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By Prof. James Petras

The Obama regime, in coordination with its allies and proxies, has re-launched a virulent world-wide campaign to destroy independent governments, encircle and ultimately, undermine global competitors, and establish a new US – EU centered world order.

We will proceed by identifying the recent ‘cycles’ of US empire-building; the advances and retreats; the methods and strategies; the results and perspectives. Our main focus is on the imperial dynamics driving the US toward greater military confrontations, up to and including conditions which can lead to a world war.

Recent Imperial Cycles

US empire-building has not been a linear process. The recent decades provide ample evidence of contradictory experiences. Summarily we can identify several phases in which empire-building has experienced broad advances and sharp setbacks – with certain caveats. We are looking at global processes, in which there are also limited counter-tendencies: In the midst of large-scale imperial advances, particular regions, countries or movements successfully resisted or even reversed the imperial thrust. Secondly, the cyclical nature of empire-building in no way puts in doubt the imperial character of the state and economy and its relentless drive to dominate, exploit and accumulate. Thirdly, the methods and strategy directing each imperial advance differ according to changes among targeted countries.

Over the past thirty years we can identify three phases in empire-building.

Imperial Advance 1980’s to 2000

In the period roughly from the mid-1980’s to the year 2000, empire-building expanded on a global scale.

(A). Imperial Expansion in the former Communist regions

The US and EU penetrated and hegemonized Eastern Europe; disintegrated and pillaged Russia and the USSR; privatized and denationalized hundreds of billions of dollars worth of public enterprises, mass media outlets and banks; incorporated military bases throughout Eastern Europe into NATO and established satellite regimes as willing accomplices in imperial conquests in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

(B). Imperial Expansion in Latin America

Beginning from the early 1980’s to the end of the century, empire-building advanced throughout Latin America under the formula of “free markets and free elections”.

From Mexico to Argentina, empire-centered, neo-liberal regimes privatized and denationalized over 5,000 public enterprises and banks, benefiting US and European multi-nationals. Political leaders lined up with the US in international forums. Latin American generals responded favorably to US-centered military operations. Bankers extracted billions in debt payments and laundered many billions more in illicit money. The US-centered, continent-wide “North American Free Trade Agreement” appeared to advance according to schedule.

 

(C).Imperial Advances in Asia and Africa

Communist and nationalist regimes shed their leftist and anti-imperialist policies and opened their societies and economies to capitalist penetration. In Africa, two key “leftist” countries, Angola and post-apartheid South Africa adopted “free market policies”.

In Asia, China and Indo-China moved decisively toward capitalist development strategies; foreign investment, privatizations and intense exploitation of labor replaced collectivist egalitarianism and anti-imperialism. India, and other state-directed capitalist countries, like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, liberalized their economies. Imperial advances were accompanied by greater economic volatility, a sharpening of the class struggle and an opening of the electoral process to accommodate competing capitalist factions.

Empire-building expanded under the slogan of “free markets and fair elections” – markets dominated by giant multi-nationals and elections, which assured elite successes.

Imperial Retreat and Reverses: 2000-2008

The brutal costs of the advance of empire led to a global counter-tendency, a wave of anti-neoliberal uprisings and military resistance to US invasions. Between 2000 – 2008 empire-building was under siege and in retreat.

Russia and China Challenge the Empire

US empire-building ceased to expand and conquer in two strategic regions: Russia and Asia. Under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, the Russian state was reconstructed; pillage and disintegration was reversed. The economy was harnessed to domestic development. The military was integrated into a system of national defense and security. Russia once again became a major player in regional and international politics.

China’s turn toward capitalism was accompanied by a dynamic state presence and a direct role in promoting double digit growth for two decades: China becoming the second largest economy in the world, displacing the US as the major trading partner in Asia and Latin America. The US economic empire was in retreat.

Latin America: The End of the Neo-Liberal Empire

Neo-liberalism and US-centered ‘integration’ led to pillage, economic crises and major popular upheavals, leading to the ascendancy of new center-left and left regimes. ‘Post neo-liberal’ administrations emerged in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Central America and Uruguay. US empire-builders suffered several strategic defeats.

The US effort to secure a continent-wide free trade agreement fell apart and was replaced by regional integration organizations that excluded the US and Canada. In its place, Washington signed bi-lateral agreements with Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Panama and Peru.

Latin America diversified its markets in Asia and Europe: China replaced the US as its main trading partner. Extractive development strategies and high commodity prices financed greater social spending and political independence.

Selective nationalizations, increased state regulation and debt renegotiations weakened US leverage over the Latin American economies. Venezuela, under President Hugo Chavez successfully challenged US hegemony in the Caribbean via regional organizations. Caribbean economies achieved greater independence and economic viability through membership in PETROCARIBE, a program through which they received petrol from Venezuela at subsidized prices. Central American and Andean countries increased security and trade via the regional organization, ALBA. Venezuela provided an alternative development model to the US-centered neo-liberal approach, in which earnings from the extractive economy financed large-scale social programs.

From the end of the Clinton Administration to the end of the Bush Administration, the economic empire was in retreat. The empire lost Asian and Latin American markets to China. Latin America gained greater political independence. The Middle East became ‘contested terrain’. A revised and stronger Russian state opposed further encroachments on its borders. Military resistance and defeats in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Lebanon challenged US dominance.

Imperial Offensive: Obama’s Advances the Empire

The entire period of the Obama regime has been taken up with reversing the retreat of empire-building. To that end Obama has developed a primarily military strategy (1) confrontation and encircling China and Russia, (2) undermining and overthrowing independent governments in Latin America and re-imposing neo-liberal client regimes, and (3) launching covert and overt military assaults on independent regimes everywhere.

The empire-building offensive of the 21st century differs from that of the previous decade in several crucial ways: Neo-liberal economic doctrines are discredited and electorates are not so easily convinced of the beneficence of falling under US hegemony. In other words, empire-builders cannot rely on diplomacy, elections and free market propaganda to expand their imperial reach as they did in the 1990’s.

To reverse the retreat and advance 21st century empire-building, Washington realized it had to rely on force and violence. The Obama regime allocated billions of dollars to finance arms for mercenaries, salaries for street fighters and campaign expenses for electoral clients engaged in destabilization campaigns. Diplomatic duplicity and broken agreements replaced negotiated settlements – on a grand scale.

Throughout the Obama period not a single imperial advance was secured via elections, diplomatic agreements or political negotiations. The Obama Presidency sought and secured the massification of global spy network (NSA) and the almost daily murder of political adversaries via drones and other means. Covert killer operations under the US Special Forces expanded throughout the world. Obama assumed dictatorial prerogatives, including the power to order the arbitrary assassination of U.S. citizens.

The unfolding of the Obama regime’s global effort to stem the imperial retreat and re-launch empire-building “pivoted” almost exclusively on military instruments: armed proxies, aerial assaults, coups and violent putschist power grabs. Thugs, mobs, Islamist terrorists, Zionist militarists and a medley of retrograde separatist assassins were the tools of imperial advance. The choice of imperial proxies varied according to time and political circumstances.

Confronting and Degrading China: Military Encirclement and Economic Exclusion

Faced with the loss of markets and the challenges of China as a global competitor, Washington developed two major lines of attack: 1. An economic strategy designed to deepen the integration of Asian and Latin America countries in a free trade pact that excludes China (the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement); and 2. Pentagon-designed military plan Air-Sea Battle , which targets China’s mainland with a full-scale air and missile assault if Washington’s current strategy of controlling China’s commercial maritime lifeline fails (FT, 2/10/14). While an offensive military strategy is still on the Pentagon’s drawing board, the Obama regime is building up its maritime armada a few short miles off China’s coast , expanding its military bases in the Philippines, Australia and Japan and tightening the noose around China’s strategic maritime routes for vital imports like oil, gas and raw materials.

The US is actively promoting an Indo-Japanese military alliance as part of its strategy of military encirclement of China. Joint military maneuvers, high-level military coordination and meetings between Japanese and Indian military officials are seen by the Pentagon as strategic advances in isolating China and reinforcing the US stranglehold on China’s maritime routes to the Middle East, Southeast Asia and beyond. India, according to one of India’s leading weeklies, is viewed “as a junior partner of the US. The Indian Navy is fast becoming the chief policeman of the Indian Ocean and the Indian military’s dependence on the U.S. military-industrial complex is increasing…” (Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), 2/15/14, p. 9. The US is also escalating its support for violent separatist movements in China, namely the Tibetans, Uighurs and other Islamists. Obama’s meeting with the Dali Lama was emblematic of Washington’s efforts to foment internal unrest.

The gross political intervention of outgoing U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke in domestic Chinese politics is an indication that diplomacy is not the Obama regime’s prime policy instrument when it comes to dealing with China. Ambassador Locke openly met with Uighur and Tibetan separatists and publicly disparaged China’s economic success and political system while openly encouraging opposition politics (FT, 2/28/14, p. 2).

The Obama regime’s attempt to advance empire in Asia via military confrontation and trade pacts, which exclude China, has led China to build-up its military capacity to avoid maritime strangulation. China answers the US trade threat by advancing its productive capacity, diversifying its trade relations, increasing its ties with Russia and deepening its domestic market.

To date, the Obama regime’s reckless militarization of the Pacific has not led to an open break in relations with China, but the military road to advancing empire at China’s expense threatens a global economic catastrophe or worse, a world war.

Imperial Advance: Isolating, Encircling and Degrading Russia

With the advent of President Vladimir Putin and the reconstitution of the Russian state and economy, the U.S. lost a vassal client and source of plundered wealth. Washington’s empire-builders continued to seek Russian ‘cooperation and collaboration’ in undermining independent states, isolating China and pursuing its colonial wars. The Russian state, under Putin and Medvedev, had sought to accommodate U.S. empire builders via negotiated agreements, which would enhance Russia’s position in Europe, recognize Russian strategic borders and acknowledge Russian security concerns. However, Russian diplomacy secured few and transitory gains while the US and EU made major gains with Russian complicity and passivity.

The un-stated agenda of Washington, especially with Obama’s drive to re-launch a new wave of imperial conquests, was to undermine Russia’s re-emergence as a major player in world politics. The strategic idea was to isolate Russia, weaken its growing international presence and return it to the vassal status of the Yeltsin period, if possible.

From the US – EU takeover of Eastern Europe , the Balkans and Baltic states, and their transformation into NATO military bases and capitalist vassal states in the early 1990’s, to the penetration and pillage of Russia during the Yeltsin years, the prime purpose of Western policy has been to establish a unipolar empire under US domination.

The EU and the US proceeded to dismember Yugoslavia into subservient mini-states. They then bombed Serbia in order to carve off Kosovo, destroying one of the few independent countries still allied with Russia. The U.S. then moved on to foment uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine and Chechnya. They bombed, invaded and later occupied Iraq – a former Russian ally in the Gulf region.

