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By Countercurrents.org

The Chilcot report that enquired into Britain’s decision to join US coalition that attacked Iraq which was released today finds that Britain decided to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on “flawed intelligence”. John Chilcot, the chair of the Iraq Inquiry said that the invasion went “badly wrong”.

The 2.6 million-word Iraq Inquiry – which took seven years to prepare – was published in full on Wednesday. It can be accessed online.

Chilcot said: “The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.” Chilcot said that, despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. Investigators also found the planning and preparations for Iraq after Hussein was overthrown were wholly inadequate, said Chilcot, who had not been asked to rule on the legality of the invasion. “The people of Iraq have suffered greatly,” Chilcot said.

Responding to the report, former Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a press conference on Wednesday that he “accept full responsibility without exception and without excuse” for the decision to go to war in Iraq, but insisted that the world “is in a better place without Saddam Hussein”.

He said,

“the decision to go to war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power in a coalition of over 40 countries led by the USA, was the hardest, most momentous, most agonising decision I took in 10 years as British prime minister.

For that decision today I accept full responsibility, without exception and without excuse. I recognise the division felt by many in our country over the war and in particular I feel deeply and sincerely – in a way that no words can properly convey – the grief and suffering of those who lost ones they loved in Iraq, whether the members of our armed forces, the armed forces of other nations, or Iraqis.

The intelligence assessments made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong. The aftermath turned out to be more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined. The coalition planned for one set of ground facts and encountered another, and a nation whose people we wanted to set free and secure from the evil of Saddam, became instead victim to sectarian terrorism.

For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know or can believe.”

Joshua Rozenberg writing for The Guardian opined:

Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry has not, in his words, “expressed a view on whether military action [in Iraq] was legal”. That question, he said, could be resolved only by a court. Still less does his report deal with the question of whether Tony Blair or others should face legal action.

These are highlights of the report

Military action

The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before all peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort

Military action might have been necessary later, but in March 2003, it said, there was no imminent threat from the then Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, the strategy of containment could have been adapted and continued for some time and the majority of the Security Council supported continuing UN inspections and monitoring

On 28 July 2002, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair assured US President George W Bush he would be with him “whatever”. But in the letter, he pointed out that a US coalition for military action would need: Progress on the Middle East peace process, UN authority and a shift in public opinion in the UK, Europe, and among Arab leaders

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – or WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified
Intelligence had “not established beyond doubt” that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons

The Joint Intelligence Committee said Iraq has “continued to produce chemical and biological agents” and there had been “recent production”. It said Iraq had the means to deliver chemical and biological weapons. But it did not say that Iraq had continued to produce weapons

Policy on the Iraq invasion was made on the basis of flawed intelligence assessments. It was not challenged, and should have been

The legal case

The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were “far from satisfactory”

The invasion began on 20 March 2003 but not until 13 March did then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith advise there was, on balance, a secure legal basis for military action. Apart from No 10’s response to his letter on 14 March, no formal record was made of that decision and the precise grounds on which it was made remain unclear

The UK’s actions undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council: The UN’s Charter puts responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security in the Security Council. The UK government was claiming to act on behalf of the international community “to uphold the authority of the Security Council”. But it knew it did not have a majority supporting its actions

In Cabinet, there was little questioning of Lord Goldsmith about his advice and no substantive discussion of the legal issues recorded

Iraq’s aftermath

Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were “wholly inadequate”

The government failed to achieve the stated objectives it had set itself in Iraq. More than 200 British citizens died as a result of the conflict. Iraqi people suffered greatly. By July 2009, at least 150,000 Iraqis had died, probably many more. More than one million were displaced

6 July 2016

‘I was a maths teacher. I shot him in the back of the head. Three times. I felt nothing. Now I regret.’

By Robert Fisk

Unlike his fellow prisoners, Hamoud Saleh Hamed does not wear leg shackles when he is pushed on a spanking new wheelchair into the Syrian prison governor’s guest room at the Mezze military jail. Impossible, since his trousered right stump and the missing lower half of his left leg mean that the 37-year old Saudi maths teacher from Mecca cannot escape by throwing himself from the second floor window. But he speaks with great calmness, a very intelligent man with long hair and a whispy beard who recounts with frightening lucidity his life as a Nusrah Front mortar platoon commander and an executioner who fired four shots into the head of a Syrian government “collaborator”.

Hamed talks about fate, and says he regrets killing the 50-year old man whose name he never knew, but he recounts with some pride his weapons’ training and his role in the bloody July 2012 Battle of Damascus when thousands of Nusrah and allied rebels vainly tried to capture the city from its Syrian army defenders. He even used Google to plot his artillery ranges across the city but lived to witness the Syrian civilians he came to ‘save’, begging him to leave the country along with his fellow fighters. “When the people wanted us to go, it gave me great pain,” Hamed said, rubbing what was left of his left leg.

“Frankly,” the governor’s balding intelligence officer admitted before Hamed was brought into the room, “I’m very surprised they are going to let you meet this man.” But I could well understand why “they” did. Hamed was a Saudi who fought against the Syrian regime alongside other Wahabi Sunni Saudis, saying he was misled about the Syrian war by the internet and the Qatari ‘al-Jazeera’ channel, describing in detail how he was groomed in Saudi Arabia for his ‘jihad’ by a friend who arranged his passage through Turkey into the Syrian killing fields. Terribly wounded, he was captured by Syrian troops last year while trying to flee to Idlib.

Hamed smiled a lot during his interview in the early hours of the morning, his words occasionally interrupted by the rumble of shellfire from the darkness outside. Like the other prisoners, he had broken his Ramadan fast the previous evening. The governor and his security officer left the room at our request and Hamed said he wanted to talk, even when we told him he did not have to speak with us and could just relax and drink the glass of orange juice beside him. He had never met a foreign journalist before but he enjoyed talking, he said. Ten months in a Syrian jail did not provide much opportunity to chat to anyone. He had not been harmed in prison, he insisted, and “the stories I had heard about what happened here were untrue.” Readers must make of this statement what they will.

Many Islamists have expressed their fascination with mathematics, but Hamed said he gained his MA because he had good teachers in “respected Mecca”, where he married a Saudi woman and was father of a son and four daughters. His father, now dead, had been muezzin at a Mecca mosque, calling Muslims to prayer five times a day. “The Syrian war had started and there were many protests,” he said. “The internet and the television channels like al-Jazeera said that the Syrian people were asking for help. Jihadi slogans spread and the jihadis outside Syria began to call for help to defend the people and stop the brutality of the Assad regime. The idea of going to Syria and to participate grew in my mind. Some sheikhs and religious leaders in Saudi Arabia spoke on television and in the mosques and encouraged us. Jihad is like a duty in Islam.”

