Saudi Arabia with which it has long enjoyed close military and economic ties but also not wanting to get involved in a war that could fan sectarian tensions at home. At the same time, Pakistan needs to build better ties with its immediate neighbour Iran that offers huge prospects of trade and energy imports once sanctions are lifted against Tehran.

Iranian Foreign Minister visits Islamabad

Pakistan parliament stance to be neutral on the Yemeni conflict came after weeks of media campaign to highlight the risk for Pakistan to join the Saudi-led coalition. It came days after the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s visit to Islamabad.

Commenting on Zarif’s visit, the Daily Times emphasized that history testifies that Iran cannot be solely blamed for the ongoing civil war in Yemen. Rather other factors are equally responsible for the crisis. In fact, the nature of the civil war in Yemen is not completely sectarian as is being projected by the media. Other factors including the presence of conflicting groups like Zaidi Shiitte rebels called Houthis, separatists from South Yemen and political loyalists are equally responsible for the ongoing civil war that actually started in 2011 when government loyalists and opposition tribesmen clashed during protests in Yemen.

The Daily Times argued that Iran has been acting responsibly and its role is not as bad as portrayed by the media. It is backing a political solution to the Yemen conflict through a ceasefire. On this basis, it has heightened its diplomatic moves for stopping the civil war in Yemen while safeguarding its own interests. “The visiting Iranian top official has stressed the need for finding a political solution to the Yemen conflict. The Iranian stance can be termed appropriate because it carries all the ingredients that can be applied for bringing back regional stability. The statement is sensible and negates the propaganda against Iran’s intentions in the Yemen conflict.”

Yemen’s quagmire

On April 9, the daily Dawn, the largest English newspaper of Pakistan, published an article under the title Yemen’s quagmire, launching a scathing attack on the Saudi-led air strikes against targets in Yemen. The paper said:

“Simply put, it looks like the Saudis have launched an ill-conceived campaign that has plenty of precedents from the recent past. Air campaigns against militia forces on the ground have not yielded results to brag about. The Americans tried it in Libya and look at what they created. They tried it in Kosovo, but ultimately had to settle for an agreement the terms of which were practically identical to the terms offered by Milosevic before the start of the campaign. The Saudis don’t have the military wherewithal to sustain this type of a campaign for very long, and no clear exit strategy either. It would be folly of tremendous proportions to join in. Going in with overwhelming force, and committing to a large state-making function has been tried by the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hasn’t worked.”

Another leading English daily The News columnist wrote, the Saudis could have played a more imaginative game by trying to influence developments in Yemen from a distance. With their eyes closed they are walking into a quagmire, although with Yemen’s history intertwined with their own who should know better than them that much like Afghanistan, Yemen has been a graveyard of invading armies?

“If Pakistan is a true friend of the Saudis it should point out these dangers, forcefully and without mincing words, and together with Iran and Turkey throw its weight behind a peaceful end to the fighting. This will be the greatest favor that anyone can do to the House of Saud. Forget about the dangers to Pakistan. Sending troops to Yemen will only mean reinforcing the disaster that the Saudis are creating for themselves,” The News concluded.

Yemen war has more in common with 19th-century Europe

Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Conn Hallinan believes that the coalition that Riyadh has assembled to intervene in Yemen’s civil war has more in common with 19th-century Europe than the 21st-century Middle East. The 22-member Arab League came together at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt last month to draw up its plan to attack the Houthi forces currently holding Yemen’s capital. And the meeting bore an uncanny resemblance to a similar gathering of monarchies at Vienna in 1814. The leading voice at the Egyptian resort was the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal. His historical counterpart was Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister who designed the “Concert of Europe” to ensure that no revolution would ever again threaten the monarchs who dominated the continent.

More than 200 years divides those gatherings, but their goals were much the same: to safeguard a small and powerful elite’s dominion over a vast area.

The Independent of UK’s writer Patrick Cockburn believes that foreign states that go to war in Yemen usually come to regret it. In practice, a decisive outcome is the least likely prospect for Yemen, just as it has long been in Iraq and Afghanistan. A political feature common to all three countries is that power is divided between so many players it is impossible to defeat or placate them all for very long.

It may be pointed out that the Houthis fought six wars with former military strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced out of the presidency in 2012. Hadi, his vice president, took over and largely ignored the Houthis — always a bad idea in Yemen.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

12 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

It is one of history’s ironies that the Lincoln Memorial is a sacred space for the Civil Rights Movement and the site of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Lincoln did not think blacks were the equals of whites. Lincoln’s plan was to send the blacks in America back to Africa, and if he had not been assassinated, returning blacks to Africa would likely have been his post-war policy.

