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By Eileen Fleming

A hostage is understood to be a person taken by force to secure the taker’s demands; or one that is involuntarily controlled by an outside influence.

Mordechai Vanunu Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower claimed the title “The Last Hostage” at his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Channels with this iconic response to Israel’s July 4 indictment against him:
On 4 July 2016, Vanunu reported at Facebook that “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.”
On 27 July 2016, MSN.com ran a five-page spread titled “Notorious kidnappings and how they ended” and published this text:

Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was abducted by Mossad agents in Rome in 1986. Vanunu, who worked as a nuclear technician at Israel’s secret nuclear weapons facility at Dimona from 1976 to 1985, was in Britain at the time, exposing the country’s nuclear capabilities.

Mossad wanted him captured on espionage charges, but didn’t want a confrontation with British intelligence or harm their country’s relation with Margaret Thatcher.

Thus, the officials lured Vanunu out of Britain and into Rome where he was kidnapped, drugged and smuggled out to Israel. Vanunu served an 18-year sentence after his conviction.

This reporter submitted the following response to MSN via their FEEDBACK page:

Regarding article “Notorious kidnappings and how they ended” and Mordechai Vanunu who indeed was kidnapped by Mossad in 1986 and released from jail in 2004.

However the Vanunu saga has continued is documented in “Beyond Nuclear: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker 2005-2010” and in the 2015 release of “Heroes, Muses and The Saga of Mordechai Vanunu”

Will MSN report on Vanunu’s 12 yr HUMAN RIGHTS struggle to leave Israel?

NO RESPONSE yet from MSN.com

On 7 February 2014, NBC reporters Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Mark Schone and Glenn Greenwald collaborated on the NBC NEWS INVESTIGATION: Snowden Docs

Instead of contacting Mordechai Vanunu for his side of the story [Vanunu’s email, snail mail and phone number were published on his site at that time] the NBC reporters repeated the “fact” that the reason Israel’s “honey trap” worked to lure the nuclear technician from London to Rome, was because “he expected an assignation with a woman”.

In 2006, after this reporter had run out of tape -but not questions- in the interview known as “30 Minutes with Vanunu” which was taped a few weeks after Vanunu’s Freedom of Speech Trial began, I asked Vanunu what was he thinking when he flew from London to Rome with who he thought was an American beautician on holiday.Vanunu looked me in the eye and readily replied:

It wasn’t like THAT-when Maxwell’s paper published my photo without ever talking to me and some of the stolen Dimona photos with a very bad story against me, I knew the Mossad was after me. Cindy said she had a sister in Rome and I thought I would be safe there until I could return to London.

We went to movies and art galleries, I trusted her. But, as soon as I got into the apartment, I was hit on the head and drugged. When I woke up and they took me for interrogation, they threw the Times article on the table and said, ‘Look, what you did.’

What Vanunu did was shoot two rolls of film from Top Secret locations within Israel’s 7-story underground WMD facility at Dimona.

What London’s Sunday Times did was publish a front-page photo of the Dimona reactor and a story that spread over three pages revealing Israel’s arsenal of upwards of 200 nuclear warheads on Oct. 5, 1986-five days after the Mossad kidnapped Vanunu.

While Cheryl deceived Vanunu with a Judas Kiss, she was also deceiving her sister-in-law Cindy, whose Passport and identity she was traveling under.

Cheryl grew up in Pennsylvania and Orlando in a Jewish family that owed its affluence to tires. I moved to Orlando in the mid 1970’s and still can recall her father, Stanley Hanin, the founder and pitchman for the Allied Discount Tires chain stores, self-produced cheesy TV commercials with the refrain, “Tires ain’t pretty, but you gotta have them!”

As her parents went through an acrimonious divorce, Cheryl embarked upon a long love affair with the Zionist State. In 1977, she spent a semester in Israel, studied Hebrew and Jewish history and threw herself into her academic and religious studies in a three-month residential course funded by the World Zionist Organization.

In 1985, Cheryl Hanin married Ofer Ben Tov, six years her senior and soon after she attracted the attention of the Mossad.

In 1996, The St. Petersburg Times reported that Cheryl continues to work for the Mossad.

It is illegal under American-Israeli diplomatic protocols for the Mossad to operate in America.

Beginning in 1951, the Mossad has ranked as one of the world’s most skilled and lethal intelligence agencies.

Gordon Thomas wrote in Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, “that Cheryl was sent on practice missions – breaking into an occupied hotel room, stealing documents from an office…She was roused from her bed in the dead of night and dispatched on more exercises: picking up a tourist in a nightclub, then disengaging herself outside his hotel. Every move she made was observed by her tutors.”

Mordechai Vanunu was hired as a technician trainee in 1976 and began a crash course in nuclear physics. All employees were required to sign the Official Secrets Act, which forbid disclosure of sensitive material. Because he was a good worker, Vanunu was cross-trained in many areas and spent nine years on the night shift at the center.

In the daytime, Vanunu graduated with a degree in Philosophy and Geography at Ben-Gurion University, where he also became active in politics and supported Palestinian human rights causes. Vanunu was repeatedly warned by officials at Dimona to halt his political activities, but he ignored them.

In 1985, Vanunu was told he would be transferred or laid off, instead he quit after photographing models of different types of bombs from Top Secret locations after a supervisor carelessly left the keys in the shower room.

After a few intense hours and nearly being caught, Vanunu returned the keys and stashed the film and camera back in his locker. A few days later he smuggled out the film and then the camera in his backpack, which was checked by Dimona Security both before entering and departing the nuclear facility.

Vanunu quit the Dimona in October 1985 and left Israel in early 1986 with the still undeveloped film. He traveled through Europe and wound up in Sydney, Australia, where he worked as a taxi driver and began to attend a social justice Anglican Church. Vanunu was born into an Orthodox Zionist home, but had become an atheist in early adolescence. The welcoming he received from parishioners who were already engaged in the struggle to get the Church to oppose nuclear weapons opened Vanunu up to tell his story about Israel’s WMD Facility at Dimona.

Among Vanunu’s new friends was Oscar Guerrero, a flamboyant Colombian who had been painting the church. Guerrero, realizing an expose of Israel’s nuclear program could be a gold mine, told Vanunu he was an “international journalist” who could help get the story published. At the Colombian’s urging, Vanunu developed his film, and Guerrero shopped the story to news organizations. All rejected him until he approached London’s Sunday Times in August 1986. Investigative reporter, Peter Hounam was assigned to determine if Vanunu’s story was credible.

Guerrero was dismissed but Hounam traveled to Australia to interview Vanunu who described a far more extensive weapons production program than anyone had imagined. Hounam wrote, “These were weapons that could obliterate a major city – they had no sensible battlefield application. I was utterly absorbed in the wealth of detail he was able to supply.”

The Sunday Times would not and did not pay for any information, but they did offer Vanunu $100,000 for a book deal and serialization in a German magazine.

However Vanunu never had a chance to sign that contract before being kidnapped by Mossad.

On 5 October 1986, London’s Sunday Times ran a front-page photo of the Dimona reactor and a three-page spread revealing Israel had an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads. Israel did not deny the story and refused to say anything about Vanunu.

The Press was denied access to Vanunu, but he reached them without speaking a sound!

A Security officer had given Vanunu a pen, which he used to ink his palm on the way to the courthouse: “Vanunu M was hi-jacked in Rome. ITL. 30.9.86. 21.000. Came to Rome by fly BA504.”

Vanunu’s inspired move was then caught on film as he pressed his palm to the car window and Hounam was able to piece together the story of Vanunu’s kidnapping which led to a confrontation with Ben Tov who had purchased the business-class tickets on British Airways Flight 504 flight to Rome.

Vanunu told this reporter that the moment he entered the apartment he was hit and pinned to the ground, drugged, clubbed, bound and flung onto a small yacht or a disguised Israeli navy ship.

Vanunu endured a closed-door trial and was denied the right to speak in his own defense. His lawyer argued he didn’t commit treason because he did not share information with a hostile foreign government but went to The Media in a case of the public’s right to know.

Hounam tracked Ben Tov to Netanya, a city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast and asked her if she was Cindy?

“I deny it, I deny everything,” she shouted as Hounam snapped a few photos of her. By that night, the house was deserted.

In 1997, another Sunday Times reporter found Cheryl Hanin Ben Tov back in Orlando, living in a secluded villa. Her only concern was that any story about her should not “harm her position in America.”

According to the paper, the Ben Tov’s also had a villa in Israel in an area that is home to many security officials.

Cheryl “continues to work for Mossad, according to her Israeli neighbors” the Sunday Times said. She and her husband, they believe “have rented out their house, while she is engaged in an overseas assignment, and are expected some day to return.”

Florida state records had also once showed Cheryl “had an active real estate sales license and was employed by CFI Sales & Marketing of Orlando.”
However CFI, whose Westgate Resorts is one of the world’s largest timeshare companies, said Ben Tov was terminated in 1997, the same year the Sunday Times found her in Orlando.

After the St. Petersburg Times began looking into Hanin’s background, state records were changed to show her license as inactive and without any reference to CFI.

Officials could not say who requested the change. CFI says it did not.

It is illegal under American-Israeli diplomatic protocols for the Mossad to operate in America, but it does not make it impossible.

What could is a Media that investigates for the public’s right to know instead of being controlled by an outside influence.

Eileen Fleming,
Senior Non-Arab Correspondent for USA’s The Arab Daily News
Author, Reporter
10 August 2016

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

On Tuesday, August 9, 2016, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in St. Petersburg to hold talks with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was Erdogan’s first foreign visit since the July 15 abortive coup against his elected government. St. Petersburg is Putin’s hometown.

Addressing a joint press conference after the talk, Putin said: “I believe that we have all the necessary prerequisites and opportunities for restoring our relations between our two countries to the full extent and Russia is ready and willing to do that.”

On his part, Erdogan said: “As a result of the negotiation we had today, political, cultural and economic relations between Russia and Turkey can finally be restored to the appropriate level we used to enjoy before the crisis.”

Ties between the two countries have been acrimonious since November last year when Turkey, citing a brief violation of its airspace along Turkey’s border with Syria, shot down a Russian military aircraft. Russia’s President Vladimir Putting ordered punishing economic sanctions, imposed a travel ban on Russian tourists visiting Turkey and suspended all government-to-government relations.