A Syrian friend in Mecca, whom he called ‘Abdul-Rahman al-Syri’ (Abdul- Rahman from Syria), organised his Saudi Airlines flight to the Turkish city of Antakya although his departure was kept secret for fear that the Saudi intelligence service would find out. “They were refusing to allow people to go to Syria,” Hamed said, “but for political reasons, nothing to do with Islamic ‘sharia’. There was coordination so that when I arrived a man called Abdul-Rahman abu Hajar took me and several others to an apartment for two nights and then took us to the border where, after a Turkish patrol had passed, we climbed through a hole in the fence and I met another Saudi called Abu Rawaha. He transported us to the Syrian town of Atme [in Idlib province] in a car.”

There was a ‘guest house’ in Atme, Hamed said, where their identity papers and passports were taken from them for “safekeeping”. After two more days, they were taken to a Nusrah-al-Qaeda military training camp where they were taught to use Kalashnikov rifles, RGP B-7 anti-tank rocket launchers and mortars. The teachers were Egyptian, their instructor Turkish. After a month, Hamed was sent to the countryside of Deir-ez-Zour with seven men, an Egyptian, a Qatari and five Saudis, where they met the Nusrah leader of eastern Syria, ‘Emir’ Abu Maria al-Qahtani, who would later be demoted by the Nusrah leadership during a dispute over relations with Isis.

“After we met,” Hamed said, “we pledged our loyalty and obedience and prayed that we would accept good times and bad times and would not question the orders of our commander as we sought to see those who are infidels in the sight of God. We were taken to the city of Deir ez-Zour which was under siege and there was fierce fighting. Then, in a convoy of cars, vans and jeeps, on roads and through the desert, Hamed says he was taken with seven more men to the Damascus suburb of Ghouta where, staying in “a great house” he was told to train on mortars for a month, after which, “to prepare for a very big battle on Damascus”, he was sent to the area of Jobar.

“One of our leaders, ‘Abu-Bakr al-Jordani’ (Abu Baker from Jordan), pin-pointed our targets. I was to fire at the Abbasin stadium and the Panorama war memorial area. I was given the target points from Google maps. The idea was to separate the defending Syrian soldiers, to confuse them. The plan was for seven suicide car bombers to enter Damascus. Zero hour for me was 9.0am on 15 July [2012] and we started shelling.” Hamed admits he did not know who was in his target areas, but says that his own home-made mortars began to explode and one was hit by Syrian army fire and he was eventually forced to escape as government forces advanced. “There had been mistakes by our leaders, one of the car bombs exploded on the road into the city.”

As his men shelled al-Ghouta – which was now under siege by the army – Hamed retreated yet again, to al-Ateibi and then to the village of Marj al-Sultan where a Nusrah man invited him to marry his niece as a second wife. She would later bear him two children. Near the village, Hamed was driving a vehicle in the company of his brother-in-law when a Syrian army rocket hit the vehicle, blowing off his left leg and severing his right leg at the knee. There followed months of medical operations in makeshift rebel hospitals and four days of surgery.

Hamed smiled at me as he said this. Was it worth it, I asked? He sighed and was silent for almost half a minute. “It was fate,” he said. “I will tell you about an incident. There was a man in the Ghouta area who had been caught signaling targets to the Syrian army. A religious judge, a mufti, condemned him to death. They asked me if I would kill him. It was outside, and the man was kneeling on the ground. He was about 50. He confessed before several of the leaders who were there. Then I shot him in the back of the head. I did not know his name. The others told me to keep shooting and I shot him three more times. I felt nothing. If this man was a Muslim and had made a sin, when I killed him I purified him from his sins.”

Hamed talked again about fate, of further months of medical operations and then of his regrets. “It was fate,” he said again. “In Ghouta, the siege was worse and people were very hungry and most civilians hoped the regime would come back to their area. When the people wanted us to go, it gave me great pain. The people who we wanted to help didn’t want us any more. And it was painful to me when fighting broke out between the different rebel groups, between Muslims, between the ‘Free Syrian Army’ and Nusrah and Daesh [Isis].”

Hamed hopes that one day he might be released from prison, to go to Turkey or another state to live with his second wife and children. “I telephoned my first wife in Saudi Arabia after I was wounded,” Hamed said. “She said she was glad that in my plight I had someone to look after me.” But he was captured trying to escape. Now, in prison, he was well treated, he said. “I was told lies about what happened here.”

He paused again for half a minute and I told him how upset I was to hear of the killing of the 50-year old man and – aware of his obvious intelligence – I added that I wished so much that Hamed had not murdered this man. “So do I,” he said quietly. Later, a Syrian friend told me he thought the courts would sentence Hamed to death because he had blood on his hands. Against all capital punishment for any reason, I told my acquaintance that the court should not do that. Besides, would not Hamed be more useful in freedom, to tell the world how the people he and his fighters intended to save had ordered them to leave, and of how the Muslim ‘saviours’ of the Syrian people ended up fighting each other in the suburbs of the city they claimed to want to ‘liberate’?

1 July 2016

By Mickey Z

When news of Elie Wiesel’s death broke on July 2, the predictable paeans and plaudits flowed. President Barack Obama, for example, called his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner “the conscience of the world.”
As for me, I instead reflected back to July 4, 2004, when Parade Magazine to hired Wiesel to pen a little something for Independence (sic) Day called “The America I Love” — for their patriotic cover story.

Over a two-page spread, the “Nobel Laureate” explained how America “for two centuries, has stood as a living symbol of all that is charitable and decent to victims of injustice everywhere … where those who have are taught to give back.” He explained that in the United States, “compassion for the refugee and respect for the other still have biblical connotations.”

Those same thoughts coming from a Trump voter in Peoria would be chalked up to ignorance, so perhaps Elie Wiesel was just an idiot, too simple-minded to discern reality from fantasy? But we can’t let him off the hook so easily when, after reminding us — yet again — of his Holocaust experiences, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom admitted, “U.S. history has gone through severe trials” (apparently this is how Nobel Peace Prize winners think: it’s “history” that undergoes trials).

