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By Mark Moreno Pascual

The recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement will expand corporate profits at the expense of people’s rights

A new addition to the growing number of “free trade” agreements (FTAs) took centerstage last Monday as the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries announced the conclusion of a mammoth “trade” deal that covers more than 60% of the global economy.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement has drawn strong opposition from countries involved in the negotiations as well as from people’s organisations around the world. It is deemed as a US-conceived treaty that is part of its pivot to Asia in an attempt to maintain its economic clout and counter the rise of China.

Why so secret?

Like all other FTAs, the TPP is negotiated behind closed doors—only corporate advisors and lobbyists are given exclusive access to the text. In 2010, TPP member states agreed not to release the negotiating text until four years after an actual agreement has been made and/or abandoned.[i] This elicits the obvious question—why keep it a secret? What is in the text that compels negotiating governments to hide it away from public scrutiny?

Here’s a hint: the only way to complete the deal is to keep it hidden from the very people who would have to live with its consequences.

The ISDS and expanding corporate rights

Often dubbed as ‘NAFTA[1] on steroids,’ the TPP includes a scandalous clause on investment that would give enormous powers to corporations. Albeit negotiated in secret, leaked sections of the agreement indicate the TPP’s full endorsement of the notorious NAFTA corporate tribunals otherwise known as the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). [ii]

The ISDS is a dispute settlement modality that allows corporations and foreign investors to sue governments over actions perceived as detrimental to expected future profits.[iii] In other words, the TPP would grant corporations the right to file legal complaints against governments for policies inimical to profit-making such as raising the minimum wage or increasing the quality of basic social services as both actions would cost corporations more capital outlay and therefore less profit.

Under TPP rules, signatory countries would be obliged to conform their domestic policies, laws and regulations in accordance with the agreement. Any constitutional protection afforded by national laws would be wiped out to give way to greater corporate control.

Privatisation and diminishing state regulation

Based on the leaked drafts, it would also appear that one of the TPP’s key objectives is to diminish the state’s role in national development. Under the guise of “regulatory cooperation,” enormous pressure is coming from big US businesses that want to “level the playing field” between the private sector and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) citing the unfair advantage given to the latter.

SOEs play an important role in providing public goods to citizens at a cheaper price – all because of the preferential treatment and subsidy provided by the government. By regulating SOEs to comply with open market standards, procurement rounds would be overrun by big foreign corporations that can freely dictate prices for consumer goods and services. In addition, social services provided by SOEs that are deemed non-profitable would be disposed and/or opened to private sector acquisition. Ultimately under TPP conditions, SOEs will be privatized and their structure will be overhauled to align with commercial objectives, effectively subsuming any prior commitment to provide public service.[iv]

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and its impact on health, farming and internet freedom

Perhaps one of the most dangerous elements of the TPP is the section on IPR rules that contain far-reaching implications across sectors. For farmers, this would entail restrictions in the use of seeds that have patented materials. IPR rules will also extend medicine patent rights for up to 25 years enabling big pharmaceutical companies to monopolize the drug market and keep charging high prices without generic competition.[v] Lastly, the TPP provision on data privacy will severely limit internet freedom by compelling internet service providers to spy on user activity, and cut user access to common-generated content such as YouTube among others.[vi]

APEC Manila: A prelude for things to come

The APEC Ministerial meetings scheduled in Manila from 18-19 November comes as an opportune moment for the US and its cohorts to celebrate their recent victory with the signing of the largest ‘free trade’ agreement ever concluded worldwide in more than a decade. With the TPP now in place and more importantly, open to new members, APEC Manila is expected to serve as a victory lap that aims to encourage other APEC member countries to join this new trade pact. In effect, it becomes a prelude to cement a larger (or even an APEC-wide) trade deal that serves the interests of the US and its corporations.

At the eve of the APEC ministerial, people’s organisations, women, youth, indigenous peoples, migrants, workers, farmers and international activists will gather in Manila for the International Festival for People’s Rights and Struggles (IFPRS 2015) as part of a series of anti-APEC/TPP activities and protest actions to register the people’s demands for a socially just world.

As the experiences of the world’s poor and working class have shown, the TPP and other free trade agreements in the offing could only mean one thing: a new world trade disorder where corporate privileges continue to expand at the expense of people’s rights and welfare.

Mark Moreno Pascual (@makoypascual) currently works as Communications Officer for IBON International – a southern International NGO working for peoples rights and democracy. Before that, he spent some years doing research and advocacy with the progressive youth movement in the Philippines campaigning against tuition fee increases and for students rights and welfare.
[1] North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trade agreement signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States creating a trilateral rules-based trade bloc in North America

WORKS CITED:

[i] Wallach, L. (2012, June 27). NAFTA on Steroids: The Transpacific Partnership would grant enormous new powers to corporations, is a massive assault on democracy. Retrieved from: http://www.thenation.com/article/nafta-steroids/

[ii] Krajewski, M. (2014). Modalities for investment protection and Investor- State-Dispute-Settlement (ISDS) in TTIP from a trade union perspective. Brussels: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

[iii] Corporate Europe Observatory (2012). Profiting from injustice: how law firms, arbitrators and financiers are fuelling an investment arbitration boom. Brussels: Corporate Europe Observatory.

[iv] Kelsey, J. (2012, March 4). The Risks of Disciplines on State-Owned Enterprises in the Proposed Transpacific Partnership Agreement. Retrieved from: http://www.itsourfuture. org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Kelsey-TPP-SOE-paper.pdf

[v] Kelsey, J. (2011, October 22). Leaked Trans-Pacific FTA Texts Reveal US Undermining Access to Medicine. Retrieved from: http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/ uploads/2011/10/TransPacific_RegCoherenceMemo.pdf

[vi] Public Citizen. (2014, October 16). The TPP’s New Plant-Related Intellectual Property Provisions. Retrieved from Public Citizen: https://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-plant-related-ip-provisions.pdf
17 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Sourav Banerjee

Since the Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 30th began airstrikes against ISIS and its affiliates in Syria at the request of the Syrian government, the world is thrown into a dark abyss of serious political turmoil. With at one side hubristic US and its allies including major powers like UK, France, Turkey, Canada and on the other Russia, Syria, Iran and now China along with Lebanon’s Hezbollah forces vying for a bigger pie in the strategic region, World War III is evidently not far from a reality, as we have the US government gratuitously threatening two nuclear powers. Ironically, both Washington and Moscow maintain their respective Syrian (mis)adventure is for the purpose of annihilating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot born out of Iraq and on prowl since 2003. However, deep beneath lay their real agendas hostile to each other that has created the crisis. For US, it is to topple the Bashar al-Assad government of Syria and install an American puppet regime as they did with Chile’s Allende government in another September 11, 1973, while Moscow’s main objective is to save its sole Middle Eastern ally from the US onslaught.

