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By Bill Van Auken

22 November, 2013

@ WSWS.org

A draft agreement reached late Wednesday night between Washington and the puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai calls for as many as 15,000 foreign troops, the vast majority of them American, to continue occupying Afghanistan through 2024 and beyond.

The deal would also leave the Pentagon in control of nine major bases spread across eight provinces. While these bases are to be formally ceded to Afghanistan next year, they would effectively remain in US hands.

They include Bagram Airbase, north of the capital, the largest US facility, Kandahar and Shorab airbase in the south, Shindand Airbase in Herat province near the western border with Iran, the Jalalabad and Gardez airbases near the eastern border with Pakistan, as well as facilities at Kabul International Airport, Herat International Airport and Mazar-i-Sharif Airport in the north near the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

While the ostensible purpose of the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) is to leave behind a “residual” US-led force to train, advise and provide logistical support to the Afghan security forces, as well as conduct counterterrorism operations, the deal would consolidate Washington’s longstanding strategic aim of establishing a permanent military foothold in a strategic region that borders China, Iran and the oil-rich Caspian Basin. This was what the Afghan war—prepared well in advance of the September 11, 2001 attacks—has been about from its onset.

While on the eve of the 2012 US election, President Barack Obama insisted that his administration was “bringing our troops home from Afghanistan,” and was committed to a timetable that would “have them all out of there by 2014,” this new agreement essentially commits Washington to unending military intervention in the impoverished country.

A UN mandate allowing the deployment of US and allied troops in Afghanistan expires at the end of 2014. The new deal, which would take effect on January 1, 2014, calls for continuing the US military presence to “2024 and beyond.”

Karzai made a public appeal to support the agreement to the nearly 3,000 Afghan clan leaders and dignitaries assembled in a Loya Jirga (Pashto for grand assembly) he had convened in Kabul. He urged acceptance of the pact on the grounds that it would bring stability to Afghanistan.

The Afghan president said that the deal would keep between 10,000 and 15,000 occupation troops in Afghanistan, while committing the US government “to seek funds on a yearly basis to support the training, equipping, advising and sustaining” of hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police.

At the same time, Karzai sought to strike a nationalist pose, stating at one point, “I don’t trust the US, and the US doesn’t trust me.”

In discussions with US officials, Karzai had demanded that Obama issue a statement acknowledging and apologizing for “mistakes” over the past decade that had led to the deaths of Afghan civilians.

A letter from Obama released in Kabul on Thursday—and brandished by Karzai before the Loya Jirga—failed to do either. Instead, it praised US troops for their “enormous sacrifices” and vowed that in future US forces would not enter Afghan homes “except under extraordinary circumstances involving urgent risk to life and limb of US nationals.”

While the Karzai regime had called for an outright ban on US troops engaging in any of the “night raids” against Afghan homes that have provoked intense popular anger, Obama’s letter essentially affirms that they will continue the practice as the Pentagon sees fit.

Similarly, the text of the draft agreement, which was dated “November 2013,” states that “unless mutually agreed, United States forces shall not conduct combat operations in Afghanistan,” which means that US troops will continue fighting in Afghanistan after 2014.

The letter went on to say that the Pentagon would “continue to make every effort to respect the sanctity and dignity of Afghans in their homes and in their daily lives.”

This “respect” has found expression in bombings and drone missile attacks on civilian targets, massacres and the disappearance and murder of suspected insurgents over the past dozen years. The war has seen a 23 percent increase in civilian casualties during the first six months of 2013 compared to the same period a year ago. The proposed agreement ensures that this carnage will continue.

The other clause within the deal that is widely opposed in Afghanistan grants US troops full immunity for any crimes carried out on Afghan soil, preventing either Afghan courts or international war crime tribunals from exercising jurisdiction. The failure of the Iraqi government to accept similar terms led to the scrapping of plans to keep thousands of US troops in that country.

Karzai told the Loya Jirga that he had opposed both the continued right of US troops to enter Afghan homes and detain Afghans as well as their blanket immunity, but that insisting on either condition would have meant the agreement’s abrogation.

“I said to the US that issue is out of the government’s authority and that the Afghan people have the authority” to accept or reject these provisions, through the Loya Jirga, he said.

Karzai’s speech provoked consternation in Washington, because of his vow to put off formal signing of any agreement until after an April 5 election that is to choose his successor. The US had called for a swift ratification of the deal in order to facilitate military planning and to prevent the agreement from becoming an issue in the Afghan election.

The White House responded swiftly to Karzai’s remarks, issuing a statement Thursday afternoon calling for the agreement to be signed before the end of the year.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest warned that a delay in finalizing the deal until April “would prevent the United States and our allies from being able to plan for a post-2014 presence.”

Karzai’s nationalist posturing notwithstanding, there is little prospect that his regime would survive without the continued presence of foreign troops and the $6 billion in annual aid promised to Kabul.

If such support “dries up, then they can’t survive,” General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a meeting of top US CEOs in Washington Tuesday. While the regime could continue without the “ubiquitous presence of US military forces,” he added, “they can’t live without any.”

The Loya Jirga, which is being held under a security lockdown in Kabul, is to meet for another three days before arriving at a consensus. Karzai has claimed that this body, which he has hand picked, has the ultimate decision on the bilateral agreement in order to distance himself from the move to indefinitely extend a foreign occupation that is deeply unpopular among the Afghan people.

In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry gave credence to this pretense, however. At the State Department he declined to discuss the contents of draft agreement, on the grounds that it was now in the hands of the Loya Jirga. “So I think it’s inappropriate for me to comment at all on any of the details,” he said. “It’s up to the people of Afghanistan.”

As fraudulent as the sovereignty of the Loya Jirga is, the Obama administration is not even going through the pretense of obtaining a popular mandate in the United States for continuing a 12-year-old war and occupation for another decade and beyond. It intends to implement the bilateral deal without any debate or vote in Congress, much less approval by the American people, who are in their overwhelming majority opposed to the continued military intervention in Afghanistan.

By Ramzy Baroud

20 November, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “the world’s most influential Jew”, Bernard Henri Levy is number 45, according to an article published in the Israeli rightwing newspaper the Jerusalem Post, on May 21, 2010.

Levy, per the Post’s standards, came only two spots behind Irving Moskowitz, a “Florida-based tycoon (who) is considered the leading supporter of Jewish construction in east Jerusalem and hands out a prize for Zionism to settler leaders.”

To claim that at best Levy is an intellectual fraud is to miss a clear logic that seems to unite much of the man’s activities, work and writings. He seems to be obsessed with ‘liberating’ Muslims from Bosnia to Pakistan, to Libya and elsewhere. However, it is not the kind that one could qualify as a healthy obsession, stemming from for instance, overt love and fascination of their religion, culture and myriad ways of life. It is unhealthy obsession. Throughout his oddly defined career, he has done so much harm, as he at times served the role of lackey for those in power, and at others, seemed to lead his own crusades. He is a big fan of military intervention, and his profile is dotted with references to Muslim countries and military intervention from Afghanistan to Sudan .. and finally to Libya.