Ever careful to point out his bearing witness to the civil rights movement (and equally careful to avoid explaining what that means), Wiesel called anti-black racism “scandalous and depressing.” But, take heart, black America, because dear Elie added “racism as such has vanished from, the American scene.”

Roll over, Mumia… and tell Sandra Bland the news.

In his 2004 essay, Wiesel deigned to mention a few more of America’s indiscretions but was at the ready to explain: “No nation is composed of saints alone. None is sheltered from mistakes and misdeeds” (more scholarly talk: “mistakes,” not “policy”). “America is always ready to learn from its mishaps,” he writes. “Self-criticism remains its second nature.”

This is the territory of madmen and commissars. Who else speaks such words… and is convinced they speak the truth? Precisely what kind of man is this professional hero, Elie Wiesel? Here are two peeks behind the myth:

While Wiesel’s documentation of the Nazi Holocaust earned him international acclamation, he was not always predisposed to yield the genocide victim’s spotlight. In 1982, for example, a conference on genocide was held in Israel with Wiesel scheduled to be honorary chairman, but the situation became complicated when the Armenians wanted in.

Here’s how Noam Chomsky described the incident: “The Israeli government put pressure upon (Wiesel) to drop the Armenian genocide. They allowed the others, but not the Armenian one. He was pressured by the government to withdraw, and being a loyal commissar as he is, he withdrew… because the Israeli government had said they didn’t want Armenian genocide brought up.”

Wiesel went even further, calling up noted Israeli Holocaust historian, Yehuda Bauer, and pleading with him to also boycott the conference. “That gives an indication of the extent to which people like Elie Wiesel were carrying out their usual function of serving Israeli state interests,” Chomsky explains, “even to the extent of denying a holocaust, which he regularly does.”

Why not welcome the Armenians, you wonder? Chalk it up to two conspicuous factors: the need to monopolize the Holocaust™ image and the geopolitical reality that Turkey (the nation responsible for the Armenian genocide) has been a rare Muslim ally for Israel.

In Parade, Wiesel also spoke of brave American soldiers bringing “rays of hope” to the people of Iraq. Even if this blatant delusion bore even an iota of truth, a reminder: such hopeful rays were not welcome in Central and South America in the 1980s, when Israel served as a U.S. proxy for proving arms to murderous regimes like that of Guatemala. In 1981, shortly after Israel agreed to provide military aid to this oppressive regime, a Guatemalan officer had a feature article published in the army’s Staff College review.

In that article, the officer praised Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the Final Solution — quoting extensively from Mein Kampf and chalking up Hitler’s anti-Semitism to the “discovery” that communism was part of a “Jewish conspiracy.” Despite such seemingly incompatible ideology, Israel’s estimated military assistance to Guatemala in 1982 was $90 million.

What type of policies did the Guatemalan government pursue with the help they received from a nation populated with thousands of Holocaust survivors? Consider the words of Gabriel, one of the Guatemalan freedom fighters interviewed in 1994 by Jennifer Harbury: “In my country, child malnutrition is close to 85 percent. Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no industry in our country — you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances. Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here.”

Similar stories can be culled from countries throughout the region, but apparently have had no effect on the rulers of the Jewish state. For example, when Israel faced an international arms embargo after the 1967 war, a plan to divert Belgian and Swiss arms to the Holy Land was implemented. These weapons were supposedly destined for Bolivia to be transported by a company managed by Klaus Barbie… as in “The Butcher of Lyon.”

One figure who might have been expected to find fault with such policy was, of course, Parade cover boy Elie Wiesel. Here is an episode from mid-1985, documented by Yoav Karni in Ha’aretz, which should put to rest any exalted expectations of the revered moralist:

When Wiesel received a letter from a Nobel Prize laureate documenting Israel’s contributions to the atrocities in Guatemala, suggesting that he use his considerable influence to put a stop to Israel’s practice of arming neo-Nazis, Wiesel “sighed” and admitted to Karni that he did not reply to that particular letter.

“I usually answer at once,” he explained, “but what can I answer to him?”

One is left to only wonder how Wiesel’s silent sigh might have been received if it was in response to a letter not about the Jewish state’s complicity in the mass murder of Guatemalans but instead about the function of Auschwitz in 1943.

In that 2004 Parade essay, Elie Wiesel claimed he discovered in America “the strength to overcome cynicism and despair.”

It sounds like what he actually overcame was honesty and compassion.

5 July 2016

By Eileen Fleming

On Monday the Jerusalem Magistrate indicted Israel Nuclear Whistle Blower Mordechai Vanunu for allegedly sharing classified information in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 television channel.

Vanunu was also indicted because he moved into a different apartment [in the same building] without informing the police, and because he was caught meeting with two foreign nationals three years ago!

Modechai Vanunu reported via Facebook:

July 4-2016: after 30 years in Israel prison the new trial started today.

From the big trial of exposing Israel Atomic weapons secrets to new charges about moving apartment without reporting, for meeting foreigners, and for speaking to Israel media about Dimona Nuclear secrets.

So the trial started and will continue in next months…

https://www.facebook.com/FreeMordechaiVanunu/

In the 9 May 2016, article Mordechai Vanunu: Indictments and Vendettas it was reported that Vanunu’s Attorney Avigdor Feldman told Haaretz:

Filing an indictment for a single meeting with two foreigners that occurred three years ago, for moving [apartment] at the same address, and in the end for an interview he gave to Danny Kushmaro at Channel 2, which passed the censor, is a record low for the state in its persecution and abuse of Mordechai Vanunu. I’m ashamed, and whoever filed this indictment should be even more ashamed.

More ashamed should be The Media who have ignored Vanunu’s Human Rights struggle in light of the fact that on 21 April 2016, Israel’s Supreme Court was to rule on Vanunu’s 8th petition to end the Human Rights restrictions against him so that he could leave ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’

Most ashamed should be ALL who could and have NOT done anything since 23 September 2008, when the Jerusalem District Court reduced Vanunu’s freedom of speech trial jail sentence from six to three months:

In light of his ailing health and the absence of claims that his actions put the country’s security in jeopardy.

I did phone Vanunu after I read that report.

Vanunu told me they were referring to his mental health.

Regarding Vanunu’s September 2015 interview with Israel Channel 2 [which was approved by the Israeli censors] Vanunu appealed directly to the Israeli public stating:

I GOT MARRIED THREE MONTHS AGO. I CAN’T GET A JOB HERE, SO SHE IS THE BREADWINNER.