Unable to ignore the damage, Erdogan conveyed regrets to Putin; the regrets were accepted which paved the way for August 9 meeting. Interestingly, the two Turkish Air Force pilots linked to the downing of the Russian Su-24 bomber have been detained in connection with the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey, according to Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag.

Areas of cooperation
Turkey wants to bring ties with Russia to pre-crisis levels with cooperation in the defense industry sector and energy projects including the Turkish Stream gas pipeline and the Akkuyu nuclear plant, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the press conference.

As a result of the negotiation we had today, political, cultural and economic relations between Russia and Turkey can finally be restored to the appropriate level we used to enjoy before the crisis,” Erdogan said.

Erdogan also outlined a list of areas of cooperation where Ankara is eager to engage in cooperation.

“I would like to emphasize that we are willing to provide strategic investment status to the Akkuyu project, and we have just reached an understanding on this issue with President Putin. We also intend to promote cooperation in the area of defense industry and defense production,” he stressed.

The Turkish head of state additionally pledged to implement the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline project, vowing to ensure a route for Russian gas exports heading toward Europe.

Russia will gradually lift the restrictions it had imposed against Turkish companies, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the press conference.

“After the press conference, we shall have an opportunity to speak to the heads of large companies from both Russia and Turkey. I mean the gradual lifting of the special economic measures, restrictions introduced earlier against Turkish companies,” Putin told a press conference after the meeting.

Did not discuss the Syrian issue

Ironically, Erdagon and Putin did not discuss the thorny Syrian issue. “During today negotiations we didn’t discuss situation in Syria,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said answering the question from journalists.

Vladimir Putin has also confirmed, that the Syrian crisis will be discussed later. “We believe that the Syrian crisis can be resolved only through diplomatic decision,” he noted. “We have experienced many challenges in our relations recently, but we should restore our relations on pre-crisis level for citizens’ sake,” President Putin said in conclusion.

Russia sides with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Turkey, like US and other European nations, want to topple Assad. They support rebel groups, including the so-called Islamist ones, who are fighting Assad. But the Syrian leader remains firmly in power more than five years after the civil war began.

According to Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, there was room for the two sides to move closer together on options for a political transition to end the five-year civil war and on the shape of a new constitution for the country.

However, Russia’s TASS news agency quoted Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin “in cooperation with Russia, we would like to facilitate a political transition in Syria as soon as possible.” But he repeated Turkey’s long-held stand that such a move would only be possible with Assad’s departure.

TurkStream gas pipeline

While the timing of Erdogan’s Russia trip could be interpreted as a signal to the West, Faruk Logoglu, a former Turkish ambassador to Washington, doubted it meant a full Turkish embrace of Russia or lasting damage to U.S. ties.

“The Turkish-American relationship is like a catholic marriage: there is no divorce. Both sides need each other,” he said. “It has experienced severe tests in the past and I think it will weather this one as well.”

However, closer ties between Ankara and Moscow could be more troublesome for Europe, which sees a plan for a gas pipeline from Russia to Turkey, a project known as TurkStream, as a complication in its efforts to cut dependence on Russian energy.

“Gas cooperation between Russia and Turkey could be scary for the European Union,” said Akin Unver, assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has university in Istanbul and an expert in regional energy.

“The EU wants to diversify suppliers and link eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe in the long run … if Russia bypasses all that with TurkStream that would not help. But the EU is in no position to bargain. Politically, it is very weak.”

EU officials fear that TurkStream will be expanded to bypass Ukraine as a transit route for supplies to Europe, increasing dependence on Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom and shutting in alternative supplies from the Caspian region.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak has said Turkey will “play a large role as a transit country” to supply Europe – the very prospect which worries EU officials. Brussels is instead promoting a chain of pipelines known as the Southern Gas Corridor to transport gas from the Shah Deniz field in Azerbaijan to European markets by 2020.

Erdogan to West: ‘Mind your own business’

President Erdogan’s visit to Russia came at a time when the Turkish government is discontented and displeased with the Western countries not showing support to his elected government but criticizing his government action against the perpetrators of the July 15 abortive coup.

Erdogan said Western leaders who were criticizing the Turkish government’s reaction to the July 15 coup attempt should “mind their own business.”

He said: “When five to 10 people die in a terror attack, you [Western countries] set the world on fire. But when there is a coup attempt against the president of the Turkish Republic, who always protects the democratic parliamentary system and who was elected with 52 percent of the general vote, instead of siding with the government you side with the perpetrators.”

Erdogan also criticized the head of the US general command for suggesting that crackdowns in the Turkish military after the failed coup attempt had harmed the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

“I am concerned that it will impact the level of cooperation and collaboration that we have with Turkey which has been excellent, frankly,” General Joseph Votel said, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, US.

After the failed coup of July 15, more than 8,500 officers and soldiers, including 157 of the 358 generals and admirals in the Turkish military’s ranks, were discharged. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has announced that the military’s shipyards and weapons factories will be transferred to civilian authority; military high schools and war academies have been shut; military hospitals will be transferred to health ministry; and the gendarmerie, a key force in anti-terror operations, and the coast guard will be tied to the interior ministry.

“Know your place,” Erdogan said in response. “The US general [Joseph Votel] stands on the coup plotters’ side with his words. He disclosed himself via his statements,” Erdogan said, as he repeated calls for the US to extradite Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of plotting the abortive coup through his followers penetrated in the Turkish civil and military bureaucracy.

Following Erdogan’s comments, Votel issued a statement denying he was supporting the coup plotters. “Any reporting that I had anything to do with the recent unsuccessful coup attempt in Turkey is unfortunate and completely inaccurate,” Votel said in his statement. “Turkey has been an extraordinary and vital partner in the region for many years. We appreciate Turkey’s continuing cooperation and look forward to our future partnership in the counter-ISIL fight.”

Massive purge in civil and military bureaucracy

In the aftermath of the abortive coup, the government has dismissed 2,745 judges including members of Turkey’s highest judiciary board. Licences of 21,000 private school teachershave been cancelled. Around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants and teachers have been suspended or removed. Erdogan ordered 1,577 deans of universities to resign.

According to Metin Gurcan, an ex-army officer now working as a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse,on July 27, 1,684 ranking officers of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) were dismissed for constituting a threat to national security and for their affiliation with the Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO).

The purge ruling, which cannot be appealed, covered 2% of 40,000 officers in the TSK and 1% of approximately 90,000 noncommissioned officers. The ranks most affected were generals and admirals.

Of the 325 generals in Turkey’s army, air and naval forces, 149 (45.8%) were discharged on July 27, including two four-star generals, seven lieutenant generals, 27 major generals/vice admirals (12 army, 11 air force and four navy) and 126 brigadier generals/rear admirals.

Before the purge was made public, Land Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Ihsan Uyar, the No. 2 name of that major command, and Gen. Kamil Basoglu, commander of Training and Doctrine of the army, submitted their resignations.

Army, air and naval commanders will be under the Minister of Defense, and gendarmerie, police and coast guard will be under the Ministry of Interior.

Erdogan has already said the chief of General Staff and Military Intelligence Organization (MIT) should be directly attached to the presidency and that such a move would require structural reforms in Turkey’s security. But because of a lack of support from opposition parties for such a radical change, a constitutional amendment will be needed to make those changes.

This is not the first coup plot to fail in Turkey

This is not the first coup plot to fail in Turkey.

According to the Geneva Center for Security Policy, following the 1960 coup, for example, Colonel Talat Aydemir spearheaded two coups in 1962 and 1963, but – like the most recent coup attempt – failed to win the support of the Turkish high command. The Turkish military, during this time, was divided – much like today – and ultimately took steps to prevent “factionalization” within the institution, beginning with a purge of 1,400 of Aydermir’s reported sympathizers from the military academy in 1963 and 1964.

The next intervention took place in 1971, through the issuing of a memorandum that forced the resignation of the then elected Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, and then again in 1980.

The military, in 2007, posted a memorandum challenging the legitimacy of the AKP’s then candidate for president, Abdullah Gul, because his wife wore a headscarf. The Turkish military has traditional viewed its role as guardians of Turkish secularism, a concept that includes other political tenets – known as “six arrows” – that collectively are defined as Kemalism. The constitutional court implicitly backed the military, as did the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The AKP subsequently called a snap parliamentary election, calculating that the public would side with them, and ultimately won 341 seats, an increase from their previous position, and easily exceeding the number of seats needed to elect Gul.

Turkey court issues arrest warrant for Fethullah Gulen

A court in Turkey has issued a formal warrant for the arrest of Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania since 1998, whom the government accuses of being behind the failed coup that resulted in the death of more than 250 people. The official Anadolu news agency said that on August 4, 2016 an Istanbul-based court issued the warrant for Gulen for “ordering the July 15 coup attempt”.

The order for Gulen’s arrest is seen a step toward a formal extradition request to the United States, which Turkish officials say will be submitted after an investigation into the botched coup.

Erdogan has been calling for the extradition since 2013, when he accused Gulen’s followers, who held positions in the judiciary, of orchestrating a corruption inquiry that implicated Erdogan’s inner circle. An arrest warrant for Mr. Gulen was issued in Turkey in 2014, accusing him of directing “an armed terrorist organization” that illegally tapped the conversations of the prime minister and president.

Metin Gurcan, a senior columnist, provides an insight into the Gulen movement which has been active in Turkey for 40 years and operates in 130 countries employing hundreds of thousands of people in the fields of education, health and trade with annual revenue exceeding $50 billion.

Metin argues that “ we tend to see the Gulenist structure in a modern paradigm as a hierarchical body, with rigid internal discipline and followers who are strongly devoted to its highly charismatic leader. This is where we make mistakes when analyzing the Gulenist structure.”

According to Kahraman Sakul of Istanbul Sehir University who spoke to Al-Monitor, the Gulenist network is based on much more complex relations. He said, “Contrary to sustained media comments, I don’t think the network model of Gulenists emulates the classical pyramid model of terrorists. The Gulen movement has transparent, overt networks of trade, finance, education, media, health and social media and secret, covert networks of military and intelligence bureaucracy.”

