Archives: Articles

By Countercurrents 

Photographs presented as proof of Russian involvement in Ukraine by the US and Kiev junta has been exposed as unverified and contradictory to the claims.

Freelance photographer Maxim Dondyuk said photos were taken without permission from his Instagram account.

The photographs were published on Monday by the New York Times.

The US State department acknowledged the error and the New York Times back-tracked its story, which claimed “photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration … suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces”.

The proof was this particular picture with an inscription “Group photograph taken in Russia ”.
“It was taken in Slavyansk [ Ukraine ],” Maxim Dondyuk told NYT over the phone. “Nobody asked my permission to use it.”

The picture was amongst others Kiev gave the OSCE mission to Ukraine to ‘prove’ Russian involvement in the massive unrest gripping the Donetsk region.

The State Department repeated the claims, citing ‘confirmation’ of Moscow involvement.

“We see in the photos that have been again in international media, on Twitter, publicly available is that there are individuals who visibly appear to be tied to Russia . We’ve said that publicly a countless number of times,” Jen Psaki, State Dept spokeswoman said.

The New York Times eventually published a climbdown Wednesday, “Scrutiny Over Photos Said to Tie Russia Units to Ukraine ”, where it admitted failing to properly verify the Kiev photo dossier.
The NYT also cited the State Dept’s Psaki admitting “the assertion that the photograph in the American briefing materials had been taken in Russia was incorrect”. She explained the picture was only part of a draft packet that wasn’t used by Kerry at the talks.

Psaki then claimed to have other evidence connecting “the Russians and the armed militants” in eastern Ukraine but would not provide details.

The NYT climbdown by Michael R. Gordon and Andrew E. Kramer ( April 22, 2014 ) said:

The photographs have come under scrutiny.

It said:

The photographs were submitted by Ukraine last week to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe , an organization in Vienna that has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine .

Some of the photographs were also provided by American officials to Secretary of State John Kerry so he could show them when he met in Geneva last Thursday with his counterparts from the European Union, Russia and Ukraine .

One series of photographs depicts what Ukraine described as a “soldier of the Russian Special Forces identified in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk during the assault of administration buildings.”

Vyachislav Ponomaryov, the de facto mayor of Slovyansk, who was ushered into office by pro-Russian militants, acknowledged in a news conference on Tuesday that armed men had come to his town from outside Ukraine but vociferously denied that they were Russian Special Forces.

Another series of photographs in the Ukrainian presentation shows a uniformed man with a long beard who was photographed this year in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and who, the Ukrainians assert, was also photographed during Russian combat operations in Georgia in 2008, wearing a Special Forces patch.

Asked about the soldier, Mr. Ponomaryov said he was a close friend but added that he did not know if the man, whom he declined to name, had fought in Georgia .

“I cannot rule it out,” he said in an interview. “He has a good background. He is one of my old friends. I have good friends in South Ossetia and in Grozny .”

The NYT report added:

Another question has been raised about a group photograph of uniformed men who are identified in the Ukrainian submission as a “sabotage-reconnaissance group” that reports to the “General Staff of the Russian armed forces.”

The Ukrainian submission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe does not identify where the group photograph was taken but asserts that one prominently featured soldier was involved in operations in eastern Ukraine .

A packet of American briefing materials that was prepared for the Geneva meeting asserts that the photograph was taken in Russia . The same men are also shown in photographs taken in Ukraine . Their appearance in both photographs was presented as evidence of Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine . The packet was later provided by American officials to The New York Times, which included that description of the group photograph in an article and caption that was published on Monday.

It said:

Maxim Dondyuk, a freelance photographer who was working in Slovyansk principally for the Russian newsmagazine Russian Reporter, said that he had taken the group photograph there and posted it on his Instagram account.

“It was taken in Slovyansk,” he said in a telephone interview. “Nobody asked my permission to use this photograph.”

Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, acknowledged that the assertion that the photograph in the American briefing materials had been taken in Russia was incorrect.

A version of the climbdown article appeared in print on April 23, 2014 , on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Scrutiny Over Photos Said to Tie Russia Units to Ukraine .

France to send fighter planes to the Baltics

France is sending four fighter jets to join NATO’s air patrols over the Baltics, General Pierre de Villiers, France ‘s chief of defense staff said on a visit to Washington .

The four jets will be sent to eastern Poland on April 28 on a double mission to train the Polish air force and to be on standby for air patrols over the Baltic States under NATO command.

However, the French general told reporters Wednesday French political leaders had not ordered further steps to support alliance members.

“For the moment, the guidance is very clear, we do not go beyond that,” he said.

On the other hand, Russia ‘s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has said that NATO exercises will do nothing to help solve the crisis in Ukraine .

“War games by NATO in Poland and the Baltic states are also not helping the normalization of the situation. We are forced to react to the situation,” he said during an official meeting in Moscow .

In response Russia has started military drills near the Ukrainian border, as the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

25 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Countercurrents

In an unprecedented move for a peaceful, nuclear arms free-world, the Marshall Islands, a Pacific nation, has sued nine nuclear-armed powers including the US. The country has also sued the US president Barack Obama and three US secretaries.

Media reports said:

The tiny Pacific country was used for 67 US nuclear tests after World War II over a 12-year period.

The tiny country’s lawsuit demands that the nuclear armed powers meet their obligations toward disarmament.

It accuses them of ‘flagrant violations’ of international law.

The island group-country filed suit on April 24, 2014 against each of the nine countries in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.

It also filed a federal lawsuit against the United States in San Francisco, naming President Barack Obama, the departments and secretaries of defense and energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The Marshall Islands claims the nine countries are modernizing their nuclear arsenals instead of negotiating disarmament, and it estimates that they will spend $1 trillion on those arsenals over the next decade.

“I personally see it as kind of David and Goliath, except that there are no slingshots involved,” David Krieger, president of the California-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told the news agency AP. He is acting as a consultant in the case. There are hopes that other countries will join the legal effort, he said.
The countries targeted also include Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The last four are not parties to the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but the lawsuits argue they are bound by its provisions under “customary international law.”

None of the countries had been informed in advance of the lawsuits.

The US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said he was unaware of the lawsuit, however “it doesn’t sound relevant because we are not members of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.”

“Our people have suffered the catastrophic and irreparable damage of these weapons, and we vow to fight so that no one else on earth will ever again experience these atrocities,” the country’s foreign minister, Tony de Brum, said in a statement announcing the lawsuits.

The country is seeking action, not compensation.

It wants the courts to require that the nine nuclear-armed states meet their obligations.

“There hasn’t been a case where individual governments are saying to the nuclear states, ‘You are not complying with your disarmament obligations,” John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, part of the international pro bono legal team, told the AP. “This is a contentious case that could result in a binding judgment.”

Several Nobel Peace Prize winners are said to support the legal action, including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Iranian-born rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi.

“We must ask why these leaders continue to break their promises and put their citizens and the world at risk of horrific devastation,” Tutu said in the statement announcing the legal action.

The Marshall Islands is asking the countries to accept the International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction in this case and explain their positions on the issue.

The court has seen cases on nuclear weapons before. In the 1970s, Australia and New Zealand took France to the court in an effort to stop its atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific.

The idea to challenge the nine nuclear-armed powers came out of a lunch meeting in late 2012 after the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation gave the Marshall Islands foreign minister a leadership award, Krieger said.

“I’ve known Tony long time,” he said. “We both have had a strong interest for a long time in seeing action by the nuclear weapons states.”
Frustration with the nuclear-armed states has grown in recent years as action toward disarmament appeared to stall, Burroughs and Krieger said.

“One thing I would point to is the US withdrawal in 2002 from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; that cast a shadow over future disarmament movement,” Krieger said. The treaty originally had bound the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “One other thing, in 1995, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty had a review and was extended indefinitely. I think the nuclear states party to the treaty felt that once that happened, there was no longer pressure on them to fulfill their obligations.”

In 1996, the International Court of Justice said unanimously that an obligation existed to bring the disarmament negotiations to a conclusion, Burroughs said.

Instead, “progress toward disarmament has essentially been stalemated since then,” he said.

Some of the nuclear-armed countries might argue in response to these new lawsuits that they’ve been making progress in certain areas or that they support the start of negotiations toward disarmament, but the Marshall Islands government is likely to say, “Good, but not enough” or “Your actions belie your words,” Burroughs said.

The Marshall Islands foreign minister has approached other countries about filing suit as well, Krieger said. “I think there has been some interest, but I’m not sure anybody is ready.”

25 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Yale Environment 360
This month, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on steps the world can take to avoid the worst impacts of future climate change. The report by the panel’s Working Group III was the final interim report before the IPCC’s major Fifth Assessment Report due to be released in October. Yale Environment 360 asked Rajendra Pachauri, who has served as IPCC chairman since 2002, five questions about the latest report and about the prospects that the international community will finally take decisive action to address climate change.

1. The most recent IPCC report suggests that the political will to tackle the climate issue seems to be growing around the world. Can you give some specific examples of that?

There is nothing that I am aware of in the Working Group III report that speaks to the political will to tackle climate change. But I can say that in my personal view I have been encouraged by a growing level of awareness and concern about climate change among senior government officials, including presidents and cabinet ministers, across the globe. I can’t say whether this will translate into global action, but it is an encouraging sign. I think there is a realization that failure to act on climate change will become a political liability at some point – and that point is rapidly drawing nearer. Besides, the cost of taking action in order to keep [global] temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius is so low that the merit of this will not be lost on the global community. Nor would they remain unaware of the numerous co-benefits of both the adaptation and mitigation measures detailed in our reports.

2. The latest report cites the steady drop in prices and increases in efficiency in solar and wind power. Do you think this is evidence that the real solution to the climate problem may come not from governments, but from scientists and business people?

I think the scientific and business communities are certainly a growing part of the solution and will become an even more decisive change agent if governments fail to act decisively. But the fact is we still need good government policies to tackle climate change. And there is much to be done in the development and dissemination of renewable energy technologies as well, which requires initiatives by all stakeholders. At the global level, scenarios [to hold the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to] 450 ppm (parts per million) are characterized by more rapid improvements of energy efficiency, nearly a quadrupling of the share of zero- and low-carbon energy supply from renewables, nuclear energy, and fossil energy with carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) or bioenergy with CCS by the year 2050.

This is a global challenge and it needs global cooperation. That can occur to some extent on a business-to-business level, but only governments can bring about global change in the time frame we need to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

3. What do you believe is the single most important step that could be taken worldwide to begin reversing the rapid rise of greenhouse gas emissions?

There is no single step that is most important. This is a problem that can only be solved from a variety of perspectives. The solutions will include not only measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but adaptation measures that help us cope with the climate change that is already locked into the system and which we will have to deal with regardless of how effectively we reduce future emissions… Climate change is too big and complex a problem to solve with anything short of our full response capability.

4. What is your strategy between now and next year’s meeting in Paris to build support and consensus for a comprehensive climate treaty?

My primary task in the next six months is to ensure that we bring out a good Synthesis Report as part of the Fifth Assessment cycle. That would complete what I hope would turn out to be a remarkable scientific assessment. I think – and certainly hope – this year will be remembered as the one in which we regained the initiative on climate change. Part of that will be a function of the amount of information being released and the initiatives undertaken this year that are raising public awareness.