Writing in the New York Magazine on Dec 26, 2011, Benjamin Wallace-Wells spoke of the French ‘philosopher’ as if he were referencing a messiah that was not afraid to promote violence for the greater good of mankind. In “European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator,” Wallace-Wells wrote of the “philosopher (who) managed to goad the world into vanquishing an evil villain.” The ‘evil villain’ in question is, of course, Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader who was ousted and brutally murdered after reportedly being sodomized by rebels following his capture in October 2011. The detailed analysis by Global Post of the sexual assault of the leader of one of Africa’s most prominent countries was published in CBS news and other media. Cases of rape have sharply increased in Libya as 1,700 militia (per BBC estimation) groups now operate in that shattered Arab country.

Levy, who at times appeared to be the West’s most visible war-on-Libya advocate, has largely disappeared from view within the Libyan context. He is perhaps off stirring trouble in some other place in the name of his dubious philosophy. His mission in Libya, which is now in a much worse state it has ever reached during the reign of Qaddafi, has been accomplished. ‘The evil dictator’ has been defeated, and that’s that. Never mind that the country is now divided between tribes and militias, and that the ‘post-democracy’ Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was recently kidnapped by one unruly militia to be freed by another.

In March 2011, Levy took it upon himself to fly to Benghazi to ‘engage’ Libya’s insurgents. It was a defining moment, for it was that type of mediation that empowered armed groups to transform a regional uprising into an all-out war involving NATO. Armed with what was a willful misinterpretation of UN resolution 1973, of March 17, 2011, NATO lead a major military offensive on a country armed with primitive air-defensives and a poorly equipped army. Western countries channeled massive shipments of weapons to Libyan groups in the name of preventing massacres allegedly about to be carried out by Qaddafi’s loyalists. Massacres were indeed carried out but not in the way western ‘humanitarian interventionists’ suggested. The last of which was merely days ago (Nov 15) when 31 people were reportedly killed and 235 were wounded as trigger happy militiamen opened fire at peaceful protesters in Tripoli that were simply demanding Misrata militants leave their city.

These are the very people that Levy and his ilk spent numerous hours lobbying in their support. One of Levy’s greatest achievements in Libya was to muster international recognition of the National Transitional Council (NTC). France and other countries lead a campaign to promote the NTC as an alternative to Qaddafi’s state institution, which NATO had systematically destroyed.

In his New York Magazine interview, Levy was quoted as saying “sometimes you are inhabited by intuitions that are not clear to you.” The statement was sourced in reference to the supposed epiphany the ‘philosopher’ had on Feb 23, 2011, watching TV images of Qaddafi’s forces threatening to drown Benghazi with ‘rivers of blood.’

Far from unclear intuitions, Levy’s agenda is that of the calculated politician-ideologue, more like a French version of the US’s neoconservatives who packaged their country’s devastating war on Iraq with all sorts of moral, philosophical and other fraudulent reasoning. For them, it was first and foremost a war for Israel’s ‘security’, with supposed other practical perks, little of which has actualized. Levy’s legacy is indeed loaded with unmistakable references to that same agenda.

Israel’s right-wingers are fascinated with Levy. The Post’s celebration of his global influence was summed up in this quote: “A French philosopher and one of the leaders of the Nouvelle Philosophie movement who said that Jews ought to provide a unique moral voice in the world.” But morality has nothing to do with it. The man’s philosophical exploits seem to exclusively target Muslims and their cultures. “The veil is an invitation to rape”, he told the Jewish Chronicle in 2006.

Philosophy for Levy seems to be perfectly tailored to fit a political agenda promoting military interventions. His advocacy helped destroy Libya, but still didn’t stop him from writing a book on Libya’s ‘spring.’ He spoke of the veil as an invitation for rape, while saying nothing of the numerous cases of rape reported in Libya after the NATO war. In May 2011, he was one of few people who defended IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, when the latter was accused of raping a chambermaid in New York City. It was a ‘conspiracy’ he said, in which the maid was taking part.

One could perhaps understand Levy’s hate for dictators and war criminals; after all, Qaddafi was no human rights champion. But Levy is no philosopher. A fundamental element of any genuine philosophy is moral consistency. Levy has none. A week after the Jerusalem Post celebrated Levy’s world influence, the Israeli daily Haaretz wrote of his support of the Israeli army.

“Bernard Henri Levy: I have never seen an army as democratic as the IDF” was the title of an article on May 30, 2010, reporting on the “Democracy and Its Challenges” Conference in Tel Aviv. “I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy.” Considering the wars and massacres conducted by the Israeli army against Gaza in 2008-9 and 2012, one cannot find appropriate phrases to describe Levy’s moral blindness and misguided philosophy. In fact, it is safe to argue that neither morality nor philosophy has much to do with Levy and his unending quest for war.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press).

By Nicola Nasser

20 November, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The eruption of the Syrian conflict early in 2011 heralded the demise of Turkey’s officially pronounced strategy of “Zero Problems with Neighbors,” but more importantly, it revealed a “hidden agenda” in Turkish foreign policy under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

What Sreeram Chaulia, the Dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs in India’s Sonipat, described as a “creeping hidden agenda” (http://rt.com on Sept. 15, 2013) is covered up ideologically as “Islamist.”

But in a more in-depth insight it is unfolding as neo-Ottomanism that is pragmatically using “Islamization,” both of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy internally and Turkey’s foreign policy regionally, as a tool to revive the Ottoman Empire that once was.

Invoking his country’s former imperial grandeur, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotoglu had written: “As in the sixteenth century … we will once again make the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, together with Turkey, the center of world politics in the future. That is the goal of Turkish foreign policy and we will achieve it.” (Emphasis added)

Quoted by Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby, writing in last March/April edition of www.worldaffairsjournal.org, the goal of Erdogan’s AKP ruling party for 2023, as proclaimed by its recent Fourth General Congress, is: “A great nation, a great power.” Erdogan urged the youth of Turkey to look not only to 2023, but to 2071 as well when Turkey “will reach the level of our Ottoman and Seljuk ancestors by the year 2071” as he said in December last year.

“2071 will mark one thousand years since the Battle of Manzikert,” when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine Empire and heralded the advent of the Ottoman one, according to Fradkin and Libby.

Some six months ago, Davotoglu felt so confident and optimistic to assess that “it was now finally possible to revise the order imposed” by the British – French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 to divide the Arab legacy of the Ottoman Empire between them.