“Until now, international opinion focused on overt Gulenist networks. But the testimonies of soldiers detained after the coup make it clear there are enormous differences between the overt and covert networks of the Gulenist movement,” Metin says adding:

“In their official narratives used by overt networks, Fethullah Gulen is portrayed as an “opinion leader.” We are told that his basic goal is to spread his service worldwide, to serve global peace by doing business all over, to overcome prejudices between religions and culture, and to ensure interfaith dialogue. But what we hear from testimonies of pro-Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO) military officers, the narrative used in secret networks is quite different.

“Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar, who was taken hostage by his closest associates on the night of the coup attempt, has said he was approached by air force brigadier Hakan Evrim, who told him, “If you wish, we can arrange for you to talk to our opinion leader Fethullah Gulen,” which proved their absolute obedience to Gulen.

How Gulen nework works?

“Soldiers in the covert networks are obliged to carry out the orders passed on to them by their civilian “older brothers.” No Gulenist in uniform knew any other officer of the same affiliation. This is best explained by the testimony of Muhammed Uslu, a civilian working in the private secretariat of the Prime Ministry who was also the “older brother” of Lt. Col. Levent Turkkan, the senior aide to Akar. We were amazed to hear how Uslu received the daily recordings of the office of the Chief of General Staff and passed them on to another civilian brother he didn’t even know.

“The group that constitutes the core of the secret network would spread the unquestionable instructions to lower levels, where the only requirement was to carry them out. This blind obedience also meant that many bright Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) officers with master’s and doctorate degrees were passing on what they learned to “older brothers” they didn’t even know.

“ Secret cells of Gulenists do not operate on a hierarchical pyramid model. Their nets don’t operate on the basis of perpendicular hierarchies of command and control but on horizontal hierarchy. For example, there are reports that on the night of July 15, many generals were ordered around by colonels and even more junior ranks. An air force noncommissioned officer is said to have issued orders to generals to apprehend Erdogan.”

Gulen Movement’s absolute secrecy in a way was the basic cause of the July 15 coup failure, Metin concludes. Gulen followers successfully infiltrated the Turkish officer corps by outmaneuvering its no-beard and no-headscarf rules. Gulen no doubt justified such concealment with his own interpretation of the Islamic tenet of taqiyah. His interpretation of Islam allows the dishonesty of systematic deception.

“Turks Can Agree on One Thing: U.S. Was Behind Failed Coup,” this was the headline of the rticle published on August 2, 2016 by the New York Times. The article written by Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu pointed out:

“Turks, in their exasperation that the United States has not turned over Mr. Gulen, have made this analogy: What if Turkey, in 2001, had harbored Osama bin Laden? Given the widespread sentiment that Mr. Gulen was behind the coup, a failure to extradite him would probably provoke a popular backlash in Turkey against the United States, and would confirm for many that the Americans had conspired against Turkey. “

Gülen came to America in 1998, reportedly to seek medical treatment. Since then, he has directed his global empire from Pennsylvania. A federal judge granted him a green card in 2008. Shortly after he left for America, a series of secretly recorded sermons featuring Gülen aired on Turkish television. In one of them, he told his followers:

“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it…”

“You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all in confidence. Know that when you leave here — as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.”

Foreign Policy magazine has described Gulen as an opportunist while Pepe Escobar calls him a CIA asset. Interestingly, a former C.I.A. official and a former American ambassador to Turkey helped Mr. Gulen receive a green card, according to the New York Times.

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

10 August 2016

By Chandra Muzaffar

In the last 10 years or so, a lot of community based, civil society inspired, people initiated, national unity endeavours have come to the fore. The Unity Walk scheduled for 14 August is one such effort. It is commendable that many more Malaysians today, compared to the past, see national unity as a goal that they should strive to achieve — regardless of what the State is doing or not doing.

Unfortunately, the good work that citizens have embarked upon does not address directly some of the fundamental challenges facing the nation as it struggles to forge national unity. What are these challenges?

One, ethnic grievances that arise from inter-personal encounters at the street-level. If a shop-keeper from one community is perceived to have cheated a customer from another community and if that perception is shared by a sizeable segment of his community, it will have a negative impact upon ethnic relations. Similarly, if a civil servant from a certain community responds to a member of the public from another community in a rude manner, and if there is a general feeling that this is a pattern, inter-ethnic ties will remain at a low ebb.

Two, decisions emanating from policies or practices that are perceived as ethnically biased. If individuals from specific ethnic backgrounds are finding it more difficult to gain promotions in various branches of the public services, it will not conduce towards ethnic harmony in the larger society. By the same token, if qualified workers whose ethnic and religious affiliation differ from that of the top brass in a private corporation are excluded from positions of power and authority, it will generate communal unhappiness that will permeate the entire social fabric.

Three, while many professions and commercial and industrial enterprises have become multi-ethnic compared to the situation four decades ago, non-formal interaction within the work-place is still along ethnic lines. This in itself is not a major problem but it does sometimes spawn communal attitudes which are inimical to building inter-ethnic understanding and empathy.

Four, it is partly because ethnic sentiments and perceptions are pervasive, that justice is often viewed from a one-sided perspective with very little appreciation of how the ethnic other sees the situation. This is why even well-meaning advocates of national unity when they catalogue legitimate injustices give the impression that they are not sensitive to what the other regards as the wrongs done to his kind.

Five, this is related in a sense to a deeper and more fundamental challenge — the challenge of how we perceive the nation and its identity. There is no shared vision of what this nation is and what it should be, a vision which transcends the ethnic and religious boundaries within the nation-state. Instead of moving towards a more inclusive Malaysian identity we have become more and more segmented into exclusive ethnic and religious identities which from time to time generate tension and friction.

Some suggestions on how we can overcome these five challenges have been put forward in the past.

One, grassroots ethnic grievances are perhaps best resolved through community relations councils operating within urban and rural localities. Rukun Tetangga outfits established in the early seventies could have evolved into effective community-level platforms for bringing ethnic and religious groups together to solve routine disputes and misunderstandings — tasks which the Police undertake today without much fanfare. If the community can also be involved, we may be able to create a genuine grassroots people’s movement committed to inter-ethnic and inter-religious harmony.

Two, as far as policies and practices with an ethnic bias are concerned, the time has come for all of us to de-emphasise ethnicity and accord greater importance to the needs of the poor and disadvantaged whoever they are, and, at the same time, to recognise and reward ability and excellence, as vital attributes for the success of any society. It is only certain vested interests that have always manipulated ethnic and religious sentiments for their own benefit that would be unhappy with this approach whose value our policy-makers and planners are cognisant of.

Three, exclusive ethnic bonding and communal attitudes can be combatted through organised attempts at encouraging interaction and raising awareness of shared values that cut across ethnic and religious boundaries. In the work-place in particular, good work ethics and professional standards should be inculcated among workers and management so that they become the shared value system of all Malaysians. Specifically, discipline and integrity — work ethics par excellence — should be prioritised.

Four, through education and awareness programmes, biased perspectives on issues of justice can be overcome. The media has a critical role to play in this. It should have the courage to expose the stark and subtle biases in the expressions of justice which appear in the media. By so doing, it would help nurture a more holistic and balanced view of justice among all communities.

Five, this would pave the way for a genuinely holistic, inclusive perspective on the nation’s identity. The equilibrium embodied in the Malaysian Constitution which is captured in the inclusive principles and goals of the Rukunegara and in the all-embracing strategic challenges of Wawasan 2020 tell us in no uncertain terms what the nation’s identity is. It is this inclusive, all-embracing identity that we should celebrate — especially since we are now being challenged by a certain interpretation of Islam which seeks to divide rather than unite Malaysians.

Instead of waiting for the State to act, shouldn’t concerned Malaysian citizens initiate on their own some of these solutions to national unity?

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan 1Malaysia.

Petaling Jaya.

9 August 2016.

By Middle East Monitor

The Palestinian Journalists’ Forum has denounced Google for deleting the name of Palestine from its maps and replacing it with Israel.

In a statement released yesterday, the forum said Google’s decision to remove Palestine from its maps on 25 July “is part of the Israeli scheme to establish its name as a legitimate state for generations to come and abolish Palestine once and for all.”

“The move is also designed to falsify history, geography as well as the Palestinian people’s right to their homeland, and a failed attempt to tamper with the memory of Palestinians and Arabs as well as the world.”

The forum said the move was “contrary to all international norms and conventions”, stressing that Google should back track on its actions.

4 August 2016

By Jim Hickey

In Hiroshima, Japan, seventy-one years ago exactly from the midnight hour that I’m writing this, most people were asleep except for the night owls and diligent lovers. I’d guess that most especially the middle school students would uniformly be deep in the throes of the land of Nod, since on the morrow—August 6, a school day—they’d all be up bright and early to continue their physically taxing work in the August swampy swelter of the riverine confluences that underlay Hiroshima’s existence as a city.

For weeks before the sixth, they had been dismantling some half of the area’s housing stock, in anticipation of rumored American bombing raids that everyone assumed would be incendiary in nature, like the many such attacks that had decimated Tokyo and other strategic industrial centers more central to the war effort than sleepy Hiroshima. Out in the sun and air, minimally clothed, working primarily in and around the city center, they were exhibiting the dutiful patriotism and obedient mutuality that were part and parcel of the meaning of being Japanese.

Alas, very few of them would survive past 8:15 the next morning, at most a couple score eleven-to-fourteen-year-old kids from all the academies and classrooms of the entire area. What dreams they had that night of August 5th would form quite a novel, or play, or book of poetry, or documentary of pending loss.

E.O. Wilson, in his The Social Conquest of Earth, points out that an ability to ‘put oneself in another’s shoes’ is at the root of much that is best about our species—empathy and compassion and altruism and such. My inability to escape from this sense of dreaming along on the last night of life was part of what led me, lo these decades ago, in 1992, to swear an oath that every year as the period of August 6th through 9th came along, I’d say something and otherwise take some sort of action about why this brief interlude is arguably the most crucial commemoration for humankind to acknowledge, if survival means anything to us.

No matter what, in the fullness of time, the certainty is inescapable that something much, much worse than Hiroshima will happen to humankind if we insist on maintaining now-thermonuclear arsenals of megadeath. The most obvious reason that this ultimately inevitable mass collective suicide continues to hang over our heads like a looming time bomb is that we haven’t figured out how to stop it, how to leave the Nuclear Fuel Fool Cycle behind. For me, not knowing how to begin effecting such a monumental shift in the direction of life, I have just elected to write and produce and perform each year whatever I could manage, to bring attention back to this hideous pass in human history.

