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By RIchard Spencer

New Christian militia goes into battle against Isil – but pays a high price

Like many of Syria’s warriors, Kino Gabriel was a student four years ago, training to be a dentist.

Like many other Syrians, he resisted the call to war, until he saw the threat to the towns and villages where he grew up and worshipped.

Like countless thousands, he soon found himself, gun in hand, snow falling in the bitter Syrian winter, fighting for his life, claiming his first kills.

Mr Gabriel, though, is a rarity in this remorseless conflict. He is a Christian, a member of a minority that in both Syrian and Iraqi wars has tried desperately to stay on the sidelines.

No longer. Christian militias have existed for a number of years, sometimes patrolling neighbourhoods, sometimes venturing further afield. But now they are engaged in their first major battle.

For the last week, they have been fighting the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant across a major front in north-west Syria, in alliance with the YPG, the Kurdish defence forces. They have had mixed fortunes, but the battle has energised Middle East Christians worldwide – many of them exiles who fled the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.

“We saw what happened in Iraq in 2003,” Mr Gabriel said, speaking by Skype from Qamishli, near the front line. “Our people were left alone, with no autonomy, no army that could defend them.

“Most of our people have emigrated, thanks to attacks from al-Qaeda and other groups. They couldn’t defend themselves. We learned that lesson and have prepared ourselves.”

In 2003, the Christian population of Iraq was well over one million. Now it is less than half that. In June last year, more than 600,000 were driven out of their homes when Isil swept across the Nineveh plain, traditional homeland of Assyrian Christians, in northern Iraq last summer.

In Syria, when the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011, the church was split, with many bishops supporting the regime but individuals joining forces with liberal activists in protest against him.

Few actually felt compelled to fight, though, until the onslaught against Christian villages and churches, first by Jabhat al-Nusra, and later by Isil.

Christians have seen churches blown up, crosses torn down, and those living under jihadist rule have been forced to pay the “jizya”, a special tax.

In a particular irony, Armenian Christians who came to Syria in flight from pogroms in their native Turkey 100 years ago have now been forced to flee in the opposite direction.

Syria, even more than Iraq, is a patchwork of sects and languages: many of these Christians speak and conduct services in Aramaic, the language of Christ.

Mr Gabriel’s chance at the front came at Christmas 2013, when he joined a militia known as the Syriac Military Council, which was fighting alongside Kurds in a battle for the town of Tel Hamis, south of Qamishli, his home city. Tel Hamis was in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian Al-Qaeda branch from which Isil then split off.

“I think I was prepared,” Mr Gabriel, a former lay servant in the church, said. “I was a little bit afraid – it was my first battle.”

He and his fellow fighters managed to drive the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters back, but the attack stalled in the December snow. The area has been fought over ever since, with the YPG and their Syriac Military Council allies claiming on Friday to have finally retaken Tel Hamis, this time from Isil, which took over Jabhat al-Nusra positions last year.

The local Arab population is split, with some supporting the Kurds, others the Islamists.

The effect on the wider community of the expanded fighting front, though, has been disastrous. Many of the Christians have fled – more than 1,000 families in the last week alone, according to George Merza, head of the local Assyrian council.

On Monday, more than 300 of those Christians that remained were taken hostage in a lightning Isil counter-offensive in villages around Tel Tamer, in north-west Syria’s semi-desert.

“They are innocent people, children, women and elders,” Mr Merza said. “We demand an immediate intervention to save our people, who have lived on this land for thousands of years in peace. Today they are driven to death and destruction. This is inhuman.”

The Syriac Military Council is hoping to offer Isil a prisoner swap, returning eight jihadis captured in the battle for Tel Hamis for the civilian captives, but no negotiations have yet begun.

The resistance put up by the Christian fighters from these ancient communities, heirs to Senacherib and Ashurnasirpal, the great Assyrian emperors of the Biblical era, has heartened an international diaspora which has up to now watched events unfold with glum, helpless horror.

Assyrians and Syriacs as far afield as London, New York and Sweden have posted patriotic appeals online. For many, it is their cousins who have been captured, and who are dying in battle.

Some have also taken it upon themselves to return home to join up, and have been joined by a number of other Western volunteers. Ashley Johnston, a former Australian soldier, became the first Westerner to die fighting alongside the Kurds and Christians in the battle for Tel Hamis on Monday.

“Ashley was a good man who never complained and was always positive,” Jordan Matson, the unofficial leader of the Kurds’ foreign legion, said in a Facebook tribute. “I consider it an honour to have known and served with him.”

Mr Matson pointed out that Mr Johnston was considered a criminal in Australia, which has made it an offence to fight in the war on either side.

The question of whether to fight or not remains, though, a major big question for the Christian exiles. They ask themselves whether it is right or even worthwhile to risk their lives for a diminished, violent homeland.

The Christians of the region have long held that they should “turn the other cheek” in the face of assault and discrimination.

Father Tony Malham, an Assyrian priest who has left Iraq and now serves the community in London, says that this is the only pragmatic response, given that Christians are overwhelmingly outnumbered.

“On the one hand, this is our homeland; on the other, it’s not true to say it’s our homeland any more,” he said. “If we want to have a home for ourselves we have to fight for it, but as Christians we can’t fight, we can’t kill.

“We have to talk, we have to talk in a civilised way. But these people who are against us can’t talk, they can only fight and kill.

Mr Gabriel acknowledges that at just 1,000 strong, his militia is a small force compared to those ranged against it. But he says he can no longer stand by and watch his people driven from their homes like sheep.

“Over the past century, our people six times have suffered displacement, massacres, other forms of aggression,” he said.

“This has targeted the Syriacs and the Christian presence in the Middle East. We are acting based on the facts before us – to protect ourselves on our historical land. This is our right and duty.”

Richard Spencer lives in Cairo. He was China correspondent for six years before reporting from Dubai.

28 February 2015

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

 

By Hassanal Noor Rashid

The Conflict Transformation and Peace Studies course hosted by the International Institute of Peace Studies (IIPDS) in Bangkok, saw passionate individuals from various countries come together to share their ideas on how to realize a peaceful and sustainable future in a political-social environment that is plagued by constant conflict.

The three week course from the 19th January 2015 until the 10th February 2015 featured lectures by diverse and prominent lecturers who deliberated with the participants on topics such as Human Rights, Hegemony, Sustainable economies and a plethora of other topics essential for those interested in addressing the many issues in politics and society today.

Many of the participants hailed from different countries and very unique backgrounds. Among the countries represented were Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Argentina, Russia, United States of America, Rwanda, India and Pakistan. What is perhaps more interesting is that some of the participants have backgrounds which further add to the diverse nature of the participants.

For example, the participant from Rwanda is currently studying in Israel and is fairly familiar with the socio-culture landscape of the country. The American is studying in Japan and the Argentinean is furthering his studies in China.

From an academic standpoint, many disciplines within the arts and humanities such as International Relations, Sociology, Anthropology and so forth, have sought throughout modern history to document, study and understand the human condition and the ever-changing world order. What marks this particular course as distinguishable was the fact that it is not simply about understanding the state of the world today, but also developing a foundation to help envision a better future.

Peace, Development and Sustainability. These are the main themes that were to be drawn out of the three week course and laid out the foundation of what a truly sustainable and peaceful society means.

It is a natural assumption that peace and justice are synonymous, but as exemplified in the many debates and discussions throughout the course, these two concepts can contradict one another. The search for justice may not necessarily be peaceful and without violence, and inversely, the attainment for peace may not be without its own injustices and conflict. In the practical sense this is why in reality, human rights workers have tendencies to come into clashes with peace activists, both of whom have well-meaning intentions, but their goals and agendas contradict one another.

This is just one example of the many conundrums faced by peace activists and advocates for social justice. It highlights the delicate and complex nature of conflicts which plague many societies across the world and brings an understanding of why these conflicts require more grace in both their analysis and resolution.

The many unique incidents of injustices were highlighted from the respective individuals who represented their own countries and societies. Each had shared their own dilemmas, many of which were pronounced overt conflicts, and some were more subtle, with tensions being defined in the nuances of their societies.

This concept of sharing and engagement is arguably the most powerful methodology of courses such as this, as it offers an important tool for any activist academic, and student.

Perspective.

Ultimately a deeper understanding and appreciation of context and perspective is what drives the peace and sustainability movement forward. Through the cultivation of meaningful dialogue and discussion, an effective counter-narrative to the hateful bigotry and misinformation that pollutes the discourse can be developed.

This is what is special about the Peace Studies course offered by the IIPDS. It offers a crucial foundational understanding of the world today and an open forum to cultivate meaningful dialogue and discussion free from discrimination and bigotry.

Most importantly however, it is planting the seeds which may hopefully lead to sustainable peace, addressing the many ills brought about by a banal form of modernity, and bringing back new life to the understanding of the human condition.
Hassanal Noor Rashid is the Program Coordinator of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

3 March 2015

 

By Robert Parry

As the Obama administration is rushing to complete a nuclear agreement with Iran and reduce regional tensions, the Israeli media is reporting on a deal with Saudi Arabia to let Israeli warplanes transit Saudi airspace en route to bombing Iran, reports Robert Parry.
ccording to an Israeli media report, Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli warplanes fly over Saudi territory to save fuel while attacking Iranian nuclear sites, the latest indication of how the two former enemies have developed a behind-the-scenes alliance that is reshaping geopolitics in the Middle East.