I WANT TO LIVE MY LIFE, START MY LIFE ANEW. I’M FINISHED WITH THIS ENTIRE [NUCLEAR] STORY, AND I’VE SAID THIS HUNDREDS OF TIMES.

I HAVE NO MORE SECRETS TO TELL, AND I WANT THEM TO LET ME LEAVE AND GO LIVE ABROAD WITH MY WIFE, AND THAT’S THE END OF THE STORY.

The Stories Vanunu told this American about his childhood, crisis of faith, crisis of identity and my research regarding USA collusion in Israel’s Nuclear Deceptions are enshrined HERE

Eileen Fleming is Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu” Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory” and BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010
Her blog is http://www.eileenfleming.org

5 July 2016

 

By Mike Head

Anger over job losses and declining living conditions, combined with years of bitter political experiences with both Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments, were the primary factors in the further collapse of support for the major parties in last Saturday’s Australian election.

With 1.5 million postal votes still to be counted, some of which will not arrive until July 15, it may be another 10 days before the outcome of the election is known. At least 13 seats in the 150-member lower house remain in doubt, leaving both parties well short of the required majority of 76 seats.

The most likely result is a hung parliament, only the third in Australia’s history, with the formation of a government dependent on deals struck with other parties and “independents.” Before the election, the Coalition government held 90 seats, due to its sweeping defeat of the Greens-backed Labor government in the 2013 election.

The deepening impact of the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 has intensified the protracted breakup of the two-party system over the past three decades. Since 2007, in particular, voters have experienced six years of Labor government, supported by the Greens, and three years of Coalition government; both seeking to slash social spending to impose the burden of the global breakdown.

The most pronounced expression of the continuing haemorrhaging of support for the political establishment, including the Greens, came in the upper house, the Senate, where a record 26 percent of the valid votes went to other groups, mostly right-wing populists who postured as opponents of the major parties.

There was a 2-percentage point swing against the ruling Coalition, taking its vote down to around 35 percent, but Labor picked up only a 1-point swing to about 30 percent, and the Greens’ vote fell 0.35 points, losing at least one of their nine Senate seats as a result. Today’s 26 percent vote for “others” stands as another marker in the historic decline in support for the major parties. It stands in sharp contrast to the 4.25 percent recorded in 1990.

For now, the main beneficiaries were predominantly nationalist formations trying to channel the social and political discontent in protectionist and xenophobic directions, pitting Australian workers against their fellow workers internationally. Despite the disintegration of mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP), which secured 5.5 percent of the vote at the last federal election in 2013 with similar anti-establishment rhetoric, the vote for such parties grew.
Most prominently, Pauline Hanson’s right-wing, anti-immigrant One Nation obtained 4 percent, including nearly 10 percent in the mining state of Queensland. The Nick Xenophon Team, which pushes for protectionism and military spending, is based in South Australia, where the closure of the car industry is compounding the mining bust, secured 3.4 percent. Hanson and Xenophon could hold up to three seats each in the 76-member Senate.

In the House of Representatives, the largest shifts against Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government came in areas of the country most devastated by the collapse of the country’s mining boom, the closure of auto and other manufacturing industries and soaring housing prices, which have taken home ownership out of the reach of many young working class people.

On average, the Coalition vote fell 3.68 percentage points to 41.8 percent, but its losses were considerably greater in the regions where the social reality was most starkly divorced from Turnbull’s constant refrain that Australians live in “exciting” times of “transition” to a new economy.

In northern and central Queensland, where thousands of jobs have been eliminated in coal mines and the Townsville nickel refinery, the anti-government swings exceeded 6 points. In electorates around the north and south of Brisbane, the state capital, where official unemployment rates are as high as 20 percent, the government’s vote fell by up to 8.5 points.

Across the western and southwestern suburbs of Sydney, where exorbitant house prices are hitting families facing high unemployment and under-employment rates, the anti-government swing reached as high as 9.3 percent, allowing Labor to regain several seats it lost in 2013.

In Tasmania, which has the second highest unemployment rate in the country, the government’s vote dropped by up to 10.8 percent, and it lost all three seats it held in the island state to Labor. Ex-PUP Senator Jacqui Lambie kept her Senate seat with a vote of 8.5 percent.

Across South Australia, where workers have been hit by closures of mines and auto-related plants, anti-government swings of around 8 percent opened the way for Xenophon’s group to pick up one or possibly two seats, as well as two or three Senate seats.

In Western Australia, where iron ore and other mine closures have eliminated thousands of jobs, the government lost more than 5 percentage points, with the largest swings in outer Perth suburbs.

While Labor has gained a number of seats, these were mainly ones it lost in the 2013 landslide, taking it back to near the total it obtained in the 2010 election, after which it formed a minority government with the Greens.

To gain votes, Labor conducted a desperate last-minute “save Medicare” campaign, falsely claiming it would defend the public health system, even as it repudiated previous promises to oppose social spending cuts worth $40 billion over four years, plus a $57 billion cut to public hospitals over the next decade.
Despite the cynical Medicare claims, Labor won only about a half of the lower house votes lost by the government, leaving it with Labor’s second lowest primary vote in a century.

In the lower house, the Greens’ vote increased marginally by just over 1 percent to 9.9 percent, but that remained well down from their peak of 11.8 percent in 2010, before they entered into a formal agreement to prop up the minority Labor government. That government, led by Julia Gillard, not only committed Australia to the US military “pivot” to Asia against China, including the basing of US marines in Darwin, but cut public spending by the greatest amount in history in 2012–13.

During this election, the Greens wanted to further cement their position in the political establishment, seeking ministerial posts in a Labor-led government and pledging to help stabilise the parliamentary set-up. Reflecting their upper-middle class and pro-business constituency, they concentrated their campaigns on largely gentrified and wealthy electorates.

For example, the Greens obtained 43 percent of the vote in inner Melbourne, 25 percent in Higgins, a well-to-do electorate held by the Coalition, and 19 percent in Kooyong, based on Melbourne’s richest neighbourhoods. In the now largely better-off electorates of Batman and Wills, they picked up 37 and 30.5 percent respectively. Likewise, the Greens polled 22 percent in Grayndler in inner Sydney, and nearly 20 percent in inner Brisbane, as well as 20 percent in the northern New South Wales rural electorate of Richmond, which includes the wealthy enclave of Byron Bay. By contrast, their vote in working class areas was generally less than 5 percent.