As Thomas DiLorenzo and a number of non-court historians have conclusively established, Lincoln did not invade the Confederacy in order to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation did not occur until 1863 when opposition in the North to the war was rising despite Lincoln’s police state measures to silence opponents and newspapers. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure issued under Lincoln’s war powers. The proclamation provided for the emancipated slaves to be enrolled in the Union army replenishing its losses. It was also hoped that the proclamation would spread slave revolts in the South while southern white men were away at war and draw soldiers away from the fronts in order to protect their women and children. The intent was to hasten the defeat of the South before political opposition to Lincoln in the North grew stronger.

The Lincoln Memorial was built not because Lincoln “freed the slaves,” but because Lincoln saved the empire. As the Savior of the Empire, had Lincoln not been assassinated, he could have become emperor for life.

As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo writes: “Lincoln spent his entire political career attempting to use the powers of the state for the benefit of the moneyed corporate elite (the ‘one-percenters’ of his day), first in Illinois, and then in the North in general, through protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for road, canal, and railroad corporations, and a national bank controlled by politicians like himself to fund it all.”

Lincoln was a man of empire. As soon as the South was conquered, ravaged, and looted, his collection of war criminal generals, such as Sherman and Sheridan, set about exterminating the Plains Indians in one of the worst acts of genocide in human history. Even today Israeli Zionists point to Washington’s extermination of the Plains Indians as the model for Israel’s theft of Palestine.

The War of Northern Aggression was about tariffs and northern economic imperialism. The North was protectionist. The South was free trade. The North wanted to finance its economic development by forcing the South to pay higher prices for manufactured goods. The North passed the Morrill Tariff which more than doubled the tariff rate to 32.6% and provided for a further hike to 47%. The tariff diverted the South’s profits on its agricultural exports to the coffers of Northern industrialists and manufacturers. The tariff was designed to redirect the South’s expenditures on manufactured goods from England to the higher cost goods produced in the North.

This is why the South left the union, a right of self-determination under the Constitution.

The purpose of Lincoln’s war was to save the empire, not to abolish slavery. In his first inaugural address Lincoln “made an ironclad defense of slavery.” His purpose was to keep the South in the Empire despite the Morrill Tariff. As for slavery, Lincoln said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” This position, Lincoln reminded his audience, was part of the 1860 Republican Party platform. Lincoln also offered his support for the strong enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to hunt down and return runaway slaves, and he gave his support to the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, already passed by Northern votes in the House and Senate, that prohibited any federal interference with slavery. For Lincoln and his allies, the empire was far more important than slaves.

DiLorenzo explains what the deal was that Lincoln offered to the South. However, just as empire was more important to the North than slavery, for the South avoiding large taxes on manufactured goods, in effect a tax on Southern agricultural profits, was more important than northern guarantees for slavery.

If you want to dislodge your brainwashing about the War of Northern Aggression, read DiLorenzo’s books, The Real Lincoln, and Lincoln Unmasked.

The so-called Civil War was not a civil war. In a civil war, both sides are fighting for control of the government. The South was not fighting for control of the federal government. The South seceded and the North refused to let the South go.

The reason I am writing about this is to illustrate how history is falsified in behalf of agendas. I am all for civil rights and participated in the movement while a college student. What makes me uncomfortable is the transformation of Lincoln, a tyrant who was an agent for the One Percent and was willing to destroy any and every thing in behalf of empire, into a civil rights hero. Who will be next? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? George W. Bush? Obama? John Yoo? If Lincoln can be a civil rights hero, so can be torturers. Those who murder in Washington’s wars women and children can be turned into defenders of women’s rights and child advocates. And probably they will be.

This is the twisted perverted world in which we live. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is confronted with Washington’s overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine, a Russian ally and for centuries a part of Russia itself, while Putin is falsely accused of invading Ukraine. China is accused by Washington as a violator of human rights while Washington murders more civilians in the 21st century than every other country combined.

Everywhere in the West monstrous lies stand unchallenged. The lies are institutionalized in history books, course curriculums, policy statements, movements and causes, and in historical memory.

America will be hard pressed to survive the lies that it lives.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

13 April, 2015
Paulcraigroberts.org