Over the two dozen years that I’ve engaged in this commemorative exercise, I’ve encouraged people to take note of many things: John Hersey’s New Yorker issue that led to his book that bore the city’s name as its title; Gar Alperowitz’s work—from Atomic Diplomacy to The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb—and the outpouring of scholarship and analysis of his now legion followers, who have unshakably demonstrated that the choice to incinerate two cities had little or even nothing to do with ending the war and ‘saving lives’ and everything to do with first conveying a sharp jab at the Soviet Union and second examining, clinically and experimentally, the new weapons system that the scientists and engineers and skilled workers and industrial laborers of the Manhattan Engineering District had assembled for use as the Soviets prepared to invade Northern Japan; and plenty else besides have I proffered over the course of nearly a quarter century. I’ve offered this information and guidance with narratives and speaking gigs and Power Point presentations.

But, as I said, what has impelled me most powerfully has not been this intellectual product, though I am above all else a nerd who would, like Dr. Faust, sell my soul for complete knowledge of all that is. What has driven me has been that sense of identification that Professor Wilson and others have discussed as so central to human consciousness.

After I had read, in countless accounts, about the hundreds of thousands of civilian victims, who would melt or bleed or die from crushing blows or expire in the conflagration that attended this first skirmish in the first nuclear war, or who would live and carry the vision of that hellish day with them to the end of their days, cinders of the atomic age, these middle school students, these old people, these Catholic priests, these American prisoners-of-war, these surviving Hibakusha so wormed their way into my psyche that I had to take some tangible step, if only of the sort that a writer is wont to deploy. So I wrote and spoke and produced.

A couple of readily available recent examples of my following up on my promise appear here, and here. I also researched and presented or published materials about the Modern Nuclear Project generally, most recently here. Exactly halfway through this interlude, however, by 2004, after only a little more than ten years of coming up with something to do or say, or do and say, every early August, I had nevertheless come to a conjunction where I might all-too-willingly have shrugged and just published or purveyed whatever I’d already created during my first decade of activity.

“What’s the use?” I thought, of innovation or addition. Lack of audience, paucity of impact, the ongoing emphasis, by our erstwhile rulers and masters, on nuclear options in energy and weaponry, all led me to despair ever helping to bring about any actual change. “When I feel inspired,” I nodded to myself, “I’ll try something new.” Otherwise, I sighed, recycling would serve to prove my fidelity.

In the event, though, a chance attendance at an art exhibit, and an even more random tutoring adventure, reinvigorated my commitment to stick to my original vow. This burst of energy and renewal of my solemn pledge all happened as a result, and in the immediate aftermath, of attending an exhibit at Emory University in Atlanta.

There, I had a chance to meet, to listen to, and to interview one of those ‘lucky’ junior high school students who miraculously survived nearly being cooked alive. She lived through months of radiation sickness and its aftermath. She was neither bitter nor shrill; she was merely ardent and diligent in declaiming the possibility, still, of Homo Sapiens’ thriving and survival.

She was one of those children, one of the score or so of preteen survivors out of a cohort of thousands; her mission in life had become simple: to travel and tell of her experience. At the Candler School of Theology, she addressed a multitude, and she spoke directly to my heart. Miyoko Matsubara’s scars made her despise her life for years; she fought off cancer, unlike her firefighter father, who after an interval of a decade or so succumbed to leukemia. Her words, of a ‘bright morning turned to endless night,’ and Emory’s exhibition of imagery that Hibakusha artists had created, seared themselves into my memory with such ferocity that I came alive to my promise once more.

This happened in October more or less. And I set immediately to work to rectify my tardiness in coming up with fresh material. That year of my enervation, 2004, I thus only created my ‘annual pilgrimage’ in November, several months late. More than ‘better late than never,’ my thinking when I did so was, “I’ve got to do something, no matter how paltry my contribution.” Following my completion of that delayed assignment, in a seemingly unrelated happenstance, I soon enough found myself with a new student.

She was on some sort of a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control. Since she was from Okinawa, she needed help in improving the flow of her English on the page. She had gotten her doctorate from Hiroshima University. She was, I learned, as gooseflesh crawled up my neck and arms, an acquaintance of a Hibakusha with whom I was more than vaguely familiar, the poet Sadako Kurihara.

Before long, my pupil shared with me Kurihara’s most famous poem. “New Life” evoked what living through hell was like. When I read the English version, out loud, I intuited that parts of it were not exactly satisfactory, as translation, to my new friend and English student; she wrote down some suggestions for me in this regard.

We talked this over on several occasions, and the result was that I rewrote Kurihara’s stanzas according to more graphic and heartfelt specifications. For better or worse, this exercise implanted in me anew an inextricable commitment. The power of these verses makes me refer to them again and again, to wit:

 

New Life
Night–pressing on a broken building’s basement
Filled with sprawling, wretched A-bomb victims–
Darkened the feeble candles which were the only light
To show a room overflowing with bodies
More broken even than their housing.

 

Sweat and blood and death subsumed my nose,
While moans and keening cries for mercy
Battered my ears with dose after dose after dose
Of the writhing pain that suffused me and all I touched,
Until I thought, “we all must die.”

 

Suddenly, in this basement turned to living hell,
A young girl’s voice sounded and transformed the suffering.
Wonder filled, she said, “The baby’s coming!” and thus, still,
In spite of everything, a young woman’s labor caused all to forget
Their own pain because a newborn might come forth to save us yet.

 

What could we do, though, having not even matches
That might decrease the forbidding darkness of our end?
From a woman’s form that had tossed and turned in agony,
Whose wails had punctuated the fetid dirge of our deathsong,
Came simply this: “I am a midwife.”

 

“Before I die, I can bring her child to life,” she said with a sigh.
The truth of her promise quite quickly came to pass, and
A new child emerged in the inferno’s smoke and smolder,
While the midwife, her wounds still weeping blood,
expired upon my shoulder.

 

Her promise is the one we live by still.
Even in the fires of hell, as life’s blood seeps away,
We will bring forth new life, even unto death.
With birth to tie ourselves to Earth even as we go,
Life is our vow, life is our will.

 

Tragic wastage and soulless murder ought to be enough to change our ways. Knowledge of diplomatic venality in the service of imperial plunder and industrial profiteering ought to prove adequate as an inducement to alter our path. Learning more and more and more about the sinister and insidious and nearly eternal toxicity of Uranium and Plutonium, not to mention the ecocidal potential of nuclear explosions or nuclear accidents themselves, ought to divert us from the dance of death that our President has just funded, to the tune of a trillion dollars of American treasure, as a twenty year project of additionally upgrading our already sublime and universal instruments of total genocide.

But awareness has not worked to turn our direction from self-destruction. What we ought is not what transpires; rather what is expedient and lucrative and empowering for those in command comes to pass year after year, decade after decade.

So this year a new thought occurred to me. Maybe we fail to understand why these satanic weapons and the cult of nuclear electricity that accompanies them are so seductive and ineluctable to the powers that be. I’ve written about these reasons, but I’ll do so with additional fervor in the coming period.

For now, for this brief outreach, I’ll just state this. Essentially, the driving need for ‘safe investments’ remains supreme as more and more dollars pile up with no apparent outlet for the current that this currency wants to create. Finding long term harbors for keeping this cash is therefore paramount, portals that require elite control, that magically subsume all the surplus to which plutocrats want to cling while the various underlying systems’ development and deployment necessitate technocratic oversight, increased militarization, and the manifestation of tighter and tighter police-state protocols.

Basically, in other words, under such a rubric, capital and profit mandate choosing every nuclear option available. The ‘leaders of the free world’ have no choice but to embrace such nuclear nuances, which means that their competitors—whether Russian or Chinese or Indian or otherwise—will ultimately also have no choice.

How could recognition of this pattern, finally and hope against hope, make a difference? Here’s one way. If we notice, clearly and without equivocation, that the business of business will always center on thermonuclear weapons and at the same time on the electricity production that relies on the same atomic reactions and thereby creates components for the bombs of power that the incorporated world demands, then an ah-ha moment is plausible, like the ability to see in the growing light of dawn the features of a landscape that had theretofore been unrecognizable.

Capitalism’s continued operation cannot break free of fission and fusion and all the other capital intensive tricks that for a time both cure its contradictions and consolidate its imprimatur. This link guarantees in time that nuclear war will happen. That nuclear war equals likely extinction is obvious. Therefore, human survival has as one of its first commandments this: we must end the rule of the bourgeoisie, or we will all burn till all that remains of us is irradiated ash.

Is that enough? Is that adequate inducement? Time will tell, albeit the clock says two or three minutes to midnight. The hour is late. Time is short, at least if we imagine our children, and our children’s children, as beings who will have the opportunity to dream, as did the children of Hiroshima as dawn drew nigh amid early morning dewfall August 6, precisely seven decades and one year ago.

Jim Hickey has written for decades about complex historical, political-economic, and social phenomena; he has a special interest in nuclear matters, imperialism, labor history.

6 August 2016

By S G Vombatkere

On my grandfather’s sixtieth birthday on July 16th, 1945, the atomic bomb was tested in USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twenty-one days later, on August 6th, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima. The same day, the experiment was hailed in The New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US president Truman said: “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history”. A second live-test was conducted three days later by dropping a 21-kiloton Plutonium-core bomb on Nagasaki. In the same issue of NYT, the hitherto secret July 16th test was also reported thus: “… a group of eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world”.

The Frankenstein monster released on the “Day of Atomic Energy” lives and prospers in the intimate relationship between bombs and nuclear power, because weapon-grade Uranium-235 and Plutonium are products or by-products of the nuclear cycle vital for the operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs). The NYT report provides justification to shift the discussion from experiments with bombs on people to NPPs, which are essentially controlled nuclear experiments, though the nuclear industry has self-certified it as proven technology.

In experiments, things can and do go wrong. Whatever the triggering factor for accidents in NPPs, the real effects on public health and safety are hidden from the public by the secretive, government-protected nuclear industry. The Frankenstein monster bared its fearsome visage when the world witnessed accidents that could not be hidden from the public, at Windscale (UK), Three Mile Island (USA), Chernobyl (USSR) and Fukushima (Japan). When nuclear accidents cannot be hidden, the nuclear industry downplays their effects with outright falsehoods, equivocating statements and technical-political verbiage. All this even while nuclear power continues to be promoted as the best combination of safe-clean-cheap-reliable (SCCR) energy, with the additional advantage of carbon-emission reduction to mitigate global warming.