The driving strategy of US policy was to encircle and reduce Russia to the status of a weak, marginal power, and to undermine Vladimir Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s position as a regional power. In 2008 Washington’s puppet regime in Georgia, tested the mettle of the Russian state by launching an assault on South Ossetia, killing at least 10 Russian peacekeepers and wounding hundreds (not to mention thousands of civilians). Then-Russian President Medvedev responded by sending the Russian armed forces to repel Georgian troops and support the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

U.S. diplomatic agreements with Russia had been asymmetrical – Russia was to acquiesce in Western expansion in exchange for ‘political acceptance’. Duplicity trumped open-diplomacy. Despite agreements to the contrary, U.S. bases and missile installations were established throughout Eastern Europe, pointing at Russia, under the pretext that they were “really targeting Iran”. Even as Russia protested that post-Cold War agreements were breached, the Empire ignored Moscow’s complaints and encirclement advanced.

In a further diplomatic disaster, Russia and China signed off on a U.S.-authored United Nations Security Council agreement to allow NATO to engage in “humanitarian overflights” in Libya. NATO immediately took this as the ‘green light’ for attack and converted ‘humanitarian intervention’ into a devastating aerial bombing campaign that led to the overthrow of Libya’s legitimate government and the destruction of Libya as viable, independent North African state. By signing the ‘humanitarian’ UN agreement, Russia and China lost a friendly government and trading partner in Africa! Even earlier, the Russians had agreed to allow the US to transport weapons and troops through Russian Federation territory to support the US invasion of Afghanistan … with no reciprocal gain (except perhaps an even greater flood of Afghan heroin).

Russian diplomats agreed to US (Zionist)-authored UN economic sanctions against Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program … undermining a political ally and lucrative market. Moscow believed that by backing US sanctions on Iran and granting transport routes to Afghanistan in late 2001 they would receive some ‘security guarantees’ from the Americans regarding the separatist movements in the Caucuses. The U.S. ‘reciprocated’ by further backing Chechen separatist leaders exiled in the US despite the on-going terror campaigns against Russian civilians – up to and even after the Chechen slaughter of hundreds of school children and teachers in Beslan in 2004….

With the US under Obama advancing its encirclement of Russia in Eurasia and its isolation in North Africa and the Middle East, Putin finally decided to draw a line by backing Russia’s only remaining ally in the Middle East, Syria. Putin sought to secure a negotiated end to the Western-Gulf Monarchist-backed mercenary invasion of Damascus. To little avail: The US and EU increased arms shipments, military trainers and financing to the 30,000 Islamist mercenaries based in Jordan as they engaged in cross-border attacks to overthrow the Syrian government.

Washington and Brussels continued their imperial push toward the Russian heartland by organizing and financing a violent seizure of power (putsch) in western Ukraine. The Obama regime financed a coalition of armed neo-Nazi street fighters and neo-liberal politicos, to the tune of $5 billion dollars, to overthrow the elected regime. The putschists then moved to end Crimean autonomy and break long-standing military treaty agreements with Russia. Under enormous pressure from the autonomous Crimean government and the vast majority of the population and facing the critical loss of its naval and military facilities on the Black Sea, Putin, finally, forcefully moved Russian troops into a defensive mode in Crimea.

The Obama regime launched a series of aggressive moves against Russia to isolate it and to buttress it faltering puppet regime in Kiev: economic sanctions and expulsions were the order of the day … Obama’s seizure of the Ukraine signaled the start of a ‘new Cold War’. The seizure of the Ukraine was part of Obama’s grand ongoing strategy of advancing empire.

The Ukraine power grab signaled the biggest geo-political challenge to the continued existence of the Russian state. Obama seeks to extend and deepen the imperial sweep across Europe to the Caucuses: the violent regime coup and subsequent defense of the puppet regime in Kiev are key elements in undermining a key adversary– Russia.

After pretending to ‘partner’ with Russia, while slicing off Russian allies in the Balkans and Mid-East over the previous decades, Obama made his most audacious and reckless move. Casting off all pretexts of peaceful co-existence and mutual accommodation, the Obama regime broke a power-sharing agreement with Russia over Ukrainian governance and backed the neo-Nazi putsch.

The Obama regime assumed that having secured Russia’s earlier acquiescence in the face of advancing US imperial power in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Gulf region, Washington’s empire-builders made the fateful decision to test Russia in its most strategic geopolitical region, one directly affecting the Russian people and its most strategic military assets. Russia reacted in the only language understood in Washington and Brussels: with a major military mobilization. Obama’s advance of ‘empire-building via salami tactics’ and duplicitous diplomacy was nearing an end.

Advancing Empire in the Middle East and Latin America

The imperial advance of the 1990’s came to an end by the middle of the first decade of the new millennium. Defeats in Afghanistan, withdrawal from Iraq, the demise of puppet regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, election losses in the Ukraine and the defeat and demise of pro-U.S. neo-liberal regimes in Latin America were exacerbated by a deepening economic crisis in the imperial centers of Europe and Wall Street.

Obama had few economic and political options to advance the empire. Yet his regime was determined to end the retreat and advance the empire; he resorted to tactics and strategies more akin to 19th century colonial and 20th century totalitarian regimes.

The methods were violent- militarism was the policy pivot. But at a time of domestic imperial exhaustion, new military tactics replaced large-scale ground force invasions. Proxy-armed mercenaries took center stage in overthrowing regimes targeted by the US. Political and ideological affinities were subsumed under the generic euphemism of “rebels”. The mass media alternated between pressuring for greater military escalation and endorsing the existing level of imperial warfare. The entire political spectrum in Europe and the US shifted rightward – even as the majority of the electorate rejected new military engagements, especially ground wars.

Obama escalated troops in Afghanistan, launched an air war that overthrew President Gadhafi and turned the Libya into a broken, failed state. Proxy wars became the new strategy to advance imperial empire-building. Syria was targeted – tens of thousands of Islamist extremists were recruited and funded by imperial regimes and despotic Gulf monarchies. Millions of refugees fled, tens of thousands were killed

In Latin America, Obama backed the military coup in Honduras overthrowing the elected Liberal government of President Manuel Zelaya, he recognized a congressional coup ousting the elected center-left government in Paraguay while refusing to recognize the election victory of President Maduro in Venezuela. In the face of Maduro’s win in Venezuela, Washington backed several months of mob street violence in an attempt to destabilize the country.

In the Ukraine, Egypt, Venezuela and Thailand, ‘the street’ replaced elections. Obama’s strategic imperial goals have focused on the re-conquest and pillage of Russia and its return to the vassal status of the Boris Yeltsin years, Latin America’s return to the neo-liberal regimes of 1990’s and China to the submissiveness of the 1980’s. The imperial strategy has been ‘to conquer from within’ setting the stage for domination from the outside.

Advancing Empire: Israel and the Middle East Detour

One of the great historical paradoxes of the U.S. imperial retreat of the 21st century has been the role played by influence of Israel and its Zionist Fifth Column embedded within the U.S. political power structure. Washington’s wars and sanctions in the Middle East have been largely at the behest of influential ‘Israel Firsters’ in the White House, Pentagon, Treasury and National Security Council and Congress.

It was largely because the US was engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Washington “neglected” China’s growing economic prowess. By concentrating on ‘wars for Israel’ in the Middle East, the U.S. has not been in a position to challenge the rise of nationalism and populism in Latin America. Protracted ‘wars for Israel’ have exhausted the US economy and the American public’s enthusiasm for new ground wars elsewhere.

Zionist ideologues, dubbed “neo-conservatives”, were instrumental in shaping the global militarist approach to empire-building and marginalizing the market-driven empire building, favored by the multi-nationals and giant extractive industry.

Obama’s attempt to halt the retreat of empire caused by Zionist militarism has not borne fruit: His effort to co-opt Zionists and pressure Israel to stop fomenting new wars in the Middle East is a failure. His ‘pivot to Asia’ has turned into a strategy of brute military encirclement of China. His overtures to Iran have been stymied by the Zionist power bloc in Congress and the imposition of Israeli-dictated terms of negotiations. The entire “advance of the empire-building project”, which was to define the Obama legacy, has been weakened by the enormous cost of heeding the advice and directives of the Israel-loyalists within his Administration. Israel, one of the most brutal colonial powers, has paradoxically and unintentionally played a major role in undermining Obama’s efforts to reverse the decline of empire and advance the U.S. diplomatic and economic dimensions of empire-building

Results and Perspectives: Advancing Empire in the Post Neo-Liberal Period

Obama’s reckless effort to advance empire in the second decade of the 21st century is far more dangerous than his predecessors in the late 20th century. Russia has recovered. It is not the disintegrating state that Bush and Clinton dismembered and pillaged. China is no longer a rising market economy so eager to trade with the US while overlooking American incursions into Chinese territorial waters. Today China is a major economic power, wielding economic leverage in the form of $3 Trillion in U.S. Treasury notes. China no longer tolerates U.S. interference in its domestic politics- it is willing to crack down on U.S.-backed ethnic separatists and terrorists.

Latin America, including Venezuela, have developed autonomous regional organizations, diversified their markets to Asia and established a powerful post-neoliberal consensus. Venezuela has turned its military, once the favorite instrument of US-engineered coups, into a bulwark of the existing democratic order.

The electoral road to US empire-building has been closed or requires tight imperial “supervision” to secure “favorable outcomes”. Washington’s new policy of choice is violence: enlisting mob action, mercenary extremists, Islamists and Uighur terrorists, neo-Nazis and the riff raff of the world in its service.

The balance sheet of six years of “advancing empire” under Obama is in doubt. The violent overthrow of President Gadhafi did not lead to a stable client regime: the utter destruction and chaos in Libya has undercut the imperial presence. Syria is under attack but by anti-Western Islamist fanatics. The defeat of Assad will not ‘advance empire’ as much as it will expand radical Islamist (including Al Qaeda) power.

The Ukraine puppet regime of neo-liberals and neo-Nazis is literally bankrupt, riven with internal conflicts and facing profound regional divisions. Russia is threatened, but their leaders have taken decisive military action to defend their Crimean allies and strategic military bases.

Obama has provoked and threatened adversaries but has not secured much in terms of valuable allies or clients. His effort to replicate the imperial advances of the 1990’s has failed because the relationships of power between Europe and Russia, Japan and China, and Venezuela and Colombia have changed. Proxies, predator drones and the US Special Forces are not able to reverse the retreat. The economic crisis has cut too deep; the domestic exhaustion with empire is too pervasive. The cost of sustaining Israel is too high. Advancing empire in these circumstances is a dangerous game: it risks a larger nuclear war to overcome adversity and retreat.

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals.

11 March, 2014

James Petras Blog

 

By Johannes Stern

In the lead-up to the referendum on the status of Crimea scheduled for March 16, Washington and its European allies are stepping up diplomatic and military pressure on Russia.

On Monday, US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt declared that the United States would not recognize the results of the “so-called referendum” and threatened further steps against Russia. He said Washington was “not prepared to recognize any result of the referendum,” as it regards Crimea “as an integral part of Ukraine.” He accused Russia of trying to change the status of Crimea “under the barrel of a gun.”