“The Saudi authorities are completely coordinated with Israel on all matters related to Iran,” a European official in Brussels told Israel’s Channel 2 in a report broadcast on Tuesday and described in other Israeli media outlets.

Riyadh’s only condition was that Israel make some progress in peace talks with the Palestinians, a stipulation that may be mostly cosmetic so the Saudis can save face with other Arab states without really interfering with an Israeli flyover to strike Iran.

Disclosure of this Israeli-Saudi military cooperation comes as the United States and five other world powers rush to finish an agreement with Iran to curtail but not eliminate its nuclear program, which Iran says is only for civilian purposes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 3 to undercut President Barack Obama’s negotiations.

The reported Saudi permission for Israeli warplanes to take a shorter route to bomb Iran also suggests that Netanyahu may be laying the groundwork for his own plans to attack the Iranian nuclear sites if the international negotiations are successful. Netanyahu has denounced a possible deal as an “existential threat” to Israel.

In recent years, Israel and Saudi Arabia have quietly begun cooperating on a range of mutual interests with the goal of blunting Iran’s regional influence. For instance, they have sided with rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally, even if the victors might be Islamist radicals affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Elements of the Saudi royal family have long been known to support Islamist militants, including forces associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that convicted al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui identified leading members of the Saudi government as financiers of the terrorist network.

According to the story, Moussaoui said in a prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of the group’s donors and that the list included Prince Turki al-Faisal, then Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many leading clerics.

“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” Moussaoui said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.” Moussaoui also said he discussed a plan to shoot down President George W. Bush’s Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, at a time when Bandar was the ambassador to the United States and considered so close to the Bush family that his nickname was “Bandar Bush.”

Moussaoui claimed, too, that he passed letters between Osama bin Laden and then Crown Prince Salman, who recently became king upon the death of his brother King Abdullah.

While the Saudi government denied Moussaoui’s accusations, Saudi and other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have been identified in recent years as financial backers of Sunni militants fighting in Syria to overthrow Assad’s largely secular regime, with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front the major rebel force benefiting from this support.

Shared Israeli Interests

The Israelis also have found themselves on the side of these Sunni militants in Syria because the Israelis share the Saudi view that Iran and the so-called “Shiite crescent” – reaching from Tehran to Beirut – is the greatest threat to their interests.

In September 2013, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close Netanyahu adviser, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad. “The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview.

“We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

That hostility toward Assad’s regime has taken a tactical form with Israeli forces launching attacks inside Syria that benefit Nusra Front. For instance, on Jan. 18, 2015, Israel attacked Lebanese-Iranian advisers assisting Assad’s government in Syria, killing several members of Hezbollah and an Iranian general. These military advisers were engaged in operations against Nusra Front.

Meanwhile, Israel has refrained from attacking Nusra militants who have seized Syrian territory near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. One source familiar with U.S. intelligence information on Syria told me that Israel has a “non-aggression pact” with Nusra forces, who have even received medical treatment at Israeli hospitals.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have found themselves on the same side in other regional struggles, including support for the military’s ouster of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, but most importantly they have joined forces in their hostility toward Shiite-ruled Iran.

I first reported on the growing relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia in August 2013 in an article entitled “The Saudi-Israeli Superpower,” noting that the complementary strengths of the two countries made their alliance a potentially powerful influence in the world. Israel could wield political and media clout while the Saudis could use their oil, money and investments.

At the time, the story was met with much skepticism, but, increasingly, the secret alliance has gone public. On Oct. 1, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hinted at it in his United Nations General Assembly speech, which was largely devoted to excoriating Iran over its nuclear program and threatening a unilateral Israeli military strike.

Amid the bellicosity, Netanyahu dropped in a largely missed clue about the evolving power relationships in the Middle East, saying: “The dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the emergence of other threats in our region have led many of our Arab neighbors to recognize, finally recognize, that Israel is not their enemy. And this affords us the opportunity to overcome the historic animosities and build new relationships, new friendships, new hopes.”

The next day, Israel’s Channel 2 TV news reported that senior Israeli security officials had met with a high-level Gulf state counterpart in Jerusalem, believed to be Prince Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States who was then head of Saudi intelligence.

Even the MSM

The reality of this unlikely alliance has now even reached the mainstream U.S. media. For instance, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described the new coziness in an article in the Jan. 19, 2015 issue.

He wrote: “On May 26, 2014, an unprecedented public conversation took place in Brussels. Two former high-ranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi Arabia – Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki al-Faisal – sat together for more than an hour, talking regional politics in a conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

“They disagreed on some things, like the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement, and agreed on others: the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat, the need to support the new military government in Egypt, the demand for concerted international action in Syria. The most striking statement came from Prince Turki. He said the Arabs had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel anymore.’”

Israel and Saudi Arabia also have collaborated in efforts to put the squeeze on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who is deemed a key supporter of both Iran and Syria. The Saudis have used their power over oil production to drive down prices and hurt Russia’s economy, while U.S. neoconservatives – who share Israel’s geopolitical world view – were at the forefront of the coup that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych a year ago.

Saudi hostility toward Russia also surfaced in 2013 when Bandar met Putin and delivered what Putin viewed as a crude threat to unleash Chechen terrorists against the Sochi Winter Olympics if Putin did not reduce his support for the Syrian government.

According to a leaked diplomatic account of a July 31, 2013 meeting in Moscow, Bandar informed Putin that Saudi Arabia had strong influence over Chechen extremists who had carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Russian targets and who had since deployed to join the fight against the Assad regime in Syria.

As Bandar called for a Russian shift toward the Saudi position on Syria, he reportedly offered guarantees of protection from Chechen terror attacks on the Olympics. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year,” Bandar reportedly said. “The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”

Putin responded, “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism.”

Bandar’s Mafia-like threat toward the Sochi games – a version of “nice Olympics you got here, it’d be a shame if something terrible happened to it” – failed to intimidate Putin, who continued to support Assad. But Putin became obsessed with security at Sochi, distracting him from the worsening crisis in Ukraine where Yanukovych was ousted in a neocon-orchestrated coup on Feb. 22, 2014, a day before the Olympic torch was extinguished.

Now, with Obama nearing a possible agreement to rein in but not end Iran’s nuclear program – against the wishes of the Israeli-Saudi tag team – the leak in the Israeli media suggests that Netanyahu with the support of Saudi Arabia’s royal family may be contemplating his own bombing campaign against Iran.

Robert Parry is an American investigative journalist best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal in 1985. He was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984. He has been the editor of Consortium News since 1995.
26 February 15

 

 

By Michael Schwartz

How Gazan Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of An International Power Struggle

Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.

Amid the many fossil-fueled conflicts in the region, one of them, packed with threats, large and small, has been largely overlooked, and Israel is at its epicenter. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when Israeli and Palestinian leaders began sparring over rumored natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. In the ensuing decades, it has grown into a many-fronted conflict involving several armies and three navies. In the process, it has already inflicted mindboggling misery on tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it threatens to add future layers of misery to the lives of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. Eventually, it might even immiserate Israelis.

Resource wars are, of course, nothing new. Virtually the entire history of Western colonialism and post-World War II globalization has been animated by the effort to find and market the raw materials needed to build or maintain industrial capitalism. This includes Israel’s expansion into, and appropriation of, Palestinian lands. But fossil fuels only moved to center stage in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the 1990s, and that initially circumscribed conflict only spread to include Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, and Russia after 2010.

The Poisonous History of Gazan Natural Gas

Back in 1993, when Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and create a sovereign state, nobody was thinking much about Gaza’s coastline. As a result, Israel agreed that the newly created PA would fully control its territorial waters, even though the Israeli navy was still patrolling the area. Rumored natural gas deposits there mattered little to anyone, because prices were then so low and supplies so plentiful. No wonder that the Palestinians took their time recruiting British Gas (BG) — a major player in the global natural gas sweepstakes — to find out what was actually there. Only in 2000 did the two parties even sign a modest contract to develop those by-then confirmed fields.

BG promised to finance and manage their development, bear all the costs, and operate the resulting facilities in exchange for 90% of the revenues, an exploitative but typical “profit-sharing” agreement. With an already functioning natural gas industry, Egypt agreed to be the on-shore hub and transit point for the gas. The Palestinians were to receive 10% of the revenues (estimated at about a billion dollars in total) and were guaranteed access to enough gas to meet their needs.

Had this process moved a little faster, the contract might have been implemented as written. In 2000, however, with a rapidly expanding economy, meager fossil fuels, and terrible relations with its oil-rich neighbors, Israel found itself facing a chronic energy shortage. Instead of attempting to answer its problem with an aggressive but feasible effort to develop renewable sources of energy, Prime Minister Ehud Barak initiated the era of Eastern Mediterranean fossil fuel conflicts. He brought Israel’s naval control of Gazan coastal waters to bear and nixed the deal with BG. Instead, he demanded that Israel, not Egypt, receive the Gaza gas and that it also control all the revenues destined for the Palestinians — to prevent the money from being used to “fund terror.”