Nations with nuclear capability have enacted laws to provide a secrecy-screen to the nuclear industry, because of legislators’ blind trust in esoteric science and technology. The secrecy-screen is required precisely because of the intimate link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It makes the plans, projects and expenditures of the nuclear industry opaque to the public and law-makers alike. Thus the legislative body which legitimizes nuclear secrecy effectively scores a self-goal. However, the nuclear industry selectively puts out information for public consumption, spends phenomenal funds on propaganda to advertise its SCCR-energy operations and, being part of the military-industrial complex, secretly builds nuclear weapons.

The truth of the matter

In 1948, US General Omar Bradley warned:“We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”

But opposition to nuclear bombs and nuclear power has been expressed right from 1946 onwards, and the arguments have become more comprehensive, cogent and forceful with the passing years. This has developed into a school of thought and peaceful action which the ruling political class, under thrall of the nuclear industry, pejoratively dubs “anti-nuclear”. However, those who oppose nuclear bombs and nuclear power are primarily concerned with problems of life, livelihood, health and safety of present and future generations of human and non-human life, and thus are pro-life rather than anti-nuclear.

The impossibility of keeping present and future generations safe from nuclear pollution (contamination) created in the past and continuing with increased vigour in the present, is a truth which the nuclear industry has consistently denied and ridiculed. The denial and ridicule is changing especially in recent times, into violent opposition by the nuclear industry to those who articulate these truths and call for shutdown of NPPs. This is happening worldwide and exemplified in India by violence in support of the nuclear industry, by Tamil Nadu police against peaceful opponents of the Koodankulam NPP by lathi-force, bullet-force, jailing protestors, and charging protestors with sedition and waging-war-against-the-state.

This brings to mind Arthur Schopenhauer’s words: “Any truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident”. Clearly, the truth about the undesirability of nuclear power is in its second stage. Transition of the nuclear industry into the third stage of this truth may happen when the questionable economic viability of nuclear power and the hollowness of the SCCR claim become apparent to the next generation of proponents of nuclear power. Sooner rather than later, the public is sure to recognize the awful reality of the nuclear Frankenstein. As the world touches the 71st anniversary of the nuclear bomb and protests against the nuclear industry multiply, Nicholas Walter’s words are apt: “No one can tell when protest might become effective, and the present might suddenly turn into the future”.

Major General S.G. Vombatkere, VSM, retired in 1996 as Additional DG Discipline & Vigilance in Army HQ AG’s Branch. He is a member of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) and People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

6 August 2016

By Eric Zuesse

A four-minute video that was posted to youtube on April 29th documents that the U.S. government has been lying about an organization, the White Helmets, the U.S. government hires to assist Syria’s Al Qaeda, called “Al Nusra,” to dispose of corpses of persons Al Nusra executes. Nusra kills Syrian government soldiers; and, according to Seymour Hersh and other investigative journalists, has, throughout the Syrian war, been supplied guns and other weapons by the governments of U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, for that purpose. This is part of America’s operation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, whom even Western polling shows to be popular amongst the Syrian general population. That same polling shows Nusra and other jihadist organizations (and the U.S. government, which arms them) to be extremely unpopular in Syria.

On April 19th, the U.S. State Department had blocked entrance into the United States by Raed Saleh, the head of the White Helmets, and refused to say why. Saleh had been invited to receive in NYC an award by USAID and NGOs that the U.S. government finances, but he was barred at the airport, apparently because the FBI had placed him onto its no-fly list as a known terrorist.

The White Helmets claim to receive no funds from any government, but the four-minute video shows a State Department official admitting “we supply through USAID about twenty three million dollars in assistance to them” (which might be annually, but that question wasn’t addressed in the video). The White Helmets’ founder, James Lemesurier, is himself funded by the governments of UK, Japan, Denmark and Netherlands, all of which are likewise trying to overthrow Assad.

Thus, U.S. and other Western taxpayers are funding this allegedly ‘non-partisan’ and ‘humanitarian’ but actually jihadist, organization, whose leader was, on April 19th, prevented from receiving in the U.S., a ‘humanitarian’ award, for processing corpses that Nusra — which the U.S. government also supports — is producing. The White Helmets also rescue jihadists (and their inevitable civilian hostages), who have been injured by Syrian government forces. That’s their ‘humanitarian’ work. This video shows jihadists cheering White Helmets. The anti-Assad ‘charities’ that were wanting to award Raed Saleh in the U.S., have said they’ll instead do it in Turkey, which is a U.S. ally — even a member of NATO.

As regards what the Syrian public think, it’s highly favorable toward Assad and highly unfavorable toward the jihadist organizations that now infest their country from abroad, and also against the United States, which they view as being the main source of this ‘civil war’ (which is instead actually a foreign invasion of their country).

The video also shows the British agent (and Britain is yet another U.S. ally) who founded and organized the ‘non-partisan humanitarian organization’, White Helmets, Mr. Lemesurier.

The Syrian government is an ally of Russia, and America’s policy is to overthrow and replace the leader of any nation who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Zelaya, Viktor Yanukovych, or Bashar al-Assad. These governments then become failed states. When Zelaya was replaced in 2009, the country he led, Honduras, became a narco-state and has since had the world’s highest murder-rate. Jihadists weren’t even needed in the Honduran case. The U.S. government didn’t perpetrate that particular coup, but only helped it succeed and enabled the installed new regime to remain in power. The Honduran coup was actually perpetrated by agents of that country’s twelve aristocratic families, who own almost all of the country. However, normally, the U.S. government itself overthrows the leaders it doesn’t like, and doesn’t merely aid the regimes that a coup by the local aristocracy has already installed. Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Presidential candidate, was the key person in the Obama Administration who worked, behind the scenes, to keep in power the coup regime that took over in Honduras on 28 June 2009. Without her assistance to the Honduran coup-regime, Zelaya, whom virtually all other governments supported as being still the legal leader of Honduras, would have been restored to power; the coup-regime would have had to bow out. By contrast, her — and President Obama’s — efforts to replace Syria’s secular but nominally Shiite President Assad, by using Saudi-funded foreign-imported Sunni jihadists, haven’t been nearly so successful, unless creating the highest degree of misery among the residents in any country in the world, is viewed by Obama and Clinton as ‘success’.

As I had reported on April 16th, headlining, “Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists”:

The “2016 Global Emotions Report” by Gallup, surveying over a thousand people in each one of 140 different nations, found that, by far, the people in Syria had “the lowest positive experiences worldwide,” the people there were far more miserable than in any other nation. The score was 36 (on a scale to 100). Second and third worst were tied at 51: Turkey because of the tightening dictatorship there as Turkey has become one of Obama’s key allies in toppling Assad; Nepal, on account of the earthquake.

So: America certainly doesn’t give a damn about the sufferings of the Syrians, and of the Iraqis, sufferings that the U.S. itself caused and which invasions by us (and by the jihadists we and our Saudi and other ‘friends’ have armed and assisted to get into Syria through our ‘friend’ Turkey) have produced the two nations with the most misery on this planet. Our Presidents mouth platitudes of ‘caring’, but, to judge by their actions, are merely lying psychopaths. But whatever they are, they’re causing the most misery of anyone. How much coverage of that fact is there in the American press? Hasn’t America’s press actually been complicit in this, all along?

So, this is the reason why the U.S. government refuses entry to a terrorist it hires to create hell for the people in Syria: it doesn’t want individuals such as Raed Saleh inside the United States. America’s leaders know that, if something like this happens, and if word of it becomes well known, the American public could become even less supportive of their leaders than they already are. It’s not what America’s aristocracy want. They might not care about the American public, but they care very much about staying in power, regardless whether under the “Democratic” or under the “Republican” label.

Back on 26 June 2015, Raed Saleh had somehow been allowed into the United States, to address an “Arria” briefing (named after the far-right aristocratic military Venezuelan diplomat and member of the U.S. aristocratic Council on Foreign Relations, Diego Arria) to the U.N. Security Council, where Saleh announced in his opening paragraph that his focus would be “to convey the message of the search and rescue teams in Syria about the suffering of the Syrian people due to the regime’s bombing with indiscriminate weapons, particularly barrel bombs.” Those were the cheap, even amateurish, improvised bombs that the Syrian Army were using to kill as many of the jihadists as they could, but which also inevitably killed and maimed also many Syrian civilians in the occupied areas of the country — there’s no way to avoid it. Saleh’s speech didn’t mention any of the many foreign jihadist groups such as Nusra and ISIS that were and are killing far more of everybody than Assad’s forces were. His focus was instead totally against Assad and the government’s forces, not at all against the jihadist mercenaries who had entered the country and made hell there; and, Saleh said, “The Syrian people who are being killed every day, Ladies and Gentlemen, hold you responsible” for not helping those jihadists eliminate the existing Syrian government. He said this without at all referring to what even Western polling of Syrians had consistently shown to be the case, which was the exact opposite: they hold the U.S. to blame and they loathe the jihadists and support the government. So, clearly, the United States did the correct thing when finally placing this jihadist of theirs onto America’s no-fly list. To the exact contrary of the U.S. government’s propaganda which says that he’s a hero and that he and his organization are ‘nonpartisan’ and that he is, as he calls himself, “the head of Syrian Civil Defense,” that appellation for him is like calling Hitler’s medics during his invasion of, say, France, “French Civil Defense.” George Orwell’s allegorical novel 1984 has clearly been surpassed in today’s reality. The extent to which Western publics accept the arrant lies they’re fed is exceeding, perhaps, even Orwell’s expectations.

So: one typical piece of Republican propaganda about the White Helmets is the May 1st article in the Wall Street Journal, “White Helmets Are White Knights for Desperate Syrians”, while a typical piece of Democratic propaganda about them is the New York Times eleven days earlier, on April 20th, which headlined “Leader of Syria Rescue Group, Arriving in U.S. for Award, Is Refused Entry”, and it reported there that “Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, called the denial of entry ‘a scandal.’ ‘The White Helmets are one of the few organizations in Syria that have been above reproach,’ he said. ‘They have tried to observe strict neutrality in order to facilitate their humanitarian work and save lives. To do this they have worked along side all sorts of militias in order to get to victims of the fighting.’” He didn’t say that the “militias” are overwhelmingly foreign jihadist groups paid by America’s fundamentalist-Sunni allies the Sauds, and Qatar’s royal family the Thanis, to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad. But, after all, it’s only propaganda, anyway. Right?