Such drastic change in the geopolitical equation in Syria as well as the world was evident when Putin declared in his UN speech on September 28 that Russia “can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world.” By this intolerable state of affairs Putin must have meant the US-manufactured crisis in the Middle East and south African countries, European refugee crisis, wide spread global Islamophobia, ISIS, sectarian violence, racism, apartheid, arbitrary regime change, military invasion of other countries, and plunder of foreign resources among many other ills, all of which gained maximum momentum since 9/11 towards an old Washington dream — “I am the monarch of all I survey.”

Pursuing its imperial aspirations quite systematically, post 9/11, in a theatre of ‘good over evil,’ US imperialism has been razing numerous nations to ground and murdering millions including women and children by whining stories of ‘terror’ and spawning enemies in different guises — al-Qaida, ISIS, Daesh, Taliban or their ‘state sponsors’. Every morning paper-boy brings some more from the battle fields of Afghanistan, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq or South Africa to serve the mass hysteria on ‘terror’. There is never enough since the serial killing — the Global War on Terror (GWOT) — started fourteen years ago.

And all these make-believe efforts are to persuade that ‘America’ cares for democracy and peace; no matter if it yields heavy ‘collateral damage’(the recent being the killing of dozen’s of medics and patients in a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan). However, the beneficiaries of US neo-colonial policies knowingly abstain from condemning this war against humanity while it is ignorance for the majority of common masses, thanks to the corporate-mainstream media nexus that strives to keep people in dark. Rather, it has artistically embedded in our active consciousness that it’s not our goddamn business; there is a messiah to rid us all from evil. There is America.

And indeed. The country has deployed its ‘Seals’ and ‘Marines’ in thousands for ‘selfless humanitarian intervention’ in every corner of the world at the cost of trillions of dollars in order to fulfil its commitment towards saving democracy and deliver justice. America will never tolerate any entity depriving people of justice, equality and democracy; so it swears before invading any nation or state in search of evil. The world is now convinced and also grateful that the messianic decades long military campaign to eliminate terror from earth was launched by the then US President Bush and later carried on by apostles like Obama, Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron and their counterparts in France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel et al.

But appearances are not necessarily to be true. Thanks to the social and alternative media, it is no more a secret, or ‘conspiracy theory’ that Taliban to al-Qaida or present day ISIS, all were manufactured by US to serve its vested economic and political interests in various strategic regions. But in a tragic twist, with the rise of once loyal fundamentalist forces, the political architect of the crisis is now fighting the monster Frankestine, which it has created and reared out of a crooked intention to savouring political and cultural hegemony over the world and usurp all its rich resources.

The propaganda machinery has always mislead about the ‘compulsions’ behind waging such war. In case of ‘Global War on Terror’, a well organised media disinformation campaign was set to demonise al-Qaeda even before any investigation report confirms the group’s handiwork behind the 9/11 attacks. In order to hide the US state’s failure in providing security to its citizens and therefore converge every attention to al-Qaeda’s brutality and further affirm Laden as the West’s biggest enemy, a plethora of al-Qaeda related stories ranging from terrorist threats, beheading videos, religious fanaticism to regime change was brewed and served chilled on a daily basis in various medias. The theatric crash of the World Trade Centre (WTC) on 9/11 morning, simultaneous attacks on other major installations including Pentagon, and the loss of numerous innocent lives were used as a pretext and justification to manufacture public consent for the invasion campaign, while in essence it was to carry out a global war of conquest, solely to have a greater influence on the oil, natural gas, nuclear material and poppy rich “state sponsors of terrorism” — Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya and others — and also to safeguard its bases in the strategic region. In a March 2, 2007, Democracy Now! interview, retired four-star General Wesley Clark said that soon after the Sept 11, 2001 events, a general called to tell him that the US was going to invade Iraq and would “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off with Iran.” No doubt the informer was right, as the Mozart of war composed the whole orchestra long before 9/11, and have been playing it beautifully at the face of people, while the ideals of “Just War” (Jus ad Bellum) bark at the moon. No one asks ‘why’, as we are only fed with ‘what’. However, truth too has its day.

Afghanistan Drama

After a meeting in Washington on the following morning of 9/11 (September 12, 2001) between the then head of Pakistan’s military Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmed and then US Secretary Colin Powell, Pakistan offered to assist the US in “going after Bin Laden”. The same day NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. Thus a full-fledged war in derogation of international law which considers the war propaganda as a criminal act under ‘Nuremberg: Crime against the Peace’ provision, began. Meanwhile, the Afghan government twice offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US. However, President Bush rejected it as America “does not negotiate with terrorists”. Twenty-six days later on the morning of October 7, 2001, the war on Afghanistan was launched. Organising and executing such major military operation thousands of miles away which according to military experts otherwise takes months to up to a year, confirms that the war on Afghanistan was already underway long before September 11, 2001, and also corroborates the long-suppressed intelligence report that Washington had foreknowledge of the attacks.

Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?

According to a hard-core investigative report (CBS news, Dan Rather, January 28, 2002) by a team of CBS news journalists including one of the reliable foreign correspondents in the industry, Barry Petersen, the Pakistan government, the most trusted ally of US in war against terror, in collusion with its intelligence wing ISI admitted the ‘enemy number one’ to the urology ward of a military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001. One would wonder, why then Laden was not arrested at the first place and a gory aftermath prevented? Had he been arrested, the humanity would have saved from the psychological scar of 9/11 and immeasurable loss and damage Laden-hunt yielded. But then what about an Osama legend, which apart from justifying the invasion of Afghanistan, generated maximum TRP thus billion dollar media economy in the course of last fourteen years?

The History of Islamic State

Though the IS today has risen to prominence as much as Obama did after being elected as a first black President of US, the group and its leaders have been shrouded in myth and mystery since its foundation by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — a Sunni militant from Jordan — in 1999. The confusion over its existence and modus operandi is so embarrassing that even the US government has to admit that the Islamic State’s second leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi never existed. Another top rank IS leader, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, is so elusive that the global intelligence could gather only two photographs and one video recording of him in existence. Such fictitious existence of the most sought after enemies forced the US security experts to admit in a sly, “They know physically who this guy is, but his backstory is just myth.”