Pyatt said President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry had held talks with European leaders over the weekend, and that the US and the European Union were in complete agreement that harsher sanctions could follow the referendum. “There is no daylight between us,” he said.

Falling into line behind Washington, European leaders released their own bellicose statements. Steffen Seibert, the press secretary of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said that, “the chancellor asserted the German position forcefully” in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, calling “the so-called March 16 referendum on Crimea illegal.”

Seibert claimed, “[T]he Russian side has not shown readiness” to establish a so called “contact group” to negotiate a Russian stand-down in Crimea. Seibert warned Moscow “to change this position in the near future,” adding that, “The time for a conversation and rapprochement is short.”

Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, who met for dinner Sunday night, threatened Russia with “further consequences” if Moscow seized on the poll to justify an attempt by Crimea to separate itself from Ukraine. Both reiterated that the referendum was “illegal.”

The aggressive stance against Russia is supported by both conservative and social democratic politicians in Europe. British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband called on Cameron to exert “maximum pressure” on Russia, while German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) threatened fresh sanctions over the weekend.

Addressing the House of Commons on Monday, Cameron warned that Russia could face targeted sanctions “within days.”

US and European officials pressed ahead despite phone calls late Sunday from Chinese President Xi Jinping to Obama and to Merkel, calling on the US and EU to scale back tensions. “The situation in Ukraine is extremely complex, and what is most urgent is for all sides to remain calm and exercise restraint to avoid an escalation in tensions,” Xi reportedly told Obama. “Political and diplomatic routes must be used to resolve the crisis,” he added. He went on to suggest that China could serve as a diplomatic channel to facilitate diplomacy.

Xi reportedly stressed with Merkel that the situation was “highly sensitive” and that China favored finding a political solution to the crisis.

The Chinese intervention evidently had no effect. On Monday, the EU confirmed that “preparatory work” on fresh sanctions had “started.” Officials from the EU and the US are reportedly to meet in London today to discuss another round of sanctions that could be formally adopted at an EU foreign ministers summit on March 17—that is, the day after the Crimean referendum.

The sanctions, including travel bans on Russian officials and the freezing of their assets, would mark the second stage in the EU’s three-step plan. In a first step, the EU last week agreed to suspend visa talks and negotiations on a new investment agreement with Russia. The third stage would involve an arms embargo and harsh trade sanctions.

Even without a formal decision on trade sanctions, the EU is taking initial steps to mount a blockade of Russian energy supplies to Europe. The European Commission decided Monday to prevent Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom from delivering more gas to central Europe by circumventing Ukraine. According to the Financial Times, EU officials “acknowledged privately the move was geopolitical as much as technical.”

These decisions are only the latest in a series of war-mongering provocations by the imperialist powers since Russia sought to secure Crimea, which has a Russian majority and is the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, in the wake of the Western-backed putsch in Ukraine on February 22.

In order to achieve their geopolitical goals and destroy Russian influence not only in the western part of Ukraine but also in the east and throughout the region, Washington, Berlin and Brussels are prepared to drive Ukraine into civil war and risk a military confrontation with Russia.

NATO announced Monday that it is deploying AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) reconnaissance aircraft to Poland and Romania as “part of the alliance’s efforts to monitor the crisis in Ukraine.”

Germany is playing a growing role in the military build-up. Most of the AWACS planes have their home base in the German town of Geilenkirchen. The deployment comes as US forces boost the number of F-15 fighter jets flying NATO air patrols over the Baltic States.

Today, Steinmeier is set to travel to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for talks on the Crimean crisis.

On Sunday, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave an interview to the German Bild newspaper in which he announced plans to improve the efficiency of the Ukrainian army. On Monday, the Ukrainian army began military drills. According to an announcement of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the government is testing the combat readiness of its troops.

The Ukrainian military drills came only one day after Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk gave a nationalist, war-mongering speech in front of pro-government crowds celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Taras Shevchenko. “Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land,” Yatsenyuk declared. “And we won’t budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this.”

The reactionary character of the new Ukrainian government and the so-called “Maidan movement” was highlighted by the fact that Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky received a friendly welcome on Sunday when he addressed a few thousand protesters.

Khodorkovsky personifies a layer of former Stalinists who, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, used their positions in the bureaucracy to amass incredible fortunes through fraud and theft of the formerly nationalised property. He spent ten years in prison for his crimes before he was released at the end of last year in a deal struck between the Putin regime and Berlin.

Khodorkovsky’s presence on the Maidan underscores that the protest movement had nothing to do with democracy or human rights. The new regime in Kiev relies on Khodorkovsky-type Ukrainian oligarchs, working closely with far-right and fascist groups, to impose massive attacks on the working class and help the imperialist powers to isolate and carve up Russia.

Addressing the Maidan crowd, Khodorkovsky denounced the Putin regime while seeking to whitewash the fascist elements who led the coup against Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. “Russian propaganda lies, as always,” he said. “There are no fascists or Nazis here, no more than on the streets on Moscow or St. Petersburg. I want you to know that there is a very different Russia. There are people there who, during those days, took to the streets to participate in anti-war rallies in Moscow. They did so despite arrests and many years that they will have to spend in prison.”

Khodorkovsky’s remarks were widely reported in the Western media, as they conform to the official propaganda, which seeks to present the mélange of fascist thugs and multi-billionaire oligarchs as a democratic revolution.

11 March, 2014

WSWS.org

 

 

By S. Chatterjee

The events that are playing out in Venezuela evoke a strange sense of déjà-vu. It brings back memories of the coup of 2002, spearheaded by the Venezuelan opposition parties with far right-wing leader Leopoldo Lopez playing a starring role with the blessings of the United States, which was a brazen attempt to undermine the Bolivarian revolution and to oust Venezuela’s democratically elected leader, the late Hugo Chavez. The current street protests in Venezuela, which began in the university town of San Cristobal as a reaction against the rising incidents of violent crime, have taken on a different hue altogether. The right wing opposition parties, with the encouragement of the US (which has US $5mn in its 2014 budget earmarked to support opposition activities in Venezuela), have blocked traffic on major thoroughfares, attacked government buildings including attempts at arson, engaged in violence ranging from shooting to throwing Molotov cocktails etc. The protesters have rallied around the slogan ‘salida’ which indicates a forceful regime change, not a constitutional removal of Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor and Venezuela’s democratically elected leader. In the propaganda of the opposition, Nicolas Maduro has repeatedly referred to as a dictator when the facts are that he won through fairly conducted elections, and his popularity was reinforced by his stunning victory by a ten point margin in the December municipal elections where the ruling party won 76% of the votes polled.

The roots of discontent in Venezuela can be traced to the massive economic redistribution attempts made by the Chavista government under Chavez which left the upper classes alienated. Though there has been a massive improvement in the living conditions of the poor in Venezuela, poverty has not been eradicated. Since the implementation of the Bolivarian Missions, Venezuela has made progress in social development particularly in areas such as health, education and poverty. In fact, Venezuela is one of the few nations which are expected to meet all the eight goals of the Millennium Development Goals, by the 2015 deadline unlike India. Notwithstanding all of this, there has been a scarcity of staple food items as well as a raging inflation which has disproportionately affected the poor. Venezuela’s dependence on imports for food security as well as speculation is largely responsible for such a condition. The government’s inability to rein in inflation has fanned the flames of discontentment and rebellion. The triggering factor has been a massive increase in violent crime in the country, which has one of the highest rates of homicide in the world, which stands at 39 out of every 1,00,000 persons. While these are very valid causes of concern for any country, it appears that the initial protests have been hijacked by the opposition which aims to create a situation which could lead to calls of external armed intervention in the country, with predictable results. A similar pattern of protests have emerged in Ukraine where a minority has come out on the streets in order to topple a government elected by the majority. Parallels may be drawn with Chile in 1973 where the popular and democratically elected Allende government was ousted by a CIA backed military coup which was preceded by a protracted period of orchestrated civil unrest by right wing and middle class groups supported and financed by the US.

The theatre for political coups has changed over the years. Coups no longer happen secretly behind the public gaze. Coups of the twenty-first century are orchestrated on streets in form of protests leading to disorder and attempts at destablisation. An important distinction needs to be drawn between protests such as those in Egypt which were an expression of majority angst against undemocratic regimes vis-a-vis attempts of minority elements to oust democratically elected officials. The corporate media, by and large, has played an unholy part in the attempt to portray Maduro government’s actions as barbaric and draconian whereas the truth is that of the hundreds initially arrested for creating disorder, less than twenty remain in detention and they have been charged with specific acts of violence. The government of Venezuela has shown extraordinary restraint in dealing with the acts of vandalism of the street mobs.

It is important to mention that the current protests are representative of the prosperous classes taking to the streets in order to defeat the results of the election. The poor have remained loyal to the Chavista government and have even organized rallies in support of it. The present protests are a clear attempt to topple the popular government and replace it with an oligarchy that would place the immense oil resources of the country at the disposal of a privileged minority instead of letting it get used for poverty eradication. It is significant to note that Venezuela has a mixed economy dominated by the petroleum sector, which accounts for roughly a third of GDP, around 80% of exports, and more than half of government revenues. It also has the least expensive petrol in the world because the consumer price of petrol is heavily state-subsidized. Naturally, the opposition has the support of the corporate media, the big corporate houses and the business elite who have a stake in pulling out the rug from beneath Maduro’s feet and reversing Chavez’s war against neo-liberalism which began some fifteen years ago, with massive support from Venezuela’s masses. It is no secret that the left-democratic governments of Latin America have been battling against Western interference and attempts at political subversion which would turn these countries into client states of the West, quite like Mexico and Colombia.

The battle in Venezuela is also being played out on the social media where Twitter and Facebook have emerged as key forums to spread both information and disinformation. The disingenuous nature of the images posted on social media were revealed recently when many of the images purportedly from Venezuela’s protests turned out to be those from Egypt, Greece, Spain and other places. The Venezuelan government has disrupted internet connectivity in various hotbeds of the protests and has even banned certain websites, in an attempt to muzzle dissent, a move which is difficult to condone because tolerance, and even encouragement, of ‘peaceful’ protest is a measure of democracy.

The issue underlying this utterly confusing spectacle of events is whether political decisions are to be taken through the ballot or through muscle-flexing on the streets. It seems patently undemocratic to allow the ballot to be cowed down by the bullet and now is a time for governments around the world to take a stand on whether democracy, by itself, is deserving of respect, or whether democracy is to be given lip-service only when it serves the interests of those demanding it.

 

S. Chatterjee is a New Delhi based lawyer

10 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Chris Marsden

Washington spent the weekend ramping up pressure on its allies to intensify the provocations and threats against Russia over Ukraine.

On Friday, President Barack Obama spoke to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On Saturday he held talks with UK Prime Minister David Cameron, French President François Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. He also held a conference call with the presidents of the ex-Soviet Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—Andris Berzins, Dalia Grybauskaite and Toomas Ilves, respectively.

A White House communication spoke of universal agreement “on the need for Russia to pull its military forces back to their base” and for “the deployment of international observers and human rights monitors to the Crimean peninsula.”