With this, the Oslo Accords were officially doomed. By declaring Palestinian control over gas revenues unacceptable, the Israeli government committed itself to not accepting even the most limited kind of Palestinian budgetary autonomy, let alone full sovereignty. Since no Palestinian government or organization would agree to this, a future filled with armed conflict was assured.

The Israeli veto led to the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sought to broker an agreement that would satisfy both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. The result: a 2007 proposal that would have delivered the gas to Israel, not Egypt, at below-market prices, with the same 10% cut of the revenues eventually reaching the PA. However, those funds were first to be delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York for future distribution, which was meant to guarantee that they would not be used for attacks on Israel.

This arrangement still did not satisfy the Israelis, who pointed to the recent victory of the militant Hamas party in Gaza elections as a deal-breaker. Though Hamas had agreed to let the Federal Reserve supervise all spending, the Israeli government, now led by Ehud Olmert, insisted that no “royalties be paid to the Palestinians.” Instead, the Israelis would deliver the equivalent of those funds “in goods and services.”

This offer the Palestinian government refused. Soon after, Olmert imposed a draconian blockade on Gaza, which Israel’s defense minister termed a form of “‘economic warfare’ that would generate a political crisis, leading to a popular uprising against Hamas.” With Egyptian cooperation, Israel then seized control of all commerce in and out of Gaza, severely limiting even food imports and eliminating its fishing industry. As Olmert advisor Dov Weisglass summed up this agenda, the Israeli government was putting the Palestinians “on a diet” (which, according to the Red Cross, soon produced “chronic malnutrition,” especially among Gazan children).

When the Palestinians still refused to accept Israel’s terms, the Olmert government decided to unilaterally extract the gas, something that, they believed, could only occur once Hamas had been displaced or disarmed. As former Israel Defense Forces commander and current Foreign Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained, “Hamas… has confirmed its capability to bomb Israel’s strategic gas and electricity installations… It is clear that, without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

Following this logic, Operation Cast Lead was launched in the winter of 2008. According to Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, it was intended to subject Gaza to a “shoah” (the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster). Yoav Galant, the commanding general of the Operation, said that it was designed to “send Gaza decades into the past.” As Israeli parliamentarian Tzachi Hanegbiexplained, the specific military goal was “to topple the Hamas terror regime and take over all the areas from which rockets are fired on Israel.”

Operation Cast Lead did indeed “send Gaza decades into the past.” Amnesty International reported that the 22-day offensive killed 1,400 Palestinians, “including some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians, and large areas of Gaza had been razed to the ground, leaving many thousands homeless and the already dire economy in ruins.” The only problem: Operation Cast Lead did not achieve its goal of “transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel.”

More Sources of Gas Equal More Resource Wars

In 2009, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inherited the stalemate around Gaza’s gas deposits and an Israeli energy crisis that only grew more severe when the Arab Spring in Egyptinterrupted and then obliterated 40% of the country’s gas supplies. Rising energy prices soon contributed to the largest protests involving Jewish Israelis in decades.

As it happened, however, the Netanyahu regime also inherited a potentially permanent solution to the problem. An immense field of recoverable natural gas was discovered in the Levantine Basin, a mainly offshore formation under the eastern Mediterranean. Israeli officials immediately asserted that “most” of the newly confirmed gas reserves lay “within Israeli territory.” In doing so, they ignored contrary claims by Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, and the Palestinians.

In some other world, this immense gas field might have been effectively exploited by the five claimants jointly, and a production plan might even have been put in place to ameliorate the environmental impact of releasing a future 130 trillion cubic feet of gas into the planet’s atmosphere. However, as Pierre Terzian, editor of the oil industry journal Petrostrategies, observed, “All the elements of danger are there… This is a region where resorting to violent action is not something unusual.”

In the three years that followed the discovery, Terzian’s warning seemed ever more prescient. Lebanon became the first hot spot. In early 2011, the Israeli government announced the unilateral development of two fields, about 10%of that Levantine Basin gas, which lay in disputed offshore waters near the Israeli-Lebanese border. Lebanese Energy Minister Gebran Bassil immediately threatened a military confrontation, asserting that his country would “not allow Israel or any company working for Israeli interests to take any amount of our gas that is falling in our zone.” Hezbollah, the most aggressive political faction in Lebanon, promised rocket attacks if “a single meter” of natural gas was extracted from the disputed fields.

Israel’s Resource Minister accepted the challenge, asserting that “[t]hese areas are within the economic waters of Israel… We will not hesitate to use our force and strength to protect not only the rule of law but the international maritime law.”

Oil industry journalist Terzian offered this analysis of the realities of the confrontation:

“In practical terms… nobody is going to invest with Lebanon in disputed waters. There are no Lebanese companies there capable of carrying out the drilling, and there is no military force that could protect them. But on the other side, things are different. You have Israeli companies that have the ability to operate in offshore areas, and they could take the risk under the protection of the Israeli military.”

Sure enough, Israel continued its exploration and drilling in the two disputed fields, deploying drones to guard the facilities. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government invested major resources in preparing for possible future military confrontations in the area. For one thing, with lavish U.S. funding, itdeveloped the “Iron Dome” anti-missile defense system designed in part to intercept Hezbollah and Hamas rockets aimed at Israeli energy facilities. It also expanded the Israeli navy, focusing on its ability to deter or repel threats to offshore energy facilities. Finally, starting in 2011 it launched airstrikes in Syria designed, according to U.S. officials, “to prevent any transfer of advanced… antiaircraft, surface-to-surface and shore-to-ship missiles” to Hezbollah.

Nonetheless, Hezbollah continued to stockpile rockets capable of demolishing Israeli facilities. And in 2013, Lebanon made a move of its own. It began negotiating with Russia. The goal was to get that country’s gas firms to develop Lebanese offshore claims, while the formidable Russian navy would lend a hand with the “long-running territorial dispute with Israel.”

By the beginning of 2015, a state of mutual deterrence appeared to be setting in. Although Israel had succeeded in bringing online the smaller of the two fields it set out to develop, drilling in the larger one was indefinitely stalled”in light of the security situation.” U.S. contractor Noble Energy, hired by the Israelis, was unwilling to invest the necessary $6 billion dollars in facilities that would be vulnerable to Hezbollah attack, and potentially in the gun sights of the Russian navy. On the Lebanese side, despite an increased Russian naval presence in the region, no work had begun.

Meanwhile, in Syria, where violence was rife and the country in a state of armed collapse, another kind of stalemate went into effect. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, facing a ferocious threat from various groups of jihadists, survived in part by negotiating massive military support from Russia in exchange for a 25-year contract to develop Syria’s claims to that Levantine gas field. Included in the deal was a major expansion of the Russian naval base at the port city of Tartus, ensuring a far larger Russian naval presence in the Levantine Basin.

While the presence of the Russians apparently deterred the Israelis from attempting to develop any Syrian-claimed gas deposits, there was no Russian presence in Syria proper. So Israel contracted with the U.S.-based Genie Energy Corporation to locate and develop oil fields in the Golan Heights, Syrian territory occupied by the Israelis since 1967. Facing a potential violation of international law, the Netanyahu government invoked, as the basis for its acts, an Israeli court ruling that the exploitation of natural resources in occupied territories was legal. At the same time, to prepare for the inevitable battle with whichever faction or factions emerged triumphant from the Syrian civil war, it began shoring up the Israeli military presence in the Golan Heights.

And then there was Cyprus, the only Levantine claimant not at war with Israel. Greek Cypriots had long been in chronic conflict with Turkish Cypriots, so it was hardly surprising that the Levantine natural gas discovery triggered three years of deadlocked negotiations on the island over what to do. In 2014, the Greek Cypriots signed an exploration contract with Noble Energy, Israel’s chief contractor. The Turkish Cypriots trumped this move by signing a contract with Turkey to explore all Cypriot claims “as far as Egyptian waters.” Emulating Israel and Russia, the Turkish government promptly moved three navy vessels into the area to physically block any intervention by other claimants.

As a result, four years of maneuvering around the newly discovered Levantine Basin deposits have produced little energy, but brought new and powerful claimants into the mix, launched a significant military build-up in the region, and heightened tensions immeasurably.

Gaza Again — and Again

Remember the Iron Dome system, developed in part to stop Hezbollah rockets aimed at Israel’s northern gas fields? Over time, it was put in place near the border with Gaza to stop Hamas rockets, and was tested during Operation Returning Echo, the fourth Israeli military attempt to bring Hamas to heel and eliminate any Palestinian “capability to bomb Israel’s strategic gas and electricity installations.”

Launched in March 2012, it replicated on a reduced scale the devastation of Operation Cast Lead, while the Iron Dome achieved a 90% “kill rate” against Hamas rockets. Even this, however, while a useful adjunct to the vast shelter system built to protect Israeli civilians, was not enough to ensure the protection of the country’s exposed oil facilities. Even one direct hit there could damage or demolish such fragile and flammable structures.