Davotoglu knows very well that Pan-Arabs have been ever since struggling unsuccessfully so far to unite as a nation and discard the legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but not to recur to the Ottoman status quo ante, but he knows as well that Islamist political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) and the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Party of Liberation) were originally founded in Egypt and Palestine respectively in response to the collapse of the Ottoman Islamic caliphate.

However, Erdogan’s Islamist credentials cannot be excluded as simply a sham; his background, his practices in office since 2002 as well as his regional policies since the eruption of the Syrian conflict less than three years ago all reveal that he does believe in his version of Islam per se as the right tool to pursue his Ottoman not so-“hidden agenda.”

Erdogan obviously is seeking to recruit Muslims as merely “soldiers” who will fight not for Islam per se, but for his neo-Ottomanism ambitions. Early enough in December 1997, he was given a 10-month prison sentence for voicing a poem that read: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers;” the poem was considered a violation of Kemalism by the secular judiciary.

Deceiving ‘Window of Opportunity’

However, Erdogan’s Machiavellianism finds no contradiction between his Islamist outreach and his promotion of the “Turkish model,” which sells what is termed as the “moderate” Sunni Islam within the context of Ataturk’s secular and liberal state as both an alternative to the conservative tribal-religious states in the Arabian Peninsula and to the sectarian rival of the conservative Shiite theocracy in Iran.

He perceived in the latest US withdrawal of focus from the Middle East towards the Pacific Ocean a resulting regional power vacuum providing him with an historic window of opportunity to fill the perceived vacuum.

“Weakening of Europe and the US’ waning influence in the Middle East” were seen by the leadership of Erdogan’s ruling party “as a new chance to establish Turkey as an influential player in the region,” Günter Seufert wrote in the German Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) on last October 14.

The US and Israel, in earnest to recruit Turkey against Iran, nurtured Erdogan’s illusion of regional leadership. He deluded himself with the unrealistic belief that Turkey could stand up to and sidestep the rising stars of the emerging Russian international polar, the emerging Iranian regional polar and the traditional regional players of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, let alone Iraq and Syria should they survive their current internal strife.

For sure, his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) and his thinly veiled Machiavellian logistical support of al-Qaeda – linked terrorist organizations are not and will not be a counter balance.

He first focused his Arab outreach on promoting the “Turkish model,” especially during the early months of the so-called “Arab Spring,” as the example he hoped will be followed by the revolting masses, which would have positioned him in the place of the regional mentor and leader.

But while the eruption of the Syrian conflict compelled him to reveal his Islamist “hidden agenda” and his alliance with the MBI, the removal of MBI last July from power in Egypt with all its geopolitical weight, supported by the other regional Arab heavy weight of Saudi Arabia, took him off guard and dispelled his ambitions for regional leadership, but more importantly revealed more his neo-Ottoman “hidden agenda” and pushed him to drop all the secular and liberal pretensions of his “Turkish model” rhetoric.

‘Arab Idol’ No More

Erdogan and his foreign policy engineer Davotoglu tried as well to exploit the Arab and Muslim adoption of the Palestine Question as the central item on their foreign policy agendas.

Since Erdogan’s encounter with the Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Economic Summit in Davos in January 2009, the Israeli attack on the Turkish humanitarian aid boat to Gaza, Mavi Marmara, the next year and Turkey’s courting of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas,” the de facto rulers of the Israeli besieged Palestinian Gaza Strip, at the same time Gaza was targeted by the Israeli Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 then targeted again in the Israeli Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Turkey’s premier became the Arab idol who was invited to attend Arab Leage summit and ministerial meetings.

However, in interviews with ResearchTurkey, CNN Turk and other media outlets, Abdullatif Sener, a founder of Erdogan’s AKP party who served as deputy prime minister and minister of finance in successive AKP governments for about seven years before he broke out with Erdogan in 2008, highlighted Erdogan’s Machiavellianism and questioned the sincerity and credibility of his Islamic, Palestinian and Arab public posturing.

“Erdogan acts without considering religion even at some basic issues but he hands down sharp religious messages … I consider the AK Party not as an Islamic party but as a party which collect votes by using Islamic discourses,” Sener said, adding that, “the role in Middle East was assigned to him” and “the strongest logistic support” to Islamists who have “been carrying out terrorist activities” in Syria “is provided by Turkey” of Erdogan.

In an interview with CNN Turk, Sener dropped a bombshell when he pointed out that the AKP’s spat with Israel was “controlled.” During the diplomatic boycott of Israel many tenders were granted to Israeli companies and Turkey has agreed to grant partner status to Israel in NATO: “If the concern of the AKP is to confront Israel then why do they serve to the benefit of Israel?” In another interview he said that the NATO radar systems installed in Malatya are there to protect Israel against Iran.

Sener argued that the biggest winner of the collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad would be Israel because it will weaken Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Iran, yet Erdogan’s Turkey is the most ardent supporter of a regime change in Syria, he said.

Erdogan’s Syrian policy was the death knell to his strategy of “Zero Problems with Neighbors;” the bloody terrorist swamp of the Syrian conflict has drowned it in its quicksand.

Liz Sly’s story in the Washington Post on this November 17 highlighted how his Syrian policies “have gone awry” and counterproductive by “putting al-Qaeda on NATO’s (Turkish) borders for the first time.”

With his MBI alliance, he alienated Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in addition to the other Arab heavy weights of Syria, Iraq and Algeria and was left with “zero friends” in the region.

According to Günter Seufert, Turkey’s overall foreign policy, not only with regards to Syria, “has hit the brick wall” because the leadership of Erdogan’s ruling party “has viewed global political shifts through an ideologically (i.e. Islamist) tinted lens.”

Backpedaling too late

Now it seems Erdogan’s “Turkey is already carefully backpedaling” on its foreign policy,” said Seufert. It “wants to reconnect” with Iran and “Washington’s request to end support for radical groups in Syria did not fall on deaf Turkish ears.”

“Reconnecting” with Iran and its Iraqi ruling sectarian brethren will alienate further the Saudis who could not tolerate similar reconnection by their historical and strategic US ally and who were already furious over Erdogan’s alliance with the Qatari financed and US sponsored Muslim Brotherhood and did not hesitate to publicly risk a rift with their US ally over the removal of the MBI from power in Egypt five months ago.

Within this context came Davotoglu’s recent visit to Baghdad, which “highlighted the need for great cooperation between Turkey and Iraq against the Sunni-Shiite conflict,” according to www.turkishweekly.net on this November 13. Moreover, he “personally” wanted “to spend the month of Muharram every year in (the Iraqi Shiite holy places of) Karbala and Najaf with our (Shiite) brothers there.”

Within the same “backpedaling” context came Erdogan’s playing the host last week to the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, not in Ankara, but in Diyarbakir, which Turkish Kurds cherish as their capital in the same way Iraqi Kurds cherish Kirkuk.