An even more threatening pose was struck by Secretary of State John Kerry. According to a State Department spokesman, Kerry warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that “continued military escalation and provocation in Crimea or elsewhere in Ukraine, along with steps to annex Crimea to Russia, would close any available space for diplomacy…”

Last Thursday, Crimea’s regional government announced a referendum for March 16 on whether to become part of Russia. Obama’s spokesman described the referendum as “a violation of Ukraine’s constitution” and a “violation of international law.”

British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC that Europe would face the “great danger of a real shooting conflict” if Russian forces moved beyond the Crimean peninsula to enter eastern Ukraine. Diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions would not remove Russian forces from the Crimea, he told the Andrew Marr Show. Asked whether Britain and the European Union would advise the Ukrainians not to take up arms against the Russians, he replied in the negative saying, “It is not really possible to go through different scenarios with the Ukrainians and say: in these circumstances you shoot and in these you don’t.”

In Kiev, Ukraine’s US-imposed prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, pledged that his government would not give a “single centimetre” of Ukrainian land to Russia. Yatsenyuk flies to Washington on Wednesday for discussions at the White House on the military and financial situation, White House officials told CNN.

Official threats of retaliatory action usually involve economic and political sanctions, but the US has above all been busy isolating Russia through a sustained military build-up in conjunction with states on Russia’s periphery.

Last Friday, the USS Truxtun crossed into the Black Sea from Turkey’s Bosphorus in what was said to be a “previously planned” training exercise together with the Bulgarian and Romanian navies. The USS Truxton is a destroyer with a crew of 300, equipped with anti-ship missiles. It was stationed in Greece as part of a strike group headed by the aircraft carrier USS George W. Bush, the world’s largest warship, and replaced the USS Taylor, which ran aground in the Turkish port of Samsun last month—an indication of the permanent US presence in the region that is now being beefed up.

The US will send 12 F-16 fighter jets, a Boeing KC-135 refuelling Stratotanker and 300 service personnel to Poland next week for an expanded training exercise. Four F-15s currently fly air patrols over the Baltic States as part of a ten-year-old NATO mission, and the US already has a training squadron of F-16 fighters and Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport planes in Poland. NATO scrambled jets over 40 times last year in response to Russian jets approaching Baltic borders.

The Eastern European and Baltic States are playing a leading role in whipping up a pro-war atmosphere against Russia, including convening a meeting of NATO last week to discuss their “fears” of Russian expansionism.

Reuters noted that Poland is discussing modernising its military, including plans to spend $45 billion in the next decade to build a new missile defence system and upgrade its weapons systems, including transport helicopters and tanks.

Lithuanian Defence Minister Juozas Olekas told Reuters: “After the events in Ukraine, the Russian aggression, the need to increase spending will be better understood by Lithuanian people, and there will be more support for it.”

Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Jan Bjorklund, last week called for a “doctrinal shift” in Swedish defence policy in the context of discussions on whether it should fully join NATO.

Pre-arranged military manoeuvres are only one of a series of “happy coincidences” indicating that the US planned the crisis that supposedly began with “spontaneous” pro-European Union protests after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed away from an EU Association Agreement last November.

For example, the United States assumed control of NATO’s air policing duties over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in January, taking over from Belgium. According to Fox News, a statement issued at the time said the mission “not only protects the integrity of NATO airspace, it illustrates the alliance’s core function of collective defence.”

The US has spent the past two decades seeking to eliminate Ukraine as a strategic buffer between Russia and the West, sponsoring the “Orange Revolution” in 2004 in an ultimately abortive attempt to install a wholly pro-Western government. Washington and its allies have tried to do the same in other former Soviet states by integrating them into the structures of NATO and the European Union, encouraging Georgia, in particular, and former Soviet republics in Central Asia to take the path of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Washington has been funnelling money into the region for years and has now opened the taps all the way. According to an admission in December by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, the US had invested “over $5 billion” to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

Others states involved in US machinations are no less financially beholden to Washington. Last Monday, the European Commission (EC) was involved in procedures demanding that Bulgaria abandon an agreement with the US on the provision of economic, technical and other types of assistance on the grounds that the deal was in breach of EU directives because of violations of competition principles. A report noted that between 1990 and 2007, Bulgaria received $600 million from the US under the agreement. Of this, fully 99.14 percent went to defence.

There is little wonder that Lavrov responded to Kerry’s phone call by declaring that the crisis in Ukraine was “created artificially for purely geopolitical reasons.”

In Ukraine, the newly-installed regime is relying on various oligarchs to rule the country in alliance with far-right and fascist groups. In recent days, several oligarchs have been appointed to top government jobs, including leadership of regional administrations in the east that have been the scene of pro- and anti-government demonstrations and conflicts.

Ihor Kolomoyskyi was named head of Dnepropetrovsk Regional Administration, while Sergey Taruta, the country’s 16th richest man, was appointed as the new regional governor of Donetsk. Kolomoisky, a metals, banking and media tycoon worth $2.4 billion, told the Associated Press that his task would be to quell any unrest in his region, which was, he claimed, being fomented by agents from Russia.

Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, worth an estimated $15.4 billion and until recently a major backer of Yanukvoych’s Party of Regions, has also been lined up to demand national unity.

The former US ambassador to Ukraine, John Edward Herbst, was unapologetic, telling the AP: “The oligarchs taking on this responsibility is a demonstration of their commitment to an independent, sovereign and territorially integrated Ukraine.”

Yesterday saw rallies by pro-government forces to honour the birth 200 years ago of poet Taras Shevchenko, known as the father of the Ukrainian language. The rallies led to clashes with pro-Russian groups in Sevastopol in Crimea.

 

10 March, 2014

WSWS.org

 

Women Globally Resist the Terrors of Imperialism and Capitalism

The world has become a terrifying  place for women. Imperialist powers take all opportunities to interfere and to expand their influence and control. The majority of the world’s women face the most oppressive and exploitative of conditions: low wages; part-time and casual jobs; lack of benefits; dangerous workplaces; lack of protective laws; the dwindling quantity and quality of social services and safety nets.

More than ever, women must unite and resist!

In Europe, close to one-third of the work force survive in precarious conditions.  Women, migrants and youth are hardest hit. Youth unemployment has rung a high 60% in Greece and 55% in Spain. Governments respond to strikes, mass protests and the general turmoil by scapegoating migrants and  minorities.

Imperialist aggression intensified in 2013 and early 2014 with the expansion of wars of aggression and economic interventionist strategies. Imperialists are fomenting civil wars from Venezuela to Ukraine.  The duly elected left and progressive government in Venezuela is under attack by a U.S.-backed opposition that uses inflammatory tactics to fragment the administration and “provoke” a civil war.  In Ukraine, the European Union backs riots in Kiev – a strategy to pry open the Ukrainian-Russian geopolitical relations and break a historic partnership.

This political meddling reveals the primary agenda of the imperialists: to gain geopolitical domination by blatantly wielding military might with no scruples about the safety and interests of the populations.

Women and children bear the worst from such induced unrest.  As in all unstable situations, their lives are more precarious in terms of their livelihood and access to health, food, and shelter. Above all, their general safety, well-being and security have been written off and many women and children end up as “collateral damage”.

In Asia, a special foraging ground for imperialists, the U.S.-led acceleration of international trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) also reveal priorities of plunder and exploitation. The TPPA, an underhanded multi-national trade deal prevents sovereign nations from developing policies and laws based on their domestic priorities. For women, the consequences of the TPPA are dire as they lose access to patented medicines and medicine technologies for easily treated communicable diseases, breast cancer screening and treatment, diabetes treatment, and more.

Ecological disasters directly related to corporate negligence and capitalist expansion have diminished the ability of women to support any type of self-sufficiency around food and work in their communities. Haiti is significant proof. Women and children survivors at the 4th year anniversary of the massive 7.3 earthquake in Haiti, the killer of over 220,000 people, even now still live in a state of food insecurity, malnutrition, and in terror of the current cholera epidemic.

In the wreckage caused by typhoon Haiyan (“Yolanda”) in the Philippines, many women and children lost their lives because of a severe lack of infrastructure and the Philippine government’s impotency in attending to the needs of victims. Meanwhile, more disaster looms in the areas of the Philippines where foreign corporations  mine and the extract resources, where displacement of communities continue, as do the destruction of forests, fields and rivers.

Mining and development aggression forcibly shrinks the capacity of women to work in their localities. When nation-states prioritize the extraction of natural resources, land-grabbing strategies and exploitation strategies are usually implemented to the detriment of the  welfare and security of residents. When “natural” disasters occur, the mass victimization of former residents becomes complete.

In Latin America, the will of global capital is the same-  occupation of land for the food security issues or real estate investments of powerful countries.  The fatal results are the same for peasant women and indigenous peoples everywhere : loss of their land and the cultural connection to their heritage.

In servitude to global capital, decrepit governments world-wide continue to chant the hymn of privatization, deregulation and liberalization, and sing the praises of the private sector as they hand over entire sectors of the economy to it.

A turnover of social services to profit corporations is underway. Privatization of the education sector has sparked massive student strikes and movements from Quebec to Chile to the Philippines.

The health care industry, among the fastest-growing in the world, now has transnationals in it. Corporate profits of these health care moguls are on top of the pile, bringing in about 10% of the  GDP of most developed countries. For masses of people, health care has become unaffordable, and the burden on families and particularly on women have increased .

As industrial jobs decline,  the Walmart-like sales jobs in the service sector spread, and are filled mostly by women. They get the lowest-wage jobs, and the least justice.

As more people are forced to migrate to survive, the feminization of migration shows no let-up, involving the fragmentation of many families and communities, and the increase of slavery in foreign lands.

Canada, a country built by immigrants, now mainly recruits temporary workers, who are denied hope for permanent residency. In the US , the Obama administration deports 1100  aspiring Americans every day. This year, President Obama will hit the dubious landmark of having deported two million people during his presidency.

The women of the world are neither blind, nor deaf; they are neither dumb, nor still.

In the face of all odds, working peoples are rising up.  Fierce resistance by women against exploitation and oppression takes place today as part of larger militant movements for liberation and social justice.

In Venezuela, attempts to destabilize President Nicolas Maduro’s duly-elected government have been met by the mobilization of thousands of Venezuelan women taking to the streets, in support of Maduro.  Across the capital of Caracas and in other regions throughout Venezuela, demonstrations and marches of toiling women have exposed and rejected the violence incited by the U.S. backed right-wing opposition, headed by Leopoldo Lopez.

Elsewhere, women oppose the imperialist culture that serves to uphold the ruling elite by spreading ignorance and setting working class people against each other.  In Uganda, the government of President Yoweri Museveni, influenced by right wing religious groups from imperialist countries, has recently passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, imposing  life imprisonment for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or intersexed Ugandans, and criminalizing supporters of the LGBTQ community or any person who “promotes homosexuality.”

In defiance of mounting violence, courageous women have brought international attention on this issue through campaign work, drawing media support, and linking with human rights organizations and LGBTQ allies.