The failure of Operation Returning Echo to settle anything triggered another round of negotiations, which once again stalled over the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s demand to control all fuel and revenues destined for Gaza and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Unity government then followed the lead of the Lebanese, Syrians, and Turkish Cypriots, and in late 2013 signed an “exploration concession” with Gazprom, the huge Russian natural gas company. As with Lebanon and Syria, the Russian Navy loomed as a potential deterrent to Israeli interference.

Meanwhile, in 2013, a new round of energy blackouts caused “chaos” across Israel, triggering a draconian 47% increase in electricity prices. In response, the Netanyahu government considered a proposal to begin extracting domestic shale oil, but the potential contamination of water resources caused a backlash movement that frustrated this effort. In a country filled with start-up high-tech firms, the exploitation of renewable energy sources was still not being given serious attention. Instead, the government once again turned to Gaza.

With Gazprom’s move to develop the Palestinian-claimed gas deposits on the horizon, the Israelis launched their fifth military effort to force Palestinian acquiescence, Operation Protective Edge. It had two major hydrocarbon-related goals: to deter Palestinian-Russian plans and to finally eliminate the Gazan rocket systems. The first goal was apparently met when Gazprom postponed (perhaps permanently) its development deal. The second, however, failed when the two-pronged land and air attack — despite unprecedented devastation in Gaza — failed to destroy Hamas’s rocket stockpiles or its tunnel-based assembly system; nor did the Iron Dome achieve the sort of near-perfect interception rate needed to protect proposed energy installations.

There Is No Denouement

After 25 years and five failed Israeli military efforts, Gaza’s natural gas is still underwater and, after four years, the same can be said for almost all of the Levantine gas. But things are not the same. In energy terms, Israel is ever more desperate, even as it has been building up its military, including its navy, in significant ways. The other claimants have, in turn, found larger and more powerful partners to help reinforce their economic and military claims. All of this undoubtedly means that the first quarter-century of crisis over eastern Mediterranean natural gas has been nothing but prelude. Ahead lies the possibility of bigger gas wars with the devastation they are likely to bring.

Michael Schwartz, an emeritus distinguished teaching professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, is a TomDispatch regular and the author of the award-winning books Radical Protest and Social Structure and The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz). His TomDispatch book,War Without End, focused on how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq. His email address is Michael.Schwartz@stonybrook.edu.

26 February, 2015
TomDispatch.com

Copyright 2015 Michael Schwartz

 

By Serge Jordan

Libyan people bearing the brunt of NATO’s fiasco

On February 15, a Libyan group acting allegedly on behalf of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), released a gruesome video. It was of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian workers held hostage by them since last December. While some technical experts have since argued that parts of the video, such as the backdrop of the beach of the port city of Sirte where these beheadings appear to have been staged, have been faked, the fate of these workers is likely sealed. Recent events have in any case brought to light how the Libyan territory has become a new ground for the IS project of geographical expansion.

This video of the beheadings immediately provoked retaliations from Cairo’s military regime. Egyptian fighter-jets launched a series of airstrikes in Darna, a city under effective IS control since last year. Despite official claims of targeting “training camps and weapons caches”, seven innocent civilians were killed in heavily populated areas of the city during the course of the operation. Last Friday, a group of militants claiming loyalty to IS killed another 42 people in three suicide car bombings in Qubbah, a small mountain town in eastern Libya, in apparent response to the Egyptian air strikes. More Egyptians have also been taken hostage since. About 15,000 workers have reportedly fled Libya back to Egypt in the last couple of days, fearing further retribution.

This recent show of forces marks a new escalation in the violence which has gripped Libya in recent years.

Egypt’s role

The Egyptian rulers’ pretext of avenging the blood of the Coptic workers killed by IS is farcical. For decades, the Coptic minority in Egypt has been enduring numerous abuses, repression and scapegoating by the ruling class. For all its posturing, the Egyptian state is also the custodian of the very economic system which pushes hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to try and escape poverty and unemployment by seeking jobs abroad. Despite many leaving, it is estimated that over 700,000 Egyptian workers still currently live in Libya.

Many of them, coming from the poorest areas of Egypt, work in low-paid and precarious jobs to sustain their families back home, despite the appalling security conditions. As reported by Reuters: “In the Egyptian village of Al-Our, about 200 km (125 miles) south of Cairo, it is easy to see why young men take the risk. There are no paved roads, clean drinking water or adequate health care.”

The military intervention of the Egyptian army on the Libyan battlefield is not new; the regime, in collaboration with the Emirati government, has carried out several airstrikes before. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seeks to export his battle between brutal dictatorship and religious extremism on to Libyan soil, to divert attention away from the growing crisis of his regime, and to whip up the fractured prestige of his army – responsible for mass murders, torture and other brutal methods of repression against political opponents. Sisi also hopes to use the airstrikes as a launch pad for installing a like-minded authoritarian regime on Egypt’s western borders.

Egyptian generals, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have thrown their weight behind Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, an ex-officer of Gaddafi’s army. He broke with Gaddafi’s regime at the end of the 1980s to defect to the United States, and has worked closely with the CIA ever since. Haftar is an aspiring dictator who thinks that an iron rule is the only way to sort out the country’s problems. “Eliminating the Islamist threat”, with whom he fought side-by-side during the war against Gaddafi, has become his new mantra.

Haftar’s army, composed of many residues from the old regime’s military, until now has been in a precarious alliance with the so-called ‘official’ government of Libya. This government, which has the blessing of Western imperialism, is now based in the Eastern city of Tobruk, close to the Egyptian border. It was thrown out of the capital Tripoli in August 2014 by Libya Dawn. This is a loose network of Islamist-leaning militias allied with brigades from the north-western city of Misrata and with officials of the former Parliament, the General National Congress.

Libya Dawn has since established a competing government and parliament with the backing of the Qatari and Turkish regimes, and is controlling Tripoli and a few chunks of the western side of the country.

In reality, both these ‘governments’ are barely able to impose much order beyond the cities where they are based. The country is breaking apart into an intricate patchwork of fiefs controlled by local militias, often based on tribal or regional affiliations, fighting for territories and influence.

The idea often propagated in the media of a battle between an ‘Islamist’ and a ‘secular’ government is over-simplistic. The Saudi and Emirati monarchies, who are backing the Tobruk-based government and General Haftar’s campaign, are not models of secularism themselves. Libya has become the scene of a bloody battle between rival power centres backing competing militias, supported by various outside players using the country as a stage for a new version of the proxy wars engulfing the region. Oil wealth and weapons have become much more important bargaining chips for these militias and their political backers than principled considerations of any sort.

For these reasons, shifts in existing loyalties are probable in what appears to be an extremely volatile situation. Among other things, tensions are developing between the weak, exiled rulers of Tobruk (so weak they had to retreat for a time to a Greek car ferry on the city’s harbour!) and the would-be military strongman Haftar. Haftar is building support for military rule, boosted by Egypt’s cash and weapons. He might aim to sideline his previous allies to impose a dictatorial statelet in the eastern part of the country, installing himself in power.

Another failed State

In 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi warned that if toppled, he would be replaced by “tribalism, Islamic extremism and anarchy”. This warning was thrown out as a threat against all those daring to challenge his regime, but succeeding developments have proved him right. Yet this was not inevitable. The lack of a viable left-wing alternative to Gaddafi’s rule allowed what was initially a popular uprising to be derailed. While signs of regionalisation and city-based differences in the protest movement existed from the start, in part inherited from Gaddafi’s divide-and-rule system of favours and retributions, the subsequent military intervention by the NATO powers paved the way for the colossal disaster that we are witnessing today.

Three years ago, the Obama administration and its French and British counterparts heralded the toppling of Gaddafi as a humanitarian triumph and a new model for Western intervention. NATO officials even declared that the mission in Libya had been “one of the most successful in NATO history.”

But as the CWI highlighted at the time, the NATO forces never intervened in Libya with the aim of coming to the rescue of the Libyan people. The aim was to turn the tide of the mass revolutionary uprisings which had started in Tunisia and Egypt and had caught them off guard, to sideline the most popular grassroots elements of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, and to impose a regime more subservient to the interests of Western oil giants and multinational corporations. This was even though Gaddafi’s clique had cozied up to Western governments and to neo-liberal reforms in the last decade of his reign.

For this purpose, Western powers did not hesitate to provide training, weapons and money to notorious Al Qaeda-linked jihadists. Some of the most prominent trainers of rebel forces in 2011 included militants who had been imprisoned at Guantanamo. This included, as revealed by the New York Times back in April 2011, the notorious Abu Sufian Bin Qumu, a founding member of the Salafist militia Ansar al Sharia. This group is held responsible for the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in September 2012. Its Tunisian branch also organised the assassination of two prominent left-wing political leaders in 2013.

While the demise of Gaddafi was welcomed by significant layers of the Libyan population, this was done through a mass bombing campaign that caused large-scale civilian killings and destruction on the country’s infrastructure. It was also through the promotion of a myriad of unaccountable militias, of pro-imperialist “free market upstarts” keen to do business with the West, and of religious fundamentalists ready to use their newly acquired influence to bite the hand that had fed them before.