However, on the same day of Barzani’s visit Erdogan ruled out the possibility of granting Turkish Kurds their universal right of self-determination when he announced “Islamic brotherhood” as the solution for the Kurdish ethnic conflict in Turkey, while his deputy, Bulent Arinc, announced that “a general amnesty” for Kurdish detainees “is not on today’s agenda.” Three days earlier, on this November 15, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said, “Turkey cannot permit (the) fait accompli” of declaring a Kurdish provisional self-rule along its southern borders in Syria which his prime minister’s counterproductive policies created together with an al-Qaeda-dominated northeastern strip of Syrian land.

Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism charged by his Islamist sectarian ideology as a tool has backfired to alienate both Sunni and Shiite regional environment, the Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Emirati, Saudi and Lebanese Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Israelis and Iranians as well as Turkish and regional liberals and secularists. His foreign policy is in shambles with a heavy economic price as shown by the recent 13.2% devaluation of the Turkish lira against the US dollar.

“Backpedaling” might be too late to get Erdogan and his party through the upcoming local elections next March and the presidential elections which will follow in August next year.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

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By Nile Bowie

20 November, 2013

The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in a Shiite district of southern Beirut is directly linked to the Syrian conflict and the external sponsors of fundamentalist militias losing ground to Assad’s forces.

The brutal attack on the morning of November 19th was carried out by a motorcyclist who detonated himself near the Iranian diplomatic compound attempting to breach the walls to make way for another man in a car who attempted to drive as close to the embassy building as possible before detonating his device. The attackers failed to substantially damage the embassy, but the double-tap bombing took the lives of two-dozen bystanders and first-responders, while injuring over a hundred more. These tactics directly reflect the methods used by al-Qaeda against Shiite communities throughout Iraq in the worsening terror campaign raging between Sunnis and Shiites. For the first time, Iranian diplomats were targeted on Lebanese soil, and the attack undoubtedly represents deteriorating relations between Shiite-Iran and Sunni-Saudi Arabia, the latter serving as the principle financier and arms supplier of the hardline Salafist militias fighting to topple the Syrian government (and losing). The use of Iraqi-style terror tactics on Lebanese soil could be interpreted by some as a spillover from worsening fighting and lawlessness in Syria, but it is more accurately a measure taken by Salafist fighters in response to strategic victories by Assad’s forces, who have the upper-hand and are quickly reconsolidating power.

The Qalamoun front

Lebanese sources indicate that the bombers acted in retaliation to the Syrian government forces’ offensive on the strategic rebel stronghold of Qalamoun, allegedly with assistance from Hezbollah and Iranian advisers, which resulted in the capturing of a key town, Qara. Qalamoun is located in a mountainous region northwest of Damascus and is fairly close to the Lebanese border where the Sunni majorities in the area of Arsal support anti-Assad fighters. The Syrian army’s capturing of the regional town of Qara, one of the last remaining supply routes for the militias into Lebanon, gives Damascus full control over the road linking the capital to the coast in the northwest, while cutting out a crucial corridor that previously linked networks of anti-Assad militias to sympathetic areas in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Meanwhile in Aleppo, where rebel-control has been most notably entrenched, government forces captured Safira in early November, a key town and crossroads for rebel supply routes.

The Syrian army will soon reach the Turkish border if the current northern campaign trajectory is kept up, meaning that heavy fighting will ensue as hardliners who have occupied the area attempt to maintain their foothold; they could eventually be forced to withdraw into southern Turkey to regroup and likely plan attacks similar to that seen in Beirut. Policy makers in Istanbul and other capitals in the region that previously lent full-on support to hardline rebel brigades will probably come to regret those decisions if they haven’t by now. (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been unusually withdrawn in recent times in contrast to the early and middle periods of the Syrian conflict where it looked like the rebels might have had a chance.) Daraa, the southern region adjacent to the Jordanian border where the conflict began, is seen as the main entry point for foreign interference – predominately Saudi and US intelligence.

The United States, along with Britain and France, have openly trained anti-Assad militias on bases within Jordanian territory near Daraa, officially to provide a counterweight to al-Qaida-linked militias, but their genuine motive has always been toppling the Syrian government – directly training and equipping rebels is only to help ensure that foreign powers have sway in a post-Assad Syria, a scenario that is looking more distant and hypothetical by the day. Government forces control the areas east of Daraa, in addition to the region adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the west. Considering the government’s current winning streak in offensive after offensive, Assad’s forces are conceivably in a strong position to secure the southern region – another step to ending the war, with a military solution being the only viable option as scattered hardline militias have refused to take part in Geneva-2.

Whodunnit?

The Iranian foreign ministry has laid the blame for the bombing in Beirut on Israel’s shoulders, despite the al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades claiming responsibility, which is a collection of Sunni jihadist units with networks in Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula who have forewarned further attacks across Lebanon until Iranian forces withdraw from Syria. It appears to be a favorite tactic of those opposing Assad to dramatically inflate the footprint of Iran in the Syrian conflict; there are no Iranian soldiers on the ground, only military personnel tasked with training and advising Syrian forces. The influence and interference of Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries is by every conceivable measure more extensive, broad, and detrimental to civilians – even the leader of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Majid Bin-Muhammad al-Majid, is a Saudi national! The group has taken it upon itself to “protect” Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims against the “Shiite domination” of Lebanon.

Members of the group have allegedly called for the overthrow of the Saudi government, though their motives and tactics completely serve the interests of the House of Saud. The social contract between the Saudi royal elite and their domestic branches of al-Qaeda (who interpret the former as opulent and unfit to rule) is essentially a promise that the House of Saud will quietly support their brand of puritanical Islam abroad on condition that they do not challenge the leadership in Riyadh. Unless Iran has compelling evidence directly linking Israel to the Beirut bombing that they have not made public, Tel Aviv’s complicity cannot be fully confirmed, but it is clear that those who oppose a political solution to the Syrian conflict – and a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue – are complicit in this terrorist attack by various degrees of separation. The bombing in Beirut actually speaks volumes of the ill health and desperation of the Salafist networks systematically waging war on Shiite communities from Beirut to Baghdad.

An Ashura to remember

Lebanese authorities had much evidence to suggest that al-Qaeda was preparing to launch terrorist attacks against recent rallies to celebrate Ashura – a religious event recognized by Shiite Muslims – in Lebanon, but jihadists were unable to due so because of impeccable security provided by thousands of Hezbollah contingents. Shiites commemorate the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Iman Hussein bin Ali, who was beheaded in 680 AD for opposing the repressive Umayyad caliphate. In remembering Iman Hussein’s act of heroic defiance, Lebanese Shiites have embraced Ashura ceremonies as an expression of defiance against attempts by Sunni Salafist movements to subjugate and oppress them. Given the geopolitical layout of the region in this ongoing Islamic cold war, this year’s Ashura celebrations had deep ideological characteristics, namely, a collective will to resist against those who seek to impose hegemony and dominate the Islamic world while perverting the values of the faith and unjustifiably cursing others as heretics – hopefully the House of Saud and their liver-eating friends will get the message.