Furthermore, the Syrian public might view that conception of ‘strict neutrality’ much the way Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps viewed the conception of ‘strict neutrality’ as between themselves and their oppressors, or the way Chinese in the Nanjing Massacre viewed that ‘strict neutrality’ between themselves and the Japanese invaders. And, polls in Syria do show they view the U.S. and its allies as the invaders. Instead of ‘strict neutrality,’ the U.S. and its allies are the foreign invaders, and not at all ‘neutral’. And, to state this documented fact (documented here by the links) isn’t propaganda at all; it’s news-reporting, in an entirely verified historical context (which is very different from propaganda).

What that four-minute video shows is news-reporting, in exactly this sense. That’s why it’s presented here: it brings all of this together, succinctly; and what I’ve done here is to document some of its important historical context, to help people who are skeptical of it (and, in such a lying world, everything should be viewed with a scientist’s skepticism) understand and evaluate it, at a deeper level than a mere four minutes can possibly present, even in a video.

—————

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.

Originally posted at strategic-culture.org

5 August 2016

By Andrew J Bacevich

My earliest recollection of national politics dates back exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new addition to our family, television. My parents were supporting President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term and that was good enough for me. Even as a youngster, I sensed that Ike, the former supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II, was someone of real stature. In a troubled time, he exuded authority and self-confidence. By comparison, Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson came across as vaguely suspect. Next to the five-star incumbent, he seemed soft, even foppish, and therefore not up to the job. So at least it appeared to a nine-year-old living in Chicagoland.

Of the seamy underside of politics I knew nothing, of course. On the surface, all seemed reassuring. As if by divine mandate, two parties vied for power. The views they represented defined the allowable range of opinion. The outcome of any election expressed the collective will of the people and was to be accepted as such. That I was growing up in the best democracy the world had ever known — its very existence a daily rebuke to the enemies of freedom — was beyond question.

Naïve? Embarrassingly so. Yet how I wish that Election Day in November 2016 might present Americans with something even loosely approximating the alternatives available to them in November 1956. Oh, to choose once more between an Ike and an Adlai.

Don’t for a second think that this is about nostalgia. Today, Stevenson doesn’t qualify for anyone’s list of Great Americans. If remembered at all, it’s for his sterling performance as President John F. Kennedy’s U.N. ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Interrogating his Soviet counterpart with cameras rolling, Stevenson barked that he was prepared to wait “until hell freezes over” to get his questions answered about Soviet military activities in Cuba. When the chips were down, Adlai proved anything but soft. Yet in aspiring to the highest office in the land, he had come up well short. In 1952, he came nowhere close to winning and in 1956 he proved no more successful. Stevenson was to the Democratic Party what Thomas Dewey had been to the Republicans: a luckless two-time loser.

As for Eisenhower, although there is much in his presidency to admire, his errors of omission and commission were legion. During his two terms, from Guatemala to Iran, the CIA overthrew governments, plotted assassinations, and embraced unsavory right-wing dictators — in effect, planting a series of IEDs destined eventually to blow up in the face of Ike’s various successors. Meanwhile, binging on nuclear weapons, the Pentagon accumulated an arsenal far beyond what even Eisenhower as commander-in-chief considered prudent or necessary.

In addition, during his tenure in office, the military-industrial complex became a rapacious juggernaut, an entity unto itself as Ike himself belatedly acknowledged. By no means least of all, Eisenhower fecklessly committed the United States to an ill-fated project of nation-building in a country that just about no American had heard of at the time: South Vietnam. Ike did give the nation eight years of relative peace and prosperity, but at a high price — most of the bills coming due long after he left office.

The Pathology of American Politics

And yet, and yet…

To contrast the virtues and shortcomings of Stevenson and Eisenhower with those of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump is both instructive and profoundly depressing. Comparing the adversaries of 1956 with their 2016 counterparts reveals with startling clarity what the decades-long decay of American politics has wrought.

In 1956, each of the major political parties nominated a grown-up for the highest office in the land. In 2016, only one has.

In 1956, both parties nominated likeable individuals who conveyed a basic sense of trustworthiness. In 2016, neither party has done so.

In 1956, Americans could count on the election to render a definitive verdict, the vote count affirming the legitimacy of the system itself and allowing the business of governance to resume. In 2016, that is unlikely to be the case. Whether Trump or Clinton ultimately prevails, large numbers of Americans will view the result as further proof of “rigged” and irredeemably corrupt political arrangements. Rather than inducing some semblance of reconciliation, the outcome is likely to deepen divisions.

How in the name of all that is holy did we get into such a mess?

How did the party of Eisenhower, an architect of victory in World War II, choose as its nominee a narcissistic TV celebrity who, with each successive Tweet and verbal outburst, offers further evidence that he is totally unequipped for high office? Yes, the establishment media are ganging up on Trump, blatantly displaying the sort of bias normally kept at least nominally under wraps. Yet never have such expressions of journalistic hostility toward a particular candidate been more justified. Trump is a bozo of such monumental proportions as to tax the abilities of our most talented satirists. Were he alive today, Mark Twain at his most scathing would be hard-pressed to do justice to The Donald’s blowhard pomposity.

Similarly, how did the party of Adlai Stevenson, but also of Stevenson’s hero Franklin Roosevelt, select as its candidate someone so widely disliked and mistrusted even by many of her fellow Democrats? True, antipathy directed toward Hillary Clinton draws some of its energy from incorrigible sexists along with the “vast right wing conspiracy” whose members thoroughly loathe both Clintons. Yet the antipathy is not without basis in fact.

Even by Washington standards, Secretary Clinton exudes a striking sense of entitlement combined with a nearly complete absence of accountability. She shrugs off her misguided vote in support of invading Iraq back in 2003, while serving as senator from New York. She neither explains nor apologizes for pressing to depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, her most notable “accomplishment” as secretary of state. “We came, we saw, he died,” she bragged back then, somewhat prematurely given that Libya has since fallen into anarchy and become a haven for ISIS.

She clings to the demonstrably false claim that her use of a private server for State Department business compromised no classified information. Now opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) that she once described as the “gold standard in trade agreements,” Clinton rejects charges of political opportunism. That her change of heart occurred when attacking the TPP was helping Bernie Sanders win one Democratic primary after another is merely coincidental. Oh, and the big money accepted from banks and Wall Street as well as the tech sector for minimal work and the bigger money still from leading figures in the Israel lobby? Rest assured that her acceptance of such largesse won’t reduce by one iota her support for “working class families” or her commitment to a just peace settlement in the Middle East.

Let me be clear: none of these offer the slightest reason to vote for Donald Trump. Yet together they make the point that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, notably so in matters related to national security. Clinton is surely correct that allowing Trump to make decisions related to war and peace would be the height of folly. Yet her record in that regard does not exactly inspire confidence.

When it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose his staggering ignorance.

By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized “Washington playbook” that President Obama himself has disparaged — a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs.

On the latter point, note that Clinton’s acceptance speech in Philadelphia included not a single mention of Afghanistan. By Election Day, the war there will have passed its 15th anniversary. One might think that a prospective commander-in-chief would have something to say about the longest conflict in American history, one that continues with no end in sight. Yet, with the Washington playbook offering few answers, Mrs. Clinton chooses to remain silent on the subject.

So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one’s head against a brick wall without evident effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much.

Pseudo-Politics for an Ersatz Era

But let’s not just blame the candidates. Trump and Clinton are also the product of circumstances that neither created. As candidates, they are merely exploiting a situation — one relying on intuition and vast stores of brashness, the other putting to work skills gained during a life spent studying how to acquire and employ power. The success both have achieved in securing the nominations of their parties is evidence of far more fundamental forces at work.

In the pairing of Trump and Clinton, we confront symptoms of something pathological. Unless Americans identify the sources of this disease, it will inevitably worsen, with dire consequences in the realm of national security. After all, back in Eisenhower’s day, the IEDs planted thanks to reckless presidential decisions tended to blow up only years — or even decades — later. For example, between the 1953 U.S.-engineered coup that restored the Shah to his throne and the 1979 revolution that converted Iran overnight from ally to adversary, more than a quarter of a century elapsed. In our own day, however, detonation occurs so much more quickly — witness the almost instantaneous and explosively unhappy consequences of Washington’s post-9/11 military interventions in the Greater Middle East.

So here’s a matter worth pondering: How is it that all the months of intensive fundraising, the debates and speeches, the caucuses and primaries, the avalanche of TV ads and annoying robocalls have produced two presidential candidates who tend to elicit from a surprisingly large number of rank-and-file citizens disdain, indifference, or at best hold-your-nose-and-pull-the-lever acquiescence?

Here, then, is a preliminary diagnosis of three of the factors contributing to the erosion of American politics, offered from the conviction that, for Americans to have better choices next time around, fundamental change must occur — and soon.

First, and most important, the evil effects of money: Need chapter and verse? For a tutorial, see this essential 2015 book by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard: Republic Lost, Version 2.0. Those with no time for books might spare 18 minutes for Lessig’s brilliant and deeply disturbing TED talk. Professor Lessig argues persuasively that unless the United States radically changes the way it finances political campaigns, we’re pretty much doomed to see our democracy wither and die.

Needless to say, moneyed interests and incumbents who benefit from existing arrangements take a different view and collaborate to maintain the status quo. As a result, political life has increasingly become a pursuit reserved for those like Trump who possess vast personal wealth or for those like Clinton who display an aptitude for persuading the well to do to open their purses, with all that implies by way of compromise, accommodation, and the subsequent repayment of favors.

Second, the perverse impact of identity politics on policy: Observers make much of the fact that, in capturing the presidential nomination of a major party, Hillary Clinton has shattered yet another glass ceiling. They are right to do so. Yet the novelty of her candidacy starts and ends with gender. When it comes to fresh thinking, Donald Trump has far more to offer than Clinton — even if his version of “fresh” tends to be synonymous with wacky, off-the-wall, ridiculous, or altogether hair-raising.