On the toppling of Gaddafi, the CWI commented in October 2011: “If this had been purely the result of struggle by the Libyan working masses it would have been widely acclaimed, but the direct involvement of imperialism casts a dark shadow over the revolution’s future”.

The CWI argued against those on the left such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) or the so-called Marxist professor and USFI supporter Gilbert Achcar, who had stood in favour of imperialist intervention in Libya under the guise of preventing Gaddafi from committing atrocities against his own people. Figures from Claudia Gazzini, a journalist for the Middle East Research and Information Project, have exposed the fallacy of such arguments: “the death toll subsequent to the seven-month NATO intervention was at least ten times greater than the tally of those killed in the first few weeks of the conflict”.

Revealingly, the same “left interventionists” have since been totally oblivious to the horrors and sufferings generated by the policy they supported at the time, which has made life for ordinary Libyans far worse than what it was even under the tyranny of Gaddafi.

Libya has now become a source of instability for the whole region, a regional magnet for the training and harbouring of jihadist fighters, as well as a flourishing market for weapons, drugs and human trafficking. According to the UN, at least 400,000 people have been internally displaced by fighting across the country, with as many as 83,000 people living in camps, schools and abandoned buildings. Over a million Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia. Several reports indicate that the vast majority of the Libyan exiles who had returned after Gaddafi’s fall have left as well.

The country is facing an unprecedented level of violence. Targeted assassinations and torture have become commonplace; migrant workers are subject to horrific abuse; and a lot of basic services are dysfunctional if they have not collapsed all together. “Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your democracy” were the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron as he visited Benghazi with ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy in September 2011. Yet, all Western embassies in Libya have now packed up and gone, incapable of even guaranteeing the security of their own staff.

Islamic State

Several armed radical Islamist factions in Libya have declared their recent allegiance to IS, as the latter has gained supporters in some key parts of the country. Religious fundamentalist groups admittedly existed in Libya prior to 2011, but their influence was relatively limited. Sectarian killings, such as perpetrated against the Egyptian Christian workers, is a recent phenomenon.

The calamitous state of the country, the free fall in living standards, the huge resentment against the actions of Western imperialism, and the massive amount of weaponry available in the country have all provided a breeding ground for IS-type jihadists. It is no accident that the coastal town of Sirte has arguably become a stronghold of IS militancy. The birthplace of Gaddafi and once a relatively prosperous city, Sirte has been reduced to ruins by intense NATO bombings.

Socialist programme needed

Only formed by the Italian colonial power in 1934, Libya is facing the possibility of violent break-up. The toppling of Gadaffi has given birth to a multitude of little tyrants, mercenaries and warlords carving up the country. The added intervention of various foreign actors is exacerbating existing tensions and heightening the possibility for more bloodshed.

The Libyan people, the poor, the oppressed and the workers, need to build wherever possible independently-run organisations that can help them bring back on the agenda a collective struggle for their most vital and pressing needs. They will need to confront all those forces basing themselves upon any form of economic plundering, corruption and violent suppression of the people.

Such a struggle would need to be equipped with a programme standing for full and equal democratic and social rights for all, repudiating any form of discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, religion, tribe, regional or city affiliation.

The potential for ordinary people to challenge the rule of reactionary militias has been expressed on a number of occasions in the last period. The setting up of democratically organised, accountable and non-sectarian workers and poor people’s defence committees in the neighbourhoods could assist in giving a more organised expression to this struggle, and in protecting communities from the rampaging violence from multiple sides which is ripping the country’s apart.

The Libyan people need to be able to determine their own future. Any further meddling and military intervention by regional and western powers needs to be vigorously opposed. The drums for a new international military intervention have been beating from some European quarters -even though it is rather likely that Western governments will try to avoid a new military campaign in the country at this stage.

These powers have clearly demonstrated that they are no friends of ordinary Libyans. As revealed by the first wave of revolts and revolutions that swept through the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011, only in the masses of the working class, the youth and the oppressed of other countries will the Libyans find a genuine ally in their struggle for social and political change.

A “neat” military coup on a national scale is unlikely, seeing the state of erosion of the Libyan state machine. But a section of the military wing led by General Haftar and his clique could exploit the despair and the fear of jihadists among large sections of the Libyan population to try and impose some form of military rule in the eastern side of the country.

However, as shown by the growing violence in the Sinai Peninsula and other parts of Egypt, the butcher-like methods of repression of Sisi, that his henchman Haftar wants to emulate in Libya, will only lead to further terrorist blowbacks. This will not address any of the problems faced by the Libyan people.

Mass action from the grassroots is necessary to oppose jihadists’ atrocities, corrupt militias, military adventurers, and the broader, nightmarish scenario of a violent disintegration of the country.

Importantly, a struggle for decent jobs and better living standards, for adequate and functioning infrastructure and services needs to take centre stage, in order to cut across the social basis of support for religious extremism. Independent trade unions need to be built in the workplaces to defend migrant workers and all workers’ rights, to fight for better wages and working conditions. Such unions can play a pivotal role in resisting the spread of racism and religious sectarianism.

Eventually, the Libyan people should strive for a government based on representatives of workers and poor and all oppressed layers of society, elected via democratic structures in the workplaces and communities.

By refusing any deal with big business and any privatisation of Libyan assets, by bringing back under public ownership and democratic people’s control the massive gas and oil reserves and other resources, a plan could be outlined for rebuilding the country to offer a better future for all Libyans.

Serge Jordan works for the Committee for a Workers’ International
26 February, 2015
Socialistworld.net

 

By Sarah Lazare

‘It is my obligation,’ says Israeli prime minister, ‘to do everything that I can to prevent this agreement.’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged on Tuesday that the purpose of his upcoming visit to Washington, D.C. is to do “everything I can” to prevent a nuclear deal between global powers and Iran—an admission that critics say reveals he is pushing for military escalation and potentially war.

“This agreement, if indeed it is signed, will allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state,” Netanyahu declared in a statement released Tuesday, according to media reports. “It is my obligation as prime minister to do everything that I can to prevent this agreement.”

“Therefore,” he continued, “I will go to Washington… because the American Congress is likely to be the final brake before the agreement.”

Critics say that the prime minister’s push to undermine the diplomatic process is ultimately a call for dangerous military escalation.

According to Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council, who spoke with Common Dreams, “A shorter version of what Netanyahu is saying is he is coming to Washington to ensure we can’t get a diplomatic solution and are on the path to war.”

Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams that amid the controversy over his visit, the prime minister is facing a growing crisis of international legitimacy.

“Luckily Netanyahu has so thoroughly discredited himself that ‘everything I can do’ is likely to be limited to speaking to adoring crowds at AIPAC, receiving concocted standing ovations in Congress, and watching pretty much everyone else in Washington run away from him so no embarrassing picture might emerge,” said Bennis.

Numerous doubts have been cast on Netanyahu’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program, including by Israel’s own spy agency Mossad, as leaked documents revealed earlier this week.

While there is no proof that Iran has a program to develop an atom bomb, Israel is the only Middle East nation that is known to possess nuclear weapons and has refused to sign the international non-proliferation treaty.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu has aggressively opposed any deal—or even talks—between Iran and the five members of the United Nations Security Council (U.S., Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France) plus Germany. His address to Washington is slated to take place shortly before Israeli elections. Over the course of the campaign, Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized unverified claims over threats posed by Iran to bolster his own candidacy.

Meanwhile, a political divide in Washington over the visit—which was arranged by GOP House Speaker John Boehner and the Israeli ambassador without the blessing of the White House—continues to deepen.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice slammed Netanyahu in an interview with the PBS show Charlie Rose on Tuesday, charging that his slated visit has “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the relationship.”

According to the New York Times, Rice’s statement is “the frankest acknowledgment yet by a top American official of the degree to which the controversy has damaged United States-Israeli relations.”

Also on Tuesday, Netanyahu turned down an invitation from Senate Democrats Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) for a closed-door meeting during his visit. “I regret that the invitation to address the special joint session of Congress has been perceived by some to be political or partisan,” Netanyahu told them. “I can assure you that my sole intention in accepting it was to voice Israel’s grave concerns about a potential nuclear agreement with Iran that could threaten the survival of my country.”

Notably, top Obama administration officials will not be attending the talk, and a congressional boycott, which has been backed by human rights and Palestine solidarity groups, has been steadily gaining support.

“The willingness by leading political figures—including the president, vice president, and secretary of state—to simply refuse to meet with the Israeli leader is a huge breakthrough that was made possible by the years of organizing by human rights activists working to expose and end U.S. complicity with Israeli war crimes and violations of human rights,” said Bennis.

Bennis added that Netanyahu’s actions may, in fact, prove to bolster these grassroots efforts. Even for Netanyahu, said Bennis, it appears that the prime minister’s “chutzpah may have gotten out in front of him this time.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

26 February, 2015
Commondreams.org

 

By Peter Symonds

Talks this week in Geneva between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif appear to have taken a step toward a long-term agreement over Iran’s nuclear programs. The prospect of a deal to end the protracted US confrontation with the Iranian regime has already fuelled considerable tension between Washington and its allies in the Middle East, particularly the Israeli government.