Hanson’s One Nation consciously targeted some of the most economically and socially devastated regions. Its vote exceeded 15 percent in central Queensland and outlying areas of Brisbane, where mining-related job losses have created virtual ghost towns and areas of deep poverty. It also picked up 8 percent in the western Brisbane electorate of Oxley, which has high levels of unemployment.

Hanson last won such levels of support during the late 1990s, when she gained from the landslide defeat of the Hawke and Keating-led Labor government of 1983-1996 that ruthlessly enforced the restructuring of the economy to satisfy the needs of global capital.

Hanson’s ability to make a political comeback, preying upon the social distress being suffered by broad layers of working people, is entirely bound up with the fact that the working class has been politically suppressed and straitjacketed for decades by the Labor Party and trade union apparatuses. They have enforced the ongoing destruction of jobs and conditions under the demand of making Australian-based employers competitive on the world market, peddling a nationalist line that dovetails with Hanson’s.

The re-emergence of Hanson, along with Xenophon, Lambie and similar “other” parties, who all defend the profit system, which is the ultimate cause of war, exploitation and social inequality, is a warning sign. It reinforces the need for workers and young people to turn to the genuine socialist perspective advanced by the Socialist Equality Party, to completely reorganise economic life to meet human need, not the insatiable profit appetites of the wealthy elite.

This article was first published in WSWS.org

5 July 2016

By Robert J Barsocchini

Frederick Douglass, one of the most brilliant minds in history, had many praises for the US and its founders. However, he experienced the nation more fully than any of them, beginning his life a victim of the totalitarian fascism they practiced and promoted, and ending it a statesman and a friend of President Lincoln. Thus his understanding and analysis of the complex country and its culture is more complete and balanced than most. Known as a dazzling orator, he had this to say in a 4th of July address in 1852:

[T]he character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July. Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner, and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun.

Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men.

You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse.

Soon after this speech and the tumult that followed, Douglass would note how the war against the South was almost entirely based on preventing division of the empire, with actual anti-slavery, humanitarian sentiment only inspiring a minuscule minority of whites. He cheered the destruction of chattel institutions, but his knowledge that this destruction was driven far less by humanitarianism than practicality regarding maintaining the empire meant he would be horrified and disheartened, but perhaps not entirely shocked, to see slavery continue, again with the official blessing and participation of the North, after the South was subdued and infrastructure was rebuilt.

Historian and Wall Street Journal contributor Douglas Blackmon documents how slavery remained official US policy up to the early 1940s, and Amnesty International and various scholars document how it continues today, with many black men still slaving on cotton fields under a provision of the 13th amendment that maintains slavery as a still ‘legal’, multi-billion-dollar per year industry.

As an example of the power of the religion of US nationalism, I cite an attorney friend and graduate of the nation’s number one top law-school, who in conversation mentioned that the 13th amendment ‘abolished slavery’, and that every law-school student studies this in depth. I interjected that the amendment abolished slavery with an exception for people convicted of ‘crimes’ (ie loitering or marijuana possession). The attorney’s response was: “I didn’t know that.”

The 13th amendment is two sentences. What does it say about US culture that a graduate from the single top law-school in the country today does not know that the 13th amendment carries an exception?

It says Frederick Douglass is right.

Full text of the 13th amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Robert J. Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and acts as a cultural intermediary for the film and Television industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’s pamphlet ‘The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter’.

5 July 2016

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

NEW YORK – Deadly terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Dhaka, and Baghdad demonstrate the murderous reach of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The longer ISIS maintains its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, the longer its terrorist network will create such carnage. Yet ISIS is not especially difficult to defeat. The problem is that none of the states involved in Iraq and Syria, including the United States and its allies, has so far treated ISIS as its primary foe. It’s time they do.

ISIS has a small fighting force, which the US puts at 20,000 to 25,000 in Iraq and Syria, and another 5,000 or so in Libya. Compared to the number of active military personnelin Syria (125,000), Iraq (271,500), Saudi Arabia (233,500), Turkey (510,600), or Iran (523,000), ISIS is minuscule.

Despite US President Barack Obama’s pledge in September 2014 to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel (behind the scenes), have been focusing instead on toppling Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Consider a recent candid statement by Israeli Major General Herzi Halevy (quoted to me by a journalist who attended the speech where Halevy made it): “Israel does not want to see the situation in Syria end with [ISIS] defeated, the superpowers gone from the region, and [Israel] left with a Hezbollah and Iran that have greater capabilities.”

Israel opposes ISIS, but Israel’s greater concern is Assad’s Iranian backing. Assad enables Iran to support two paramilitary foes of Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel therefore prioritizes the removal of Assad over the defeat of ISIS.

For the US, steered by neoconservatives, the war in Syria is a continuation of the plan for global US hegemony launched by Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and Under Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at the Cold War’s end. In 1991, Wolfowitz told US General Wesley Clark:

“But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran (sic), Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

The multiple US wars in the Middle East – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and others – have sought to remove the Soviet Union, and then Russia, from the scene and to give the US hegemonic sway. These efforts have failed miserably.

For Saudi Arabia, as for Israel, the main goal is to oust Assad in order to weaken Iran. Syria is part of the extensive proxy war between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia that plays out in the battlefields of Syria and Yemen and in bitter Shia-Sunni confrontations in Bahrain and other divided countries in the region (including Saudi Arabia itself).

For Turkey, the overthrow of Assad would bolster its regional standing. Yet Turkey now faces three foes on its southern border: Assad, ISIS, and nationalist Kurds. ISIS has so far taken a back seat to Turkey’s concerns about Assad and the Kurds. But ISIS-directed terrorist attacks in Turkey may be changing that.

Russia and Iran, too, have pursued their own regional interests, including through proxy wars and support for paramilitary operations. Yet both have signaled their readiness to cooperate with the US to defeat ISIS, and perhaps to solve other problems as well. The US has so far spurned these offers, because of its focus on toppling Assad.

The US foreign-policy establishment blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for defending Assad, while Russia blames the US for trying to overthrow him. These complaints might seem symmetrical, but they’re not. The attempt by the US and its allies to overthrow Assad violates the UN Charter, while Russia’s support of Assad is consistent with Syria’s right of self-defense under that charter. Yes, Assad is a despot, but the UN Charter does not give license to any country to choose which despots to depose.

The persistence of ISIS underscores three strategic flaws in US foreign policy, along with a fatal tactical flaw.