By Hossein Mousavian

19 November 2013

@ Financial Times

Tehran suggested strong measures similar to recent proposals in 2005, says Hossein Mousavian

As Iran meets world powers in Geneva on Wednesday for this month’s second round of talks on its nuclear programme, there is much self-congratulation about the supposed effectiveness of the sanctions after decades of intransigence.

But the idea that it is sanctions that have brought Tehran to the table is wrong. The real cause is the desire of new President Hassan Rouhani to reach a rapprochement with the US, the EU, its neighbours and other world powers, alongside the fact that the US red line has changed from “no enrichment of uranium” to “no nuclear bomb”.

In fact, Tehran has not left the table since the start of talks in 2003, even under Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. While I was a member of the Iranian nuclear negotiating team from 2003 to 2005, the country was not under crippling sanctions. Yet in March 2005 it suggested strong measures similar to recent proposals: first, to ensure transparency at its nuclear sites; and second, on objective guarantees not to divert its nuclear programme towards weaponisation.

Proposals included implementing the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol enabling on-site inspections; limiting the expansion of the enrichment programme; capping enrichment at 5 per cent, enabling its use for fuel but not weapons; and converting all enriched uranium to fuel rods, ensuring there would be no reprocessing and plutonium separation at the heavy water reactor southwest of Tehran – a process that could facilitate weaponisation. Tehran also suggested rules to guarantee the permanent ban on developing, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons in return for respect for its right to enrich uranium under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The proposals are similar to demands François Hollande, the French president, made of Iran on his trip to Israel on November 17.

The talks failed in 2005 as a result of US insistence on preventing Iran from exercising its legitimate rights to enrichment. The west missed the chance to resolve the disagreement and instead imposed sanctions. Contrary to the claims of some US lawmakers and Israeli officials, sanctions only caused a dramatic rise in nuclear capability, as Tehran sought to show it would not respond to pressure. Before, Iran was enriching uranium to below 5 per cent at one site with 3,000 centrifuges and possessed a minute stockpile of enriched uranium. Today, it is enriching to 20 per cent at two sites with 19,000 centrifuges. It has a stockpile of 8,000kg of enriched uranium and more sophisticated centrifuges.

A draft agreement reached between Iran and the six powers (except France) in the first round of the Geneva talks covers all the world powers’ big concerns. France blocked that deal because it was drafted primarily by Iran and the US, to the exclusion of other nations. Furthermore, Israel succeeded in pressing France not to compromise. Israel also campaigned for the US Congress to block the draft and to impose more aggressive sanctions on the grounds that this would force Iran into making more concessions.

The Obama administration is seeking to avoid a war in the region that would jeopardise American lives; Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, wants to take military action because it is in line with his vision of eliminating the Islamic Republic as a regional power. Mr Obama and Congress should prioritise American lives as the supreme national interest. Detente with Tehran is the short and long-term US interest in the region.

Like Russia, other European countries and China, the Obama administration is optimistic that the world powers and Iran can reach a deal. Overstressing sanctions and undervaluing the opportunities offered by the Iranians could lead once more to unintended consequences – this time potentially disastrous. Instead, the world powers should grab this opportunity, bring an end to years of negotiations and end up with a realistic, face-saving and peaceful resolution to the nuclear dilemma, opening the door for co-operation on peaceful crisis management in the Middle East.

The writer is a research scholar at Princeton, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators and author of ‘The Iranian Nuclear Crisis’

20 January 2013

@ Assyrian International New Agency

(AINA) — A top secret memo sent by the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia reveals the Saudi Kingdom sent death-row inmates, sentenced to execution by decapitation, to Syria to fight Jihad against the Syrian government in exchange for commuting their sentences.

According to the memo, dated April 17, 2012, the Saudi Kingdom negotiated with a total of 1239 inmates, offering them a full pardon and a monthly salary for their families, who were to remain in the Kingdom, in exchange for “…their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.”

The memo was signed by Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan, the “Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior.”

According to the memo, prisoners were of the following nationalities: Yemenis, Palestinians, Saudis, Sudanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Somalis, Afghanis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Kuwaitis.

There were 23 Iraqi prisoners.

A former member of the Iraqi parliament, who spoke to AINA on condition of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the document and said most of the Iraqi prisoners Saudi Arabia sent to Syria returned to Iraq and admitted that they had agreed to the deal offered by the Saudi Kingdom, and requested the Iraqi government to petition the Saudi government to release their families, who were being held hostage in Saudi Arabia.

Yemeni nationals who were sent to Syria also returned to Yemen and asked their government to secure the release of their families, according to the former Iraqi MP, who said there are many more documents, like the one shown below, about Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Initially Saudi Arabia denied the existence of this program. But the testimony of the released prisoners forced the Saudi government to admit, in private circles, its existence.

According to the former Iraqi MP, the Russians threatened to bring this issue to the United Nations if the Saudis continued working against President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudis agreed to stop their clandestine activities and work towards finding a political solution on condition that knowledge of this program would not be made public.

Here is the translation of the memo:

This is a document issued by
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Interior Follow-up	LOGO	Number: 71466/J/H Attachments: Date: 25/5/1433 H. [April /17/2012 AD]
	(Top Secret)
His Excellency General Suood Al-Thnayyan The Classified [Secret] Office at the Ministry of Interior		May Allah protect him
Peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings
In reference to the Royal Court telegram No. 112, dated on 04/19/1433 H [March 3, 2012], referring to those held in the Kingdom jails accused with crimes to which Islamic Sharia law of execution by sword [decapitation] applies, we inform you that we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis. We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria. Please accept my greetings. [Signed] Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan CC: Authority of enforcement of the common good and prevention of forbidden Copy for general intelligence

By Patrick L. Smith, Salon

17 November 13

@ readersupportednews.org

More misleading half-truths from a paper too cowed by power and myth to tell the truth about U.S. foreign policy.

Never before have I written a column concerning nothing more than a pair of quotation marks. Then again, never until now have I seen the power of punctuation so perniciously deployed.

It is not a new trick. Very popular in hackdom during the Cold War decades. Enclose something in quotation marks and all between them is instantly de-legitimized; no argument or explanation need be made. Here, try it:

“… the Cuban ‘doctors’ sent to Angola…”

Or:”… Soviet-made ‘farm equipment’ in Portugal since its 1974 revolution…”

Well, they were doctors and it was farm equipment. In the latter category I sat in a Soviet tractor out in the Portuguese vineyards, and damn it if the camponês did not find it useful.