However, the Islamic State is a caliphate established by a jihadist Islamic group with an objective to establish Salafist government over the Levant region of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Cyprus and Southern Turkey. Apart from 80,000 fighters, the group possesses convoys of identical Toyota trucks (thanks to the US), and a top grade arsenal including Stinger missiles, US-made anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank weapons, Blackhawk helicopters and cargo planes, and even Scud missiles of Gulf War fame. The group also allegedly got hold of nuclear materials from Iraq’s Mosul University, but the IAEA believes the material is too sub-standard to be a nuclear threat. Though initiated at as early as 1997-98, the so-called Islamic State became a violent phenomenon just a decade ago, evidently as a reaction to US policies and actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The Father of terror

Numerous evidence including official documents of the US Congress and testimonies of US intelligence officials confirms the fact that al-Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war in 1980s and the US had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but in the wake of the Cold War “he (Osama Bin Laden) turned against us”. Bin Laden was 22 years old when he was enrolled and later trained in one of the CIA sponsored guerrilla training camps of the “Islamic freedom fighters” in Afghanistan unconditionally supported and endorsed by the Reagan administration. “Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the (Islamic) Jihad,” notes one source (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May, 2005). “The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,” reads another Washington Post article dated 23 March 2002. Such was the provocation. There is no doubt that like Laden many others must have been introduced to the business of ‘holy war’ either in school or through such CIA funded newspaper advertisements seeking Afghan and muslim youths to join Jihad.

In another equation related to Cuba, much of southern Florida had been home to a big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists for decades. Students graduated from these camps have carried out hundreds of heinous terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad including bombing of a Cuban airliner (Cubana de Aviacion Flight 455) in flight on October 6, 1976, killing all 73 people on board. But no wonder, it was never included in the ‘terror list’. Nor were the US supported Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, which was leading a ‘counter revolution’ opposing the Sandinista Junta government of Nicargua and had over 1300 deadly terror attacks in their kitty. In former CIA director Stansfield Turner’s admission, “I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras’ actions have to be characterised as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism.” The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia with close ties to al-Qaeda and Laden which have allied themselves with Washington’s agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Throughout the post 9/11 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert and at times direct support to the al-Qaeda affiliated radical Islamist organisations like Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA). US proximity with a Taliban led Pakistani group Jundullah, which had kidnapped and killed more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks has been doing rounds in the intelligence circle. Thousands of Ladens are being produced everyday from such US-backed terror groups while America becomes an awkward father. With its failed policies fuelling the expansion of al-Qaeda like violent groups in over 20 countries, there is hardly any room to argue if Laden symbolises terrorism, then US stands for the father of terror.

The US Culture of Violence: Columbus to Obama

The United States has conducted war in brutal ways since before the country was founded, and perhaps so the country inherits a deep culture of violence, evident from its foreign policies as well as gun violence back home. Columbus discovered the continent and enslaved millions of indigenous peoples. He slaughtered them in thousands, “treated them as workhorse animals and sex slaves; fed live natives to his dogs, cut off the hands of those who did not work hard enough” and thus began a process of ethnic cleansing across the continent and gifted us with America. His son was one of the originators of the African slave trade.

That Columbus way of tyranny and war was pursued by almost all who ascended the throne of America there after, and it is still in vogue. Throughout the 19th century, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny — a widely held belief in the US that American settlers were destined to expand throughout the continent — gave the United States an impetus for a vigorous expansion across North America by capturing new territories, which saw a massive genocide and displacement of millions of American Indian tribes. Post Spanish-American War (1898) and World War I (1914) the country earned the status of a global super power and after WW II it became almost invincible with being the first country to develop nuclear weapons. Then began the era of Cold War (1947), named after its characteristics of indirect, compressed, small-scale proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. From 1965 to 1973, US Army dropped eight million tons of napalm bombs and between 1962 and 1971, it sprayed nearly 20,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange — the chemical poison that not only kills people and causes serious health problems for generations, but also poisons the land beyond use — over Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of forest lands and 24 million acres of agricultural land. Even bombing hospitals as a weapon of terror too were rampant. The US bombed Hanoi’s Bach Mai hospital on December 22, 1972, in which 28 doctors and nurses lay dead among the civilian casualties. During the Iraq invasion (2003), health services were categorically attacked under the Presidency of Sr George Bush. On November 9, 2003, US bombed the Hai Nazal Hospital in Falluja killing 35 patients, 15 medics, 4 nurses, 5 support staff and 4 doctors (The Nation, 13 December). Obama too is consistent with Columbus-like psychopathic compulsions of his predecessors, as his troops and allies are currently wreaking havoc in home and abroad. In a tragic similarity, he too bombed a charity hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan hardly a month back.

Washington’s obsession with power and profit unfolds a foretold era of global cricis including the absolute criminalisation of the American state back home. World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks further gave birth to the most paranoid country on earth, while the world saw the total collapse of civil liberties and democratic rights through the militarisation of US foreign policies seeking to achieve absolute dominance over the world. Washington’s vicious politics have done enough damage to the human civilisation and it is the time for people to resist and seek justice and “if there’s any justice it would result in the arrest of those who lead us into war in Iraq,” as a former CIA acting director said. And justice is not faraway, because “a state cannot survive treason (Roman philosopher Marcus Cicero).”

Sourav Banerjee is a political activist, writer and works as an editor with a US based publication house. He can be reached at souravbanerjee25@yahoo.co.in

17 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Erika Solomon in Beirut, Guy Chazan and Sam Jones in London

Jihadis’ oil operation forces even their enemies to trade with them

On the outskirts of al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria, with warplanes flying overhead, a line of trucks stretches for 6km. Some drivers wait for a month to fill up with crude.

Falafel stalls and tea shops have sprung up to cater to the drivers, such is the demand for oil. Traders sometimes leave their trucks unguarded for weeks, waiting for their turn.

This is the land of Isis, the jihadi organisation in control of swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory. The trade in oil has been declared a prime target by the international military coalition fighting the group. And yet it goes on, undisturbed.

Oil is the black gold that funds Isis’ black flag — it fuels its war machine, provides electricity and gives the fanatical jihadis critical leverage against their neighbours.

But more than a year after US President Barack Obama launched an international coalition to fight Isis, the bustling trade at al-Omar and at least eight other fields has come to symbolise the dilemma the campaign faces: how to bring down the “caliphate” without destabilising the life of the estimated 10m civilians in areas under Isis control, and punishing the west’s allies?