First, the neocon quest for US hegemony through regime change is not only bloody-minded arrogance; it is classic imperial overreach. It has failed everywhere the US has tried it. Syria and Libya are the latest examples.

Second, the CIA has long armed and trained Sunni jihadists through covert operations funded by Saudi Arabia. In turn, these jihadists gave birth to ISIS, which is a direct, if unanticipated, consequence of the policies pursued by the CIA and its Saudi partners.

Third, the US perception of Iran and Russia as implacable foes of America is in many ways outdated and a self-fulfilling prophecy. A rapprochement with both countries is possible.

Fourth, on the tactical side, the US attempt to fight a two-front war against both Assad and ISIS has failed. Whenever Assad has been weakened, Sunni jihadists, including ISIS and al-Nusra Front, have filled the vacuum.

Assad and his Iraqi counterparts can defeat ISIS if the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran provide air cover and logistical support. Yes, Assad would remain in power; yes, Russia would retain an ally in Syria; and yes, Iran would have influence there. Terrorist attacks would no doubt continue, perhaps even in the name of ISIS for a while; but the group would be denied its base of operations in Syria and Iraq.

Such an outcome would not only end ISIS on the ground in the Middle East; it could lay the groundwork for reducing regional tensions more generally. The US and Russia could begin to reverse their recent new cold war through shared efforts to stamp out jihadist terrorism. (A pledge that NATO will not offer admission to Ukraine or escalate missile defenses in Eastern Europe would also help.)

There’s more. A cooperative approach to defeating ISIS would give Saudi Arabia and Turkey reason and opportunity to find a new modus vivendi with Iran. Israel’s security could be enhanced by bringing Iran into a cooperative economic and geopolitical relationship with the West, in turn enhancing the chances for a long-overdue two-state settlement with Palestine.

The rise of ISIS is a symptom of the shortcomings of current Western – particularly US – strategy. The West can defeat ISIS. The question is whether the US will undertake the strategic reassessment needed to accomplish that end.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include
The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, and, most recently, The Age of Sustainable Development.

5 July 2016

Prof Michel Chossudovsky

The first reports of shots came at 2.03am involving a confrontation between Mateen and a security guard at the entrance of the nightclub ”An off-duty cop working as a security guard at the club returned fire, prompting Mateen to retreat further into the hotspot and take hostages, officials said.” (New York Post, June 12, 2016).

According to police statements, there was, however, no “active shooter situation” at 2am in the morning, requiring an immediate police response. Moreover, there was no firm evidence that killings of hostages had taken place.

The Orlando police authorities initiated a process of negotiation with Mateen. When Mateen said that “there would be an imminent loss of life,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina (image right) was prompted “to end a three-hour standoff and ordered the assault that killed Mr. Mateen and freed dozens of people trapped in the club.” (New York Times, June 13, 2016).

Shortly after 5am, the police using an armored vehicle burst through the wall of the building. “A furious gunfight with 11 SWAT team members followed, during which Mateen was killed and a cop was saved from death when a shot struck his Kevlar helmet”. (New York Post ,June 12, 2016).

The Islamic State (ISIS) allegedly claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement released by its Amaq news agency, saying the onslaught “was carried out by an Islamic State fighter,” (Ibid).

What Really Happened?

The official FBI police report acknowledges shootings at 2am, it does not confirm the occurrence of killings of hostages prior to 5am. The killings started when the Police SWAT Teams stormed the Building at 5.13am. (see Timeline Below)

The Orlando Police Department Timeline summarized in an FBI Tampa Press release not only suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team broke into the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am. This assessment was confirmed by Judge Napolitano in a Fox News report.

The Police report does however acknowledge that individual SWAT members entered the building before 5am. According to the head of the SWAT team Capt. Mark Canty [image below] “both SWAT and patrol officers pulled “several” people out of the club during the three-hour standoff.”

The Killing of Omar Mateen

Mateen was allegedly involved in an exchange of gunfire with the SWAT team starting at 5.13am, While under attack of the SWAT team, Mateen could not have killed and injured over 100 people in 1-2 minutes; the FBI report confirms that he was killed at 5.15pm.

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

After most of the hostages got out, Mateen emerged from the first hole [in the wall] around 5:14 a.m.

There was a barrage of shots and Mateen was taken down in that hallway. [at 5.15am]

Possible Killings Perpetrated by the SWAT Team?

Barely mentioned by the mainstream media, police officials have acknowledged that some of the killings could have been perpetrated (“accidentally”) by the SWAT officers.

“The Orlando Chief of Police John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.” (Naples Daily News, June 14, 2016)

Killing them in order to save them? An upside down diabolical concept. Kill with a view to saving lives?

It should however be mentioned that Orlando Police Chief John Mine was not directly in charge of the SWAT operation per se. The latter was under the command of Capt. Mark Canty.

Police Chief John Mina intimated that 8-9 SWAT officers might have killed people in the nightclub by accident (see quote below).

This important “detail” revealed by the Orland Chief of Police did not make the headlines of the mainstream media. It was reported locally in Florida, (Florida Naples News). It was not picked up by the national news media:

Mina said his decision to enter the club with such violence was tough. “It was a hard decision to make, but it was the right decision,” he said. “Our No. 1 priority is on saving lives, and it was the right decision to make.”

… Orlando officers walked into the nightclub and found lifeless club patrons strewn about a bar and lounge area. More bodies were found in a nearby bathroom.

“Some of the Victims Could have Been Killed by Officers who Were Trying to Save Them”

Saving People by Killing them? “New Normal”? The SWAT police officers were celebrated as HEROES by the mainstream media “for having saved dozens of lives”.

Source London’s Daily Mail

The possibility of SWAT killings at the Pulse nightclub was acknowledged and then casually dismissed by the Washington Post (June 20, 2016).

“The FBI is still working to determine if any of the victims at Pulse were hit by police fire, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation… The SWAT commander at Pulse said Sunday he was not sure if any victims may have been struck by officers’ gunfire, and the chief medical examiner has said he does not know.” (emphasis added)

No further investigation by the Washington Post was required.

Were the Victims shot by Omar Mateen or by the Police SWAT Team?

The Orlando Police Department Timeline (see below) (quoted by Judge Napolitano) suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team stormed the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am.

Within the scope of 1-2 minutes, Mateen is said to have killed 49 people and injured 53. And this happened while the suspect was been fired at by the SWAT team.