In Spain, where new restrictive legislation on abortion will set back women’s reproductive rights by 25 years, thousands of women across the country have mobilized to block the legislation.

In December, 2013, women from such countries as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines joined forces for a series of activities dubbed, “Grassroots Women’s Solidarity,” during the People’s Global Camp in Bali, Indonesia. The Camp was set up in protest of the 9th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization taking place there and included many colourful and militant activities, marches and workshops to expose the bankrupt WTO. Finally, at the camp, the International Women’s Alliance (IWA) successfully launched its “US Troops Out Now” campaign, aimed to stop militarization and US intervention in the Asia Pacific region and beyond. Women from grassroots organizations led by the IWA forged their strength with other sectors, such as youth, workers, and peasants, for larger mobilizations, which collectively exposed and made its call to junk the renewed neoliberal offensives of the World Trade Organization.

Women of the World, Rise Up and Unite!!

Stop the criminalization of women migrants and their families!!

No to developmental aggression!!

Free Women Political Prisoners!!

Stop Imperialist Wars of Aggression!!

Decent Jobs and conditions for all!!

Solidarity Against Precarious Work!!

Women Unite Against the Capitalist Crisis!!

Livelihood and a Sustainable planet!!

Press statement
March 8, 2014

By Edward Snowden

Whistleblower Edward Snowden delivers written testimony to European Parliament

What follows is a statement addressed to an investigative panel of the European Parliament looking into the nature and scope of U.S. surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency and its partner agencies in Europe. Subsequent to the statement are specific answers to written questions posed by the panel to Mr. Snowden. The original statement from which this was reproduced is available here as a pdf.

Introductory Statement

I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others that we learned about over the last year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the foundation of liberal societies.

The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political pressure to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that such programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was untrue, as did a Federal Court.

Looking at the US government’s reports here is valuable. The most recent of these investigations, performed by the White House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program investigated was not only ineffective — they found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack — but that it had no basis in law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program, and the greatest success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the United States transferring $8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.

After noting that even this unimpressive success – uncovering evidence of a single unlawful bank transfer — would have been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended. Unfortunately, we know from press reports that this program is still operating today.

I believe that suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on “collecting it all,” we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.

Despite the extraordinary intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications world-wide, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “Underwear Bomber,” was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009. The 290 persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed to detonate the device. While even Mutallab’s own father warned the US government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn’t get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a US visa.

Nor did the US government’s comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn’t do more than a cursory investigation — although they did plenty of worthless computer-based searching – and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died. The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in America.

This should not have happened. I worked for the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue. And I have risked my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.

The NSA granted me the authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance systems, including within the United States. I have personally targeted individuals using these systems under both the President of the United States’ Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress’ FAA 702. I know the good and the bad of these systems, and what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under penalty of perjury that this is true.

These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.

If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the United States Government to be generally responsible, and I hope you will agree with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated in mass surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents — and I say billions without exaggeration — for nothing more substantial than a “potential” intelligence advantage that has never materialized, what are other governments going to do?

Whether we like it or not, the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable result will be states that are both less liberal and less safe. Thank you.

I will now respond to the submitted questions. Please bear in mind that I will not be disclosing new information about surveillance programs: I will be limiting my testimony to information regarding what responsible media organizations have entered into the public domain. For the record, I also repeat my willingness to provide testimony to the United States Congress, should they decide to consider the issue of unconstitutional mass surveillance.

–Rapporteur Claude Moraes MEP, S&D Group–

Given the focus of this Inquiry is on the impact of mass surveillance on EU citizens, could you elaborate on the extent of cooperation that exists between the NSA and EU Member States in terms of the transfer and collection of bulk data of EU citizens?

– A number of memos from the NSA’s Foreign Affairs Directorate have been published in the press.

One of the foremost activities of the NSA’s FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK’s GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers. These efforts to interpret new powers out of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers’ insistence that legal limits be respected, effects the GCHQ internally described in its own documents as “damaging public debate.”

In recent public memory, we have seen these FAD “legal guidance” operations occur in both Sweden and the Netherlands, and also faraway New Zealand. Germany was pressured to modify its G-10 law to appease the NSA, and it eroded the rights of German citizens under their constitution. Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries’ communications. The ultimate result of the NSA’s guidance is that the right of ordinary citizens to be free from unwarranted interference is degraded, and systems of intrusive mass surveillance are being constructed in secret within otherwise liberal states, often without the full awareness of the public.

Once the NSA has successfully subverted or helped repeal legal restrictions against unconstitutional mass surveillance in partner states, it encourages partners to perform “access operations.” Access operations are efforts to gain access to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, normally beginning with those that handle the greatest volume of communications. Sometimes the NSA provides consultation, technology, or even the physical hardware itself for partners to “ingest” these massive amounts of data in a manner that allows processing, and it does not take long to access everything. Even in a country the size of the United States, gaining access to the circuits of as few as three companies can provide access to the majority of citizens’ communications. In the UK, Verizon, British Telecommunications, Vodafone, Global Crossing, Level 3, Viatel, and Interoute all cooperate with the GCHQ, to include cooperation beyond what is legally required.

By the time this general process has occurred, it is very difficult for the citizens of a country to protect the privacy of their communications, and it is very easy for the intelligence services of that country to make those communications available to the NSA — even without having explicitly shared them. The nature of the NSA’s “NOFORN,” or NO FOREIGN NATIONALS classification, when combined with the fact that the memorandum agreements between NSA and its foreign partners have a standard disclaimer stating they provide no enforceable rights, provides both the NSA with a means of monitoring its partner’s citizens without informing the partner, and the partner with a means of plausible deniability.

The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn’t search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn’t search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national government’s spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.

The Parliament should ask the NSA and GCHQ to deny that they monitor the communications of EU citizens, and in the absence of an informative response, I would suggest that the current state of affairs is the inevitable result of subordinating the rights of the voting public to the prerogatives of State Security Bureaus. The surest way for any nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy.

The right to be free unwarranted intrusion into our private effects — our lives and possessions, our thoughts and communications — is a human right. It is not granted by national governments and it cannot be revoked by them out of convenience. Just as we do not allow police officers to enter every home to fish around for evidence of undiscovered crimes, we must not allow spies to rummage through our every communication for indications of disfavored activities.

Could you comment on the activities of EU Member States intelligence agencies in these operations and how advanced their capabilities have become in comparison with the NSA?

– The best testimony I can provide on this matter without pre-empting the work of journalists is to point to the indications that the NSA not only enables and guides, but shares some mass surveillance systems and technologies with the agencies of EU member states. As it pertains to the issue of mass surveillance, the difference between, for example, the NSA and FRA is not one of technology, but rather funding and manpower. Technology is agnostic of nationality, and the flag on the pole outside of the building makes systems of mass surveillance no more or less effective.

In terms of the mass surveillance programmes already revealed through the press, what proportion of the mass surveillance activities do these programmes account for? Are there many other programmes, undisclosed as of yet, that would impact on EU citizens rights?

– There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders.

–Shadow Rapporteur Sophie Int’Veld MEP, ALDE Group–

Are there adequate procedures in the NSA for staff to signal wrongdoing?

– Unfortunately not. The culture within the US Intelligence Community is such that reporting serious concerns about the legality or propriety of programs is much more likely to result in your being flagged as a troublemaker than to result in substantive reform. We should remember that many of these programs were well known to be problematic to the legal offices of agencies such as the GCHQ and other oversight officials. According to their own documents, the priority of the overseers is not to assure strict compliance with the law and accountability for violations of law, but rather to avoid, and I quote, “damaging public debate,” to conceal the fact that for-profit companies have gone “well beyond” what is legally required of them, and to avoid legal review of questionable programs by open courts. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2013/oct/25/leaked-memos-gchq-mass-surveillance-secret-snowden) In my personal experience, repeatedly raising concerns about legal and policy matters with my co-workers and superiors resulted in two kinds of responses.

The first were well-meaning but hushed warnings not to “rock the boat,” for fear of the sort of retaliation that befell former NSA whistleblowers like Wiebe, Binney, and Drake. All three men reported their concerns through the official, approved process, and all three men were subject to armed raids by the FBI and threats of criminal sanction. Everyone in the Intelligence Community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations.

 

The second were similarly well-meaning but more pointed suggestions, typically from senior officials, that we should let the issue be someone else’s problem. Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns, no one at NSA could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.

Do you feel you had exhausted all avenues before taking the decision to go public?

– Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.

It is important to remember that this is legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were passed as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.

Do you think procedures for whistleblowing have been improved now?

– No. There has not yet been any substantive whistleblower reform in the US, and unfortunately my government has taken a number of disproportionate and persecutory actions against me. US government officials have declared me guilty of crimes in advance of any trial, they’ve called for me to be executed or assassinated in private and openly in the press, they revoked my passport and left me stranded in a foreign transit zone for six weeks, and even used NATO to ground the presidential plane of Evo Morales – the leader of Bolivia – on hearing that I might attempt to seek and enjoy asylum in Latin America.

What is your relationship with the Russian and Chinese authorities, and what are the terms on which you were allowed to stay originally in Hong Kong and now in Russia?

– I have no relationship with either government.

–Shadow Rapporteur Jan Philipp Albrecht MEP, Greens Group–

Could we help you in any way, and do you seek asylum in the EU?

 

– If you want to help me, help me by helping everyone: declare that the indiscriminate, bulk collection of private data by governments is a violation of our rights and must end. What happens to me as a person is less important than what happens to our common rights.

As for asylum, I do seek EU asylum, but I have yet to receive a positive response to the requests I sent to various EU member states. Parliamentarians in the national governments have told me that the US, and I quote, “will not allow” EU partners to offer political asylum to me, which is why the previous resolution on asylum ran into such mysterious opposition. I would welcome any offer of safe passage or permanent asylum, but I recognize that would require an act of extraordinary political courage.

Can you confirm cyber-attacks by the NSA or other intelligence agencies on EU institutions, telecommunications providers such as Belgacom and SWIFT, or any other EU-based companies?

– Yes. I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred. And I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.

–Shadow Rapporteur Cornelia Ernst MEP, GUE Group–

In your view, how far can the surveillance measures you revealed be justified by national security and from your experience is the information being used for economic espionage? What could be done to resolve this?

– Surveillance against specific targets, for unquestionable reasons of national security while respecting human rights, is above reproach. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a growth in untargeted, extremely questionable surveillance for reasons entirely unrelated to national security. Most recently, the Prime Minister of Australia, caught red-handed engaging in the most blatant kind of economic espionage, sought to argue that the price of Indonesian shrimp and clove cigarettes was a “security matter.” These are indications of a growing disinterest among governments for ensuring intelligence activities are justified, proportionate, and above all accountable. We should be concerned about the precedent our actions set.