The resilience of Isis, and the weakness of the US-led campaign, have given Russia a pretext to launch its own, bold intervention in Syria.

Despite all these efforts, dozens of interviews with Syrian traders and oil engineers as well as western intelligence officials and oil experts reveal a sprawling operation almost akin to a state oil company that has grown in size and expertise despite international attempts to destroy it.

Minutely managed, Isis’ oil company actively recruits skilled workers, from engineers to trainers and managers.

Estimates by local traders and engineers put crude production in Isis-held territory at about 34,000-40,000 bpd. The oil is sold at the wellhead for between $20 and $45 a barrel, earning the militants an average of $1.5m a day.

“It’s a situation that makes you laugh and cry,” said one Syrian rebel commander in Aleppo, who buys diesel from Isis areas even as his forces fight the group on the front lines. “But we have no other choice, and we are a poor man’s revolution. Is anyone else offering to give us fuel?”

Oil as a strategic weapon

Isis’ oil strategy has been long in the making. Since the group emerged on the scene in Syria in 2013, long before they reached Mosul in Iraq, the jihadis saw oil as a crutch for their vision for an Islamic state. The group’s shura council identified it as fundamental for the survival of the insurgency and, more importantly, to finance their ambition to create a caliphate.

Most of the oil Isis controls is in Syria’s oil-rich east, where it created a foothold in 2013, shortly after withdrawing from the north-west — an area of strategic importance but with no oil. These bridgeheads were then used to consolidate control over the whole of eastern Syria after the fall of Mosul in 2014.

When it pushed through northern Iraq and took over Mosul, Isis also seized the Ajil and Allas fields in north-eastern Iraq’s Kirkuk province. The very day of its takeover, locals say, militants secured the fields and engineers were sent in to begin operations and ship the oil to market.

“They were ready, they had people there in charge of the financial side, they had technicians that adjusted the filling and storage process,” said a local sheikh from the town of Hawija, near Kirkuk. “They brought hundreds of trucks in from Kirkuk and Mosul and they started to extract the oil and export it.” An average of 150 trucks, he added, were filled daily, with each containing about $10,000-worth of oil. Isis lost the fields to the Iraqi army in April but made an estimated $450m from them in the 10 months it controlled the area.

While al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network, depended on donations from wealthy foreign sponsors, Isis has derived its financial strength from its status as monopoly producer of an essential commodity consumed in vast quantities throughout the area it controls. Even without being able to export, it can thrive because it has a huge captive market in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, diesel and petrol produced in Isis areas are not only consumed in territory the group controls but in areas that are technically at war with it, such as Syria’s rebel-held north: the region is dependent on the jihadis’ fuel for its survival. Hospitals, shops, tractors and machinery used to pull victims out of rubble run on generators that are powered by Isis oil.

“At any moment, the diesel can be cut. No diesel — Isis knows our life is completely dead,” says one oil trader who comes from rebel-held Aleppo each week to buy fuel and spoke to the Financial Times by telephone.

A national oil company

Isis’ strategy has rested on projecting the image of a state in the making, and it is attempting to run its oil industry by mimicking the ways of national oil corporations. According to Syrians who say Isis tried to recruit them, the group headhunts engineers, offering competitive salaries to those with the requisite experience, and encourages prospective employees to apply to its human resources department.

A roving committee of its specialists checks up on fields, monitors production and interviews workers about operations. It also appoints Isis members who have worked at oil companies in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the Middle East as “emirs”, or princes, to run its most important facilities, say traders who buy Isis oil and engineers who have worked at Isis-controlled fields.

Some technicians have been actively courted by Isis recruiters. Rami — not his real name — used to work in oil in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province before becoming a rebel commander. He was later contacted by an Isis military emir in Iraq via WhatsApp.

“I could choose whatever position I wanted, he promised me,” he said. “He said: ‘You can name your salary’.” Sceptical of the Isis project, Rami ultimately turned down the offer and fled to Turkey.

Isis also recruits from among its supporters abroad. In the speech he gave after the fall of Mosul, Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called not only for fighters but engineers, doctors and other skilled labour. The group recently appointed an Egyptian engineer who used to live in Sweden as the new manager of its Qayyara refinery in northern Iraq, according to an Iraqi petroleum engineer from Mosul, who declined to be named.

The central role of oil is also reflected in the status it is given in Isis’ power structures.

The group’s approach to government across the territories it controls is highly decentralised. For the most part, it relies on regional walis — governors — to administer territories according to the precepts laid down by the central shura.

However, oil — alongside Isis’ military and security operations and its sophisticated media output — is centrally controlled by the top leadership. “They are organised in their approach to oil,” said a senior western intelligence official. “That’s a key centrally controlled and documented area. It’s a central shura matter,” he added, referring to Isis’ ruling “cabinet”.

Until recently, Isis’ emir for oil was Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian whose real name, according to the Pentagon, was Fathi Ben Awn Ben Jildi Murad al-Tunisi, and who was killed by US special forces in a raid in May this year. According to US and European intelligence officials, a treasure trove of documentation relating to Isis’ oil operations was found with him. The documents laid bare a meticulously run operation, with revenues from wells and costs carefully accounted for. They showed a pragmatic approach to pricing too, with Isis carefully exploiting differences in demand across its territories to maximise profitability.

Oversight of the oil wells is carefully controlled by the Amniyat, Isis’ secret police, who ensure revenues go where they should — and mete out brutal punishments when they do not. Guards patrol the perimeter of pumping stations, while far-flung individual wells are surrounded by protective sand berms and each trader is carefully checked as he drives in to fill up.

At the al-Jibssa field in Hassakeh province, north-eastern Syria, which produces 2,500-3,000 bpd, “about 30-40 big trucks a day, each with 75 barrels of capacity, would fill up”, according to one Hassakeh oil trader.

Isis’ distribution network

But the biggest draw is al-Omar. According to one trader who regularly buys oil there, the system, with its 6km queue, is slow but market players have adapted to it. Drivers present a document with their licence plate number and tanker capacity to Isis officials, who enter them into a database and assign them a number.

Most then return to their villages, shuttling back to the site every two or three days to check up on their vehicles. Traders say that towards the end of the month, some people come back and set up tents to stay close to their trucks while they wait their turn.