In the end, this kind of thing is simply passive aggression, my least favorite neurosis. No one actively lies such that one can confront and reveal. It is lying by misleading and by implication, so sending us off full of groundless conviction and prejudice.

In this case, we have the irresponsible use of inverted commas, as the Brits say, to shape national opinion on a question of vital importance. The question is Iran. And now to the supine, corrupted and corrupting organ.

You have taken a wild guess, and you are right. We have our familiar problem with our friends on Eighth Avenue, the New York Times, faithful servants of the sanctioned orthodoxy. I give these folks an “A” for clever disguise this time, and I flunk them in the professional ethics class. Simply shameful, this round of reckless chicanery.

Here is the situation.

As all know, a deal with Iran over its nuclear program is the biggest game going these days – an historic opportunity, as previously asserted in this space. Fumble this, and the Obama administration will go down as hopelessly moronic on the foreign-relations side.

You may know, too, that a round of talks between six world powers and the Iranians just hit a pothole. It is essential to understand why.

The paradox is apparent, not real. Knowing why reveals what a nation with imperial ambitions looks like when it is nearing exhaustion and would rather decline than shape up, re-imagine itself, and take a new and constructive place in the global community. Not knowing why encourages Americans to preserve their righteous self-image even as the moths of history chew holes in it.

Best, in Washington’s view, that we do not know why talks in Geneva last weekend failed.

Complex story, but we can take care of it simply. Iran wants a nuclear program, and this includes the capacity to enrich uranium. This is Iran’s right under international law. Washington and the major European powers do not want Iran to have such a program because they worry Iran will eventually build a nuclear weapon. The talks in Geneva went sour because the U.S. and the Europeans demanded that Iran surrender its right.

O.K. Here is the lead in the Times report from the City of Diplomacy:

The Iranian government’s insistence on formal recognition

of its “right” to enrich uranium emerged as a major obstacle,

diplomats said Sunday.

Two big problems. Nothing emerged as an obstacle in Geneva other than Secretary of State Kerry’s duplicity, given that his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, now charges him with misleading Iran as to demands to be made on the enrichment question. Iran has been quite clear all along: Enrichment under law will never get on the table. Zarif would have skipped the trip had he known Kerry’s plans; Kerry knew this.

Then the quotation marks. With them, the Times proposes to deprive Iran of its statutory rights so that Washington can lie to us as well as to the Iranians.

You are all set now for the corker. You search through the piece to understand the quotation marks, and you come to this, edited down so as to get to the point:

Iran has asserted repeatedly that it has the right to enrich uranium….

The Obama administration is prepared to allow Iran to enrich

uranium to the low level of 3.5 percent…. But the administration

is not prepared to acknowledge at this point that Iran has a “right”

to enrich….

This is how the consciousness of empire is dribbled into us and sustained, one touch at a time. Iran asserts only the validity of international law. What the administration is prepared to allow or acknowledge has nothing to do with what Iran can and cannot do as a sovereign nation.

This is also why these talks are very likely to fail. If they do, it will be the fault of Washington and its allies and the complicit media. It is this kind of language that enables Congress to begin debates on new sanctions against Iran. Concessions and demands are different: Iran may choose to concede this or that; the U.S. cannot demand those things by pretending international law does not (somehow) apply.

In my view, we are amid a pandemic of misinformation as to our global behavior. The dishonesty with which we are given the world – an essentially fantastic version of it – is becoming abject to the point of danger. And it is frighteningly willful. Here is the paradox: We cannot bear to see things as they are because things as they are constitute a refutation of our dearest mythologies, but we must see things as they are if we are to make sense of ourselves in the 21st century.

The Iran case has just become urgent in this regard. As I have asserted previously, it will be profoundly detrimental if the U.S. and the Europeans do not pursue what is a patently serious effort on Iran’s part to claim its rights and ease the world’s worries as to its nuclear program.

If the honorable editor will permit the unconventional, two things belong in caps so that a modest few Americans might stop wandering in the dark purposely created by the Times and all the other media too weak-minded to make judgments without reference to the Times:

ONE: IRAN HAS AN UNAMBIGUOUS RIGHT UNDER LAW TO A NUCLEAR PROGRAM, INCLUDING ENRICHMENT, EVEN IF THIS MAKES IT (AS IT WILL) NEARLY CAPABLE OF WEAPONIZING. READ YOUR DAILY NEWS DOSAGE WITH THIS IN MIND.

TWO. THERE IS ZERO EVIDENCE THAT IRAN DESIRES A NUCLEAR WEAPON, AND DECADES OF POLICY TO INDICATE IT PREFERS A NUCLEAR-FREE MIDDLE EAST. THERE IS ONLY ONE REASON IRAN WOULD CHANGE ITS MIND: ISRAEL’S NEVER-MENTIONED ARSENAL OF NUKES. THE MOTIVE WOULD BE DETERRENCE, AND MOST OF US WORSHIPPED AT THE ALTAR OF DETERRENCE WELL ENOUGH DURING THE COLD WAR. IRAN HAS SIGNED THE NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY; ISRAEL DECLINES TO DO SO.

The adage among properly cynical diplomats used to be that they were sent abroad to lie for their country. During the Cold War, as Washington’s sponsored atrocities grew evident, the thought took a turn: Diplomats were sent abroad to lie to their country.

Consider it a template and apply it to our press folk.

Correspondents used to be sent abroad to keep the country informed (in theory, at least). Now correspondents go forth to send home a simulacrum of truth, a semblance, while keeping their country misinformed.

It is no good positing some golden age of spotless integrity, some yesteryear when newspapers, the wires and broadcasters glistened with high principle. There never was such a time. A good press is ever a work in progress, requiring the calloused hands of each generation to make it however good it can, always and by definition short of any ideal.

Too far short when one considers this columnist’s cohort.

By Uri Avnery, Gush-Shalom

16 November 13

@ Readersupportednews.org

FROM THE first moment, I did not have the slightest doubt that Yasser Arafat was assassinated.

It was a matter of simple logic.

On the way back from the funeral, I happened upon Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset for the nationalist Arab Balad party, who is a highly qualified doctoral pharmacist. We exchanged views and came to the same conclusion.

The findings of the Swiss experts last week only confirmed my conviction.

FIRST OF all, a simple fact: people don’t just die for no reason.

I visited Arafat a few weeks before it happened. He seemed in reasonably good health. Upon leaving, I remarked to Rachel, my wife, that he seemed more sharp and alert than during our last visit.

When he suddenly became very ill, there was no obvious cause. The doctors at the French military hospital, to which he was transferred at the insistence of Suha, his wife, and where he died, conducted a thorough examination of his body. They found no explanation for his condition. Nothing.