The UK’s GCHQ is the prime example of this, due to what they refer to as a “light oversight regime,” which is a bureaucratic way of saying their spying activities are less restricted than is proper (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/legal-loopholes-gchq-spy-world). Since that light oversight regime was revealed, we have learned that the GCHQ is intercepting and storing unprecedented quantities of ordinary citizens’ communications on a constant basis, both within the EU and without http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret- world-communications-nsa). There is no argument that could convince an open court that such activities were necessary and proportionate, and it is for this reason that such activities are shielded from the review of open courts.

In the United States, we use a secret, rubber-stamp Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that only hears arguments from the government. Out of approximately 34,000 government requests over 33 years, the secret court rejected only 11. It should raise serious concerns for this committee, and for society, that the GCHQ’s lawyers consider themselves fortunate to avoid the kind of burdensome oversight regime that rejects 11 out of 34,000 requests. If that’s what heavy oversight looks like, what, pray tell, does the GCHQ’s “light oversight” look like?

Let’s explore it. We learned only days ago that the GCHQ compromised a popular Yahoo service to collect images from web cameras inside citizens’ homes, and around 10% of these images they take from within people’s homes involve nudity or intimate activities (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-inte…). In the same report, journalists revealed that this sort of webcam data was searchable via the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system, which means the GCHQ’s “light oversight regime” was used not only to capture bulk data that is clearly of limited intelligence value and most probably violates EU laws, but to then trade that data with foreign services without the knowledge or consent of any country’s voting public.

We also learned last year that some of the partners with which the GCHQ was sharing this information, in this example the NSA, had made efforts to use evidence of religious conservatives’ association with sexually explicit material of the sort GCHQ was collecting as a grounds for destroying their reputations and discrediting them (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html). The “Release to Five Eyes” classification of this particular report, dated 2012, reveals that the UK government was aware of the NSA’s intent to use sexually explicit material in this manner, indicating a deepening and increasingly aggressive partnership. None of these religious conservatives were suspected of involvement in terrorist plots: they were targeted on the basis of their political beliefs and activism, as part of a class the NSA refers to as “radicalizers.”

I wonder if any members of this committee have ever advocated a position that the NSA, GCHQ, or even the intelligence services of an EU member state might attempt to construe as “radical”? If you were targeted on the basis of your political beliefs, would you know? If they sought to discredit you on the basis of your private communications, could you discover the culprit and prove it was them? What would be your recourse?

And you are parliamentarians. Try to imagine the impact of such activities against ordinary citizens without power, privilege, or resources. Are these activities necessary, proportionate, and an unquestionable matter of national security? A few weeks ago we learned the GCHQ has hired scientists to study how to create divisions amongst activists and disfavored political groups, how they attempt to discredit and destroy private businesses, and how they knowingly plant false information to misdirect civil discourse (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/).

To directly answer your question, yes, global surveillance capabilities are being used on a daily basis for the purpose of economic espionage. That a major goal of the US Intelligence Community is to produce economic intelligence is the worst kept secret in Washington.

In September, we learned the NSA had successfully targeted and compromised the world’s major financial transaction facilitators, such as Visa and SWIFT, which released documents describe as providing “rich personal information,” even data that “is not about our targets” (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-exclusive-nsa-spies-on… transactions-a-922276.html). Again, these documents are authentic and unmodified – a fact the NSA itself has never once disputed.

In August, we learned the NSA had targeted Petrobras, an energy company (http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united… brazilian-oil-giant.html). It would be the first of a long list of US energy targets. But we should be clear these activities are not unique to the NSA or GCHQ. Australia’s DSD targeted Sri Mulyani Indrawati, a finance minister and Managing Director of the World Bank (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/18/australia-tried-to-monitor-… presidents-phone). Report after report has revealed targeting of G-8 and G-20 summits. Mass surveillance capabilities have even been used against a climate change summit.

Recently, governments have shifted their talking points from claiming they only use mass surveillance for “national security” purposes to the more nebulous “valid foreign intelligence purposes.” I suggest this committee consider that this rhetorical shift is a tacit acknowledgment by governments that they recognize they have crossed beyond the boundaries of justifiable activities. Every country believes its “foreign intelligence purposes” are “valid,” but that does not make it so. If we are prepared to condemn the economic spying of our competitors, we must be prepared to do the same of our allies. Lasting peace is founded upon fundamental fairness.

The international community must agree to common standards of behavior, and jointly invest in the development of new technical standards to defend against mass surveillance. We rely on common systems, and the French will not be safe from mass surveillance until Americans, Argentines, and Chinese are as well.

 

The good news is that there are solutions. The weakness of mass surveillance is that it can very easily be made much more expensive through changes in technical standards: pervasive, end-to-end encryption can quickly make indiscriminate surveillance impossible on a cost- effective basis. The result is that governments are likely to fall back to traditional, targeted surveillance founded upon an individualized suspicion. Governments cannot risk the discovery of their exploits by simply throwing attacks at every “endpoint,” or computer processor on the end of a network connection, in the world. Mass surveillance, passive surveillance, relies upon unencrypted or weakly encrypted communications at the global network level.

If there had been better independent and public oversight over the intelligence agencies, do you think this could have prevented this kind of mass surveillance? What conditions would need to be fulfilled, both nationally and internationally?

– Yes, better oversight could have prevented the mistakes that brought us to this point, as could an understanding that defense is always more important than offense when it comes to matters of national intelligence. The intentional weakening of the common security standards upon which we all rely is an action taken against the public good.

The oversight of intelligence agencies should always be performed by opposition parties, as under the democratic model, they always have the most to lose under a surveillance state. Additionally, we need better whistleblower protections, and a new commitment to the importance of international asylum. These are important safeguards that protect our collective human rights when the laws of national governments have failed.

European governments, which have traditionally been champions of human rights, should not be intimidated out of standing for the right of asylum against political charges, of which espionage has always been the traditional example. Journalism is not a crime, it is the foundation of free and informed societies, and no nation should look to others to bear the burden of defending its rights. Shadow Rapporteur Axel Voss MEP, EPP Group

Why did you choose to go public with your information?

– Secret laws and secret courts cannot authorize unconstitutional activities by fiat, nor can classification be used to shield an unjustified and embarrassing violation of human rights from democratic accountability. If the mass surveillance of an innocent public is to occur, it should be authorized as the result of an informed debate with the consent of the public, under a framework of laws that the government invites civil society to challenge in open courts.

That our governments are even today unwilling to allow independent review of the secret policies enabling mass surveillance of innocents underlines governments’ lack of faith that these programs are lawful, and this provides stronger testimony in favor of the rightfulness of my actions than any words I might write.

Did you exhaust all possibilities before taking the decision to go public?

– Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.

It is important to remember that this is legal dilemma did not occur by mistake. US whistleblower reform laws were passed as recently as 2012, with the US Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, but they specifically chose to exclude Intelligence Agencies from being covered by the statute. President Obama also reformed a key executive Whistleblower regulation with his 2012 Presidential Policy Directive 19, but it exempted Intelligence Community contractors such as myself. The result was that individuals like me were left with no proper channels.

Are you aware that your revelations have the potential to put at risk lives of innocents and hamper efforts in the global fight against terrorism?

– Actually, no specific evidence has ever been offered, by any government, that even a single life has been put at risk by the award-winning journalism this question attempts to implicate.

The ongoing revelations about unlawful and improper surveillance are the product of a partnership between the world’s leading journalistic outfits and national governments, and if you can show one of the governments consulted on these stories chose not to impede demonstrably fatal information from being published, I invite you to do so. The front page of every newspaper in the world stands open to you.

Did the Russian secret service approach you?

– Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that’s their job.

But I didn’t take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I’m sure they were disappointed, it doesn’t take long for an intelligence service to realize when they’re out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.

I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service.

Who is currently financing your life?

– I am.

–Shadow Rapporteur, Timothy Kirkhope MEP, ECR Group–

You have stated previously that you want the intelligence agencies to be more accountable to citizens, however, why do you feel this accountability does not apply to you? Do you therefore, plan to return to the United States or Europe to face criminal charges and answer questions in an official capacity, and pursue the route as an official whistle-blower?

– Respectfully, I remind you that accountability cannot exist without the due process of law, and even Deutsche Welle has written about the well-known gap in US law that deprived me of vital legal protections due to nothing more meaningful than my status as an employee of a private company rather than of the government directly (http://www.dw.de/us-whistleblower-laws-offer- no-protection/a-17391500). Surely no one on the committee believes that the measure of one’s political rights should be determined by their employer.

Fortunately, we live in a global, interconnected world where, when national laws fail like this, our international laws provide for another level of accountability, and the asylum process provides a means of due process for individuals who might otherwise be wrongly deprived of it. In the face of the extraordinary campaign of persecution brought against me by my the United States government on account of my political beliefs, which I remind you included the grounding of the President of Bolivia’s plane by EU Member States, an increasing number of national governments have agreed that a grant of political asylum is lawful and appropriate.

Polling of public opinion in Europe indicates I am not alone in hoping to see EU governments agree that blowing the whistle on serious wrongdoing should be a protected act.

Do you still plan to release more files, and have you disclosed or been asked to disclose any information regarding the content of these files to Chinese and Russian authorities or any names contained within them?

As stated previously, there are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders. I have not disclosed any information to anyone other than those responsible journalists. Thank you.

Whistleblower Edward Joseph Snowden is a US former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

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

07 March, 2014

CommonDreams.org

By Paul Craig Roberts

According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. http://www.kommersant.ua/doc/2424454 It is Greece all over again.

Before anything approaching stability and legitimacy has been obtained for the puppet government put in power by the Washington orchestrated coup against the legitimate, elected Ukraine government, the Western looters are already at work. Naive protesters who believed the propaganda that EU membership offered a better life are due to lose half of their pension by April. But this is only the beginning.

The corrupt Western media describes loans as “aid.” However, the 11 billion euros that the EU is offering Kiev is not aid. It is a loan. Moreover, it comes with many strings, including Kiev’s acceptance of an IMF austerity plan.

Remember now, gullible Ukrainians participated in the protests that were used to overthrow their elected government, because they believed the lies told to them by Washington-financed NGOs that once they joined the EU they would have streets paved with gold. Instead they are getting cuts in their pensions and an IMF austerity plan.

The austerity plan will cut social services, funds for education, layoff government workers, devalue the currency, thus raising the prices of imports which include Russian gas, thus electricity, and open Ukrainian assets to takeover by Western corporations.

Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American agribusiness.

One part of the Washington/EU plan for Ukraine, or that part of Ukraine that doesn’t defect to Russia, has succeeded. What remains of the country will be thoroughly looted by the West.

The other part hasn’t worked as well. Washington’s Ukrainian stooges lost control of the protests to organized and armed ultra-nationalists. These groups, whose roots go back to those who fought for Hitler during World War 2, engaged in words and deeds that sent southern and eastern Ukraine clamoring to be returned to Russia where they resided prior to the 1950s when the Soviet communist party stuck them into Ukraine.