The reports are contradictory: First they say that the SWAT team was being fired upon by the suspect (see quote above) “who had hid in the bathroom” and then they acknowledge that he was killed when the hostages started pouring out of the building (through a hole in the wall, when they broke down the wall).

“A cop rammed his Bearcat armored vehicle through the club wall. Hostages poured out. So did Mateen, guns blazing. With quick efficiency, officers shot him dead.” (Naples Daily News, June 13, 2016)

What the above statement suggests is that Mateen was executed at point blank (“with efficiency”) upon exiting the building through a hole in the wall with members of the SWAT team waiting to kill him upon his exit through the hole. If Mateen had known that he was to be executed, he would not have attempted to exit the building through the hole in wall together with hostages.

Reports suggest that there was an extensive exchange of fire between Mateen and the SWAT team: “Omar Mateen, 29, was killed by police when he engaged them in a gun battle.” In the same Naples News report, quoting Chief of Police Mina:

“There’s a hole in the wall about two feet off the ground and three feet wide. We were able to rescue dozens and dozens of people who came out of that wall,” Mina said. “The suspect came out of that hole himself with a handgun and a long gun and engaged in a gun battle with officers where he was ultimately killed.”

Visibly this statement by Chief of Police Mina is convoluted to say the least: it would have been almost impossible for Mateen to have effectively engaged the SWAT officials upon exiting the hole in the wall. (See image). Mateen’s fate was similar to that of the dead (alleged ISIS-Daesh) terror suspects killed rather than arrested by the police in Brussels and Paris terror attacks.

The official story is that Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 on the orders of the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh).

And this allegedly took place –according to the OPD time line– in a lapse of 1-2 minutes before he was shot dead at 5.15am, while leaving the building through a hole in the wall.

There were eleven SWAT police officers who stormed the building at 5.13am; the suspect was reported dead at 5.15am. According to the Orlando Police Chief, 8 or 9 out of the 11 SWAT officers accidentally shot at the hostages. The statement of Orlando Police Chief Mina does not refer to an error of one or two SWAT officers, the entire SWAT team (8 or 9 out of 11) under the helm of SWAT Commander Capt. Canty “accidentally” fired at the nightclub patrons.

CCTV Camera Footage

Law enforcement officials have acknowledged that the CCTV footage from several cameras inside the Pulse nightclub were available and have been viewed and examined. Sofar the CCTV footage of what happened inside the nightclub including the “friendly fire” of the SWAT team, has not been released.

Did Mateen have the ability of shooting and killing 49 people and injuring 53 in the course of less than 2 minutes while also exiting the building through a hole in the wall at 5.14am and confronting the SWAT team in cross-fire. Is this corroborated by the CCCTV footage?

The autopsy reports as well as the ballistic reports have not been released.

Ballistics

It is worth noting that Mateen allegedly used the Sig Sauer MCX .223-caliber rifle with a magazine capacity of 30 rounds. He also had in his possession a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol with a standard magazine capacity of 17 rounds.

1. the semi-automatic parameters of the two weapons in his possession would not have allowed Omar Mateen to fire more than one hundred shots within a 1-2 minutes without magazine reloading. Note the time line: 5.13am-5.15am. 5.15am: Mateen is recorded dead.

See the video below which indicates the semi-automatic nature of the Sig Sauer MCX.

In this regard, the nature of Mateen’s semi-automatic weapons was acknowledged by a USA Today Report which intimates that some of killings were attributable to “friendly” police fire:

“It’s unclear how many rounds Mateen had with him, and authorities are investigating whether some of those killed were hit by friendly fire”. (emphasis added)

The USA Today’s couched statement tacitly recognizes that the SWAT officers might have been responsible for the some of the deaths inside the Pulse nightclub. But that truth has to be suppressed. It is not worthy of detailed investigation.

2. Both the SIG Sauer as well as the Glock 17 9mm firearms used by Mateen were also used by the police SWAT teams, which suggests that the ballistics for gunshot casualties in the Orlando nightclub (by Mateen and the SWAT team) would be hard to distinguish.

Bear in mind, irrespective of the number of magazine loads Mateen had in his possession, he would not have been able to kill and/or injure more than one hundred people in a time span of less than 2 minutes.

What is at stake is a coverup of what happened inside the nightclub which is casually acknowledged and at the same time denied by the mainstream media.

The unspoken truth is dismissed, the facts are twisted.

Conclusion

What we are dealing with is an orchestrated coverup. The Forbidden Truth has to be suppressed.

Lies, “half truths” and innuendos in mainstream media reporting. Nonetheless, straight from “The Horse’s Mouth”, the SWAT police team was allegedly involved in the Orlando Pulse nightclub killings:

“Officers may have shot Orlando Club patrons”

“the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.” (Naples Daily News, June 14, 2016)

… [A]uthorities are investigating whether some of those killed were hit by friendly fire”. (emphasis added)

“The FBI is still working to determine if any of the victims at Pulse were hit by police fire,

“The SWAT commander [Capt. Canty] at Pulse said Sunday he was not sure if any victims may have been struck by officers’ gunfire”

Mina said his decision to enter the club with such violence was tough. “It was a hard decision to make, but it was the right decision,” he said. “Our No. 1 priority is on saving lives, and it was the right decision to make.”

The Obama Administration, the FBI, the Media have casually dismissed the possibility of police involvement in the killings despite the statements emanating from police sources. Theater of the absurd: The official story is that the killings were ordered by the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) based in Raqqa, Northern Syria, which happens to be supported and financed by two of America’s staunchest allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in close liaison with Washington.

The CCTV camera footage which is available to law enforcement officials will, most probably, not be made public.

https://www.fbi.gov/tampa/press-releases/2016/investigative-update-regarding-pulse-nightclub-shooting

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.

2 July 2016

By Karim El-Bar

Muhannad said he couldn’t keep the cash he had discovered in the wardrobe because his religion forbids it

A Syrian refugee living in Germany discovered €150,000 ($166,500) in an old wardrobe donated by a charity earlier this week – then handed the cash over to police, German media reported.

The 25-year-old, who has been identified only as Muhannad M, told reporters that his religion forbade him from keeping the money.

“For the police and city, he is the hero of the day,” police spokesman Ralf Steinmeyer, 55, said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Muhannad, whose family is still living in Syria, hails from al-Houla, near Homs.