The challenge for the IPCC will be to maintain the momentum we are building this year through the release of the Fifth Assessment Report. I can’t get into too many details at this point, but we are planning to hold a series of events in 2015 to highlight what climate change means to different regions around the world. We are very mindful that we need to take additional measures to ensure that the wealth of information from the report does not fade away before the meeting in Paris.

5. Given the track record of past climate conferences, how likely is it that the world community will approve a meaningful treaty in Paris in 2015?

I certainly hope it leads to a meaningful outcome, but I am not in the position to give odds. However, I do think it would be a mistake to underestimate the chances of success. While it is tempting to conclude that [the Paris conference] will be a failure because it has been so difficult to reach an agreement in the past, we have to remember that ambitious global agreements typically take years, even decades, to finalize. Given the threat of climate change, we have to forge ahead with as much determination and energy as possible regardless of the odds. The stakes are much too high to give up.

 

23 April, 2014
Yale Environment 360

 

By Prof. James Petras

During the beginning of his first term in office President Obama promised “to remake the Middle East into a region of prosperity and freedom”. Six years later the reality is totally the contrary: the Middle East is ruled by despotic regimes whose jails are overflowing with political prisoners. The vast majority of pro-democracy activists who have been incarcerated, have been subject to harsh torture and are serving long prison sentences. The rulers lack legitimacy, having seized power and maintained their rule through a centralized police state and military repression.Direct US military and CIA intervention, massive shipments of arms,military bases, training missions and Special Forces are decisive in the construction of the Gulag chain from North Africa to the Gulf States.

We will proceed by documenting the scale and scope of political repression in each US backed police state. We will then describe the scale and scope of US military aid buttressing the “remaking of the Middle East” into a chain of political prisons run by and for the US Empire.
The countries and regimes include Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan and Turkey . . . all of which promote and defend US imperial interests against the pro-democracy majority, represented by their independent social-political movements.

Egypt: Strategic Vassal State

A longtime vassal state and the largest Arab country in the Middle East, Egypt’s current military dictatorship, product of a coup in July 2013, launched a savage wave of repression subsequent to seizing power. According to the Egyptian Center for Social and Economic Rights, between July and December 2013, 21,317 pro-democracy demonstrators were arrested. As of April 2014, over 16,000 political prisoners are incarcerated. Most have been tortured. The summary trials, by kangaroo courts, have resulted in death sentences for hundreds and long prison terms for most. The Obama regime has refused to call the military’s overthrow of the democratically elected Morsi government a coup in order to continue providing military aid to the junta.In exchange the military dictatorship continues to back the Israeli blockade of Gaza and support US military operations throughout the Middle East.

Israel: The Region’s Biggest Jailer

Israel, whose supporters in the US dub it the “only democracy in the Middle East”, is in fact the largest jailer in the region.
According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselm, between 1967 and December 2012, 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned at some point, over 20% of the population. Over 100,000 have been held in “administrative detention” without charges or trial. Almost all have been tortured and brutalized. Currently Israel has 4,881 political prisoners in jail. What makes the Jewish state God’s chosen… premier jailer, however, is the holding of 1.82 million Palestinians living in Gaza in a virtual open air prison. Israel restricts travel, trade, fishing, building , manufacturing and farming through air, sea and ground policing and blockades. In addition, 2.7 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (West Bank) are surrounded by prison-like walls, subject to daily military incursions, arbitrary arrests and violent assaults by the Israeli armed forces and Jewish vigilante settlers engaged in perpetual dispossession of Palestinian inhabitants.

Saudi Arabia: Absolutist Monarchy

According to President Obama’s ‘remaking of Middle East’ Saudi Arabia stands as Washington’s “staunchest ally in the Arab world”. As a loyal vassal state, its jails overflow with pro-democracy dissidents incarcerated for seeking free elections, civil liberties and an end to misogynist policies. According to the Islamic Human Rights Commission the Saudis are holding 30,000 political prisoners, most arbitrarily detained without charges or trial.
The Saudi dictatorship plays a major role bankrolling police state regimes throughout the region. They have poured $15 billion into the coffers of the Egyptian junta subsequent to the military coup, as a reward for its massive bloody purge of elected officials and their pro-democracy supporters. Saudi Arabia plays a big role in sustaining Washington’s dominance, by financing and arming ‘jailer-regimes’ in Pakistan, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt.
Bahrain: Small Country – Many Jails

According to the local respected Center for Human Rights, Bahrain has the dubious distinction of being the “top country globally in the number of political prisoners per capita”. According to the Economist (4/2/14) Bahrain has 4,000 political prisoners out of a population of 750,000. According to the Pentagon, Bahrain’s absolutist dictatorship plays a vital role in providing the US with air and maritime bases, for attacking Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. The majority of pro-democracy dissidents are jailed for seeking to end vassalage , autocracy, and servility to US imperial interest and the Saudi dictatorship.
Iraq: Abu Ghraib with Arab Characters

Beginning with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and continuing under its proxy vassal Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens have been tortured, jailed and murdered. Iraq’s ruling junta, has continued to rely on US military and Special Forces and to engage in the same kinds of military and police ‘sweeps’ which eviscerate any democratic pretensions. Al-Maliki relies on special branches of his secret police, the notorious Brigade 56, to assault opposition communities and dissident strongholds. Both the Shi’a regime and Sunni opposition engage in ongoing terror-warfare. Both have served as close collaborators with Washington at different moments.

The weekly death toll runs in the hundreds. The Al-Maliki regime has taken over the torture centers (including Abu Ghraib), techniques and jails previously headed and run by the US and have retained US ‘Special Forces’ advisers, overseeing the round-up of human rights critics, trade unionists and democratic dissidents.

Yemen:A Joint US-Saudi Satellite

Yemen has been ruled by US-Saudi client dictators for decades. The autocratic rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh was accompanied by the jailing and torture of thousands of pro-democracy activists, secular and religious, as well as serving as a clandestine torture center for political dissidents kidnapped and transported by the CIA under its so-called “rendition” program. In 2011 despite prolonged and violent repression by the US backed Saleh regime, a mass rebellion exploded threatening the existence of the state and its ties to the US and Saudi regimes. In order to preserve their dominance and ties to the military, Washington and Saudi orchestrated a ‘reshuffle’ of the regime: rigged elections were held and one Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a loyal crony of Saleh and servant of Washington, took power. Hadi continued where Saleh left off: kidnapping, torturing, killing pro-democracy protestors… Washington chose to call Hadi’s rule “a transition to democracy”. According to the Yemen Times (4/5/14) over 3,000 political prisoners fill the Yemen prisons. “Jailhouse democracy” serves to consolidate the US military presence in the Arabian Peninsula.

Jordan: A Client Police State of Longstanding Duration

For over a half century, three generations of reigning Jordanian absolutist monarchs have been on the CIA payroll and have served US interests in the Middle East. Jordan’s vassal rulers savage Arab nationalists and Palestinian resistance movements; signed off on a so-called “peace agreement” with Israel to repress any cross-border support for Palestine; provide military bases in support of US, Saudi and EU training, arming and financing of mercenaries invading Syria.

The corrupt monarchy and its crony oligarchy oversee an economy perpetually dependent on foreign subsidies to keep it afloat: unemployment is running over 25% and half the population is subsisting in poverty. The regime has jailed thousands of peaceful protestors. According to a recent Amnesty International Report (Jordan 2013), King Abdullah’s dictatorship “has detained thousands without charges”. The jailhouse monarchy plays a central role in buttressing US empire-building in the Middle East and facilitating Israeli land grabbing in Palestine.

Turkey: NATO Bulwark and Jailhouse Democracy

Under the reign of the self-styled “Justice and Development Party” led by Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has evolved into a major military operational base for the NATO backed invasion of Syria. Erdoğan has had his differences with the US; especially Turkey’s cooling relations with Israel over the latters’ seizure of a Turkish ship in international waters and the slaughter of nine unarmed Turkish humanitarian activists. But as Turkey has turned toward greater dependence on international capital flows and integration into NATO’s international wars, Erdoğan has become more authoritarian. Facing large scale public challenges to his arbitrary privatization of public spaces and dispossession of households in working class neighborhoods, Erdoğan launched a purge of civil society ,class based movements and state institutions. In the face of large scale pro-democracy demonstrations in the summer of 2013, Erdoğan launched a savage assault on the dissidents. According to human rights groups over 5,000 were arrested and 8,000 were injured during the Gezi Park protests.
Earlier Erdoğan established “Special Authorized Courts” which organized political show trials based on falsified evidence which facilitated the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of military officers, party activists, trade unionists, human rights lawyers and journalists, particularly those critical of his support for the war against Syria. Despite conciliatory rhetoric, Erdogan’s jails contain several thousand Kurdish dissidents, including electoral activists and legislators (Global Views 10/17/12).

While Erdoğan has served as an able and loyal Islamist anchor against popular democratic and nationalist movements in the Middle East, his pursuit of greater Turkish influence in the region, has led the US to deepen its political ties with the more submissive and pro-Washington , pro-Israel Gulenist movement embedded in the state apparatus ,business and education. The latter has adopted a permeationist-strategy: purging adversaries in its quiet march to power from within the state. The US still relies on Erdoğan’s “jailhouse democracy” to repress anti-imperialist movements in Turkey; to serve as a military anchor for the war against Syria; to back sanctions against Iran and to support the pro-NATO Maliki regime in Iraq.

The Middle East Gulag and US Military Aid

The police state regimes and the long-term authoritarian political culture in the Arab world is a product of long-term US military support for despotic rulers. The absence of democracy is a necessary condition for expanding and advancing the US imperial military presence in the region.
A small army of US Islamophobic academics, “experts”, journalists and media pundits totally ignore the role of the US in promoting, sustaining and strengthening the ruling dictators and repressing the profoundly democratic mass movements which have erupted over a prolonged period of time. Spearheaded by long-time pro-Israel Middle East scribes and scholars, in Ivy League universities, these propagandists, claim that Arab dictatorships are a product of “Islamic culture”,or the “authoritarian personality of Arabs” in search of a ‘strongman’ to guide and rule them. Ignoring or distorting the history of working class struggles, pro-democracy protests and affirmations, in all of the major Arab countries, these scholars justify the US ties to the dictatorships as “realistic policies” given the “available options”.

Wherever real democracy begins to emerge, where political rights begin to be exercised, Washington provokes coups and intervenes to bolster the repressive apparatus of the state (Bahrain 2011-14, Yemen 2011 to 2014, Egypt 2013, Jordan 2012 among numerous other cases). While the bulk of the Middle East “experts” blame the Arab citizens for authoritarian rule, they completely ignore and cover-up Israel’s racist majority which solidly backs the incarceration and torture of hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy Palestinians.
To understand the Middle East gulag requires a discussion of US ‘aid policy’ which is central to sustaining the ‘jailhouse regimes’.

US Aid to Egypt: Billions for Dictators

The Egyptian police state anchors the US ‘arc of empire’ from North Africa to the Middle East. Egypt has been actively engaged in destabilizing Libya, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and collaborating with Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. The Mubarak dictatorship received $2 billion dollars a year from Washington – nearly $65 billion for its imperial services. US aid strengthened its capacity to jail, and torture pro-democracy and trade union activists. Washington continued its military support of dictatorial rule after the military coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected government, to the tune of $1.55 billion dollars for 2014 .