Once in possession of al-Omar’s oil, the traders either take it to local refineries or sell it on at a mark-up to middlemen with smaller vehicles who transport it to cities further west such as Aleppo and Idlib.

Isis’ luck with oil may not last. Coalition bombs, the Russian intervention and low oil prices could put pressure on revenues. The biggest threat to Isis’ production so far, however, has been the depletion of Syria’s ageing oilfields. It does not have the technology of major foreign companies to counteract what locals describe as a slow drop in production. Isis’ need for fuel for its military operations means there is also less oil to sell in the market.

For now, though, in Isis-controlled territory, the jihadis control the supply and there is no shortage of demand. “Everyone here needs diesel: for water, for farming, for hospitals, for offices. If diesel is cut off, there is no life here,” says a businessman who works near Aleppo. “Isis knows this [oil] is a winning card.”

Additional reporting by Ahmad Mhidi, an independent journalist based on the Turkish border and Geoff Dyer in Washington

14 October 2015

http://www.ft.com/

Expert : Diana Buttu, Ramallah-based analyst, former advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.

Q&A

Q – How would you describe the current situation in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank?

“The situation is very tense. People feel extremely vulnerable and insecure, even more so than they usually do living under Israel’s occupation. Amidst the violence and unrest, the Israeli army and police are operating on a ‘shoot to kill’ policy and settlers are running rampant, attacking Palestinians and their property under the protection of Israeli soldiers. Palestinians feel that, at any moment, they can become victims of Israeli violence.

“Since the beginning of October, nearly 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli police or soldiers. This week alone, Israeli forces have killed at least five Palestinian children in the occupied territories. Last weekend, a 19-year-old Palestinian named Fadi Alloun was accused of being a ‘terrorist’ by a mob of Israelis in East Jerusalem and summarily executed by Israeli police who shot him seven times rather than using non-lethal measures to arrest him, even though video evidence showed that he posed no danger to anyone at the time he was killed. Contrast the way that Fadi was shot down in cold blood by Israeli police with the measures Israeli forces use against Jews who carry out violent attacks such as the Israeli who stabbed four Palestinians last week in southern Israel, who police managed to apprehend alive, or the Israeli who stabbed people at the Jerusalem Pride Parade, who was also captured alive.

“In Fadi’s case, he was accused of a being ‘terrorist’ and that was all it took for Israeli police to deem him worthy of being executed without trial. The phenomenon of Israeli police and soldiers murdering defenseless Palestinians who have been accused or suspected of attacking Israelis is not new. It is emblematic of the racism and brutality of Israel’s occupation regime, which Palestinians are once again in the streets protesting against. For Palestinians, we are all potential targets. We can all be labeled ‘terrorists’ by an Israeli, killed and our deaths covered up as a result.”
Q – What are the causes of the ongoing unrest?

“After nearly five decades of Israel’s occupation and denial of their freedom, Palestinians, like other oppressed people around the world, have reached their breaking point. The daily recipe of home demolitions, land confiscation, settlement construction, arrests, abuse and torture of prisoners, including children, invasions of Palestinian towns, refugee camps and homes, savage military assaults, and a cruel and illegal siege, has pushed Palestinians into the streets once again to protest for their freedom. The mostly young Palestinians courageously challenging Israel’s occupation army have lived their entire lives under racist and repressive Israeli military rule and have had enough.

“Add to this potent mix Israel’s insistence on sparking religious tensions by allowing right wing Jewish extremists to go to the Al Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, where they openly declare that they intend to destroy the mosque and build a temple, and its turning a blind eye to ongoing attacks by settlers, including the torching of the Dawabshe home in Duma where three Palestinians, including an 18-month-old child, were burned to death this summer. Israel has yet to charge anyone with these crimes, just as it has failed to hold anyone accountable in more than 90% of cases involving soldiers or settlers killing Palestinians unlawfully, creating a culture whereby Israelis feel they can kill Palestinians with impunity.”
Q – Some are speculating that we’re witnessing the start of a new intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation. Do you think this is the case?

“People speak of a third intifada only when Israelis are killed and never when Palestinians are killed. Palestinian measures to resist Israel’s occupation have been ongoing for years, including in West Bank towns like Nabi Saleh or Bilin, where Palestinians hold weekly protests against ongoing land confiscations and the construction of Israel’s apartheid wall. Yet these continued popular, nonviolent protests receive little or no attention.

“The protests that we are witnessing today are increasing in size and scope but Palestinians are in need of a leadership that supports such popular resistance for it be coordinated and effective. Right now, that isn’t the case.”
Q – How do we move forward from the current political impasse?

“Palestinians urgently need an international force to protect them, given that the Palestinian Authority is unable to do so, and Israel is unwilling. For nearly five decades, Palestinians – refugees and stateless – have lived under the wrath of the most powerful army in the region. Last year, Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, including more than 500 children. Yet, rather than protect Palestinians, much of the international community continues to demand that Palestinians provide security to their occupier and oppressor. This formula has not worked, and never will.

“What is clear is that Palestinians are now in need of international support to stop Israeli impunity. If the world is genuine in its belief that all people should live in freedom, it should support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other measures to hold Israel accountable, including indicting Israeli officials for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.”

http://imeu.org/

14 October 2015

The family of Deven Guilford, 17, filed a wrongful death lawsuit.

By Daniel Marans and Matt Ferner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lRWoThpv8s

The family of an unarmed teenager shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy during a Michigan traffic stop in February has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit alleging that the officer’s “entire course of action was illegal.”

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday against Eaton County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jonathan Frost and the county, says the officer was driving a new patrol car on Feb. 28 that had “improperly bright or misaimed headlights, even on low beams.” Deven Guilford, 17, who had been driving to his girlfriend’s house after playing basketball at his church, was one of three drivers to flash their brights at the officer to get him to dim his lights, the suit says. Frost stopped all three drivers.

Five minutes after Guilford was pulled over, the lawsuit says, the teen lay dead in the snow on the side of the road, struck by seven bullets. The county prosecutor said the teen fought with the deputy and was killed in “justifiable self-defense.”

Guilford’s parents said in a statement that video taken by the deputy’s body camera turned their “confusion” to “outrage.”

“We always had great respect for law enforcement and the men and women who chose that profession in the past,” Brian and Becky Guilford said. “But we must say that belief has been shaken to the core by the actions of Frost and refusal of the Eaton County Prosecutor to hold Frost accountable. The failed criminal justice system forces us to seek other avenues for some kind of JUSTICE FOR DEVEN.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensation for wrongful death and emotional and financial damages.