The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security, Hillary Clinton is utterly conventional. She subscribes to a worldview (and view of America’s role in the world) that originated during the Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States proclaimed itself the planet’s “sole superpower,” and persists today remarkably unaffected by actual events. On the campaign trail, Clinton attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American exceptionalism, paying fervent tribute to “the world’s greatest military,” swearing that she’ll be “listening to our generals and admirals,” and vowing to get tough on America’s adversaries. These are, of course, the mandatory rituals of the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified if anything by the perceived need for the first female candidate for president to emphasize her pugnacity.

A Clinton presidency, therefore, offers the prospect of more of the same — muscle-flexing and armed intervention to demonstrate American global leadership — albeit marketed with a garnish of diversity. Instead of different policies, Clinton will offer an administration that has a different look, touting this as evidence of positive change.

Yet while diversity may be a good thing, we should not confuse it with effectiveness. A national security team that “looks like America” (to use the phrase originally coined by Bill Clinton) does not necessarily govern more effectively than one that looks like President Eisenhower’s. What matters is getting the job done.

Since the 1990s women have found plentiful opportunities to fill positions in the upper echelons of the national security apparatus. Although we have not yet had a female commander-in-chief, three women have served as secretary of state and two as national security adviser. Several have filled Adlai Stevenson’s old post at the United Nations. Undersecretaries, deputy undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries of like gender abound, along with a passel of female admirals and generals.

So the question needs be asked: Has the quality of national security policy improved compared to the bad old days when men exclusively called the shots? Using as criteria the promotion of stability and the avoidance of armed conflict (along with the successful prosecution of wars deemed unavoidable), the answer would, of course, have to be no. Although Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Clinton herself might entertain a different view, actually existing conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and other countries across the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa tell a different story.

The abysmal record of American statecraft in recent years is not remotely the fault of women; yet neither have women made a perceptibly positive difference. It turns out that identity does not necessarily signify wisdom or assure insight. Allocating positions of influence in the State Department or the Pentagon based on gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation — as Clinton will assuredly do — may well gratify previously disenfranchised groups. Little evidence exists to suggest that doing so will produce more enlightened approaches to statecraft, at least not so long as adherence to the Washington playbook figures as a precondition to employment. (Should Clinton win in November, don’t expect the redoubtable ladies of Code Pink to be tapped for jobs at the Pentagon and State Department.)

In the end, it’s not identity that matters but ideas and their implementation. To contemplate the ideas that might guide a President Trump along with those he will recruit to act on them — Ivanka as national security adviser? — is enough to elicit shudders from any sane person. Yet the prospect of Madam President surrounding herself with an impeccably diverse team of advisers who share her own outmoded views is hardly cause for celebration.

Putting a woman in charge of national security policy will not in itself amend the defects exhibited in recent years. For that, the obsolete principles with which Clinton along with the rest of Washington remains enamored will have to be jettisoned. In his own bizarre way (albeit without a clue as to a plausible alternative), Donald Trump seems to get that; Hillary Clinton does not.

Third, the substitution of “reality” for reality: Back in 1962, a young historian by the name of Daniel Boorstin published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. In an age in which Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton vie to determine the nation’s destiny, it should be mandatory reading. The Image remains, as when it first appeared, a fire bell ringing in the night.

According to Boorstin, more than five decades ago the American people were already living in a “thicket of unreality.” By relentlessly indulging in ever more “extravagant expectations,” they were forfeiting their capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Indeed, Boorstin wrote, “We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.”

While ad agencies and PR firms had indeed vigorously promoted a world of illusions, Americans themselves had become willing accomplices in the process.

“The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

This, of course, was decades before the nation succumbed to the iridescent allure of Facebook, Google, fantasy football, “Real Housewives of _________,” selfies, smartphone apps, Game of Thrones, Pokémon GO — and, yes, the vehicle that vaulted Donald Trump to stardom, The Apprentice.

“The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America,” wrote Boorstin. It’s also become the essence of American politics, long since transformed into theater, or rather into some sort of (un)reality show.

Presidential campaigns today are themselves, to use Boorstin’s famous term, “pseudo-events” that stretch from months into years. By now, most Americans know better than to take at face value anything candidates say or promise along the way. We’re in on the joke — or at least we think we are. Reinforcing that perception on a daily basis are media outlets that have abandoned mere reporting in favor of enhancing the spectacle of the moment. This is especially true of the cable news networks, where talking heads serve up a snide and cynical complement to the smarmy fakery that is the office-seeker’s stock in trade. And we lap it up. It matters little that we know it’s all staged and contrived, as long as — a preening Megyn Kelly getting under Trump’s skin, Trump himself denouncing “lyin’ Ted” Cruz, etc., etc. — it’s entertaining.

This emphasis on spectacle has drained national politics of whatever substance it still had back when Ike and Adlai commanded the scene. It hardly need be said that Donald Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary knack — a sort of post-modern genius — for turning this phenomenon to his advantage. Yet in her own way Clinton plays the same game. How else to explain a national convention organized around the idea of “reintroducing to the American people” someone who served eight years as First Lady, was elected to the Senate, failed in a previous high-profile run for the presidency, and completed a term as secretary of state? The just-ended conclave in Philadelphia was, like the Republican one that preceded it, a pseudo-event par excellence, the object of the exercise being to fashion a new “image” for the Democratic candidate.

The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It’s an identifiable set of arrangements — laws, habits, cultural predispositions — that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics. As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind.

At an earlier juncture back in 1956, out of a population of 168 million, we got Ike and Adlai. Today, with almost double the population, we get — well, we get what we’ve got. This does not represent progress. And don’t kid yourself that things really can’t get much worse. Unless Americans rouse themselves to act, count on it, they will.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author most recently of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History..

First published in TomDispatch

Copyright 2016 Andrew J. Bacevich

5 August 2016

By Nick Turse

It’s rare to hear one top military commander publicly badmouth another, call attention to his faults, or simply point out his shortcomings. Despite a seemingly endless supply of debacles from strategic setbacks to quagmire conflicts since 9/11, the top brass rarely criticize each other or, even in retirement, utter a word about the failings of their predecessors or successors. Think of it as the camouflage wall of silence. You may loathe him. You may badmouth him behind closed doors. You may have secretly hoped for his career to implode. But publicly point out failures? That’s left to those further down the chain of command.

And yet that’s effectively exactly what newly installed U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) chief, General Thomas Waldhauser, did earlier this year in a statement to the Senate Arms Services Committee (SASC). It’s just that no one, almost certainly including Waldhauser himself, seemed to notice or recognize it for the criticism it was, including the people tasked with oversight of military operations and those in the media.

Over these last years, the number of personnel, missions, dollars spent, and special ops training efforts as well as drone bases and other outposts on the continent have all multiplied. At the same time, incoming AFRICOM commanders have been publicly warning about the escalating perils and challenges from terror groups that menace the command’s area of operations. Almost no one, however — neither those senators nor the media — has raised pointed questions, no less demanded frank answers, about why such crises on the continent have so perfectly mirrored American military expansion.

Asked earlier this year about the difficulties he’d face if confirmed, Waldhauser was blunt: “A major challenge is effectively countering violent extremist organizations, especially the growth of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and ISIL in Libya.”

That should have been a déjà vu moment for some of those senators. Three years earlier, the man previously nominated to lead AFRICOM, General David Rodriguez, was asked the same question. His reply was suspiciously similar: “A major challenge is effectively countering violent extremist organizations, especially the growth of Mali as an al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb safe haven, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia.”

All that had changed between 2013 and 2016, it seemed, was the addition of one more significant threat.

In the midst of Rodriguez’s 2016 victory lap (as he was concluding 40 years of military service), Waldhauser publicly drew attention to just how ineffective his run as AFRICOM chief had been. Some might call it unkind — a slap in the face for a decorated old soldier — but perhaps turnabout is fair play. After all, in 2013, Rodriguez did much the same to his predecessor, General Carter Ham, when he offered his warning about the challenges on the continent.

Three years before that, in 2010, Ham appeared before the same committee and said, “I believe that the extremist threat that’s emerging from East Africa is probably the greatest concern that Africa Command will face in the near future.” Ham expressed no worry about threats posed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or Boko Haram. ISIL in Libya didn’t even exist. And even that “greatest concern,” al-Shabaab, was, Ham noted, “primarily focused on internal matters in Somalia.”

In other words, over these last years, each incoming AFRICOM commander has offered a more dismal and dire assessment of the situation facing the U.S. military than his predecessor. Ham drew attention to only one major terror threat, Rodriguez to three, and Waldhauser to four.

His Own Worst Critic

That said, Waldhauser isn’t the only AFRICOM chief to point a finger at Rodriguez’s checkered record. Another American general cast an even darker shadow on the outgoing commander’s three-year run overseeing Washington’s shadow war in Africa:

“AFRICOM’s priorities on the continent for the next several years will be… in East Africa to improve stability there. Most of that is built around the threat of al-Shabaab. And then, in the North and West Africa is really built around the challenges from Libya down to northern Mali and that region and that instability there creates many challenges… And then after that is the West Africa, really about the Boko Haram and the problem in Nigeria that is, unfortunately, crossing the boundary into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. So those are the big challenges and then just the normal ones that continue to be a challenge are the Gulf of Guinea… as well as countering the Lord’s Resistance Army…”

That critic was, in fact, General David Rodriguez himself in an AFRICOM promotional video released on multiple social media platforms last month. It was posted on the very day that his command also touted its “more than 30 major exercises and more than 1,000 military to military engagements” between 2013 and 2015. It was hardly a surprise, however, that these two posts and the obvious conclusion to be drawn from them — just how little AFRICOM’S growing set of ambitious continent-wide activities mattered when it came to the spread of terror movements — went unattended and uncommented upon.

Waldhauser and Rodriguez have not, however, been alone in pointing out increased insecurity on the continent. “Terrorism and violent extremism are major sources of instability in Africa,” Assistant Secretary Linda Thomas-Greenfield of the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May. “Terrorist organizations such as al-Shabaab, Boko Haram (which now calls itself the Islamic State in West Africa), al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and al-Murabitoun are conducting asymmetric campaigns that cause significant loss of innocent life and create potentially long-term humanitarian crises.”

National intelligence director James Clapper, who called the continent “a hothouse for the emergence of extremist and rebel groups” in 2014, spoke of the dangers posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army and al-Shabaab, as well as terror threats in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and Tunisia, and instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo, Burundi, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year.