Despite “expressions of concern” over the murder of thousands of pro-democracy protestors by the new military strongman General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, there was no cut in funding for so-called “counter-terrorism” and “security”. To continue funding the dictatorship under US Congressional legislation, Washington refused to characterize the violent seizure of power as a coup . . . referring to it as a “transition to democracy”. The key role of Egypt in US foreign policy is to protect Israel’s ‘eastern flank’. US aid to Egypt is product of the pressure and influence of the Zionist power configuration in Congress and the White House: US aid is conditioned on Egypt’s ‘policing’ of the Gaza border, ensuring that Israel’s blockade is effective. The White House supports Cairo’s repression of the majority of nationalist, anti-colonial Egyptians opposed to Tel Aviv’s dispossession of the Palestinians. Insofar as Israel’s interests’define US Middle East policy, Washington’s financing of Egypt’s jailhouse dictatorship is in accord with Zionist Washington’s strategy.

Israel: The US “Pivot” in the Middle East

Most independent and knowledgeable experts agree that US Middle East policy is largely dictated by a multitude of Zionist loyalists occupying key policymaking positions in Treasury, State Department, the Pentagon and Commerce as well as Congressional dominance by the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations and their 171,000 full time paid activists. While there is some truth in what some critics cite as the divergence of the ‘real’ US ‘national interest’ from Israel’s colonial ambitions, the fact is that US leaders in Washington perceive a convergence between imperial dominance and Israeli militarism. In point of fact a submissive Egypt serves wider US imperial and Israeli colonial interests.
Israel’s war on Lebanon against the anti-imperialist Hezbollah movement served US efforts to install a docile client as well as Israeli’s effort to destroy a partisan of Palestinian self-determination. Washington’s divergence with Israel over Israel’s dispossession of all Palestine does run counter to Washington’s interest in a Palestinian mini-state run by neo-colonial Arab officials. As a result of Zionist influence, Israel is the biggest per-capita US aid recipient in the world, despite having a higher standard of living than 60% of US citizens. Between 1985-2014, Israel received over $100 billion dollars, of which 70% was military, including the most advance high technology weaponry. Israel ,the country which has the world record for political prisoners and military attacks on its neighbors over the past forty years, holds the record for US military aid. Israel as the premier ‘jailhouse democracy’ is a key link in the chain of gulags extending from North Africa to the Gulf States.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia competes with Israel as an incarceration center of pro-democracy dissidents; the Saudi’s recycle hundreds of billions of petro-rents through Wall Street, enriching local Saudi despots and overseas pro-Israel investment bankers. The Saudi-US-Israeli convergence is more than incidental. They share military interests in warring against pro-independence, pro-democracy Arab movements throughout the Middle East. Saudi houses the major US military base and the biggest intelligence operations in the Gulf. It backed the US invasion of Iraq. It finances thousands of Islamic mercenaries in the US-NATO proxy war against Syria. It invaded Bahrain to smash the pro-democracy movement. It intervenes with Washington in support of the Yemen police state. It is the biggest and most lucrative market for the US military-industrial complex. US military sales between 1951 – 2006 totaled $80 billion. In October 2010 it signed off on a $60.5 billion purchase of US arms and services.

Bahrain: A US Aircraft Carrier called a Country

Bahrain serves as the naval base for the US Fifth fleet – and an operative base for attacking Iran. It has been servicing the occupation of Afghanistan and US control of oil shipping routes. The Al-Khalifa dictatorship is extremely isolated, highly unpopular and faces constant pressure from the pro-democracy majority. To bolster their vassal rulers, Washington has increased its military sales to the tiny statelet from $400 million between 1993-2000 to $1.4 billion in the subsequent decade. Washington has increased its sales and military training program in direct proportion to the growth of democratic discontent, resulting in the geometrical growth of political prisoners.

Iraq: War, Occupation,and the Killing Fields of a Jailhouse Democracy

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq led to the slaughter of nearly 1.5 million Iraqis (mostly civilians, non-combatants) at a cost of $1.5 trillion dollars and 4,801 US military deaths. In 2006 the US engineered ‘elections’ led to the installation of the Maliki regime, buttressed by US arms, mercenaries, advisers and bases. According to a recent study for the Congressional Research Office (February 2014), by Kenneth Kilzman, there are 16,000 US military personnel and “contractors” currently in Iraq. Over 3,500 US military contractors in the Office of Security Cooperation bolster the corrupt Maliki police state. The jailhouse democracy has been supplied with US missiles and drones and over $10 billion dollars in military assistance :this includes $2.5 billion in aid and $7.9 billion sales between 2005 – 2013. For 2014 -2015 Malaki has requested $15 billion in weapons, including 36 US F-16 combat aircraft and scores of Apache attack helicopters. In 2013 the Malaki regime registered 8,000 political deaths resulting from its internal war.
Iraq is a crucial center for US control of oil, the Gulf and as a launch pad to attack Iran. While Maliki makes ‘gestures’ toward Iran, its role as an advanced link in the US imperial gulag defines its real ‘function’ in the Gulf region.

Yemen: The Desert Military Outpost for the American Gulag

Yemen is a costly military outpost for Saudi despotism and US power on the Arabian Peninsula. According to a study, Yemen: Background and US Relations by Jeremy Sharp for the Congressional Research Service (2014), the US has supplied $1.3 billion in military aid to Yemen between 2009-2014. Saudi Arabia donated $3.2 billion in 2012 to bolster the Saleh dictatorship in the face of a mass popular anti-dictatorial uprising. Washington engineered a transfer of power from Saleh to “President” Hadi and ensured his continuity by doubling military aid to keep the jails full and the resistance in check. According to the New York Times (6/31/13) Hadi was “a carry-over of dictator Saleh”. The continuity of a jailhouse democracy in Yemen is a crucial link between the Egypt-Israel-Jordan axis and the Saudi-Bahrain imperial gulag.

Jordan: Eternal Vassal and Mendicant Monarchy

Jordan’s despotic monarchy has been on the US payroll for over a half century. Recently it has served as a torture center for kidnapped victims seized by US Special Forces engaged in the “rendition” program. Jordan has collaborated with Israel in assaulting and arresting Palestinians in Jordan engaged in the freedom struggle. Currently Jordan along with Turkey serves as a training and weapons depot for NATO backed mercenary terrorists invading Syria. For its collaboration with Israel, Washington and NATO, the corrupt jailhouse monarchy receives large scale long-term military and economic aid. The monarchy and its extended network of cronies, jailers and family, skim tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid, laundered in overseas accounts in London, Switzerland, Dubai and New York. According to a Congressional Research Service Report (January 27, 2014), US aid to the Jordanian royal dictatorship amounts to $660 million per year. An additional $150 million for military aid was channeled to the regime with the onset of the NATO intervention in Syria. The fund was directed to build-up the infrastructure around the Jordan-Syria border. In addition, Jordan serves as a major conduit for arms to terrorists attacking Syria: $340 million destined for “overseas contingencies” probably is channeled through Amman to arm the terrorists invading Syria. In October 2012, Jordan signed agreements with the US allowing a large contingent of Special Forces to establish airfields and bases to supply and train terrorists.

Turkey: A Loyal Vassal State with Regional Ambitions

As the southern military bulwark of NATO, on Russia’s frontier, Turkey has been on the US payroll for over 66 years. According to a recent study by James Zanotti Turkey – US Defense Co-Operation: Prospects and Challenges (Congressional Research Service, April 8, 2011) in exchange for bolstering the military power of Turkey’s “jailhouse democracy”, the US secured a major military presence including a huge air base in Incirlik a major operational center housing 1,800 US military personnel. Turkey collaborated with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and supported the NATO bombing of Libya. Today Turkey is the most important military operational center for jihadist terrorists invading Syria. Despite President Erdoğan’s periodic demagogic nationalist bombast, the US empire builders continue to have access to Turkish bases and transport corridors for its wars, occupations and interventions in the Middle East and South and Central Asia. In exchange the US has stationed missile defense systems and vastly increased arms sales, so-called “security assistance”. Between 2006 – 2009 US military sales exceeded $22 billion dollars. In 2013-14, tensions between Turkey and the US increased as Erdoğan moved to purge the state of the Gulenists, a US backed fifth column, which permeated the Turkish state and used its position to support closer collaboration with Israel and US military interests.

Conclusion

The expansion of the US Empire throughout North Africa and the Middle East has been built around arming and financing vassal states to serve as military outposts of the empire. These vassal regimes, ruled by dictatorial monarchies, and authoritarian military and civilian rulers, rely on force and violence to sustain their rule. The US has supplied the weapons, advisers, and financing allowing them to rule. The US arc of imperial military bases stretching from Egypt through Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq , Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, is protected by a chain of prison camps containing tens of thousands of political prisoners.
The US engagement, its pervasive presence throughout the region, is accompanied by a chain of jailhouse democracies and dictatorships. Contrary to liberal and conservative policy pundits and academics, US policy for over 50 years has actively sought out, installed and protected bloody tyrants who have pillaged the public treasury, concentrated wealth, surrendered sovereignty and underdeveloped their economies.
Pro-Israel academics at prestigious US universities have systematically distorted the structural bases of violence, authoritarianism and corruption in the Islamic world: blaming the victims, the Turkish and Arab people, and ignoring the role of US empire builders in financing and arming the authoritarian civilian and military rulers and absolutist monarchies and their corrupt military, judicial and police officials.
Contrary to the mendacious tomes published by the prestigious University presses and written mostly by highly respected pro-Israel political propagandists, the remaking of the Middle East depends on the strength of the democratic currents in Islamic society. They are found in the student movements, among the trade unionists and unemployed, the nationalist intellectuals and Islamic and secular forces who oppose the US Empire for very practical and obvious reasons. Along with Israel the US is the main organizer of the vast chain of political prison camps that destroy the most creative and dynamic forces in the region. Greater Arab vassalage provokes the periodic explosion of a vibrant democratic culture and movement; unfortunately it also results in greater US military aid and presence. The real clash of civilizations is between the democratic aspirations of the Eastern popular classes and the deeply embedded authoritarianism of Euro-American- Israeli imperialism.

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies.

23 April, 2014

Globalresearch.ca

 

By Countercurrents

Former US president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday the West should not impose sanctions that would hurt the Russian people over their leaders’ actions in Ukraine . And, hours after the US vice-president Joe Biden’s Kiev visit, the Kiev authority has relaunched military assaults against the federationists in the east of Ukraine . The federationists are opposing the authority that has seized parliament and usurped power in Kiev .

Media reports on Ukraine said:
Carter told AFP on the sidelines of a discussion in Paris on climate crisis: “I don’t think we would go so far as to impose sanctions that would hurt the Russian people.”

Carter was taking part in a meeting with students as a member of The Elders group set up to promote human rights around the world.
Carter said Russia ‘s takeover of Crimea had been “inevitable”.
“I don’t think anything could have been done by the US or European countries or anyone else to prevent that eventuality.
” Russia has always considered Crimea to be part of Russia .”
He said: “my hope and my belief is that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is not going to use military force” in eastern Ukraine .
“He is going to try to use other means to convince those people who live there that their best option is to cast their lot more towards Russia than towards the West. So I don’t think there is anything we can do that is going to deter Putin.”
Carter said Ukrainians must be allowed to decide their own fate.
He hoped they would be supported by Russia from the East and the US and Europe from the West so as to “not be torn between the two.”