Guilford’s death is the latest in a string of police killings involving allegations of excessive force that have ignited a national debate about police accountability. The best-known cases, including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland, have involved African-Americans and accusations of racial discrimination.

Guilford and Frost are white.

The Eaton County prosecutor declined to bring criminal charges against Frost in June, releasing photographs that he said showed injuries the officer sustained during a struggle with Guilford. The prosecutor also noted that Guilford’s body showed the presence of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Guilford “did not cooperate or comply with Sgt. Frost’s eight requests for a driver’s license and vehicle paperwork,” the prosecutor’s press release at the time said. After Frost decided to arrest Guilford for failure to show a license, the teen struggled with the officer for 10 to 15 seconds and provoked the deadly force, the prosecutor said.

An internal investigation also cleared Frost and recommended the sheriff’s department “re-emphasize” training, according to local Newschannel 3 WWMT.

Guilford’s family says in the lawsuit that Guilford did nothing wrong in flashing his high-beams at the officer. Frost’s “entire course of action was illegal and in violation of Deven’s constitutional rights,” the suit says.

The lawsuit says Guilford asked for the officer’s badge number and questioned why he was being stopped — things within his rights to demand. Frost, the suit says, escalated the exchange at every stage and ultimately used excessive force.

CORRECTION: This article has been edited to note that the prosecutor’s press release describes a struggle of 10 to 15 seconds, not 10 to 15 minutes.

15 October 2015
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Adam Hersh

NEW YORK – As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems.

You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade.

New Zealand has threatened to walk away from the agreement over the way Canada and the US manage trade in dairy products. Australia is not happy with how the US and Mexico manage trade in sugar. And the US is not happy with how Japan manages trade in rice. These industries are backed by significant voting blocs in their respective countries. And they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the TPP would advance an agenda that actually runs counter to free trade.

For starters, consider what the agreement would do to expand intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies, as we learned from leaked versions of the negotiating text. Economic research clearly shows the argument that such intellectual property rights promote research to be weak at best. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary: When the Supreme Court invalidated Myriad’s patent on the BRCA gene, it led to a burst of innovation that resulted in better tests at lower costs. Indeed, provisions in the TPP would restrain open competition and raise prices for consumers in the US and around the world – anathema to free trade.

The TPP would manage trade in pharmaceuticals through a variety of seemingly arcane rule changes on issues such as “patent linkage,” “data exclusivity,” and “biologics.” The upshot is that pharmaceutical companies would effectively be allowed to extend – sometimes almost indefinitely – their monopolies on patented medicines, keep cheaper generics off the market, and block “biosimilar” competitors from introducing new medicines for years. That is how the TPP will manage trade for the pharmaceutical industry if the US gets its way.

Similarly, consider how the US hopes to use the TPP to manage trade for the tobacco industry. For decades, US-based tobacco companies have used foreign investor adjudication mechanisms created by agreements like the TPP to fight regulations intended to curb the public-health scourge of smoking. Under these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, foreign investors gain new rights to sue national governments in binding private arbitration for regulations they see as diminishing the expected profitability of their investments.

International corporate interests tout ISDS as necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking. But that argument is nonsense. The US is seeking the same mechanism in a similar mega-deal with the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, even though there is little question about the quality of Europe’s legal and judicial systems.

To be sure, investors – wherever they call home – deserve protection from expropriation or discriminatory regulations. But ISDS goes much further: The obligation to compensate investors for losses of expected profits can and has been applied even where rules are nondiscriminatory and profits are made from causing public harm.

Philip Morris International is currently prosecuting such cases against Australia and Uruguay (not a TPP partner) for requiring cigarettes to carry warning labels. Canada, under threat of a similar suit, backed down from introducing a similarly effective warning label a few years back.

Given the veil of secrecy surrounding the TPP negotiations, it is not clear whether tobacco will be excluded from some aspects of ISDS. Either way, the broader issue remains: Such provisions make it hard for governments to conduct their basic functions – protecting their citizens’ health and safety, ensuring economic stability, and safeguarding the environment.

Imagine what would have happened if these provisions had been in place when the lethal effects of asbestos were discovered. Rather than shutting down manufacturers and forcing them to compensate those who had been harmed, under ISDS, governments would have had to pay the manufacturers not to kill their citizens. Taxpayers would have been hit twice – first to pay for the health damage caused by asbestos, and then to compensate manufacturers for their lost profits when the government stepped in to regulate a dangerous product. It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Adam S. Hersh is Senior Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

2 October 2015

By Paul Craig Roberts

The world is beginning to realize that a seachange in world affairs occured on September 28 when President Putin of Russia stated in his UN speech that Russia can no longer tolerate Washington’s vicious, stupid, and failed policies that have unleashed chaos, which is engulfing the Middle East and now Europe. Two days later, Russia took over the military situation in Syria and began the destruction of the Islamic State forces.

Perhaps among Obama’s advisors there are a few who are not drowning in hubris and can understand this seachange. Sputnik news reports that some high-level security advisors to Obama have advised him to withdraw US military forces from Syria and give up his plan to overthrow Assad. They advised Obama to cooperate with Russia in order to stop the refugee flow that is overwhelming Washington’s vassals in Europe. The influx of unwanted peoples is making Europeans aware of the high cost of enabling US foreign policy. Advisors have told Obama that the idiocy of the neoconservatives’ policies threaten Washington’s empire in Europe.

Several commentators, such as Mike Whitney and Stephen Lendman, have concluded, correctly, that there is nothing that Washington can do about Russian actions against the Islamic State. The neoconservatives’ plan for a UN no-fly zone over Syria in order to push out the Russians is a pipedream. No such resolution will come out of the UN. Indeed, the Russians have already established a de facto no-fly zone.

Putin, without issuing any verbal threats or engaging in any name-calling, has decisively shifted
the power balance, and the world knows it.

Washington’s response consists of name-calling, bluster and more lies, some of which is echoed by some of Washington’s ever more doubtful vassals. The only effect is to demonstrate Washington’s impotence.

If Obama has any sense, he will dismiss from his government the neoconservative morons who have squandered Washington’s power, and he will focus instead on holding on to Europe by working with Russia to destroy, rather than to sponsor, the terrorism in the Middle East that is overwhelming Europe with refugees.

If Obama cannot admit a mistake, the United States will continue to lose credibility and prestige around the world.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

11 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ali Abunimah

This video shows Yahya Hassan embracing and bidding farewell to his baby daughter Rahaf in Gaza on Sunday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNOtwmkxc4I

“Wake up, my daughter,” the inconsolable father says, and asks relatives to “leave her with me.”