Details of the closed-door negotiations leaked to the American media point to a pact that would limit or reduce Iran’s existing uranium enrichment capability for a lengthy period, then allow it to increase the number of gas centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium. The US and its allies have accused Tehran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon, a charge that Iranian leaders have repeatedly denied.

The presence of US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, director of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, in Geneva points to high-level discussions of various technical aspects of an agreement. Many questions remain unanswered, including the time frames involved and the ending of crippling US-led sanctions—the critical issue for Iranian leaders. Press reports this week suggesting that the freeze on Iran’s uranium enrichment could be 10 years provoked sharp criticism from US Congressional Republican leaders and Israeli ministers.

Republican Senator Bob Corker, the foreign relations committee chairman, declared that 10 years was not long enough and was “very concerning.” Another Republican, Lindsey Graham, denounced the Obama administration for negotiating with Iranian officials who are “hell bent on expanding their influence in the Mideast in a destructive fashion.”

Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Monday that Israel considered the negotiations “totally unsatisfactory,” as a deal would allow Iran to be “extremely close” to a “dangerous breakout program.” He condemned a 10-year time frame as “sacrificing the future of Israel and the US, and the future of the world.”

The Israeli government has bitterly opposed the negotiations from the outset and repeatedly threatened military action against Iran if all Tehran’s nuclear facilities were not dismantled. Israel, which has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, is determined to ensure its unchallenged military superiority in the Middle East.

Relations between the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will address the US Congress next week at the invitation of Republican leaders, have become rancorous. Obama has declined to meet Netanyahu, who will undoubtedly use his speech to denounce the talks with Iran.

On Tuesday, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice declared that Netanyahu’s decision to travel to Washington before next month’s election in Israel was “destructive of the fabric of the relationship” between the two countries.

Addressing US Senate hearings on Tuesday, Secretary of State Kerry defended the talks with Iran and dismissed suggestions that a time-frame was decided. “The answer is the proverbial ‘don’t believe what you read.’ I’ve told you it’s not true,” he said. Kerry said he expects to know soon if Tehran would agree to “an acceptable and verifiable plan” to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

The US has always placed the onus on Iran to demonstrate that it has no plans to build a nuclear weapon. In practice, this means severe restrictions on its uranium enrichment to ensure no possibility of “break-out”—that is, to produce enough weapons-grade uranium—within a year. The US has also demanded a highly intrusive inspection regime, on top of the International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring of all Iranian nuclear facilities.

The negotiations involving the so-called P5+1 group—the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany—began with an interim agreement in November 2013 that followed the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in June. Iran was compelled to freeze or limit much of its nuclear activity in return for limited sanctions relief. After the initial deadlines ran out, the talks were extended last November to the end of next month to secure the framework of an agreement, and June to finalise it.

The Obama administration has deliberately dragged out the talks to force Iran to agree to its terms. Punitive US-led economic sanctions have halved Iran’s oil exports, sent inflation spiralling and slashed government revenue. The current slump in global oil prices has further hit the Iranian economy, with growth expected to more than halve to 2 or even 1 percent in the coming fiscal year.

Iranian President Rouhani insisted on Wednesday that a comprehensive nuclear agreement would have to include the lifting of international sanctions. “The side negotiating with us should know that conclusion of the talks and the result of a deal should be removal of the whole oppressive and illegal sanctions,” he said.

Rouhani had the backing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to proceed with the negotiations. Khamenei, who has the ultimate say over foreign and defence policies, has to date kept conservative critics of the talks inside Iran in check. He warned yesterday that if the US and its allies retained the sanctions, Iran could retaliate by holding “back gas that Europe and the world is so dependent on.”

While pressing for an agreement to end the sanctions, the Iranian regime is keeping its options open should the talks fail. Last week, Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan signed an agreement in Moscow to expand military ties between the two countries. Noting their shared viewpoints, Dehghan said: “Iran and Russia are able to confront the expansionist intervention and greed of the United States through cooperation, synergy and activating strategic potential capacities.”

Any nuclear agreement faces numerous obstacles. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, a pro-Western Iranian exile group, claimed on Tuesday to have evidence that Iran was conducting secret nuclear research and some uranium enrichment at a site dubbed Lavizan-3. These claims are clearly aimed at undermining the negotiations. This organisation has in the past been used by Israeli intelligence as a conduit for publishing allegations against the Iranian regime.

While Israel has publicly opposed the talks, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are no less hostile to a deal with Iran. Saudi Arabia, which regards Iran as a dangerous regional rival, has threatened to develop its own nuclear programs if Tehran is permitted to maintain its nuclear facilities. An unnamed Arab official told the Wall Street Journal last week: “At this stage, we prefer a collapse of the diplomatic process to a bad deal.”

With further US-Iranian negotiations due next week, tensions will undoubtedly continue to rise. Provocations or military action aimed at sabotaging the negotiations cannot be ruled out. In the five years up to 2012, Israeli intelligence engaged in a criminal campaign of assassinations and sabotage inside Iran aimed at undermining its nuclear programs. Israel’s Channel 2 aired a program on Tuesday suggesting that Saudi Arabia was on the point of granting Israel permission to overfly its territory “en route to attack Iran if an attack is necessary.”

26 February, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Dr. Daud Batchelor

As Australia’s international standing has risen, the country’s sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites: the disproportionately influential military-industrial complex and Zionist lobbies. Australia’s sovereignty is being compromised by the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former PM Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we “have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war”.

External threats facing Australia include a commercial takeover of critical resources, primarily by China. The second is inordinate influence by the US, our “friendly” ally under the ANZUS Treaty. Evidence suggests some US covert involvement in removing former PMs Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd. Near neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia, have no expansionist aims. Our defences should not be overly strained but Australia increased its ‘defence’ budget 32% since 2003 with the target to achieve 2% of GDP. Fighting distant wars of questionable merit and overinflating domestic terrorism sucks funds from needy domestic programmes and puts Australia into massive debt paralleling the United States itself.

John Howard dramatically changed Australia’s defence policy to project military power globally. The 9/11 attacks occurring while PM Howard visited President Bush Jr cemented a tight alliance. Howard offered virtually a blank cheque for Australia’s military to support future US engagements. Significantly, many since Mearsheimer and Walt’s exposure have chronicled the excessive influence Israeli lobbies e.g. AIPAC, have over US foreign policies. Israeli is set not only on protecting itself but creating a Greater Israel involving fragmentation of neighbouring Arab states – the Yinon Plan of the World Zionist Organization. Australia is locked into engagements of the US resulting from certain US-Zionist strategies. The US domineering worldview is inculcated whenever American forces and agencies meet counterparts in the Australian Defence Forces, ASIO and Australian Federal Police.

Impacts on Australia’s foreign polices result from the powerful Murdoch media oligopoly, which champions Israel, and the Zionist-led Lowy Institute for International Policy, which has a snug relationship with the ADF, ASIO and AFP, all Institute members. The Institute’s Board of Directors includes Martin Indyk, former Israeli government propagandist. Great concern is that Allan Gyngell, founding Executive-Director of the Lowy Institute, is now Director-General of Australia’s Office of National Assessments. Gyngell leads a supposedly independent organisation providing key analyses on which Cabinet relies to decide foreign policies. Zionists can well influence key decisions. Abuse is of grave concern given faulty ONA reports claiming WMDs in Iraq used to incite Australia’s participation in the infamous 2003 invasion. Former ONA officer, Andrew Wilke, resigned claiming pre-invasion pressures to exaggerate reports.

Former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, explained that the pro-Israel lobby enjoys such a “very unhealthy level” of influence in dictating Australia’s foreign policy through party donations and MP trips to Israel. The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council had a direct line into the PM’s office and aggressively lobbied politicians. Politicians have been drawn deeply into Israel’s global strategy: a visit to Israel is essential for any aspiring PM. Australia has developed arguably the harshest anti-terrorism legislation and supports illegal Israeli settlements. Australia with only the US recently voted against a proposal in the Security Council demanding Israel ends its Palestinian occupation. Israel defies UN resolutions and commits war crimes violating Geneva conventions and international law. Despite this, the government strongly supports Israel. In the 2008-09 and 2014 Gaza wars, Israel killed 3,500 Palestinians, 75% civilians, while the fewer Israeli fatalities were overwhelmingly soldiers. Israel attacked densely-habited areas causing slaughter and damage to hospitals, schools and UN shelters. Ban Ki-moon and European nations condemned Israel’s disproportionate response and targeting of civilians. Israel could well face charges in the International Criminal Court.

Legitimate concerns questioning Australia’s involvement in distant wars unrelated to Australia’s security raise the spectre of ‘blowback’ in supporting American global hegemony and destruction of Muslim lands. Emergence of ISIS is directly linked to failed Australian-American strategies in Iraq. The government’s embrace of Americas’ pro-Israel anti-Muslim agenda is against Australia’s best interests in ignoring our peaceful Muslim neighbours – Indonesia, and Malaysia, successful liberal democracies on whom Snowdon showed Australian and US governments aggressively spy. Such conduct could drive these friendly neighbours closer to China and Russia to our detriment.