Kiev relaunches military assault

The Kiev authority has relaunched military assaults against its pro-Kremlin separatists, hours after US Vice President Joe Biden ended a two-day visit to Kiev in which he warned Russia over its actions in the former Soviet republic.
Related Stories
Already the US has started sending 600 troops to Poland and to Baltic countries – Estonia , Lithuania and Latvia – for “exercises”.
The latest moves underscored the severity of the crisis that has brought East-West relations to their most perilous point since the end of the Cold War.
The acting president in Kiev , Oleksandr Turchynov, said on Tuesday he was ordering the military to restart operations against the rebels.
In a further slide back towards violence, which many fear could tip into civil war, a Ukrainian reconnaissance plane was hit by gunfire while flying above Slavyansk . However, the Antonov An-30 propellor-driven plane safely made an emergency landing and none of its crew members were hurt.
The federationists had taken over Kramatorsk ‘s police station late Monday, extending their grip from the already occupied town hall.
Russia is claiming Kiev ‘s new leaders are to blame for the collapse of the accord, which was reached recently in Geneva .
Russia says ultra-nationalists who were involved in months of protests that ousted Ukraine ‘s president Viktor Yanukovych in February killed rebels in an attack Sunday near the eastern town of Slavyansk .
“We in the United States stand with you and the Ukrainian people,” Biden said in a joint news conference with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister claimant in Kiev .

$5 billion regime change-investment

The US is to blame for the events in Ukraine as it invested $5 billion in regime change in the country, taking a more radical stance that its EU allies, said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s envoy to the UN.
“It seems it was the Americans, who tried to push through the most radical scenario,” Churkin said in an interview with Rossiya 24 channel. “They didn’t want any sort of compromise between Yanukovich and the opposition. And, I think, they came to the conclusion that it was time to cash in those $5 billion and handle the matter towards abrupt regime change, which, eventually, happened.”
This explains why the US , but not the European Union, took center stage when the coup resulted in legal vacuum in Kiev , he added.
US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told CNN on Monday that Washington has invested around $5 billion into supporting democracy in Ukraine since the fall of Soviet Union .
But Churkin has doubts about Nuland’s claims, saying that “any sane person would, at least, say that those investments didn’t pay off.”

“If those $5 billion were spent on support of democracy, but not overthrow of the existing government and regime change, then no democracy has triumphed there [in Ukraine],” he explained.
The Maidan standoff was “a head-on attack” by the US and its Western allies aimed at distancing Russia and Ukraine from each other, Russia ‘s envoy to the UN said.
However, it failed and “led to a completely unexpected result for them when Crimea was reunited with Russia ,” he stressed.
“One has to be naïve to suggest that it all happened fast,” Churkin said of the deal on the de-escalation of the Ukraine crisis, which Kiev agreed with Russia , the US and EU on April 17.
“Despite all their recurrent adventurism, they [the US ] realize that peace is rather fragile and too many crises, too much unrest has been created in different parts of the world. I don’t think they’re interested in the emergence of a new serious crisis, with non-obvious consequences for them,” the envoy said.
According to Churkin, one of those steps should be the confiscation of 3 million items of weapons, which are currently illegally held by the “radical nationalists” in Ukraine .
Kiev calls for the disarmament of federalization supporters in eastern Ukraine, but “how will the radicals [from Western Ukraine] lay down their arms as they are sometimes declared the National Guard and thus obtain official status?” he wondered.
The envoy has ruled out the possibility of a UN peacekeeping operation in Ukraine , calling it “unrealistic.”
“ Ukraine is a very big country and from political point of view there’s no frontline there. And, thank God, it can’t be drawn,” he said.
The presence of observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) “is just enough to monitor what’s happening there,” Churkin stressed.
The envoy also said the EU has begun realizing there’s “a considerable danger” in the rise of far-right forces in Ukraine .
“It’s not a secret that Europe has radicals of its own. Giving such a boost to the nationalist radicalism in Europe … I think that serious politicians understand this,” he said.
But those concerns are only shared during personal contacts, but “nobody talks openly about it,” he added.

Russia dismisses US threat

In Moscow , Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the US threat of new sanctions.
“I am sure we will be able to minimize their consequences,” he said in a televised speech to the Russian parliament.
However he acknowledged that Russia ‘s economy was facing an “unprecedented challenge”.

A divided EU

The European Union is divided on going further with its own sanctions on Moscow , with some member states worried that increased punishment could jeopardize supplies of Russian gas.
Sweden , which is not a NATO member, announced Tuesday it was increasing defense spending because of the “deeply unsettling development in and around Ukraine “. It plans to boost its fleets of fighter jets and submarines.

Lugansk plans referendum

In the eastern part of Ukraine , the federationists remain firmly entrenched in public buildings they have occupied for more than a week.
In the town of Lugansk , protesters pledged to hold their own local referendum on autonomy on May 11.

23 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

 

Vice President Joseph Biden’s two-day visit to Ukraine has ended with a resumption of the Kiev regime’s military crackdown against its political opponents in the southeast of the country and a dangerous escalation of US threats against Russia.

Oleksandr Turchynov, who is both acting president and chairman of the parliament following the US-backed, fascist-led coup of February 22, announced Tuesday that he had ordered the country’s security forces to “carry out effective counterterrorist activities aimed at defending Ukrainian citizens living in the country’s east from terrorists.”

Troops have reportedly been massed in the town of Izyum, on the border between Ukraine’s Kharkov region and Donetsk, the country’s most industrialized region. Donetsk has been the center of protests against the US-backed ultranationalists who seized power in Kiev.

Government buildings and police stations have been seized in over a dozen cities and towns. Local councils that have been elected are demanding autonomy for the region and a federalized form of government. In Lugansk, a local popular assembly has announced it will hold a two-stage referendum on May 11 and May 18, asking voters whether the region should be autonomous in the first round and, in the second, whether it should be independent or seek annexation by Russia. Other areas are preparing similar votes.

Izyum is about 50 kilometers northeast of Slavyansk, a center of the protests in Donetsk. The troops that have been deployed there reportedly include National Guard units that are heavily populated by fascist thugs from the Right Sector.

The Kiev regime initially launched its “antiterrorist” offensive early last week, seizing control of a military airfield in Kramatorsk and sending an armored column rolling toward Slovyansk. Halted by a crowd of local people, however, the Ukrainian soldiers refused to take action against them, instead turning over their armored vehicles and weapons to anti-Kiev militiamen.

It was in the aftermath of this humiliating fiasco that the Ukrainian regime’s foreign minister joined his counterparts from the US, Russia and the European Union in drafting an agreement in Geneva to halt all violence and de-escalate tensions by disarming illegal groups, ending occupations of public buildings and spaces, freeing political prisoners and initiating a dialogue between the regions.

Shortly afterwards, the regime in Kiev added that it was observing an “Easter truce.” It was during this supposed truce that a column of four cars carrying Right Sector gunmen attacked a roadblock on the outskirts of Slovyansk on Easter Sunday, killing three local men.

It is now apparent that the Kiev regime and its patrons in Washington were only playing for time with the negotiations in Geneva. It hardly seems a coincidence that the first abortive “counterterrorist” offensive was launched after a secret visit to Kiev by CIA Director John Brennan, while the second attempt was initiated immediately after Vice President Biden’s trip to the country.

Turchynov claimed the resumption of the crackdown was triggered by the discovery in Slovyansk of the body of a local politician and member of his own right-wing Batkivshchyna, or “Fatherland,” party, who had been abducted earlier. Another body found in the town has yet to be identified. Turchynov charged that “these crimes are being committed with the full support and connivance” of Russia.

This is all merely a pretext for an aggressive operation planned and directed from Washington. This was made clear in an interview published by the Washington Post Tuesday with the Kiev regime’s minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov. Asked by the Post whether the regime was going “to fight the terrorists,” Avakov replied, “Tomorrow the holidays will be finished and the announced Easter truce will be finished… We will act… We will start liberating people from the terrorists.”

The US-backed crackdown against the population of southeastern Ukraine threatens to plunge the country into a bloody civil war. At the same time, the launching of such an operation within miles of the Russian border poses the immediate threat of a catastrophic conflict between a nuclear-armed Russia and the Western powers.

In tandem with the turn toward armed repression in Ukraine, Washington is escalating its reckless and provocative military actions in the region directed against Russia. The Pentagon announced Tuesday that a first contingent of US paratroopers will arrive in Poland today to begin months of joint infantry exercises with Polish troops. Similar company-sized units will be dispatched to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the coming days in what the US military describes as “land force training activities in the Baltic region scheduled to take place this year and possibly into next year.”

“Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has renewed our resolve to strengthening NATO’s defense plans and capabilities, and to demonstrate our continued commitment to collective defense in reinforcing our NATO allies in Central and Eastern Europe,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said.

Also announced was the dispatch of another warship to the Black Sea in what is being described as a “reassurance mission.”

This supposed response only points to the real motivation behind the US-backed coup in Ukraine: to escalate the military encirclement of Russia, bringing NATO to its borders and eliminating Moscow as an impediment to US geostrategic hegemony over the Eurasian landmass.

Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for Eurasian affairs and the designated “point person” on operations in Ukraine, made clear the scale of the US investment in the drive to impose a US puppet regime in Kiev in an interview Monday on CNN news.

Nuland is a former chief of staff to Dick Cheney and the wife of Robert Kagan, the founding chairman of the Project for a New American Century, the rightwing think tank that was the leading advocate for wars for regime change in Iraq and elsewhere. She boasted to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has “invested” $5 billion in promoting “democracy” in Ukraine. She followed this admission with the preposterous claim that no US aid had been funneled to the fascist-led violence in Kiev’s Maidan, which she described as “a spontaneous movement.”

Nuland concluded by issuing marching orders to the Kiev regime, insisting that it must “negotiate a deal with the IMF, where they would institute real reform,” i.e., austerity measures that will spell mass unemployment and a devastating decline in living standards for Ukrainian workers. She also affirmed Washington’s backing for elections being staged by the illegitimate regime in Kiev on May 25 and demanded that the regime “ensure that the country is peaceful enough for those elections to go forward.” This was a clear directive to launch bloody repression against those in southeastern Ukraine who have opposed the US-orchestrated coup.

Moscow responded to the latest US threats and provocations in a Tuesday telephone conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry that had been initiated from Washington. Lavrov insisted that the US-backed Ukrainian regime had to take “urgent steps” to implement the April 17 agreement reached in Geneva. This meant reversing the order to send troops into southeastern Ukraine and freeing dissidents arrested there. He also demanded that the regime disarm neo-fascist groups such as the Right Sector.

What has become clear is that while Russia’s regime, representing the interests of the country’s capitalist oligarchs, hoped that Geneva could prove a path to peaceful accommodation with US imperialism, Washington saw the agreement as a means to an entirely different end. It used it to gain time to reorganize a military crackdown in Ukraine, while at the same time claiming that Russia was in violation of the deal because of the refusal of the opponents of the Kiev regime in southeastern Ukraine to halt their protests. This provides the pretext for intensified sanctions and stepped-up military provocations against Moscow.