That by itself was very strange. Arafat was the leader of his people, the de facto head of a state, and one can be sure that the French doctors left no stone unturned to diagnose the case.

That left only radiation or poison. Why was no poison detected at the autopsy? The answer is simple: in order to detect a poison, one must know what one is looking for. The list of poisons it almost unlimited, and the routine search is restricted to a small number.

Arafat’s body was not examined for radioactive polonium.

WHO HAD the opportunity to administer the poison?

Well, practically anybody.

During my many visits with him, I always wondered at the lax security precautions.

At our first meeting, in besieged Beirut, I wondered at the trust he put in me. It was known at the time that dozens of Mossad agents and Phalangist spies were combing the city for him. He could not be sure that I was not a Mossad agent myself, or that I was not followed, or that I was not unwittingly carrying some locating device.

Later, in Tunis, the security search of his visitors was perfunctory. The security precautions of the Israeli Prime Minister were immeasurably more stringent.

In the Ramallah Mukata’a (“compound”), no security measures were added. I had meals with him several times, and wondered again at his openness. American and other foreign guests, who were (or seemed to be) pro-Palestinian activists were invited by him freely, sat next to him and could easily have slipped poison into his food. Arafat would joke with his guests and feed them choice tidbits with his hand.

Certain poisons do not need food. Slight physical contact is enough.

YET THIS man was one of the most threatened persons in the world. He had many deadly enemies, half a dozen secret services were bent on his destruction. How could he be so lax?

When I remonstrated with him, he told me that he believed in divine protection.

Once, when he was flying in a private jet from Chad to Libya, the pilot announced that the fuel had run out. He was going to crash land in the middle of the desert. Arafat’s bodyguards covered him with cushions and formed a ring around him. They were killed, but he survived almost without a scratch.

Since then he became even more fatalistic. He was a devout – though unostentatious – Muslim. He believed that Allah had entrusted him with the task of liberating the Palestinian people.

SO WHO carried out the assassination?

For me, there cannot be any real doubt.

Though many had a motive, only one person had both the means and a profound and lasting hatred for him – Ariel Sharon.

Sharon was furious when Arafat slipped through his fingers in Beirut. Here was his quarry, so near yet so far. The Arab-American diplomat Philip Habib managed to make an arrangement which allowed the PLO fighters, including Arafat, to withdraw with honor from the city, with their arms. I was lying on the roof of a warehouse in Beirut Harbor when the PLO troops, flags flying, were driving by to the ships.

I did not see Arafat. His men were hiding him in their midst.

Since then, Sharon made no secret of his determination to kill him. And when Sharon was resolved to do something, he never, but never, gave up. Even in much smaller matters, if he was thwarted, he would return to his effort again and again and again, until he succeeded.

I knew Sharon well. I knew of his determination. Twice, when I felt that Sharon was nearing his goal, I went with Rachel and some colleagues to the Mukata’a to serve as a human shield. Later we had the satisfaction of reading an interview with Sharon, in which he complained that he had not been able to carry out the planned assassination because “some Israelis were staying there”.

THIS WAS much more than a personal vendetta. He – and not only he – saw it as a national aim.

For Israelis, Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian people, an object of abysmal hatred. He was hated more than any other human being after Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. The generations-old conflict with the Palestinian people was personified by this man.

It was Arafat who had resurrected the modern Palestinian national movement, whose supreme aim was to thwart the Zionist dream of taking possession of all the country between the sea and the Jordan. It was he who had led the armed struggle (a.k.a. terrorism). And when he turned towards a peaceful settlement, recognized the State of Israel and signed the Oslo Accords, he was even more hated. Peace was bound to give back a lot of territories to the Arabs, and what could be worse?

The hatred of Arafat had long since ceased to be rational. For many, it was a total, physical rejection, a deadly brew of hate, aversion, enmity, mistrust. In the forty or so years after he appeared on the stage, millions upon millions of words had been written about him in Israel, but I truly believe that I have never seen a single positive word about him.

For all those years, an entire army of paid propaganda hacks conducted a relentless demonization campaign against his person. Every conceivable accusation was thrown at him. The assertion that he had AIDS, which is now so prominent in the Israeli covert propaganda effort, was invented then in order to mobilize homophobic prejudices. Needless to say, no evidence of homosexuality was ever presented. And the French doctors found no trace of AIDS.

IS THE Israeli government capable of deciding to carry out such a deed? It is an established fact that it is.

In September 1997, an Israeli hit squad was sent to Amman to assassinate Khalid Mishal, the Hamas leader. The chosen instrument was levofentanyl, a deadly poison that leaves no traces and produces effects like a heart attack. It was administered by a slight physical touch.

The act was bungled. The killers were detected by passers-by and fled into the Israeli embassy, where they were besieged. King Hussein, generally an Israeli collaborator, was furious. He threatened to hang the perpetrators unless a life-saving antidote was provided at once. The then Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, caved in and sent the Chief of the Mossad to Amman with the required medicine. Mishal was saved.

Later, in 2010, another squad was sent to assassinate another Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel. They bungled the job, too – though they succeeded in killing their prey by paralyzing and then suffocating him, they were filmed by the hotel cameras and their identity disclosed.

God knows how many un-bungled murders have been carried out this way.

Israel, of course, is not alone in this field. Before, a Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, was ill-advised enough to displease Vladimir Putin. He was killed by the same radioactive polonium as Arafat, but before he died an alert doctor detected the poison. Even before, a Bulgarian dissident was poisoned by a tiny pellet fired from an umbrella,. One must assume that every self-respecting secret service has suchlike means of murder.

WHY DIDN’T Sharon kill Arafat before? After all, the Palestinian leader was besieged for a very long time in his Ramallah compound. I myself saw Israeli soldiers a few meters away from his office.

The answer is political. The US was afraid that if Israel was seen killing the PLO chief, a hero to tens of millions around the Arab world, the region would explode against the US. George Bush the son forbade it. The answer was to do it in a way that could not be traced to Israel.

This, by the way, was quite usual for Sharon. A few weeks before his 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he told the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, about his plan. Haig forbade it – unless there was a credible provocation. Lo and behold, a dastardly attempt was made on the life of the Israeli ambassador in London, the provocation was duly deemed to be intolerable and the war started.

For the same reason, the Netanyahu government now strenuously denies Israeli involvement in the assassination of Arafat. Instead of bragging about the successful operation, our powerful propaganda machine asserts that the Swiss experts are incompetent or lying (probably they are also anti-Semites), and that the conclusions are wrong. A respected Israeli professor is trotted out to declare that it is all nonsense. Even the good old story about AIDS is called out of retirement.

Sharon himself, in his endless coma, cannot react. But his old assistants, all of them seasoned liars, repeat their mendacious stories.