Prior to expanding anti-terrorist laws deemed by many to be targeting the preponderantly peaceful Muslim community, massive AFP raids were conducted in NSW and Queensland. Their scale implied citizens were under imminent attack by numerous terrorists. Was this to forestall opposition to the government’s retrenchment of citizen rights? Numbers arrested were low and prosecutions will likely be few. Bernard Keane commented, “Australians are less safe now then a few weeks ago because of decisions taken, primarily for political ends, by the Abbott government, namely to intervene in a conflict in Iraq and Syria that has nothing to do with Australia’s national interests”. Apart from the Martin Place shootings, there have been no fatalities in Australia by Muslim hands since 1915 when Britain invaded Turkey. PM Abbott over-emphasises terrorism in Australia while neglecting family violence that causes 80 deaths annually. Samuel Makinda warned that with the expanded anti-terror legislation, politicians have legislated away citizens’ rights. Alerting Australians that it was now a “police state”, Gideon Polya, estimated there were “only 6 Australian deaths by terrorists (none Muslim) in the last 36 years. Yet the major Australian parties … have committed $125 billion in terms of long-term accrual cost to the Islamophobic War on Terror.”

Australia’s subservience to the US and Israeli lobbies should change and stop fighting their wars and blowing out Australia’s finances. With a forecasted A$40 billion budget shortfall, either the government will raise taxes, diminish services, or increase debt. In the absence of military threats at home, our main concern should be economic security. Australians should consider an alternative from heightened militarism in this Gallipoli centenary honouring our heroes, who spoke little wishing not to glorify war for imperialism’s sake. Let us resist the insidious takeover of our independence to chart our own course and further peace and stability of Australia and harmonious relations amongst our own citizens and neighbouring countries.

Dr Daud Batchelor, political analyst, whose grandfathers/father fought to protect Australia’s security.

26 February 2015

By Alfred W. McCoy

“The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky.

All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

This should be (but seldom is considered) a jarring, disconcerting path for a country that, more than any other, nurtured the idea of, and wrote the rules for, an international community of nations governed by the rule of law. At the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, the U.S. delegate, Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, pushed for the creation of a Permanent Court of Arbitration and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build the monumental Peace Palace at The Hague as its home. At the Second Hague Conference in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root urged that future international conflicts be resolved by a court of professional jurists, an idea realized when the Permanent Court of International Justice was established in 1920.

After World War II, the U.S. used its triumph to help create the United Nations, push for the adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ratify the Geneva Conventions for humanitarian treatment in war. If you throw in other American-backed initiatives like the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, you pretty much have the entire infrastructure of what we now casually call “the international community.”

Breaking the Rules

Not only did the U.S. play a crucial role in writing the new rules for that community, but it almost immediately began breaking them. After all, despite the rise of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, Washington was by then the world sovereign and so could decide which should be the exceptions to its own rules, particularly to the foundational principle for all this global governance: sovereignty. As it struggled to dominate the hundred new nations that started appearing right after the war, each one invested with an inviolable sovereignty, Washington needed a new means of projecting power beyond conventional diplomacy or military force. As a result, CIA covert operations became its way of intervening within a new world order where you couldn’t or at least shouldn’t intervene openly.

All of the exceptions that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II. Until the creation of the CIA in 1947, the United States had been an innocent abroad in the world of intelligence. When General John J. Pershing led two million American troops to Europe during World War I, the U.S. had the only army on either side of the battle lines without an intelligence service. Even though Washington built a substantial security apparatus during that war, it was quickly scaled back by Republican conservatives during the 1920s. For decades, the impulse to cut or constrain such secret agencies remained robustly bipartisan, as when President Harry Truman abolished the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), right after World War II or when President Jimmy Carter fired 800 CIA covert operatives after the Vietnam War.

Yet by fits and starts, the covert domain inside the U.S. government has grown stealthily from the early twentieth century to this moment. It began with the formation of the FBI in 1908 and Military Intelligence in 1917. The Central Intelligence Agency followed after World War II along with most of the alphabet agencies that make up the present U.S. Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and last but hardly least, in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Make no mistake: there is a clear correlation between state secrecy and the rule of law — as one grows, the other surely shrinks.

World Sovereign

America’s irrevocable entry into this covert netherworld came when President Truman deployed his new CIA to contain Soviet subversion in Europe. This was a continent then thick with spies of every stripe: failed fascists, aspirant communists, and everything in between. Introduced to spycraft by its British “cousins,” the CIA soon mastered it in part by establishing sub rosa ties to networks of ex-Nazi spies, Italian fascist operatives, and dozens of continental secret services.

As the world’s new sovereign, Washington used the CIA to enforce its chosen exceptions to the international rule of law, particularly to the core principle of sovereignty. During his two terms, President Dwight Eisenhowerauthorized 104 covert operations on four continents, focused largely on controlling the many new nations then emerging from centuries of colonialism. Eisenhower’s exceptions included blatant transgressions of national sovereignty such as turning northern Burma into an unwilling springboard for abortive invasions of China, arming regional revolts to partition Indonesia, and overthrowing elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1961, covert ops had acquired such a powerful mystique in Washington that President John F. Kennedy would authorize 163 of them in the three years that preceded his assassination.

As a senior CIA official posted to the Near East in the early 1950s put it, the Agency then saw every Muslim leader who was not pro-American as “a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action.” Applied on a global scale and not just to Muslims, this policy helped produce a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend towards democracy from 1958 to 1975, as coups — most of them U.S.-sanctioned — allowed military men to seize power in more than three-dozen nations, representing a quarter of the world’s sovereign states.

The White House’s “exceptions” also produced a deeply contradictory U.S. attitude toward torture from the early years of the Cold War onward. Publicly, Washington’s opposition to torture was manifest in its advocacy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the CIA began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of those same international conventions. After a decade of mind-control research, the CIAactually codified its new method of psychological torture in a secret instructional handbook, the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual, which it then disseminated within the U.S. Intelligence Community and to allied security services worldwide.

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA worked through the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development that sent American police advisers to developing nations. Established by President Kennedy in 1962, in just six years OPS grew into a global anti-communist operation with over 400 U.S. police advisers. By 1971, it had trained more than a million policemen in 47 nations, including 85,000 in South Vietnam and 100,000 in Brazil.

Concealed within this larger OPS effort, CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay. Amnesty Internationaldocumented widespread torture, usually by local police, in 24 of the 49 nations that had hosted OPS police-training teams. In tracking torturers across the globe, Amnesty seemed to be following the trail of CIA training programs. Significantly, torture began to recede when America again turned resolutely against the practice at the end of the Cold War.

The War on Terror

Although the CIA’s authority for assassination, covert intervention, surveillance, and torture was curtailed at the close of the Cold War, the terror attacks of September 2001 sparked an unprecedented expansion in the scale of the intelligence community and a corresponding resurgence in executive exceptions. The War on Terror’s voracious appetite for information produced, in its first decade, what the Washington Post branded a veritable “fourth branch” of the U.S. federal government with 854,000 vetted security officials, 263 security organizations, over 3,000 private and public intelligence agencies, and 33 new security complexes — all pumping out a total of 50,000 classified intelligence reports annually by 2010.

By that time, one of the newest members of the Intelligence Community, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, already had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive nearly $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Maryland — all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring in from drones, U-2 spy planes, Google Earth, and orbiting satellites.

According to documents whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked to theWashington Post, the U.S. spent $500 billion on its intelligence agencies in the dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, including annual appropriations in 2012 of $11 billion for the National Security Agency (NSA) and $15 billion for the CIA. If we add the $790 billion expended on the Department of Homeland Security to that $500 billion for overseas intelligence, then Washington had spent nearly $1.3 trillion to build a secret state-within-the-state of absolutely unprecedented size and power.

As this secret state swelled, the world’s sovereign decided that some extraordinary exceptions to civil liberties at home and sovereignty abroad were in order. The most glaring came with the CIA’s now-notorious renewed use of torture on suspected terrorists and its setting up of its own global network of private prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the reach of any court or legal authority. Along with piracy and slavery, the abolition of torture had long been a signature issue when it came to the international rule of law. So strong was this principle that the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously in 1984 to adopt the Convention Against Torture. When it came to ratifying it, however, Washington dithered on the subject until the end of the Cold War when it finally resumed its advocacy of international justice, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Even then, the sovereign decided to reserve some exceptions for his country alone. Only a year after President Bill Clinton signed the U.N. Convention, CIA agents started snatching terror suspects in the Balkans, some of them Egyptian nationals, and sending them to Cairo, where a torture-friendly autocracy could do whatever it wanted to them in its prisons. Former CIA director George Tenet later testified that, in the years before 9/11, the CIA shipped some 70 individuals to foreign countries without formal extradition — a process dubbed “extraordinary rendition” that had been explicitly banned under Article 3 of the U.N. Convention.

Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his staff wide-ranging secret orders to use torture, adding (in a vernacular version of Schmitt’s dictum),“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” In this spirit, the White House authorized the CIA to develop that global matrix of secret prisons, as well as an armada of planes for spiriting kidnapped terror suspects to them, and a network of allies who could help seize those suspects from sovereign states and levitate them into a supranational gulag of eight agency black sites from Thailand to Poland or into the crown jewel of the system, Guantánamo, thus eluding laws and treaties that remained grounded in territorially based concepts of sovereignty.

Once the CIA closed the black sites in 2008-2009, its collaborators in this global gulag began to feel the force of law for their crimes against humanity. Under pressure from the Council of Europe, Poland started an ongoing criminal investigation in 2008 into its security officers who had facilitated the CIA’s secret prison in the country’s northeast. In September 2012, Italy’s supreme court confirmed the convictions of 22 CIA agents for the illegal rendition of Egyptian exile Abu Omar from Milan to Cairo, and ordered a trial for Italy’s military intelligence chief on charges that sentenced him to 10 years in prison. In 2012, Scotland Yard opened a criminal investigation into MI6 agents who rendered Libyan dissidents to Colonel Gaddafi’s prisons for torture, and two years later the Court of Appeal allowed some of those Libyans to file a civil suit against MI6 for kidnapping and torture.

But not the CIA. Even after the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report documented the Agency’s abusive tortures in painstaking detail, there was no move for either criminal or civil sanctions against those who had ordered torture or those who had carried it out. In a strong editorial on December 21, 2014, the New York Times asked “whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity.” The answer, of course, was yes.Immunity for hirelings is one of the sovereign’s most important exceptions.

As President Bush finished his second term in 2008, an inquiry by the International Commission of Jurists found that the CIA’s mobilization of allied security agencies worldwide had done serious damage to the international rule of law. “The executive… should under no circumstance invoke a situation of crisis to deprive victims of human rights violations… of their… access to justice,” the Commission recommended after documenting the degradation of civil liberties in some 40 countries. “State secrecy and similar restrictions must not impede the right to an effective remedy for human rights violations.”

The Bush years also brought Washington’s most blatant repudiation of the rule of law. Once the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) convened at The Hague in 2002, the Bush White House “un-signed” or “de-signed” the U.N. agreement creating the court and then mounted a sustained diplomatic effort to immunize U.S. military operations from its writ. This was an extraordinary abdication for the nation that had breathed the concept of an international tribunal into being.

The Sovereign’s Unbounded Domains

While Presidents Eisenhower and Bush decided on exceptions that violated national boundaries and international treaties, President Obama is exercising his exceptional prerogatives in the unbounded domains of aerospace and cyberspace.

Both are new, unregulated realms of military conflict beyond the rubric of international law and Washington believes it can use them as Archimedean levers for global dominion. Just as Britain once ruled from the seas and postwar America exercised its global reach via airpower, so Washington now sees aerospace and cyberspace as special realms for domination in the twenty-first century.

Under Obama, drones have grown from a tactical Band-Aid in Afghanistan into a strategic weapon for the exercise of global power. From 2009 to 2015, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force deployed a drone armada of over 200 Predators and Reapers, launching 413 strikes in Pakistan alone, killing as many as 3,800 people. Every Tuesday inside the White House Situation Room, as the New York Times reported in 2012, President Obama reviews a CIA drone “kill list” and stares at the faces of those who are targeted forpossible assassination from the air. He then decides, without any legal procedure, who will live and who will die, even in the case of American citizens. Unlike other world leaders, this sovereign applies the ultimate exception across the Greater Middle East, parts of Africa, and elsewhere if he chooses.

This lethal success is the cutting edge of a top-secret Pentagon project that will, by 2020, deploy a triple-canopy space “shield” from stratosphere to exosphere, patrolled by Global Hawk and X-37B drones armed with agile missiles.

As Washington seeks to police a restless globe from sky and space, the world might well ask: How high is any nation’s sovereignty? After the successive failures of the Paris flight conference of 1910, the Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923, and Geneva’s Protocol I of 1977 to establish the extent of sovereign airspace or restrain aerial warfare, some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it.

President Obama has also adopted the NSA’s vast surveillance system as a permanent weapon for the exercise of global power. At the broadest level, such surveillance complements Obama’s overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of cutting conventional forces while preserving U.S. global power through a capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains: land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.” In addition, it should be no surprise that, having pioneered the war-making possibilities of cyberspace, the president did not hesitate to launch the first cyberwar in history against Iran.

By the end of Obama’s first term, the NSA could sweep up billions of messages worldwide through its agile surveillance architecture. This included hundreds of access points for penetration of the Worldwide Web’s fiber optic cables; ancillary intercepts through special protocols and “backdoor” software flaws; supercomputers to crack the encryption of this digital torrent; and a massive data farm in Bluffdale, Utah, built at a cost of $2 billion to store yottabytes of purloined data.

Even after angry Silicon Valley executives protested that the NSA’s “backdoor” software surveillance threatened their multi-trillion-dollar industry, Obama called the combination of Internet information and supercomputers “a powerful tool.” He insisted that, as “the world’s only superpower,” the United States “cannot unilaterally disarm our intelligence agencies.” In other words, the sovereign cannot sanction any exceptions to his panoply of exceptions.

Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents in late 2013 indicate that the NSA has conducted surveillance of leaders in some 122 nations worldwide, 35 of them closely, including Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. After her forceful protest, Obama agreed to exempt Merkel’s phone from future NSA surveillance, but reserved the right, as he put it, to continue to “gather information about the intentions of governments… around the world.” The sovereign declined to say which world leaders might be exempted from his omniscient gaze.

Can there be any question that, in the decades to come, Washington will continue to violate national sovereignty through old-style covert as well as open interventions, even as it insists on rejecting any international conventions that restrain its use of aerospace or cyberspace for unchecked force projection, anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or conventions that in any way check this power will be violated when the sovereign so decides. These are now the unwritten rules of the road for our planet. They represent the real American exceptionalism.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Torture & Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, among other works.

 

Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy

24 February, 2015
TomDispatch.com

 

By William Blum

American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.

Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.

I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.

The Twilight Zone of the US State Department
“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop … the Twilight Zone.” (American Television series, 1959-1965)

State Department Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015. Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, questioned by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Lee: President Maduro [of Venezuela] last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We have seen many times that the Venezuelan Government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan Government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

Lee: Sorry. The US has – whoa, whoa, whoa – the US has a longstanding practice of not promoting – What did you say? How longstanding is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a longstanding practice.

Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history –

Lee: Not in this case.

Psaki: – is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

Lee: In this specific case.

Psaki: Correct.

Lee: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime, even – (laughter)

Psaki: The last 21 years. (Laughter.)

Lee: Well done. Touché. But I mean, does “longstanding” mean 10 years in this case? I mean, what is –

Psaki: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.

Lee: I understand, but you said it’s a longstanding US practice, and I’m not so sure – it depends on what your definition of “longstanding” is.

Psaki: We will – okay.

Lee: Recently in Kyiv, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government at the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and you supported it. The constitution was –

Psaki: That is also ludicrous, I would say.

Lee: – not observed.

Psaki: That is not accurate, nor is it with the history of the facts that happened at the time.

Lee: The history of the facts. How was it constitutional?

Psaki: Well, I don’t think I need to go through the history here, but since you gave me the opportunity –- as you know, the former leader of Ukraine left of his own accord.

………………..

Leaving the Twilight Zone … The former Ukrainian leader ran for his life from those who had staged the coup, including a mob of vicious US-supported neo-Nazis.

If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki, tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War. None of the attempts were democratic, constitutional, peaceful, or legal; well, a few were non-violent.

The ideology of the American media is that it believes that it doesn’t have any ideology
So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.

In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.

Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?

For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”

I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Cuba made simple
“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation – unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.”

Aha! So that’s the problem, according to a Washington Post columnist – Cuba is not a democracy! That would explain why the United States does not maintain an embargo against Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt and other distinguished pillars of freedom. The mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship. Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for blindly following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. (They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries). Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have the Koch Brothers to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.

Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba not a democracy because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement two years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.

Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.

The Ministry of Propaganda has a new Commissar
Last month Andrew Lack became chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US government-supported international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. In a New York Times interview, Mr. Lack was moved to allow the following to escape his mouth: “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

So … this former president of NBC News conflates Russia Today (RT) with the two most despicable groups of “human beings” on the planet. Do mainstream media executives sometimes wonder why so many of their audience has drifted to alternative media, like, for example, RT?

Those of you who have not yet discovered RT, I suggest you go to RT.com to see whether it’s available in your city. And there are no commercials.

It should be noted that the Times interviewer, Ron Nixon, expressed no surprise at Lack’s remark.

William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.williamblum.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

Email bblum6 [at] aol.com

Notes
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, chapters 3 and 35
“Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt”, Spiegel Online(Germany), February 8, 2010. Google “Goldman Sachs” Greece for other references.
U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015
Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List
CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002
ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002
“60 Minutes II”, February 26, 2003
Washington Post, March 1, 2003
“60 Minutes”, January 27, 2008
Democracy Now!, February 12, 2015, Wright statement made February 10
Al Kamen, Washington Post, February 18, 2015
Huffington Post, May 3, 2012
New York Times, January 21, 2015
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24 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org