Al-Houla was the site of one of the Syrian uprising’s bloodiest massacres in 2012, when the army and pro-government militias killed 108 people, including 34 women and 49 children, according to UN figures. Most victims were summarily executed.

Muhannad reportedly reached Germany last October before gaining refugee status and being transferred to the town of Minden.

It was in this community of about 83,000 people, in western Germany, that the Syrian made his extraordinary discovery.

Muhannad had just moved into a flat paid for by a job centre and started to furnish his apartment with donations from charities.

While assembling and cleaning the donated wardrobe, he found a secret compartment made up of two boards screwed together. Inside he found the money.

“They were all new €500 notes. I thought it was fake money,” he told the German newspaper Bild, describing the €50,000 in cash he found inside the compartment.

He also found five savings books worth €100,000, bringing the total amount to €150,000.

After a brief internet search, and a crash course in telling fake money from real ones, he realised the cash was genuine.

If he was uncertain at first whether the money was real, he certainly had no qualms about what to do next.

“I am a Muslim. I’m not allowed to keep this money. My religion forbids it,” he told Radio Westphalia.

He alerted the local migration authorities who, in turn, informed the police.

“Allah would never allow me to finance my own interests with someone else’s wealth,” he added.

Police have identified the owner of the money, according to German daily Die Welt, and are still attempting to make contact.

“People often report small amounts of money found to the police,” Steinmeyer said. “But such a large sum is absolutely exceptional.”

“This young man has behaved in an exemplary manner and deserves great credit,” he added.

Muhannad is currently enrolled in a German language course and aims to study for a master’s degree in Germany, having finished his university studies in Syria in communications technology.

No good deed goes unpaid, however, as he will receive three percent of the value of the money he handed over – €4,500.

But Bild reported that it is possible the finder’s fee will be offset against the job centre’s overheads. Perhaps no good deed goes unpunished.

Karim El-Bar is an Egyptian-British, London-based staff writer/editor focused on the Middle East.

29 June 2016

 

By George Monbiot

Let’s sack the electorate and appoint a new one: this is the demand made by MPs, lawyers and the 4 million people who have signed the petition calling for a second referendum. It’s a cry of pain, and therefore understandable, but it’s also bad politics and bad democracy. Reduced to its essence, it amounts to graduates telling nongraduates: “We reject your democratic choice.”

Were this vote to be annulled (it won’t be), the result would be a full-scale class and culture war, riots and perhaps worse, pitching middle-class progressives against those on whose behalf they have claimed to speak, and permanently alienating people who have spent their lives feeling voiceless and powerless.

Yes, the Brexit vote has empowered the most gruesome collection of schemers, misfits, liars, extremists and puppets that British politics has produced in the modern era. It threatens to invoke a new age of demagoguery, a threat sharpened by the thought that if this can happen, so can Donald Trump.

It has provoked a resurgence of racism and an economic crisis whose dimensions remain unknown. It jeopardises the living world, the NHS, peace in Ireland and the rest of the European Union. It promotes what the billionaire Peter Hargreaves gleefully anticipated as “fantastic insecurity”.

But we’re stuck with it. There isn’t another option, unless you favour the years of limbo and chaos that would ensue from a continued failure to trigger article 50. It’s not just that we have no choice but to accept the result; we should embrace it and make of it what we can.

It’s not as if the system that’s now crashing around us was functioning. The vote could be seen as a self-inflicted wound, or it could be seen as the eruption of an internal wound inflicted over many years by an economic oligarchy on the poor and the forgotten. The bogus theories on which our politics and economics are founded were going to collide with reality one day. The only questions were how and when.

Yes, the Brexit campaign was led by a political elite, funded by an economic elite and fuelled by a media elite. Yes, popular anger was channelled towards undeserving targets – migrants.

But the vote was also a howl of rage against exclusion, alienation and remote authority. That is why the slogan “take back control” resonated. If the left can’t work with this, what are we for?

So here is where we find ourselves. The economic system is not working, except for the likes of Philip Green. Neoliberalism has not delivered the meritocratic nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’ paradise, offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle first while leaving productive workers on the wrong side of the moat.

The age of enterprise has become the age of unearned income, the age of the market the age of market failure, the age of opportunity a steel cage of zero-hours contracts, precarity and surveillance.

The political system is not working. Whoever you vote for, the same people win, because where power claims to be is not where power is.

Parliaments and councils embody paralysed force, gesture without motion, as the real decisions are taken elsewhere: by the money, for the money. Governments have actively conspired in this shift, negotiating fake trade treaties behind their voters’ backs to prevent democracy from controlling corporate capital.

Unreformed political funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes. In Britain these problems are compounded by an electoral system that ensures most votes don’t count. This is why a referendum is almost the only means by which people can be heard, and why attempting to override it is a terrible idea.

Culture is not working. A worldview that insists both people and place are fungible is inherently hostile to the need for belonging. For years now we have been told that we do not belong, that we should shift out without complaint while others are shifted in to take our place.

When the peculiarities of community and place are swept away by the tides of capital, all that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in which we engage with glazed passivity. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

In all these crises are opportunities – opportunities to reject, connect and erect, to build from these ruins a system that works for the people of this country rather than for an offshore elite that preys on insecurity.

If it is true that Britain will have to renegotiate its trade treaties, is this not the best chance we’ve had in decades to contain corporate power – of insisting that companies that operate here must offer proper contracts, share their profits, cut their emissions and pay their taxes? Is it not a chance to regain control of the public services slipping from our grasp?

How will politics in this sclerotic nation change without a maelstrom? In this chaos we can, if we are quick and clever, find a chance to strike a new contract: proportional representation, real devolution and a radical reform of campaign finance to ensure that millionaires can never again own our politics.

Remote authority has been rejected, so let’s use this moment to root our politics in a common celebration of place, to fight the epidemic of loneliness and rekindle common purpose, transcending the tensions between recent and less recent migrants (which means everyone else). In doing so, we might find a language in which liberal graduates can talk with the alienated people of Britain, rather than at them.

But most importantly, let’s address the task that the left and the centre have catastrophically neglected: developing a political and economic philosophy fit for the 21st century, rather than repeatedly microwaving the leftovers of the 20th (neoliberalism and Keynesianism). If the history of the last 80 years tells us anything, it’s that little changes without a new and feracious framework of thought.

So yes, despair and rage and curse at what has happened: there are reasons enough to do so. But then raise your eyes to where hope lies.

George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land.

28 June 2016