The toddler died along with her pregnant mother Nour Rasmi Hassan in an Israeli air strike.

Israel claimed it was bombing two Hamas “weapons-manufacturing centers” after one of its anti-missile batteries intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza.

The fierce explosion of the Israeli bombs caused a nearby house in Gaza City’s al-Zaytoun neighborhood to collapse killing Nour, who was 5-months pregnant, along with Rahaf, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, which cited medical sources.

Nour Hassan was aged 30. The father Yahya was also injured in the attack.

Senior Israeli military personnel generally acknowledge that Hamas is not firing the rockets and is attempting to prevent small groups from doing so, in line with the ceasefire agreement that ended Israel’s 51-day attack on Gaza in August 2014.

But Israel asserts that Hamas is responsible for everything that happens in Gaza. While Palestinian violations of the ceasefire are extremely rare, Israel has breached it hundreds of times, according to international monitors.

Gaza boys killed

On Saturday, Israeli occupation forces shot dead two Palestinian boys near its boundary fence with the Gaza Strip, east of Khan Younis.

The Palestinian Authority health ministry named the boys as 13-year-old Marwan Barbakh and 15-year-old Khalil Othman, according to Ma’an News Agency.

The Palestine Red Crescent said that its medics had treated seven Palestinians shot with live rounds across the Gaza Strip, and 21 who suffered excessive tear gas inhalation on Saturday, Ma’an added.

On Friday, Israel killed six Palestinians in the same area of Gaza. The six had been protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Gaza-based journalist Mohammed Omer has suggested that the desperate situation in Gaza, which remains under tight Israeli siege with little reconstruction since last year’s attack, is fueling the protests.

“When I talk to protesters they tell me: either we live in dignity or die. Israel has to realize this shift in the new generation,” Omer tweeted.

Since the start of October, 23 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces, according to figures released by the Palestinian Authority health ministry on Sunday.

The ministry put the number of injured by live ammunition or rubber-coated steel bullets fired by Israeli forces at more than 1,100.

A Palestinian man who had been hit in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet on Thursday, also died of his injuries on Saturday.

Ibrahim Ahmad Mustafa Aoud, 27, was injured during confrontrations with Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, Ma’an News Agenvy reported. Doctors said he died due to severe head trauma.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books. Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.

11 October, 2015
Electronicintifada.net

By Ralph Nader

The photographs in the New York Times told contrasting stories last week. One showed two Taliban soldiers in civilian clothes and sandals, with their rifles, standing in front of a captured U.N. vehicle. The Taliban forces had taken the northern provincial capital of Kunduz. The other photograph showed Afghan army soldiers fully equipped with modern gear, weapons, and vehicles.

Guess who is winning? An estimated thirty-thousand Taliban soldiers with no air force, navy, or heavy weapons have been holding down ten times more Afghan army and police and over 100,000 U.S. soldiers with the world’s most modern weaponry – for eight years.

ISIS forces from Syria have taken over large areas of northern and western Iraq, including its second largest city, Mosul, and the battered city of Fallujah. ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria are estimated to number no more than 35,000. Like the Taliban, ISIS fighters, who vary in their military training, primarily have light weaponry. That is when they are not taking control of the fleeing, much larger, Iraqi army’s armored vehicles and ammunition from the United States.

Against vastly greater numbers of Iraqi soldiers, backed by U.S. weapons, U.S. planes bombing daily, 24/7 aerial surveillance, and U.S. military advisors at the ground level, so far ISIS is still holding most of its territory and is still dominant in large parts of Syria.

The American people are entitled to know how all this military might and the trillions of dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, since 2003 and 2001 respectively, can produce such negative fallouts.

Certainly these failures have little to do with observing the restraints of international law. Presidents Bush and Obama have sent military power anywhere and everywhere, regardless of national boundaries and the resulting immense civilian casualties, in those tragic, blown-apart countries.

The current perception of the U.S. in these countries is that of invaders on a rampage. Recruiting motivated fighters, including a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers, is easier when the invaders come from western countries that for over a century have been known for attacking, carving up boundaries for artificial states, intervening, overthrowing, propping up domestic dictators, and generally siding with oligarchic or colonizing interests that brutalize the mass of the people.

It hasn’t helped for these invasions to be supported by an alien culture rooted in the Christian crusades against Islam centuries ago, whose jingoism in the U.S. continues among some evangelical groups today.

But of course more contemporary situations are, first and foremost, the wonton destruction and violent chaos that comes with such invasions. With the absence of any functioning central governments and the dominance of tribal societies, the sheer complexity of the invaders trying to figure out the intricate “politics” between and within tribes and clans turns into an immense, ongoing trap for the western military forces.

When the U.S. started taking sides with the Shiites against the Sunnis in Iraq, or between different clans and tribes in Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers, not knowing the language or customs, were left with handing out $100 bills to build alliances. Our government air-shipped and distributed crates of this money. With the local economies at a standstill, public facilities collapsed, fear gripped families from violent streets and roads, and all havoc broke lose in the struggle for safety and survival.

Afghan soldiers, who are paid only $120 a month, will do almost anything to supplement their income, including selling weapons. At higher levels, bribes, payoffs, extortions create an underground economic system. The combination of lack of understanding, the systemic bribes, and the ensuing corruption has produced a climate of chaos.

Then there is the reckless slaughter of civilians – wedding parties, schools, clinics, peasant boys collecting fire-wood on a hillside – from supposedly pinpoint, accurate airplanes, helicopter gunships, drones, or missiles. Hatred of the Americans spreads as people lose their loved ones.

Our “blowback” policies are fueling the expansion of al-Qaeda offshoots and new violent groups in over 20 countries. On 9/11, the “threat” was coming from a corner of one country – northeastern Afghanistan. The Bush/Cheney prevaricator frenzy led to local bounty hunters taking innocent captives, falsely labeled as “terrorists,” who were sent to the prisons in Guantanamo, Cuba. These actions have damaged our country’s reputation all over the world.

All this could have been avoided had we heeded the advice of retired, high-ranking military, national security, and diplomatic officials not to invade Iraq and their advice not to overreact in Afghanistan. But the supine mass media, and an overall cowardly Congress let the lies, deceptions, and cover-ups by the Bush regime go unchallenged and, as Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) put it, Bush/Cheney “lied us into the Iraq War.”