As for disarming the Right Sector, neither Washington nor its puppets in Kiev had the intention of doing any such thing. They recognize the need to use these fascist elements as a battering ram against not only the anti-Kiev protests, but also against resistance from the working class as a whole to the drastic IMF-dictated social and economic attacks that are to come.

23 April, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Nile Bowie
Washington’s drone program isn’t making Yemen safer – it is traumatizing and radicalizing communities, and swelling the ranks of Al-Qaeda.

The Obama administration has recently taken part in a joint operation with Yemeni forces that has produced the highest death toll of any confirmed drone strike in Yemen so far this year, according to sources from the Associated Press (AP).

Yemen’s state media claims that the victims of the attack were among the most dangerous elements of Al-Qaeda, and that the strike was based on confirmed intelligence that the targeted individuals were planning to target Yemen’s civil and military institutions. Yemeni officials claim that the target site, located in remote mountainous regions in the country’s troubled south, was one of the few examples of permanent infrastructure setup by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to train fighters and store armaments.

The strike allegedly took place with regional cooperation and assistance from Saudi Arabia, and due to official secrecy provisions, the United States does not have a legal obligation to acknowledge or comment on the strikes undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The exact death toll varies from source to source, but more than a dozen people have been killed at minimum, with at least three civilian causalities. Witnesses say that a car carrying the alleged militants was hit with a missile as it drove by a vehicle carrying civilians, who were also killed. A second strike on the area was launched shortly after.

Yemen’s government officially claims that 55 alleged militants have been killed so far, and the Supreme Security Committee – which includes the country’s intelligence chief, defense and interior ministers – and President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi approved the strike.

Hadi, who came to power in February 2012 after he stood unopposed in elections, is a staunch supporter of the US drone program, despite the high number of civilian casualties incurred by the strikes. AQAP, active in the south-central regions of the country, is a small but pervasive organization whose tactics include using sophisticated car bombs and suicide attacks that have been bold and deadly in their fight against the government in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa.

Criminalizing drones
Yemen, the only state on the Arabian Peninsula to have a purely republican form of government, is in the midst of an ongoing political and security crisis prompted by divisions between various movements and factions, who are themselves divided between Sunni and Shiite sects of Islam. The central government in Sanaa commands little authority outside the capital, and faces a widely popular secessionist movement in the south, an entrenched Shiite rebel movement in the north, and a scattered AQAP insurgency campaign that has succeeded in gathering adherents largely due to their resentment of the Obama administration’s drone warfare campaign throughout the country.

Yemen has the youngest population in the world, with an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent, while half the population still lives below the poverty line.

Longtime leader Ali Abdullah Saleh submitted his resignation in 2011, following nationwide protests calling for an end to corruption and greater representation. The collective vision for reform shared by nearly all sides of this highly polarized country failed to progress following Saleh’s removal, and like other Arab nations who experienced a change in power during the period known as the Arab Spring, militias and extremist elements took advantage of the precarious security situation to embolden themselves.

In an effort to reconstruct Yemeni society and assuage various movements and communities who feel unrepresented throughout the country, Hadi has channeled his administration’s efforts into UN-backed reconciliation talks known as the National Dialogue Conference (NDC), which impressively brought together over 500 activists and representatives from a diverse array of backgrounds to reform the security apparatus and administrative structure of the country, and draft a new constitution that would be the basis for both presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014.

In a rare show of consensus, participants at the conference voted to criminalize the use of drones for extrajudicial killing, which have enraged average Yemenis from all walks of life. Drone strikes were made technically illegal since 2013, but their continued prevalence in partnership with Yemeni security forces dangerously delegitimizes the government in Sanaa and puts Hadi in an exceedingly awkward position at a time when the government is distrusted for colluding with foreign powers.

The message sent by the delegates of the NDC, which is the most democratic and representative reflection of Yemeni society that currently exists, is that the use of drones are an affront to the sovereignty and dignity of the state, opening the possibility that President Hadi may be criminally persecuted if the current policy continues.
Killing with impunity
President Obama’s speech on his administration’s drone warfare program in 2013 was widely perceived as a convincing and compelling defense of an otherwise controversial policy.

In describing the elaborate precautions and high standards taken prior to launching a strike, Obama claimed, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” The president acknowledged how any US military activity risks creating animosity and enemies in the target country, and spoke of the high threshold set for taking lethal action, in respect for the dignity of every human life.

According to the rules in place under the Obama administration, targeted strikes can only take place when capturing a suspect would not be feasible, when the authorities of the country in question could not or would not address the threat, and when no other reasonable alternatives were available.

In the six months since Obama delivered his speech on the rules for using armed drones, reports indicate that covert strikes in Yemen and Pakistan incurred more casualties when compared to the six months before the speech was given.

Behind the US president’s carefully-selected language and various moral assurances, is a covert assassination program that has operated under an accountability and transparency vacuum, where basic statistical data is withheld under the blanketing justification of protecting national security, and hundreds of innocent civilians have been targeted and killed with near-total impunity.

The facts that have been established about the Obama administration’s program are profoundly disturbing. The United States is bound to abide by international human rights law outside of a defined conflict zone, which would apply for its operations in Yemen and Pakistan, where war has not been declared. In such a legal environment, targeted killings can only take place when strictly unavoidable and necessary to protect life, and due to the official secrecy policies surrounding the Obama administration’s drone program, US officials are not legally obliged to acknowledge strikes or provide evidence needed to substantiate alleged threats to the degree that would satisfy the law enforcement standards that govern the intentional use of lethal force outside armed conflict.

The legal criterion to justify a strike is determined in secret by the White House with advice from the Justice Department, but with no oversight or accountability. Obama’s so-called ‘near-certainty’ standard and his administration’s definition of an ‘imminent threat’ are not open to independent review, and are taken unilaterally by the executive branch. As noted by UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, the United States violates international law by targeting of persons directly participating in hostilities who are located in non-belligerent states.

The known criteria for justifying lethal force has proven to be shockingly indiscriminate, to the point where the president’s ‘near-certainty’ standards can never logically be met. The Obama administration, according to investigations, targets individuals based on their exhibiting of ‘behavioral characteristics’ that are deemed typical of militants, rather than making strikes based on the confirmed identity of a target.

Such use of ‘signature strikes’ has resulted in the arbitrary targeting of any military-age male in a given strike vicinity on the presumption that he is a combatant, and directly targetable. The ‘double tap’ technique involves launching an initial drone strike, which is followed by a second strike that targets rescuers and first responders, a tactic that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits have made use of in the past.

The double tap relies on the assumption that the initial target is a militant, and all those who converge on the scene of the initial strike must be militants themselves. Such a strategy cannot possibly meet the stringent requirements needed to avoid the killing of civilians, and can only result in actions that can be described as war crimes or extrajudicial killings.
An undeclared war
Obama’s speech marked the first formal public acknowledgement of a US citizen’s death in a drone strike. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric of Yemeni descent and a US citizen, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen in May 2011. In describing his criteria for an extrajudicial targeted strike, Obama claims there is no difference between a foreign terrorist and a terrorist with US citizenship.

Al-Awlaki’s assassination and the subsequent killing of his 16-year-old son, also an American national, sets an alarming precedent. At one time, Anwar al-Awlaki was known to be a moderate cleric who denounced terrorism and violence. At some stage between the events of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Anwar al-Awlaki underwent a profound change in his political orientation and began to preach jihad, in response to what he viewed as the United States engaging in a war against Islam and Muslim civilians.

Just as Anwar al-Awlaki’s views morphed toward the violent fringe as a reaction to US policy, the radicalization of communities and traumatized survivors of drone strikes throughout Yemen provides AQAP with a steady flow of militants seeking to avenge their families’ deaths by harming the United States. The Obama administration and the Yemeni political elite may view drone strikes as a short-term fix, but the radicalization of growing swathes of society will prove to be a major liability for any future government in power.

Washington has assured the public that the American role in Yemen is highly constrained, and held in accordance with a mandate to target members of Al-Qaeda approved by Congress after 9/11. The scope and breadth of covert operations undertaken by the CIA and secretive paramilitary unit Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are impossible to ascertain, but Washington’s role in Yemen’s civil wars are much deeper than what the public imagines.

The inhumanity of this war comes to the fore in incidents such as the US bombing of a wedding convoy in December 2013, killing 12 civilians. Consider the vile injustice meted out in 2009 to the people of al-Majalah, a Bedouin village that became the target of US cluster-bombing, killing 41 civilians, including nine women and 21 children. Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a Yemeni journalist who exposed the American slaughter at al-Majala, was jailed by authorities and framed as an Al-Qaeda collaborator. His original release from prison was blocked by the personal intervention of President Obama, who phoned former Yemeni President Saleh and lobbied for Shaye to remain in custody.

Contrary to claims that drones only target those high-level figures who pose an imminent threat to the US homeland, reports indicate that low-level fighters, local commanders, and even figures in Yemen’s own military have been targeted by US drones – not because they present any risk to US national security, but because they are political opponents of the current US-backed regime in Sanaa.

The Obama administration’s dirty wars and covert operations in Yemen represent a glaring evasion of justice and accountability that will continue to sow wanton killing and perpetual conflict if left unchecked.
Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is also a Just member.
24 April, 2014
rt.com

 

By Dr Gideon Polya

Decent people reject racism apartheid and genocide. Zionism is genocidal racism in its awful theory and ghastly practice of subjugation, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of  another people. This evil is most starkly exposed when one considers the horrendous child abuse variously inflicted by racist Zionists, by Apartheid Israel and by pro-Zionist US Alliance allies of the Apartheid rogue state on exiled Palestinian children, Occupied Palestinian children, Palestinian Israeli children, Jewish Israeli children, Jewish children in general,  Muslim children, Third World children and indeed potentially all children of the world as systematically outlined below.

 

1. Apartheid Israel violates the Right to Life of Palestinian children.

The most fundamental  human Right is the Right to Life [1] but the racist Zionists  have denied this Right to the approximately  2 million Palestinians (half of them children) who have died from violence (0.1 million) or from imposed deprivation (1.9 million) since 1936. By comparison one notes that the German Nazis killed 1.5 million Jewish children in WW2 through violence or imposed deprivation. In contrast,  Israeli deaths at the hands of Palestinians since 1920 have totalled about 3,700 [2].

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has compiled the following details of violent Israeli and Palestinian child deaths in the period 1987-2012 in Israel, the West Bank and  Gaza:  (a) total fatalities in the First Intifada, minors under the age of 17 (Dec. 9, 1987-Sept. 28, 2000): Israelis – 18; Palestinians – 281 (by Israel security forces) and 23 (by Israeli civilians); (b) total Casualties: (Sept. 29, 2000-Sept. 30, 2012): Israelis – 129; Palestinians – 1,337; (c) fatalities since the outbreak of the second intifada and until operation “Cast Lead” (Sept. 29, 2000-Dec. 26, 2008): Israelis – 123; Palestinians – 954; (d) fatalities during operation “Cast Lead” (Dec. 27, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009): Israelis – 0; Palestinians – 345; (e) fatalities after operation “Cast Lead”: (Jan. 19, 2009-Oct. 31, 2012): Israelis – 6; Palestinians – 38 i.e. a total of 2,978 or about 3,000 and about 120 on average per year [3].