At this time of writing it looks like Crimea has seceded from Ukraine. Washington and its NATO puppets can do nothing but bluster and threaten sanctions. The White House Fool has demonstrated the impotence of the “US sole superpower” by issuing sanctions against unknown persons, whoever they are, responsible for returning Crimea to Russia, where it existed for about 200 years before, according to Solzhenitsyn, a drunk Khrushchev of Ukrainian ethnicity moved southern and eastern Russian provinces into Ukraine. Having observed the events in western Ukraine, those Russian provinces want to go back home where they belong, just as South Ossetia wanted nothing to do with Georgia.

Washington’s stooges in Kiev can do nothing about Crimea except bluster. Under the Russian-Ukraine agreement, Russia is permitted 25,000 troops in Crimea. The US/EU media’s deploring of a “Russian invasion of 16,000 troops” is either total ignorance or complicity in Washington’s lies. Obviously, the US/EU media is corrupt. Only a fool would rely on their reports. Any media that would believe anything Washington says after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to peddle the regime’s lies about “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,” which the weapons inspectors had told the White House did not exist, is clearly a collection of bought-and-paid for whores.

In the former Russian provinces of eastern Ukraine, Putin’s low-key approach to the strategic threat that Washington has brought to Russia has given Washington a chance to hold on to a major industrial complex that serves the Russian economy and military. The people themselves in eastern Ukraine are in the streets demanding separation from the unelected government that Washington’s coup has imposed in Kiev. Washington, realizing that its incompetence has lost Crimea, had its Kiev stooges appoint Ukrainian oligarchs, against whom the Maiden protests were partly directed, to governing positions in eastern Ukraine cities. These oligarchs have their own private militias in addition to the police and any Ukrainian military units that are still functioning. The leaders of the protesting Russians are being arrested and disappeared. Washington and its EU puppets, who proclaim their support for self-determination, are only for self-determination when it can be orchestrated in their favor. Therefore, Washington is busy at work suppressing self-determination in eastern Ukraine.

This is a dilemma for Putin. His low-key approach has allowed Washington to seize the initiative in eastern Ukraine. The oligarchs Taruta and Kolomoyskiy have been put in power in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, and are carrying out arrests of Russians and committing unspeakable crimes, but you will never hear of it from the US presstitutes. Washington’s strategy is to arrest and deep-six the leaders of the secessionists so that there no authorities to request Putin’s intervention.

If Putin has drones, he has the option of taking out Taruta and Kolomoyskiy. If Putin lets Washington retain the Russian provinces of eastern Ukraine, he will have demonstrated a weakness that Washington will exploit. Washington will exploit the weakness to the point that Washington forces Putin to war.

The war will be nuclear.

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

07 March, 2014

Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Alex Lantier

Western powers ratcheted up sanctions against Russia Thursday, while the US mounts a major military buildup in Eastern Europe.

The immediate pretext for sanctions from both the US and Europe was the vote in the regional parliament of the Crimean Peninsula to prepare secession from Ukraine and association to Russia, subject to a popular referendum later this month. Russian-backed forces have taken over the strategic peninsula, which hosts a major Russian naval base at Sevastopol and where most of the population is Russian speaking.

Installed by a Western-backed, fascist-led putsch on February 22, the Kiev regime faces broad hostility in more pro-Russian parts of the country. Its first act was to eliminate Russian as an official language in Ukraine.

Thursday morning, as European Union (EU) officials prepared to meet to discuss actions against Russia, US President Barack Obama unilaterally issued an executive order authorizing sanctions and visa bans against Russian officials. Later yesterday, EU officials announced a similar, three-step plan for sanctions on Russia, echoing Obama’s arguments.

Obama’s order described Russian actions in Crimea as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Obama’s message to Congress announcing the executive order said it would target “persons—including persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean region without the authorization of the government of Ukraine—who undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine.”

In a press statement later in the day, Obama added, “The proposed referendum on the future of Crimea would violate the Ukrainian constitution and violate international law. Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine.” He added, “In 2014, we’re well past the days when borders can be drawn over the heads of democratic leaders.”

Like every statement coming from top US officials, and parroted in the media, these statements reek of hypocrisy and are full of contradictions. In fact, it is Washington and its allies who are trampling on the Ukrainian constitution, backing a right-wing regime they helped install via an extra-legal putsch. If anyone should be detained and their fortunes seized because they were “destabilizing Ukraine” and violating its constitution, it is top officials in Washington and the European capitals.

And in criticizing “borders…drawn over the heads of democratic leaders,” Obama spoke as the chief executive of a state that has been engaged in endless war and has elevated the violation of national sovereignty to a principal of foreign policy. Western powers themselves unilaterally redrew the borders of a European country, Yugoslavia—separating Kosovo from Serbia and declaring it independent in a move aimed at undermining Serbian and Russian influence in the Balkans.

More broadly, Washington and the EU reserve the right to occupy other countries and carry out drone murder in violation of the sovereignty of countries across the Middle East and Africa.

Obama’s reference to “legitimate” and “democratic” government is used in reference to a government that is based on right-wing and anti-Semitic forces like the Right Sector militia and the Svoboda party, which have praised Ukrainian SS units who carried out the Holocaust during World War II.

The reliance of the US and European operation on fascistic forces was revealed in the EU negotiations over sanctions. During the discussions, Eastern European regimes such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states pressed for harsher terms against Russia. A proposal emerged to call for “quick steps towards the dissolution of any paramilitary structures”— a demand aimed at pro-Russian self-defense groups in Crimea.

However, this demand was dropped, Britain’s Daily Telegraph noted, “because it would also apply to Kiev groups, particularly the far-right nationalist groups that are the backbone of the new government here.”

Washington is also deepening its military buildup against Russia in Eastern Europe. US officials announced Thursday that they would send 12 F-16 fighters to Poland and the guided missile destroyer USS Truxtun to the Black Sea, which borders Ukraine and Russia. According to US Navy web sites, the Truxtun is part of the battle group of the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush, which recently arrived in the region.

Moscow responded with massive air defense drills in Western Russia. Military spokesman Colonel Oleg Kochtkov called it the “largest-ever exercise” by air defense units in the region.

Western powers are also dispatching military observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to Ukraine, trying to send them into the Crimea.

Washington and the EU are embarking on an unprecedented confrontation with Russia, aimed at forcing a humiliating Russian climb-down in Ukraine, discrediting President Vladimir Putin’s regime, and undermining Russian influence in the region.

Media portrayals of this policy as motivated by the Western powers’ alleged love of democracy are lies. It is bound up with the concerns of imperialism. These include Russia’s role as an obstacle to US war plans, such as its plans to attack Syria last September, and its decision to grant asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after he exposed unconstitutional mass spying on the people by US and European spy agencies.

A media silence prevails on the significance of the Sevastopol base, which Kiev is now trying to seize from the local Crimean authorities and place under Western control. It played a key role in Russian naval deployments to the Mediterranean during last year’s Syrian war scare.

As they stir up military tensions at the heart of Europe and threaten to cut off Russia’s $2 trillion economy from world markets, the imperialist powers are apparently calculating that the Russian ruling elite will ultimately back down. Later on Thursday, Obama had a telephone call with Putin in which he outlined a deal that would involve the pullback of Russian troops and the installation of international monitors in Crimea.

Having seen one unpopular post-Soviet regime collapse in Ukraine, they anticipate that personal concerns of Russian oligarchs desperate to save their bank accounts in London and Zurich will again trump everything and everyone else.

The reaction of Russia in Crimea was anticipated by US officials and has been used to immensely intensify tensions against the nuclear power. There is at least a section of the ruling class that is clearly prepared for war.

By moving towards an all-out clash with Russia, moreover, the US and European powers are risking vast unintended consequences and economic, military, and political shocks.

Economic commentators underlined that a policy of sanctions with Russia threatens to shut down large portions of the European economy, which relies on Russia as a key source of oil and gas. An anonymous US official remarked, “Russia is now a two-trillion-dollar economy, if you’re going to sanction them across the board, you have to be very careful not to kill yourself while doing it.”

07 March, 2014

WSWS.org

 

The challenge for journalists covering Africa is telling African stories in their full human dimension.

By Solomon Dersso

Not unexpectedly, the tragic events in South Sudan and the Central African Republic received much attention in the mainstream international media. As much as it drew world attention to the plight of those affected by the conflicts in these countries, the nature of the coverage of such events also triggered a heated debate.

In an article titled “In defence of western journalists in Africa” published on 21 February 2014, Michela Wrong took issue with recent articles such as Nanjala Nyabola’s Al Jazeera piece lamenting the failings of western media in covering Africa.

While Wrong’s piece raises various pertinent issues, close scrutiny of the three major points reveal that it defends what does not need defending instead of addressing the very issues that merit attention, namely critical debate on mainstream western coverage of Africa.

First, she suggested that these writers, whom she considers to be academic, “seem to have little idea how journalists actually work”. Although not true for all journalists, Wrong is right that journalists, who report from war zones, have a lot to worry about. One, however, cannot help wondering how this can be an excuse for anything.

Given that reporting, whatever its form, serves as the most powerful vehicle for shaping public opinion and eventually the action of various actors, the question should be whether one-dimensional reporting would do justice to the subjects of the report.

Politics of coverage

To put it differently, the issue is the risk that such reporting could lead to misconceived conclusions culminating in unhelpful policy responses.

On this, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Africa’s foremost critical thinkers and public intellectuals, observed in his “Saviours and survivors: Darfur, politics and the War on Terror”: “No wonder those who rely on the (western) media for their knowledge of Africa come to think of Africans as peculiarly given to fighting over no discernible issues and why the standard remedy for internal conflicts in Africa is not to focus on issues but to get adversaries to ‘reconcile’, regardless of the issues involved.”

Second, Wrong said: “[M]ost fundamentally, those writers (attacking western journalists) seem to have lost sight of the definition of news, which aims to convey distant events to a non-specialist audience, as succinctly as possible.” In so doing, she suggested that the resultant limitation of time and space necessitates one-dimensional reporting and restricts the luxury of nuance available to academics.

While one understands the limitation of time and space, once again this fails to be a convincing argument for defending “one-dimensional” coverage of African events, which often tends to be reductionist and superficial in their content and negative in their scope  (focusing mainly on the tragedy, violence, despair and devastation).

The issue is, therefore, about the possibility of telling African stories in their full human dimension within those limitations of space and time.

Wrong’s point on the failure of academics to understand how journalists work brings us to her third major point that being; “articles attacking the western media’s one-dimensional coverage” take the reader for being stupid.

She briskly made the argument that most readers understand the nuances of one-dimensional reporting of African events in the same way they “grasp the notion that their true causes are rich and diverse” when they come across one-dimensional reporting of WWII, the Northern Ireland conflict or the Yugoslav civil war.

Here, two issues immediately arise: First, is the reporting of violence in the west ordinarily one-dimensional? Second, whether one-dimensional reporting of western events, if it ever was common, was  the same as one-dimensional reporting of African events?

Corporate media drama

A simple review of reports on incidents of violence in the west reveals that they are not commonly one-dimensional. In his March 12, 2013 piece titled “Kenya vote: How the west was wrong” published in The Guardian, writer Mukoma Wa Ngugi wrote: “In the West, tragedy after tragedy, the journalist does not forget the agency of the victims, and their humanity.”