TO MY mind, the assassination of Arafat was a crime against Israel.

Arafat was the man who was ready to make peace and who was able to get the Palestinian people to accept it. He also laid down the terms: a Palestinian state with borders based on the Green Line, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

This is exactly what his assassins aimed to prevent.

By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

14 November, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Time to end the failed experiment with rigged corporate trade and put in place fair trade for the people and planet before profits

Momentum is growing in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  Yesterday, the TPP was dealt two blows. Each could be lethal but the TPP, and its Atlantic counterpart, called TAFTA, are not dead yet. It is time for the movement of movements that formed to oppose the TPP to stand in solidarity, defeat these agreements and end the era of rigged corporate trade.

Yesterday’s first blow came from Wikileaks, showing once again that when government works in secret with big corporations, exposure by whistle blowers is critical to changing the corrupt direction of government and the economy.  Wikileaks published the full text of the intellectual property chapter; the leaked document included the positions of all the parties.  It will take time for all the corporate rigging in this lengthy document to be understood, but already it is evident that Internet freedom will be curtailed, access to healthcare will become more expensive and access to information will be undermined.

This is not the first leak of TPP text. Previous leaks are consistent with the Wikileaks leak – enhanced corporate power that puts profits before the needs of the people and the protection of the planet.  The Wikileaks release shows that the United States is by far the most aggressive advocate for trans-national corporate interests, often isolated in pushing for harmful policies.

The second blow came from members of the U.S. House of Representatives.  In recent days, several letters were sent to President Obama opposing Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority.  Fast Track undermines Congress’ responsibility under the Commerce Clause to regulate trade between nations by allowing the president to sign the agreement before Congress even sees it. The letters made public on November 13 th demonstrate broad bi-partisan opposition to Fast Track with 179 Members signing at least one of the three letters.

A letter spearheaded by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) garnered the support of three-quarters of House Democrats with 151 Members telling President Obama they oppose Fast Track, writing:

“we will oppose ‘Fast Track’ Trade Promotion Authority or any other mechanism delegating Congress’ constitutional authority over trade policy that continues to exclude us from having a meaningful role in the formative stages of trade agreements and throughout negotiating and approval processes.”

Important leaders of the Democratic Party signed the letter including 18 out of 21 Ranking Members who would chair committees if the Democrats were in the majority.  This means that to pursue Fast Track authority, President Obama will need to challenge three-quarters of his own party.

But, that is not all. In another letter , organized by Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and signed by 12 of the 16 Democratic Party members of the Ways and Means Committee, which is primarily responsible for Fast Track legislation, members expressed opposition to Fast Track unless it was radically different from previous grants of authority. The letter says it “cannot just be an extension of earlier trade promotion authorities. Any new proposed TPA must . . . ensure Congress plays a more meaningful role in the negotiating process.”

And, the opposition is bi-partisan. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) drafted a letter signed by 23 Republicans .  The Republican letter emphasized that Congress has the “exclusive authority to set the terms of trade.” Further, “The Founders established this clear check and balance to prevent the president from unilaterally negotiating with foreign nations and imposing trade policies that Congress would deem to be against the national interest.” They write that they refuse to “cede our constitutional authority to the executive” through Fast Track.

These are just the latest problems in the quest for Fast Track, indeed a bill has yet to be introduced.  The previous US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, said in 2012 “We’ve got to have it.” He wanted the authority by the end of 2012.  In April, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) promised Obama Fast Track by June of 2013.  The broad bi-partisan opposition announced this week shows that winning Fast Track has very little support in Congress.  In fact, the letters may be the death knell for such legislation.

The Wikileaks documents show there is a lot of division among the negotiating nations with important disagreements on key aspects of the text. Without Fast Track to guarantee passage of the TPP, these nations will be even less likely to agree to demands by the U.S.  Further, Asian countries are negotiating their own competing agreement , which does not include the United States but, unlike the TPP, does include China.

Latin American countries are also speaking out against the TPP. Earlier this year, Rodrigo Contreras , Chile’s lead TPP negotiator quit to warn people of the dangers of the TPP – highlighting how big financial institutions will dominate their governments and how the TPP “will become a threat for our countries: It will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPP negotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.” And, recently the Parliament of Peru passed a resolution “requesting that the government open a ‘public, political, and technical debate’ on the binding rules being negotiated in the TPP.”

In the United States, cities and counties are beginning to pass TPP Free Zones , saying they will not obey the TPP if it becomes law.  These local governments are concerned with provisions that would not allow them to give preference to buying local, buying U.S. made goods or other provisions that undermine their sovereignty.

In addition to opposition in the U.S. government and foreign governments, a mass citizen uprising is developing against the TPP.  There have been large protests in many of the countries involved in the negotiations as well as in the United States. The night before the Wikileaks documents were released, 13 cities did visibility protests opposing the TPP in light shows.  In September we joined with activists in Washington, DC in a series of protests, including covering the office building of the US Trade Representative in banners to expose their secret trade agreement. Protests are scheduled for Salt Lake City, UT on November 19 th where lead negotiators from 12 countries will hold meetings. A global day of protest is planned for December 3 against not only the TPP but also the WTO and all toxic trade agreements.

The TPP is running into resistance in Congress, local governments and among Pacific nations in Asia and Latin America; and by people who oppose the agreement all over the world. This is part of a growing movement of movements – all of the movements impacted by corporate trade, e.g. labor, environmental, Internet freedom, healthcare, food sovereignty, immigrant’s rights, banking regulation –  are joining together to defeat it.

The people are winning. Fourteen trade agreements have been stopped in the last 14 years and as Tom Donohue of the US Chamber of Commerce wrote this week “the WTO has not concluded a single new multilateral trade agreement since it was created in 1995.” Mass protest against rigged corporate trade agreements can end the experiment in trade that puts profits ahead of the people and planet.

We are on the verge of defeating Fast Track. It is important that we keep the pressure on Congress. Neither the TPP nor TAFTA will become law if people learn what is in them and Congress fulfills its constitutional responsibility to review their impact. Denying the President Fast Track is the essential step to defeat both of these agreements.

Once we defeat Fast Track and prevent TPP and TAFTA from becoming law, we need to remain in solidarity and work to transform trade so it becomes “fair” trade that puts the necessities of the people and the protection of the planet first. The people will have firmly established that they will not tolerate rigged corporate trade deals. If corporations want to see trade between nations, they need a new approach – transparent, participatory and fair – with new goals of serving the people and planet.

To get involved in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership visit http://www.FlushTheTPP.org .

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD are participants in PopularResistance.org ; they co-direct   It’s Our Economy   and co-host   Clearing the FOG   shown on UStream TV and heard on radio. Their twitters are  @KBZeese  and  MFlowers8 .