It isn’t as if the Taliban and ISIS are winning the “hearts and minds” of the local people. On the contrary, while promising law and order, they treat local populations quite brutally, with few exceptions. But the locals have long been treated brutally by the police, army, and militias jockeying for the spoils of conflict. Unfortunately, there is still no semblance of ground-level security.

All Empires fail and eventually devour themselves. The U.S. Empire is no different. Look at the harm to and drain on our soldiers, our domestic economy, the costly, boomeranging, endless wars overseas and what empire building has done to spread anxieties and lower the expectation level of the American people for their public budgets and public services.

Not repeatedly doing what has failed is the first step toward correction. How much better and cheaper it would be if years ago we became a humanitarian power – well received by the deprived billions in these anguished lands.

What changes are needed to get out of these quagmires and leave a semblance of recovery behind? Press those gaggles of presidential candidates, who war-monger with impunity or who are dodging this grave matter, for answers. Make them listen to you.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us” (a novel).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

10 October, 2015
Nader.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

The Obama administration Friday announced an “operational pause” of the disastrously failed Pentagon program for arming and training “vetted rebels” in Turkey and sending them back across the border into Syria.

Instead, Pentagon and White House officials indicated, the focus will now shift to cementing ties with leaders of existing “rebel” militias, consisting overwhelmingly of Sunni Islamist forces with connections to Al Qaeda. US backing to these groups will apparently include both arms and ammunition as well as close air support from warplanes deployed by the US and its so-called coalition.

The policy shift follows the revelation last month by General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US Central Command, that only “four or five” individual US-trained fighters were then on the ground in Syria, and barely 100 more were undergoing training. This, after the allocation of $500 million for the Pentagon to train over 5,000 such fighters within the first year.

Austin’s revelation was followed within weeks by the Pentagon being forced to retract its initial denial of verified reports that a group of US-trained fighters sent into Syria had immediately turned over its vehicles and weaponry to the al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.

The change in strategy also follows a first week of Russian airstrikes against Islamist forces in Syria, including some that had previously received arms shipments organized by the CIA. Beginning in 2011, the US spy agency set up a clandestine station in Turkey and organized the funneling into Syria of weaponry from Libyan stockpiles after the US-NATO war for regime change had succeeded in toppling and murdering Muammar Gaddafi.

Both Washington and Moscow claim to be waging their respective military campaigns in Syria for the purpose of destroying the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an Al Qaeda offshoot that is the direct product of the unleashing of death and destruction against Iraq, Libya and Syria itself by the US military and CIA.

In reality, however, the US and Russian governments are fighting for opposite aims: Washington, to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad and install an American puppet regime; and Moscow to prop up the Assad government, its sole Middle Eastern ally.

The administration has come under increasing criticism from Republican opponents and sections of the US military and intelligence complex for its supposed “inaction” in the face of the Russian offensive in Syria. This found expression Friday in a column published under the joint byline of Obama’s former defense secretary, Robert Gates, and former Bush administration national security adviser Condoleezza Rice entitled “Countering Putin.”

It calls for actions to “create a better military balance of power on the ground,” including the creation of “no-fly zones” as well as “robust support” for various anti-regime forces and an effort to “solidify our relationship with Turkey,” a principal sponsor of the Islamist militias inside Syria.

The Obama administration’s announcement was also preceded by a letter sent to the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA by a bipartisan group of Senate critics of the administration’s Syria policy calling for an end to the “rebel” training program.

“The Syria Train and Equip Program goes beyond simply being an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars. As many of us initially warned, it is now aiding the very forces we aim to defeat,” stated the letter, which was signed by Democratic senators Tom Udall (New Mexico), Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Chris Murphy (Connecticut) along with Republican Mike Lee (Utah).

The shift in policy announced Friday will not alter this aspect of the program, but only remove the fig leaf of “moderate” Syrian forces, with the handing over of weapons directly to the Islamists who constitute the dominant force among the anti-Assad “rebels.”

The Pentagon has acknowledged that among the principal obstacles to its training program was the vetting process that was supposed to have excluded those whose views were close to Al Qaeda’s, and the requirement that they engage ISIS as the main enemy, rather than the Assad government. It was unable to find such recruits in anywhere near the numbers projected.

President Barack Obama acknowledged in a press conference last week that the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program “has not worked the way it was supposed to.” He added, “And part of the reason, frankly, is because when we tried to get them to just focus on ISIL,” i.e., ISIS.

It appears that the administration’s answer to this failure is to drop these previous restrictions, providing direct US military aid to forces fighting for the overthrow of the Syrian government, including Islamists who would have been excluded from the Pentagon training program.

In the first announcement of the new program, Defense Secretary Ash Carter, speaking in London following a meeting with his British counterpart, Michael Fallon, said that it would be modeled on “the work we’ve done with the Kurds in northern Syria … That’s exactly the kind of example that we would like to pursue with other groups in other parts of Syria going forward. That is going to be the core of the President’s concept.”

The US coordination with the Kurds, particularly during the ISIS siege of the Syrian city of Kobani, on the Turkish border, involved Kurds providing ground forces, while identifying targets and calling in airstrikes by US warplanes.

As part of the new program, Pentagon officials said that the US military would train “enablers,” leading members of various militias, who would be instructed in how to coordinate with American warplanes in targeting and striking forces on the ground.

The Kurdish “example” has been rendered problematic by Washington’s alliance with Turkey, which has allowed US airstrikes to be launched from Incirlik Air Base and other bases inside Turkey in return for Washington’s tacit approval of Turkish bombing of the Kurds.

The identity of the “other groups” with whom Washington wants to replicate this strategy is far from clear. Some media reports named the “Syrian Arab Coalition” as a likely recipient of US weapons and close air support. Prior to Friday’s announcement, however, no one had ever heard of this coalition, which appears to be something that the Pentagon hopes to cobble together from existing “rebel” groups.

The dominant forces fighting the Assad government consist of ISIS, which Washington claims to be committed to destroying, the al-Nusra Front, which is on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, and Ahrar al-Sham, another Islamist group whose founders came out of Al Qaeda. Other smaller factions are largely fighting in alliance with these forces.

To the extent that the US military provides air support to these militias, it may well come into direct conflict with Russian warplanes that are bombing them.

Far from a tactical retreat, it appears that the suspension of the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program is only setting the stage for a far bloodier war inside Syria, while heightening the real danger of a military clash between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia.

10 October, 2015
WSWS.org