To illustrate this he noted: “The 2010 London riots …in equal measure the rioters and the fed-up shop owners who started cleaning up after the rebellion; the heroic street sweepers. The August 2012 Sikh massacre: Yes, the violence but also how a rainbow community came together to stand against extremism…”

The long racist history of propagating a negative image of Africa, the Conradian “Heart of Darkness” or the Economist’s “Hopeless Continent” image of Africa, also means that one-dimensional reporting of Africa could not be the same as one-dimensional reporting of western events.

Ngugi Wa Thiongo, one of Africa’s great literary giants, in a speech delivered on Africa Day on May 25, 2012 at the University of the Free State in South Africa, said that this negative image of Africa “is spread and intensified in the images of everyday: In the West, TV clips to illustrate famine, violent crimes, and ethnic warfare, tend to draw from dark faces (ordinarily African).

In commercials, TV dramas, in the cinema, one hardly ever sees a really dark person portraying beauty and positivity. This has created a psychological disposition such that, as the late Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s most renowned literary giants, put it; ‘the automatic response that people have when you mention Africa is something which has been fixed in the mind for a long time’, a negative image of Africa a subject on which he wrote one of his widely recognized essays An image of Africa.

Viewed in this light, one-dimensional coverage of African events inevitably tends to perpetuate this racially-charged denigrating and dehumanizing negative image.

In defence of debate

It is apparent from the foregoing that what needs defending is a critical debate on mainstream western reporting of Africa and the critical voice of Africanist writers like Nanjala Nyabola, Ngugi, and Lucy Hovil. This can draw on works of Africanist scholars, but also such important works addressing the same subject in a different context as Edward Said’s Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world.

Surely, there are western journalists who report  Africa in all its dimensions and diversity and with nuances.These journalists should be celebrated and commended. Not because they deserve commendation for doing their work the right way. It is because they should serve as model to be emulated by others.

This is not a request for a politically correct reporting that skirts the truth to avoid offending.It is about telling the facts in all its manifestations.

Perhaps this is not a matter about which we should complain against western journalists only. Indeed, what we should lament about more is the role that we, Africans, have played and continue to play for the dominance of the negative and stereotypical mainstream western reporting of Africa.

Because, as Thiongo rightly pointed out, the “biggest sin …is not that certain groups of white people, and even the West as a whole, may have a negative view of blackness embedded in their psyche, the real sin is that the black bourgeoisie in Africa and the world should contribute to the negativity and even embrace it by becoming participants or shareholders in a multi-billion industry built on black negativity”.

Rather than just ‘talking about knocking down the other story’, as Achebe pointed out, ‘create a situation in which there is evenness’. To this end, ‘We (Africans) have got to do that kind of thing on a large scale – to change the dominant image of Africa which has been there for hundreds of years’.

This we should do as part of  – and in defence of –  the critical debate on mainstream western coverage of Africa.

Solomon Ayele Dersso, a legal academic and analyst of African affairs who regularly writes on African Union issues.

6 March 2014

Al-Jazeera.com

By Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi

Before we proceed into the subject matter, let’s have a look at these two nefarious instances of ruthless killing of Sufi ideologues and Ulema at the hands of extremist goons:

(1) Mufti Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi (May God be please with him) was a Sufi-minded Pakistani Islamic cleric noted for his moderate vision of Islam and staunch and outspoken opposition of terror activities in Pakistan. On June 12, 2009, he was suicide bombed during the Jum’a prayer that he was leading in his mosque in Lahore, Pakistan. This terrorist attack was launched on him, after his publicly denouncing the Tehrik-e-Taliban’s terrorist ideologies and activities as un-Islamic.

(2) Shaikh Ramadan Al-Buti, an erudite Islamic scholar of global standing with Sufi background, was popularly known as a “moderate Islamic scholar”. Through his extensive and hard-hitting writings and religious sermons, he openly denounced and refuted the literalist Salafist interpretations of Islamic postulates. In his rigorous efforts to refute the views of Salafist extremism explaining its literalism and incoherence to the modern era, he authored a highly relevant book: “As-Salaf was a blessed epoch, not a school of thought”. His views severely opposed the militant and political ideologies and activities of the Islamist extremists actively engaged in different parts of the Muslim world, as outlined in his famous book: Al-Jihad Fil Islam (1993). He believed in a spiritual Islamic system of belief that unites all people regardless of their different confessions. While delivering a religious sermon to his students at the Iman Mosque in the central Mazraa district of Damascus, Syria, he was suicide bombed by the Salafist terrorists.

The nefarious series of deadly attacks, wanton killing and suicide bombing of Sufi-minded Ulema and spiritually-inclined Islamic scholars, at the hands of the neo-Kharijites, Salafists, Wahhabis and other religious goons of extremist ideological strains, continues today unabated. To my horror, Maulana Usaid ul Haq Qadri Badayuni, who many of us adored as a source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration, was targeted and martyred on the 4th March of this year in a terrorist attack during his visit to the Sufi shrines in Baghdad, Iraq. He went there to visit particularly the shrines of the most revered Sufi saint Hazrat Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a) and Imam Abu Hanifa (r.a).

We received this shocking news in India just a few hours after Maulana had posted the recent snaps of his visit to the Iraqi Sufi shrines on his Facebook page, as he was actively engaged in his online Islamic literary pursuits, with thousands of friends and followers on Facebook from all over the world, with whom he shared links to his books and trips to historical Islamic places and Sufi shrines.

Maulana was travelling with his father Hazrat Qazi Abdul Hameed Muhammad Salim Qadri (the head of the Quadria Sufi shrine, in Budaun, Uttar Pradesh, India) and his younger brother Maulana Mohammed Lateef Qadri in an Indian delegation of 26 spiritually-inclined people who left Mumbai for Iraq on February 25 to visit the Sufi shrines in Baghdad. They were scheduled to return to India next week. In Iraq, when they reached Sulaimania town, around 300km from Baghdad, an armed terrorist group started firing the car and left the Maulana shot dead.

According to Mohammad Wajihuddin’s report in Times of India, brother of the deceased, Mohammed Lateef Qadri said on phone from Iraq:

“We had covered half the distance of the destination when some gunmen suddenly stopped our car and started firing indiscriminately. The driver, who was also injured, speeded up and we reached a check post from where an ambulance was called. Usaid died in the attack while the driver has been hospitalised,”

On the next day, the late Maulana Usaid’s body was brought to Baghdad where it was buried in a graveyard adjacent to the shrine of Hazrat Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a).

One of the most acclaimed Sunni Islamic scholars of the modern India, Maulana Usaidul Haq, also known as “Sheikh Sahab”, was a Sufi-minded theologian par excellence, spiritual poet, prolific writer, social thinker and, above all, a great humanitarian. He was noted for his deep inclination towards spiritual, intellectual and social efforts for peace-building and human welfare, following in the footsteps of our revered Sufi saints of India. He was an erudite Islamic scholar in Indian soil with greater popularity among the Sufi-minded Muslims across the globe. In a very young age (37), Maulana touched the sky and made Herculean efforts for the betterment of the Indian community at large.

Maulana Usaid-ul-Haq believed that in a multicultural, multi-faith and pluralistic county, India, Muslims need a system of faith that ensures its relevance to the country’s composite culture, pluralistic nature, different life styles and myriad ethos. He held that Sufism has remarkably been an unopposed ambassador of love and harmony among the different Indian religious communities: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, in the ancient India and even today. So, he believed, the mystical foundation of Islam should be strengthened so as to serve the masses of the country irrespective of caste, creed and religious confession.

In his lifetime, Maulana organised several conferences and seminars aimed at establishing religious harmony among the followers of different religions in India.

A historic peace conference titled “Shanti Sammelan” organised by his Khanqah Quadriya in Budaun, India, on the occasion of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)’s birthday will remain unforgotten in the history of modern Indian Sufis. In this conference, Maulana Usaid-ul-Haq brought together prominent Ulema and Muslim scholars like the famous Sufi-minded Islamic writers and scholars Maulana Yaseen Akhtar Misbahi, Maulana Khushtar Noorani, Dr. Khwaja Muhammad Ikram (Director of NCPUL), Bekal Utsahi, a famous Urdu-Hindi poet along with non-Muslim leaders and clergy such as Swamy Agnivesh, a famous Hindu cleric, Father M.D. Thomas (Director, Commission of Religious Harmony, Delhi), Pundit Anil Shastri and Sardar Gurmeet etc. All these leading figures of different religions spoke in unison, on an Islamic stage, for establishing peace and eradicating the epidemic of terrorism. This noble effort of Maulana Usaid-ul-Haq proved that Indian Sufi shrines, in all ages, have preached Islam through peaceful efforts and selfless services to humanity and that the Khanqah of Badayun is no exception to this.

Just recently, on February 10, when he was preparing to travel to Iraq in New Delhi, I got a chance to meet him along with other prominent Sufi-minded Ulema in my locality. We were having a discussion on different religious issues, particularly on incorporating moderate, sophisticated and cordial ways to serve Islam and humanity. He expressed great concerns over the importance of humanitarian activities and social work in Islam, spiritual solace, love for the prophets and Sufia-e-Kiram (the holy Sufi saints) and most importantly promoting peace and harmony between people of all denominations and speaking up against acts of terror and violence in the name of Islam.

Maulana Usaid-ul-Haq had laid down his life in refuting the terror ideologies and had devoted his illuminating knowledge and sources to the service of humanity through his intellectual and social contributions. He emerged as a real Mujahid and, therefore, we believe he attained martyrdom in the land of the spiritual guide of the Sufi saints Hazrat Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a). Maulana had gone there to especially visit the Sufi shrines and was planning to travel to Turkey for the very purpose before he was martyred. By his sheer good luck, he has been blessed with a resting place among the family members of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a) within the premises of his shrine in Baghdad.

The wanton killing of the Sufi clerics, Ulema and scholars is substantial evidence that those involved in global terrorism in the name of Islam, Jihad and Istishhad (martyrdom) have no ideological endorsement from the Sufi-minded Muslims. Terrorism has absolutely no ideological link with Sufi shrines and monastery system of Islam, which is entirely based on universal brotherhood, global peace, inclusiveness and religious tolerance.

At a time when essential concepts, basic tenets and many beautiful doctrines of Islam are being misused, misinterpreted and radicalised by the Salafi-Wahabi extremists, exclusivists and totalitarians, who now falsely claim be the mainstream Sunnis, the world thinkers should take an inquisitive look at all the different ideologies and strains of Islam with more focus on mystical interpretation of Islam. I am sure it will help them discover the truth that Sufism and its followers represent the only and true version of Islam: peaceful, pluralistic and moderate. This is precisely why its followers, in general, and Ulema and ideologues, in particular, are suffering the gravest attacks from the terror ideologies and activities creeping into the Muslim world under the grab of Islamism.

Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi is an Alim and Fazil (classical Islamic scholar) with a Sufi background.

07 March, 2014