UNICEF reveals that 3,000 Occupied Palestinian  under-5 year old infants die each year as compared to 1,000 for Apartheid Israel .  The under-5 year old infant mortality in deaths per 1,000 live births is 22.4 (for Occupied Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp), and  14.9 (for Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank) [4]  as compared to 6 for Apartheid Israel [5].

Palestinian children are not just killed by Israeli shells, bombs, bullets and beatings but mostly die avoidably from racist Zionist-imposed deprivation. It is estimated that about 300,000 Occupied Palestinians in total and about 200,000 Palestinian under-5 year old infants died avoidably from deprivation under Israeli guns since 1967 in an ongoing Palestinian Genocide [2, 6, 7].

Avoidable mortality (avoidable death, excess mortality, excess death) is the diffeence between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics. For impoverished Third World countries avoidable deaths are about 1.4 times under-5 infant deaths [8]. Accordingly, annual avoidable Occupied Palestinian deaths total about 3,000 x 1 .4 = 4,200  of which about half (2,100) are of children. Thus the racist Zionists violently kill about 120 Occupied Palestinian children each year and passively murder another 2,100 Occupied Palestinian children annually through imposed deprivation. This means that on average the Apartheid Israeli authorities violently kill a Palestinian child every three days but on average also deliberately passively murder about 6 Palestinian children each day through imposed deprivation as surely as if they beat, bombed, shot or gassed them as did their genocidally racist Nazi German role models.

Genocidally racist Apartheid Israel grossly violates Article 6 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states:: “ 1. States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life. 2. States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child” [1].

 

2. Apartheid Israel deprives Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) of all human rights set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Charter of Human Rights.

 

A recent detailed analysis shows that nearly 47 years after the 1967 Israeli conquest of all of Palestine, the Western-backed, invasion-, occupation- , theft- , genocide-, lying- and race-based Apartheid State of Israel still comprehensively violates all the basic human rights of the Indigenous Occupied Palestinian People as set out in the 30 Articles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [9, 10]. Apartheid Israel also comprehensively violates the “Convention on the Rights of the Child” in denying not just the Right to Life on a massive, genocidal, mass paedocidal and mass infanticidal scale but in denial of essentially all other rights of the child to Occupied Palestinian children [1].

 

3. Highly abusive, traumatizing and deadly  mass confinement and deprivation  of Occupied Palestinian children.

 

Of the 1.8 million Occupied Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Concentration Camp over half (52.5%, 0.9 million) are children who are highly abusively confined without human rights and without charge or trial and for the asserted crime of being  Indigenous Palestinians living in a tiny part of the country inhabited continuously by their forebears for thousands of years  to the very dawn of agrarian civilization. Of the 2.5 million Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank about half (47.3%, 1.2 million) are highly abusively confined without human rights to ever-dwindling Bantustans under violent Israeli military rule and forbidden access by Israeli Apartheid to “Jewish” roads and “Jewish” land [11]. While the West Bank Bantustans are policed by war criminal Israeli military with guns, the Gaza Concentration Camp is policed by Israeli naval shelling, Israeli military shelling and gunfire and Israeli air force rockets, phosphorus bombs and high explosive bombs.

UNICEF provides a dire summary of the conditions of Occupied Palestinians [4]: Rank in Human Development Index (2007):  106/177; GNI per capita (US$, 2008): 1,230; Percentage of people living below the national poverty line (2007): 55.7 % (Gaza), 23.6 % (West Bank); Unemployment (2008):  19.8% (West Bank), [about 80% (Gaza)]; Number of Palestinian children killed as a result of conflict (September 2000 – January 2009):  1,475; Percentage of stunting:  10%;  Percentage of anaemia:  50%;  Percentage of households not connected to water networks (2008): 10%; Percentage of Primary School net enrolment (2008, SOWC 2010):  73%.

Jewish British Labor MP David Miliband (the son of anti-racist, pro-human rights Jewish British parents) visited Gaza and commented (2011): “The statistics say that 80% of the population are on UN food aid. The youth unemployment rate is 65%. The website of the United Nations office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs has a comprehensive database where you can see how many trucks, containing different kinds of supplies, have been allowed in by the Israeli authorities. … But although life is real, it is traumatic and limited. We saw buildings – not just the former Hamas headquarters – still reduced to rubble. There are houses riddled with bullet holes. The electricity supply cuts out for up to eight hours a day. There are not enough schools or teachers, so there are classes of 50 or 60 and the school day is restricted to a few hours to allow for two or even three shifts. … The consequences of war are everywhere, nowhere more so than for those caught in the crossfire…Save the Children, obviously, is most concerned about the 53% of the Gaza population under 18. The statistics say 10% of children are “stunted” – so undernourished before the age of two that they never grow to their full potential” [12].

Apartheid Israel thus grossly violates Article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states: “ 1. States Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status. 2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child’s parents, legal guardians, or family members” [1].

 

4. Highly abusive and traumatizing imprisonment and torture of West Bank Palestinian children.

 

The Committee on the Rights of Children (a body of independent legal experts charged by the UN with the task of monitoring the protection of children’s rights in signatory states)  has condemned Israeli torture and other maltreatment of Palestinian children (2014) : “The Committee expresses its deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police, and about the State party’s failure to end these practices in spite of repeated concerns expressed by treaty bodies… [Palestinian children are] systematically subject to physical and verbal violence, humiliation, painful restraints, hooding of the head and face in a sack, threatened with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, restricted access to toilet, food and water. These crimes are perpetrated from the time of arrest, during transfer and interrogation, to obtain a confession but also on an arbitrary basis as testified by several Israeli soldiers as well as during pretrial detention” [13].

The Australian ABC TV Four Corners program recently broadcast profoundly disturbing revelations of how the Israeli military arrest, imprison  and torture Palestinian children to obtain information about Occupied Palestinian family members and community members (2014): “ The Israeli army is both respected and feared as a fighting force. But now the country’s military is facing a backlash at home and abroad for its treatment of children in the West Bank , occupied territory. Coming up, a joint investigation by Four Corners and The Australian newspaper reveals evidence that shows the army is targeting Palestinian boys for arrest and detention. Reporter John Lyons travels to the West Bank to hear the story of children who claim they have been taken into custody, ruthlessly questioned and then allegedly forced to sign confessions before being taken to court for sentencing…” [14].

Apartheid Israel thus also grossly violates Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states: “ States Parties shall ensure that: (a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age; (b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time; (c) Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, and in a manner which takes into account the needs of persons of his or her age. In particular, every child deprived of liberty shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child’s best interest not to do so and shall have the right to maintain contact with his or her family through correspondence and visits, save in exceptional circumstances; (d) Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance, as well as the right to challenge the legality of the deprivation of his or her liberty before a court or other competent, independent and impartial authority, and to a prompt decision on any such action” [1].

 

5. Horrendous physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Jewish Israeli and Arab Israeli children.

 

Yarden Skop writing in the progressive Jewish Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2013): “ A study on child abuse of more than 10,000 children — the first of its kind to be conducted in Israel — found that close to half of them reported that they had been physically, emotionally or sexually abused. The study, which was conducted from September 2011 to September 2013 by the Center for the Study of Society at the University of Haifa , was headed by Prof. Zvi Eisikovits and Prof. Rachel Lev-Wiesel. Until now statistics on child abuse in Israel have been based solely on cases reported to the authorities and on information received from the authorities themselves. The University of Haifa study collected first-hand accounts from Jewish and Arab children aged 12 (sixth grade), 14 (eighth grade) and 16 (tenth grade). The total size of the sample was 8,239 Jewish children and 2,274 Arab children.  The study found that almost half of the children (48.5 percent) reported that they had suffered one or more kinds of abuse. Twenty-eight percent reported emotional abuse, 18 percent reported sexual abuse, 15 percent reported emotional neglect, 14 percent reported physical neglect, 14 percent reported physical harm and nine percent reported that they had been exposed to violence within the family. More than two-thirds of the Arab children (67.7 percent) reported that they had suffered one or more kinds of abuse. This means that two of every three Arab children suffer some sort of violence” [15].

Danielle Ziri writing about this new report on Israeli child abuse in the conservative Jewish Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post (2013): “ In the Jewish sector, almost half of the children surveyed – 48.5 percent – reported that they had experienced one or more types of abuse. In addition, the report showed that there is a very significant gap between the number of child victims of abuse known to the authorities and the number of children who indicated directly that they had been abused. In 2012, social workers reported 48,992 children and youth on suspicion of child abuse and neglect, which constituted 1.9% of all children in Israel , compared to the 48.5% of children who reported being affected by abuse in this study… It was also found that the rate of abuse is higher with the age of the child: among 12-year-olds, 42.9% reported that they had endured some kind of violence, while 48.9% of 14-year-olds and 58% of 16-year-olds reported so. In terms of physical abuse, 14.1% of children in the Jewish sector and 27.6% in the Arab sector reported that they had been kicked, hit or physically hurt…According to the results, 17.6% of children in the Jewish sector and 22.3% of children in the Arab sector had been victims of sexual abuse. About 8.3% of Jewish children and 11.8% of Arab children had suffered serious sexual harm. Of the children who had been sexually abused, 46.5% in the Jewish sector and 49% in the Arab sector indicated that the abuse occurred more than once, and most of them also mentioned that it had continued over the past year. Moreover, the vast majority indicated that their abuser was a man and over one third of the children abused said it had happened within their family” [16] .

 

6. Horrendous intellectual child abuse applied to Israeli children.

 

The state of Israel is a nuclear terrorist, serial war criminal, genocidally racist, racism- and genocide-based, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid state. Racist Zionist (RZ)-run Apartheid Israel is a democracy-by-genocide – of about 12 million Palestinians only 7%, the adults of 1.7 million Palestinian  Israelis  (21% of the Israeli population) can vote for the government ruling all of Palestine plus part of Lebanon and a largely ethnically cleansed part of Syria, albeit as third class citizens; 1.8 million Occupied Palestinians are highly abusively confined to the Gaza Concentration Camp with minimal human rights;  2.5 million Occupied Palestinians live with minimal human rights under highly abusive military rule in West Bank Bantustans;  about 6 million Palestinians are forbidden  to even live in Palestine;  there are  5.9 million Jewish Israelis and 0.3 million non-Jewish and non-Arab Israelis [2, 11]. About 50% of Occupied Palestinians are children (49.3% overall, 52.5% in the Gaza Concentration Camp, 47.3% in the West Bank ) [11] and about 36% of Israelis are children.

Outstanding Jewish American scholar Professor Jared Diamond in his best-selling book “Collapse” (Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) [17] enunciated the “moral principle, namely that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people” – an injunction grossly violated by racist Zionist (RZ)-run Apartheid Israel and its racist, genocide-committing and genocide-ignoring US Alliance backers. However Israeli children are taught otherwise and are subject to horrendous intellectual child abuse in being raised to accept the rightness of invading and colonizing the country of another people and in the process subjecting the Indigenous inhabitants (50% children)  to war, occupation, robbing, deprivation,  imprisoning, torture, killing, exiling, trauma, and ethnic cleansing (genocide). Yet anti-racist Jewish humanitarians argue otherwise – for example, Moshe Menuhin (1893-1983, a prominent anti-Zionist, father of famous violinist,  universalist and anti-Zionist Yehudi Menuhin and the author of “The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time”, “Jewish Critics of Zionism”, and of the family history “The Menuhin Saga”) put it succinctly thus: “Jews should be Jews – not Nazis.” [18].