And then there’s Brigadier General Donald Bolduc who heads Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), the most elite U.S. troops on the continent. He painted a picture that was grimmer still. Last November, during a closed door presentation at the annual Special Operations Command Africa Commander’s Conference in Garmisch, Germany, the SOCAFRICA chief drew attention not just to the threats of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, ISIL, and the Lord’s Resistance Army, but also another “43 malign groups” operating in Africa, according to another set of documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

The growth of terror groups from the one named by Ham in 2010 to the 48 mentioned by Bolduc in 2015 is as remarkable as it has been unremarked upon, a record so bleak that it demands a congressional investigation that will, of course, never take place.

Questions Unasked, Questions Unanswered

U.S. Africa Command boasts that it “neutralizes transnational threats” and “prevents and mitigates conflict,” while training local allies and proxies “in order to promote regional security, stability, and prosperity.” Rodriguez’s tenure was, however, marked by the very opposite: increasing numbers of lethal terror attacks across the continent including those in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tunisia. In fact, data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland shows that attacks have spiked over the last decade, roughly coinciding with AFRICOM’s establishment. In 2007, just before it became an independent command, there were fewer than 400 such incidents annually in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, the number reached nearly 2,000.

While these statistics may be damning, they are no more so than the words of AFRICOM’s own chiefs. Yet the senators who are supposed to provide oversight haven’t seemed to bat an eye, let alone ask the obvious questions about why terror groups and terror attacks are proliferating as U.S. operations, bases, manpower, and engagement across the continent grow. (Note that this is, of course, the same Senate committee that Rodriguez misled, whether purposefully or inadvertently, earlier this year when it came to the number of U.S. military missions in Africa without — again — either apparent notice or any repercussions.)

In an era of too-big-to fail generals, an age in which top commanders from winless wars retire to take prominent posts at influential institutions and cash in with cushy jobs on corporate boards, AFRICOM chiefs have faced neither hard questions nor repercussions for the deteriorating situation. (Similar records — heavy on setbacks, short on victories — have been produced by Washington’s war chiefs in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 15 years and they, too, have never led to official calls for any sort of accountability.)

Rodriguez is now planning on resting at his northern Virginia home for a few months and, as he told Stars and Stripes, seeing “what comes next.”

U.S. Africa Command failed to respond to multiple requests for an interview with Rodriguez, but if he follows in the footsteps of the marquee names among fellow retired four-stars of his generation, like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, he’ll supplement his six-figure pension with one or more lucrative private sector posts.

What comes next for AFRICOM will play out on the continent and in briefings before the Senate Armed Services Committee for years to come. If history is any guide, the number of terror groups on the continent will not decrease, the senators will fail to ask why this is so, and the media will follow their lead.

During his final days in command, AFRICOM released several more short videos of Rodriguez holding forth on varioius issues. In one of the last of these, the old soldier praised “the whole team” for accomplishing “a tremendous amount over the last several years.” What exactly that was went unsaid, though it certainly wasn’t achieving AFRICOM’s mandate to “neutraliz[e] transnational threats.” But what Rodriguez said next made a lot of sense. He noted that AFRICOM wasn’t alone in it — whatever it was. Washington, D.C., he said, had played a key role, too. In that, he couldn’t have been more on target. The increasingly bleak outlook in Africa can’t simply be laid at the feet of AFRICOM’s commanders. Again and again, they’ve been upfront about the deteriorating situation. Washington has just preferred to look the other way.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com..

Copyright 2016 Nick Turse

First published in Tomdispatch.com

2 August 2016

By Alex Lantier

Co-Written by Alex Lantier and Johannes Stern

Relations between Ankara and Washington are deteriorating rapidly following the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, which the Turkish government believes was supported by the Obama administration. In a series of stunning statements on Friday, delivered from the bombed-out ruins of a police base in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan directly accused the US government of backing the coup.

Erdogan denounced statements by top US military and intelligence officials attending a security conference in Aspen, Colorado who criticized him for launching a purge of the Turkish army in the aftermath of the coup. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper rebuked Erdogan for arresting Turkish military officers close to Washington. “Many of our interlocutors have been purged or arrested,” he fumed. “There’s no question this is going to set back and make more difficult cooperation with the Turks.”

Gen. Joseph Votel, the chief of the US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, warned that the purge was “something to be very, very concerned about” because it could harm the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) militia in Syria. NATO Supreme Commander General Curtis Scaparrotti declared, “Some of the officers that we have our relationships with in Turkey are now either detained, in some cases retired as a result of the coup. We’ve got some work to do there.”

Erdogan angrily charged Votel with supporting the coup, saying, “The US general stands on the coup plotters’ side with his words. He disclosed himself via his statements… Is it up to you to decide on this? Who are you? Instead of thanking the state for repelling the coup attempt, you stand with the coup plotters.”

Referring to the US-based Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen, whom he accuses of organizing the coup, Erdogan said: “The coup plotter is in your country. You are nurturing him there. It’s out in the open.” He added, “My people know who is behind this scheme… they know who the superior intelligence behind it is, and with these statements you are revealing yourselves, you are giving yourselves away.”

The Turkish president attacked US and European ruling circles for expressing concern that escalating arrests of army officers would harm Turkey’s future. He pledged to continue the crackdown in the army. “What are their concerns?” he asked. “They are concerned about the suspensions, detentions, arrests and the like and the increase in them. Are they going to increase? If the people are guilty, they will.”

The statements by both Erdogan and the US officials underscore the drastic deterioration in relations between Washington and Ankara that had already occurred prior to the coup. Far from welcoming Erdogan’s survival, Washington is attacking a government that narrowly survived a coup attempt that claimed over 270 lives and nearly led to Erdogan’s assassination.

The coup has exposed the explosive tensions growing behind the scenes within the NATO alliance, of which Turkey is a member state. The attempted putsch took place against the backdrop of a warming of relations between Turkey and Russia that cuts across US policy in the Middle East, in particular, US plans to undermine Russian influence by orchestrating the overthrow of Moscow’s sole surviving Arab ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Turkish government recklessly shot down a Russian jet involved in fighting US-backed rebels in Syria. In the aftermath of that incident in November of last year, Turkey has become increasingly concerned that the Syrian war is strengthening the position of separatist Kurdish forces. Under those conditions, Ankara intitated a broad shift in its foreign policy this spring. It signaled that it might cease backing the Syrian war, which it had agreed to support shortly after Washington launched it five years ago.

After the ouster of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in May, his replacement, Binali Yıldırım, proposed to bring Turkish foreign policy back to the “good old days.” He said he intended to “increase the number of friends and reduce the number of enemies.”

In June, Erdogan sent Moscow a letter calling Russia “a friend and a strategic partner.” The letter stated, according to the Kremlin, “We never had a desire or a deliberate intention to down an aircraft belonging to Russia.”

Coincidentally or otherwise, Davutoglu has made statements indicating that he gave the shoot-down order in November–though he later retracted them–and the pilot who shot down the Russian warplane in November flew a rebel F-16 fighter over Ankara during the failed coup.

On July 13, two days before the coup, Yıldırım even included Syria in the list of countries with which Turkey intended to improve ties. He said, “I am sure that we will return ties with Syria to normal. We need it. We normalized our relations with Israel and Russia. I’m sure we will go back to normal relations with Syria as well.”

Since 2001, US imperialism has laid waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria in order to install pro-US puppet regimes, crush Russian influence and dominate the Middle East. It takes little imagination to recognize that powerful sections of the American bourgeoisie, which historically backed three successful coups in Turkey (1960, 1971 and 1980), might have at least tolerated last month’s coup attempt in order to cut off developing ties between Russia and Turkey.

The US foreign policy establishment is, moreover, deeply disturbed by the policies Erdogan outlined after the coup, indicating that he was considering an alliance with Russia and Iran. In a telephone call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani a few days after the coup, Erdogan said that Turkey is now “even more determined to work hand-in-hand with Iran and Russia to resolve regional issues and strengthen our efforts to return peace and stability to the region.” Erdogan is now scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on August 9.

US officials in Aspen insisted that such alliances were unacceptable to Washington. Clapper accused Moscow of trying to “drive a wedge between Turkey and the West, specifically Turkey and NATO.”

As for Scaparrotti, he declared, “We will watch closely how this relationship develops. I would be concerned if they were departing from the values that are the bedrock of the Washington Treaty [which founded NATO]—the rule of law.”

Under these conditions, US claims that Washington had no advance warning of the coup are simply not credible. Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base, which hosts more than 5,000 American soldiers and is the main base for the US-led bombing campaign against Syria and Iraq, was the organizing center of the putsch. Pro-coup fighter jets flew in and out of Incirlik as the coup unfolded. Shortly after the coup failed, the base commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, was arrested along with other pro-coup soldiers at the base.

Given that Incirlik is the site of dozens of US nuclear weapons, no credibility can be given to claims that US intelligence was unaware that a coup against Erdogan was being organized from there. Were that truly the case, it would represent a CIA intelligence breakdown of stunning proportions.

It is now being reported that Ankara received warning of the coup and Erdogan escaped assassination only because of reports from Russian forces that US-linked assassins were on the way to kill him.

Russian forces at the nearby Khmeimim airbase in Syria reportedly intercepted coded radio signals containing information about preparations for a coup and shared them with the Turkish government. Erdogan left a hotel in Marmaris only minutes before 25 rebel soldiers descended on the hotel and began shooting. Ultimately, hundreds were killed and thousands wounded as rebel army units bombed the Turkish parliament and attacked pro-Erdogan protesters and loyal military and police units.

A pro-coup officer captured by the Turkish government, Lieutenant Colonel Murat Bolat, told the conservative Yeni Savak newspaper that his unit was designated to detain and possibly murder Erdogan after receiving precise information on Erdogan’s location from US sources.

“A person in the meeting, whom I guess was an officer from the Special Forces, said, ‘Nobody will be allowed to rescue the president from our hands,’” he said, indicating that this meant Erdogan was to be shot after he was captured if the forces who had arrested him faced any counterattack.

Yeni Safak also identified US General John F. Campbell as the “man behind the failed coup.” According to the newspaper, the former commander of the Resolute Support Mission and United States Forces in Afghanistan worked with a team of 80 CIA operatives, distributing $2 billion to pro-US and pro-Gülen elements in the Turkish military to prepare the coup.

First published in WSWS.org

1 August 2016