The impact of this horrendous Israeli intellectual child abuse is revealed by American physician and evolutionary anthropologist Dr John Hartung as reported by Professor Richard Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion” (pp 253-257) [19] who reported the findings of Israeli psychologist George Tamarin: “Tamarin  presented to more than a thousand Israeli school children, aged between eight and fourteen , the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua [which states] Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword … Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: “Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not? They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval, and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with total approval … Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua’s name replaced by “General Lin” and “ Israel ” replaced by “a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago”. Now the experiment gave opposite results. nly 7 per cent approved of General Lin’s behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved… It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it” [19].

 

7. Horrendous impact of Apartheid Israel on the world’s children.

 

Apartheid Israel has been a major recipient of US aid that would otherwise have gone to alleviate poverty and prevent avoidable mortality – and especially avoidable mortality of children – around the world. The horrendous long term, committed accrual financial cost of Apartheid Israel to Americans has now reached a gigantic $40 trillion in today’s dollars. However the human cost involves the preventable deaths of millions of Americans – passive mass murder of Americans  in an American Holocaust inflicted by the fiscal perversion of traitorous Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) One Percenters committing $8-10 trillion to ethnic cleansing and active and passive mass murder of Muslims abroad in support of Apartheid Israel instead of keeping Americans  alive at home.    The long term, committed accrual cost of Zionist-subverted American Government support for Apartheid Israel in circa 2008 dollars totals about $40 trillion, the breakdown being  (1) $3 trillion (1948-2003), (2) $4-6 trillion (Zionist-promoted Iraq and Afghan Wars), (3) $0.7 trillion (Value of a Statistical Life- or VSL-based cost of  88,000 US veteran suicides since September 2001) and (4) about $30 trillion (one quarter of the VSL-based cost of 15.6 million preventable American deaths since September 2001). This is an under-estimate because it does not consider the millions of preventable American deaths before 9-11 and linked to Zionist subversion and perversion of America [20, 21].

This racist Zionist perversion of the USA (now aka USrael or the United States of Israel)  has come at a huge cost to the world’s children. Thus it is estimated that the 1950-2005 avoidable deaths globally totaled 1.3 billion of which 1.2 billion were in the Developing World and 0.6 billion in the Muslim World, with about half being children [8]. These estimates are consonant with estimates of 1950-2005 under-5 year old infant deaths totaling 0.88 billion for the world, 0.85 billion for the Developing World and 0.4 billion for the Muslim World [8] , this representing a Muslim Genocide and Muslim Holocaust 100 times greater than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed) and the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which pro-Zionist Churchill with Australian complicity deliberately  starved 6-7 million Indians to death for strategic reasons [8, 22-25].  In 2003 global  avoidable deaths from deprivation totaled about 16 million and under-5 year old infant deaths totaled about 10 million [8]. However currently annual avoidable deaths from deprivation total about 18 million (half of them children) and annual under-5 year old infant deaths total about 7 million, with this Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust carnage occurring on Spaceship Earth with the racist Zionist perverted and subverted US in charge of the flight deck.

However Apartheid Israel has a more direct involvement in this global carnage through its role as a dirty tricks US surrogate, keeping the Muslim world suppressed and through dirty involvements in atrocities like the Guatemalan Indian Genocide and the Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide [8].  While non-nuclear weapons and anti-nuclear weapons Iran has not invaded any other country for centuries, it is subject to Zionist-promoted sanctions that are connected to 100,000 avoidable Iranian deaths from deprivation each year (half being children). In contrast, Apartheid Israel has militarily attacked 12 other countries (the list, including  attacks on national ships and aircraft, is as follows: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Uganda, USA, and Turkey), noting that such attacks result in diversion of national resources from keeping children alive to national defence).

Thus the 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries actually occupied by Apartheid Israel total 24 million (half being children), the breakdown being  as follows (with the data expressed as 1950-2005 avoidable deaths/2005 population, both in millions, m) : Apartheid Israel [0.095m/6.685m =1.4%] – Egypt [19.818m/74.878m = 26.5%], Jordan [0.630m/5.750m = 11.0%], Lebanon [0.535m/3.761m = 14.2%], Occupied Palestinian Territories [0.677m/3.815m = 17.7%], Syria [2.198m/18.650m = 11.8%], total = 23.858m/106.854 = 22.3% [8]. This carnage is similar in magnitude to that achieved by Nazi Germany in its WW2 invasion of the Soviet Union . These 24 million avoidable deaths in countries variously  occupied by Apartheid Israel are indicative of 17 million under-5 year old infants in these racist Zionist (RZ)-violated countries in the period 1950-2005 [8].

Numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts conclude that the US was responsible for the 9-11 atrocity (3,000 killed) with some concluding  that Apartheid Israel must have been involved [26]. The resulting Zionist-promoted US War on Terror has, so far, been associated with 10 million Muslim deaths from violence or from violently-imposed deprivation. The post-1990, Zionist-promoted War on Muslims has been associated with 12 million such deaths, a Muslim Genocide and a Muslim Holocaust 2 times greater in deaths than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million deaths)  [2, 27-29].

 

8. Horrendous impact of Apartheid Israel on children of its pro-Zionist friends, the   US and Australia .

 

US is the richest country on earth but an estimated 1.3 million Americans die preventable deaths each year due to gross fiscal perversion whereby trillions of dollars are spent on the military, wars and killing people abroad rather than on keeping Americans alive at home [20, 21]. The traitorous Neocon American  and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) Establishment One Percenters responsible for this passive mass murder of 1.3 million Americans each year should be  exposed and sidelined  by the long-suffering 99% of ordinary Americans. For those who love ordinary Americans and have been inspired by great American humanitarians, there are  some truly shocking statistics. Thus, for example,  about 90,000 US veterans of Zionist-promoted wars (in which they mostly  participated barely out of their  teenage years) have suicided since 9-11 and an estimated 280,000 under-5 year old American infants have died since 9-11 linked  to the Neocon American  and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) Establishment’s fiscal perversion of spending trillions of dollars on killing Muslim children abroad rather than keeping American children alive at home. The horrendous long term, committed, accrual financial cost of Apartheid Israel to Americans has now reached a gigantic $40 trillion in today’s dollars, this being directly linked to 21,000 under-5 year old American infant deaths each year [20, 21] .

PC racist White Australia is Apartheid Israel ‘s best friend after the US and makes a major financial and diplomatic contributions in support of the Apartheid rogue state. A succession of Australian political leaders have had their names attached to forests in Apartheid Israel on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land. However the long term, committed, accrual cost of the Zionist-promoted War on Terror to Australia has been $125 billion  with this fiscal perversion being linked to 66,000 preventable Australian deaths annually or 0.9 million preventable deaths since 9-11 out of a population of 23 million [30, 31]. Some 2,000 Indigenous Australians die preventably each year in a continuing Aboriginal Genocide and the Indigenous under-1 year old infant mortality is 2 times that for White Australia.  Zionist narcissism, bullying and mendacity has contributed to an appalling “look the other way” Australian culture which means that the ongoing Aboriginal Genocide is ignored [32], as is horrendous child abuse in Australia [33, 34].

The former pro-Zionist Gillard Labor Government instituted a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse that is unfortunately confined to investigating horrendous institutional child sexual abuse (up to 40,000 cases over the last 40 years by Catholic Church personnel). However both the Coalition and Labor continue to ignore the awful reality that 34% of Australian women and 16% of Australian men – 4.4 million Australians in all – have been subject to child sexual abuse i.e. the Coalition and Labor major parties have ignored huge non-institutional child sexual abuse [33, 34] . In contrast to its declared inability to quantitate the extent of child abuse in Indigenous communities, the “Little Children are Sacred” Report (pp234-236) [35 ] refers to studies in America indicating that 25% of females and 10% of males experience childhood sexual abuse in the US [36] and in Australia  indicating that 34% of females and 16% of males today experienced child sexual abuse [37].

It is not surprising that pro-war, pro-Zionist, human rights abusing  countries like the US and Australia that turn a bind eye to horrendous child sexual abuse within their societies  would likewise ignore the horrendous Israeli child abuse outlined above.

 

9. Horrendous impact of Apartheid Israel on rational public discussion, children and the looming Climate Genocide.

 

The Zionist Lobbies have had an appalling impact on democracy and rational public discussion in the Western democracies. Both anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish critics of Apartheid Israeli human rights abuses are routinely falsely defamed as “anti-Semites” by the racist Zionists and their fellow travellers. Thus, for example, PC racist (politically correct racist) Apartheid Australia has reached a new low in its world-leading support for Apartheid Israel and by permitting, without public challenge, the egregiously false defamation of  anti-racist Jews critical of human rights abuses by the racist, democracy-by-genocide, Zionist rogue state [38]. Australia and other Western countries ignore the huge threat to their  institutions  posed by the free hand given to the traitorous  Zionist Lobby [39].

Mainstream politicians, whether Democrat or Republican in the US , Conservative,  Liberal Democrat or Labour in the UK , or Coalition or Labor in Australia , are overwhelmingly silent over Apartheid Israeli crimes whether through racist conviction or fear of the Zionist Lobby. The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted and subverted Western democracies have become Murdochracies, Lobbyocracies and Corporatocracies in which Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, policies,  public perception of reality and political power.  Thus, for example,  the Australian PM Kevin Rudd was removed in a US-approved, Mining Corporation-backed and pro-Zionist-led Coup on 24 June 2010 having incurred the hatred of the Zionist Lobby by mildly protesting Israeli forging of Australian passports and violently kidnapping Australians in international waters [40].

The Orwellian  irrationality introduced into Western public life by the theft, bullying and mendacity of the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) Establishment One Percenters has devastating impact on preventable deaths in these societies e.g. 1.3 million avoidable deaths from deprivation  annually in the US [20, 21, 30] and 66,000 such deaths annually in Australia [30, 31]. This mendacious Lobbyocracy and Corporatocracy culture subverts urgently required rational societal responses to the 3 apocalyptic threats facing humanity, namely nuclear weapons, poverty and man-made climate change. Notwithstanding pious political rhetoric, terracidal climate change inaction is the reality in the Western democracies [41].  The consequences of climate change inaction are dire [41-44] – top climate scientists  have warned that as few as 0.5 billion will survive.   Noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050 (UN Population Division), these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including roughly twice the present population of particular mainly non-European groups, and specifically 6 billion under-5 year old infants [42] – mass paedocide, mass infanticide and near-terminal homicidal child abuse thanks to the egregious theft, bullying and mendacity of the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) Establishment One Percenters .

 

Summary.

 

The false carnard of Jews drinking the blood of Christian children was one of the appalling racist lies culminating in the expulsion of the Jews from England by King Edward I in 1290. 7 centuries later racist Zionists  have turned  a racist lie of paedocide (child killing) into an horrendous reality of massive and deadly child abuse inflicted by racist Zionists, Apartheid Israel and by pro-Zionist US Alliance allies of the Apartheid rogue state on exiled Palestinian children, Occupied Palestinian children, Palestinian Israeli children, Jewish Israeli children, Jewish children in general,  Muslim children, Third World children and indeed potentially all children of the world as systematically outlined above. Those who ignore, deny, excuse, encourage, support, advocate, or are otherwise complicit in lethal and non-lethal human rights abuse of children have crossed the thin red line separating decent human beings from Nazi-style barbarity.

What can decent people do about horrendous and traumatizing Zionist and Israeli child abuse? Decent people are obliged to (a) inform everyone they can; (b) urge and apply  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters; and (c) urge and effect the sidelining of racist Zionists and their supporters from public life as has already happened to like racists such as the Nazis, neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and the KKK.  Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Speak out!

References.

 

[1]. “ Convention on the Rights of the Child”: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx

[2]. “Palestinian Genocide” :   http://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .

[3]. “Children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict .

[4]. UNICEF, “State of Palestine”: http://www.unicef.org/oPt/overview.html  .

[5]. UNICEF, “ Israel ”: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/israel.html .

[6]. William Cook (editor) “The Plight of the Palestinians. A long history of destruction”; for review see Gideon Polya, “Review “The Plight of the Palestinians. A long history of destruction”, Countercurrents, 17 June 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya170612.htm .

[7]. Gideon Polya, “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in William Cook (editor) “The Plight of the Palestinians. A long history of destruction”.

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country since Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/  .

[9]. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html  .

[10]. Gideon Polya, “ Apartheid Israel excludes Occupied Palestinians from all provisions of  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ”, Countercurrents, 20 May 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya200512.htm .

[11]. “Demographics of the Palestinian Territories ”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Palestinian_territories .

[12]. David Miliband. “ Gaza represents the ultimate failure of politics”, Guardian, 11 October 2011: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/11/david-miliband-gaza-politics-save-the-children .

[13]. Phoebe Greenwood, “ Israel furious at UN report detailing torture of Palestinian children”, The Telegraph, 21 June 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10135157/Israel-furious-at-UN-report-detailing-torture-of-Palestinian-children.html?fb .

[14].   John Lyons, Janine Cohen and Sylvie Le Clezio , “Stone cold justice”, ABC TV Four Corners, 24 February 2014: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/02/10/3939266.htm .

[15]. Yarden Skop, “Nearly half of Israel ‘s children suffer physical, sexual or emotional abuse, study finds”, Haaretz, 13 November 2013: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.557668 .

[16]. Danielle Ziri, “Child abuse more prevalent than ever, report shows”, The Jerusalem Post, 11 December 2013: http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Child-abuse-more-prevalent-than-ever-report-shows-331434 .

[17]. Jared Diamond, “Collapse”.

[18]. Moshe Menuhin quoted by Grace Halsell in “Like father, like son: a tribute to Moshe and Yehudi Menuhin”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), July 1996: http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0796/9607018.htm .

[19]. Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”.

[20]. Gideon Polya, “American Holocaust, millions of untimely American deaths and $40 trillion cost of Israel to Americans”,  Countercurrents , 27 August, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270813.htm .

[21]. Gideon Polya, “ One million Americans die preventably annually in USA ”, Countercurrents, 18 February 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya180212.htm .

[22]. Madhusree Mukerjee, “Churchill’s Secret War. The British Empire and the ravaging of India during World War II”.

[23]. “Bengal Famine”, BBC, 10 January 2009: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html .

[24]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”, now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com.au/   .

[25].  Gideon Polya, “ Bengal Famine. How Australia & UK killed 6-7 million Indians in WW2”, MWC News, 27 September 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/13742-bengal-famine.html .

[26]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[27]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .

[28]. “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .

[29]. “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[30]. Gideon Polya, “Endless War on Terror. Huge cost for Australia & America ”, MWC News, 14 October 2012: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/22149-endless-war-on-terror.html .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “Why PM Julia Gillard Must Go: 66,000 Preventable Australian Deaths Annually”, Countercurrents: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya210212.htm  .

[32]. “Aboriginal Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ .

[33]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous child abuse by  pro-war, pro-Zionist, climate criminal Australian Coalition Governments”, Countercurrents,  4 December 2013 : http://www.countercurrents.org/polya041213. h t m .

[34]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous Australian child sexual abuse”, MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/22859-gideonpolya-sexual-abuse.html  .

[35]. “Little Children are Sacred” Report: http://web.archive.org/web/20070703014641/http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf  .

[36]. Finkelhor, D. (1994), Current information on the scope and nature of child sexual abuse”, Future of Children, 4(2), pp31-53).

[37]. Dunne, M.P., Purdie, D.M., Cook, M.D., Boyle, F.M. & Najman, J.M.(2003), Is child sexual abuse declining? Evidence from a population-based survey of men and women in Australia , Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 27 (2), pp141-152).

[38]. Gideon Polya, “Open Letter To Australian Human Rights Commission Condemns Pro-Zionist Anti-Jewish Anti-Semitism In Apartheid Australia ”,  Countercurrents, 4 March, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya040314.htm .

[39]. Gideon Polya, “Racist Zionism and Israeli State Terrorism threats to Australia and Humanity”, Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/racist-zionism-and-israeli .

[40]. Gideon Polya, “Pro-Zionist-led Coup ousts Australian PM Rudd”, MWC News, 29 June 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/3488-pro-zionist-led-coup.html .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Terracidal Climate Change Inaction”, Countercurrents, 6 April 2014 : http://www.countercurrents.org/polya060414.ht m .

[42]. “Climate genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .

[43]. “Are we doomed?”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/are-we-doomed .

[44]. “Climate justice & intergenerational equity”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/climate-justice .

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007, including an avoidable mortality-related history of every country since Neolithic times and now available  for free perusal on the web : http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”(now also available  for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

 

21 April, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

 

By Alex Lantier

Amid the crackdown on pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine being carried out by his Western-backed regime, Ukraine’s acting prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, called for a military buildup against Russia in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” program Sunday. He advocated measures, including US military aid to his government, that pose the risk of a direct clash between nuclear-armed powers.

This aggressive and provocative policy, centered on the standoff in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian protesters and the military and fascist paramilitary forces of the unelected regime in Kiev, is inflaming tensions throughout Europe. Late Saturday and early Sunday, pro-regime forces attacked armed pro-Russian protesters who had set up roadblocks outside Slavyansk, killing at least one protester. A number of pro-regime fascists were also killed or wounded.

One of the pro-regime fighters killed in Slavyansk carried a badge of the fascist Right Sector militia, which led the February putsch that installed the current regime in Kiev.

“The personal belongings of a militant killed in the skirmish included a Right Sector badge number 20,” said Vyachaslav Ponomarev, the leader of Slavyansk’s pro-Russian forces. “Badge number one is held by [Right Sector leader Dmytro] Yarosh.”

A week ago, Yarosh called for the “total mobilization” of the Right Sector fascists to crush opposition to the Kiev regime.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was “enraged” by the attack in Slavyansk. “It is surprising,” it wrote, “that the tragedy occurred after the signing on April 17 in Geneva of the final statement of the four-sided meeting of representatives of Russia, the USA, EU and Ukraine, which calls for refraining from any violent actions, intimidation, or provocations. The Russian side insists on the strict fulfillment by the Ukrainian side of its commitments concerning the de-escalation of the situation in southeast Ukraine.”

In fact—as the blank check given by the US-puppet regime in Kiev to the Right Sector makes clear—Kiev and its Western backers are ignoring the Geneva statement. Instead, they are pressing ahead with a reckless policy of militarily encircling Russia.

On “Meet the Press,” Yatsenyuk called for a military escalation against Russia. “It’s crystal clear that Russia is the threat, the threat to the globe, and the threat to the European Union and the real threat to Ukraine,” he said. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has a dream to restore the Soviet Union,” Yatsenyuk continued, “and every day he goes further and further. And God knows where the final destination is.”

Pressed by NBC’s David Gregory to ask the Western powers to send weapons to bolster his regime’s armed forces, Yatsenyuk asked for help rebuilding Ukraine’s economy and military.

Yatsenyuk’s comments were a political travesty. The threat to world peace comes not from Russia, but from the aggressive policy pursued by Washington and Berlin and their European allies.

The program of the capitalist oligarchy around Putin is not to restore the forms of state ownership that existed under the USSR, or to reunify the 15 former Soviet republics under its control. Rather, the Kremlin is desperately seeking to find a viable defense posture as NATO and the United States deploy their armed forces ever further to the east and closer to Russia’s post-Soviet borders.

The US has already sent millions of dollars in equipment to the Ukrainian army, as part of a broader military buildup by the NATO powers throughout Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. US and NATO officials have sent forces to the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and the Black Sea, despite warnings—including from within Western governments—that further escalation could provoke war with Russia.

Over the weekend, British media reported that the head of the MI6 intelligence agency briefed British Prime Minister David Cameron to the effect that Western military action in Ukraine could spiral into “all-out war with Russia.” He told Cameron that Putin would not “stand idly by” if the West intervened to back the Kiev regime.

“The basic message is that it’s not worth starting World War Three over Ukraine,” a senior British government source told the Mirror regarding the briefing.

British MI6 agents and Defense Intelligence Staff are apparently traveling throughout Ukraine, spying, in particular, on pro-Russian cities in eastern Ukraine. These agents on the ground, the Mirror reported, “warn that the crisis could turn into a violent civil war, with much of eastern Ukraine declaring independence and effectively joining Russia.”

The misgivings of British agents combing Ukraine notwithstanding, NATO is stoking up the conflict, adopting aggressive policies against Russia in ways previously reserved for defenseless ex-colonial countries targeted for US attack and regime change.

Surveying US policy towards Russia, the New York Times wrote on Sunday: “Just as the United States resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union and its global ambitions, Mr. Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state.”

Sections of the US State Department are pressing for an even harsher policy, the newspaper noted, and say they are “privately worrying that Mr. Obama has come across as weak.”

These remarks point to the explosive conflicts unleashed by the decision of the leading NATO powers to back the Kiev putsch and provoke a conflict with Russia. As rival armies face off in Eastern Europe in ways unseen since the Nazi Wehrmacht fought the Soviet Red Army during World War II, Washington is serving notice that it considers the Kremlin, like the Iraqi and Libyan regimes before it, a “pariah,” and will treat it accordingly.

The fate of the heads of state of previous “pariah” regimes gives some indication of the concerns now facing Putin and top officials in Russia. Saddam Hussein was hanged after a show trial in US-occupied Iraq; Libyan ruler Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was tortured and extrajudicially murdered in the bombed-out ruins of his hometown, Sirte.

The most obvious difference, however, is that Russia is a more substantial power, which can threaten military retaliation with conventional forces and a nuclear arsenal capable of annihilating the planet. This underscores the depths of the crisis of world imperialism and the immensely reckless character of US-European policy.

While Putin stressed in his television appearance Saturday that he saw “nothing to prevent us from normalizing relations” with the NATO powers, top Russian officials have made clear that Russia is preparing a more forceful response should NATO continue to escalate the crisis.

On Friday, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that the imposition of crippling economic sanctions on Russia planned by Washington and the European powers was “absolutely unacceptable.” He warned, “We can mobilize our whole society if someone starts driving Russia into a corner.”

Appearing on Russian television Saturday, Peskov said that any further enlargement of NATO to include countries further to the east would pose a serious threat to Russia. “One more step towards the Russian border,” he said, would cause “the entire European security architecture to be overhauled.”

“NATO cannot stop being a military organization,” Peskov noted, adding, “Russia will have to take measures to ensure its own security.”

 

21 April, 2014

WSWS.org